Lisa Jakub has detailed the moment she realized she was sitting in the exact room where the Menendez brothers murdered their parents.
Jakub, 46, who played Lydia Hillard in the 1993 comedy Mrs. Doubtfire, published the account in a Substack post titled Because you asked, an excerpt from her memoir You Look Like That Girl. At just 13 years old, the Canadian-born actress was living in a 9,000-square-foot mansion at 722 North Elm Drive in Beverly Hills after her mother took a housesitting job for a producer and her screenwriter husband. The couple had purchased the property at a discount following the 1989 killings.
The producer had assured Jakub and her mother that the house had been remodeled since the murders, and somehow that made everyone feel better. Jakub wrote that she and her mother accepted the arrangement as a significant upgrade from the Oakwood corporate housing studio apartment in Burbank where they had been living. The mansion came with 23 exquisitely decorated rooms, manicured grounds, a pool, a tennis court with an automatic ball machine, and a live-in maid named Maria who continued working there during their stay.
Jakub spent hours outside trying to master the tennis ball machine while stinging, gray ash from the Los Angeles fires floated down around her. She wrote that she would play until the burning in her lungs got to be too much, then retreat to the air-conditioned mansion to cool off by lying facedown on the marble entryway floor. Besides burning ash, there was another obstacle to spending time outside: Graveline Tours frequently cruised the house in a hearse, with guides narrating the killings over a speaker to sightseers who stuck their long-lens cameras out the windows.
The house was a particular hot spot at that time because the brothers were currently on trial. Jakub wrote that people came at all times of the day and night, pleading for the lives of the boys they didn’t know, shaking the gate and holding up handmade signs. She heard the tour guide’s monologue so many times she could have given the tour herself.
Surprisingly, the house was not that creepy. Jakub wrote that it didn’t feel like a place of torture and murder, noting that you expect darkness and low ceilings, not a brightly wallpapered sunroom and a restaurant-quality kitchen. She added that the maid seemed unbothered by it all, so she tried to take her cues from her. Jakub slept in Lyle Menendez’s old bedroom throughout her time in the house.
The master bathroom’s pink marble tub had once belonged to Michael Jackson, who reportedly used it to bathe his pet monkey, while Elton John owned the property before him. The producer advised Jakub to use one of the other nine bathrooms for her bathing needs, explaining that the tub could never get “clean-clean” even with Maria’s meticulous attention. Jakub noted that the fact the tub disturbed the producer more than the patricide and matricide was kind of surprising.
One day, Jakub was stretched out on the leather couch, flipping channels on the theater screen that acted as a television. She wrote: “There was some Hollywood pseudo-news show that was giving an update on the ongoing trial of the Menendez brothers. Suddenly, a black and white photo of the murder scene flashed on the nine-foot screen; a body lying on the floor, one on the couch, covered in dark splotches of blood.”
The photos made her catch her breath, and her skin got prickly. She continued: “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.”
In the viral moment that preceded this revelation, Lyle and Erik Menendez, then 21 and 18, shot and killed their parents Jose and Kitty Menendez in the Beverly Hills home on August 20, 1989. The brothers claimed self-defense after years of abuse, but prosecutors argued they were motivated by greed. They were convicted in 1996 and originally sentenced to life without parole. In May 2025, both brothers were resentenced in a decision that opened the door to possible parole, but in August 2025 they were both denied, with officials citing rule violations and concerns they still posed a risk to the community.
Jakub watched the protesters outside the gates and wanted to invite them in to sit on the couch and look at that photo. She concluded her Substack post by noting that she has not watched any of the recent films or documentaries on the murders, feeling the levels of suffering are more than she can handle at the moment. She had assumed the world had moved on from this tragic story, but wrote that apparently the army of Menendez brothers defenders have just moved from the gates of 722 North Elm Drive to a more central location — TikTok.