Netflix Monsters gives one of its main characters a wig, which makes you wonder a little why Lyle Menendez was bald when he was young.
Monsters: The Story of Lyle and Erik Menendez is the second season of the American crime anthology series developed by Ryan Murphy. This time it follows the lives of the Menendez brothers, young men who killed their parents in the late 1990s.
The series joins an ever-expanding list of true crime stories on the platform, appearing alongside dramatizations such as the real-life story OutlawRaquel de Oliveira and a lot of documentaries like the murders of Jennifer Pan, like What Jennifer did.
Why did Lyle Menendez lose his hair?
As shown in episode 1 Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez(then) 21-year-old Lyle Menendez was revealed to be bald.
The real-life killer, played by Nicholas Alexander Chavez in the Netflix series, is shown at the beginning of the series as having serious hairline issues. This is shown when Lyle’s mother Kitty (Chloë Sevigny) rips off the boy’s head.
No medical records revealed why Lyle lost his hair at a young age and had to wear a sheath. Some believe, though never confirmed, that the hair loss was related to the stress and anxiety associated with her father’s alleged abuse.
It has been stated that Chavez did not shave his head due to the series’ infamous toupee scene. Instead, the actor opted to wear a bald cap and prosthetics to mimic his look Monsters the character had in real life.
Real-life events inspired this toupee-ripping series when Lyle Menendez was dealing with hair issues in his 20s, and a moment that closely mimics this was put on record during the Menendez Brothers’ trial.
According to the Book The Menendez murdersMenendez bought the headband at the suggestion of his father, who said he needed a full head of hair if he was ever going to achieve his dream of being a career politician.
The convicted murderer’s cabin was the subject of so much discussion that it became a mainstay in the 1994 trial of the Menedez Brothers.
In a 2008 Vanity Fair expose on the brothers, the sheath came up no fewer than seven times, and the magazine wrote that Lyle’s brother (and co-conspirator in their parents’ murder) Erik didn’t know his sibling had used hair extensions until then. the faithful day when their mother pulled it from his head:
“The defense argued that until the moment Kitty pulled the hair extension from Lyle, Erik did not know that his brother was wearing a sheath. The defense further argued that the sight of his older brother’s baldness and the sudden awareness of his brother’s vulnerability and shame freed Erik to confess his own deep secret to Lyle , that their father had sexually abused her for 12 years.”
According to the breakdown of the Menendez case, Erik saw a sheath rip from the top of his brother’s head, showing a special vulnerability in Lyle that he had never seen before.
This, the defense argued, eventually led Erik to open up to Lyle about the past sexual abuse between him and his father that occurred several years earlier.
It doesn’t mean that this incident made them kill their parents, but some have argued that it paved the way for this thinking between them.
Monsters stream on Netflix.
