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.
