First, it was a driver of a sedan slowing down to a crawl 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 running out of a van for selfies, followed by bikers, who stopped to see what all the ruckus was about. In the end, they all had the same question.
“Is that the right house?”
In recent weeks, the quietude of this affluent Beverly Hills neighborhood has been filled with the buzzing of tourists and true crime fanatics all swarming to peek at the infamous Menendez mansion on Elm Drive — where two brothers murdered their parents in 1989. The case has received renewed attention after a Netflix show and documentary profiled their case and L.A. County Dist. Atty. George Gascón announced he recommends they be resentenced after new evidence that they had been molested by their father came to light, which could make them eligible for parole.
In just the last month, Beverly Hills police officials say, officers have responded to 18 calls for service related to noise complaints and trespassing concerns around the mansion.
“There’s people all hours of the night,” said Elm Drive resident Mindy R., who declined to provide 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 tow companies to manage the crowd. It was nothing but the occasional tour bus through the neighborhood before, Mindy said.
“I didn’t register that [the mansion] was across the street from me,” she said of when she first moved in a few years ago. “It’s been pretty quiet until the Netflix show came out.”
In September, Netflix released its dramatization of the case, “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story,” as the latest chapter in its true crime anthology series. A two-hour documentary featuring new audio interviews with the siblings, “The Menendez Brothers,” was released by Netflix a month later. The scripted show and documentary introduced a new generation to a case that had their parents and grandparents 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 tale of these two charismatic yet troubled young men who seemed to have it all between wealth and looks before they violently snapped, taking their parents’ lives with shotguns.
The renewed celebrity status of the house 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 raise the idea of a haunting.
“This psychic visited the Menendez home. Do you see what I see?” says the caption of one TikTok video that has been viewed more than 2.5 million times, as it zooms ever closer to an upstairs window to suggest a shadow of Jose Menendez’s face.
Natalie Gardena, a surgical technician from Pomona, said she’s seen content creators hopping the fence on social media to take photos on the porch to re-create a picture of the brothers standing in front of the mansion.
The 25-year-old visited the mansion on Wednesday on her day off from work and said she was initially drawn to the home by her morbid fascination with true crime documentaries — she had also visited Benedict Canyon in Beverly Hills where the Manson murders happened. But watching the scripted Netflix series also caused her to sympathize with the brothers’ experiences of alleged abuse under their father.
“The system just failed them,” Gardena said. She thinks it was unfair that the trial focused on the brothers’ spending spree after the killings without fully acknowledging the sexual assault allegations. “If they were sisters, they would have been out long time ago. But since they’re men, no one believed men could be sexually abused back then.”
Though the mansion is no longer owned by the Menendez family — it was sold for $17 million in March and is vacant as it undergoes renovation — that apparently hasn’t stopped its appeal at home or abroad.
On a recent Wednesday afternoon, visitors were walking or driving by the home virtually every minute. Among them were tourists from France and South Africa who stopped by to take pictures of the mansion’s front-facing facade and the residence’s 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 on his itinerary. “It’s fascinating to visit this place … something that you always see on the screens … you have the opportunity in real life [to see it].”
For others, seeing the residence brings up a deep sense of personal loss and grief.
Rebecca Hecht, who went to Beverly Hills High School a year ahead of Erik Menendez, lives about a mile away from the home and was walking by the house with a labradoodle on a recent afternoon.
“I just feel a very heavy presence being here,” Hecht said. “It feels very ominous on the street.”
Her brother Adam taught Erik tennis, she said. The same summer the murders happened, Adam also mysteriously disappeared — a case that’s never been solved.
“In 1989, I believe I lost three brothers,” said a tearful Hecht, who still can’t believe that a schoolmate of hers has been in prison for decades. “I understand what they went through, because I grew up in this town, I had a very similar father to them. But the abuse was far worse that they went through.”
With the renewed attention drawn to the case, she finally mustered the courage to watch the entirety of the Menendez trial on YouTube. And while she doesn’t condone murder, she believes they deserve a second chance because of the alleged abuse.
“They’re model citizens in prison, and strangely, 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’s too personal to watch it.
But she hopes the media attention has swayed the public’s and officials’ opinions in favor of the brothers.
“I think any publicity is good publicity. I do think there’s a firestorm of attention right now, and I believe it’s pushing in the direction of their release,” she said.
