Jeffrey Dahmer The Monster Within (Documentary)

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had become shy and withdrawn.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

Lionel tried for a year to help his

inebriation. "

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."