Celebrity4 min(s) read
Mrs Doubtfire actress Lisa Jakub has opened up about living inside the infamous Menendez family home.
Jakub, who played Lydia Hillard alongside the late Robin Williams in the classic comedy, was just 13 when she moved into 722 North Elm Drive in Beverly Hills.
The young actress ended up sleeping in Lyle Menendez's former bedroom.
Jakub moved into the mansion in 1993 after a producer she had been working with managed to get a good "deal" on the property because of its history.
The filmmaker needed someone to house-sit and invited Jakub and her mother to move in with her.
At the time, Lyle and Erik were facing trial for murdering their father, José Menendez, 45, and mother, Mary Louise "Kitty" Menendez, 47, at their home in Beverly Hills.
The brothers shot their father five times, including a fatal point-blank shot to the back of the head in 1989. As their mother tried to flee, they turned the gun on her, shooting her nine times.
After the killings, the siblings tossed the weapons and their blood-soaked clothes, and then purchased tickets to see Batman at a local cinema.
They later returned home and called 911, hysterically claiming they had found their parents' bodies.
It wasn't until six months after the murders that they were arrested in March 1990.
The brothers were eventually convicted of first-degree murder in 1996, serving decades behind bars under life sentences without parole before being resentenced to 50 years to life in May 2025.
The chilling case was spotlighted in the second season of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan's Netflix series, Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story (2024).
After its release, 24 members of Lyle and Erik's family issued a scathing statement blasting the director for the show's "grotesque shockudrama".
They also described the series as "a phobic, gross, anachronistic, serial episode nightmare that is not only riddled with mistruths and outright falsehoods but ignores the most recent exculpatory revelations".
Murphy hit back at the criticism, saying the Menendez brothers "should be sending me flowers" because the series brought more attention to their case than they’ve had in 30 years
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Despite knowing what had happened inside the mansion, Jakub said she was surprised by how ordinary it felt.
"Surprisingly, the house was not that creepy. It didn’t feel like a place of torture and murder," she wrote in her blog. "You expect that from dark places with low ceilings, not from a house with a brightly wallpapered sunroom and a restaurant-quality kitchen."
Of course, it was hardly an ordinary family home, boasting "twenty-three exquisitely decorated rooms" and a tennis court.
Jakub also remembered Graveline Tours regularly arriving outside the property in 1993, carrying curious tourists eager to get a look at the infamous house.
"I heard the monologue so many times I could have given the tour," she penned.
The Menendez family were apparently not the only well-known people connected to 722 North Elm Drive.
According to a live-in maid who shared the property with Jakub, Michael Jackson had previously lived there, as well as Elton John.
"Who knows what had gone on in there," Jakub wrote.
One of Jakub's strangest memories came while watching television during the Menendez brothers' ongoing trial.
Pictures of the mansion suddenly appeared on screen, prompting the actress to realize she was sitting inside the very room being shown.
"The photos made me catch my breath, and my skin got prickly," she said. "I started pondering the fragility of life…but, wait. Those windows in the photo…they looked familiar. I glanced behind me. Yep. It was this room."
"I looked down at the floor next to the couch I was sitting on. Sure, it was a different couch, but it was in the same position. They were right here. Bloody. Swollen. Dead. Massacred. I turned off the TV," she added.
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