First of all, he was a driver of a slowing sedan to a ramp and pointing as they passed through the Spanish style manor, draped with elm leaves and hidden behind an intimacy fence.
Then came a group of teenage girls who lack a van for selfies, followed by bikers, which stopped to see what it was. In the end, they all had the same question.
“Is this the right house?”
In the past few weeks, the quiette of this rich district of Beverly Hills has been filled with the buzz of tourists and real crime fanatics who swarmed to take a look at the infamous Manoir Menendez on Elm Drive – where two brothers murdered their parents in 1989. The case was received renewed attention After a Netflix program and a documentary profiled their case and the county of the dist. Atty. George Gascón announcement He recommends that they be convicted after New evidence That they had been attacked by their father appeared, which could make them eligible for parole.
A person takes a photo of the old manor of the Menendez brothers in Beverly Hills.
(Michael Blackshire / Los Angeles Times)
Last month, Beverly Hills police officials claimed that the police responded to 18 calls to services related to noise complaints and intrusive concerns around the manor.
“There are people every hour of the night,” said Mindy R., a resident of Elm Drive, who refused to provide her full name for the sake of her security because of all recent visitors. “People come out of their cars, blocking our aisle.”
Now she and her neighbors call the police and towing companies to manage the crowd. It was only the occasional tourist bus in the neighborhood before, Mindy said.
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“Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” from Netflix fired real crime fanatics from around the world to see the manor where the 1989 murders occurred.
“I did not record that (the manor) was in front of me,” she said about her advance for the first time a few years ago. “It was quite calm until the release of Netflix show.”
In September, Netflix published its dramatization of the case, “Monsters: the story of Lyle and Erik Menendez”, “ As a last chapter in his True crime anthology series. A two -hour documentary with new audio interviews with the brothers and sisters, “The Menendez brothers”, “ was published by Netflix a month later. The show and documentary scripted introduced a new generation in a case that had their parents and grandparents stuck to television screens during the first try in 1993.
The trial, one of the first of its kind to be a television, created an appetite for a new American genre: real crime. The nation was absorbed by the history of these two young charismatic but troubled men who seemed to have everything between wealth and looks before breaking violently, taking the lives of their parents with hunting rifles.
The status of renewed celebrity of the house has since become a gold mine of Viral content for tiktors Who films the mansion and remedy the horrible details of the murder scene for the online audience or lift the idea of a haunting.
“This psychic visited the Menendez house. Do you see what I see? ” Said the legend of a Tiktok video that has been viewed more than 2.5 million times, because it zooms more and more from a window upstairs to suggest a shadow of the face of Jose Menendez.
Natalie Gardena, a surgical technician from Pomona, said that she had seen content creators jumping the fence on social networks to take photos on the porch to recreate a photo of the standing brothers in front of the manor.
Erik Menendez, on the left, and his brother Lyle in front of their house in Beverly Hills.
(Ronald Soble / Los Angeles Times)
The 25 -year -old woman visited the mansion on Wednesday on her leave and said she was initially attracted to the house by her morbid fascination for real documentaries on crime – she had also visited Benedict Canyon in Beverly Hills where the murders of Manson occurred. But watching the Netflix scripted series also led him to sympathize with the experiences of the brothers of alleged abuse under their father.
“The system has just failed them,” said Gardena. She thinks it was unfair that the trial focuses on the frenzy of the expenses of the brothers after the killings without fully recognizing allegations of sexual assault. “If they were sisters, they would have been released a long time ago. But as they were men, no one thought that men could be sexually abused at the time.”
Although the manor no longer belongs to the Menendez family – it was sold for $ 17 million in March and is vacant because it is renovating – which has apparently not stopped calling the country or abroad.
A tourist bus passes in front of the old mansion of the Menendez brothers in Beverly Hills.
(Michael Blackshire / Los Angeles Times)
A recent Wednesday afternoon, visitors were walking or led home almost every minute. Among them, there were tourists from France and South Africa who stopped to take pictures of the front facade of the manor and the numbers of the residence on the aisle.
“In Italy, the show is very popular,” said Fabrizio Serra, a 23 -year -old man who visited Los Angeles and decided to include Manoir Menendez on his route. “It's fascinating to visit this place … Something you always see on screens … You have the opportunity in real life (to see it).”
Nicholas Chavez like Lyle Menendez, on the left, Cooper Koch like Erik Menendez, Middle and Javier Bardem like Jose Menendez in “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story”.
(Miles Crist / Netflix)
For others, seeing the residence raises a deep feeling of personal loss and sorrow.
Rebecca Hecht, who went to the Lycée de Beverly Hills a year ahead of Erik Menendez, lives about one mile from the house and walked near the house with a labradoodle a recent afternoon.
“I just feel a very heavy presence here,” said Hecht. “It seems very worrying in the street.”
Her brother Adam taught tennis Erik, she said. The same summer, the murders occurred, Adam has also mysteriously disappeared – a case that has never been resolved.
“In 1989, I believe that I lost three brothers,” said a hecht in tears, who still cannot believe that one of his comrades had been in prison for decades. “I understand what they lived, because I grew up in this city, I had a father very similar to them. But the abuses were much worse than they crossed. ”
With the renewed attention attracted by the case, she finally gathered the courage to look at the entire trial on YouTube. And although she does not tolerate murder, she believes that she deserves a second chance because of the alleged abuse.
Lyle, on the left, and Erik Menendez left a courtroom in Santa Monica in 1990 after a judge judged that the conversations between the two brothers and their psychologist after their parents were killed were not privileged and could be used as proof in their case of murder.
(Nick UT / Associated Press)
“These are model citizens in prison, and strangely, ironically, prison was probably a better life for them, and that is why they were able to prosper,” said Hecht.
As for the Netflix program, Hecht said it was too personal to watch it.
But she hopes that the attention of the media has influenced the opinions of the public and officials in favor of the brothers.
“I think all advertising is a good advertisement. I think there is a storm of attention at the moment, and I think that is growing in the sense of their release,” she said.
