World's Most Evil Killers - Season 1, Episode 14 - Jeffrey Dahmer - Full Episode | Forensic Files

-Shortly before midnight on July the 22nd, 1991, 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 U.S. history.
-That night people were afraid. People were whispering under their breaths, you know, it was the devil.
It's the devil. -The man had escaped from a small one-bedroom apartment on North 25th Street.
When the officers went to investigate, they found themselves in a living nightmare.
-They saw the body parts and then one of the officers said he heard a scream. Then he realized later he was the one who screamed
when he saw the body. -Without detection, 31-year-old Jeffrey Dahmer had killed 17 young men across a 13-year period.
-He hasn't got the same level of repulsion and shock at dead bodies or mutilated bodies that most of us have.
It was just another aspect of his life. -Jeffrey Dahmer had etched his name in history
as one of the world's most evil killers. ♪♪ ♪♪ The name Jeffrey Dahmer has become synonymous with evil.
Between 1978 and 1991 he killed 17 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 Dahmer once he'd killed his victims
that really stunned the world with stories of necrophilia and cannibalism. The first journalist to arrive at the crime scene
was Anne E. Schwartz. -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.
You know some dishes in the sink, but by and large, this was not some chamber of horrors
like people 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. -The story of this macabre killer begins 30 years
before his arrest. Jeffrey Dahmer was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on May the 21st, 1960.
The family moved to Iowa before settling in Ohio in 1966. -He lived with these parents who were constantly,
constantly as he put it "at each other's throats." You know, his mother appeared to have been
this raging bundle of neurotic behavior. Parents were constantly fighting and screaming.
You know, Dahmer himself evidently throughout much of his early life was completely, completely ignored by both of them.
They were so caught up in their own psychological turmoil. -Jeffrey Dahmer 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 Dahmer. -Feeling ostracized by his family and classmates,
Dahmer spends a lot of time playing alone in the woods surrounding his Ohio home.
-Well, 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. This soon progressed.
He would go fishing, and he was interested in what the fish looked like on the inside,
so he would chop up the fish to have a look at this. -Dahmer took his fish and cut it open.
Was fascinated with the inside of the fish, and one of his little friends asked him,
"Jeffrey, why do you... what are you doing?" And he said, "Just look at it." -You know, and this escalates to the point
that he's apparently killing stray dogs and decapitating them. -One of the young boys in the neighborhood
was walking in the woods behind Dahmer'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. -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.
-Dahmer continued to struggle to fit in at high school and turned to alcohol from a young age.
-Well, Dahmer 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.
-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 '70s when Dahmer's coming to school intoxicated,
nobody thinks, "Gee, we better make sure we take care of this because what if he turns out to be a serial killer?"
-In the summer of 1978 Dahmer's parents finally divorced. -The breakdown of Jeffrey Dahmer's parent's 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. And I think that's very much what happened with Dahmer.
-Having just recently graduated from high school, Dahmer soon had no one around him at all.
-Well, in 1978 Jeffrey Dahmer was 18. His mother had gone away with his younger brother,
and his father was living in a hotel. So he's alone, and he's ruminating, and he's fantasizing,
and things are going to take a turn for the worse quite soon after this. -On June the 18th, 1978, Dahmer's fantasy world
collided with the real one when he pulled over to pick a 19-year-old hitchhiker called Steven Hicks.
-Dahmer picked him up and invited him back to his house to have some drinks, and I guess maybe smoke some dope.
-They were in the basement of his parents' home. They had had sex. And then Steven 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.
-And then when the guy said he wanted to leave, Dahmer clubbed him on the back of the head with a barbell
and then strangled him. Then, ultimately, disposed of the body, removed all the flesh,
and eventually dissolved it in acid and pulverized the bones with a sledgehammer.
-This is a really, really brutal crime. And he disposes of the body parts in the woods behind his house,
and that's already symbolic place for Jeffrey Dahmer 'cause 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 him.
-Dahmer had experienced taking the life of another human for the first time. ♪♪ -I think that the first murder
is a real milestone for Jeffrey Dahmer. 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 gonna stop.
-He's not desperate, but he becomes accustomed to it. He becomes ready to kill again, and just kill and kill
and kill and kill until he gets caught. -But it wasn't until 13 years later in August 1991
that Dahmer was finally apprehended after one of his potential victims escaped from his Milwaukee apartment.
Once in custody Dahmer confessed to killing 17 young men and boys. The man whose job it was to prosecute the relentless killer
was Milwaukee District Attorney, Mike McCann. -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 is almost a moral issue. That word came up with Dahmer.
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. -Dahmer's case made headlines across the world
after the details of his grizzly confession were leaked. -A<i> New York Times</i> reporter
compromised the integrity of a worker at our building and got a copy of the confession.
It was a detailed 38-page confession. So the details of the gory things he had done,
again, captured people's interest. So that's how it rapidly became a matter of intense interest.
-The confession outlined the life of a deranged serial killer. After murdering Steven Hicks and desecrating his body in 1978,
Dahmer didn't kill again for 9 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 U.S. Army.
-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 alcohol. -In 1981, 21-year-old Dahmer
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.
-He was sent to live with his grandmother, who is the one adult apparently he had,
you know, something approaching a normal affection for. It was there he really embarked on this career of horror.
-By 1986 Dahmer 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.
-I think being homosexual affected Dahmer in two ways. Firstly, it was a source 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.
-It was this exposure to the gay scene that seemed to reawaken the dark sexual urges inside of him.
And by September 1987, over 9 years since the murder of Steven Hick, Jeffrey Dahmer was ready to kill again.
-His idea was to drug people and keep them with him so that they wouldn't answer back to him,
they wouldn't argue with him, they wouldn't fight him. They would stay with him.
That's what he wanted. He wanted companionship. 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 perspective victims, 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 gonna be a victim.
But if the person answered, "My parents aren't speaking to me anymore. I'm estranged from my family.
I'm kind of on my own now." That was the perfect victim for Jeffrey Dahmer because he wanted to choose people who wouldn't be missed.
-Between September 1987 and March 1988, Dahmer killed 3 men. The youngest a 14-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. -He cleverly developed a program to destroy the bodies,
get rid of the bodies, left no evidence. This was a very clever killer. Very clever killer.
-Dahmer would dissolve his victims, presumably to make it easier to dispose of them.
Dissolving tissue in chemicals can certainly interfere with identifying it as human tissue.
It'll interfere with DNA. You're really left predominately with skeletal remains
to try and identify features such as age, sex, race. -Dahmer murdered two of the victims
at his grandmother's house where he was living. -His 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. -On September the 25th, 1988, Dahmer moved into his own apartment on North 25th Street in Milwaukee
and didn't wait long before attacking again. The very next day, September the 26th,
he enticed a 13-year-old boy back to his home and drugged him. -One of the methods that Dahmer used to subdue his victims
was to use benzodiazepine. It's the same family of drugs as Valium. He put them in drinks.
That would make you woozy, sleepy, and then eventually go unconscious. -Dahmer sexually assaulted the boy,
but somehow, possibly due to Dahmer passing out drunk, the 13-year-old escaped and went to the police.
In January 1989, he was convicted of sexual assault, but the sentencing was delayed until May,
during which time an unrelenting Dahmer, unbeknownst to the authorities, managed to claim a fifth victim.
The 29-year-old served 10 months in prison, but when he was released in March 1990,
he picked up right where he left off. -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, he started to do some really bizarre things.
-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. -In 1990, Dahmer killed another four young men.
His M.O. was becoming more and more polished. -He would offer his victims 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.
-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 would strangle them to death. -It seemed as though Dahmer got a thrill, not from the murder
but from the dead bodies of his victims. -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. -He would commit necrophiliac sex acts on the corpses,
dismember the corpses, dissolve parts of the bodies in these vats of acid he had,
keep certain organs in his refrigerator, some of which he would actually cannibalize.
-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. -Dahmer, from the beginning, is driven
by this terror of being alone. He killed his first victim, Steven Hicks when Hicks
said he had to go and Dahmer didn't want to be alone. There's some desire, which is part of normal sexuality.
You know you love somebody... Somebody will say, "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, you want to merge with them. With somebody like Dahmer that becomes
this very literal horror. -And the horror only became worse when Dahmer began experimenting with his semi-conscious victims.
-He would drill holes in their skulls and put muriatic acid inside to see if he could get them to a zombie state
so that he could keep them alive and subservient to him. -It's essentially an amateur version
of attempting to perform a lobectomy 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. -But, of course, that didn't work, and his victims died one after another.
Hearing about that 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, this isn't the kind of thing that happens here. -In May 1991, 31-year-old Jeffrey Dahmer
was in his killing prime. He'd already murdered 11 men and had begun collecting bones and skulls from his victims
and cannibalizing their organs. What would've 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.
-Jeffrey Dahmer had a job in a local chocolate factory. And I think for him it enabled him
to maintain a façade of normality. He was just an average Joe, a regular guy who went to work every day.
-I think he killed so many people without being caught 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 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.
-For most people, if they were to commit the type of acts that Jeffrey Dahmer did,
they would no way be able to function normally, but Jeffrey Dahmer was not most people.
He hasn't got the same level of repulsion and shock at dead bodies or mutilated bodies that most of us have.
It was just another aspect of his life. -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 up and leave town. It happens enough that the police don't get worried.
If it's a woman, they'll immediately commit resources to investigate, but a young man they don't.
-But on May the 26th, 1991, Dahmer came agonizingly close to capture after an encounter with a 14-year-old boy.
-Dahmer had taken Konerak Sinthasomphone, a young Asian male who he 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, Konerak ran out of the apartment.
He was naked. He was completely dazed. And he's running up the alley next to Dahmer's apartment building.
A woman in another apartment building saw him running up the alley and said, "There's a boy running up the alley.
Something's going on." And then these women call the police. -And then Dahmer appeared.
Again, this is another remarkable characteristic of these psychopaths was that they have an ability
to maintain a kind of coolness under the most extraordinarily high-pressured circumstances.
-So he walked up to the officers. "Good evening, officers." 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 he?" Dahmer said, "He's 19." And the officers said, "Okay, well, just to make sure
let's all walk back up to the apartment together." -The cops went in and looked around.
They even peeked into the bedroom where there was a decomposing corpse of one of Dahmer's previous victims,
but they took such a cursory look at it that they didn't even notice it. -Assuming the couple were having a lover's tiff,
the two police officers left Konarek alone with Dahmer in the apartment building.
And in the early hours of the morning, he murdered the 14-year-old boy. An opportunity to catch the killer had been missed.
-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. People aren't wanting to see it. 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.
-After evading capture, Dahmer was free to continue. -There was two sides really to Dahmer'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 sadist that thrill ends when the victim dies. But Dahmer was also something of a necrophiliac
who as 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,
and I think that's what's really at the root of Jeffrey Dahmer. It's power, and it's 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.
-By July 1991, Dahmer's desire to kill had become insatiable. In just 16 days, he murdered four more men
bringing his total number of victims to 17. But Dahmer's reign of terror was about to come to an end.
On July the 22nd, he met a man called Tracy Edwards. -While they were together in the apartment,
Dahmer threw a handcuff on him. This was now the beginning of his ritual. 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 saw the police car, 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 you just get this off of me?" 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 in.
And that was when Dahmer was officially finished. He was finished killing, and he knew that he was finished.
-The police officers immediately arrested Dahmer after finding the remains of some of his victims
in his apartment. -They saw the body parts and then one of the officers said 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. -What followed was an incredible media circus
on Dahmer's doorstep as unbelievable stories about what was being uncovered inside
his apartment were revealed. -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.
All of the atrocities that we heard about that had happened in that apartment really did happen.
-The medical examiner who was called to the scene didn't know what was happening.
It was so strange. There was a freezer there. Body parts in the freezer. Called in a Hazmat crew.
Well, our television stations cover the police radio. When they hear that, they dispatch crews there.
And the first day it was local television. Second day, national television. By the third day, it was international television.
-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. We 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 <i> Milwaukee Journal</i> that morning, and it was released in the paper about 8:00,
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. -But no one quite knew the enormity of the crimes
until Dahmer confessed to detectives at the local police station. -When I've spoken to the detectives
that were working this case, they have said this was not a great whodunit. This would've been a whodunit if Jeffrey Dahmer
hadn't confessed to everything. -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 16 separate slayings.
Most of the time he did not know the name of the victims. -When Dahmer remembered a crime
that he might not have shared with the detectives, 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."
Dahmer had said 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 may be 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.
-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 recognized the extent of his depravity.
-Although he confessed to killing 16 people in the state of Wisconsin, Dahmer was first charged with four counts of murder
on the 25th of July, 1991, and a further 11 counts were added in August. The following month, investigators in Ohio
found teeth and bone fragments belonging to Steven Hicks in the woods near Dahmer's family home.
A preliminary hearing was set for January 1992. His legal team were going to argue that the killings
were the work of a madman. -The issue wasn't going to be did he do it or not. The 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 mental health facility.
People would say to me, "Mike, this guy killed 16 people. He was drinking their blood, eating parts of their body.
He must've been crazy." It sounds like he's crazy to say that, but that's not what the insanity rule is.
-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 in the history
of not just Wisconsin but the entire U.S.A. -My reaction to it then was the same reaction
I think that everybody who lived in Milwaukee had when they heard about the case.
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. -The trial of Jeffrey Dahmer began on the 30th of January, 1992.
Anne had a front row seat. -The courtroom 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.
It was the kind of media attention to a trial that Milwaukee hadn't seen in a very, very long time if ever.
I 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." -It would be up to Milwaukee D.A., Mike McCann, to prove that Dahmer was sane and responsible for his actions.
-Guilty wasn't going to be an issue, but we wanted the jury to know enough about the facts
and so did the defense to say, "All right, what really happened here?" How atrocious was it?
How planned was it? How was he behaving? What skills were involved? He couldn't control himself.
-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've seen him in court. He was this good attorney. But 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. -He did it quietly. He concealed the bodies.
Cleverly concealed. Destroyed the bodies. Planned it well. Laid in the equipment.
Got the drugs that he used. No one that he worked with 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.
-Mike employs the help of psychiatry expert Dr. Phillip Resnick. -The more bizarre the crimes,
such as involving cannibalism, the more the lay 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 assistants in morgues or assistants in pathology labs where they may have access to dead victims.
Others will actually dissenter bodies after they're buried so that one does not have to actually kill
to exercise the necrophiliac impulse, and that's one of the reasons I felt that he didn't qualify for insanity.
-The trial was essentially a debate between specialtist psychiatrists about the mental state of Dahmer
who sat watching the whole thing play out over two weeks. -Dahmer was very calm in court.
When you talk are you assessing a person by what you see? No one studying him would believe he was insane.
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.
-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. -On February 15th, the jury had reached a verdict
on Dahmer's sanity. -Someone like Dahmer comes along who has never been in a psychiatric hospital and alleges insanity.
Juries are gonna be skeptical of it. And then when it's all in the form of a sexual drive
rather than a traditional psychosis where someone's out of touch with reality, and he's taken careful steps to cover his tracks,
it's very difficult to succeed with insanity with that type of case. -Jeffrey Dahmer was ruled to be sane by the jury.
On February 17, 1992, Judge Lawrence Gram sentenced him to life imprisonment for each of the 15 counts against him.
-When the verdict was announced in court, there was a great shout from the gallery,
especially from the victims' families. They cried. -I was pleased in the sense, happy, 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. -The state of Wisconsin does not have the death penalty,
but Dahmer would have to serve a minimum of 936 years. He was immediately sent to the Columbia Correctional
Institute in Portage. Three months later, on the 1st of May, 1992 in Ohio, Dahmer was also found guilty of murdering Steven Hicks in 1978
and given yet another life sentence. -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. They didn't go away.
He was just in a place where he couldn't act on them. -Locked away for the rest of his life,
Dahmer found comfort in the Bible. And by 1994, he decided to get baptized. The prison called on local minister Roy Ratcliff.
-So I was quite surprised to be escorted to a little room and left alone, and then Jeff come to the room, and he closes 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 has killed several people." So, yeah that was a little bit disconcerting,
but I was there for 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. Courteous, 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 murder people. These are the hands that dismembered people."
-On May the 10th, 1994, the same day that notorious serial killer John Wayne Gacy was executed,
Jeffrey Dahmer was baptized in a prison bathtub. -Then the door opens, and I walk 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 said, "I baptize you in the name of the Father, Son,
and the Holy Spirit for the forgiveness of your sins," and pushed his head down under.
And then when he came back up I said something I often say to people when I baptize them.
I said, "Welcome to the family of God." He said, "Well, thank you very much." -But just six months after his baptism,
on November the 28th, 1994, Dahmer and another convicted murderer, Jesse Anderson,
were attacked and killed by a fellow inmate. -Christopher Scarver took a barbell,
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.
When I called his mother, she said, "Well, now everybody got what they want. The monster is dead."
And then she said, "And he was my son. He was my boy." -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 are the crimes he committed. They're not thinking about where I'm thinking about
is here's a person who is trying to serve God as best as he can and now his life has been taken from him.
-I 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 hitchhiker, Steven Hicks, to death with a barbell,
and that he himself died in a very, very similar way. -The apartment on North 25th Street
that housed Dahmer's macabre collection of victims' remains, and where 12 young men lost their lives,
was demolished in November 1992. But Dahmer's twisted legacy has been impossible to wipe out.
He has become one of the most infamous serial killers in the world. -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
and drilling holes in their skull and injecting brains with muriatic acid to turn them into zombies?
There's something there ultimately inexplicable. -Jeffrey Dahmer committed some of the most evil acts
that I have ever written about or heard about or 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 some of the most evil acts known to man. -Dahmer'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 and trophies and eating their organs. Jeffrey Dahmer truly is the stuff of nightmares,
and unquestionably one of the world's most evil killers. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪

Jeffrey Dahmer is one of the most notorious killers in the world. For thirteen years he raped, murdered and ate his young male victims — seventeen of them in total.

An in-depth look at the lives and crimes of some of the world's most evil killers, including Jeffrey Dahmer, Richard Ramirez, Cary Stayner, Leonard Lake, Dorothea Puente and more.

Brief Summary

The episode details Jeffrey Dahmer's life, crimes, and psychological motivations behind his murders.

Key points

The Arrest of Jeffrey Dahmer. In 1991, police apprehended Dahmer, uncovering a history of horrific murders.
Dahmer's First Murder. At 18, Dahmer killed Steven Hicks, marking the start of his killing spree.
The Nature of Evil. Prosecutor Mike McCann reflects on the evil nature of Dahmer's actions.
Dahmer's Dark Obsession. Dahmer's fascination with death escalated from animals to humans, revealing his dark psyche.
The Facade of Normality. Dahmer blended into society, maintaining a normal life while committing horrific acts.
Dahmer's Ritual Unveiled. Dahmer's gruesome methods of control and murder are revealed, showcasing his chilling psyche.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

It's the devil.

People were whispering under their breaths about the fear in the city.

0:33WatchJul 28, 2021

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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