“So much has not been said yet”

Lyle and Eric Menendez speak out in a new Netflix documentary.

The brothers, both incarcerated at the Donovan Correctional Facility in California, were interviewed every 15 minutes via prison phones about the infamous trial that resulted in them being sentenced to life in prison for the murder of their parents, Jose and Kitty Menendez.

“Everyone asks why we killed our parents,” Lyle says in an audio interview from prison for the documentary The Menendez Brotherswhich begins streaming on October 7. “Maybe people can understand the truth now.”

“What happened that night is very well known, but a lot of things have been untold,” Eric says in an exclusive clip for PEOPLE.

The Menendez brothers became household names in 1989 when Lyle, then 21, and Erik, 18, armed with 12-gauge shotguns, entered the study of their family home in Beverly Hills, California, and shot their parents to death while the couple watched television.

The murders of August 20, 1989, which are now the subject of the second season of Ryan Murphy's Netflix series Monster: The Story of Lyle and Erik Menendezstarring Javier Bardem and Chloë Sevigny, made national headlines and spawned several documentaries.

According to the brothers, the murders came after years of alleged sexual abuse by their father, a Hollywood executive – abuse that they say their mother ignored.

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Authorities, however, said the brothers' motive was greed, citing the lavish spending spree the brothers continued after the murders, which included expensive watches, cars and tennis lessons.

“It was a media spectacle from the beginning,” Lyle says in the documentary.

“So we were not the ones telling the story about our lives,” Eric says. “Two children don't commit this crime for money.”

In 1996, three years after their first trial ended inconclusively, the siblings were found guilty of the premeditated murder of their parents and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.

Since then, there have been efforts to overturn their convictions. Most recently, in May 2023, the brothers' attorneys filed a petition in Los Angeles County Superior Court citing new evidence in the case.

In the habeas corpus petition, the lawyers referred to allegations of sexual abuse against Jose by Roy Rosselló, a former member of the Puerto Rican boy band Menudo. Rosselló said that he raped him in the 1980s.

The lawyers also cite a recently discovered letter Erik wrote to his cousin Andy Cano describing alleged sexual abuse by his father several months before the murders.

“We say that the second trial was not consistent with the Constitution for a variety of reasons,” Mark Geragos previously told PEOPLE. “And a habeas [Corpus petition] has new evidence. It needs new evidence because this case has basically been dead for almost 17 years. And the new evidence was the Menudo accuser and the letter that Andy Cano wrote or received from Erik eight months before the murder.”

“The judge can basically do three things,” Geragos adds. “He can dismiss the case, he can order the prosecutor to respond, or he can do what he did, which is give the prosecutor an informal response. That order has been taken very seriously by the prosecutor over the last 15 months because we have presented him with evidence.”

Geragos says Lyle and Erik remain “cautiously optimistic.”

The documentary, directed by Alejandro Hartmann, also includes interviews with juror Betty Oldfield, Kitty's sister Joan Vander Molen and prosecutor Pamela Bozanich.

The Menendez Brothers will air on Netflix on October 7th.