Stories Of Erik From Barbara Walters' Memoir
Excerpts taken from Audition: A Memoir By Barbara Walters (2009)
She starts with describing how she was able to be the first person to interview both Lyle and Erik. The interview aired on June 28, 1996:
I talked with Leslie throughout both trials. She was a piece of work, small with masses of curly blond Orphan Annie hair and a tiger both inside and outside the courtroom. She infuriated some lawyers and journalists with her shenanigans, but she and I hit it off. Leslie was in the process of trying out for a TV show of her own with one of the networks (it never came to pass), and I gave her some suggestions.
What I ultimately wanted, of course, as did absolutely every television journalist, was an interview with the brothers. But I also genuinely liked her. My relationship with her served me well when, after the second trial ended, she advised Erik and Lyle to go with me for the interview. By then the Menendez brothers had been found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
It is known that the only reason the brothers agreeded to the interview is to be able to plead their case on why they should not be separated. However, their plea fell on deaf ears. Erik wrote Barbara a letter shortly after the separation:
"I gather you know the disaster that occurred a few weeks ago," Erik wrote me in October 1996. "Lyle and I were separated. I won't dwell on this unfortunate and cruel decision that was made by whatever powers that be. I am sad."
The brothers remain in separate prisons to this day.This was not the first letter I received from Erik. Almost from the time I interviewed him, he had begun to write to me. At first I didn't answer, but his letters were so intelligent and he seemed in such emotional pain, stressing again and again how tortured he was by what he had done, that I began to answer him. He told me he had received hundreds and hundreds of letters from people who had been abused by their parents. He tried to answer them and hoped he could do something to help them, though of course he couldn't. He also had thoughts about prison reform, but the authorities were not interested, he said, and his views were getting him into trouble.
[…]
So when Erik wrote to me in 2002, three years after his marriage, and suggested that I might want to do an interview with Tammi, I immediately answered that yes, I did. Erik said that his wife was very afraid of talking-she had been asked to leave her volunteer job when her colleagues found out she was Mrs. Erik Menendez-but he would tell her that it was a good idea. He kept hoping and trying to get his case reopened, this time using the restricted material relating to his parental abuse. Perhaps he felt an interview with the sympathetic Tammi would help win him a new trial. So I flew to California to meet Tammi.
After we got to know each other a bit, we went together to visit Erik in prison.
It was a bizarre meeting. I had been in enough prisons by then to know to bring quarters for the vending machine, and we sat there, the three of us, eating hamburgers and having a conversation as if we were in McDonald's. I remember thinking how well Erik looked. He had been incarcerated for twelve years by then, but he was tanned and fit. It turned out he was a night janitor in the prison and by day worked out with plastic bags filled with water as weights. He and Tammi were very sweet together. They could hold hands during the visit, but no other contact was allowed.
Tammi, Barbara and Erik in 2002
I later interviewed Tammi outside the prison. (We couldn't film the couple together because on-camera interviews with inmates weren't allowed.)
You can watch Tammi and Erik’s interview here
The interview seemingly got Erik in more trouble. Both he and Tammi wrote me that soon afterward he'd been taken away in handcuffs and locked in "the hole." He spent four days in an isolation cell, Tammi wrote, "with blood, feces and food scattered about," before he found out why: he'd been charged with "conspiracy to escape." He passed a polygraph test and was eventually released from lockdown. But there were other repercussions.
Erik has since been transferred four hours away to Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga, California, and Tammi can only visit him on weekends. Lyle has been moved, too, to Mule Creek State Prison in Ione, California. Each brother has appealed his sentence but to no avail. Erik's worst fears have played out; the brothers haven't been allowed to see or speak to each other in more than a decade. They can write to each other, but the letters are opened and read by the authorities.
Erik writes to me to this day. He is the only convicted murderer I've stayed in touch with. Do I think what he did was hideous? Yes, of course. Does he think what he did was hideous? Yes. At least he says so. His letters are intelligent, sensitive, and uncomplaining. Erik will probably never be released from prison, and I wonder again and again how this man I have just described as intelligent and sensitive could have cold-bloodedly shot both of his parents to death. As I've said before about Erik and all the murderers I've interviewed, I can feel empathy toward them as human beings, but I just cannot comprehend their crimes.
The last special Barbara presented about the Menendez Brothers was in 2015, in an episode titled “Menendez Brothers: The Bad Sons" where she included the first appearance of Erik’s letter to his cousin, Andy Canó on Christmas of 1988. A letter that would later be used as evidence for the habeas corpus filed in 2023 in addition to Roy Rosselló’s testimony.
Erik spoke highly of her in 2020, in a video posted by Justice Watchdog.
However, Barbara is indifferent about Lyle, as Rosie O’Donnell recalled in an article by Verity:
O’Donnell received a letter from Lyle Menendez about 30 years ago after he saw her on “Larry King Live,” saying that she believed Erik’s claims that they were molested by their father. “I was out to lunch with Barbara Walters and our publicist Cindy Berger, and I said, ‘Barbara, you’re not going to believe this, but guess who wrote to me—Lyle Menendez,” O’Donnell recalls. “Barbara said, ‘Ignore him, he’s a murderer. He’s very cunning.’”