00:00:04
-Shortly before midnight
on July the 22nd, 1991, two Milwaukee police officers
were flagged down
00:00:12
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
00:00:22
would lead to the arrest of one of the most prolific
serial killers in U.S. history.
00:00:28
-That night people were afraid. People were whispering
under their breaths, you know, it was the devil.
00:00:34
It's the devil. -The man had escaped from
a small one-bedroom apartment on North 25th Street.
00:00:41
When the officers
went to investigate, they found themselves
in a living nightmare.
00:00:46
-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
00:00:51
when he saw the body. -Without detection,
31-year-old Jeffrey Dahmer had killed 17 young men
across a 13-year period.
00:01:00
-He hasn't got the same level
of repulsion and shock at dead bodies or mutilated
bodies that most of us have.
00:01:08
It was just another aspect
of his life. -Jeffrey Dahmer had etched
his name in history
00:01:14
as one of the world's
most evil killers. ♪♪ ♪♪ The name Jeffrey Dahmer
has become synonymous with evil.
00:01:41
Between 1978 and 1991 he killed
17 young men and boys by drugging them
before strangling them to death.
00:01:51
As the revelations
of the murders came to light, it was the behavior of Dahmer
once he'd killed his victims
00:01:57
that really stunned the world with stories of necrophilia
and cannibalism. The first journalist to arrive
at the crime scene
00:02:06
was Anne E. Schwartz. -It wasn't a gory crime scene. It was really quite antiseptic.
00:02:12
It was a very simple one-bedroom
with a kitchen and a living room. And it looked like a regular
single guy lived there.
00:02:21
You know some dishes
in the sink, but by and large, this was not
some chamber of horrors
00:02:27
like people will describe it. Certainly, not at first look. Once detectives and officers
started searching further,
00:02:35
that's when they found out
the actual horror was in that apartment. -The story of this
macabre killer begins 30 years
00:02:44
before his arrest. Jeffrey Dahmer was born
in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on May the 21st, 1960.
00:02:53
The family moved to Iowa
before settling in Ohio in 1966. -He lived with these parents
who were constantly,
00:03:03
constantly as he put it
"at each other's throats." You know, his mother
appeared to have been
00:03:09
this raging bundle
of neurotic behavior. Parents were constantly
fighting and screaming.
00:03:17
You know, Dahmer himself
evidently throughout much of his early life was completely, completely
ignored by both of them.
00:03:25
They were so caught up in
their own psychological turmoil. -Jeffrey Dahmer never really
made close social links
00:03:34
with any of his peers. He was a little bit odd. And if you speak to his
school friends at the time,
00:03:41
he didn't seem to have a lot
of empathy for other children. So when children would fall over
in the playground
00:03:47
or get hurt or cry, he didn't appear
to be affected by that and would sometimes
laugh at them.
00:03:53
So something wasn't quite right
with a young Jeffrey Dahmer. -Feeling ostracized
by his family and classmates,
00:04:02
Dahmer spends a lot of time
playing alone in the woods surrounding his Ohio home.
00:04:07
-Well, he had a really
morbid curiosity with death from quite a young age. And this started with a fairly
innocent insect collection,
00:04:15
and he would keep the bodies
of insects inside jars full of chemicals. This soon progressed.
00:04:21
He would go fishing,
and he was interested in what the fish
looked like on the inside,
00:04:26
so he would chop up the fish
to have a look at this. -Dahmer took his fish
and cut it open.
00:04:32
Was fascinated with
the inside of the fish, and one of his little
friends asked him,
00:04:39
"Jeffrey, why do you... what are you doing?" And he said, "Just look at it."
00:04:45
-You know,
and this escalates to the point that he's apparently
killing stray dogs
00:04:52
and decapitating them. -One of the young boys
in the neighborhood was walking in the woods
behind Dahmer's house
00:05:00
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.
00:05:07
-So, there's some early interest
in animal anatomy that blossoms into this
very, very dark obsession,
00:05:18
and then somehow becomes tangled
up with his own sexuality. -Dahmer continued to struggle
to fit in at high school
00:05:27
and turned to alcohol
from a young age. -Well, Dahmer started drinking
when he was at school,
00:05:33
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.
00:05:39
He had scotch whiskey in it. So this was quite a disturbing
behavior for a teenager.
00:05:45
-There's a thought that
in hindsight you ask why more people
didn't try to intervene.
00:05:51
You've got a kid
coming drunk to school. But back in the '70s when Dahmer's coming
to school intoxicated,
00:05:58
nobody thinks, "Gee, we better
make sure we take care of this because what if he turns out
to be a serial killer?"
00:06:06
-In the summer of 1978 Dahmer's
parents finally divorced. -The breakdown of Jeffrey
Dahmer's parent's marriage
00:06:14
was quite a tough time for him. His parents were
at each other's throats. It was not an amicable
divorce at all.
00:06:20
And each of them was forcing him
to side with them, so he felt very much torn
between his parents.
00:06:26
So this was a real source
of conflict for him. And I think at this time
children often,
00:06:32
who have these experiences,
will retreat into themselves. They will preoccupy themselves
with things
00:06:37
that they're interested in and will lose themselves
in their own fantasy world.
00:06:42
And I think that's very much
what happened with Dahmer. -Having just recently
graduated from high school,
00:06:47
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,
00:06:56
and his father
was living in a hotel. So he's alone,
and he's ruminating,
00:07:01
and he's fantasizing, and things are going to
take a turn for the worse quite soon after this.
00:07:08
-On June the 18th, 1978,
Dahmer's fantasy world collided with the real one
when he pulled over to pick
00:07:16
a 19-year-old hitchhiker
called Steven Hicks. -Dahmer picked him up
and invited him back
00:07:23
to his house
to have some drinks, and I guess maybe
smoke some dope. -They were in the basement
of his parents' home.
00:07:30
They had had sex. And then Steven Hicks
wanted to leave, and that was when Dahmer just
wanted so badly to have company.
00:07:40
Sounds like such
a textbook psychological thing. You know, abandonment syndrome,
but this was at the heart
00:07:46
of what made him
so needy for company. -And then when the guy said
he wanted to leave,
00:07:52
Dahmer clubbed him on the back
of the head with a barbell and then strangled him.
00:07:57
Then, ultimately, disposed of
the body, removed all the flesh, and eventually
dissolved it in acid
00:08:06
and pulverized the bones
with a sledgehammer. -This is a really, really
brutal crime.
00:08:12
And he disposes
of the body parts in the woods behind his house, and that's already symbolic
place for Jeffrey Dahmer
00:08:18
'cause this is a place where
he's dismembered animals before, where he's displayed
mutilated dogs on tree trunks.
00:08:25
So we're seeing that this place
is special to him. -Dahmer had experienced taking
the life of another human
00:08:32
for the first time. ♪♪ -I think that the first murder is a real milestone
for Jeffrey Dahmer.
00:08:41
So he knows now
that he's capable of this. He knows that he's capable
of taking someone else's life,
00:08:47
so it's not just
a fantasy anymore. It's now a reality. He's gone from harming animals
to harming people.
00:08:53
And he's not gonna stop. -He's not desperate,
but he becomes accustomed to it.
00:08:59
He becomes ready to kill again,
and just kill and kill and kill and kill
until he gets caught.
00:09:07
-But it wasn't until
13 years later in August 1991 that Dahmer was finally
apprehended after one
00:09:14
of his potential victims escaped
from his Milwaukee apartment. Once in custody Dahmer
confessed to killing
00:09:21
17 young men and boys. The man whose job it was to
prosecute the relentless killer
00:09:28
was Milwaukee District Attorney,
Mike McCann. -The word evil
doesn't come up very often.
00:09:33
It just doesn't.
Guilty. Not guilty. Did he do it?
Didn't he do it? Culpability, yes.
00:09:38
But not often evil because evil
is almost a moral issue. That word came up with Dahmer.
00:09:43
You couldn't help see
what he did. Innocent people, strangers, to take for
a couple of hours of sex
00:09:49
to take a human being's life. That's so evil. So evil. -Dahmer's case made headlines
across the world
00:09:57
after the details of his
grizzly confession were leaked. -A<i> New York Times</i> reporter
00:10:02
compromised the integrity
of a worker at our building and got a copy
of the confession.
00:10:06
It was a detailed
38-page confession. So the details of
the gory things he had done,
00:10:11
again, captured
people's interest. So that's how it rapidly became
a matter of intense interest.
00:10:18
-The confession
outlined the life of a deranged serial killer. After murdering Steven Hicks and
desecrating his body in 1978,
00:10:28
Dahmer didn't kill again
for 9 years. After dropping out
of Ohio State University
00:10:34
after just one semester, he was spending
most of his days drinking until his father urged him
to enlist in the U.S. Army.
00:10:43
-The alcohol continued as
a theme when he joined the army, and he moved to Germany.
00:10:49
One of his former colleagues
remembers him just sitting in his room
drinking gin all day long,
00:10:54
not even leaving
his room to eat. So there was
a real dependency on alcohol. -In 1981, 21-year-old Dahmer
00:11:03
was discharged from the army
after his drinking rendered him
incapable of serving.
00:11:10
After spending a month sleeping
rough on the beaches of Florida, he returned to Ohio.
00:11:16
But his father had had enough
and shipped him off to start a new life
in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
00:11:22
-He was sent to live
with his grandmother, who is the one adult
apparently he had,
00:11:26
you know, something approaching
a normal affection for. It was there he really embarked
on this career of horror.
00:11:35
-By 1986 Dahmer had been
arrested a couple of times for exposing himself in public,
00:11:41
once in front
of a group of children. The hopeless alcoholic
had managed to find work
00:11:48
at a local chocolate factory
in Milwaukee and was frequenting
gay bars and bathhouses.
00:11:54
-I think being homosexual
affected Dahmer in two ways. Firstly, it was
a source of shame for him
00:12:00
because it was quite
a stigmatized social identity at the time. But also it enabled him
an opportunity
00:12:07
when it came to
his killing behavior. So being homosexual
at this time, it was something
that happened in the shadows.
00:12:14
It was something that
happened underground, and this was the ideal place for
someone like him to go hunting.
00:12:19
-It was this exposure
to the gay scene that seemed to reawaken the dark
sexual urges inside of him.
00:12:26
And by September 1987,
over 9 years since the murder of Steven Hick, Jeffrey Dahmer
was ready to kill again.
00:12:35
-His idea was to drug people
and keep them with him so that they wouldn't
answer back to him,
00:12:42
they wouldn't argue with him,
they wouldn't fight him. They would stay with him.
00:12:45
That's what he wanted. He wanted companionship. So, he would go to the bars
on Milwaukee's near south side,
00:12:52
and he would have conversations
with people in these bars. And when he was talking
to these people,
00:12:57
these perspective victims,
he would say, "So what was it like
when you came out?
00:13:03
How is your family about it?" So if your response was,
"Oh, my family has been great.
00:13:08
They're so supportive. I'm very close to my parents." That person wasn't
gonna be a victim.
00:13:14
But if the person answered, "My parents aren't
speaking to me anymore. I'm estranged from my family.
00:13:20
I'm kind of on my own now." That was the perfect victim
for Jeffrey Dahmer
00:13:25
because he wanted to choose
people who wouldn't be missed. -Between September 1987 and
March 1988, Dahmer killed 3 men.
00:13:36
The youngest a 14-year-old boy who he paid to pose
for nude photographs before drugging
and strangling him to death.
00:13:45
He would dissolve
the bodies in acid. -He cleverly developed
a program to destroy the bodies,
00:13:50
get rid of the bodies,
left no evidence. This was a very clever killer. Very clever killer.
00:13:56
-Dahmer would dissolve
his victims, presumably to make it easier
to dispose of them.
00:14:02
Dissolving tissue in chemicals
can certainly interfere with identifying it
as human tissue.
00:14:08
It'll interfere with DNA. You're really left predominately
with skeletal remains
00:14:13
to try and identify features
such as age, sex, race. -Dahmer murdered
two of the victims
00:14:20
at his grandmother's house
where he was living. -His grandmother became aware
00:14:24
that he was bringing these
young guys back to her house. I mean, she thought for gay sex.
00:14:31
Obviously, she had no inkling
of the atrocities he was committing
on their bodies,
00:14:37
although she was complaining
also about a foul odor that she noticed. -On September the 25th, 1988,
Dahmer moved into
00:14:45
his own apartment on
North 25th Street in Milwaukee and didn't wait long
before attacking again.
00:14:53
The very next day,
September the 26th, he enticed a 13-year-old boy
back to his home
00:14:59
and drugged him. -One of the methods that Dahmer
used to subdue his victims was to use benzodiazepine.
00:15:06
It's the same family
of drugs as Valium. He put them in drinks. That would make you
woozy, sleepy,
00:15:14
and then eventually
go unconscious. -Dahmer sexually assaulted
the boy, but somehow, possibly due
to Dahmer passing out drunk,
00:15:23
the 13-year-old escaped
and went to the police. In January 1989, he was
convicted of sexual assault,
00:15:32
but the sentencing was delayed
until May, during which time
an unrelenting Dahmer,
00:15:38
unbeknownst to the authorities,
managed to claim a fifth victim. The 29-year-old
served 10 months in prison,
00:15:46
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.
00:15:57
The scale and the nature
of his behavior became all the more grotesque. So he wasn't just killing
people, dismembering them,
00:16:05
and then disposing
of their bodies, he started to do some
really bizarre things.
00:16:11
-He was in the process
of constructing some hideously
diabolical shrine in his bedroom
00:16:21
out of the skulls and skeletons
of some of his victims. It's almost as though
some bizarre archaic thing
00:16:30
had broken through and he was
performing or creating some sort of ancient
human sacrificial temple
00:16:43
in this little
Milwaukee apartment. -In 1990, Dahmer killed
another four young men.
00:16:51
His M.O. was becoming
more and more polished. -He would offer
his victims money to go back
00:16:58
to his apartment with him to take pictures,
nude photographs of them. And then perhaps to have sex.
00:17:06
Every single one of his victims
went with him willingly. He would offer them a drink,
00:17:12
and once he found out
what they wanted to drink, he kept a lot of things on hand,
different kinds of alcohol,
00:17:19
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.
00:17:25
-They would pass out. He would then have sex with them
while they were passed out.
00:17:29
Do with them as he wished, but of course,
they couldn't do to him. Then as they approached
recovery, coming out of it,
00:17:34
he would strangle them to death. -It seemed as though Dahmer got
a thrill, not from the murder
00:17:39
but from the dead bodies
of his victims. -Dahmer liked necrophilia. He liked sex
with unconscious people.
00:17:46
He wasn't a slasher in the sense
that he took delight in killing. His purpose was sex
with these people,
00:17:52
company with these people. That's hard to believe. -He would commit necrophiliac
sex acts on the corpses,
00:18:00
dismember the corpses,
dissolve parts of the bodies in these vats of acid he had,
00:18:05
keep certain organs
in his refrigerator, some of which he would
actually cannibalize.
00:18:11
-Dahmer said that the
cannibalism that he engaged in was born out of a curiosity.
00:18:17
He wanted to find out, first of
all, what that would be like. He also said that there was
an element of wanting
00:18:24
to make these people
a part of him so they would be
with him forever. -Dahmer, from the beginning,
is driven
00:18:33
by this terror of being alone. He killed his first victim,
Steven Hicks when Hicks
00:18:40
said he had to go and Dahmer
didn't want to be alone. There's some desire, which is
part of normal sexuality.
00:18:46
You know you love somebody... Somebody will say, "I love you
so much I want to eat you up."
00:18:51
With normal people,
that's, obviously, metaphorical. But it does express some desire
to be so close to the person
00:19:00
that you want to
incorporate them into, you want to merge with them. With somebody like Dahmer
that becomes
00:19:06
this very literal horror. -And the horror
only became worse when Dahmer began experimenting
with his semi-conscious victims.
00:19:16
-He would drill holes
in their skulls and put muriatic acid
inside to see if he could get them
to a zombie state
00:19:24
so that he could keep them
alive and subservient to him. -It's essentially
an amateur version
00:19:33
of attempting to perform
a lobectomy or a lobotomy, but it would be
an incredibly unpleasant
00:19:38
and damaging thing to do
to someone's brain. If you affect the frontal lobes,
you will affect personality,
00:19:45
potentially make
somebody docile. If he's less accurate, you could
essentially cause a stroke
00:19:50
that could cause paralysis,
speech problems. It really very much depends
on which part of the brain
00:19:56
is actually damaged. -But, of course,
that didn't work, and his victims died
one after another.
00:20:04
Hearing about that is
the stuff of horror movies, and the fact that it was
happening in a city
00:20:13
where we were known for
manufacturing and beer and a very good
Midwestern work ethic,
00:20:22
tight families, this isn't the
kind of thing that happens here. -In May 1991, 31-year-old
Jeffrey Dahmer
00:20:31
was in his killing prime. He'd already murdered 11 men
and had begun collecting
00:20:37
bones and skulls
from his victims and cannibalizing their organs. What would've been a nightmare
for most was a fantasy for him,
00:20:47
and he carefully went
about his killings under the radar of the police
and the people of Milwaukee.
00:20:54
-Jeffrey Dahmer had a job
in a local chocolate factory. And I think for him
it enabled him
00:20:59
to maintain a façade
of normality. He was just an average Joe, a regular guy
who went to work every day.
00:21:06
-I think he killed so
many people without being caught because of the fact that
he looked like everyone else.
00:21:12
He did what successful
serial killers do. He blended. They blend in with society.
00:21:19
Now he was a Caucasian male living in a predominantly
African-American neighborhood,
00:21:24
but he didn't talk to anybody,
bother anybody. He was barely someone
people noticed.
00:21:31
Barely noticed. He also was targeting
people who he found out might not be missed.
00:21:40
-For most people,
if they were to commit the type of acts
that Jeffrey Dahmer did,
00:21:44
they would no way be able
to function normally, but Jeffrey Dahmer
was not most people.
00:21:50
He hasn't got the same level
of repulsion and shock at dead bodies or mutilated
bodies that most of us have.
00:21:57
It was just another aspect
of his life. -It was not known that we had a
serial slayer loose in our city.
00:22:03
We did not know because
he was so cleverly disposing of the bodies. The families were reporting
the sons were missing,
00:22:09
but the police
were not finding bodies. And not infrequently young men
something happens in their life,
00:22:13
they just up and leave town. It happens enough that
the police don't get worried.
00:22:17
If it's a woman, they'll
immediately commit resources to investigate,
but a young man they don't.
00:22:22
-But on May the 26th, 1991, Dahmer came agonizingly
close to capture after an encounter
with a 14-year-old boy.
00:22:32
-Dahmer had taken
Konerak Sinthasomphone, a young Asian male
who he found attractive.
00:22:38
He met him in the mall. Offered him money
to go back to his apartment. He went, and he began
to work the ritual.
00:22:47
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.
00:22:58
He took a break.
He ran out to get more beer. While he was gone, Konerak ran
out of the apartment.
00:23:05
He was naked.
He was completely dazed. And he's running up the alley next to Dahmer's
apartment building.
00:23:11
A woman in another apartment
building saw him running up the alley and said, "There's a boy
running up the alley.
00:23:20
Something's going on." And then these women
call the police. -And then Dahmer appeared.
00:23:26
Again, this is another
remarkable characteristic of these psychopaths
was that they have an ability
00:23:34
to maintain a kind of coolness under the most extraordinarily
high-pressured circumstances.
00:23:44
-So he walked up
to the officers. "Good evening, officers."
He's very polite.
00:23:48
He's sober. And he said,
"This is my boyfriend. He came to stay with me.
00:23:55
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."
00:24:02
And the officers said,
"Okay, well, just to make sure let's all walk back up
to the apartment together."
00:24:10
-The cops went in
and looked around. They even peeked
into the bedroom where there was
a decomposing corpse
00:24:15
of one of Dahmer's
previous victims, but they took such
a cursory look at it
00:24:19
that they didn't even notice it. -Assuming the couple
were having a lover's tiff,
00:24:24
the two police officers left Konarek alone with Dahmer in the apartment building.
00:24:30
And in the early hours
of the morning, he murdered the 14-year-old boy. An opportunity to catch
the killer had been missed.
00:24:38
-I think
that really speaks volumes about the attitudes
of the police at the time in terms
of ethnic minorities,
00:24:44
in terms of young people,
in terms of the gay community. And that was another victim
00:24:49
that could potentially
have been saved. So there's this terrible thing
going on behind closed doors,
00:24:56
and people just
aren't seeing it. People aren't wanting to see it. Even the police
are not joining up the dots
00:25:03
and finding out
what's really going on, so this is allowed to just
bubble away and get worse.
00:25:08
-After evading capture,
Dahmer was free to continue. -There was two sides really
to Dahmer's pleasure
00:25:15
that he got from
killing his victims. So he was a sadist
who enjoys the pain and suffering of other people.
00:25:22
And with sadist that thrill ends
when the victim dies. But Dahmer was also something
of a necrophiliac
00:25:28
who as interested
in having corpses around and doing things
with those corpses. And that means that the thrill
starts with death.
00:25:36
So he has this continuous
fulfillment going on. And he's always
fully in control,
00:25:41
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
00:25:47
that he has all this knowledge
about what he's done and nobody else quite knows
what he's up to.
00:25:53
-By July 1991, Dahmer's desire
to kill had become insatiable. In just 16 days,
he murdered four more men
00:26:02
bringing his total
number of victims to 17. But Dahmer's reign of terror
was about to come to an end.
00:26:10
On July the 22nd, he met a man
called Tracy Edwards. -While they were together
in the apartment,
00:26:18
Dahmer threw a handcuff on him. This was now the beginning
of his ritual. Dahmer had taken photographs
of his victims
00:26:26
in various stages
of dismemberment. Polaroids. And those were sitting on
the dresser inside the bedroom.
00:26:32
They weren't sitting out
in the main living room, but there was some speculation
00:26:37
that Tracy Edwards
had perhaps seen that. And he ran out of the apartment
in his underwear.
00:26:44
Ran down the street. And when he saw the police car, Tracy Edwards has said
his intention
00:26:51
was just to get
the handcuff off. That's all he wanted. He stopped these cops to say,
00:26:55
"Hey, can you just
get this off of me?" So he stopped, and the officers
start talking to him
00:27:01
about what he saw. And then they said, "Well, we
should probably check this out.
00:27:06
Let's all go back
to the apartment." Dahmer answered,
and the minute he saw
00:27:11
that it was the police he tried
to shut the door on them. The police pushed
the door open a bit.
00:27:16
They started
struggling with him, and then finally
he just gave in. And that was when Dahmer
was officially finished.
00:27:26
He was finished killing, and
he knew that he was finished. -The police officers
immediately arrested Dahmer
00:27:33
after finding the remains
of some of his victims in his apartment. -They saw the body parts
and then one of the officers
00:27:39
said he heard a scream. Then he realized later
he was the one who screamed when he saw the body,
00:27:43
so they knew they were dealing
with a very serious offense. Dahmer did not resist.
00:27:47
A little slight resistance, but
Dahmer was taken into custody, and the investigation
was initiated.
00:27:51
-What followed was
an incredible media circus on Dahmer's doorstep
as unbelievable stories
00:27:57
about what was
being uncovered inside his apartment were revealed. -It was so fantastical that you
think people are making it up
00:28:07
when they're telling you
the details. But as it turned out,
they weren't making it up.
00:28:12
All of the atrocities
that we heard about that had happened in that
apartment really did happen.
00:28:17
-The medical examiner
who was called to the scene didn't know what was happening.
00:28:21
It was so strange.
There was a freezer there. Body parts in the freezer. Called in a Hazmat crew.
00:28:26
Well, our television stations
cover the police radio. When they hear that,
they dispatch crews there.
00:28:30
And the first day
it was local television. Second day, national television. By the third day,
it was international television.
00:28:36
-They were able
to show video of these items coming out of the front door
of this apartment building.
00:28:44
That's not usual
at a crime scene. We saw a large blue barrel
in which we know
00:28:48
that Jeffrey Dahmer was trying
to dissolve body parts. It had a refrigerator
that was holding skulls
00:28:55
and also it was
holding body parts. So these are coming down
the stairs, and people were just
incredulous to watch it.
00:29:05
When I wrote the story for the
<i> Milwaukee Journal</i> that morning,
00:29:08
and it was released
in the paper about 8:00, I think, in the morning. Normally, we were
an afternoon paper,
00:29:17
but we went out early with it because it was
such an incredible story. -But no one quite knew
the enormity of the crimes
00:29:24
until Dahmer confessed
to detectives at the local police station. -When I've spoken
to the detectives
00:29:30
that were working this case, they have said this was
not a great whodunit. This would've been a whodunit
if Jeffrey Dahmer
00:29:39
hadn't confessed to everything. -When Dahmer was arrested
there were already
00:29:43
a number of bodies
in his quarters. He gave full confessions
to the police detailing his involvement
in 16 separate slayings.
00:29:51
Most of the time he did not know
the name of the victims. -When Dahmer remembered a crime
00:29:57
that he might not have shared
with the detectives, he would have the jail call them
00:30:02
whether it was
the middle of the night or the middle
of the day and say, "I remembered something else.
Please, come over."
00:30:08
Dahmer had said
he wanted to make sure that he didn't forget anything because he wanted those
families to have closure.
00:30:15
I'm not sure about that. That may be giving
Jeffrey Dahmer more credit than he is deserved,
00:30:23
but he did claim
to want to try and remember so that all of those families
would have closure.
00:30:30
-One of the interesting
things about Dahmer that does differentiate him
from other killers of his breed
00:30:36
is that he did seem
to be capable of a certain degree of remorse, and certainly recognized
the extent of his depravity.
00:30:45
-Although he confessed
to killing 16 people in the state of Wisconsin, Dahmer was first charged
with four counts of murder
00:30:53
on the 25th of July, 1991, and a further 11 counts
were added in August. The following month,
investigators in Ohio
00:31:02
found teeth and bone fragments
belonging to Steven Hicks in the woods
near Dahmer's family home.
00:31:09
A preliminary hearing
was set for January 1992. His legal team were going
to argue that the killings
00:31:16
were the work of a madman. -The issue wasn't going to be
did he do it or not.
00:31:20
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
00:31:25
he could induce the jury
to believe that he was insane. Under those circumstances,
00:31:29
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.
00:31:35
He was drinking their blood,
eating parts of their body. He must've been crazy."
00:31:40
It sounds like
he's crazy to say that, but that's not what
the insanity rule is.
00:31:44
-The city wanted justice. They wanted to see the man
the press were calling The Milwaukee Cannibal
locked away in prison
00:31:52
for the horrific crimes
he had committed. The trial of Jeffrey Dahmer would be one of the biggest
in the history
00:32:00
of not just Wisconsin
but the entire U.S.A. -My reaction to it
then was the same reaction
00:32:08
I think that everybody
who lived in Milwaukee had when they heard
about the case.
00:32:14
No, it can't be. This is Milwaukee. Those kinds of things
don't happen here.
00:32:18
This is the Midwest. This is a very nice place. -The trial of Jeffrey Dahmer
began on
00:32:27
the 30th of January, 1992. Anne had a front row seat. -The courtroom was
an odd spectacle
00:32:35
because Court TV was still new in the game
back then. And the idea that you would
come to court
00:32:46
and you'd be on television
was still kind of new to people. It was the kind of media
attention to a trial
00:32:54
that Milwaukee hadn't seen in
a very, very long time if ever. I can remember so clearly
the first time Jeffrey Dahmer's
00:33:02
initial appearance
in court when he walked in. I think the real fear
that people had
00:33:08
when they first
saw Jeffrey Dahmer was that he looked
like everybody else. He was a good-looking young man,
00:33:16
and he is not the person
that you would look at and say, "Stay away from that guy."
00:33:22
-It would be up to
Milwaukee D.A., Mike McCann, to prove that Dahmer was sane
and responsible for his actions.
00:33:31
-Guilty wasn't going
to be an issue, but we wanted the jury
to know enough about the facts
00:33:35
and so did the defense to say, "All right, what really happened
here?" How atrocious was it?
00:33:38
How planned was it?
How was he behaving? What skills were involved?
He couldn't control himself.
00:33:44
-It was a lot to take in because the testimony
was so graphic. We all knew Mike McCann.
00:33:52
He was a religious man. And we've seen him in court. He was this good attorney.
00:34:01
But the kinds of things
that he was reciting out of the criminal complaint and the confession
were unheard of.
00:34:08
These things were unheard of. And they happened
right here in our city. -He did it quietly.
00:34:15
He concealed the bodies. Cleverly concealed.
Destroyed the bodies. Planned it well.
Laid in the equipment.
00:34:20
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
00:34:27
that it seemed that he was sane, and that's what we wanted
to get across to the jury.
00:34:31
-Mike employs the help of psychiatry expert
Dr. Phillip Resnick. -The more bizarre the crimes,
00:34:38
such as involving cannibalism,
the more the lay public wants to think that guy
had to be out of his mind.
00:34:46
But in looking at it from
the actual strict definition of insanity, generally,
the diseases
00:34:53
of paraphilias like necrophilia where someone has trouble
controlling themselves
00:34:59
are not viewed
for the most part as diseases
which qualify for insanity because of the social
implications.
00:35:09
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,
00:35:19
the majority of necrophiliacs
will select a setting where they can accomplish this
without homicide.
00:35:27
So some become assistants
in morgues or assistants in pathology labs where they may have
access to dead victims.
00:35:37
Others will actually dissenter
bodies after they're buried so that one does not
have to actually kill
00:35:46
to exercise
the necrophiliac impulse, and that's one
of the reasons I felt that he didn't
qualify for insanity.
00:35:53
-The trial was
essentially a debate between specialtist
psychiatrists about the mental state of Dahmer
00:36:00
who sat watching the whole thing
play out over two weeks. -Dahmer was very calm in court.
00:36:06
When you talk are you assessing
a person by what you see? No one studying him
would believe he was insane.
00:36:12
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.
00:36:21
-This was a case
to tell the world that I did what I did
not for reasons of hate.
00:36:26
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
00:36:36
on Dahmer's sanity. -Someone like Dahmer
comes along who has never been in a psychiatric hospital
and alleges insanity.
00:36:45
Juries are gonna
be skeptical of it. And then when it's all
in the form of a sexual drive
00:36:52
rather than
a traditional psychosis where someone's out
of touch with reality,
00:36:58
and he's taken careful steps
to cover his tracks, it's very difficult
to succeed with insanity
00:37:03
with that type of case. -Jeffrey Dahmer was ruled
to be sane by the jury. On February 17, 1992,
Judge Lawrence Gram
00:37:13
sentenced him
to life imprisonment for each of the
15 counts against him. -When the verdict
was announced in court,
00:37:20
there was a great shout
from the gallery, especially from
the victims' families.
00:37:26
They cried. -I was pleased in the sense,
happy, not exuberant, but happy that this danger
was removed from our community,
00:37:33
that the jury had
not been hoodwinked, that the jury realized
this chap was not insane.
00:37:38
-The state of Wisconsin
does not have the death penalty, but Dahmer would have to serve
a minimum of 936 years.
00:37:46
He was immediately sent
to the Columbia Correctional Institute in Portage. Three months later,
on the 1st of May, 1992 in Ohio,
00:37:55
Dahmer was also found guilty of
murdering Steven Hicks in 1978 and given yet another
life sentence.
00:38:03
-Dahmer always said that
he was compelled to kill. That they were urges. He said, "I had urges
that I could not control."
00:38:11
He also said that even
though he was in prison, he was relieved
that the killing was done.
00:38:20
He still had the urges. They didn't go away. He was just in a place
where he couldn't act on them.
00:38:28
-Locked away
for the rest of his life, Dahmer found comfort
in the Bible. And by 1994,
he decided to get baptized.
00:38:37
The prison called on
local minister Roy Ratcliff. -So I was quite surprised
to be escorted
00:38:43
to a little room and left alone, and then Jeff come to the room,
and he closes the door.
00:38:49
And then there's he and I
sitting together across the table,
and I'm thinking for a moment,
00:38:55
"Wow, I'm in a room with a man
who has killed several people." So, yeah that was
a little bit disconcerting,
00:39:00
but I was there for a purpose
and for a reason, so I wanted to find out
what was going on
00:39:04
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.
00:39:11
Jeff was a normal guy. Courteous,
very respectful to me. When we shook hands, I noticed
his hands were really small.
00:39:18
Looking at his hands
and thinking, "Wow, these are the hands
that strangled people.
00:39:22
These are the hands
that murder people. These are the hands
that dismembered people."
00:39:25
-On May the 10th, 1994, the same day
that notorious serial killer John Wayne Gacy was executed,
00:39:34
Jeffrey Dahmer was baptized
in a prison bathtub. -Then the door opens,
and I walk into the room,
00:39:40
and Jeff had already
crawled into the tub. And the only thing
that was above the water
00:39:44
was just simply his head. And so said, "I baptize you
in the name of the Father, Son,
00:39:47
and the Holy Spirit for
the forgiveness of your sins," and pushed his head down under.
00:39:51
And then when he came back up
I said something I often say to people when I baptize them.
00:39:55
I said,
"Welcome to the family of God." He said,
"Well, thank you very much."
00:39:59
-But just six months
after his baptism, on November the 28th, 1994, Dahmer and another convicted
murderer, Jesse Anderson,
00:40:09
were attacked and killed
by a fellow inmate. -Christopher Scarver
took a barbell,
00:40:16
went into the bathroom, and beat both Jeffrey Dahmer
and Jesse Anderson to death.
00:40:21
There were a number of people who felt that Jeffrey Dahmer
got exactly what he deserved.
00:40:27
When I called his mother,
she said, "Well, now everybody
got what they want.
00:40:31
The monster is dead." And then she said,
"And he was my son. He was my boy."
00:40:37
-It was a terrible, terrible
death in that sense there. But for some people,
it was a relief.
00:40:42
They were glad because
all they could think about are the crimes
he committed. They're not thinking about
where I'm thinking about
00:40:46
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.
00:40:52
-I mean, some people see
some sort of poetic symmetry in the fact that
Dahmer's first murder
00:40:59
was the one
in which he bludgeoned the teenage hitchhiker,
Steven Hicks, to death with a barbell,
00:41:06
and that he himself died
in a very, very similar way. -The apartment
on North 25th Street
00:41:13
that housed Dahmer's macabre
collection of victims' remains, and where 12 young men
lost their lives,
00:41:20
was demolished in November 1992. But Dahmer's twisted legacy
has been impossible to wipe out.
00:41:28
He has become one of the most
infamous serial killers in the world. -I think of Dahmer as
sort of like the flip side
00:41:35
of somebody like Mozart. How do you account for somebody
creating that kind of music?
00:41:41
Ultimately, how do you
account for somebody who is luring young men
to his apartment
00:41:47
and drilling holes
in their skull and injecting brains
with muriatic acid to turn them into zombies?
00:41:53
There's something there
ultimately inexplicable. -Jeffrey Dahmer committed
some of the most evil acts
00:42:00
that I have ever written about
or heard about or seen on a television show
because they were real.
00:42:07
I don't know
if he was sane or insane because that's not my training
to figure that out,
00:42:15
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
00:42:26
in a perverse horror movie. He was a man
who killed to satisfy his unhealthy
sexual perversions.
00:42:33
Keeping parts of his
victims' skeletons and trophies and eating their organs.
00:42:38
Jeffrey Dahmer truly
is the stuff of nightmares, and unquestionably one of
the world's most evil killers.
00:42:48
♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪