Netflix's Monsters gives one of its main characters a wig, making some wonder why Lyle Menendez was bald when he was young.
Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story marks the second season of the Ryan Murphy-developed American crime anthology. This time around, it follows the life of the Menendez brothers, a pair of young men who killed their parents in the late 1990s.
The series joins an ever-expanding catalog of true-crime stories on the platform, appearing alongside dramatizations, like the real-life story of Outlaw's Raquel de Oliveira, and plenty of documentaries like Jennifer Pan's killings as seen in What Jennifer Did.
Why Was Lyle Menendez Losing His Hair?
As seen in Episode 1 of Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez, the (at the time) 21-year-old Lyle Menendez was revealed to have been balding.
The real-life killer, played by Nicholas Alexander Chavez in the Netflix series, is shown early on in the series with severe hairline problems. This is demonstrated as Lyle's mother Kitty (Chloë Sevigny) rips a toupee off her son's head.
No medical records revealed why Lyle lost his hair at a young age and was forced to wear a toupee. Some believe, despite it never being confirmed, the hair loss had to do with stress and anxiety associated with alleged abuse from his father growing up.
It has been noted that Chavez did not shave his head for the series' infamous toupee scene. Instead, the actor opted to wear a bald cap and prosthetics to emulate the look his Monsters character had in real life.
Real-life events inspired this toupee-ripping sequence, as Lyle Menendez was dealing with hair troubles early in his 20s, and a moment that closely mimicked this was written into the record during the Menendez Brothers' trial.
According to the book The Menendez Murders, Menendez purchased the hairpiece at his father's suggestion, who said that he would need a full head of hair if he were ever going to reach his aspirations of being a career politician.
The convicted killer's toupee was so much a topic of conversation that it became a mainstay in coverage of the Menedez Brothers' 1994 trial.
In a 2008 Vanity Fair expose about the brothers, the toupee came up no less than seven times, with the magazine writing that Lyle's brother (and co-conspirator in the murder of their parents) Erik did not know his sibling wore a hairpiece until that faithful day when their mother pulled it from his head:
"The defense claimed that until the moment Kitty pulled the hairpiece off Lyle, Erik did not know that his brother wore a toupee. The defense further claimed that the sight of his older brother’s baldness and the sudden awareness of his brother’s vulnerability and embarrassment freed Erik to confess to Lyle his own deep secret, that their father had been sexually molesting him for 12 years."
According to that breakdown of the Menendez case, Erik seeing the toupee getting ripped from atop his brother's head showed a particular vulnerability within Lyle that he had never seen before.
This, as the defense argued, is what ultimately led Erik to open up to Lyle about a previous instance of sexual assault between him and his father that took place several years earlier.
Not to say this incident led the two to kill their parents, but some have made the case that it paved the path toward that thinking between the two.
Monsters is streaming on Netflix.
