Speaker 1: Jeffrey Darmer murdered seventeen young men over thirteen years. He
Speaker 1: would cut open his victims for his own sexual pleasure,
Speaker 1: preserve their severed body parts, and towards the end, eat
Speaker 1: their thighs, biceps, and hearts. But how did this once
Speaker 1: apparently innocent child turn into one of the world's most
Speaker 1: gruesome serial killers. Did circumstance drive dharma to carnage and
Speaker 1: cannibalism or was he born to kill.
Speaker 2: Who?
Speaker 1: Jeffrey Dahmer was one of the most infamous serial killers
Speaker 1: of modern times. His name is synonymous with mutilation, necrophilia,
Speaker 1: and cannibalism.
Speaker 3: You think of the crimes that he committed, they're so horrific,
Speaker 3: you kind of think only a madman or somebody totally evil,
Speaker 3: evil incarnate would do this. But when you talked with
Speaker 3: jeff Dahmer, you just did not get this idea. He
Speaker 3: could be engaging, he could be bright, witty, he could
Speaker 3: make jokes.
Speaker 4: He was able to fool a lot of people.
Speaker 5: People that worked with him had no idea that he
Speaker 5: was a violent man. This was part of the real
Speaker 5: danger of Jeffrey Dahmer. He could join you or me
Speaker 5: at lunch and no one would detect that he was.
Speaker 4: A violent person.
Speaker 6: Jeffrey Dahmer, on the surface, was not a abnormal appearing individual.
Speaker 6: He's fairly good looking, he's well spoken, he was articulate.
Speaker 7: Never in a million years would I have guessed a
Speaker 7: homicidal maniac.
Speaker 4: To me, he's He's always been.
Speaker 8: Really a tragic figure, which is kind of hard for
Speaker 8: a lot of people to understand. But I don't really
Speaker 8: think of him as, you know, the serial killer monster.
Speaker 8: I just think of him as his kid who was
Speaker 8: spiraling out of control and nobody stopped him.
Speaker 1: Jeffrey Dahmer grew up in the small rural town of Bath, Ohio,
Speaker 1: a middle class boy from Middle America. Robert Wrestler, an
Speaker 1: FBI behavioral analyst and the man responsible for coining the
Speaker 1: phrase serial killers, was called in to interview Dama. His
Speaker 1: years of experience interviewing serial killers such as John Wayne
Speaker 1: Gacy gave him a unique insight into Dahma's mind.
Speaker 6: There is no evidence with Geoffrey Dahmer of any severe
Speaker 6: mistreatment or abuse in his childhood. His mother had metal problem,
Speaker 6: He was depressed most of the time, She slept a lot,
Speaker 6: and dropped out of family activities. The father was a PhD.
Speaker 6: Chemist and very busy and very intelligent man who spent
Speaker 6: a great deal of his time at work.
Speaker 1: Pat Kennedy worked the beat in Milwaukee for over twenty
Speaker 1: five years. Back in the summer of nineteen ninety one,
Speaker 1: he was assigned to the Jeffrey Dahmer case and spent
Speaker 1: six long weeks with him. He knew him better than most.
Speaker 4: He was a product of upper white middle class. He
Speaker 4: was educated.
Speaker 3: He came from a family of.
Speaker 1: Means, Yet the fractures in his parents' relationship left a
Speaker 1: young Jeffrey feeling isolated. His interests turned to animals. He
Speaker 1: viewed them very differently to how most children look upon
Speaker 1: their pets.
Speaker 3: He stated, when he was a very young child, seven
Speaker 3: or eight, he had found a decomposed squirrel and the
Speaker 3: bones were there. He kind of took it apart. He
Speaker 3: said that he found a roadkill and he wanted to
Speaker 3: see what was inside it, like a raccoon or a dog.
Speaker 4: He brought that home.
Speaker 3: A dead dog that he found on the side of
Speaker 3: the road was hit by a car, cut that open
Speaker 3: and looked at the inside of that.
Speaker 1: Jeffrey started to do this from a very young age,
Speaker 1: he would roam the surrounding countryside looking for roadkill to
Speaker 1: add to his growing macarbre collection. His fascination with bones
Speaker 1: would continue into his adulthood, but he would eventually move
Speaker 1: from animals to humans.
Speaker 3: As he got to be about thirteen or fourteen, and
Speaker 3: he was coming into his sexual awareness that he had
Speaker 3: some kissing with another boy in the neighborhood, and he
Speaker 3: realized that he was attracted to boys becoming aroused sexually,
Speaker 3: and the cutting up of these animals somehow became matched.
Speaker 4: So what he did as a.
Speaker 3: Young man with animals, he eventually did do later on
Speaker 3: in life with human beings.
Speaker 1: John beckdef first met Jeffrey Darmer when they were at
Speaker 1: school together here at the Revere High School in the
Speaker 1: mid seventies. John professionally known as DIRF, has since created
Speaker 1: a comic book illustrating his teenage years with Dama Dahmer.
Speaker 8: Well, he was he had a pretty rough time here,
Speaker 8: as did a lot of us. You know, he was
Speaker 8: the constant victim of harassment and abuse. Has beat up
Speaker 8: a lot, especially early on. Later you know, they sort
Speaker 8: of got bored with him. But early on, I imagine
Speaker 8: he had it pretty tough.
Speaker 1: Dama discussed his childhood at length with Robert Wrestler. This
Speaker 1: is the first time these recordings have ever been heard.
Speaker 2: I was visiting the evening and these saw these three
Speaker 2: seniors from high school approaching learns and I just had
Speaker 2: a feeling that something was going to happen. Sure enough,
Speaker 2: took him a billy and wagged me on the back.
Speaker 8: Back when we got to high school. It was when
Speaker 8: suddenly he became this.
Speaker 2: This uh.
Speaker 8: Incredible freak, you know, with the drinking and.
Speaker 4: Erratic behavior.
Speaker 1: By this time, Dharma had discovered that drinking was one
Speaker 1: way to dull the pain of his confusion over his
Speaker 1: sexuality and his sinister fantasies.
Speaker 2: Did you have problems with daydreaming? Or you do kind
Speaker 2: of a treating school well? And in junior year, that's
Speaker 2: when I started drinking. So that's were you ever called
Speaker 2: on a copper for that a couple of days. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you had promise that was fare.
Speaker 8: Obviously, someone getting drunk at seven in the morning is
Speaker 8: not a good thing. Showing up at school. Just wreeking
Speaker 8: of booze.
Speaker 1: Jeffrey was a lonely teenager who kept to himself. When
Speaker 1: he did become the center of attention. It was accidental.
Speaker 8: Well, I was on the yearbook staff along with a
Speaker 8: couple other of my friends, so we would go dahmer
Speaker 8: into sneaking into various photos for the yearbook, and one
Speaker 8: of those was the National Honor Society, which obviously he
Speaker 8: was not a member of, And when the advisor caught
Speaker 8: a look of it as we were pasting it up,
Speaker 8: he blacked his face out of the photo, which they
Speaker 8: then ran, which is sort of a symbol of his
Speaker 8: wasted youth, just this blacked out face, you know, the
Speaker 8: boy who didn't exist.
Speaker 1: Jeffrey's complex character meant that while seemingly happy to fade
Speaker 1: into the shadows, he also felt a desperate need to
Speaker 1: draw attention to himself.
Speaker 8: A bunch of us got together and raised put a
Speaker 8: pool in of thirty five dollars. I think it was
Speaker 8: for him to put on a performance at the mall
Speaker 8: of his seizures and epileptic fits and various acts of weirdness.
Speaker 1: Dirth also remembers stories of Dama experimenting with animals. His
Speaker 1: odd behavior was evident one fishing.
Speaker 9: Trip fish out of the lake, just a little sunfish,
Speaker 9: and took out a pocka knife and slashed it to bits,
Speaker 9: and my other friend said, what the hell did you
Speaker 9: do that for?
Speaker 8: Dahma responded, I just wanted to see what it looked like.
Speaker 1: As a teenager, as an extension of his childhood fascination
Speaker 1: of dead animals, Dama began to construct fantasies of sex
Speaker 1: with dead or unconscious men.
Speaker 6: Dahmer told me that on one occasion, he had seen
Speaker 6: in the newspaper on account of a young man who
Speaker 6: was killed on a motorcycle, and he fell in love
Speaker 6: with the individual just from the photograph. He actually went
Speaker 6: to the funeral home to a view the corpse, but
Speaker 6: he became so aroused that he excused himself into the bathroom,
Speaker 6: where he masturbated.
Speaker 1: This was also a parent in his fantasy of killing
Speaker 1: a local junker.
Speaker 3: He thought he would wait in the bushes with the
Speaker 3: baseball bat. This guy would come by, and he'd balk
Speaker 3: him in the head and he'd have this guy. And
Speaker 3: he actually said he went out and waited for the
Speaker 3: jogger one day with a baseball bat, but he didn't
Speaker 3: come by that day.
Speaker 1: The breakdown of his parents' marriage meant that eighteen year
Speaker 1: old Dama was left alone with his fantasies.
Speaker 8: His mom spled and his dad had already left, and
Speaker 8: he was left alone in the house. But the adults
Speaker 8: really failed him. There's no question as parents, as teachers, we.
Speaker 2: Were pretty upset by that breakup. I know it was
Speaker 2: pretty obvious. Yeah, person, Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1: And it was this that led to the death of
Speaker 1: his first victim.
Speaker 6: Damer told me that one fantasy that he had was
Speaker 6: that he would encounter a hitchhiker and he would be
Speaker 6: have a narrow waist, broad shoulders, a bird chest. He
Speaker 6: would not have a shirt on, and he would have
Speaker 6: very little hair in his body. He would pick up
Speaker 6: this hitchhiker and that they would have a great time
Speaker 6: together in all sorts of sexual adventures. He was driving
Speaker 6: down the road and he saw his fantasy hitchhiker.
Speaker 1: The subject of Dumba's fantasy was sixteen year old Stephen Hicks.
Speaker 1: Hicks was a free spirit who was hitchhiking to a
Speaker 1: summer festival. This was a common form of transport in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies Ohio. Little did Hicks know who he would
Speaker 1: encounter in this.
Speaker 3: Calm brought the guy home. They had access to alcohol,
Speaker 3: they were drinking. They got a little intoxicated. But when
Speaker 3: the guy wanted to leave, Jeff did not want him
Speaker 3: to leave. He wanted him to stay because he was
Speaker 3: lonely and else he was intoxicated. He said that when
Speaker 3: he tried to stop the guy from leaving, a little
Speaker 3: bit of a wrastling match broke out, and as they
Speaker 3: were rastling around, that's when Jeff grabbed a hand bire
Speaker 3: bell and smashed the guy on the head. Now, he
Speaker 3: said when he hit him, he didn't really he wasn't
Speaker 3: thinking I'm going to kill this guy. I just want
Speaker 3: to keep him here.
Speaker 1: Dahma cut the body up and placed it in black binliners.
Speaker 1: He loaded them into his car and was planning to
Speaker 1: dispose of them when he was stomped by a police
Speaker 1: officer for a minor traffic offense.
Speaker 3: As he was writing him a ticket and came back
Speaker 3: to give him the ticket for crossing the yellow center line.
Speaker 3: He also, like any police officer, he took his flashlight
Speaker 3: and flashed inside the car to see if there's any
Speaker 3: weapons or any contraband.
Speaker 4: Like any good cop.
Speaker 3: And he saw the five bag and the guy actually said, hey,
Speaker 3: what's that back there, And he said, oh, it's just
Speaker 3: some trash I was going to take to the domp
Speaker 3: that I just didn't get there yet, And the cop
Speaker 3: gave him the ticket for a cross in the center
Speaker 3: line and left.
Speaker 1: This was the first of the many missed opportunities when
Speaker 1: Dharma could have been stopped.
Speaker 4: This is Dahmer's house.
Speaker 8: This is where he killed his first victim. He took
Speaker 8: it into this crawl space and apparently stripped the flesh
Speaker 8: off the bones underneath there, and when the cops went
Speaker 8: in there, turned his light on it and the whole
Speaker 8: thing lit up. Ceiling, floor, walls, everywhere, just covered with
Speaker 8: dried blood.
Speaker 1: He then smashed the bones up with a snedchhammer, stood
Speaker 1: in the middle of the woods and spun in a
Speaker 1: three hundred and sixty degree circle, throwing the remains as
Speaker 1: he turned.
Speaker 3: He said, for the next couple of weeks, you'd read
Speaker 3: the paper every day to see was there anything about
Speaker 3: this guy missing or anything.
Speaker 4: Never did.
Speaker 3: So he realized I got away with murder. I killed
Speaker 3: somebody and nobody knows about it. I'm gay and nobody
Speaker 3: knows about it. Again, from the very beginning, more secrecy
Speaker 3: became part of his life.
Speaker 4: It also tortured.
Speaker 3: Him, and that's kind of how it started, and then
Speaker 3: it just grew from there.
Speaker 1: It would be nine years before Delma would kill again.
Speaker 1: Once he did, he would be unable to stop. Jeffrey
Speaker 1: Dlma began to drink heavily after enrolling in college. His
Speaker 1: attempt to lead a normal life was not going according
Speaker 1: to plan.
Speaker 3: After he had flunked out of Ohio State for being
Speaker 3: drunk and then got kicked out of the army, he
Speaker 3: had a short stint down at Florida, didn't last very long.
Speaker 1: With no job and no skills, but consumed with a
Speaker 1: desire to kill again. Dema went to live with his
Speaker 1: grandmother in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, trying to find sonace in religion.
Speaker 3: And he said when he first came to West Dallit
Speaker 3: he would go with Grammar at a church on Sundays.
Speaker 4: He tried to read the Bible.
Speaker 3: He totally didn't do anything homosexual. He didn't try to
Speaker 3: get involved with any kind of gay stuff.
Speaker 4: He said, he.
Speaker 3: Really thought this is the way to go. Religion is
Speaker 3: going to be my savior.
Speaker 1: For a while, Dama was able to control his urges. However,
Speaker 1: this proved to be the calm before the storm.
Speaker 3: An interesting thing that tipped The balance for him was
Speaker 3: he was at the Wawatosa library. As he was sitting
Speaker 3: there reading a book, a young man walked by him
Speaker 3: and threw a crumpled up peoples of paper in front
Speaker 3: of him and walked by and Jeff took it, opened
Speaker 3: it up and inside and said, if you want to
Speaker 3: blow job, meet me in the men's room.
Speaker 2: Do you think that that note thrown thing was kind
Speaker 2: of a catalyst a trip, it seems, and wait to hear,
Speaker 2: because that's when everything started falling hard. What does that
Speaker 2: mean to you? I mean this thing, it just was
Speaker 2: just sitting there sort of throwing out a challenge to
Speaker 2: whoever did make sure enough stud he didn't know e
Speaker 2: fou again and he didn't meet up with.
Speaker 6: He said, that's at the stage for seeking more contact
Speaker 6: from a sexual side with young men, and that that
Speaker 6: led to homicide and that when on seventeen more.
Speaker 1: Times, incapable of relating to people, but desperate for his
Speaker 1: own brand of necrophilic sexual contact. In nineteen eighty five,
Speaker 1: Dama started to hang out in gay bathhouses where he
Speaker 1: would take his partner to a cubicle and drug them.
Speaker 4: He was a very selfish lover.
Speaker 3: He he wanted to be the giver. He did now
Speaker 3: want to be the receiver of homosexual sex. Actually, he
Speaker 3: enjoyed oral and anal sex, but did not want anyone
Speaker 3: to perform anal sex on him.
Speaker 1: Sex for Thelma was a matter of obtaining and exercising
Speaker 1: physical control of his partner. But when word got around
Speaker 1: that he was drugging young men, he was banned from
Speaker 1: the local homosexual hangouts, so I resorted to using hotels.
Speaker 3: Jeff met an individual at a tavern and convinced him
Speaker 3: to come back where he had a room here at
Speaker 3: the Ambassador Hotel, and he brought gentleman back to his hotel,
Speaker 3: drugged him with the drug alcohol combination, and then Jeff himself,
Speaker 3: according to he blacked out. When he woke up in
Speaker 3: the morning, this person was lying next to him dead
Speaker 3: and was beaten about the face and the chest and
Speaker 3: the body, and Jeff figured that he did kill him,
Speaker 3: but he didn't. He couldn't remember doing it because he
Speaker 3: was an alcoholic.
Speaker 6: Black home, he went to uh department store across the street.
Speaker 6: He bought a very large suitcase or a small trunk,
Speaker 6: if you will, and brought it up to the room
Speaker 6: and put the body in it and actually had the
Speaker 6: hotel thus boy help him bring the body down to
Speaker 6: the street where he hailed a cab. The cab driver
Speaker 6: helped him load it into the cab and said to Dahmer,
Speaker 6: this is really heavy, buddy, what he got in here
Speaker 6: a body? And Dahmer said, yeah, I do, and that
Speaker 6: they both laughed about it after the ambassador one that
Speaker 6: was that did you find that pleasurable?
Speaker 2: Or was that equally frightening? For what reason? Was that
Speaker 2: one fright? Because it was a totally plan. It was
Speaker 2: a total surprise to me that did happened.
Speaker 1: Happened for the people have Milwalk. It was just the
Speaker 1: beginning of a killing spree that would last five years.
Speaker 1: District Attorney Michael McCann remembers the time.
Speaker 5: Well Dahmer killed sixteen young men between nineteen eighty seven
Speaker 5: and nineteen ninety one. We had no idea that a
Speaker 5: serial slayer was operating in our city.
Speaker 1: From this moment onwards, Dama continued to kill. Sometimes there
Speaker 1: would be months, weeks, or even just days between his killings.
Speaker 1: After already killing four men in August nineteen eighty eight,
Speaker 1: Darma made a fatal mistake. His fifth victim, escaped. The
Speaker 1: police were called and Dama was arrested for molesting and
Speaker 1: taking photographs of a thirteen year old boy. With the
Speaker 1: police and the court unaware of his grisly death toll,
Speaker 1: he was sentenced to do only twelve months in a
Speaker 1: low security prison. His defense lawyer was Gerald Boyle.
Speaker 7: He had spent first year in a very very uncomfortable
Speaker 7: environment of the county jail where he could only get
Speaker 7: out to go to work, a very hard way to
Speaker 7: serve time. So the judge gave him this very strong sentence.
Speaker 2: But.
Speaker 4: Nobody kick.
Speaker 7: Yes, he had already killed four people by that time.
Speaker 1: Dama's sentence was reduced after he made a desperate plea
Speaker 1: to the court, stating that what he did was deplorable
Speaker 1: and assuring the judge that it would never happen again,
Speaker 1: but it soon would. Dama needed to get his own place.
Speaker 1: He moved from his grandmother's house to Flat two one
Speaker 1: to three Oxford apartments.
Speaker 3: So here's the building where it used to be. And
Speaker 3: now the city has done nothing with this, absolutely nothing,
Speaker 3: It just sits there. Fallum.
Speaker 4: Now the building was in this design.
Speaker 3: It was a rectangle three story white stock l thirty
Speaker 3: six unit.
Speaker 1: Apartments Behind this door was a place for Dama to
Speaker 1: fulfill his fantasies and commit horrendous act so that a
Speaker 1: place of death and destruction. He would pick out many
Speaker 1: of his victims from gay bars.
Speaker 3: This area here is pretty much where kind of the
Speaker 3: gay area kind of starts. This place right here two
Speaker 3: nineteen was the place he liked to go for the
Speaker 3: They would have the drag shows right next to it.
Speaker 3: Sey Levie was another one of his favorites. As we
Speaker 3: go this way, there's there's a couple now. He was
Speaker 3: considered kind of a honey. I mean he was a
Speaker 3: nice looking guy. I mean people thought he was nice looking,
Speaker 3: and like I said, I wish I could be as
Speaker 3: lucky with women as this guy was with men. I mean,
Speaker 3: there's quite a he got laid a lot, and he
Speaker 3: didn't kill everybody that he was sexually involved with.
Speaker 1: Local bartender Tony Timer remembers Dama, well.
Speaker 10: Come to the back bar and he'd order a drinking
Speaker 10: and get a drinking and go and he'd sit in
Speaker 10: the corner. He was in his own little world, or
Speaker 10: like he was always waiting for something, which obviously he was.
Speaker 1: It was here that Dama met Tony's good friend Eddie Smith.
Speaker 4: Eddie was such.
Speaker 10: A wild, crazy person, so you couldn't help it like him,
Speaker 10: which you know Dahmer did. And so they knew each
Speaker 10: other well, you know, well enough to make him comfortable
Speaker 10: enough to go into a house and take photographs.
Speaker 1: Eddie dreamt of becoming a model, and Dama knew all
Speaker 1: the right things to say. At one hundred dollars a session,
Speaker 1: it was easy money.
Speaker 10: Edie would be sitting at the bar and all of
Speaker 10: a sudden, you know if Sometimes he would turn around
Speaker 10: and say, I gotta go. We got to make some money,
Speaker 10: and I'm like, where are you going? And he'd just
Speaker 10: turn around and look towards the hallway and I'd see
Speaker 10: Jeffrey's standing right there, and I'm like, oh, you're going, okay,
Speaker 10: Well call me when you're whatever.
Speaker 11: You know.
Speaker 1: On Wednesday, the twenty fourth of June nineteen ninety, Eddie
Speaker 1: met up with Dama and was seen dancing with him
Speaker 1: at the Phoenix Club.
Speaker 4: He just left. Dahmer never came back.
Speaker 1: It was only at the trial years later that Tony
Speaker 1: realized that the same quiet man who used to drink
Speaker 1: at the end of his bar was the same man
Speaker 1: who had brutally murdered his friend.
Speaker 10: The community was shattered, you know what I mean. People
Speaker 10: stopped coming out. I blew my life apart. It didn't
Speaker 10: just affect my life.
Speaker 1: But it wasn't just the gay community that Dama targeted.
Speaker 1: He was an opportunistic killer who was always on the
Speaker 1: lookout for potential prey.
Speaker 3: One of his victims was in the bus stop right here,
Speaker 3: right up here, as a young man from Upper Michigan
Speaker 3: who was just down here visiting, and Jeff Dahmer met
Speaker 3: him in the bus stop right over there in front
Speaker 3: of that McDonald's and convinced him to come home with him.
Speaker 4: That was the end of that year.
Speaker 5: Some of the men that he victimized were homosexual, some
Speaker 5: were not. He would approach them and suggest that he'd
Speaker 5: like to take pictures of them.
Speaker 4: Would they come to his apartment.
Speaker 5: He had already prepared at that apartment a drug that
Speaker 5: he would induce them to drink.
Speaker 2: He said.
Speaker 6: Once he snapped the lock on the door and the
Speaker 6: person was in his apartment, he seemed to become more aggressive,
Speaker 6: more powerful. It was almost like a psychological transformation, and
Speaker 6: he became more sexually aroused.
Speaker 3: He would lay listening to their heart, and he trained
Speaker 3: himself to learn when they were coming out of the
Speaker 3: drug induced coma by their breathing, because it would start
Speaker 3: to get kind of sharp and short from the long
Speaker 3: breathing of a drug induced and that's when he knew
Speaker 3: it was time to kill them.
Speaker 1: He would then perform oral sex on them before strangling
Speaker 1: and dismembering them, and often keeping his favorite body parts
Speaker 1: around his flat for days on end.
Speaker 6: Sometimes he would have sex with the individual as they
Speaker 6: were unconscious, but always after they were dead as well.
Speaker 6: So I mean it became I think the preference was
Speaker 6: for the dead person because that way he didn't have
Speaker 6: to deal with there with conversation, He didn't have to
Speaker 6: deal with denials or rejections. It was strictly on his
Speaker 6: own turrif. At that time, he had all of his
Speaker 6: victims back at his apartment.
Speaker 2: Where he would be able to enjoy.
Speaker 6: Himself by going through the rituals that he needed to
Speaker 6: perform acts of sexual activity combined with destruction of the bodies.
Speaker 3: He would come back from work and make love with
Speaker 3: the dead body. He would sleep with it, he would
Speaker 3: lie with it, he would rob it and have sex
Speaker 3: with it.
Speaker 6: He was just very, very enamored with the concept of
Speaker 6: opening a body, seeing the internal organ spill forth. And
Speaker 6: several of the bodies he would put in his bathtub
Speaker 6: and pack with ice in midweek because he had to
Speaker 6: work the next day, so he could keep them for
Speaker 6: the weekend where he had more time to enjoy himself
Speaker 6: with these bodies.
Speaker 4: He said.
Speaker 6: To do that, he'd have to shower with cold water
Speaker 6: so he would melt the ice. Was uncomfortable, it was
Speaker 6: well worth it.
Speaker 1: One way to understand Dama's obscure fantasy world is to
Speaker 1: talk to someone who shares Dama's interest in death and bodies.
Speaker 1: Niko Klaus is better known as the Vampire of Paris.
Speaker 1: A convicted cannibal and murderer, Klaus killed a man in
Speaker 1: cold blood in October nineteen ninety four. He served just
Speaker 1: seven years in prison and is now free to walk
Speaker 1: the streets.
Speaker 12: So I can really relate to somebody like him. I
Speaker 12: can't understand what went through his mind and what his
Speaker 12: obsessions were. He was really concerned with the esthetics of death,
Speaker 12: how beautiful they looked like in his eye. This is
Speaker 12: why he took photographs of his victims. He would pose
Speaker 12: them in twisted positions.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what was the idea to pose him there? It
Speaker 2: was just a way to exhibit control, to look and
Speaker 2: to situate and seek keeping these photographs and was imported
Speaker 2: to you as well. I'd use of the past.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and you had a lot of.
Speaker 3: It continued on and grew in momentum that the passions
Speaker 3: and the lust became stronger. His wont to look for
Speaker 3: this this perfect orgasm, I guess you could call it.
Speaker 3: He had to do more and more things in order
Speaker 3: to have this satisfying orgasm. It just started with having
Speaker 3: pornographic homosexual arm sex, and then actually having homosexual sex
Speaker 3: with people in the baths, and then having sex and killing,
Speaker 3: and then having sex with dead people, and then having
Speaker 3: sex with the viscera, and then actually eating the people
Speaker 3: that he had sex with to get this.
Speaker 4: Superb orgasmic experience.
Speaker 1: How does a human being get to the point that
Speaker 1: they can only eat the flesh of another Only another
Speaker 1: cannibal can truly know. Nico was working as a mortuary
Speaker 1: assistant at a Parisian morgue when he tried human flesh
Speaker 1: for the first time.
Speaker 12: There is a state of euphroia right after you have
Speaker 12: done it. You refeel on a big high and you
Speaker 12: are like on the top of a mountain.
Speaker 2: During dismemberment. That you say mustn't eat is later cut
Speaker 2: it into smaller pieces, and Washington put it in them
Speaker 2: these plastic clear plastic freezer bags and put them in
Speaker 2: the floor freezer, just as an escalation, trying something new,
Speaker 2: dissatisfy and I would cook it and then look at
Speaker 2: the picture imagine it was afterwards. Did that have any
Speaker 2: any positive effect to that ritual? Satisfying it made it
Speaker 2: feel like they were more part of me.
Speaker 3: What he did was he bought an adaptable grill to
Speaker 3: put on his gas stove. We found this and he
Speaker 3: said he would just kind of seer it on both sides.
Speaker 4: With a little oil keep.
Speaker 3: He did add some condiments to it, some vegetables and
Speaker 3: mushrooms and onions, and towards the end there was.
Speaker 4: The month before we caught him.
Speaker 3: Pretty much the only meat that he ate was was
Speaker 3: human flesh.
Speaker 12: Taste like osmid in my experiences, but of course it
Speaker 12: depends on the pot the sweet.
Speaker 1: Ultimately, Dma wanted a partner he could completely control, dead
Speaker 1: or alive.
Speaker 6: He began fantasizing that he could make things much better
Speaker 6: for himself by creating a sex zombie, and the sex
Speaker 6: zombie he thought would stay with him and all the
Speaker 6: time he would not have to murder anymore.
Speaker 2: I wasn't getting satisfaction, so I took it to a
Speaker 2: new level. I had a handle that I used for
Speaker 2: the more.
Speaker 4: He used like a.
Speaker 11: Stall in the arm system, drills small more or very
Speaker 11: quickly and with a large syringe.
Speaker 2: I filled that up with wasect, killed it and projected
Speaker 2: instruct I was hoping to bring his society mistake.
Speaker 12: He was not interested in having a relationship with a
Speaker 12: willing victim. He wanted total control over a human body
Speaker 12: and do whatever he wanted.
Speaker 1: He had met fourteen year old kernerac Centosymphony in the
Speaker 1: mall when he tried out his new drilling technique, but
Speaker 1: he made the mistake of leaving him alone.
Speaker 2: I saw him sitting on that side what two girls
Speaker 2: were with. They called the police to think of his
Speaker 2: story quickly, and he told him that he was a
Speaker 2: friend who gets drunk. He was not wanting to the backs.
Speaker 2: One officer grab him by this and I another arm,
Speaker 2: so grab him on the other arm, and they walked
Speaker 2: him up with the parents and they left. That's why
Speaker 2: I did the second right away. How want to take him?
Speaker 2: A guy that was me?
Speaker 1: Yet again like many before them, The police were taken
Speaker 1: in by the courtiers Doctor Jekyl side of Jeffrey Dahmer's personality,
Speaker 1: but with the bodies piling up and a pungent smell
Speaker 1: emanating from his apartment, it wouldn't be long before he
Speaker 1: would start drawing attention to himself.
Speaker 3: Jeff said that this was a continual problem, the smell
Speaker 3: that his neighbors the building supervisor complained about the smell.
Speaker 1: So Pac liber Princeville was in charge of Dama's apartment
Speaker 1: building and had to deal with the complaints.
Speaker 6: Somebody told me that it is coming from his apartment,
Speaker 6: and so I had to call him and ask him
Speaker 6: what's going on?
Speaker 4: Can't he clean up or what?
Speaker 2: I'd either blame it on the freezer or the fish team.
Speaker 2: You really said, he almost passed out? What was in there?
Speaker 2: Three headless cobscrict.
Speaker 1: The man who brought an end to Dama's reign of
Speaker 1: ten It was thirty two year old Tracy Edwards, who,
Speaker 1: after escaping from DAMA, was running down a street with
Speaker 1: a pair of handcuffs on one wrist when he managed
Speaker 1: to flag down a passing police car.
Speaker 5: Had the officer been able to unleash that handcuff, that
Speaker 5: may have been the end of it. So they went
Speaker 5: back to Dahmer's residency.
Speaker 3: Jeff opened the door, They said who they were, what
Speaker 3: they wanted, but Jeff didn't have the key for the handcuff.
Speaker 4: Because he didn't.
Speaker 3: The way he got the handcuffs back from his victims
Speaker 3: was by cutting off their hands.
Speaker 5: When they entered the apartment, one of the officers saw
Speaker 5: some pictures in a bedroom of a skinning of a
Speaker 5: human being. Looked at the pictures, was surprised, then looked
Speaker 5: around the room and realized he was in the very
Speaker 5: room where those pictures had been taken. He yelled out
Speaker 5: to his partner grab them.
Speaker 3: When I arrived, I saw Dahmer was arrested on the ground, handcuffed,
Speaker 3: and I was told by the officers to look in
Speaker 3: the refrigerator the time. When I did open up the refrigerator,
Speaker 3: what I found in there was an empty refrigerator with
Speaker 3: a cardboard box containing a freshly severed head of a
Speaker 3: black male. The eyes and the mouth were open. Should
Speaker 3: be stated that The interior refrigerator was immaculately clean. In
Speaker 3: the back was a box of arm Hammer baking soda,
Speaker 3: and on the side were condiments mustard, ketchup a one sauce.
Speaker 3: I felt fear from the bottom of my feet all
Speaker 3: the way to the top of my head. You can't
Speaker 3: make sense of anything that looked so bizarre.
Speaker 1: Dama's killing spray was finally brought to an end. What
Speaker 1: was motivating Jeffrey Dahma to kill, dismember, and eat his victims?
Speaker 1: Was he sane or insane? Jeffrey Dahma was just eighteen
Speaker 1: years old when he took the life of his first victim.
Speaker 1: Nine years later, he was driven to kill again. It
Speaker 1: was after this that the killings escalated. He continued to kill,
Speaker 1: and for years he got away with murder. No one
Speaker 1: suspected the mild mannered, good looking middle class boy of
Speaker 1: any further wrongdoing.
Speaker 3: In a long list of these, I mentioned the judge
Speaker 3: the commuted as sentenced, the first police officer that let
Speaker 3: him go in Ohio. When he first got out, he
Speaker 3: was on probation, But not once during his entire time
Speaker 3: of being on probation did a probation officer come to
Speaker 3: his apartment, much less make a surprise visit to his apartment. Also,
Speaker 3: he was under court order to see a psychologist every month.
Speaker 3: In some of the days, he had just killed somebody
Speaker 3: over the weekend and chopped them up and threw them away,
Speaker 3: and then he was sitting and talking to the psychologist,
Speaker 3: putting on a front and being cleared to go.
Speaker 1: This time was different. They had him in custody and
Speaker 1: they weren't about to let him out of their sight.
Speaker 1: Knowing that it was all finally over, Dahma signed away
Speaker 1: his rights to an attorney. From midnight into the early
Speaker 1: hours of the next morning, he started on the wicked
Speaker 1: truth behind his evil acts.
Speaker 3: He didn't tell us about eating people right away. In
Speaker 3: the freezer part of the refrigerator, they found individually wrapped
Speaker 3: and prepared body parts the thigh, bicep, heart, liver.
Speaker 1: As Kennedy continued his interrogation, the most pertinent question was why.
Speaker 3: There was mental illness in his family, And that's not
Speaker 3: a stigma. I mean, a lot of our families have
Speaker 3: mental illnesses. The fact that there was a lot of
Speaker 3: arguing going on between his mom and dad and when
Speaker 3: he was growing up, the fact that he felt to band,
Speaker 3: and I mean, all these things together could they produce
Speaker 3: Who knows?
Speaker 1: Had his desertion as a teenager left Jeffrey with a
Speaker 1: fear of abandonment that affected his adult life.
Speaker 3: We had discussions about love because I said, Jeff, well,
Speaker 3: why don't you just have a regular boyfriend? You know,
Speaker 3: I mean, and then you woudn't have to kill these
Speaker 3: But said, people always left. I could never get anyone
Speaker 3: to stay with me. So I saw that the only
Speaker 3: way I can cap them with me was by killing them,
Speaker 3: but by actually eating the person that this young man
Speaker 3: actually became part of jeff Dahmer.
Speaker 6: Dahmer did state that he was there was not a
Speaker 6: victim of his crimes, that he did not personally love
Speaker 6: and would like to have stayed on a permanent level.
Speaker 6: It all boiled on the same routine. When they were
Speaker 6: going to leave, that's when they died.
Speaker 1: Even Doma himself can't provide an explanation.
Speaker 2: What do you account to the fact that you're getting
Speaker 2: into this so often, the fact that I was desperately
Speaker 2: trying making so much satisfied that they never did.
Speaker 1: But was it just a simple case of not being
Speaker 1: able to find what he was looking for and you met.
Speaker 2: Somebody who consensually would set up let the arrangement with you,
Speaker 2: what do you have a bank? And then the procedure
Speaker 2: that he stayed with the person would have had to
Speaker 2: be totally compliant, willing to do whatever. M like that.
Speaker 1: So it's true, there was never any doubt that Dama
Speaker 1: committed these heenous crimes. His sixty hour confession and the
Speaker 1: insurmountable evidence was to solve a complicated question. Was Darma
Speaker 1: sane or insane? If the court found Darma sane, he
Speaker 1: would spend the rest of his life in prison. If
Speaker 1: they judged him insane, he would go to a psychiatric
Speaker 1: hospital from which one day he could possibly be released.
Speaker 1: Prosecutor Michael McCann had a different approach to the trial.
Speaker 5: We heave in Wisconsin what's called a bifurcated trial. We
Speaker 5: use the same jury, but we do it sequentially. First,
Speaker 5: did he do the slayings? Secondly, was he saying or
Speaker 5: insane at the time. So the second part of the
Speaker 5: trial was the real issue that went on for several
Speaker 5: weeks in this very courtroom.
Speaker 1: Arma called on his old defense attorney, Gerald Boyle. Boyle
Speaker 1: felt his client had to be insane.
Speaker 7: Killing didn't obviously meaning to him. He had no consciance,
Speaker 7: so he was not going to be rehabilitated, no matter
Speaker 7: who was working with him.
Speaker 1: To the average person, killing and eating another human would
Speaker 1: not be considered a sane act. But according to Wisconsin's
Speaker 1: legal definition of sanity, if a person knows what they
Speaker 1: are doing is wrong but keeps doing it anyway, they
Speaker 1: are classified as sane.
Speaker 6: Garmer definitely knew what he was doing, but he didn't care.
Speaker 6: He justified what he was doing by his own standards.
Speaker 6: He knew what was against the law.
Speaker 5: I think after you kill a certain number of people,
Speaker 5: you've lost all track of morality. You no longer feel
Speaker 5: constrained by the morals that bind most of us.
Speaker 1: Damer sat emotionless during the verdict before the judge and
Speaker 1: the families of the victims he'd killed and dismembered. He
Speaker 1: was judged to be sane and sentenced to life imprisonment
Speaker 1: on the seventeenth of February nineteen ninety two.
Speaker 5: Someone asked me once, how many people do you have
Speaker 5: to kill and eat before you're insane?
Speaker 4: In Milwaukee.
Speaker 5: I can say this that everyone who knew Dahmer and
Speaker 5: I think the most skilled psychiatrists said Dahmer was saying.
Speaker 5: That is even more frightening than believing Dahmer was insane.
Speaker 5: I believe he was sane and tragically evil.
Speaker 3: I felt that that was a just end for what
Speaker 3: he did. He needed to be removed from society forever
Speaker 3: for the rest of his life. And I think that's
Speaker 3: what he should have gotten.
Speaker 4: That's what he got.
Speaker 5: Of course, we had fifteen verdicts of guilty and fifteen
Speaker 5: verdicts of sane while committing the crime, and then, of
Speaker 5: course the sentence of the court was such that so
Speaker 5: long nine hundred plus years, that he would never be released.
Speaker 5: When Dahmer went to the maximum security prison at Columbia,
Speaker 5: he came in contact with a minister or minister and
Speaker 5: started reading the Bible and attending chapel there.
Speaker 1: Faced with life imprisonment, Dama turned to religion once again
Speaker 1: for comfort and possible salvation. Eventually, he asked local Church
Speaker 1: of Christ minister Roy Radcliffe to come to the jail
Speaker 1: to baptize him.
Speaker 13: After I agreed to baptize him, he heaved a deep
Speaker 13: sigh of relief because he was afraid that I would
Speaker 13: say I can't baptize you because your sins are too grievous,
Speaker 13: Your sins are too bad, your sins are unforgivable. Well,
Speaker 13: that violates everything I've ever believed. And I would never
Speaker 13: say that Jesus Christ came to save sinners. Jeffrey Dahmer
Speaker 13: was a sinner. It's as simple as that. It was
Speaker 13: our first Thanksgiving holiday that was coming up, and so
Speaker 13: he made a big deal about giving this card to me,
Speaker 13: and it was written out and so forth that he
Speaker 13: talked about how much he was grateful for all that
Speaker 13: I'd done for him, and how thankful he was that
Speaker 13: I was in his life and I hadn't given up
Speaker 13: on him. The only emotion he ever had confessed to
Speaker 13: regarding his murders was love. It wasn't hatred at all.
Speaker 13: And I never saw a sense of malice or anger
Speaker 13: hatred toward any of his victims at all.
Speaker 1: In November nineteen ninety three, two inmates were killed by
Speaker 1: delusional schizophrenic Christopher Scava at the Columbia Correctional Institute. One
Speaker 1: was Jesse Anderson, the other was Jeffrey Dahmer.
Speaker 5: Carver got a piece of equipment off an exercise machine
Speaker 5: crept up upon Dahmer and bludgeoned him to death, and
Speaker 5: then crossed a gymnasium and bludgeoned to death Anderson.
Speaker 3: He knew that he was going to be killed if
Speaker 3: he asked for the general population, and talking to the investigator,
Speaker 3: said that the gentleman that was killed with him, Jesse Anderson,
Speaker 3: had all kinds of defensive marks where he tried to
Speaker 3: stop Carver, but Jeff Dahmer had no defense of mine.
Speaker 3: Arks on him that all his strikes were from the beginning,
Speaker 3: from the head, and a very interesting thing. What I
Speaker 3: thought was interesting was he was killed with a hand
Speaker 3: bar bell, which is the same instrument he used to
Speaker 3: kill his very first victim.
Speaker 13: He was a young man that I felt a friendship toward,
Speaker 13: and I had lost a friend, and so I was
Speaker 13: very much in shock and disbelief about it.
Speaker 4: At first, I.
Speaker 6: Felt somewhat sorry for the man being beaten to death
Speaker 6: by another inmate. Didn't seem right. It's not supposed to
Speaker 6: be what happens in prison.
Speaker 4: It did kind of shake me up a little bit.
Speaker 3: I don't know if this means, you know, not the
Speaker 3: macho guy I wanted.
Speaker 4: To be, But.
Speaker 3: I felt really conflicted about it because I had got
Speaker 3: to know him. I saw him as a very tragic,
Speaker 3: tragic figure. I guess I felt sad that he was
Speaker 3: dead because I don't believe anybody needs to die like that.
Speaker 8: He died pretty brutally, but you can't say he didn't
Speaker 8: deserve it.
Speaker 4: But still.
Speaker 8: I think at that point it's probably a relief to him.
Speaker 8: I would think that was no kind of life.
Speaker 10: I was kind of elated that was kind of happened, Like, well,
Speaker 10: good riddings. I'm glad it's over. That's the least he
Speaker 10: can do for me for taking my friend. He didn't
Speaker 10: deserve to live.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 13: Not after that, Jeffrey Dahmer was cremated immediately, although his
Speaker 13: brain was removed at the request of his mother.
Speaker 4: She wanted the brain studied.
Speaker 13: Because she's trying to offset the belief that Lionel had
Speaker 13: suggested that somehow his brain was deformed. About a year later,
Speaker 13: the scientist involved with the brain decides there's no abnormality
Speaker 13: with his brain.
Speaker 1: Was Dharma's behavior simply down to nurture? Was Dama not
Speaker 1: born to kill?
Speaker 14: No, I he was born like that. I think it's environmental,
Speaker 14: and I just I think anybody who, in a young
Speaker 14: age is the victim of abject loneliness is probably going
Speaker 14: to have serious problems in life of one nature or another.
Speaker 4: Did he choose evil? Yes? Was he an evil person?
Speaker 3: I can't say, and I wouldn't say that about anybody,
Speaker 3: especially after I spent so much time with him and
Speaker 3: saw parts of him that were very much like you
Speaker 3: and me. He had cares and loves and feelings like
Speaker 3: anybody else. Did he have some I personally thought he
Speaker 3: was crazy. You'd have to be crazy to do what
Speaker 3: he did.
Speaker 4: I don't think Dahmer was born to kill.
Speaker 5: I think Dahmer had the benefits of a good family,
Speaker 5: a basically good family, a decent area in which to
Speaker 5: we raised, educational opportunities.
Speaker 4: He chose not to accept them.
Speaker 1: Whatever factors led to Dahma's path of destruction, it will
Speaker 1: take the city of Milwaukee a long time to return
Speaker 1: to normality.
Speaker 10: He's garred the setting. He's done something that will probably
Speaker 10: take generations to to to to heal, but for some
Speaker 10: people will never heal.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, m hm, h m hmmm, yeah, yeah, h
Speaker 7: m h m hmmm, yeah, yeah, m hm