arguments, as far as physical hitting or anything like that, but there was a lot of yelling. a lot of tension in the house sometimes. all set? everybody ready? at the time of the interview, jeffrey dahmer s mother, joyce, was writing her own book, tentatively titled, an assault on motherhood. she insisted that her co-author sit next to her for support. the book was never published, and the co-author never appeared in the original broadcast. what kinds of things was jeff exposed to? what kinds of things did he see and hear? nothing nothing out of the ordinary. well, what can i do? i can compare it with my own upbringing. and my mother and father fought, and it was kind of a normal thing, and they would get over it. and lionel and i discovered very early on that we were very different people. i was more emotional and more
now he turns around and, for whatever his reasons are, i don t know what he s trying to accomplish with talking about something he should have shared with me before he ever married me, if he s got some thought that that had anything to do with jeff. you mean his mental state, that you weren t informed? dreaming of murder yes. exactly. obsession with explosives? he never talked to you about any of that? none of that. i think one of the points is it s all clear in retrospect. i mean, he for instance, one of the anecdotes that he tells in the book, joyce, is when jeff was 4 years old and he had crawled lionel had crawled underneath the house to remove some dead animals and he put the bones of dead animals into a bucket. and jeff, at age 4, probably innocently went over and was playing with the bones and seemed fascinated that absolutely astounds me. excuse me for interrupting you,
do you feel that you re being blamed? yes, i do. do you feel that lionel s blaming you? that certainly does seem to be what happened when he first came out on television. and there are elements of lionel s book which do seem to say things about the pregnancy, about reluctance to breastfeed after the pregnancy, about joyce s state during early motherhood, which seem to indicate something was wrong with the mothering. now, this isn t the theme of the book, but it corresponds to the theme of so many questions from the media that have come along, all along the way. and i m not saying you re asking these now. but at the same time, lionel asks a lot of questions about himself, about what kind of father he was, about his own thoughts and maybe his own mistakes. i mean, one of the first places he looks is right in the mirror. but if he feels that way about himself, it s fine, if he
wants to make false or inaccurate accusations about his own behavior. but to state things about joyce which may or may not be true, and in some cases apparently are not true, in his book is a certain type of blaming somebody who has not yet had the opportunity to speak up. you ve read his book? yes. joyce, you have not read it? no, i haven t. joyce has not read it yet. joyce has been not well and reading that book, which just came out, hasn t been something she is ready for. the excerpts that i have seen in the newspaper are so astounding to me. he told everyone that i was crazy, that i had abused my body with medicines, that i somehow was to blame. there s no doubt about that.
se, but there are some that really, really are healthy, quite healthy. and ours could have been. and it just makes me sick to my stomach that it wasn t. that s how i feel. you know, i ll feel that way to my death. coming up the agonizing search for pieces of the puzzle turns to joyce s pregnancy with jeffrey, a topic that would fuel an intense debate. there s an obvious discrepancy here between what you re saying and what lionel is saying about the nature of the pregnancy. are you serious? [ female announcer ] you can make macaroni & cheese