By Nicole Stock, August 21, 2025
On a bright, sunny Friday the 13th in June, a 1994 Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham limousine pulled up in front of a Beverly Hills mansion that was obscured by a chain-link fence. Across the street, an open-top tour bus drove by, with its passengers craning their heads in the direction of the funeral limo.
The landmark the vehicles were visiting? The home where Erik and Lyle Menendez killed their parents more than three decades ago.
The limo stopped at the mansion as part of the Westside Gory tour, a three-hour true crime experience that debuted this summer from Grave Line Tours. The limo’s route stretches from Hollywood to Brentwood and back, with a guide chronicling two of the city’s most infamous crime stories: the Menendez killings and the murder trial of O.J. Simpson.
“This is the kind of perennial case, slash cases, that grabs the attention” of true crime enthusiasts, said Adam Levine, the owner and founder of Grave Line Tours.
The Menendez brothers, who killed their parents in their Beverly Hills home in 1989, were ultimately convicted of murder in 1996 and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. A year before, the football star O.J. Simpson had been acquitted in the killings of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald L. Goldman.
It has been more than 35 years since Southern California was rocked by both cases, and public sentiment, at least toward the Menendez brothers, has shifted greatly over time. But interest in the cases has rarely wavered. The last year has been dominated by the Menendez case in particular, with both a scripted series and a documentary on Netflix pulling in huge streaming numbers and various prominent people speaking out in their favor, including Rosie O’Donnell, who detailed how her friendship with Lyle led, in part, to her own documentary.
The recent uptick in that interest, fueled by the parole hearings for the Menendez brothers this week, helped create plenty of space for yet another tour in Los Angeles — a city with a celebrity culture so ingrained in every aspect of it that it fascinates locals and draws in tourists.
The tour began with the guide, Blaze Lovejoy, acknowledging that she would be recounting tragic events, and that the tour intends no disrespect toward the dead or their families. Before setting out, she said she would attempt to lay out the facts as objectively as possible, letting people form their own opinions.
Among the people invited to sit in on that first tour was Steven Ray Morris, a podcast producer, who called the cases “iconic” and said the tour was useful because he had not previously learned the context behind them, even after working on a true crime podcast for seven years.
This tour, Mr. Morris said, was particularly good because it didn’t just hit the highlights and the expected places, but also focused on some lesser known sights related to the case, painting a more realistic portrait of how deeply it affected the area.
“I don’t like the glamorous detail,” he said. “I just like the mundaneness of it all.”
To that end, the Westside Gory ride, which costs $85 and can accommodate as many as eight guests at a time, makes numerous stops. One was the headquarters of the Director’s Guild of America, where a memorial for Jose Menendez, the brothers’ father who had ties to the film industry through his role as a record executive, was held. Another was the Beverly Center, a local mall the brothers frequented.
The tour’s host, Blaze Lovejoy, narrates the tour from a script, providing a great deal of detail on both cases.
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People in the back of a limo hold their phones up to open windows to take photos.
There are, of course, plenty of opportunities to stop and take photos.Credit...Jamie Lee Taete for The New York Times
Ms. Lovejoy read from a script, walking the audience through the events of the two cases, playing audio recordings, such as the 911 call from the Menendez killings.
Snaking the streets between Hollywood and Beverly Hills, Ms. Lovejoy pointed out the building that once housed the office of Dr. L. Jerome Oziel, the psychologist who testified in the Menendez trial that the brothers had confessed to him. Nearby, on Rodeo Drive, Ms. Lovejoy highlighted the site of the cafe where, she said, O.J. Simpson and Nicole Brown met, which is now a Saint Laurent storefront.
While the extraordinary cases are connected by time period, and the intense media coverage that followed, packaging them arose from something more trivial: traffic.
“It was just a logistical practical concern,” Mr. Levine said of mapping out a tour that, over the course of nearly three hours, picks up passengers in Hollywood, heads to the Menendez house in Beverly Hills, and then out to the Simpson house in Brentwood — approximately a 40-minute drive if you were not stopping along the way.
As for why the Menendez case has continued to dominate the true-crime world, some people believe it could be because abuse allegations, like those the brothers made against their parents, are more commonly talked about in this era than they were in the early 1990s when the focus was almost entirely on the crime committed by the brothers, rather than any motivations that had led to their actions.
Dr. Chivonna Childs, a staff psychologist at the Cleveland Clinic, said intrigue in true crime stories like this often stems from curiosity about what’s going on in the minds of the people who committed various offenses. But, she said, empathy can play a role, too, particularly among people who have experienced trauma themselves.
Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor of information politics and media ethics at the University of Oregon, said the brothers’ case also provided a clear example of how societal conversations around abuse allegations have changed, thanks, partly, to social media.
“For all of the ways that it has destroyed us, it’s given people a broader vocabulary about many things and true crime is no exception to that,” she said of social media.
At its core, though, the case has most likely stuck with people because, in its most basic form, parent-child conflict is a familiar story, Dr. Phillips said.
On the Westside Gory tour, the “mourners” — what Mr. Levine calls attendees — can step outside of their present day realities and be totally immersed in two events that have been a part of our culture for decades.
“You can basically feel as crappy or as great as you do in real life and then you get into the limo and everything changes,” Mr. Levine said. “It’s a completely separate zone.”
