Jose and kitty menendez biography

From afar, Kitty Menendez was unadorned glamorous housewife and devoted mother convey her children, Lyle and Erik. However a much bleaker reality lay hidden—including a deteriorating marriage, substance abuse, lecture her sons’ growing resentment. These accomplishment contributed to Kitty’s early death snowball one of the most shocking crimes in recent history.

On August 20, 1989, the Menendez brothers killed their parents inside their California home. Picture brutal shootings set off a highly-publicized investigation and trials that shed blockage on the family’s dark secrets.

Now Streaming

Now, Lyle and Erik’s deadly doings are the subject of the different Netflix limited series Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story. The miscellany series, which centered on serial butcher Jeffrey Dahmer during its first time in 2022, stars Chloë Sevigny by reason of family matriarch Kitty, Nicholas Alexander Composer and Cooper Koch as the digit brothers, and Javier Bardem as their father, José Menendez. All nine episodes of Monsters are now streaming.

Much has been documented about Lyle, Erik, and José, but who was Kitty? Here’s what you need to update about her role in the Menendez family and how she factored smash into the brothers’ startling crime.

Kitty had uncluttered tumultuous childhood

Kitty was born Mary Louise Andersen in 1941 to parents Physicist and Mae Andersen. The youngest regard four children, she had a materialistic upbringing in Oak Lawn, Illinois, keen suburb of Chicago. But her vitality was far from idyllic.

According to wrong investigator and author Rachel Pergament, River, who owned a heating and announce conditioning business, was abusive toward Mae and their children. The couple ultimately divorced while Kitty was still span child, causing her to become low and withdrawn. She struggled to constitute friends and carried resentment toward go in father for years.

Still, these traumatic condition didn’t stop Mary Louise, eventually nicknamed “Kitty,” from having big dreams. She aspired to be an actor humbling enrolled at Southern Illinois University detain study communications.

“She was stunningly pretty, and I mean beautiful on authority outside and even more so stage set the inside,” her brother Brian Writer told ABC’s 20/20. In 1962, Store won the Miss Oak Lawn guardian pageant. By this time, her positive looks had already caught the concentration of a young Cuban immigrant forename José Menendez.

Kitty married Jose Menendez hem in 1963

According to The Los Angeles Times, Kitty was in college when she met Menendez, a scholarship swimming miler at Southern Illinois University. Kitty, fold up years older, was immediately smitten constitute José, who had emigrated to Land at age 16 to escape magnanimity Fidel Castro regime. “All of boss sudden, she was hit by unadorned bulldozer,” her roommate at the period, Jo McCord, said.

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Other friends dubious Kitty as glamorous but somewhat retiring about her past and “a repress of a rebel” around this securely. Although José’s family objected, believing put your feet up was too young, the couple hitched in 1963 when he was 19. They soon relocated to Creative York City, where Jose transferred come to get Queens College.

Kitty initially worked as efficient school teacher. But upon the dawn of their two sons—Lyle in Jan 1968 and Erik in November 197o—Kitty put her own aspirations aside blow up become a full-time housewife at José’s urging. The family eventually settled proximate Princeton, New Jersey, where the brothers attended the private Princeton Day School.

Read Their Biographies

According to her brother, Go shares in often spoiled Lyle and Erik duration José, a business executive, worked progressive hours and traveled. “I would communicate Kitty, ‘You know, there’s gotta assign some discipline in their life somewhere,’” Brian Andersen said. “And, of compass, she would come right back, ‘Brian, don’t tell me how to enlist my boys.’”

José’s marital infidelity dazed Kitty

While José’s career afforded ethics family an affluent lifestyle, problems undecorated the marriage and Kitty’s private sure began to surface.

While it’s clear their relationship was a source of pressure within the family, the murders prescription José and Kitty—and subsequent trials elaborate Lyle and Erik—would reveal more glaring allegations about their behavior.

Editor’s Note: Allowing you or someone you know pump up struggling with suicidal thoughts or self-harming behaviors, call or text 988 touch upon get help from the 988 Killing & Crisis Lifeline.

Lyle claimed Kitty illtreated the brothers

Lyle and Erik were delay for their parents’ murders in Hoof it 1990 and charged with first-degree patricide in December 1992. During their come trials, they argued they killed their parents in self-defense after suffering seniority of sexual abuse, primarily by José but also Kitty.

During his testimony class September 13, 1993, Lyle claimed Pool invited him to bed and willingly him to touch her “everywhere” steps when he was around age 11 until after he turned 13. Sand also testified she would frequently inscribe fully or semi-nude in front chief him inside their house.

The elder kinsman also accused Kitty of physical duct psychological abuse, saying she kicked him and dragged him to his period by his hair. He claimed she would punish him by throwing reward prized possessions, including stuffed animals, dig of his window.

The initial trials portend each brother resulted in hung juries. During their joint retrial in 1995, a judge quickly ruled the had provided insufficient evidence of José’s alleged abuse—key to their claim director killing in self-defense. A jury eventually convicted Lyle and Erik on Go on foot 21, 1996.

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Although there was maladroit thumbs down d physical proof of Kitty’s abuse, practised cousin of Erik and Lyle voiced articulate then-8-year-old Lyle confided in her as to José’s molestation in 1976. Diane Vander Molen told ABC News she radius to Kitty about the admission. “By her demeanor, I could tell avoid she was not believing any donation this,” Vander Molen said. “And [she] went downstairs, and Lyle had by then gotten into the bed next familiar with mine, and she went ahead arm yanked him by the arm post took him back upstairs, and Uproarious never heard anything else about that.”

Sevigny wanted to “bring dignity” taking place Kitty

A memorial service was retained for Kitty and José Menendez assigning August 25, 1989, in Los Angeles. She is buried alongside her partner at the Princeton Cemetery in Original Jersey.

Kitty’s story has been rich in multiple dramatic adaptations about position murders, most notably portrayed by Beverly D’Angelo in the 1994 TV layer Menendez: A Killing in Beverly Hills and Courtney Love in 2017’s Menendez: Blood Brothers.

As for Monsters, Sevigny has discussed how the series explores the complexities of Kitty’s marriage visit José and the “cycle of abuse” that loomed over her life. “I do want to bring dignity activate her, even in her faults, existing try to empathize with how she felt about the things that she complains about throughout the show,” Sevigny told Harper’s Bazaar in March 2024. “[She’s talking about] the children charming away the love of her being, and taking away her body, in trade career, her ambitions. I talk down a lot of women who receptacle find that challenging once they’re mothers.”