The Menendez Murders: The Shocking Untold Story of the Menendez Family and the Killings That Stunned the Nation

Discover the definitive book on the Menendez case--and the primary source material for NBC's Law and Order True Crime: The Menendez Murders.

A successful entertainment executive making $2 million a year. His former beauty queen wife. Their two sons on the fast track to success. But it was all a façade.

The Menendez saga has captivated the American public since 1989. The killing of José and Kitty Menendez on a quiet Sunday evening in Beverly Hills didn't make the cover of People magazine until the arrest of their sons seven months later, and the case developed an intense cult following. When the first Menendez trial began in July 1993, the public was convinced that Lyle and Erik were a pair of greedy rich kids who had killed loving, devoted parents.

But the real story remained buried beneath years of dark secrets. Until now.

Journalist Robert Rand, who originally reported on the case for the Miami Herald and Playboy, has followed the Menendez murders from the beginning and has continued investigating and interviewing key sources for 28 years. Rand is the only reporter who covered the original investigation as well as both trials. With unparalleled access to the Menendez family and their history, including interviews with both brothers before and after their arrest, Rand has uncovered extraordinary details that certainly would have changed the fate of the brothers' first-degree murder conviction and sentencing to life without parole.

In The Menendez Murders: The Shocking Untold Story of the Menedez Family and the Killings That Stunned the Nation, Rand shares these intimate, never-before-revealed findings, including a deeply disturbing history of child abuse and sexual molestation in the Menendez family going back generations, and the shocking admission O.J. Simpson made to one of the Menendez brothers when they were inmates at the L.A. County Men's Central Jail.

Author: Robert Rand
Publisher: Benbella Books
Published: 09/04/2018
Pages: 376
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.15lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9781946885265

About the Author
Robert Rand is an Emmy Award-winning journalist who works in TV, print, and digital media. He began covering the Menendez brothers case for the Miami Herald the day after the killings on August 21, 1989. He was in court daily for both trials and provided analysis for Court TV, ABC, and CBS News. In March 1991, Playboy published Rand's article The Killing of Jose Menendez. The 14,000-word story was the longest article ever published by Playboy. Rand's print work includes stories contributed to People, The Guardian, Stern, Grazia, and Tropic, the Sunday magazine of the Miami Herald. He covered the William Kennedy Smith rape trial for Paris Match.

In July 2016, Rand was hired by Wolf Films as a consultant working on the development of the NBC eight-hour limited series Law & Order True Crime: The Menendez Murders, which aired in the fall of 2017. Rand's unpublished manuscript of The Menendez Murders provided the primary source material for the series.

Rand has appeared as the primary interview in dozens of documentaries about the Menendez case, including ABC 20/20's Truth and Lies: The Menendez Brothers and Dateline NBC's Unthinkable: The Menendez Murders, which both aired in 2017.

Rand was awarded a Los Angeles Emmy Award for two years of stories at KCOP-TV in L.A. about an illegal immigrant who was wrongly convicted. The stories resulted in the overturning of a ten-year-old conviction and the release of the man from jail. He was a member of the Special Assignment investigative reporting group at CBS 2 in L.A. and the I-Team at KYW TV (Philadelphia) that won a Columbia-DuPont Silver Baton Award for a year-long series about wealthy property tax dodgers.