Anna Eriksson was working as a model and receptionist at a beauty salon in 1993 when she decided to write a letter to a stranger: Lyle Menendez, then in the midst of his first trial for the murder of his parents.
A year later, she left her life behind to move to California and follow the second trial closely. On July 2, 1996, while a court sentenced Lyle and his brother Erik to life without the possibility of parole, Anna married him. The ceremony took place by speakerphone, with Lyle in custody and Anna standing in the office of Leslie Abramson, the defense attorney.
The marriage lasted five years. It ended in 2001, when Anna discovered that Lyle was writing letters to other women from prison—the same letters that, years earlier, had brought the two of them together. In 2025, she confessed that the media resurgence of the case brought back, fully intact, the emotions of those years in the 1990s.
