Capturing the Friedmans Page #6

to live with it.

She was the best mother

she knew how.

She loved her kids,

and she loved her husband.

She wasn't the warmest,

most outgoing human being

in the world.

When I had the first child,

I was just ecstatic,

but I didn't know how to do it.

And I wasn't the most

well-balanced person myself.

You know, we all have

hang-ups, and

that's my hang-up.

Good things can never

happen to me, only bad.

That's all the snapshots.

I know.

This whole thing is

all the snapshots.

Did they go and they

looked through each one?

They must have.

This is ancient film.

Holy sh*t.

- Dad, what is it?

- Oh, my God, it's amazing.

How did you get this?

This is great.

- This is my Dad's.

- Who took it?

My father.

Dad, what's that a film of?

This is a film of my sister.

I had a sister.

She died a year

before I was born.

My brother knew her when

he was young, of course.

And she died of blood poisoning.

It was a horrible,

terrible, sudden death.

And it destroyed the family.

Arnold's parents divorced.

So Arnold's mother

had these two boys,

and they were really on

welfare. I don't know.

They lived in

a basement apartment.

Evidently, there

was one bedroom,

and the boys slept in

the bedroom with the mother.

We shared, all 3 of us,

not in the same bed,

but we all shared

the same room, big rooms.

And rather than put a,

apparently

the living room

was the living room,

and then there was the kitchen,

so we put all the beds

in the one room.

And that she dated a lot of men

and would bring the men

into the apartment, and they

would have sex in the bed

while Arnold was

there listening.

And Arnold said that,

because he saw his mother

in bed with a man, that

when he was adolescent,

he was experimenting,

as all children do,

and he had sex with his brother

in bed or something like that.

And to me,

that's not what all children do.

Arnold sent me this right around

when he started writing me,

and it's called "My Story,"

and it was written in 1988.

And I think it was his attempt

to talk about the case

but also talk about the case

in the context of his life.

And it starts out, it says,

"This story goes back 50 years

to when I was a child."

He says, "When I

reached adolescence"

I sought out partners for

my emerging sexuality.

My first partner, when I was

13, was my 8-year-old brother.

I had overt sexual

relations with him

"over a period of a few years."

I know that my brother has said

that he messed around with me

when I was a kid.

And I don't remember any of it.

I don't remember anything.

I have nothing up here

that has me yelling or

screaming or crying

or trying to get away

or unhappy or I

there's nothing there that.

Maybe someday a door will open,

but it better hurry up,

because I'm 65.

And at this point in time,

I could care less.

Then he goes on and says,

"My next partners were boys"

my own age, all of which

sexual relations,

probably being within

norms for my age.

However, the emotional

impact of these relations

was very pronounced and

lasted through my adult life.

A more normal situation,

as probably happened

with my partners, would

have been to outgrow

and forget these episodes.

However, I literally fell

in love with these boys,

and the relations were far

more significant to me

"than they were to my partners."

And then he told me that when he

got to be an older teenager,

like maybe in his late teens,

he started worrying

that he was still attracted to

kids that were the same age

as his brother had been

when Arnold was 13,

and that really started

bothering him.

And then after he had his own

children, he was worried.

He started worrying that

maybe he would molest

his own children.

And at that point,

he went to therapy,

and the therapist told him,

"No, don't worry.

You've got everything

under control."

The Jazzbo Mambo

with the boogie beat

is the newest dance

on 52nd Street

All the cats come running

from both near and far

to do the Jazzbo Mambo

8 to the bar

Come on, Light Fingers!

Light Fingers, come on!

Jazzbo Mambo

Jazzbo Mambo

Jazzbo Mambo, 8 to the bar

You could see that

this wasn't exactly

Fred MacMurray and

"My Three Sons," right?

It always struck us as being

a very dysfunctional

family, obviously.

And we'd have to,

you would have to wonder,

wouldn't you,

what kind of a family

situation you would have

that could produce

this kind of crime.

What might it be like to grow up

in a household like this?

I don't know.

I can't even imagine.

Today is September 14, 1975.

We just concluded a tour

of Jungle Safari.

Jungle Habitat.

Jungle Habitat in

West Milford, New Jersey.

Here are my 3 brothers.

Two brothers, you dummy.

All right, there are 3 children.

What happened was the 3

sons were like a gang.

Like, "This is our gang"

and Mom."

"She's not part of our gang."

And we have, of course,

A pterodactyl.

A Jewish pterodactyl.

Shmuck, shmuck, schmuck.

The 4 of us got along so well.

We had a very similar

kind of sense of humor.

You know, one guy would say

something, and then it would,

then the next person

would add to the joke.

And my mother, who has

no sense of humor,

and she just didn't

get that part of us.

And she resented that.

When this whole thing blew

apart, the men got together,

and Arnold confided in them.

And me?

And I was a loyal wife.

People told me, "Oh, why

don't you leave him?"

He's a horrible person.

"Just walk out and leave him."

And I didn't.

I went all over town.

I raised money for bail.

I called every relative I knew.

I begged.

And I did all this

for him, right?

He was my husband. I loved him.

And no one said,

"What do you want?" to me.

OK.

OK, I think we can eat now.

So you're saying what we have is

the people who we thought

would testify

and say that nothing happened.

And we are afraid to put them

on the witness stand,

even though we know

that nothing happened.

We think they will say

something happened.

The Friedmans suggested that

we speak to various people

who may have been present

at the time.

And some of those people weren't

alleged victims at all.

And that the hope was that one

or more of these people

would say,

"This is just not true."

But that just didn't happen.

As far as I'm concerned

he's being, he's

So then nothing happened.

We begged him to tell us

that something happened,

to explain how this whole mess

could have happened.

That's the only way to explain

how it could have happened

other then the fact that the

police are out of their minds.

We begged him.

He told us nothing happened.

That's good enough for me.

Nothing happened.

If my father had the ability

to confess to me,

yeah, he had done

something one time,

and that's how this whole crazy

mess got started,

it would make a lot more sense.

Not that I wanted that

to be the case, but

you have to find a way

to explain the unexplainable.

Oh, my gosh.

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