“She told me to stop it and that I was exaggerating,” Lyle said during the trial. “And that my dad has to punish me when I do things wrong. And she…she told me that he loved me.”
But despite that, Erik in particular wanted to set the record straight about how much he loved his mother and how guilty he still feels over her loss.
“I miss my mother tremendously,” he said in the documentary. “I wish that I could go back and talk to her and give her a hug and tell her I love her and I wanted her to love me and be happy with me and be happy that I was her son and feel that joy and that connection. And I just want that.”
The brothers also discussed the difficulty in laying out so much of their life during the trial, with Lyle saying that he “deeply did not want to talk about anything that happened in our past.”
But as defense experts Dr. Ann Burgess noted in the documentary, after meeting with the boys—Lyle and Erik were 21 and 18 respectively at the time—shortly after the murders, “I had said there has to be something going on in the family for this to have happened.”
“That is not something that they need money, or any other motive, or revenge, or all of the other motives that we could think of,” she continued. “I said, ‘Something is very wrong in the family.'”
