Robert Rand

• Robert Rand is an Emmy Award-winning journalist who works in television, print, and digital media.
• He also author of The Menendez Murders: The Shocking Untold Story of the Menendez Family and the Killings that Stunned the Nation.
• In July 2016, Robert was hired by Wolf Films as a consultant to work on development of the NBC eight-hour limited series, "Law and Order: True Crime the Menendez Murders," which aired in Fall of 2017.
• His then unpublished manuscript for the Menendez murders was the primary source of that series.

• https://www.benbellabooks.com
• https://www.benbellabooks.com/shop/menendez-murders

Glenn Yeffeth: Welcome to the Building Books podcast. I'm Glenn Yeffeth, publisher of BenBella Books. On this podcast, we will talk about ideas, authors, and how publishing really works.

Glenn Yeffeth: Welcome, Robert Rand. Robert Rand is one of our authors, the author of "The Menendez Murders: The Shocking Untold Story of the Menendez Family and the Killings that Stunned the Nation." Robert is an Emmy award winning journalist who works in television, print, and digital media. He's been covering the Menendez brothers from the beginning. He's been covering for the Miami Herald since the day after the killings on August 21st, 1989. He was in court daily for both trials and provided analysis for CourtTV, ABC, and CBS. He was awarded a Los Angeles Emmy award for two years of stories that KCOP TV in L.A., about an illegal immigrant who was wrongly convicted. Those stories resulted in overturning of a 10 year old conviction and the release of the man from jail.

Glenn Yeffeth: In July 2016, Robert was hired by Wolf Films as a consultant to work on development of the NBC eight hour limited series "Law and Order: True Crime the Menendez Murders," which aired fall 2017, which I saw, which was fantastic. His unpublished manuscript for the Menendez murders provided the primary source [inaudible 00:01:16] that series.

Glenn Yeffeth: Robert, great working with you, and I'm thrilled to have you on this podcast. Welcome.

Robert Rand: Thank you, Glenn. It's great to be with you. What a fascinating journey I have been on for 29 years. It'll be 29 years this month, August 20th, 1989, since the murders of Jose and Kitty Menendez. I was literally on the ground floor starting the day after Jose and Kitty were killed in Beverly Hills. I had been writing for the Sunday magazine of the Miami Herald, and had recently been in Las Vegas at a convention for the home video business. A friend of mine was the editor of a trade magazine for the home video business, and he called me, I remember the call very clearly. Monday, August 21st, 1989, and he said, "You're not going to believe this. This executive that I know who's a high profile executive in the home video business, he and his wife were blown away last night in Beverly Hills." That started my journey.

Glenn Yeffeth: You've been following from the beginning. When did you start to suspect the brothers?

Robert Rand: The murders were August 20th, 1989. The brothers were not arrested until March eighth, 1990, seven months later. I actually had very little suspicion of the brothers in the beginning. The majority, not the majority, all of the mainstream media was focused on that these killings were possibly related to the father's work in the home video business.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Robert Rand: He had taken over a company that had once been run by the mafia. The general history of the home video business actually featured movies and mainstream movies that we saw in the home video business. The birth of the home stream video business was actually in the adult film industry. Once that took hold, then the mainstream studios saw, "We have an opportunity for our mainstream movies," and then home video business evolved in becoming much more mainstream. The birth of the home video business was actually in the adult film industry.

Glenn Yeffeth: There were some early mob connections that led to that suspicion, which turned out to be the wrong direction.

Robert Rand: That's right. Jose Menendez had been an executive for a top executive with Hertz Rent-A-Car in New York. Also, he was head of RCA Records in New York. The Menendez family had lived in the Princeton, New Jersey area for about 20 years before they came to California. Jose Menendez was hoping to be named to the top job at RCA Records. When that didn't happen, he pulled the cord on a golden parachute and was a free agent looking for some type of work in the entertainment business where he would not only run a company, but he would own a piece of that company. He was recruited by Carolco Pictures. Carolco Pictures was one of the top independent studios in the movie business in the 1980s. They released the Rambo movies, the Terminator movies, Basic Instinct. They wanted to start up a home video division, just like all the other studios.

Robert Rand: Jose Menendez was hired to create a home video business for Carolco Pictures. He had a seat on the board at Carolco. In fact, after he came out to California, he used to butt heads sometimes with Sylvester Stallone, from the Rambo movies, over the budgets, which kept growing larger and larger in these movies. One of the companies that Carolco bought was called IVE. It was owned by a man by the name of Noel Bloom. Noel Bloom had been accused by the California Attorney General's Office of having some possible ties to a mafia-related adult film industry. Noel Bloom's company, IVE, had released some soft core porn movies. When Menendez came in as the new boss, Noel Bloom was going to keep working there, but they butted heads, and they had some serious friction between them. Bloom left the company and it ended up in litigation.

Robert Rand: That litigation was ongoing at the time that Jose Menendez died. The first thing that all of the media turned to was, there was this friction between Jose Menendez and Noel Bloom, and the past history of the company. You have to remember, back in 1989, we had no Internet, we had no 24 hour news cycle, and the Menendez murders were actually on the national media radar for maybe two or three days. It was an interesting story, and it was certainly bizarre. Beverly Hills averages two murders a year. In one night, 1989's quota had been filled.

Robert Rand: The initial media speculation in the L.A. Times and the national media was that this was somehow related to the home video industry, which did have some shady characters that go back to its origin that I mentioned in the adult film industry. The people that worked at the new company named Live Entertainment, which was the company that Jose Menendez ran, and he had been running that for about a year and a half. Over the course of that year and a half, they had basically cut their ties to some of the shady people that were in the past of the company. The people who worked for Menendez and worked with Live Entertainment, they were astonished that the media picked up on this mafia hit possibility of a story. Five days after the murders, on August 25th, 1989, the Wall Street Journal had a giant front page headline, "Hints of a Mob Rub Out."

Glenn Yeffeth: It's interesting that you talked about what a different news environment it was back then, and how this was interesting for a couple days, and then people moved on. The case wound up really imprinting in the public mind to an amazing degree. Why do you think that was?

Robert Rand: As I said, there were seven months between the murders and the arrest of Erik and Lyle Menendez. I was in on the ground floor of the story because I found out that Jose Menendez was Cuban-American. I found out that he had a sister in West Palm Beach, Florida. I was writing features for the Sunday magazine of the Miami Herald. I called Jose's sister a couple weeks after the funeral, and five percent to make a condolence call and 95% to possibly hit on her for a story, and she immediately invited me to come up to West Palm Beach. I spent four hours sitting on her couch in her living room listening to the family history, which went back to Spain, to Cuba, then the States. In each country, the family had been very poor, and then become very successful, then lost everything, and moved on to a new country. That was the situation as they started in Spain, lost everything, went to Cuba, became very wealthy, then Castro came in. They had to leave Cuba and come to the States.

Robert Rand: The entire family was dirt poor when they arrived in the Stats in 1960. Jose Menendez was a student at Queens College. He was not a great student, but he worked several jobs to pay for school. His first break was getting a job at Coopers and [inaudible 00:08:47], the big aid accounting firms. It was from there that he began his rise up the corporate ladders through Hertz Rent-A-Car and RCA Records. I didn't answer your question, and that was, how did this story blow up into the huge international sensation that it was. The Beverly Hills Police investigation appeared to be going nowhere for seven months. Publicly, they weren't saying anything. The media occasionally would run a story about, "It still looks like some sort of mafia-related hit."

Robert Rand: Two months after the murders, five months before they were arrested, I actually spent three days with Erik and Lyle Menendez. My assignment for the Miami Herald was not to write a story about the murder investigation, which we didn't know much about, and the Beverly Hills Police weren't really saying much. My assignment was to write a biography of Jose Menendez, rags to riches story of a Cuban-American immigrant ends in a terrible tragedy. As part of that research, I got to spend three days with Erik and Lyle Menendez two months after the murders, five months before they were arrested. They were not suspects publicly. I had no reason to be suspicious of them. They told me how much they loved their parents and how much they missed them, and how close their family was.

Robert Rand: I've been an investigative reporter, going back to college after a long time ago at the University of Pennsylvania, and I had absolutely no reason to be suspicious of them. I did meet with the lead Beverly Hills investigators, [inaudible 00:10:23] and Tom Lanahan. When we had lunch, they were talking about mafia hit theories. I think they were doing that intentionally to throw me off the trail. The reality was, about 10 days after the murders, one of the mothers of a friend of the brothers had an attorney call the Beverly Hills Police and said, "You should really take a close look at Erik and Lyle Menendez." That was all confidential.

Robert Rand: Fast forward to March of 1990, here we have this horrible murder case, two people brutally killed by two dozen shotgun blasts. March eighth, 1990, the Beverly Hills Police holds a news conference, and make a shocking announcement that Lyle Menendez, the son of the victims had been arrested and charged with the murder of his parents. Erik Menendez was playing in a tennis tournament in Israel, and he actually got the phone call and was able to escape from Israel and get on a plane to London before Interpol was coming to arrest him. He actually got out of Israel. Interpol and the Beverly Hills Police had no idea where he was. He was hiding out in a hotel in London with his tennis coach, and the family contacted an attorney by the name of Robert Shapiro, a name you might know from the O.J. case.

Robert Rand: Robert Shapiro negotiated for Erik Menendez to come and surrender to the Beverly Hills Police, fly back to the States. It was a horrible legal mistake that Shapiro made. Shapiro was known as the deal maker who settled cases. He wasn't known as a litigator who actually went to trial. If Erik Menendez had just walked into a police station in London surrendered, it would've been a condition of his extradition that he not be eligible for the death penalty. Instead, Shapiro has him fly to Miami where he meets his aunt and her son, and then fly to Los Angeles. By voluntarily coming back to the States, Erik Menendez became eligible for the death penalty thanks to Robert Shapiro.

Glenn Yeffeth: That's fascinating. That's a big mistake, isn't it?

Robert Rand: It is a big mistake, but let me finally answer your question, which I still haven't done yet, which is, here's what happened. I wrote a cover story for People Magazine two weeks after Erik and Lyle Menendez were arrested, and this was a case, "Murder in Beverly Hills" was the headline of the People Magazine story I wrote. It was Beverly Hills. It was the movie business. It was kids killing their parents. It just had a lot of buzzwords that caught the attention of the media. Suddenly, this story went from being sort of a quiet little L.A. story for the past seven months, to being not only a national, but an international media sensation. Foreign magazines and newspapers were extremely interested in the story. I think in the first couple months after the brothers were arrested, I sold three or four dozen stories to foreign magazines. People all around the world were following this case and fascinated by it.

Glenn Yeffeth: There's something about murder among the rich that's fascinating. When I think about our fascination with Columbo, which is all about spoiled rich people killing each other, and there's something about that, people wanted to fit this murder into that mold of spoiled rich kids killing their parents, didn't they?

Robert Rand: That was the prosecution theory. Actually, the first day that the Beverly Hills police had a news conference, the chief of the Beverly Hills police told a roomful of reporters, he was asked, "What was the motive? Why do you think this happened?" The police chief said, "It's no secret that the Menendez family had an estate worth 14 million dollars." Two days later, [inaudible 00:14:19] at the District Attorney of L.A. at the time, had a news conference and he repeated that same theory. This was that Erik and Lyle Menendez were in a hurry to inherit their parents' money, and that's why the murders had happened.

Glenn Yeffeth: Having sat through both trials with very different outcomes, was there any part to the trial that you felt weren't fair to the brothers?

Robert Rand: Going back to the first trial when they were holding jury selection, which took about six weeks, it was a very challenging situation for the court to pick a jury, and for the defense and prosecution to pick a jury. Everybody who came into the room had heard about the case. Everybody knew something about the case. There were three years between the arrest of the brothers in March of '90, and the start of the first trial was July '93, in fact, 25 years ago. The media coverage was intense and it was very heavy and ongoing. Again, not just in the States, but all over the world.

Robert Rand: Everybody had heard something about the case, and the judge was asking the perspective jurors, "Can you set aside whatever you've learned in the media, and can you just base your verdict, base your analysis of the case on the evidence?" Some people said yes, some people said no. For three years, the only story the public had been hearing was, "Greedy rich kids kill Ozzie and Harriet on a Sunday night in Beverly Hills."

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Robert Rand: The defense made what I consider a tactical error, in they chose not to go public with the defense. About six to eight months after the brothers were arrested, they had a therapist by the name of Dr. William Vicary, who was evaluating Erik, the younger brother, and he was able to start getting tiny bits of information out of Erik, that this was a family with secrets. Dr. Vicary told me that when he goes into ... He's a forensic psychiatrist, who testifies in a lot of high profile cases. He told me that when he goes into evaluate a defendant, the people that are faking it will start talking, the first day he comes in, and start talking about, "I was abused. I was molested," and he looks through that. In the case of Erik and Lyle Menendez, they wouldn't say a thing. It took months of Dr. Vicary establishing a rapport with the brothers before he was able to get even the tiniest bit of information out of them. The Menendez family was a family with secrets, and Erik and Lyle Menendez were determined to not reveal those secrets.

Glenn Yeffeth: Based on my reading of the book, it seemed like that first trial, which was a hung jury, and then in the second trial, the judge was determined to not let that happen again. I don't know if my reading is correct, but it seemed to me that the judge really worked hard to change the outcome in the second case. It was kind of shocking to me, almost, that the judge had that much influence over what happens over the course of a trial.

Robert Rand: That's right. Judge Stanley Weisberg was a former prosecutor himself, as many judges are, and actually Judge Weisberg had been the prosecutor of a case about a year and a half before the Menendez brothers were arrested, in which a wealthy young man from Beverly Hills killed his entertainment executive father. All of the evidence, and as you read the stories in the L.A. times, it appeared that the case was heading towards a first degree murder conviction, and the jury came back with involuntary manslaughter. Judge Weisberg had that personal experience before he ever came into the court with the Menendez case.

Robert Rand: I believe that in the first trial, the judge allowed the defense to put on 65 witnesses, family members, teachers, coaches, friends of the family, and these were people that had been eyewitnesses to physical, verbal, and emotional abuse. The public was hung up on were the brothers sexually molested or not. That was never the sole criterion for me in evaluating this case. At the end of the first trial, none of the jurors could agree on a verdict. All of the women jurors voted for manslaughter. All the men voted for murder. The misconception by the public was because of the media coverage after the first trial, people thought that the women jurors wanted to let the brothers just walk out of a jail. That's not true.

Robert Rand: Manslaughter is still a murder conviction in California. It just carries a lesser penalty. If the brothers had been convicted of voluntary or involuntary manslaughter, they still would've been sent to state prison for 25 or 30 years. The general public was just outraged. I remember on talk radio here in Los Angeles, for months and months after the first trial was over, people couldn't let it go. They said, "What's wrong with those jurors? The brothers admitted that they killed their parents. Why couldn't they convict them?" As I just said, everybody agreed that this was a case of murder, but the disagreement was whether it was manslaughter or first degree premeditated murder. That was the difference.

Robert Rand: The first trial was followed by people in the U.S. and all over the world, because it was broadcast by a brand new cable network called CourtTV. People were watching it for eight hours a day, like a novela. Night time, during primetime, CourtTV ran a three hour highlight show, and people would watch that highlight show. The Internet barely existed in 1993, but there were the primitive bulletin boards that existed on prodigy, and they were Menendez bulletin boards during the first trial. People, after watching the trial all day, after watching the highlight show, they would go on these bulletin boards until 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning debating minutia. This was really the birth of social media connected to a high profile case.

Robert Rand: The mainstream media was completely against the brothers, and the L.A. County DA's office has a dozen people that do public relations, and their job is to put out the spin in this high profile cases, and the story they kept pushing was "Greedy Rich Kids, Greedy Rich Kids." One interesting factoid is that in 1992, an L.A. County grand jury considered evidence of murder for a financial gain, and that grand jury did not return an indictment of murder for financial gain. However, that didn't stop the prosecution from trying to push the greedy, rich kids, because they knew that theory would play well with the media, and they hoped would play well with the jurors too. The first trial ended with two hung juries. There were separate juries, one for each brother, because some evidence only pertained to one brother or the other.

Robert Rand: After that first trial ended, the L.A. County DA's office immediately announced in the same day that, "We are going to retry this case. We believe this is first degree murder." The second trial started in October of 1995, and it had the misfortune of starting the day after the O.J. verdict. The first thing the judge did was kick the TV camera out of the courtroom, and he knew that would cut down on the media coverage. It cut probably 75, 80% of the media coverage that the first trial had. Over the course of the six month trial, the judge kept reversing all of his original evidence rulings. He refused to allow most of the family history into the guilt phase of the trial that had been the heart of the defense in the first trial.

Glenn Yeffeth: He has that much discretion. That was interesting to me. I'd never been aware that the judge can play that strong a role.

Robert Rand: Yes.

Glenn Yeffeth: In the end, do you feel that it was a fair process, that Menendez got what they should've gotten?

Robert Rand: No. It absolutely was not a fair process because the defense was only allowed to put on a very limited version of what they put on in the first trial, and after the brothers were convicted of first degree murder, then after the guilt phase was over, then they had what's called the penalty phase, and that's when the jurors had to decide whether to send the brothers to the gas chamber, or send them to life without parole. Those were the only two choices. Death penalty or life without parole. During that penalty phase, which lasted about three weeks, the defense was allowed to put on all of these witnesses with the family history, and the jury voted to sentence them to life without parole. I interviewed most of the jurors after the second trial, and three or four of them told me if they had heard that family history in the guilt phase, they never would've voted for first degree murder.

Glenn Yeffeth: Wow.

Robert Rand: That is the fix. When the brothers were going through their various appeals, their last stop on the route through the appeals was at the federal ninth circuit court of appeals. One of the justices, Alex Kozinski, said that he believed there had been collusion between the L.A. County DA's office and the judge to convict the brothers. I agree with them.

Glenn Yeffeth: Wow. It's interesting what the coincidences are with Simpson trial. The involvement of Shapiro in the beginning, the coincidence of the timing of the innocence verdict. Also, if I remember this right, Lyle actually had Simpson as a cellmate, or as a next door neighbor.

Robert Rand: Actually, Erik and O.J. were-

Glenn Yeffeth: It was Erik, okay.

Robert Rand: At jail. The first 10 days that O.J. was in jail. This will sound bizarre, but Erik Menendez was actually giving O.J. advice on how to survive in the L.A. County jail, because O.J. was trying to be the old O.J. and be friendly with the sheriff’s deputies, and chat them up. He was watching as they were bringing him really good food, not the usual jail food. They were bringing O.J. lots of good food, and they were trying to chat up O.J. to get him to talk about the case. Erik Menendez began whispering to O.J. at night and telling him, "These guys are not your friends. These guys are trying to ... They're recording everything you're saying and they're trying to get information that's going to help the prosecution."

Robert Rand: That is a crazy moment in the whole narrative of the Menendez case. Lyle Menendez spent a lot of time in the attorney room with O.J. The attorney room is where defendants meet with their lawyers. They meet with material witnesses because traffic in L.A., everybody's always running late. Sometimes Lyle and O.J. would have a lot of time hanging out together. Over the course of that time, they would discuss their cases. Lyle Menendez was giving O.J. advice and suggesting that he consider a manslaughter plea in the case. O.J. told him that he could never do that. He said he was concerned his reputation would be ruined and he would never work again in TV or the movies.

Robert Rand: This was the bizarre state of mind that O.J. was in, in that he actually thought, "If I get through this, I'm going to go back to being the old O.J. and everybody will love me, and I'll be back making more Naked Gun movies and doing more football commentary."

Glenn Yeffeth: Turned out to be naïve.

Robert Rand: Over the course of these conversations that they had, Lyle definitely had the impression that O.J. was responsible for the deaths of his ex-wife and Ron Goldman.

Glenn Yeffeth: How much contact, if any, have you had with the brothers since their conviction?

Robert Rand: I have not been in touch. The convictions were in 1996. I was not in touch with the brothers for a period of years, but back during the trials, they were calling me three or four nights a week from the L.A. County Jail, so we had quite a bit of contact. When I went to work with Wolf Films and NBC on the "Law and Order: True Crime" series, I was back in contact with Lyle Menendez. We've been talking on probably three or four times a week over the past two and a half years, so we've had quite a bit of contact, and he's been extremely helpful to me in fact checking information. He was helpful when the people at NBC had questions; it was wonderful that I had the access to him. I have been to visit him. He was originally at Mule Creek State Prison near Sacramento, and in April of 2018, the brothers were reunited after 22 years.

Glenn Yeffeth: Wow.

Robert Rand: Lyle had applied for a transfer for six years in a row, and had been turned down by the Department of Corrections. In February, they approved the transfer and they sent him down to RJ Donovan Prison near San Diego, where Erik had been for two and a half years. They put prisoners in isolation. It's a standard procedure for the first 30 days, so on April fourth, 2018, Lyle called me about 6:00 at night. Actually, I was over doing some interviews with his aunt, [inaudible 00:28:36], in Florida. He was so excited that the brothers had seen each other for the first time in 22 years.

Glenn Yeffeth: Wow. That's heartwarming. It really is, because from the book, I know they were so close.

Robert Rand: Yes. The L.A. County Probation Department, when they made that recommendation before the brothers were sentenced, they recommended that they be sent to the same facility, but the day before the sentencing, the Beverly Hills police filed a motion, and they said the brothers had been co-conspirators in a crime, and if they were sent to the same prison, they might co-conspire to commit a future crime. It was really mean-spirited and done out of spite, that they were separated. For 22 years, the brothers were not allowed to talk to each other on the phone. They could talk to each other's wives. They have wives, by the way, which is a whole other story. They could write letters to each other, but they couldn't talk on the phone. They used to play chess with each other, in which they would send the moves in a letter back and forth.

Glenn Yeffeth: Wow. What was it like working with the Dick Wolf and his team on this miniseries?

Robert Rand: It was a fascinating experience for me. What happened there was an O.J. Simpson 10 hour limited series on FX in February of 2016, which was very popular, and during that O.J. series, I was approached by several different producers that said, "We loved that O.J. series. We'd like to do something about Menendez." The day after the O.J. season finale, Dick Wolf posted a story in the Hollywood Reporter, one of the entertainment trade papers, and he said, "I'm super producer Dick Wolf, and I'm going to do the Menendez series." I was fortunate enough that I had a friend who knew an executive at Wolf Films, and I already had a little package together of some of my background and some of the magazine articles I had done about the case. Within one hour after the Hollywood Reporter posted the story that Dick Wolf and NBC were making a Menendez series, they had a whole package of information about me.

Robert Rand: My friend who networked me to them said, "Dick Wolf himself is going to take it home this weekend, and he's going to read it." I sat by the phone on the following Monday waiting for the phone to ring, and the day went by, a week went by, a month went by, a few months went by, and I thought, "They must just be doing it the cheap way." You can get the court transcripts and you can get the L.A. Times stories, and you can write a script off that, but you're not going to have the benefit of my 29 years of reporting and my inside access to the brothers and the family.

Robert Rand: Fast forward to July 2016, NBC announced that they were going forward and actually green lighting going to make the series. A couple hours later, I get a phone call from somebody at Wolf Films frantically asking me if I could come in the next day to meet with some of the executives there. Apparently, they just read my material in the last couple days. I went into this meeting and a friend of mine, who's an A-list screenwriter, told me, "You're meeting with some of the biggest executives in Hollywood." I was worried the night before, "Do I need to do some homework? Do I need to get ready?" My friend said, "No. These guys are such big executives. Your meeting is only going to be 15 or 20 minutes."

Robert Rand: Two and a half hours into the meeting I thought it was going pretty well. At the end of the meeting, four and a half hours, one of the executives put his arm around me and said, "We're going to make you an offer. You clearly have all kinds of inside information on this story, and that's what we're looking for." The first thing that they wanted after they hired me as a consultant was they wanted to see my unpublished manuscript. At the time, that manuscript was about 900 pages long.

Glenn Yeffeth: I remember that.

Robert Rand: That's about a quarter of a million words. Even "Helter Skelter," one of the most famous true crime books of all time, that came out in 1974, that was 690 pages long. Unfortunately, in the short attention span world we live in, in 2018, people don't want to read a book quite that long. Thanks to Laura [inaudible 00:33:13], a wonderful editor that you folks networked me to, we took that 250,000 words and we brought it down to a really concise 100,000 words. I think the book is much better for it. It's a great read, and I love the pace of it.

Glenn Yeffeth: I agree completely. It really is a page turner. Not only do you just learn so much about the legal system and the events of the case, but human nature itself. In all the different characters, you did such a great job portraying them, so kudos to you. Were you happy with how the miniseries came out?

Robert Rand: I was. Very happy. When I went to work with Dick Wolf and NBC, I had no idea what their point of view was going to be. They certainly knew what my point of view was going to be, and the show runner, his name was [inaudible 00:34:11], again, I went to my A-list screenwriter friend, and I was all excited. I said to her, "Is he actually going to read my 900 page manuscript?" She said, "No, he's not going to read your 900 page manuscript. He's way too busy. He's working six different things at once." Renee was in China shooting a Canadian TV series. He came back to L.A., and I had a call from him. He said, "I read your manuscript. I never really read your manuscript. I read it twice. I have 200 pages of notes about it with questions."

Glenn Yeffeth: That's great.

Robert Rand: To the credit of Dick Wolf, Renee [inaudible 00:34:52] and NBC, 98% of what you saw in that miniseries was accurate. They hired their own independent researchers. They didn't just take my word for it. It was fascinating to see their whole process, but they were very determined to make the miniseries accurate. What you saw in that miniseries is an accurate story, and it's still available on Hulu. It's a great binge worthy series. I run into people every day that have watched the series and have just seen it, and you have to remember there's a whole new generation that wasn't even born during the first trial that are now being exposed to the story, and they're fascinated by it. There's been an incredible wave of overwhelming support and sympathy for Erik and Lyle Menendez on social media, since the NBC series ran last fall. That's been fascinating for me to experience, because the mainstream media, back in the 1990s during the trials, the only story that most people were hearing was "Greedy Rich Kids."

Glenn Yeffeth: That became almost a meme, the old Menendez meme. It almost became a verb.

Robert Rand: The fact that Dick Wolf, who, his brand, creator of "Law and Order," Dick Wolf's brand is hero cops, hero prosecutors, scumbag defendants. The fact that Dick Wolf was willing to read my manuscript and consider an entirely new take on the story, and then accept that take and go with that take, was just astonishing to me.

Glenn Yeffeth: Robert, I'm going to shift the topic a little bit because I like to end these podcasts, I'd like to talk a little bit about the writing process and the publishing process. Tell me a little bit about why you decided to do this book. I think this is your first book, isn't it?

Robert Rand: That's correct. I had worked in TV news starting when I was in college at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. I had an internship that led to a summer job that led to a full-time job in TV news. Most of my career has been in TV news. I was a producer and a reporter at local stations in Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Miami. Then I left a station in Miami, and I had this idea that I wanted to be a writer. I used to read Dominic Dunn's stories in Vanity Fairs, his trial coverage. I used to think myself, "I want to write stories like that." I had a story idea. I had never worked in print before, and I called up the editor of the Sunday magazine of the Miami Herald back when newspapers had Sunday magazines. Not too many do anymore. I had an idea that I pitched him on, and he liked it, asked me to come in, and the first story was about a girlfriend of a Cuban mafioso, who had turned informant against her boyfriend while she was living with him. The woman was a femme fatale and a high profile person in the Miami media.

Robert Rand: I had accidentally bumped into her on a plane flight from Miami to L.A., where she was being hidden as a protected witness. That was the story I pitched, and that led to a relationship where I was writing for the Sunday magazine, "Tropic," the Sunday magazine of the Miami Herald, and that was what led me up to the Menendez story, which was when I was out at the home video business convention, and then found out about the deaths of Jose and Kitty Menendez. As I said, my inspiration or my mentor was Dominic Dunn from Vanity Fair. I ended up not only meeting him, but becoming personal friends with him. We sat next to each other every day during the six month long first trial, and we used to do weekly debates on CourtTV, which he would be his traditional pro-prosecution stance, and I would be pro-defense, or as I like to call it journalism, telling both sides of the story.

Robert Rand: We had lunch together three or four days a week. He took me to some very cool A-list Hollywood parties. He was quite the well-connected gentleman. It's very exciting that he was my mentor and my inspiration to become a writer. Then I ended up becoming personal friends with him. However, we disagreed completely on the case. There's a fascinating scene in the book in which Dominic Dunn suffered a terrible tragedy in his own life, where his daughter was murdered. She was an actress named Dominique Dunn, and she was murdered by her live-in boyfriend, who was a chef at a high profile restaurant in Hollywood. The first murder trial he ever covered was his own daughter's trial for Vanity Fair in 1984. The daughter had been in an abusive relationship and she had been in the hospital before after being beaten up by the boyfriend, and then the boyfriend actually killed her.

Robert Rand: It appeared that it was going to be a first degree murder outcome. It ended up being a manslaughter outcome. That is what launched him into his direction of becoming a pro-prosecution cheerleader in every trial that he covered. On the first day that Lyle Menendez testified, it was probably one of the most dramatic moments I've ever seen in a courtroom, because it was emotional, it was compelling, it just caught everybody by surprise. It's one thing when you're watching testimony like that on TV, or if you see the YouTube video clips, but we were all jammed in together, in a tiny little courtroom with the jurors, family members, reporters, and everybody's jammed together in this small courtroom. The testimony was so overwhelmingly compelling and emotional that there were jurors that were crying, there were family members that were crying. There were reporters that were crying. It was overwhelming.

Robert Rand: Dominic Dunn asked me to walk out into the hallway with him at the [inaudible 00:41:21], and asked me to come down the hall. He looked kind of pale and he said, "I can't believe I'm going to say this, but I think he's telling the truth. I believe what he's saying." I was kind of stunned to hear that, and a few hours later, he and I were live on CourtTV for their highlight show, live to the east coast. Since he was Dominic Dunn, they would introduce him first. I was curious to hear what he was going to say after our private conversation at 2:30. The first thing he said was, "I didn't believe one word coming out of his mouth. Everything he said was a lie." I knew he was going to be talking for about five minutes, and I was debating in my head, "Should I bust Dominic Dunn on national TV, right here, and say, 'What about what you told me a few hours ago?'" But I chose to be professional and not do that.

Glenn Yeffeth: It's funny, Robert, it's a small world, because we did Kim Goldman's memoir, "Can't Forgive," and I believe Dominic Dunn was a very important person for her during this trial.

Robert Rand: Of course.

Glenn Yeffeth: Anyway, we were talking about your writing process. When did you decide to write this book?

Robert Rand: From the very beginning, I thought that there was a book. I'm talking about within maybe a month or two months after the brothers were arrested. I was putting together this biography of Jose Menendez in the seven months between the murders, so August of '89, and the arrest of the brothers, March of '90. I had already gotten to know the family. I already saw that the family had an extremely interesting story, and then when the story took a crazy left turn and the brothers were arrested, I actually knew the family. On the weekend after the brothers were arrested, there were probably 200 or 300 media people outside the gates of the mansion. I was sitting in the living room with the family talking with them because they knew me.

Robert Rand: I actually got to see them go through this horrible, traumatic debate. Most of them were saying, "There's no way that the brothers were responsible for the parents' deaths," but Kitty's brothers were saying, "The police don't just arrest people unless they have evidence." Because I was so far on the inside at the very beginning, very early on, I decided, "This is a book."

Glenn Yeffeth: 29 years later, we have a book.

Robert Rand: Here we are. There were a few distractions along the way.

Glenn Yeffeth: I'm sure.

Robert Rand: I continued working in TV news. I had actually a personal distraction. My mom had some mild dementia, and I took care of her for 15 years. At the same time that I'm writing a book about kids killing their parents, I'm taking care of my mom.

Glenn Yeffeth: Wow. Talk a little bit about your writing process. I know you wrote 250,000 words and then scaled it back to 100,000. Is that something you would do again? Do you feel like that was a good approach?

Robert Rand: No. What I've learned from having made every mistake possible in writing a book, was that established true crime writers frequently don't get involved until a case is almost over, or until it's over, because then you can pick and choose who you want to interview and where you want to spend time. I was actually there for every single evidence hearing, for the high points, the low points, everything in between. I believe I have a much richer story in this book because I was there for every little development, every hearing of the story. It's much different than if you come in later and just read transcripts.

Glenn Yeffeth: I will vouch for that. The book really reflects just an incredible encyclopedic knowledge of everything that went on.

Robert Rand: I am ready for the challenge of a pop quiz anytime. What makes this story fascinating and what people are confused about, there have been hundreds of documentaries that have been done since the story began, and most of the documentary makers and most of the news coverage has tried to fit this story into a traditional true crime format, and this story is not a traditional true crimes story. It is a story about a family. It is a story about domestic violence. It's a story about intergenerational abuse. We've mentioned O.J. a couple times since we've been talking, and one of the fascinating factoids to me is that the L.A. County DA's office decided that the Menendez brothers was a death penalty case, and the O.J. Simpson trial was also a domestic violence case, but the L.A. County DA's did not go after the death penalty for him.

Robert Rand: I asked, as Leslie Abramson, the attorney with the blonde curly hair, who was seen in the media quite a bit, why was the Menendez case death penalty and not O.J. if they're both domestic violence cases.

Glenn Yeffeth: That's a great question. What's the answer?

Robert Rand: I think that they either both were, or they both weren't.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Robert Rand: Erik and Lyle Menendez did not go out and commit a robbery and kill strangers, or something like that. I believe the resolution of this case should've been a manslaughter and not a murder. In the book, I present what I believe is the evidence, that overwhelmingly shows why this was a manslaughter and not a murder case. That's confusing to people because after hearing so much of the mainstream media coverage going off in one direction, it's confusing that maybe there's another side of the story. I have to say that with Dick Wolf on my side, when he made that series, it was always my dream that someday somebody would read all of this information in one place, and they would smack their head and say, "Wait a minute. This is not a story about greedy rich kids," I believe that's what happened with Dick Wolf.

Glenn Yeffeth: Great. Robert, any advice for other journalists who decide they are ready to do a full length book?

Robert Rand: Yes. Dive in completely. The lucky break I caught was in this seven months between the murders and the arrest of the brothers. I had the story to myself. There was really nobody that was following it that carefully. A couple guys at the L.A. Times, but they did not go on to cover the trials. My secret was that I just established relationships with the family members and with the brothers themselves. Studying the true crimes genre, this is my first book, as we said; I've never seen anything like what I've done because it's very unusual to have so much access to the defendants and their family, and the attorneys, as I was able to develop.

Glenn Yeffeth: Absolutely. "The Menendez Murders" is coming out in September 2018, and it's a fantastic book that I think you'll find to be a great page turner. It's a really insightful, fascinating read. Robert, thank you so much for making the time. I know you're a busy man, I really appreciate you taking the time for this podcast.

Robert Rand: Glenn, thanks for having me on.

Glenn Yeffeth: Have a great day.

Robert Rand: You too.

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