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Erik and Lyle Menendez Can Possibly Be Freed: Inside the Latest True Crime Cases
New evidence, new trials, new suspects! In Touch breaks down the latest on the mysteries that gripped America.
Inside the Menendez Brothers’ Case
The Menendez brothers “have paid their debt to society” and should be freed after spending nearly 35 years behind bars, LA County District Attorney George Gascón declared on October 24. New evidence appears to corroborate Lyle and Erik Menendez’s claims that they killed out of fear and in self-defense after a lifetime of physical, emotional and sexual abuse suffered at the hands of their parents, José and Kitty. Days later, Lyle and Erik’s lawyer reportedly filed docs in California asking Governor Gavin Newsom to grant clemency to the brothers — which would free them instantly. When Lyle, 56, and Erik, 53, stood trial, “the world was not ready to believe boys could be raped or that young men could be victims of sexual violence. Today we know better,” says Kitty’s sister Joan VanderMolen, 93, who, along with other family members, has long supported the brothers’ claims that they only killed after years of being molested by their father with their mother’s knowledge. “No jury today would issue such a harsh sentence without taking their trauma into account.”
Inside Madeleine McCann’s Case
The prime suspect in the 2007 abduction of British toddler Madeleine McCann just won a legal victory that could soon put more distance between him and police. On October 8, a court in Braunschweig, Germany, acquitted Christian Brueckner, 47 — a previously convicted rapist, pedophile, burglar and drug trafficker who was living in Portugal when the 3-year-old was snatched from her parents’ Praia da Luz vacation apartment, never to be seen again — of rape and sexual abuse charges related to other crimes he allegedly committed between 2000 and 2017 (acts unrelated to Madeleine’s case, to which he was first publicly connected in 2020). Christian will remain behind bars for now — he’s currently serving a seven-year prison sentence in Germany for the 2005 rape of a 72-year-old American woman in Portugal — but he’s scheduled to be freed next year. Though law enforcement continues to investigate his suspected links to Madeleine’s disappearance (he says he wasn’t involved), they’ve yet to file any formal charges against him.
Inside Scott Peterson’s Case
Scott Peterson is one step closer to a new trial nearly 22 years after the bodies of his 27-year-old wife, Laci, and unborn son, Conner, washed up in the San Francisco Bay. On October 7, a California judge granted Scott’s defense team access to evidence they believe could lead to his exoneration, including investigation records related to a burglary at a neighbor’s Modesto, California, home that took place around the time pregnant Laci went missing in 2002 while Scott, 52, claimed he was fishing. “I believe that Laci went over there to see what was going on, and that’s when she was taken,” the former fertilizer salesman, who’s serving a life-without-parole sentence for the murders after being convicted on circumstantial evidence, said in August. His lawyers are also getting a crime lab file and documents relating to the collection of fingerprints from a burned-out van discovered nearby. The news comes months after the judge approved retesting of duct tape found on Laci’s pants. Scott’s lawyers believe the tape could hold DNA implicating someone else.
JonBenet Ramsey’s Case
A former suspect in the 1996 killing of 6-year-old JonBenét Ramsey is back in the news following his early release from a Colorado prison. In January, convicted pedophile Gary Oliva — whom a former classmate claims confessed, in a series of letters, to accidentally killing the child beauty queen — served less than eight years of a 10-year sentence. He was caught in 2016 with 695 images depicting child pornography, reportedly including 335 of or relating to JonBenét. Gary has denied harming her, and DNA evidence hasn’t linked him to the killing, but her father, John Ramsey, 80, has repeatedly questioned why police still haven’t tested DNA from an unidentified male found on the garrote used to strangle his daughter in the basement of their Colorado home. “[I’m worried] the only logical reason they won’t commit to testing it anymore is because they lost it,” he tells In Touch.
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