WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. – Evidence of a Cuban-American family’s dark secret was hidden in plain sight in a West Palm Beach home. Marta Menendez Cano, a retired stockbroker born in Havana, was open about her belief that the secret it held was to blame for the deaths of her brother, sister-in-law, her son, and the life sentences of her two nephews.
Marta Cano allegedly welcomed Robert Rand, a former Miami Herald reporter and author, to her Palm Beach home and allowed him to sift through the things her late son Andres “Andy” Cano had left behind. The grieving mother told ABC News her son had overdosed on sleeping pills in 2003.
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Rand reported finding a letter handwritten by a victim of child sex abuse. Nearly four decades after the 3-page letter was written, attorneys and advocates claim it is evidence that in combination with the testimony of a Puerto Rican pop singer could end up freeing two survivors.
“I’ve been trying to avoid dad. It’s still happening Andy but it’s worse for me now,” Erik Menendez wrote to his cousin Andy Cano, according to the attorneys. “I can’t explain it. He is so overweight that I can’t stand to see him. I never know when it’s going to happen and it’s driving me crazy. Every night I stay up thinking he might come in.”
Erik Menendez and his brother Lyle Menendez would later kill their parents in 1989. Prosecutors at the time told the jury their motive was greed. Advocates for the brothers now argue the zeitgeist of the times when intra-familial child sexual abuse was viewed as an impossibility may have influenced a case that has long been in the public eye.
NOT THE ‘KIND OF MAN’
Marta Cano’s brother José Menendez was born in Havana, Cuba. After Fidel Castro took power, his parents sent him to the U.S. He wed Mary Louise “Kitty” Andersen, who he had met in college, in 1963, and had two sons: Lyle in 1968 and Erik in 1970. He was an RCA Records executive when he moved the family to Beverly Hills.
José Menendez was behind RCA Records signing Menudo, the famous Puerto Rican boy band Ricky Martin belonged to as a boy from 1984 to 1989. Over the years, dozens of boys between 9 and 13 joined Menudo and sold millions of albums worldwide.
Roy Rosselló, a former teenage Menudo member, revealed José Menendez had raped him when he was 13 and 14 years old. He said the band’s founder first offered him to Menendez to seal the deal with RCA Records, and Menendez took him to his home where he drugged and raped him the first time.
“He was in unbearable pain for a week,” Attorneys Mark Geragos and Cliff Gardner, representing the Menendez brothers, wrote in their 21-page petition signed on May 3, 2023. They added, “Jose Menendez orally copulated Roy in a bathroom prior to a Menudo concert in New York. Later that same night, Jose Menendez anally raped Roy in a hotel room.”
Before he died, Andy Cano testified in court that he had known about the horrors happening in the Menendez home for years. He said his cousin Erik Menendez was 12 when he asked him if his father was doing the same things and then swore him to secrecy.
“Had jurors seen the letter Erik Menendez wrote to [his first cousin] Andy Cano, and learned that [their father] Jose Menendez anally raped and orally copulated a 13 or 14-year-old boy [Menudo member] in 1984, the prosecutor would not have been able to argue that ‘the abuse never happened,’ ‘[t]here is no corroboration of sexual abuse,’ Jose Menendez was not the ‘kind of man that would’ abuse children and was ‘not a violent and brutal man,’”
Andy Cano was not the only cousin who testified. Diane Vandermolen testified that she was a teen when she was staying at the Beverly Hills home for the summer, and 8-year-old Lyle came into her room and asked if he could sleep there to avoid his father’s sexual abuse. She said she was so outraged that she told Lyle’s mother, Mary “Kitty” Andersen, who then “angrily dragged Lyle upstairs by his arm.”
The defense attorneys wrote the brothers recall being sexually abused as early as when they were 6 years old and “ along with the sexual abuse, there were death threats should the abuse ever be disclosed.” They also wrote a witness testified, “a chilling rule in the Menendez home: when Jose Menendez was in the bedroom with one of the boys, no one was allowed to walk down the hallway past the bedroom.”
The boys’ physical and psychological abuse was no secret. The defense listed family members, close friends, and a variety of coaches and teachers, who witnessed “physical and mental abuse ... ranging from physical assaults on the boys to public humiliation and mocking.”
SPOTLIGHT ON THE CASE
José Menendez was shot in the head and Mary “Kitty” Andersen was shot 15 times on Aug. 20, 1989, at their Beverly Hills house. Detectives arrested Lyle Menendez on March 8, 1990. Erik Menendez surrendered two days later.
Their first trials were mistrials. The second trial was different: The judge barred child sex abuse evidence, the prosecution described the motive as greed, and they were both convicted on March 21, 1996, on two counts of first-degree murder. They were sentenced to two consecutive life prison terms without the possibility of parole.
Court TV still has videos of the witness testimony online. Rand — who allegedly handed the cousin-to-cousin handwritten letter to a defense attorney — published his book “The Menendez Murders: The Shocking Untold Story of the Menendez Family and the Killings that Stunned the Nation” in 2018. In a 2022 documentary HBO Max series, “Menudo: Forever Young” Angelo Garcia, a former Menudo member, disclosed several men sexually abused him during his time with the group.
Last year, Peacock released the three-part documentary series “Menendez + Menudo: Boys Betrayed.” It told the two heart-wrenching stories. Rand, the journalist who found the letter by Erik Menendez, co-produced it.
“We believe that there might be other victims out there and we are hoping that they’ll contact us,” Rand recently told CNN.
This year the brothers were the focus of ABC News Studios’ “IMPACT x Nightline: The Menendez Brothers: Monsters or Victims?” on Hulu; and the series “Monsters: The Erik and Lyle Menendez Story” on Netflix. There was a TikTok “Free the Menendi” campaign, and Kim Kardashian, who has been pursuing a career in law since 2018, has been raising awareness about their case. Earlier this month, she published an opinion asking for leniency.
“My hope is that Erik and Lyle Menendez’s life sentences are reconsidered,” Kardashian wrote. “We owe it to those little boys who lost their childhoods, who never had a chance to be heard, helped or saved.”
CASE GETS REEVALUATED
With the revived interest and while campaigning for reelection, Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón, who is running against a former federal prosecutor on Nov. 5, responded to the 2023 petition.
According to Gascón, since the murders happened when the brothers were under 26 years old the state law would make them eligible for youthful parole. The brothers’ family had different reactions.
Their maternal aunt Joan Andersen asked for their release, but their maternal uncle Milton Andersen criticized Gascó's decision as politically motivated. Their paternal cousin Anamaria Baralt has been campaigning for their release on TikTok. She recently described how she, Andy Cano, and the brothers were like a “little cousin quartet,” so she and Cano “struggled” after the murders and the sentencing.
“Andy and I were ... we struggled hard, real hard,” Baralt said on TikTok adding, “We both made some really bad choices. We both used substances. Andy more than me. He really struggled with addiction in his life and I certainly was on that same path. I was somehow able to pull myself out of that abyss. God knows I tried to help Andy too ... He had struggled for years, and years to get clean and rehabs and so he wasn’t able to.”
Baralt said Andy Cano was 29 when he died, and his mother Marta Cano was still alive, but she was in memory care.
For more information about how to deal with familial childhood sex abuse, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233, the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-4673, or the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-422-4453.
THE LETTER
THE HABEAS CORPUS PETITION