The crimes of Jeffrey Dahmer
made the world cringe.
Seventeen murders
Cannibalism
Sex with the dead.
A man who made is Milwaukee apartment
into a violent and neurotic death chamber.
"One thing led to another
it took more and more deviant type
of behaviors to satisfy
My urges."
Dahmer even tried to create living
sex zombies by injecting acid into their brains.
Jeffrey Dahmer it seemed, was a close to
raw evil as the world had ever known.
"Jeffrey thought he was the devil,
Jeffrey thought he was so evil
that he was equal to the devil."
(music)
The first child of Joyce and Lionel Dahmer
was born in Milwaukee Wisconsin
on May 21st, 1960, just before their first
anniversary. His name was Jeffrey.
"It was a very happy when Jeff
was first born and for a couple of
months it was like everything was brand new
and very, very um enjoyable and happy.
Looking forward to the future."
While Jeff's father pursued his chemistry degree,
Jeff grew into a bright and loving child.
"He was very exuberant, he liked to wrestle.
He liked to run around and ham it up for the camera.
And he liked to play with kids,
liked to get together with them.
He was very outgoing."
Jeff was also a very curious child.
"He seemed to want to play with things
and feel things and get to know their
texture and he seemed to be very in tuned
with what's around him. He just wanted
to know what was going on."
He had a fascination with animals
as a youngster. Once, 4 year old
Jeff watched his father collect the bones
of small animals that had died under the house.
"I had brought them out, put them in a metal
pail just to collect them all in one place,
and they had dropped in with sort of clanky
noise and Jeff seemed sort of interested
in that noise and he took a whole and let
them drop too.
You know, in retrospect, everything
looks grim and dark and sinister,
like you know could that be the start of
something evil. Well, I have to admit,
it's simply just the curiosity of a child."
Lionel finished his schooling with a PhD
in chemistry. The family moved to Ohio,
relocating 3 times before settling down
on a nearly 2 acre wooden lot in the town
of Bath, an hours drive south of Cleveland.
It was then that Lionel began to notice
the previously gregarious Jeff
had become shy and withdrawn.
"He did seem to be awkward socially
and just didn't feel comfortable."
To take his mind off of the move,
7 year Jeff was given a dog, Frisky,
who he loved dearly.
"With the people he new, or his new pet,
um the next door neighbor boy, he was very relaxed
but there was this shyness and feeling of
inferiority that we were concerned about at that time."
What the Dahmer's thought their son needed
was to feel more involved, so they let
Jeff choose the name of their second son,
Jeff named his brother David.
Lionel also encouraged his son to
participate in activities that would include
contact with other kids.
"What we were trying to do was involve
Jeff in those activities with the thought
that involvement would lead to human involvement,
forced almost, interaction."
And on the weekends, father and son planted
gardens and raised sheep for competitions
at 4H fairs.
To commemorate their gardening days,
young Jeff gave his father a handmade card
with a poem.
"There's a picture of me eating
an ear of corn on the front, and Jeff
says 'the squash and the pumpkins
can never compare to the dad that has curly
hair.' and it says 'this poem is from Jeff
and I love you to death.'"
When Jeff was 10, his mother was hospitalized
and treated for anxiety.
From their, his parents marriage began to fail.
Jeff's fascination with nature and
small animals continued into his teenage years
where he became curious about what they
looked like on the inside.
For specimens, he collected road kill,
riding around the country roads in Bath
carrying garbage bags, Jeff searched
for carcasses. Jeff brought road kill
he found into the backyard of the house,
and there in the secrecy of the woods,
he dissected the animals.
"I really have become convinced
that was the starting point of this downward
spiral of his. And it was associated
with just puberty, and when you have
hormones kicking into this, this
terrible mixture, what he's doing,
he's investigating insides of animals,
and his sexuality was developing at the same time."
Teenage Jeff was discovering that he
felt sexually attracted only to men,
but the thoughts with sex with men
became interlocked with fantasies of killing
another men and dismemberment.
The fantasies excited him, but were unspeakable.
"I think it was around age 14 or 15
I started to have obsessive thoughts
of violence, intermingled with sex
and it just got worse and worse,
I didn't know how to tell anyone about it,
so I didn't, I just kept it all inside."
The fantasies included lying next to
an unconscious man, for the first time,
Jeff's fantasies crossed the line
from his mind into action.
He devised a plan,
he would knock out a local jogger with a bat
and lie next to him.
On the day he opted to wait for his victim,
the jogger didn't run by,
he never attempted the clubbing a second time.
As he entered high school,
his sexual fantasies traumatized him.
He began drinking. On the way to classes
in the morning, he would fill a cup
with hard liquor at a friend's house.
"And I remember sitting next to him in
um, first period, I believe history class,
and he had a Styrofoam cup of scotch I believe.
I remember saying, 'Jeff what is that?' and he
threw his head back and he said, 'It's my medicine."
But clearly, he was getting drunk at 8 o'clock
in the morning."
At home, Jeff was watching his parents
marriage dissolve. When their bickering
escalated to open fighting, he retreated
to the forested backyard, slapping tree trunk
with sticks.
"I would leave the house, run out
in the woods and sulk, wondering
why they had to have such a rough relationship."
He remained aloof with few interests and
no close friendships.
But he still seemed to have a sense of humor.
On the high school tennis team,
Jeff spent most of his time goofing around
rather than playing a serious game.
But more often than not, the jokes where
at Jeff's expense. He gained a reputation
as the class clown, acting out in a
bizarre or unexpected manner became known
as "doing a Dahmer."
"All of a sudden you would be walking down
the hall, and you would hear someone
yelling or and hollering and running
through the hallway and it's Jeff Dahmer
in the middle of the day,
running, flapping his arms, yelling
'Hurrican drill, hurricane drill, everybody hide.'
At one point, Jeff collected money from
classmates in exchange for a show at the mall.
"And a woman is handing out samples of
sunflower seeds, and Jeff is taking one
and then another and then another,
being very polite as he always was,
and then just spits them out all over the place,
and starts yelling at the top of his lungs
'I'm allergic, I'm alleric!' and runs away."
During his junior high, Jeff went along
on a school sponsored trip to Washington D.C.
"And Jeff said, 'I have an idea, let's go
see the Vice President.' And we all sort
of laughed and said sure, the Vice President."
Jeff went to a payphone, when he returned,
he announced that they would be seen in the
office of Vice President Walter Mondale in 2 hours.
"He has explained that we were high school
students from Ohio, working on our school newspaper,
and we were in town for a week and could
we come and talk to someone in the Vice President's office."
His slick talking worked. Dahmer had
gotten his classmates inside the executive
office building to meet with Mondale.
In the classroom, Jeff was something
of a model student.
"Very polite to adults, dressed very nice,
very respectful to teachers, um
did his work, he could be an "A" student
if he wanted to. Other times he would fail the
class because he had no interest.
He could be very polite with very good manners,
'Yes sir, no sir' when he spoke with teachers."
He was perfecting his ability to fool
authority figures, but as time went on,
Jeff became less interested with his
performance at school.
"No one really knew what was going on in his mind,
he didn't really open up to anybody
he didn't have any close friends,
and he had really slipped away from his
social life. The older we got in high school."
At the school near Bath, Ohio, Jeff
remained an alcoholic outcast,
his behavior was the subject of mockery
from other students.
"I don't think he connected, you know
he didn't engage with people.
So if you don't engage with people,
you um, you know, give and take of conversation
and feelings, you end up internalizing a lot
you fantasize a lot and then the next step
is to think that some of those fantasies are real."
A step Jeff was ready to make,
he would kill his first victim just after
high school graduation.
For Jeffrey Dahmer, the summer of 1978
started with high school graduation.
It would be down hill from there.
His parents, after years of open and bitter
fighting, divorced.
Jeffrey's father, Lionel, moved out of the family's house
in Bath and into this nearby motel
unbeknownst to Lionel, Jeff's mother
took younger brother David and moved to Wisconsin.
Jeffrey found himself home lone.
Jeffrey was 18, and like most teens his age,
he had active sexual fantasies.
But Jeffrey's deviated from the norm
to include thoughts of killing his lover.
Now the isolation of the empty family home
gave him the opportunity to act out those fantasies.
Just weeks after graduation,
Jeffrey picked up a hitch hiker along the road.
It was 18 year old Steven Hicks.
"I wish I had just kept going, but I didn't.
I turned around, picked up him, and
that's when, that's when the nightmare
became a reality."
Jeffrey invited Hicks back to the house
they drank beers, and spent a couple of hours
just hanging out.
Then Hicks said he had to go, but Jeffrey
didn't want to be alone.
He attacked Hicks, knocking him out
with a barbell, and then he strangled him.
Dahmer had fulfilled his fantasy,
but he was lucid enough to know he
had committed a murder. He quickly began
to hide the evidence.
He dismembered Hicks' body with a knife,
a skill he had practiced as a younger teen
with roadkill.
He put the pieces into trash bags,
and loaded them into his car in the middle of the night.
He was heading for a dump site
when he was pulled over by the police
for drifting over the center line.
The officer asked Jeff what was in the bags
and why was he out so late.
Jeff was trapped for the first time,
but he was ready with a lie.
He cooly told the cops that he was troubled
by his parents' divorce and couldn't sleep.
So he thought a trip to the dump would
take his mind off of things.
The police let him go with a ticket.
Jeffrey turned home, racked with guilt
over the murder. He stashed the bones
of Steven Hicks under the house for 2 weeks.
Then he smashed them to bits with a sledge hammer.
Behind the house, Jeff spun in a circle,
tossing the fragments among the leaves and brush.
In August, Jeffrey's father stopped by the house.
"I said, 'where is your mother? Where's
Dave?' and he said 'they're gone.'
I said, 'what do you mean?' 'They're gone
they left.'
Jeff's father moved back into the house
he encouraged Jeff to find a job.
But Jeff wasn't interested.
He spent his days drinking,
even getting himself arrested for
public intoxication.
Lionel took his son to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings
and psychological counseling sessions.
They had little impact.
Nothing could erase the violence and terror
his first murder had imprinted on his mind.
Only the alcohol seemed to provide relief.
By the end of the summer,
Jeff was still jobless,
so Lionel suggested an alternative
college.
He enrolled Jeff at Ohio State.
But Jeff spent the first quarter in
a drunken state, selling his blood
to plasma centers and spending the money
on beer.
Predictably, Dahmer flunked out and
returned home
"I said, Jeff the doors are closing
um, I think perhaps the armed services
might be something that you need."
Like all the other choices that had been
made for him, Jeff passively went along
with his enlistment.
After his basic training was complete,
he left for an army hospital in San Antonio
Texas, where he was given specialized
instruction as a field medic.
There, Dahmer learned more about
human anatomy.
For one of the first times in his life,
he was excited about what he was doing,
responding to instruction and discipline.
After 6 months in the Army,
his sluggish body had become lean and strong.
Normally shy and reclusive,
Jeff became outgoing, even smiling.
But the mood swing was temporary.
The Army sent him for a tour of duty
in Germany, and there once again,
Jeff emptied bottle after bottle.
His superiors noticed and gave Dahmer
an early discharge.
He went directly to Miami Beach
without contacting his family.
He worked at a sandwich shop and lived
out of a motel.
When his booze bills exceeded the room cost
Jeff took to sleeping on the beach.
"He was terrified one night
when a rat, big huge rat, came crawling over him
and he called us, he said he needs some money
I said we won't send you money but
we will send you a ticket.
You can come home.
So I met him at the airport,
Cleveland Hopkins Airport and
he had a smile on his face,
but as I got closer, it wasn't a smile
of happiness, it was a smile of
inebriation. "
Lionel tried for a year to help his
alcoholic son, to no avail,
Jeff was sent to stay with his father's
mother near Milwaukee.
There, he seemed to find some stability
at last, making a concentrated effort to
turn his life around. He stopped drinking,
went to church with his grandmother,
and he fought what he believed were
immoral homosexual urges
which eventually led to his inescapable
fantasies about murder.
Dahmer even found jobs, first at a blood bank
and then working nights as a chocolate mixer
in a candy factory.
But the lifestyle of church going and right
living as he called it
didn't last. After 3 quiet years in his
grandmothers home, Jeff came face to face
with his fears.
At the library, a man handed him a note
offering sexual favors.
Dahmer declined, but later would say
the note was a turning point.
He awakened sexual desires deep inside him
specifically, he wanted the submissive
company of another male,
he wanted someone to fulfill his sexual needs
but he didn't want to be burdened
by anyone else's needs.
Jeffrey started with a perfectly
submissive partner.
He stole a store window mannequin.
He kept the plastic man in his closet
bringing it out to masterbate to until
his grandmother found it and insisted
he get rid of it.
On his free nights
Jeffrey began exploring gay life in
Milwaukee, browsing through porn shops
and going to bath houses.
The bath clubs catered mostly to men
seeking anonymous sex.
To make his partners there submissive
Jeffrey gave them drinks laced with
sleeping pills.
When they fell unconscious,
he would lie down next to them,
listening to the sounds of their bodies.
Their heartbeats, their stomachs,
but the druging experiments, when one man
over dosed and spent a week in a hospital.
Jeff was asked never to return to the club.
But he then discovered the gay bars and
discos of Milwaukee.
These would become the killer's favorite
hunting grounds.
By his late 20's, Jeffrey Dahmer
was settled in Milwaukee,
living at his grandmother's and
prowling the cities gay scene.
No one suspected that this reclusive loner
with boyish good looks was on his way to
becoming a psychopathic serial killer.
"He did take pleasure in the fact
that he was in control of his own
little world. That nobody knew what
was going on, that he was the master of it."
"Dahmer could fit in any group
and you wouldn't say oh he must be crazy
or he must be a killer. That's why
he was so successful.
He wasn't a repulsive individual."
Certainly not in Milwaukee's gay clubs.
"We have it on good facts
that he was considered somewhat of a honey
in the gay community.
That people found him attractive.
Several people told us that he was
the kind of guy you wanted to take care of
you wanted to baby him."
But Dahmer had very specific requirements
for his men.
"He chose a body style. He liked long
lean smooth muscular body styles and it didn't
matter if they were black, white, yellow
or brown, if he found them attractive,
he would try to get them."
In November 1987, Dahmer met 25 year old
Steve Toomey at a downtown club called 219
after a few drinks they left the bar
for a night at the nearby Embassador Hotel.
Dahmer used an old trick to get Toomey
into the submissive state he craved.
"I put some sleeping pills in his drink
to render him unconscious and um
was just going to spend the night with him
when I woke up in the morning, my
fore arms were bruised
and his chest was bruised and blood
was coming out of his mouth,
he was hanging over the side of the bed
and um, I have no memory of beating him to death.
But I must of."
But Dahmer didn't panic.
He went out and bought the biggest suitcase he could find.
At the hotel, he crammed Toomey's body
into the case, dragged it into a taxi,
went back to his grandmother's house
and dismembered Toomey in the basement.
"That's when the obsession went into full swing."
"He decided after the second death
he would no longer attempt to control
his desires, that he would give full
reign to them, yield entirely to them
and after that his life became the
pursuit of unmitigated sexual pleasure."
Dahmer now decided to pursue his fantasies
of ultimate control. It was no longer enough
for his partners submissive just a night.
He wanted to keep them that way forever.
So with the intent to murder and then
butcher the men he picked up,
Dahmer returned to the clubs.
At a bus stop outside 219,
he met 14 year old James Docksdater.
Dahmer offered him $50 to spend the night
with him. They took the bus back to
Dahmer's grandmothers while she
slept, Jeff and Docksdater had oral sex
then Dahmer drugged and strangled him
his preferred method of killing.
"He stated that in no way did he want to
hurt anybody, as funny as it sounds,
that is the reason why he killed everyone
by strangling them, because not only did
he get the power and the thill of
committing the murder, but it was
also the most humane way."
With Docksdater, Dahmer further explored
his dark fantasies.
He hid the body in the basement for
a week and continued to have sex with it.
"Most serial killers are sexual deviants
who are social and psychological
sociopaths and sexual sexiopaths
who kill people for their own sexual gratification.
Dahmer was different than that.
He was a true necrophiliac
he was trying to have sex with an
unconscious or dead person."
Once Docksdater started to decay,
Dahmer dismembered him near a floor drain
just as he had with Toomey.
Dahmer was now drinking heavily
again, especially on the nights he
planned to murder.
By the time he killed he would be stoned drunk.
"He drank because his conscious was
so strong. This isn't a man that
didn't know the difference of right
from wrong."
Two months after killing Docksdater
Dahmer picked up 21 year old Richard Guierro
from a Milwaukee bar,
again offering him money to spend the night.
In a familiar pattern,
Dahmer drugged and strangled him.
He spent a few hours with the corpse
before dismembering it.
He then placed the body parts
into trash bags for the city
garbage collection the next day.
In the summer of 1988,
Jeff's grandmother had asked him to move out.
She had been troubled by Jeff's
late hours, the mannequin in his bedroom,
and now unidentified foul smells
from the basement.
He took an apartment on Milwaukee's
west side, and immediately
accelerated his downward spiral
when he approached a 13 year old
boy on the street and lured him
into the apartment.
Inside, Dahmer scared the boy by
fondling him and the youngster ran
from the apartment.
Dahmer was convicted on 2nd degree
sexual assault charges only.
The murders were still his secret.
He was sentenced to 1 year in a work
release program, which required
to spend his nights in a prison
dormitory while he continued working
at the chocolate factory.
In the 10 days before he began
his sentence, Dahmer struck again.
He met 26 year old, Anthony Sears
at the gay club "La Cashe" and killed him.
He mummified Sear's head and genitals
and kept them inside his locker
at the chocolate factory.
Towards the end of the work release term,
Jeff's father wrote to the judge
and urged him to put Jeff in an
alcoholic treatment program writing,
I have tremendous reservations regarding
Jeff's chances when he hits the streets.
No program was ordered.
Jeff was release 2 months early.
He moved into another low income
neighborhood in Milwaukee.
The rent at the Oxford Apartments was cheap
and the location was close to the gay clubs.
On his own again, he was free to feed
his relentless sexual urges.
Within 3 weeks of his release,
Dahmer began a 1 year killing frenzy.
He would leave 13 more families
most of them African American,
searching for loved ones
who had simply, disappeared.
The police too searched in vain.
"Once Jeff started on his killing spree,
all his financial resources,
all of his time, money, effort,
desires, emotions, thoughts, went into
his secret world of killing people and
keeping them with him.
Many times he talked about trying to
fight it, even after he killed a
couple people saying how he wasn't
going to do it again,
but within a month he would be out
at the bars stalking."
One victim almost got away.
Dahmer had drugged 14 year old
Konerak Sinthasomphone.
The brother of the boy Dahmer
had been jailed for molesting the year before.
As Konerak slept, Dahmer went out
to buy more liquor. But while he was gone,
the teen woke up. He staggered out
to the street naked.
A concerned neighbor called 9-1-1.
Police arrived by this time Dahmer
had returned from his beer run.
As he had with police in Bath Ohio,
after his first killing,
Dahmer smoothly lied.
He told police that Konerak was
his gay lover that simply had
too much to drink.
He brought the cops into his apartments
and showed them polaroids he taken
of the teen. Proof of their relationship.
The police believed the 14 year old
was of legal age and left him behind
with Dahmer.
They wrote the incident off as a
lover's quarrel.
Again, Dahmer had been slippery enough
to keep his killings a secret.
As soon as the cops left,
he murdered the boy.
Inside Dahmer's apartment,
the bodies started to pile up.
So he bought a 50 gallon sized drum
and he filled it up with
a powerful acid to dissolve
the dismembered limbs and torsos.
After weeks in the acid,
the remains of Dahmer's would be
lovers became slug which
he flushed down the toilet or
the bathtub drain.
For others, Jeffrey boiled
the skin off their bones on the stove.
A sweet bitter odor of death
began to infest the building,
and many tenants traced
the smells straight to Dahmer's door.
"It was awfully funny, whatever
Jeff was cookin'. Jeff never bought
no groceries, so what could
have been cookin'?
That smelled like chitlins.
Chitlins have very peculiar nasty odor to them.
You know?"
Dahmer was pathologically lonesome,
not wanting his sexual partners to
leave him even after death.
He took keepsake photos while
removing their flesh and preserved
certain parts.
"And one thing led to another
it took more and more deviant type
behaviors to satisfy my urges."
He devised a plan to build a shrine
out of skeletons and skulls, but
he was still in search for the perfect
partner, one that was completely
submissive but alive and not prone to decay.
On a few still living victims,
Dahmer used a power drill to open small
holes in their skulls, then he
injected acid into their brains.
According to Dahmer, none of his
experimental zombies lived longer than
a day. And in perhaps the ultimate effort
to keep his victims with him,
Dahmer began eating their flesh.
"It made me feel like they were
permanent part of me.
Besides just curiosity of what it would
be like, it made them feel like
they were part of me and it gave me
a sexual satisfaction."
Throughout this year of ruthless killing
Dahmer still appeared outwardly normal.
In this video taken at his grandmother's
house on Thanksgiving, Dahmer
talked calmly with his father.
"Well, you are looking good."
"Thanks"
"Grandma was saying that she thought
that you got quite a bit thinner,
but you look fit, I don't know."
Well, I have been surviving mostly
on McDonald's food, so much
easier to just pop into a restaurant.
Like I said before it gets too expensive, and
I have to start eating at home more."
"It's amazing how he could sit there
and appear like he's clean cut,
nice jacket on, and talking very
hopefully about his job. Intellegent.
It's amazing how much a human being
can hide from another human being."
But careful as he was, Jeffrey Dahmer
was about to run out of good lies.
In July, 1991, the city of Milwaukee
discovered a serial killer.
31 year old Jeffrey Dahmer.
One man, Tracy Edwards,
managed to escape from the horrors
of Dahmer's apartment and flagged down
a passing patrol car.
When the officer's entered the apartment,
they found 83 polaroids of bodies
in various stages of dismemberment.
There were more shocking discoveries in the kitchen.
"There were 4 fully infleshed
skulls still there, sitting
in the refrigerator.
One officer said he opened the ice box
he heard a scream, it was only later that
he realized that it was he himself
that had screamed."
TV news cameras rolled as what
was left of the victims was carried out.
The 57 gallon drum that was filled
with the torsos of 3 men.
A freezer with dismembered limbs
and flesh, metal cooking pots
with mummified hands and genitals.
This time there was no lie
Dahmer could tell to save himself.
"He was walking at a pretty defeated manner
his shoulders were hunched, his head
was down, he was sweating perfusely.
He had a faint, kind of a whining,
like a baby crying noise about him."
At the police station, detectives
began a marathon interview with the
suspected killer.
Dahmer had first blamed the booze
instead of himself, saying he wouldn't
have been caught if he hadn't been so drunk,
but Dahmer was now clearly scared.
"The look of terror and almost hysteria
that he had on his face in the interrogation
room that first night as he was coming off
of the alcohol and he was realizing
that the gig was up, he was caught,
he did cry several times,
he went into a rage, besides
asking to kill himself,
he stood up and pounced around a couple of times."
Once Dahmer sobered up,
no one could guess at the gruesome
details to follow.
"He made this statement when I tell you
what I am going to tell you, you
are going to be famous."
And I tried to say Jeff, there is nothing
you can tell me that is going to
freak me out. And he laughed at that.
He said you don't know, you don't
know what I have done."
Dahmer spent the next 6 weeks with the
detectives recounting the murders of 17 men
a 159 paged confession.
It seemed cathartic to Dahmer to
finally get the deeds of the last 13 years
off of his chest.
With the information from his confession
investigators went back to Dahmer's
childhood home in Bath Ohio.
They raked up the shattered bones
of Steven Hicks, Dahmer's first victim.
The Milwaukee county coroner started
matching skulls with torsos and the police
started the sad task of notifying
families.
Dahmer pleaded guilty but insane.
The issue of his sanity would be the sole
question before the jury.
"You know immediately that it's going
to be probably a sanity defense. What
can you argue, you can't claim self defense,
you can't say you don't know how those
bodies got there."
Wisconsin had no death penalty,
so if the jury found him sane,
he would spend the rest of his life
in prison. If they found him insane,
he would be prisoned in a mental facility.
Dahmer himself couldn't understand
why he enjoyed fantasizing about murder.
"Jeffrey thought he was the devil.
Jeffrey thought that he was so evil
that he was equal to the devil
and he knew there was something wrong with
him but he didn't know what it was but
he never categorized himself as being insane."
The man who entered the Milwaukee
County courtroom in January, 1992,
appeared completely normal. Until the words
of his confession were read in court by
Lt. Dennis Murphy.
"He said this was a person he really liked,
he indicated that he had fileted his heart
and kept it in the freezer, and he
also kept his bicep.
He indicated that he had eaten the
thigh muscle of this subject, but it
was so tough he could hardly chew it.
He then purchased a meat tenderizer and
used it on the bicep."
Dahmer's father, Lionel, sat in the courtroom
beside his second wife, Sherry,
stunned by what he heard.
"No one softened the blow for us,
no one told us, no one prepared us
with any of these details.
How could this be, how could I not know
about it?"
Dahmer's crimes seemed to be
devastating proof of insanity.
What else could explain the actions
of a man who had sex with the dead
dismembered their bodies,
preserved their skulls,
and ate their flesh,
all for sexual gratification
But the law has a very strict
interpretation of insanity
and Dahmer's defense team had to prove
2 things, 1, that he indeed suffered from
mental disease, and that it had kept him
from knowing right from wrong.
necrophilia, a compulsion to have sex
with the dead is recognized as a
sexual disorder, but it does not make
one legally insane.
"He argued that the necrophilic drive
was such that he could not control it, but
we don't accept that in the United States
as a defense, no more than we accept a
pediphilic drive of the man who wants
to have sex with children."
"Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury,
I understand that you have arrived
at a verdict in this manner....."
In a 10-2 decision, the jury found
Jeffrey Dahmer legally sane.
Some relatives of Dahmer's victims
sat quietly in court,
others cried.
Prior to his sentencing,
they were allowed to express themselves
before the judge.
"Jeffrey I hate you BEEP BEEP,
I hate you. This is out of control.
Don't BEEP with Jeffrey, I'll kill you
BEEP. I HATE YOU!!!"
Once order was restored,
Dahmer spoke publicly for the first time.
"I feel so bad for what I did to those poor
families and I understand their rightful
hate. I have seen their tears and if I
could give my life right now to bring
their loved ones back I would do it.
I am so very sorry."
Many questioned the emotional depth of
Dahmer's apology, whether a man who
killed so routinely, had the conscious
to feel remorse.
The judge sentenced Dahmer to a 937
year prison term, but it
would last only a few tormented years.
Jeffrey Dahmer's final home
was the Columbia Correctional Institution
in Portage, Wisconsin.
His former residence at the Oxford
Apartments in Milwaukee stood as a
painful reminder of the lives that
ended there so in November 1992,
it was demolished.
In his prison cell at the age of 32,
Dahmer's life became a conflicted introspection
trying to sort out the blame for his
killing nature and seeking devine
forgiveness for it.
He had spent time in church as a boy
and with his grandmother as an adult,
but had lost his religion during the murder spree.
Dahmer placed the blame for the murders
on his atheist beliefs and the theory
of evolution.
"He said if it all happens naturalistically
what's the need for a god. Can't I set my
own rules. Who owns me? I own myself."
Yet Jeffrey was still a controdiction
for he was always quite willing to blame
the devil for taking over his soul.
The serial killer wondered now
what would happen to him when he died.
Dahmer decided he wanted to be baptized.
Evangelist Roy Ratcliff was called
by the prison minister to talk with the inmate
in April, 1994.
"He was a very congenial, likeable sort
of person. I always felt I was dealing with
a small boy in a grown up man's body.
He could get real excited and interested
and neat or cool things that a little boy
would get involved in."
One month later, Dahmer was taken to
the prison's medical center where
he was baptized in a whirlpool.
"The way we walked other prisoners with
mops and brooms and various cleaning supplies
and they would look up and the only one
they saw who they recognized was Jeff,
and they would call out in a very friendly
banter "Hey J.D. how's it going?"
He would call back, "I'm going to be
baptized this is great."
Dahmer appeared to be making a remarkable
transformation in prison.
"He would ask questions,
he would say but what about this
what about that, so uncharacteristic
of the earlier years, go back to senior year
in high school, you wouldn't get any of that.
He was so interactive, and so concerned
about our welfare.
He was reaching out, he was rehumanizing."
But those dark haunted fantasies
remained with Dahmer.
"I will probably have live with it for
the rest of my life. I wish it would go away
I wish I there was some way to completely get
rid of the compulsive thoughts, the feelings."
Dahmer got another reminder of his past
when he was visited by Theresa Smith.
Dahmer had killed her brother, Eddie.
"First thing he did when he came in
was apologized for killing my brother.
I asked him why my brother and he
said he had seen the way he had danced
you know and he liked the way he looked
and he said I was just attracted to him.
He said he had strangle him and um,
then he was trying some new experiment or
something with preserving the skull and
the body and whatever and it didn't work.
So he had to destroy him."
Dahmer had spent his entire adult life
as the predator. But now in prison he
became the prey. The notorious serial killer
was a target for other inmates.
In August, 1994, he was attacked in the
prison chapel with a crudely fashioned knife.
He survived.
But on November 29th, 1994,
inmate Christopher Scarver, who called
himself Christ, bludgeoned Dahmer with a
metal rod from the prison gym.
Dahmer died on the way to the hospital.
Among his last wishes, Dahmer had asked
to be cremated. His ashes were split
between his mother and father.
"There are statements in his will and testament
that say I don't want a marker, I don't want a grave,
I don't want a funeral, I don't want any kind of
he's saying I want to be wiped out."
But the horrible questions that his
life of killing posed do continue
and they defy answers.
"There were mysteries of mysteries
that will never be solved. Even if he lived
I don't know that what he was all about
would ever be solved. Except maybes."
"It's hard when there is no explanations
sure there were red flags in Jeff's life
but no one knew about them.
He was so secretive and so careful."