Menendez brothers murder trial was 'classic battle of the sexes,' juror says

Hazel Thornton, who served as a juror during Erik and Lyle Menendez's 1993 trial for the murder of their parents, said that the men on the jury weren't swayed by the brothers' claims that their father abused them sexually. 

"It was a classic battle of the sexes," juror #9, Hazel Thornton, told NewsNation. "The men did not believe that Jose [Menendez] had been abusing his sons. The men never did back down and accept the fact that they may have been abused."

In August 1989, when Erik and Lyle were 21 and 20, respectively, they shot their father six times, and their mother ten times, in the den of their Beverly Hills mansion. 

Police initially suspected the murders to be mob-related. The brothers spent lavishly in the months after the killings, leading investigators to suspect that they killed their parents for financial gain. But there wasn't sufficient evidence to arrest the brothers until Judalon Smith, the mistress of Erik's therapist, Jerome Oziel, told police about Erik and Lyle's involvement.

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Prosecutors in Los Angeles are reviewing new evidence to determine whether the siblings should be serving life sentences for killing their parents in their Beverly Hills mansion more than 35 years ago, the city’s district attorney said earlier this month.

The brothers' attorneys have argued that they should have been convicted of manslaughter, rather than murder, due to their father's alleged abuse, in which case they already would have been released from prison. Thornton writes on her website that she voted for voluntary manslaughter. 

MENENDEZ BROTHERS, CONVICTED OF KILLING PARENTS, DEFENDED BY RELATIVES AS THEY FIGHT FOR FREEDOM

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Their case is being highlighted in a new Netflix scripted series, "Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story," and another documentary on October 7. 

Thornton told NewsNation that she doesn't intend to watch the Netflix series, which the brothers' family members called a "a phobic, gross, anachronistic, serial episodic nightmare that is not only riddled with mistruths and outright falsehoods, but ignores the most recent exculpatory revelations" in a statement on X. 

"Why would I want to watch a story that doesn’t reflect the truth as I know it?" Thornton said.

For seven months, Thornton served on the Los Angeles jury in the brothers' first of two trials.

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"The women who voted for voluntary manslaughter were ridiculed and thought to be indecisive, emotional, enamored of the brothers, and too stupid to understand the jury instructions," Thornton wrote in her account of the experience. 

After a month of deliberations and two hung juries, then-Los Angeles District Attorney Gil Garcetti announced that the brothers would be retried. 

At the culmination of their second trial in 1996, both brothers were convicted on two counts of first-degree murder with special circumstances for lying in wait, and conspiracy to murder. Both were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Erik and Lyle Menendez have appealed their conviction multiple times over the years without success, but their latest petition for freedom points to two new pieces of evidence.

The first is a letter from Erik Menendez to his cousin Andy Cano, mailed eight months before Kitty and Jose Menendez were murdered. Cano's mother found the letter nine years ago, according to the brothers' attorneys. Cano testified at one of the brothers' trials that Erik had told him about the alleged sexual abuse, but he died in 2003. 

The second is a sworn statement from Roy Rossello, a former member of the band Menudo, claiming that Jose Menendez had sexually abused him. Jose, who was managing the boy's band, allegedly drugged and sexually assaulted the boy when he visited the Menendez household at 14, according to the statement.