Lyle (Nicholas Alexander Chavez) takes a painful walk down memory lane in Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story episode 4 recap.
"Kill or Be Killed" begins in Calabasas, Calif., in 1988. A van carrying two masked men pulls up to a house. One enters the gate code and they quickly go inside. They know this house and know what they’re after, including items like gym equipment. Back inside the van, Erik (Cooper Koch) and Lyle (Nicholas Alexander Chavez) remove their masks and congratulate each other on not getting caught.
Leslie (Ari Graynor) asks Lyle about how they ended up getting caught and how Jose forced Erik to take the fall for them both. That’s when Erik started seeing Dr. Oziel. Lyle gets defensive when he thinks the lawyer is trying to set up his father as a horrible man. Despite everything, Lyle loved his father. Leslie points out that he shot his father in the head. Lyle says Jose wanted him to be best in everything, including tennis, school and life, dating the best girls around.
What is Psychology Lab anyway?
In a flashback, we see Jose (Javier Bardem) slapping Lyle for getting bad grades, telling his son he’ll write Lyle’s next paper for school. Kitty (Chloë Sevigny) refuses to allow him to date the wrong girl or even let her inside and "eat off [her] china." Later, Lyle reads his college entrance essay for Princeton, which Jose takes credit for. Jose then goes on to say everyone cheats in this world and it’s all about winning.
Leslie points out that Lyle did get into Princeton, but then he got kicked out for plagiarism. In another flashback, Jose argues with the dean over whether a "psychology lab" is real. He tells the dean his son is not getting expelled; if his son cheated he’ll be beaten, but he’s given too much money for him to be expelled. The dean eventually agrees to a one-year suspension.
Lyle is forced to return to LA during his suspension. In the shower, Lyle realizes his hair is falling out. His father introduces him to the board at RCA and says he’s getting straight As at school and he’s there for a summer internship. While he’s talking, Jose looks at his head and asks if he’s losing his hair in front of everyone. Jose is there when Lyle is fitted for a hairpiece. Lyle isn’t convinced about "wearing a wig" but Jose doesn’t give him a choice. He forces Lyle to thank him in front of the salesman.
Leslie wants to go back to before he was suspended. Erik and his friend show Lyle their haul from their latest robbery and tell him how easy it is because they know when all of their friends are on vacation. When the police find the missing items in the boys’ possession, Jose tells them to give him a number so he can "write a check." On the drive home, Jose is furious. He doesn’t want to hear they’re sorry. He tells them they’re out of the will. They can do whatever they want — lie, cheat or steal — but they can’t get caught.
Jose tells Dr. Oziel (Dallas Roberts) over the phone that their therapy is court-mandated and they won’t be sharing anything beyond what the court requires. Especially about their family. Leslie presses him about why Lyle didn’t share anything about his father back then, and why he’s not talking about the abuse now. Eventually, he seems to agree. Lyle says that his Princeton roommate knows about the abuse, as does his female cousin. He asked her once if her dad "ever touches her privates" and she had no idea what he was talking about. He was around six.
How it started
Lyle says the abuse started with massages after tennis. He remembered his father’s hands feeling "special, like [he] was the center of his world." They would touch each other. He’s not sure if his mother knew, but in a flashback Kitty is seen outside the door and then she walks away.
When Lyle turned seven, Jose started showing him movies and then he would guide Lyle’s movements later. Lyle says he remembers it because he had gotten the Sesame Street stuffed animals and they disagreed with what he was doing. Leslie listens as Lyle details how Jose started using objects. He told his cousin about it, and her mother talked to Kitty but it never stopped. So Lyle did it to Erik "to make it normal." It got worse at eight, Lyle says. That’s when Jose started raping him. He told his dad to stop, and eventually it did. And now he knows it’s because he was doing it to Erik. He went to his father and told him to stop doing it to Erik, but the only way Jose would stop is if Lyle stopped talking about it.
Lyle recalls that the night Erik learned about his hairpiece is when he learned that Jose was still abusing Erik. Lyle hates himself because his father made him hate his own brother, so he vowed to protect him. Soon after Erik learned about the hairpiece, Lyle went to Jose and told his father he’d expose him unless he stopped. Jose loves Lyle’s fire, but he says Erik made his choice. Leslie asks what he thinks Jose meant by that. Lyle knew what it meant: Jose was going to kill him.
A deeper, darker evil
Dominick Dunne (Nathan Lane) entertains a big crowd at a party, detailing the Menendez house’s pedigree. It has been owned by a number of famous people, but you can’t help but be drawn to the television room and what happened there. He outlines what he thinks happened based on his conversations with detectives. He believes that the act was premeditated. He spoke with Craig (Charlie Hall), Judalon (Leslie Grossman) and Peter (Jeff Perry), along with guards from the prison who saw Lyle’s escape plans. He can’t believe that several family members support the brothers. He even mentions Leslie calling her clients "adorable." Dominick says you don’t kill your parents for money by defacing them with bullets and reloading the gun to finish off your mother. This is about something "deeper, darker and evil that goes beyond hate."
Leslie throws down the Vanity Fair magazine, furious that the "pseudojournalist" wrote so many lies about the case. Her husband, a journalist, asks if she really called the boys "adorable." She says there’s no way she can win with so much pro-prosecution misinformation. She can’t quit, so she asks if her husband can help spread some news in her favor.
Leslie meets with Donovan, who tells her that he doesn’t want to be put on the witness stand. She points out that Lyle used his ID to buy the shotguns. And she’d think he’d do anything to keep Lyle from the gas chamber. She asks what they talked about when they lived together. They both had domineering fathers who only cared about winning, but he could see how much pressure Lyle was under. She asks if he shared any secrets about Jose. Donovan admits Lyle told him about Jose's affair and how it was killing his mother.
Later, though, Lyle asks his best friend if he’d take care of Erik if something happened because they’re family. Lyle talks about secrets and wants to know if there’s anything Donovan was hiding. Donovan thought he was testing him, so he admitted to being molested as a kid. He’d never told anyone about it before. Lyle, in tears, says he knows what Donovan is going through because he and his brother were molested, too. By Jose. Leslie confirms that Lyle confessed this four months before the murders. Donovan says Lyle had so much guilt about it.
Back in the present, Leslie asks why that weekend was so special and why he thought his life was in danger. He recalls Erik’s story about Jose banging on the door and rushing in, furious that he told someone about what happened. Erik gets past him and runs downstairs, where he runs into Kitty. She admits she knew what Jose was doing but wanted to protect their family. Kitty loved guns and even took Erik shopping for guns. She shot birds in the backyard and threatened homeless people.
Lyle recalls having to buy the guns on Friday because they were supposed to go shark fishing on Saturday, but his mother told them the trip was pushed from 11 to 4, which freaked them out because it would be dark. They left the guns in the car and went with their parents, and during the car ride, they could see the gun in their mother’s purse. On the boat, Lyle apologizes to Erik for not being able to come to him. When they don’t fish, Jose is furious. They realize the "gun" was actually lipstick.
That night, they bought shotgun shells and practiced shooting the guns. The plan was already in motion.
The entire season of Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story is available to stream now on Netflix.
