A month after Lyle and Erik Menendez were arrested for brutally slaying their parents inside their Beverly Hills home, Dr. Ann Burgess entered the Los Angeles County Jail with a stack of blank paper and a set of colored pencils.

It was April 1990, and the maelstrom around Jose and Kitty Menendez’s double murder – and the brothers’ forthcoming trial – had reached a fever pitch. News articles described the crime scene in gory, painstaking detail. Prosecutors and tabloids portrayed the brothers as greedy, calculated, cold-blooded killers.

But inside the jail’s visitation room, Burgess recalls she politely asked the prison guards to remove Erik Menendez’s handcuffs.

They hesitated before relenting.

Burgess, a psychiatric clinical nurse specializing in working with victims of trauma and abu

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