Saying “I Do” in a Prison Visiting Room
When Lyle Menendez stood before a judge on July 2, 1996, it was to hear his sentence: life in prison without parole. That same day, he also stood—this time via telephone—to be married.
Lyle wed Anna Eriksson in a ceremony attended by his attorney Leslie Abramson and his aunt, officiated by Judge Nancy Brown. Years later, in Folsom State Prison, Erik Menendez would follow a similar path, marrying Tammi Ruth Saccoman in a waiting room where their wedding cake was a single Twinkie.
In a case defined by violence and betrayal, the brothers’ love lives became an unexpected subplot.
Lyle: Two Marriages, One Prison
Lyle’s first marriage, to Eriksson, ended in 2001 after she discovered he had been writing to another woman. In 2003, he married again, this time to Rebecca Sneed, in a visiting area of Mule Creek State Prison. They had known each other for roughly a decade before getting engaged.
The relationship endured for years under the most constrained of circumstances—no shared home, no physical intimacy beyond supervised contact, no possibility of building a life on the outside together. By 2024, Lyle and Sneed had separated, bringing an end to a union that had only ever existed within prison walls.
Erik and Tammi: A Twinkie for a Wedding Cake
On June 12, 1999, Erik married Tammi Saccoman at Folsom. Later, Tammi would recall the scene with a mix of humor and ache: a Twinkie as their improvised cake, a “wonderful ceremony” followed by a painfully lonely night when she had to leave the prison alone.
She committed herself fully to the relationship. Tammi and her daughter drove 150 miles every weekend to visit Erik. Her daughter began calling him her “Earth Dad,” blending the emotional reality of family with the physical reality of prison.
In interviews, Tammi spoke candidly about the cost and the connection. She acknowledged the difficulty of a sexless marriage but said it wasn’t “a problem” because she needed emotional attachment more than physical intimacy—and she had found that with Erik.
Writing Their Own Story
In 2005, Tammi self-published They Said We’d Never Make It—My Life with Erik Menendez. She later admitted that Erik had “done a lot of editing” on the manuscript, making the book a joint project of sorts, an attempt to claim their narrative in a world that had already written one for him.
Her family didn’t understand her choice. Some, she said, “threw up their hands” when the relationship grew serious. To them, Erik was an infamous killer serving life without parole. To her, he was the realization of a “dreamed about” connection.
Love as Lifeline
From his side of the bars, Erik framed the relationship as a kind of survival tool. Speaking to People magazine in 2005, he said he couldn’t bear to dwell on his sentence. When he did, he was gripped by “great sadness and a primal fear.” Instead, he focused on Tammi: “Tammi is what gets me through.”
In that single line lies the strange heart of these prison marriages. For the Menendez brothers, whose names are synonymous with one of America’s most notorious crimes, love is not a path to a shared future, but a way to endure a present that has no clear end. The walls remain, the sentences stand—yet within that cage, they have tried, however imperfectly, to build something that resembles a life.