They are phone calls that punctuate Anamaria Baralt’s day, and ones she’s never too busy to pick up.
‘Excuse me,’ she says, politely breaking off our conversation. ‘I have to take this. It’s Lyle.’
She swivels away, briefly. ‘Hi honey,’ she greets the caller. Although it’s impossible to hear the details, it’s obvious the exchange is warm and affectionate. Two people with a shared history, swapping some news about their day.
They say their goodbyes after a few minutes, with Anamaria saying animatedly: ‘Love you … love you, bye.’
The Lyle Anamaria has just spoken with is her first cousin, Lyle Menendez, the elder of the notorious ‘Menendez brothers’, currently 29 years into a whole-life sentence for the murder of their wealthy parents in 1989.
They are the brothers whose story, entitled ‘Monsters’, became a Netflix sensation last year, starring A-list actors Javier Barden and Chloe Sevigny as the murdered couple, Jose and Kitty.
They are the same brothers, now balding and greying men in their 50s, who are due to appear in court in Van Nuys, California, via Zoom for a two-day resentencing hearing, starting next week (April 17), where their prison term could be modified, leading to their immediate eligibility for parole – marking another step towards freedom.
A separate parole board hearing for Lyle, 57, and Erik, 54, is due in June.
Erik Menendez, left, and brother Lyle, are pictured in front of their Beverly Hills home – their story, called Monsters, became a Netflix sensation last year
Lyle, left, and Erik Menendez are seen in court in Santa Monica, California, in August 1990
Anamaria Baralt, cousin of the Menendez brothers, hugs attorney Mark Geragos after a hearing in the brothers’ case Friday, April 11, 2025
Their cousin Anamaria, a 54-year-old yoga teacher from Seattle, is one of the brothers’ most vocal supporters and will be one of several family members testifying at the resentening hearing. She is fervently hoping her cousins will be freed.
Other witnesses due to give evidence include prison staff who are due to describe the pair’s exemplary behaviour in jail.
The brothers’ defence has always been that they were driven to kill after suffering years of sexual and physical abuse at the hands of their father while their mother, an unstable alcoholic and dependent on prescription drugs, did nothing to stop it.
It’s a dark family secret that Anamaria herself has struggled to understand but now accepts as an uncomfortable truth.
Her cousins – childhood playmates with whom she grew up – have confessed to the terrible crime they committed, shown remorse and spent their entire adult lives reflecting on their actions, she says.
In the meantime, she offers daily emotional support over the phone as they wait to hear if they will be released after more three decades behind bars.
‘Lyle and I speak multiple times a day,’ she says. ‘He likes to be in the mix, so he loves to hear all the gossip about the family and what everybody’s doing, even if it’s just the little things.
‘They have TV and tablets, so we have conversations about everything and nothing, like my kids and my work and what’s happening in The Bachelor (an American reality TV show). Erik is a little more private, but he’s good.’
Two booking photos provided by the California Department of Corrections shows Erik Menendez, left, and Lyle Menendez
Jose and Kitty Menendez pictured with their sons. The parents were shot 14 times with 12-gauge shotguns in their million-dollar Beverly Hills home
Family and supporters of Erik and Lyle Menendez stand outside the courthouse on Friday
Anamaria, a mother of two, has lived in the shadow of this painful family tragedy for more than three decades.
She could only bring herself to watch one episode of the ‘Monsters’ Netflix show, she says. ‘I hated the way they depicted Lyle as this hot-headed, rage-fueled person when the truth is that I’ve never heard him raise his voice.
‘I want people to see that Erik and Lyle are real human beings, with a loving family behind them, and not characters in a fictionalised TV show.’
She and her cousins had a happy childhood – or so she thought.
Her late father Carlos and Jose Menendez grew up together in their native Havana and remained close friends after the pair moved to America following the Cuban Revolution in 1959.
Carlos married Jose’s eldest sister, Terri, Anamaria’s mother. Jose married his college sweetheart, Kitty, and the families settled in neighbouring houses in Princeton, New Jersey.
Anamaria has memories in the Seventies of the cousins running in and out of each other’s houses, playing in her family’s swimming pool, climbing trees and playing board games.
‘They were typical boys – wild and fun and full of life. Very sporty,’ she says.
Anamaria Baralt, niece of Jose Menendez, is pictured speaking at the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center in Los Angeles, California, last October
The brothers listen during a pre-trial hearing, on December 29, 1992, in LA
However, she always thought something was not quite right in the Menendez household but could never put her finger on it.
She remembers a ‘strange intensity and physicality’ when her uncle Jose would grab his wife or sons roughly.
‘I got the feeling that there was something off about their family and there were a couple of moments that I look back on with hindsight and cringe,’ she recalls.
Without going into details, she says: ‘There was one discussion that I had with Erik, and I should have recognised how odd the conversation was. But I was 14 and he was 15 …’ she shrugs. It haunts me.’
On the evening of the murders, in August 1989, the Menendez family had been living in Beverly Hills, California, thanks to Jose’s successful career as an executive in the music business.
According to prosecutors, the boys plotted the killings carefully, securing shotguns (they couldn’t get the right paperwork in time for handguns), which they used to shoot their parents at close range, as they watched television.
Jose was shot six times in a barrage of bullets and Kitty, a former small-town beauty queen, was hit nine times and finished off with a point-blank shot in her face.
The brothers then called police, with Lyle tearfully screaming down the phone ‘someone killed my parents.’
Anamaria Baralt, cousin of convicted killers Lyle and Erik Menendez, has been speaking out
Lyle, left, and Erik Menendez sit with defense attorney Leslie Abramson, right, in the Municipal Court in the Beverly Hills area of Los Angeles, during a hearing, Nov. 26, 1990
LA County District Attorney Nathan Hochman speaks during a news conference about the case of Erik and Lyle Menendez on March 10, 2025
At first detectives believed it was a Mafia hit following a botched business deal: Jose was a self-made multi-millionaire and an executive of RCA records.
The brothers’ bizarre behaviour in the months that followed, as they burned through their inheritance, started to raise suspicions, however.
Erik hired a full-time tennis coach and started attending tournaments around the world while Lyle bought a buffalo wing shop restaurant and a Porsche Carrera sports car. Both splurged on Rolex watches.
Eventually, however, suicidal and tormented by guilt, Erik confessed all to his therapist, who couldn’t inform on them without breaking the doctor / patient confidentiality code. Instead his mistress informed the police after they broke up.
The brothers, then aged 21 and 18, were arrested in March 1990.
There followed not one but two high-profile trials in which prosecutors argued the grisly murders were premeditated and motivated by greed, because the boys were due to be cut out of their father’s will and his £11 million fortune.
The brothers’ lawyers contended, meanwhile, that the pair acted in self-defence because they feared for their lives after threatening to expose the family’s dirty secret.
Lyle, left, and Erik Menendez sit in Beverly Hills Municipal Court where their attorneys delayed making pleas on behalf of the brothers in 1990
The brothers were found guilty of killing their parents Jose and Kitty Menendez (pictured)
A grab of Lyle Menendez in footage from ABC
‘There was nothing in Erik’s and Lyle’s personalities that would ever have suggested to me that they were capable of that kind of violence,’ Anamaria says today.
When the boys confessed and disclosed the sexual abuse that they claimed they had suffered, the family grieved all over again.
‘We were devastated on two counts; that they committed the crime but also that they hadn’t sought help from anybody in the family,’ says Anamaria.
‘I know what they did and why they did it but there was never a moment when I was mad at them or held it against them.
‘I was personally hurt that they didn’t feel like they could trust me with it – what they had endured, what they had done and the reason behind it,’ she says. ‘I imagine they felt like they were protecting me.’
Ironically, Anamaria had been planning a career as a criminal prosecutor, but the murders put an end to her law career aspirations. She later went ‘into a tailspin’ and ended up dropping out of college.
‘For my whole life, all I’d wanted to do was put away the bad guys, but I was never going to be able to look at a defendant again and not see the grey areas in a case and the family that’s hurting behind them. I was never going to be able to fight for the death penalty, which is what Erik and Lyle were initially facing.’
She was left in a very ‘dark place,’ she says. ‘It’s one thing to go through a tragedy. It’s an entirely different thing to have your family be the butt of jokes on sitcoms and late-night TV shows and to have the people you love judged so harshly,’ she adds, referring to the fact that the crime and subsequent trials became public fodder.
Erik (R) and Lyle Menendez (L) during a court appearance in Los Angeles, California, in 1992
Lyle, left, and Erik Menendez are seen here in court in Beverly Hills in April 1991
This image released by Netflix shows Nicholas Chavez as Lyle Menendez, left, and Javier Bardem as Jose Menendez,
She couldn’t bear to attend her cousins’ first trial in 1993, which was televised and watched by millions of people all over the world and ended in a mistrial when two juries could not agree on a verdict.
The brothers were convicted at a second trial in 1996, after the judge limited testimony related to the brothers’ claims of sexual abuse. The second jury found them guilty of first-degree murder and they were sentenced to spend the rest of their lives behind bars.
Had their claims of sexual abuse been believed the brothers could have been convicted of manslaughter, a verdict that would have brought maximum sentences of 22 years.
‘Life without parole. They were so young. It was devastating to all of us,’ Annamaria says.
With her cousins locked up, Anamaria and her family had to pick up the pieces of their own shattered lives.
Aged 28, she got a degree in web design and before training as a yoga teacher. She and her husband Wayne have two sons, now aged 17 and 18.
It wasn’t difficult, she says, to tell her children about their infamous second cousins. ‘My children have known since they were seven or eight that they have cousins Erik and Lyle who did this thing that was obviously very bad,’ she says.
‘But at the same time, my boys know that no matter what they do, there is room for forgiveness. I believe in redemption and that it’s never too late to say you’re sorry and to be able to grow.’
A courtroom sketch from a resentencing hearing held for Erik and Lyle Menendez on Friday in Los Angeles
The brothers pictured at a 1992 court appearance
The brothers could have languished in prison for the rest of their lives but support for them grew online following the re-screening of their first, televised trial, during the Covid pandemic.
Coupled with the family’s own campaign, for them to be freed on parole, it helped propel their case back into the spotlight.
‘All these young people were looking at it from a different perspective,’ says Anamaria. ‘As a Gen Xer, I never spoke about my feelings, but young people today have been raised with the idea of clear boundaries and a much better understanding of the trauma caused by sexual abuse. I think they saw that first trial and were outraged by Erik and Lyle not being believed.’
After conviction, the brothers spent 20 years apart in separate prisons but are now in the same R.J. Donovan State Prison in San Diego that houses some of America’s most violent criminals.
Both have married behind bars but are prohibited from having conjugal visits. Lyle was married to a former Playboy model Anna Eriksson from 1996 to 2001 and married lawyer Rebecca Sneed in 2003. They are now amicably separated. Erik married Tammi Sackerman, a former prison pen pal, in 1999, and has a stepdaughter Talia.
And after more than three decades behind bars, the brothers are closer than ever to freedom.
Factors in their favour include a recently discovered letter Erik wrote as a teenager to another family member saying he was being molested by his father, testimony from a member of the boy band Menudo who says he was sexually assaulted by Jose when he was a youth and the fact that both were under the age of 26 when given their whole-life sentences.
The brothers’ apparently exemplary conduct while incarcerated will also be taken into account.
Supporters hold signs during a press conference regarding developments in the Menendez brothers case Thursday, March 20, 2025, in Los Angeles
Lyle Menendez, second from left, and his brother, Erik, second from right, are flanked by their attorneys Gerald Chaleff, left, and Robert Shapiro in 1990
‘What’s been remarkable Is to watch them build very full lives for themselves in prison,’ says Anamaria. ‘They’re not just sitting in a cell, rotting,’
She proudly reels off the initiatives the brothers have created during incarceration including meditation courses for fellow prisoners, supporting other inmates who have been given life without parole sentences and a green space prison beautification scheme.
‘I know if they get out, they would both want to continue advocacy for people who have struggled with childhood sexual abuse,’ Anamaria says.
She can’t help but imagine what she and her cousins would do if they were on the outside. ‘Erik will live with his wife and his stepdaughter – he wants a family life,’ she says.’ I see Lyle taking his green space initiative to other prison facilities.
‘I think they will want privacy and not be in the public eye though that will be hard, I expect.’
She has her own plans if her cousins are released. ‘Since I’m a yoga teacher and Erik’s a meditation teacher, I’d love to do a collaboration with him, I think that would be pretty cool.
‘With Lyle, I just want to hang out and have a meal with him and do all the little things we take for granted.’
Most of all, she says, she wants to see her cousins reunited with their aunt – her mother Terri – who believes her nephews have spent enough time behind bars for the murder of her brother and his wife.
With his wife Laurel looking on, psychologist Dr. L. Jerome Oziel denied claims he had a woman eavesdrop on therapy sessions in which his patients Lyle and Erik Menendez allegedly confessed to killing their parents in 1989
Attorney Mark Geragos arrives for a hearing regarding the case of Erik and Lyle Menendez Friday, April 11, 2025
‘I want to see them hug my mother because she’s paid a big price all these years and she’s desperate for them to be freed. She’s 85 and has cancer so that would be a dream come true.’
Anamaria says she and her family cannot move on with their lives until they see the brothers freed.
‘If their case was held today, we’d have a better understanding about abuse and what it does to you, and I think their sentences would have been very different,’ says Anamaria.
‘We have long forgiven them, and we desperately want closure as a family.’
