First, it was the driver of a sedan slowing down and pointing as they passed the Spanish-style mansion, draped in elm leaves and hidden behind a privacy fence.
Then came a group of teenage girls who got out of a van to take selfies, followed by bikers who stopped to see what the fuss was about. Ultimately, they were all asking the same question.
“Is this the right house?”
In recent weeks, the quiet of this affluent Beverly Hills neighborhood has been filled with the buzz of tourists and true crime fanatics, all flocking to take a look at the infamous Menendez mansion on Elm Drive – where two brothers murdered their parents in 1989. The case was heard. renewed attention after a Netflix show and documentary presented their case and LA County Dist. Atty. George Gascon announcement he recommends that they be returned after new evidence that they had been molested by their father emerged, which could make them eligible for parole.
In the past month alone, Beverly Hills police officials say, officers responded to 18 calls for service related to complaints about noise and trespassing issues around the mansion.
“It’s busy at all hours of the night,” said Elm Drive resident Mindy R., who declined to give her full name out of concern for her safety because of all the recent visitors. “People are getting out of their cars, blocking our driveway. »
Now she and her neighbors call the police and towing companies to manage the crowds. Before, it was nothing more than an occasional tour bus through the neighborhood, Mindy said.
“I didn’t notice (the mansion) was across the street from my house,” she said of her first move in a few years ago. “It was pretty quiet until the Netflix show came out.”
In September, Netflix released its dramatization of the case, “Monsters: The Story of Lyle and Erik Menendez”, as the final chapter of his true crime anthology series. A two-hour documentary featuring new audio interviews with the siblings, “The Menéndez Brothers” was released by Netflix a month later. The scripted show and documentary introduced a new generation to a case in which their parents and grandparents were glued to television screens during the first trial in 1993.
The trial, one of the first of its kind to be televised, created an appetite for a new American genre: true crime. The nation was engrossed in the story of these two charismatic but troubled young men who seemed to have it all between wealth and looks before violently giving in, killing their parents with shotguns.
The house’s renewed celebrity status has since become a goldmine of viral content for TikTokers who film the mansion and rehash the gruesome details of the murder scene for online audiences or conjure up the idea of a haunting.
“This medium visited the Menendez house. Do you see what I see? says the caption of a TikTok video that has been viewed more than 2.5 million times, as she moves closer and closer to an upstairs window to suggest a shadow of José Menendez’s face.
Natalie Gardena, a surgical technician from Pomona, said she has seen content creators jump over the fence on social media to take photos on the porch to recreate a photo of the brothers standing in front of the mansion.
The 25-year-old visited the mansion on her day off on Wednesday and said she was first drawn to the house by her morbid fascination with true crime documentaries – she had also visited Benedict Canyon in Beverly Hills, where the Manson murders took place. But watching the Netflix scripted series also led her to sympathize with the brothers’ experiences of alleged abuse under their father’s care.
“The system just failed them,” Gardena said. She thinks it was unfair for the trial to focus on the brothers’ spending sprees after the murders without fully acknowledging the sexual assault allegations. “If they were sisters, they would have dated a long time ago. But since they are men, no one believed at the time that men could be victims of sexual abuse.
Although the mansion is no longer owned by the Menendez family – it was sold for $17 million in March and is vacant as it is being renovated – that apparently hasn’t stopped its appeal in the country or abroad. ‘stranger.
On a recent Wednesday afternoon, visitors walked or drove by the house almost every minute. Among them were tourists from France and South Africa who stopped to take photos of the mansion’s facade and the residence numbers on the driveway.
“In Italy, the show is very popular,” said Fabrizio Serra, a 23-year-old who was visiting Los Angeles and decided to include the Menendez mansion in his itinerary. “It’s fascinating to visit this place… something you always see on screen… you get the opportunity in real life (to see it).”
For others, seeing the residence stirs a deep sense of personal loss and grief.
Rebecca Hecht, who went to Beverly Hills High School a year before Erik Menendez, lives about a mile from the house and was walking outside the house with a labradoodle on a recent afternoon.
“I just feel a really strong presence here,” Hecht said. “It’s very worrying on the street.”
Her brother Adam taught Erik tennis, she said. The same summer that the murders took place, Adam also mysteriously disappeared – a case that was never solved.
“In 1989, I think I lost three brothers,” says a tearful Hecht, who still can’t believe one of his classmates has been in prison for decades. “I understand what they went through, because I grew up in this town, I had a father who was a lot like them. But the abuse was much worse than what they suffered.
With the renewed attention on the case, she finally found the courage to watch the entire Menendez trial on YouTube. And while she doesn’t condone the killing, she believes they deserve a second chance because of the alleged abuse.
“They are model citizens in prison and, oddly enough, ironically, prison was probably a better life for them, and that’s why they were able to thrive,” Hecht said.
As for the Netflix show, Hecht said it was too personal to watch.
But she hopes the media attention will have swayed public and official opinion in favor of the brothers.
“I think any publicity is good publicity. I think there’s a storm of attention right now, and I believe it’s pushing in the direction of their liberation,” she said.