Cooper Koch hopes Menendez Brothers “get paroled and have an amazing rest of their lives” after prison visit

nme.com:

Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, has said he hopes the two titular brothers eventually get paroled and “have an amazing rest of their lives”.The Netflix show, which came out last week (September 19), stars Koch and Nicholas Alexander Chavez as the Menendez brothers, who murdered their parents José and Kitty with a shotgun in their Beverly Hills mansion in 1989.To this day, the brothers, who were aged 18 and 21 at the time, claim they acted in self-defence after years of alleged sexual abuse by their father, portrayed by Javier Bardem in the show.The brothers were initially tried separately in 1993 in a highly publicised trial which aired on TV, where the prosecution argued that Lyle and Erik killed their parents for financial gain.

Both trials ended in two hung juries.The two brothers were later tried together in a second trial, where they were both convicted on two counts of first-degree murder and conspiracy to murder.

They were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole in 1996.Now Koch, after having recently paid the brothers a visit in their prison facility in San Diego, California alongside Kim Kardashian, has spoken out in support of them, saying he “believes” them, described them as “upstanding individuals” and hopes they are granted parole so that they can have “amazing” lives in the future.“They committed the crime when they were 18 and 21 years old, and at the time, it was really hard for people to believe that male-on-male sexual abuse could occur, especially with father and son,” Koch said.“It was really hard for people to understand that the story that they were telling was true, and this theory that they killed their parents for money is just bonkers.