How Lyle Menendez's toupee from the Netflix series “Monsters” played a role in the trial

The Menendez brothers became infamous in 1989 when then-21-year-old Lyle and 18-year-old Erik walked into the den of their family home in Beverly Hills, California, and fatally shot their parents, Kitty and Jose, with shotguns.

According to the brothers, the murders occurred on August 20, 1989, after years of alleged sexual abuse by their Hollywood executive father – abuse that they say their mother had ignored.

On Ryan Murphy's scripted Netflix show Monsters: The Story of Lyle and Erik MenendezIn the film, which follows the brothers before and after the murders, the murders are depicted as days after Kitty ripped off Lyle's toupee during a family argument at the dinner table over Lyle's plan to marry his girlfriend.

Although many of the characterizations in Monster are controversial – Erik claimed that Lyle's portrayal was “based on terrible and blatant lies” – the hairpiece incident actually happened.

Accordingly USA todayLyle testified in court about the incident, saying, “She reached for my hairpiece, grabbed it and just ripped it off.”

Lyle testified, per USA todaythat his brother “didn’t know I had a hairpiece. I was completely embarrassed in front of my brother.”

On the topic of hairpieces, Robert Rand wrote in the book: The Menendez Brothers: The Shocking, Untold Story of the Menendez Family and the Murders That Stunned the Nationthat removing the wig “required a special solvent,” per Today. “When Kitty tore it off, Lyle felt tremendous pain.”

In the representation in MonsterThe hairpiece incident prompted the brothers, played by Alexander Chavez and Cooper Koch, to admit to each other that they had allegedly been sexually abused by their father, sparking the fatal shooting.

A vanity Just An article by writer Dominick Dunne, who covered the trial, said that the claim about the hairpiece and its connection to the molestation allegations was an important part of the brothers' defense at trial: “The defense claimed that until the moment “When Kitty took off the hairpiece Lyle, Erik didn't know his brother was wearing a toupee,” Dunne wrote. “The defense further contended that the sight of his older brother's baldness and the sudden awareness of his brother's vulnerability and embarrassment enabled Erik to confess to Lyle his own deep secret that their father had sexually molested him for twelve years.”

Dunne wrote, “Menendez's state-of-the-art hairpiece, or toupee, or wig, or hair substitute, as his very expensive rug was also called, became a constant prop in the trial, almost as important as the two missing Mossberg 12-gauge shotguns with which the brothers blew their parents away.”

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According to Rand's book, Lyle began wearing a hairpiece two years before the murders at the urging of his father, who believed his son had a career in politics and “to be successful he would need a thick head of hair,” Rand's book says Today.

According to Dunne, Lyle allegedly received a toupee for $1,450 in 1988 and received three more over the next year and a half.

“He always insisted on 100 percent human hair,” Dunne wrote. “The piece had three inches of hair in the front, ten inches on the sides and five inches in the back. Delivery took four to six weeks.”

“In one,” Dunne wrote, “he ordered a perm. In another, he requested sun streaks and highlights.”

In 1996, three years after their first trial ended in deadlock, the siblings were sentenced to life in prison without parole for the first-degree murder of their parents.