Speaker 1: Shortly before midnight on July the twenty second, nineteen ninety one,
two Milwaukee police officers were flagged down in their patrol
car by a man with a pair of handcuffs dangling
from one wrist. The police had no idea that this
bizarre encounter would lead to the arrest of one of
the most prolific serial killers in US history.
Speaker 2: That night, people were afraid. People were whispering under their breaths.
It was the devil, It's the devil.
Speaker 1: The man had escaped from a small one bedroom apartment
on North twenty fifth Street. When the officers went to investigate,
they found themselves in a living nightmare.
Speaker 3: They saw the body parts and then one of the
officers that he heard a scream. Then he realized he
was the one who screened when he saw.
Speaker 1: The body without detection. Thirty one year old Jeffrey Dahmer
had killed seventeen young men across a thirteen year period.
Speaker 4: He hasn't got the same level of repulsion and shock
dead bodies or mutilated bodies that most of us have.
It was just another aspect of his life.
Speaker 1: Jeffrey Damer had etched his name in history as one
of the world's most evil killers. The name Jeffrey Dama
has become synonymous with evil. Between nineteen seventy eight and
nineteen ninety one, he killed seventeen young men and boys
by drugging them before strangling them to death. As the
revelations of the murders came to light, it was the
behavior of Dama once he killed his victims that really
stunned the world with stories of necrophilia and cannibalism. The
first journalist to arrive at the crime scene was Annie Schwartz.
Speaker 2: It wasn't a gory crime scene. It was really quite antiseptic.
It was a very simple one bedroom with a kitchen
and a living room, and it looked like a regular
single guy lived there. Some dishes in the scene, but
by and large, this was not some chamber of horrors
like people you know will describe it, certainly not at
first look. Once detectives and officers started searching further, that's
when they found out the actual horror was in that apartment.
Speaker 1: The story of this macabre killer begins thirty years before
his arrest. Jeffrey Dahmer was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on
May the twenty first, nineteen sixty the family moved to
Iowa before settling in Ohio in nineteen sixty six.
Speaker 5: If you live with his parents, who were constantly, constantly,
as he put it, at each other's throats, you know,
his mother appeared to have been, you know, this raging
bundle of neurotic behavior of parents were constantly fighting and screaming.
And you know, Dahmer himself evidently throughout much of his
early life, was completely completely ignored by both of them
were so caught up in their own psychological turmoil.
Speaker 4: Jeffrey Darmer never really made close social links with any
of his peers. He was a little bit odd, and
if you speak to his school friends at the time,
he didn't seem to have a lot of empathy for
other children. So when children would fall over in the
playground or get hurt or cry, he didn't appear to
be affected by that and would sometimes laugh at them.
So something wasn't quite right with a young Jeffrey Darmer.
Speaker 1: Feeling ostra size by his family and classmates, Dama spent
a lot of time playing alone in the woods surrounding
his Ohio home.
Speaker 6: Well.
Speaker 4: He had a really morbid curiosity with death from quite
a young age, and This started with a fairly innocent
insect collection, and he would keep the bodies of insects
inside jars full of chemicals.
Speaker 6: This soon progressed.
Speaker 4: He would go fishing, and he was interested in what
the fish look like on the inside, so he would
chop up the fish to have a look at this.
Speaker 2: Damer took his fish and cut it open. It was
fascinated with the inside of the fish, and one of
his little friends asked him, Jeffrey, why do you what
are you doing?
Speaker 5: And he said, just look at it, you know, And this,
you know, escalates, you know, to the point that it's
you know, he's apparently killing stray dogs and you know,
decapitating them.
Speaker 4: One of the young boys in the neighborhood was walking
in the woods behind Damo's house when Dahmer was a teenager,
and he came across the body of a dead dog
and it was mutilated and it was nailed to a tree.
Speaker 5: So there's some early interest in animal anatomy that blossoms
into this very very dark obsession and then somehow becomes
tangled up with his own sexuality.
Speaker 1: Dahma continued to struggle to fit in at high school
and turn to alcohol from a young age.
Speaker 4: Well, Dahma started drinking when he was at school, and
one of his former classmates remembered that he used to
come in with a cup and he didn't have tea
or coffee in this cup. He had scotch whiskey in it.
So this was quite a disturbing behavior for a teenager.
Speaker 2: There's a thought that, in hindsight, you ask why more
people didn't try to intervene. You've got a kid coming
drunk to school. But back in the seventies, when Dahmer's
coming to school intoxicated, nobody thinks we better make sure
we take care of this because what if he turns
out to be a serial killer.
Speaker 1: In the summer of nineteen seventy eight, Dama's parents finally divorced.
Speaker 4: The breakdown of Jeffrey Darmer's parents' marriage was quite a
tough time for him. His parents were at each other's throats.
It was not an amicable divorce at all, and each
of them was forcing him to side with them. So
he felt very much torn between his parents. So this
was a real source of conflict for him, and I
think at this time. Children often who have these experiences
will retreat into themselves. They will preoccupy themselves with things
that they're interested in and will lose themselves in their
own fantasy world.
Speaker 6: And I think that's very much what happened with Darma.
Speaker 1: Having just recently graduated from high school, Darma soon had
no one around him at all.
Speaker 6: Well.
Speaker 4: In nineteen seventy eight, Jeffrey Darmer was eighteen. His mother
had gone away with his younger brother, and his father
was living in a hotel, and he's ruminating and he's fantasizing,
and things are going to take her a turn for
the worst.
Speaker 6: Quite soon after.
Speaker 1: This, on June the eighteenth, nineteen seventy eight, Dahmer's fantasy
world collided with the real one when he pulled over
to pick up a nineteen year old hitchhiker called Stephen Hicks.
Speaker 5: Dahmer picked him up and invited him back to his
house to have some drinks and I guess maybe smoke
some dope.
Speaker 2: They were in the basement of his parents' home. They
had had sex, and then Stephen Hicks wanted to leave,
and that was when Dahmer just wanted so badly to
have company. Sounds like such a textbook psychological thing, you know,
abandonment syndrome, but this was at the heart of what
made him so needy for company.
Speaker 5: And then when the guy said he wanted to leave,
Dahmer clubbed him on the back of the head with
a bar bell and then strangled him, then ultimately dispoke
to the body, removed all the flesh and eventually dissolved
in an acid, and pulverized the bones with a sledgehammer.
Speaker 6: This is a really, really brutal crime.
Speaker 4: And he disposes of the body parts in the woods
behind his house. And that's a really symbolic place for
Jeffrey Dharmer because this is a place where he's dismembered
animals before, where he's displayed mutilated dogs on tree trunks,
So we're seeing that this place is special to it.
Speaker 1: Dharma had experienced taking the life of another human for
the first time.
Speaker 4: I think that the first murder is a real milestone
for Jeffrey Darmer, so he knows now that he's capable
of this. He knows that he's capable of taking someone
else's life. So it's not just a fantasy anymore. It's
now a reality. He's gone from harming animals to harming people,
and he's not going to stop.
Speaker 3: He's not desperate, but he becomes accustomed to it. He
becomes ready to kill again.
Speaker 4: And just kill and kill and kill and kill until
he gets caught.
Speaker 1: But it wasn't until thirteen years later, in August nineteen
ninety one, that Dama was finally apprehended after one of
his potential victims escape from his Milwaukee apartment. Once in custody,
Dahma confess to killing seventeen young men and boys. The
man whose job it was to prosecute the relentless killer
was Milwaukee District Attorney Mike mccannon.
Speaker 3: The word evil doesn't come up very often. It just doesn't. Guilty,
not guilty. Did he do it, didn't he do it?
Culpability yes, but not often evil because evil was almost
a moral issue. The word came up with Damer. You
couldn't help see what he did innocent people, strangers, to
take for a couple of hours of sex, To take
a human being's life, that's so evil, so evil.
Speaker 1: Dama's case made headlines across the world after the details
of his grisly confessed and were leaked.
Speaker 3: The New York Times reporter compronized the integrity of a
worker at our building and got a copy of the confession.
It was a detailed, thirty eight page confession, so the
details of the gory things he had done again captured
people's interests, so that's how it rapidly became a matter
of intense interest.
Speaker 1: The confession outlined the life of a deranged serial killer.
After murdering Stephen Hicks and desecrating his body in nineteen
seventy eight, Dama didn't kill again for nine years. After
dropping out of Ohio State University after just one semester,
he was spending most of his days drinking until his
father urged him to enlist in the US Armor.
Speaker 4: The alcohol continued as a theme when he joined the
army and he moved to Germany. One of his former
colleagues remembers him just sitting in his room drinking gin
all day long, not even leaving his room to eat,
so there was a real dependency on.
Speaker 1: Our In nineteen eighty one, twenty one year old Dama
was discharged from the Army after his drinking rendered him
incapable of serving. After spending a month sleeping rough on
the beaches of Florida, he returned to Ohio, but his
father had had enough and shipped him off to start
a new life in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Speaker 5: He was sent to live with his grandmother, who was
the one adult. Apparently he had you know, something approaching,
you know, a normal affection for I was there he
really embarked on this career of horror.
Speaker 1: By nineteen eighty six, Dama had been arrested a couple
of times for exposing himself in public, once in front
of a group of children. The hopeless alcoholic had managed
to find work at a local chocolate factory in Milwaukee
and was frequenting gay bars and bathhouses.
Speaker 4: I think being homosexual affected Dahmer in two ways. Firstly,
it was a sort of shame for him because it
was quite a stigmatized social identity at the time. But
also it enabled him an opportunity when it came to
his killing behavior. So being homosexual at this time it
was something that happened in the shadows. It was something
that happened underground, and this was the ideal place for
someone like him to go hunting.
Speaker 1: It was this exposure to the gay scene that seemed
to reawaken the dark sexual urges inside of him, and
by September nineteen eighty seven, over nine years since the
murder of Stephen Hicks, Jeffrey Dahmer was ready to kill again.
Speaker 2: His idea was to drug people and keep them with
him so that they wouldn't they wouldn't answer back to him,
they wouldn't argue with him, they wouldn't fight him, they
would stay with him.
Speaker 7: That's what he wanted. He wanted companionship.
Speaker 2: So he would go to the bars on Milwaukee's near
south side and he would have conversations with people in
these bars. And when he was talking to these people,
these prospective victim, he would say, so, what was it
like when you came out? How is your family about it?
So if your response was, oh, my family has been great.
They're so supportive, I'm very close to my parents, that
person wasn't going to be a victim. But if the
person answered, my parents aren't speaking to me anymore, I'm
estrange for my family.
Speaker 7: I'm kind of on my own now.
Speaker 2: That was the perfect victim for Jeffrey Dahmer because he
wanted to choose people who wouldn't be missed.
Speaker 1: Between September nineteen eighty seven and March nineteen eighty eight,
Dama killed three men the youngest of fourteen year old
boy who he paid to pose for nude photographs before
drugging and strangling him to death. He would dissolve the
bodies in acid.
Speaker 3: He cleverly developed a program to destroy the bodies to
get rid of the bodies, left no evidence. This was
a very clever killer, very clever killer.
Speaker 8: Dama would dissolve his victims, presumably to make it easier
to dispose of them. Dissolving tissuan chemicals can certainly interfere
with identifying it as human tissue. It'll interfere with DNA.
You're really left predominantly with skeletal remains to try and
identify features such as age, sex, race.
Speaker 1: Darma murdered two of the victims at his grandmother's house
where he was living.
Speaker 5: As grandmother became aware that he was bringing these young
guys back to her house. I mean she thought for
gay sex. Obviously, she had no inkling of the atrocities
he was committing on their bodies, although she was complaining
also about a foul odor that she noticed.
Speaker 1: On September the twenty fifth, nineteen eighty eight, Dharma moved
into his own apartment on North twenty fifth Street in
Milwaukee and didn't wait long before attacking again. The very
next day, September the twenty sixth, he enticed a thirteen
year old boy back to his home and drugged him.
Speaker 8: One of the methods that Dama used to subdue his
victims was to use Benson doazepines, the same family of
drugs as valium. He put them in drinks that would
make you woozy, sleepy, and then eventually go unconscious.
Speaker 1: Dama sexually assaulted the boy, but somehow, possibly due to
Dama passing out drunk, the thirteen year old escaped and
went to the police. In January nineteen eighty nine, he
was convicted of sexual assault, but the sentencing was delayed
until May, during which time an unrelenting Dama, unbeknownst to
the authorities, managed to claim a fifth victim. The twenty
nine year old served ten months in prison, but when
he was released in March nineteen ninety, he picked up
right where he left off.
Speaker 4: So Jeffrey Dahmer really did ramp up his offending. The
scale and the nature of his behavior became all the
more grotesque. So he wasn't just killing people, dismembering them
and then disposing of their bodies.
Speaker 6: He started to do some really bizarre things.
Speaker 5: He was in the process of constructing some hideously diabolical
shrine in his bedroom out of the skulls and skeletons
of some of his victims. It's almost as though some
bizarre archaic thing had broken through and he was performing
or creating some sort of ancient human sacrificial temple in
this little Milwaukee apartment.
Speaker 1: In nineteen ninety, Dama killed another four young men. His
mo was becoming more and more polished.
Speaker 2: He would offer his victim's money to go back to
his apartment with him, to take pictures, nude photographs of them,
and then perhaps to have sex. Every single one of
his victims went with him willingly. He would offer them
a drink, and once he found out what they wanted
to drink, he kept a lot of things on hand,
different kinds of alcohol, and that's when he would put
a drug in it that would put them to sleep,
or that would relax them so that they would pass out.
Speaker 3: They would pass out, He would then have sex with
them while they were passed out, do with them as
he wished, but of course they couldn't do to him then,
as they approached recovery. Coming out of it, he was
strangling to death.
Speaker 1: It seemed as though Dama got a thrill not from
the murder, but from the dead bodies of his victims.
Speaker 3: Dahmer liked necrophilia. He liked sex with unconscious people. He
wasn't a slasher in the sense that he took delight
in killing. His purpose was sex with these people. Company
with these people. That's hard to believe.
Speaker 5: He would commit necrophilia, sex, ax on the corpse, dismember
the corpses, dissolve parts of the bodies, and these vats
of vacidy had keep certain organs and his refrigerator, some
of which he would actually cannibalize.
Speaker 2: Dahmer said that the cannibalism that he engaged in was
born out of a curiosity. He wanted to find out,
first of all, what that would be like. He also
said that there was an element of wanting to make
these people a part of him, so they would be
with him forever.
Speaker 5: Dahmer, from the beginning, you know, is driven by this
terror of being alone. He said. He killed his first victim,
Stephen Hicks, when Hicks said he had to go and
Dahmer didn't want to be alone as some desire, which
is part of normal sexuality. You know you love somebody,
you know somebody will be saying, Oh, I love you
so much, I want to eat you up. With normal people,
that's obviously metaphorical, but it does express some desire to
be so close to the person that you want to
incorporate them into. If you want to merge with them
with something like Dahmer, that becomes this very literal horror, And.
Speaker 1: The horror only became worse when Dharma began experimenting with
his semi conscious victims.
Speaker 2: He would drill holes in their skulls and put myriadic
acid inside to see if he could get them to
a zombie state so that he could keep them alive
and subservient to him.
Speaker 8: It's essentially an amateur version of attempting to perform albactomy
or a lobotomy, but it would be an incredibly unpleasant
and damaging thing to do to someone's brain. If you
affect the frontal lobes, you will affect personality, potentially make
somebody docile. If he's less accurate, you could essentially cause
a stroke that could cause paralysis, speech problems. It really
very much depends on which part of the brain is
actually damaged.
Speaker 2: But of course that didn't work, and his victims died
one after another.
Speaker 7: Hearing about that.
Speaker 2: Is the stuff of horror movies, and the fact that
it was happening in a city where we were known
for manufacturing and beer and a very good Midwestern work ethic,
tight families.
Speaker 7: This isn't the kind of thing that happens here.
Speaker 1: In May nineteen ninety one, thirty one year old Jeffrey
Dahmer was in his killing prime. He'd already murdered eleven
men and had begun collecting bones and skulls from his
victims and cannibalizing their organs. What would have been a
nightmare for most was a fantasy for him, and he
carefully went about his killings under the radar of the
police and the people of Milwaukee.
Speaker 4: Jeffrey Dahmer had a job in a local chocolate factory,
and I think for him it enabled him to make
a facade of normality. He was just an average joe,
a regular guy who went to work every day.
Speaker 2: I think he killed so many people without being quite
because of the fact that he looked like everyone else.
He did what successful serial killers do. He blended They
blend in with society. Now, he was a Caucasian male
living in in a predominantly African American neighborhood, but he
didn't talk to anybody bother anybody. He was barely someone
people noticed, barely noticed. He also was targeting people who
he found out might not be missed.
Speaker 4: For most people, if they were to commit the type
of acts that Jeffrey Darmer did, they would no way
be able to function normally. But Jeffrey Darmer was not
most people. He hasn't got the same level of repulsion
and shock dead bodies or mutilated bodies that most of
us have. It was just another aspect of his life.
Speaker 3: It was not known that we had a serial slayer
loose in our city. We did not know because he
was so cleverly disposing of the bodies. The families were
reporting the sons were missing, but the police were not
finding bodies. And not infrequently, young men, something happens in
their life, they just lead these up and leave town.
That happens enough that the police don't get worrid. If
it was a woman, they'll immediately commit resources to investigate,
but the young men they don't.
Speaker 1: But on May the twenty sixth, nineteen ninety one, Dahma
came agonizingly close to capture after an encounter with a
fourteen year old boy.
Speaker 2: Dahmer had taken Conrac synthism phone a young Asian male
who found attractive. He met him in the mall, offered
him money to go back to his apartment. He went,
and he began to work the ritual. Dahmer would drug
him and then he began the process of this crude lobotomy,
and he had drilled a hole in this young man's head.
He took a break, he ran out to get more beer.
While he was gone, Conorrac ran out of the apartment.
He was naked, he was completely dazed, and he was
running up the alley next to the Dahmer's apartment building.
Speaker 7: A woman in another apartment building.
Speaker 2: Saw him running up the alley and said, there's a
boy running up the alley.
Speaker 7: Something's going on. And then these women.
Speaker 5: Call the police, and then Dahmer appeared. And again this
is another remarkable characteristic of these psychopaths is that they
have an ability to maintain, you know, a kind of
coolness under the most extraordinarily high pressure circumstances.
Speaker 7: So he walked up to the officers. Good evening, officers.
Speaker 2: He's very polite, he's sober, and he said, this is
my boyfriend. He came to stay with me. We had
a little bit too much to drink and he ran
out of the house. Said how old is Dahmer said
he's nineteen, and the officers said, okay, well, just to
make sure, let's all walk back up to the apartment together.
Speaker 5: The cops went and looked around. They even picked into
the bedroom where there was a decomposing corpse of one
of Dahmer's previous victims. But you know, they took such
a cursory look at it that they didn't even notice.
Speaker 1: It, Assuming the couple were having a lover's tiff. The
two police officers left Knorak alone with Dahma in the
apartment building, and in the early hours of the morning,
he murdered the fourteen year old boy. An opportunity to
catch the killer had been missed.
Speaker 4: I think that really speaks volumes about the attitudes of
the police at the time, in terms of ethnic minorities,
in terms of young people, in terms of the gay community,
and that was another victim that could potentially have been saved.
So there's this terrible thing going on behind closed doors
and people just aren't seeing it.
Speaker 6: People aren't wanting to see it.
Speaker 4: Even the police are not joining up the dots and
finding out what's really going on. So this is allowed
to just bubble away and get worse.
Speaker 1: After evading capture, Dharma was free to continue.
Speaker 4: There was two sides really to Dharma's pleasure that he
got from killing his victims. So he was a sadist
who enjoys the pain and suffering of other people. And
with sadis that that thrill ends when the victim dies.
But Dharma was also something of a necrophiliac who was
interested in having corpses around and doing things with those corpses,
and that means that the thrill starts with death. So
he has this continuous fulfillment going on, and he's always
fully in control.
Speaker 6: And I think that's what's really at the root.
Speaker 4: Of Jeffrey Darmer, its power and its control, and it's
the feeling that he has all this knowledge about what
he's done and nobody else quite knows what he's up to.
Speaker 1: By July nineteen ninety one, Dama's desire to kill and
become insatiable. Sixteen days he emerged four more men, bringing
his total number of victims to seventeen. But Dahma's reign
of tellor was about to come to an end. On
July the twenty second, he met a man called Tracy Edwards.
Speaker 2: While they were together in the apartment, Dahmer threw a
handcuff on him.
Speaker 7: This was now the beginning of his ritual.
Speaker 2: Dahmer had taken photographs of his victims in various stages
of dismemberment polaroids, and those were sitting on the dresser
inside the bedroom. They weren't sitting out in the main
living room, but there was some speculation that Tracy Edwards
had perhaps seen that, and he ran out of the
apartment in his underwear, ran down the street and when he.
Speaker 7: Saw the police car.
Speaker 2: Tracy Edwards has said his intention was just to get
the handcuff off, That's all he wanted. He stopped these
cops to say, hey, can just get this.
Speaker 7: Off of me.
Speaker 2: So he stopped and the officers start talking to him
about what he saw, and then they said, well we
should probably check this out. Let's all go back to
the apartment. Dahmer answered, and the minute he saw that
it was the police. He tried to shut the door
on them. The police pushed the door open a bit.
They started struggling with him, and then finally he just
gave him and that was when Dahmer was officially finished.
He was finished killing, and he knew that he was finished.
Speaker 1: The police officers immediately arrested Dama after finding the remains
of some of his victims in his apartment.
Speaker 3: They saw the body parts and then one of the
officers that he heard a scream. Then he realized later
he was the one who screamed when he saw the body,
so they knew they were dealing with a very serious offense.
Dahmer did not resist a little slight resistance, but Dahmer
was taken into custody and the investigation was initiated.
Speaker 1: What followed was an incredible media circus on Dahma's doorstep,
as unbelievable stories about what was being uncovered inside these
apartments were revealed.
Speaker 2: It was so fantastical that you think people are making
it up when they're telling you the details, but as
it turned out, they weren't making it up.
Speaker 7: It was all of the.
Speaker 2: Atrocities that we heard about that it happened in that apartment,
really did happen.
Speaker 3: The medical examiner who was called to the scene didn't
know what was happening.
Speaker 7: Was so strange.
Speaker 3: There was a freezer, their bodies sparts in the freezer,
called in a hasmat crew. Well, our television stations cover
the police radio. When they hear that, they dispatch crews there.
The first day was local television, second day national television.
By the third day it was international television.
Speaker 2: They were able to show video of these items coming
out of the front door of this apartment building. That's
not usual at a crime scene. Saw a large blue
barrel in which we know that Jeffrey Dahmer was trying
to dissolve body parts. It had a refrigerator that was
holding skulls and also it was holding body parts. So
these are coming down the stairs and people were just
incredulous to watch it. When I wrote the story for
the Milwaukee Journal that morning, and it was released in
the paper about eight o'clock, I think in the morning.
Normally we were an afternoon paper, but we went out
early with it because it was such an incredible story.
Speaker 1: But no one quite knew the enormity of the crimes
until Dahma confessed to detectives at the local police station.
Speaker 2: When I've spoken to the detectives that were working this case,
they have said, this was not a great who done it?
This would have better who done it if Jeffrey Dahmer
hadn't confessed to everything.
Speaker 3: When Dahmer was arrested, there were already a number of
bodies in his quarters. He gave full confessions to the
police detailing his involvement in sixteen separate slayings. Most of
the time, he did not know the name of the victims.
Speaker 2: When Dahmer remembered a crime that he might not have
shared with the detects dives, he would have the jail
call them, whether it was the middle of the night
or the middle of the day, and say I remembered
something else, Please come over.
Speaker 7: Dahmer had said.
Speaker 2: He wanted to make sure that he didn't forget anything
because he wanted those families to have closure. I'm not
sure about that. That maybe giving Jeffrey Dahmer more credit
than he is deserved, but he did claim to want
to try and remember so that all of those families
would have closure.
Speaker 5: One of the interesting things about Dahmer that does differentiate
him from other killers of his breed is that he
did seem to be capable of a certain degree of
remorse and certainly recognize the extent of his depravity.
Speaker 1: Although he confessed to killing sixteen people in the state
of Wisconsin, Damer was first charged with four counts of
murder on the twenty fifth of July nineteen ninety one,
and a further eleven counts were added in August. The
following month, investigators in Ohio found teeth and bone fragments
belonging to Stephen Hicks in the woods near Dama's family home.
A preliminary hearing was set for January nineteen ninety two.
His legal team were going to argue that the killings
were the work of a madman.
Speaker 3: Years She wasn't going to be did he do it
or arty? Issue was going to be was he sane
or insane when he did it? And his hope was
that at least in even one of the cases, he
could induce the jury to believe that he was insane.
Under those circumstances, he would be sentenced not to a prison,
but to a metal health facility. People would say to me, Mike,
this guy killed sixteen people. He was drinking their blood,
eating parts of their body. He must have been crazy.
It sounds like he's crazy to say that, but that's
not what the insanity rule is.
Speaker 1: The city wanted justice. They wanted to see the man
the press were calling the Milwaukee cannibal locked away in
prison for the horrific crimes he had committed. The trial
of Jeffrey Dahmer would be one of the biggest still
the history of not just Wisconsin, but the entire USA.
Speaker 2: My reaction to it then was the same reaction I
think that everybody who lived in Milwaukee had when they
heard about the case.
Speaker 7: No, it can't be. This is Milwaukee. Those kinds of
things don't happen here. This is the Midwest. This is
a very nice place.
Speaker 1: The trial of Jeffrey Dahmer began on the thirtieth of
January nineteen ninety two and had a front row seat
the courtroom.
Speaker 2: Was an odd spectacle because court TV was still new
in the game back then, and the idea that you
would come to court and you'd be on television was
still kind of new to people. That was the kind
of media attention to a trial that Milwaukee hadn't seen
in a very very long time, if ever can remember
so clearly the first time Jeffrey Dahmer's initial appearance in court,
when he walked in, I think the real fear that
people had when they first saw Jeffrey Dahmer was that
he looked like everybody else. He was a good looking
young man, and he is not the person that you
would look at and say, stay away from that guy.
Speaker 1: It would be up to Milwaukee DA Mike McCann to
attempt to prove that Dama was saying and responsible for
his actions.
Speaker 3: Yuelty wasn't going to be an issue, but we wanted
the jury to know enough about the facts and so
the defense to say, right, what really happened here, How
atrocit was it, how planned was it, how was he behaving?
What skills were involved? He couldn't control himself.
Speaker 2: It was a lot to take in because the testimony
was so graphic. We all knew Mike McCann he was
a religious man, and we'd seen him in we've seen
him in court attorney that the kinds of things that
he was reciting out of the criminal complaint and the
confession were unheard of. These things were unheard of, and
they happened right here in our city.
Speaker 9: He did it quietly.
Speaker 3: He concealed the bodies, cleverly, concealed, destroyed the bodies, planned
it well, laid in the equipment, got the drugs that
he used, knowing that he worked or thought he was insane.
The way he conducted himself was in a way that
it seemed that he was sane, and that's what we
wanted to get across to the jury.
Speaker 1: Mike employed the help of psychiatry experts doctor Philip Resnick.
Speaker 9: The more bizarre the crimes, such as involving cannibalism, the
more the la public wants to think that guy had
to be out of his mind. But in looking at
it from the actual strict definition of insanity, generally, the
diseases of paraphilias like necrophilia, where someone has trouble controlling themselves,
are not viewed for the most part as diseases which
qualify for insanity because of the social implications. One of
the points that I made as a consultant is, even
if you have necrophilia, and even if you have trouble
controlling your impulse, the majority of necrophiliacs will select a
setting where they can accomplish this without homicide, so some
become assistance in morgues or assistance in pathology labs where
they may have access to dead victims. Others will actually
disinentear bodies after they're buried so that one does not
have to actually kill to exercise the necrophilia's impulse. And
that's one of the reasons I felt that he didn't
qualify for insanity.
Speaker 1: The trial was essentially a debate between specialist psychiatrists about
the mental state of Dama, who sat watching the whole
thing play out over two weeks.
Speaker 3: Namer was very common court when you talk of you
assessing a person by what you see. No one studying
him would believe he was insane. He was in kind,
he was watching what was going on. He wasn't reacting
in any negative way. He conducted himself in a very
rational way, a very proper way.
Speaker 10: This was a case to tell the world that I
did what I did not for reasons of hate. I
hated no one I knew I was sick or evil
or both. Now I believe I was sick.
Speaker 1: On February fifteenth, the jury had reached a verdict on
Dama's sanity.
Speaker 9: Someone like Dahmer comes along who has never been in
a psychiatric hospital and alleges insanity juries are going to
be skeptical of it. And then when it's all in
the form of his sexual drive rather than a traditional
psychosis where someone's out of touch with reality and he's
taking careful st elpse to cover his tracks, it's very
difficult to succeed with insanity. With that type of case.
Speaker 1: Jeffrey Damer was ruled to be sane by the jury.
On February seventeenth, nineteen ninety two. Judge Lawrence Graham sentenced
him to life imprisonment for each of the fifteen counts
against him.
Speaker 2: When the verdict was announced in court, there was a
great shout from the gallery, especially from the victim's families,
that cried, I.
Speaker 3: Was pleased in the sense happy. I'd not exuberant, but
happy that this danger was removed from our community, that
the jury had not been hoodwinked, that the jury realized
this chap was not insane.
Speaker 1: The state of Wisconsin does not have the death penalty,
but Dama would have to serve a minimum of nine
hundred and thirty six years. He was immediately sent to
the Columbia Correctional Institute in Portage. Three months later, on
the first of May nineteen ninety two, in Ohio, Dama
was also found guilty of murdering Stephen Hicks in nineteen
six seventy eight, had given yet another life sentence.
Speaker 2: Dahmer always said that he was compelled to kill, that
they were urges. He said, I had urges that I
could not control. He also said that even though he
was in prison he was relieved that the killing was done,
he still had the urges.
Speaker 7: They didn't go away.
Speaker 2: He was just in a place where he couldn't act
on them.
Speaker 1: Locked away for the rest of his life, Dahma found
comfort in the Bible, and by nineteen ninety four he
decided to get baptized. The prison called on local minister
Roy Ratcliffe.
Speaker 11: So I was quite surprised to be escorted to a
little room and left alone. And then Jeff Camp comes
to the room and he closed the door, and then
there's he and I sitting together across the table, and
I'm thinking for a moment, Wow, I'm in a room
with a man who was killed three people. So yeah,
that was a little bit discon but I was therefore
a purpose and for a reason. So I wanted to
find out what was going on and to see what
I could do to help. So my fears were set aside,
primarily because of my focus on what I was trying
to do. Jeff was a normal guy, curteous, very respectful
to me. When we shook hands, I noticed his hands
were really small. Looking at his hands and thinking, wow,
these are the hands that strangled people. These are the
hands that murdered people, These are the hands that dismembered people.
Speaker 1: On May the tenth, nineteen ninety four, the same day
that notorious serial killer John Wayne Gacy was executed, Jeffrey
Dama was baptized in a prison bathtub.
Speaker 11: Then the door opened and I walked into the room
and jeff had already crawled into the tub, and the
only thing that was above the water was just simply
his head. And so I baptized you in the name
of the Father, Son of the Holy Spirit, for the
forgiveness your sins, and pushed his head down under and
then we came back up. I said something I often
say to people when I baptized him. I said, welcome
to the family of God. He said, well, thank you
very much.
Speaker 1: Just six months after his baptism. On November the twenty eighth,
nineteen ninety four, Dahmer and another convicted murderer, Jesse Anderson,
were attacked and killed by a fellow inmate.
Speaker 7: Christopher Scarver.
Speaker 2: Took a barbelle, went into the bathroom and beat both
Jeffrey Dahmer and Jesse Anderson to death. There were a
number of people who felt that Jeffrey Dahmer got exactly
what he deserved. And I called his mother. She said, well,
now everybody got what they want. The monster is dead.
And then she said he was my son, He's my boy.
Speaker 11: It was a terrible, terrible death in that sense there,
but for some people it was a relief. They were
glad because all they could think about all the crimes
they committed. They're not thinking about. Where I'm thinking about
is here's a person who's trying to serve God as
best as he can, and now his life is being
taken from is I.
Speaker 5: Mean, some people see some sort of poetic symmetry in
the fact that Dahmer's first murder was the one in
which he bludgeoned the teenage hushaker Stephen Hicks to death
with a barbelle and that he himself died in a
very similar way.
Speaker 1: The apartment on North twenty fifth Street that housed Dama's
macarb collection that victims remains and where twelve young men
lost their lives, was demolished in November nineteen ninety two,
but Dama's twisted legacy has been impossible to wipe out.
He has become one of the most infamous serial killers
in the world.
Speaker 5: I think of Dahmer as sort of like the flip
side of somebody like Mozart. How do you account for
somebody creating that kind of music. Ultimately, how do you
account for somebody who is luring young men to his
apartment in drilling holes in their skull and injecting brains
with miuriatric acid to turn them into zombies. There's something
there ultimately inexplicable.
Speaker 2: Jeffrey Dahmer committed some of the most evil acts that
I have ever written about or heard about were seen
on a television show because they were real. I don't
know if he was sane or insane, because that's not
my training to figure that out, but I can absolutely
say that he did.
Speaker 7: Some of the most evil acts known to man.
Speaker 1: Dama's crimes would not feel out of place in a
perverse horror movie. He was a man who killed to
satisfy his unhealthy sexual perversions, keeping parts of his victims
skeletons as trophies, and eating their organs. Jeffrey Dahmer truly
is the stuff of nightmares and unquestionably one of the
world's most evil killers.