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World's Most Evil Killers S01E02
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CreativityTranscript
00:00Shortly before midnight on July the 22nd, 1991, two Milwaukee police officers were flagged
00:14down in their patrol car by a man with a pair of handcuffs dangling from one wrist.
00:21The police had no idea that this bizarre encounter would lead to the arrest of one of the most
00:27prolific serial killers in U.S. history.
00:31That night, people were afraid.
00:34People were whispering under their breaths, you know, it was the devil, it was the devil.
00:38The man had escaped from a small one-bedroom apartment on North 25th Street.
00:44Where the officers went to investigate, they found themselves in a living nightmare.
00:49They saw the body parts and then one of the officers said he heard a scream, then he realized
00:52later he was the one who screamed when he saw the body.
00:55Without detection, 31-year-old Geoffrey Dahmer had killed 17 young men across a 13-year period.
01:03He hasn't got the same level of repulsion and shock at dead bodies or mutilated bodies that
01:09most of us have.
01:10It was just another aspect of his life.
01:13Geoffrey Dahmer had etched his name in history as one of the world's most evil killers.
01:19The name Geoffrey Dahmer has become synonymous with evil.
01:43Between 1978 and 1991, he killed 17 young men and boys by drugging them before strangling them to death.
01:52As the revelations of the murders came to light, it was the behavior of Dahmer once he'd killed his victims
02:00that really stunned the world, with stories of necrophilia and cannibalism.
02:06The first journalist to arrive at the crime scene was Annie Schwartz.
02:10It wasn't a gory crime scene. It was really quite antiseptic.
02:15It was a very simple one bedroom with a kitchen and a living room and it looked like a regular single guy lived there.
02:23There's some dishes in this thing, but by and large, this was not some chamber of horrors like people, you know, will describe it.
02:31Certainly not at first look.
02:32Once detectives and officers started searching further, that's when they found out the actual horror was in that apartment.
02:40The story of this macabre killer begins 30 years before his arrest.
02:49Geoffrey Dahmer was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on May the 21st, 1960.
02:55The family moved to Iowa before settling in Ohio in 1966.
03:00He lived with these parents who were constantly, constantly, as he put it, at each other's throats.
03:08You know, his mother appeared to have been, you know, this raging bundle of neurotic behavior.
03:15The parents were constantly fighting and screaming.
03:19And, you know, Dahmer himself evidently throughout much of his early life was completely, completely ignored by both of them.
03:27We're so caught up in their own psychological turmoil.
03:34Geoffrey Dahmer never really made close social links with any of his peers.
03:39He was a little bit odd.
03:40And if you speak to his school friends at the time, he didn't seem to have a lot of empathy for other children.
03:47So when children would fall over in the playground or get hurt or cry,
03:51he didn't appear to be affected by that and would sometimes laugh at them.
03:55So something wasn't quite right with a young Geoffrey Dahmer.
04:00Feeling ostracized by his family and classmates,
04:04Dahmer spent a lot of time playing alone in the woods surrounding his Ohio home.
04:10Well, he had a really morbid curiosity with death from quite a young age.
04:14And this started with a fairly innocent insect collection.
04:17And he would keep the bodies of insects inside jars full of chemicals.
04:22This soon progressed.
04:24He would go fishing.
04:25And he was interested in what the fish looked like on the inside.
04:28So he would chop up the fish to have a look at this.
04:32Dahmer took his fish and cut it open.
04:35He was fascinated with the inside of the fish.
04:38And one of his little friends asked him,
04:41Jeffrey, why do you, why do you, what are you doing?
04:45And he said, just look at it.
04:48You know, and this, you know, escalates, you know, to the point that it's, you know,
04:52he's apparently killing stray dogs and, you know, decapitating them.
04:57One of the young boys in the neighborhood was walking in the woods behind Dahmer's house
05:02when Dahmer was a teenager.
05:04And he came across the body of a dead dog and it was mutilated and it was nailed to a tree.
05:09So there's some early interest in animal anatomy that blossoms into this very, very dark obsession
05:20and then somehow becomes tangled up with his own sexuality.
05:25Dahmer continued to struggle to fit in at high school and turned to alcohol from a young age.
05:32Well, Dahmer started drinking when he was at school and one of his former classmates remembered
05:37that he used to come in with a cup and he didn't have tea or coffee in this cup.
05:41He had scotch whiskey in it. So this was quite a disturbing behavior for a teenager.
05:46There's a thought that in hindsight, you ask why more people didn't try to intervene.
05:53You've got a kid coming drunk to school.
05:56But back in the 70s when Dahmer's coming to school intoxicated, nobody thinks,
06:01gee, we better make sure we take care of this because what if he turns out to be a serial killer?
06:09In the summer of 1978, Dahmer's parents finally divorced.
06:14The breakdown of Jeffrey Dahmer's parents' marriage was quite a tough time for him.
06:17His parents were at each other's throats. It was not an amicable divorce at all and each of them was
06:23forcing him to side with them. So he felt very much torn between his parents. So this was a real
06:30source of conflict for him. And I think at this time, children often who have these experiences
06:36will retreat into themselves. They will preoccupy themselves with things that they're interested in
06:41and will lose themselves in their own fantasy world and I think that's very much what happened with Dahmer.
06:46Having just recently graduated from high school, Dahmer soon had no one around him at all.
06:53Well, in 1978, Jeffrey Dahmer was 18. His mother had gone away with his younger brother
06:58and his father was living in a hotel. So he's alone and he's ruminating and he's fantasizing.
07:05And things are going to take her a turn for the worse quite soon after this.
07:11On June the 18th, 1978, Dahmer's fantasy world collided with the real one,
07:17when he pulled over to pick up a 19-year-old hitchhiker called Stephen Hicks.
07:22Dahmer picked him up and invited him back to his house to have some drinks and I guess maybe smoke some dope.
07:28They were in the basement of his parents' home. They had had sex and then Stephen Hicks wanted to leave.
07:38And that was when Dahmer just wanted so badly to have company.
07:43It sounds like such a textbook psychological thing, you know, abandonment syndrome,
07:47but this was at the heart of what made him so needy for company.
07:51And then when the guy said he wanted to leave, Dahmer clubbed him on the back of the head with a barbell
07:57and then strangled him, then ultimately disposed of the body, removed all the flesh
08:05and eventually dissolved it in acid and pulverized the bones with a sledgehammer.
08:12This is a really, really brutal crime and he disposes of the body parts in the woods behind his house.
08:18And that's a really symbolic place for Jeffrey Dahmer because this is a place where he's dismembered
08:23animals before where he's displayed mutilated dogs on tree trunks. So we're seeing that this place is special to him.
08:31Dahmer had experienced taking the life of another human for the first time.
08:35I think that the first murder is a real milestone for Jeffrey Dahmer. So he knows now that he's capable
08:46of this. He knows that he's capable of taking someone else's life. So it's not just a fantasy
08:51anymore. It's now a reality. He's gone from harming animals to harming people and he's not going to stop.
08:57He's not desperate, but he becomes accustomed to it. He becomes ready to kill again and just kill
09:05and kill and kill and kill until he gets caught. But it wasn't until 13 years later in August 1991,
09:14that Dahmer was finally apprehended after one of his potential victims escaped from his Milwaukee
09:20apartment. Once in custody, Dahmer confessed to killing 17 young men and boys. The man whose job
09:28it was to prosecute the relentless killer was Milwaukee District Attorney Mike McCann.
09:33The word evil doesn't come up very often. It just doesn't. Guilty, not guilty. Did he do it?
09:38Didn't he do it? Culpability, yes. But not often evil because evil is almost a moral issue. That word came
09:44up with Dahmer. You couldn't help see what he did. Innocent people, strangers, to take for a couple of
09:51hours of sex, to take a human being's life. That's so evil, so evil. Dahmer's case made headlines across
09:58the world after the details of his grisly confession were leaked. A New York Times reporter compromised
10:05the integrity of a worker at our building and got a copy of the confession. It was a detailed 38-page
10:10confession, so the details of the gory things he had done again captured people's interest.
10:16So that's how it rapidly became a matter of intense interest. The confession outlined the life of a
10:23deranged serial killer. After murdering Stephen Hicks and desecrating his body in 1978, Dahmer didn't
10:31kill again for nine years. After dropping out of Ohio State University after just one semester,
10:39he was spending most of his days drinking until his father urged him to enlist in the US Army.
10:46The alcohol continued as a theme when he joined the army and he moved to Germany. One of his former
10:52colleagues remembers him just sitting in his room drinking gin all day long, not even leaving his
10:58room to eat. So there was a real dependency on alcohol. In 1981, 21-year-old Dahmer was discharged from
11:07the army after his drinking rendered him incapable of serving. After spending a month sleeping rough
11:14on the beaches of Florida, he returned to Ohio. But his father had had enough and shipped him off to
11:21start a new life in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He was sent to live with his grandmother,
11:26who was the one adult. Apparently he had, you know, something approaching, you know, a normal affection for.
11:32I was there. He really embarked on this career of horror. By 1986, Dahmer had been arrested a couple
11:41of times for exposing himself in public, once in front of a group of children. The hopeless alcoholic had
11:49managed to find work at a local chocolate factory in Milwaukee and was frequenting gay bars and bath
11:56houses. I think being homosexual affected Dahmer in two ways. Firstly, it was a source of shame for him
12:03because it was quite a stigmatized social identity at the time. But also it enabled him an opportunity
12:09when it came to his killing behavior. So being homosexual at this time, it was something that happened in the
12:16shadows. It was something that happened underground and this was the ideal place for someone like him
12:20to go hunting. It was this exposure to the gay scene that seemed to reawaken the dark sexual urges
12:28inside of him. And by September 1987, over nine years since the murder of Stephen Hicks, Jeffrey Dahmer
12:35was ready to kill again. His idea was to drug people and keep them with him so that they wouldn't,
12:43they wouldn't answer back to him. They wouldn't argue with him. They wouldn't fight him. They would
12:47stay with him. That's what he wanted. He wanted companionship. So he would go to the bars on Milwaukee's
12:54near South Side and he would have conversations with people in these bars. And when he was talking
12:59to these people, these prospective victims, he would say, so what was it like when you came out?
13:06How was your family about it? So if your response was, oh, my family has been great,
13:11they're so supportive. I'm very close to my parents. That person wasn't going to be a victim.
13:16But if the person answered, my parents aren't speaking to me anymore. I'm estranged from my
13:22family. I'm kind of on my own now. That was the perfect victim for Jeffrey Dahmer because he wanted
13:29to choose people who wouldn't be missed. Between September 1987 and March 1988,
13:37Dahmer killed three men, the youngest a 14-year-old boy who he paid to pose for nude photographs
13:44before drugging and strangling him to death. He would dissolve the bodies in acid.
13:50He cleverly developed a program to destroy the bodies, to get rid of the bodies, left no evidence.
13:54This was a very clever killer, very clever killer.
13:58Jeffrey Dahmer would dissolve his victims, presumably to make it easier to dispose of them.
14:04Dissolving tissue and chemicals can certainly interfere with identifying it as human tissue. It'll
14:11interfere with DNA. You're really left predominantly with skeletal remains to try and identify features such
14:17as age, sex, race. Dahmer murdered two of the victims at his grandmother's house where he was living.
14:25His grandmother became aware that he was bringing these young guys back to her house. I mean,
14:31she thought for gay sex. Obviously she had no inkling of the atrocities he was committing on their bodies.
14:39Although she was complaining also about a foul odor that she noticed.
14:43On September the 25th, 1988, Dahmer moved into his own apartment on North 25th Street in Milwaukee,
14:52and didn't wait long before attacking again. The very next day, September the 26th,
14:58he enticed a 13-year-old boy back to his home and drugged him.
15:02One of the methods that Dahmer used to subdue his victims was to use benzodiazepines,
15:09the same family of drugs as Valium. He'd put them in drinks. That would make you woozy, sleepy,
15:16and then eventually go unconscious.
15:18Dahmer sexually assaulted the boy, but somehow, possibly due to Dahmer passing out drunk,
15:25the 13-year-old escaped and went to the police. In January 1989, he was convicted of sexual assault,
15:34but the sentencing was delayed until May, during which time an unrelenting Dahmer,
15:40unbeknownst to the authorities, managed to claim a fifth victim.
15:46The 29-year-old served 10 months in prison, but when he was released in March 1990,
15:52he picked up right where he left off.
15:54So Jeffrey Dahmer really did ramp up his offending. The scale and the nature of his behavior became
16:03all the more grotesque. So he wasn't just killing people, dismembering them, and then disposing of
16:09their bodies. He started to do some really bizarre things. He was in the process of constructing some
16:18hideously diabolical shrine in his bedroom out of the skulls and skeletons of some of his victims.
16:27It's almost as though some bizarre, archaic thing had broken through, and he was performing
16:36or creating some sort of ancient, you know, human sacrificial temple in this little Milwaukee apartment.
16:49In 1990, Dahmer killed another four young men. His M.O. was becoming more and more polished.
16:57He would offer his victims money to go back to his apartment with him to take pictures,
17:03nude photographs of them, and then perhaps to have sex. Every single one of his victims
17:10went with him willingly. He would offer them a drink, and once he found out what they wanted to drink,
17:17he kept a lot of things on hand, different kinds of alcohol, and that's when he would put a drug in it
17:24that would put them to sleep, or that would relax them so that they would pass out.
17:28They would pass out. He would then have sex with them while they were passed out,
17:31do with them as he wished, but of course they couldn't do to him. Then as they approached
17:35recovery, coming out of it, he would strangle them to death. It seemed as though Dahmer got a thrill,
17:40not from the murder, but from the dead bodies of his victims. Dahmer liked necrophilia. He liked sex
17:47with unconscious people. He wasn't a slasher in the sense that he took delight in killing. His purpose was
17:53sex with these people, coupling with these people. That's hard to believe.
17:57He would commit necrophiliac sex acts on the corpses, dismember the corpses, dissolve parts
18:04of the bodies in these vats of acid he had, keep certain organs in his refrigerator, some of which
18:10he would actually cannibalize. Dahmer said that the cannibalism that he engaged in was born out of
18:18a curiosity. He wanted to find out, first of all, what that would be like. He also said that there was
18:26an element of wanting to make these people a part of him so they would be with him forever.
18:32Dahmer from the beginning, you know, was driven by this terror of being alone. He said he killed his
18:40first victim, Stephen Hicks, when Hicks said he had to go and Dahmer didn't want to be alone. There was some
18:46desire, which is part of normal sexuality. You know, you love somebody, you know, somebody will
18:51say, oh, I love you so much, I want to eat you up. With normal people, that's obviously metaphorical,
18:58but it does express some desire to be so close to the person that you want to incorporate them into,
19:04you want to merge with them. With somebody like Dahmer, that becomes this very literal horror.
19:10And the horror only became worse when Dahmer began experimenting with his semi-conscious victims.
19:18He would drill holes in their skulls and put myriadic acid inside to see if he could get them to a
19:25zombie state so that he could keep them alive and subservient to him. It's essentially an amateur
19:34version of attempting to perform a lobectomy or a lobotomy, but it would be an incredibly unpleasant
19:40and damaging thing to do to someone's brain. If you affect the frontal lobes, you will affect
19:46personality, potentially make somebody docile. If he's less accurate, you could essentially cause a stroke
19:53that could cause paralysis, speech problems. It really very much depends on which part of the brain
19:59is actually damaged. But of course that didn't work and his victims died one after another. Hearing
20:07about that is the stuff of horror movies and the fact that it was happening in a city where we were
20:16known for manufacturing and beer and a very good midwestern work ethic, tight families. This isn't the
20:26kind of thing that happens here. In May 1991, 31-year-old Jeffrey Dahmer was in his killing prime.
20:36He'd already murdered 11 men and had begun collecting bones and skulls from his victims
20:42and cannibalizing their organs. What would have been a nightmare for most was a fantasy for him,
20:49and he carefully went about his killings under the radar of the police and the people of Milwaukee.
20:56Jeffrey Dahmer had a job in a local chocolate factory and I think for him it enabled him to
21:01maintain a facade of normality. He was just an average Joe, a regular guy who went to work every day.
21:08I think he killed so many people without being caught because of the fact that he looked like everyone
21:14else. He did what successful serial killers do. He blended. They blend in with society.
21:21Now he was a Caucasian male living in a predominantly African-American neighborhood,
21:26but he didn't talk to anybody. He didn't bother anybody. He was barely someone people noticed.
21:33Barely noticed. He also was targeting people who he found out might not be missed.
21:42For most people, if they were to commit the type of acts that Jeffrey Dahmer did, they would no way
21:48be able to function normally. But Jeffrey Dahmer was not most people. He hasn't got the same level of
21:54repulsion and shock at dead bodies or mutilated bodies that most of us have. It was just another
22:00aspect of his life. It was not known that we had a serial slayer loose in our city. We did not know
22:06because he was so cleverly disposing of the bodies. The families were reporting the sons were missing,
22:11but the police were not finding bodies. And not infrequently young men, something happens in their
22:15life. They just leave these up and leave town. It happens enough that the police don't get worried.
22:20If it was a woman, they'll immediately commit resources to investigate, but the young men, they don't.
22:24But on May the 26th, 1991, Dahmer came agonizingly close to capture after an encounter with a 14-year-old boy.
22:34Dahmer had taken Conorac Synthesim phone, a young Asian male who he found attractive. He met him in the
22:41mall, offered him money to go back to their, his apartment. He went and he began to work the ritual.
22:50Dahmer would drug him. And then he began the process of this crude lobotomy. And he had drilled a hole in
22:59this young man's head. He took a break. He ran out to get more beer. While he was gone, Conorac ran out
23:06of the apartment. He was naked. He was completely dazed. And he was running up the alley next to
23:12Dahmer's apartment building. A woman in another apartment building
23:17saw him running up the alley and said, there's a boy running up the alley. Something's going on. And then
23:26these women called the police. And then Dahmer appeared. And again, this is another like remarkable
23:32characteristic of these psychopaths is that they have an ability to maintain, you know, a kind of
23:39coolness under the most extraordinarily high pressure circumstances. So he walked up to the
23:48officers, good evening officers. He's very polite. He's sober. And he said, this is my boyfriend.
23:55He came to stay with me. We had a little bit too much to drink. And he ran out of the house.
24:01Said, how old is he? Dahmer said, he's 19. And the officers said, okay, well, just to make sure,
24:09let's all walk back up to the apartment together. The cops went in and looked around. They even peeked
24:15into the bedroom where there was a decomposing corpse of one of Dahmer's previous victims. But,
24:20you know, they took such a cursory look at it that they didn't even notice it.
24:23But assuming the couple were having a lover's tiff, the two police officers left Conorak alone with
24:30Dahmer in the apartment building. And in the early hours of the morning, he murdered the 14-year-old boy.
24:36An opportunity to catch the killer had been missed.
24:40I think that really speaks volumes about the attitudes of the police at the time,
24:45in terms of ethnic minorities, in terms of young people, in terms of the gay community.
24:50And that was another victim that could potentially have been saved.
24:55So there's this terrible thing going on behind closed doors, and people just aren't seeing it.
25:00People aren't wanting to see it. Even the police are not joining up the dots and finding out what's
25:06really going on. So this is allowed to just bubble away and get worse.
25:10After evading capture, Dahmer was free to continue.
25:15There was two sides, really, to Dahmer's pleasure that he got from killing his victims.
25:20So he was a sadist who enjoys the pain and suffering of other people. And with sadists,
25:25that thrill ends when the victim dies. But Dahmer was also something of a necrophiliac,
25:31who was interested in having corpses around and doing things with those corpses. And that
25:37means that the thrill starts with death. So he has this continuous fulfillment going on.
25:42And he's always fully in control. And I think that's what's really at the root of Jeffrey Dahmer.
25:47It's power, and it's control, and it's the feeling that he has all this knowledge
25:51about what he's done, and nobody else quite knows what he's up to.
25:55By July 1991, Dahmer's desire to kill had become insatiable. In just 16 days,
26:03he murdered four more men, bringing his total number of victims to 17.
26:09But Dahmer's reign of terror was about to come to an end. On July the 22nd, he met a man called
26:15Tracy Edwards. While they were together in the apartment,
26:21Dahmer threw a handcuff on him. This was now the beginning of his ritual.
26:26Dahmer had taken photographs of his victims in various stages of dismemberment, Polaroids.
26:32And those were sitting on the dresser inside the bedroom. They weren't sitting out in the main
26:37living room. But there was some speculation that Tracy Edwards had perhaps seen that.
26:42And he ran out of the apartment in his underwear, ran down the street. And when he saw the police car,
26:51Tracy Edwards has said his intention was just to get the handcuff off. That's all he wanted. He stopped
26:56these cops to say, hey, can you just get this off of me? So he stopped. And the officers start talking
27:03to him about what he saw. And then they said, well, we should probably check this out. Let's all go back
27:09to the apartment. Dahmer answered. And the minute he saw that it was the police,
27:15he tried to shut the door on them. The police pushed the door open a bit. They started struggling with him.
27:20And then finally, he just gave him. And that was when Dahmer was officially finished. He was
27:29finished killing and he knew that he was finished.
27:31The police officers immediately arrested Dahmer after finding the remains of some of his victims
27:38in his apartment. They saw the body parts. And then one of the officers said he heard a scream.
27:42Then he realized later he was the one who screamed when he saw the body. So they knew they were dealing
27:46with a very serious offense. Dahmer did not resist a little slight resistance, but Dahmer was taken
27:51into custody and the investigation was initiated. What followed was an incredible media circus on Dahmer's
27:57doorstep as unbelievable stories about what was being uncovered inside his apartment were revealed.
28:04It was so fantastical that you think people are making it up when they're telling you the details.
28:11But as it turned out, they weren't making it up. It was all of the atrocities that we heard about
28:16that had happened in that apartment really did happen. The medical examiner who was called to the
28:21scene didn't know what was happening. It was so strange. There was a freezer there,
28:24body parts in the freezer, called in a hazmat crew. Well, our television stations cover the police
28:30radio. When they hear that, they dispatch crews there. The first day was local television. Second
28:35day, national television. By the third day, it was international television. They were able to show
28:40video of these items coming out of the front door of this apartment building that's not usual at a
28:47crime scene. You saw a large blue barrel in which we know that Jeffrey Dahmer was trying to dissolve
28:53body parts. They had a refrigerator that was holding skulls and also was holding body parts. So these
29:01were coming down the stairs and people were just incredulous to watch it. When I wrote the story for the
29:09Milwaukee Journal that morning and it was released in the paper about eight o'clock, I think, in the
29:16morning. Normally, we were an afternoon paper, but we went out early with it because it was such an
29:21incredible story. But no one quite knew the enormity of the crimes until Dahmer confessed to detectives
29:29at the local police station. When I've spoken to the detectives that were working this case,
29:35they have said this was not a great whodunit. This would have been a whodunit if Jeffrey Dahmer hadn't
29:42confessed to everything. When Dahmer was arrested, there were already a number of bodies in his
29:47quarters. He gave full confessions to the police detailing his involvement in 16 separate slayings.
29:54Most of the time, he did not know the name of the victims. When Dahmer remembered a crime that he
30:00might not have shared with the detectives, he would have the jail call them, whether it was the middle of
30:05the night or the middle of the day, and say, I remembered something else. Please come over.
30:11Dahmer had said he wanted to make sure that he didn't forget anything because he wanted those
30:15families to have closure. I'm not sure about that. That may be giving Jeffrey Dahmer more credit than
30:23he is deserved, but he did claim to want to try and remember so that all of those families would have
30:31closure. One of the interesting things about Dahmer that does differentiate him from other killers of his
30:38breed is that he did seem to be capable of a certain degree of remorse and certainly recognized the
30:45extent of his depravity. Although he confessed to killing 16 people in the state of Wisconsin,
30:52Dahmer was first charged with four counts of murder on the 25th of July 1991, and a further 11 counts were
31:00added in August. The following month investigators in Ohio found teeth and bone fragments belonging to
31:08Stephen Hicks in the woods near Dahmer's family home. A preliminary hearing was set for January 1992.
31:16His legal team were going to argue that the killings were the work of a madman.
31:20The issue wasn't going to be did he do it or not. The issue was going to be was he sane or insane when
31:24he did it. And his hope was that at least in even one of the cases he could induce the jury to believe
31:29that he was insane. Under those circumstances, he would be sentenced not to a prison but to a mental
31:34health facility. People would say to me, Mike, this guy killed 16 people. He was drinking their blood,
31:39eating parts of their body. He must have been crazy. It sounds like he's crazy to say that,
31:44but that's not what the insanity rule is. The city wanted justice. They wanted to see
31:50the man the press were calling the Milwaukee cannibal locked away in prison for the horrific
31:56crimes he had committed. The trial of Jeffrey Dahmer would be one of the biggest in the history of
32:03not just Wisconsin, but the entire USA. My reaction to it then was the same reaction,
32:10I think that everybody who lived in Milwaukee had when they heard about the case. No, can't be.
32:18This is Milwaukee. Those kinds of things don't happen here. This is the Midwest. This is a very nice place.
32:26The trial of Jeffrey Dahmer began on the 30th of January 1992. Anne had a front row seat.
32:33The courtroom was an odd spectacle because court TV was still new in the game back then. And the idea
32:45that you would come to court and you'd be on television was still kind of new to people. It
32:53was the kind of media attention to a trial that Milwaukee hadn't seen in a very, very long time,
33:00if ever. I can remember so clearly the first time Jeffrey Dahmer's initial appearance in court
33:06when he walked in. I think the real fear that people had when they first saw Jeffrey Dahmer
33:13was that he looked like everybody else. He was a good looking young man and he is not the person
33:21that you would look at and say, stay away from that guy. It would be up to Milwaukee DA Mike McCann to
33:28attempt to prove that Dahmer was sane and responsible for his actions. Guilty wasn't going to be an issue,
33:35but we wanted the jury to know enough about the facts and so the defense to say, all right,
33:39what really happened here? How atrocious was it? How planned was it? How was he behaving?
33:43What skills were involved? He couldn't control himself. It was a lot to take in because the testimony was so
33:51graphic. We all knew Mike McCann. He was a religious man and we'd seen him and we've seen him in court.
34:00He's a good attorney. But the kinds of things that he was reciting out of the criminal complaint
34:08and the confession were unheard of. These things were unheard of and they happened right here in our city.
34:16He did it quietly. He concealed the bodies, cleverly concealed, destroyed the bodies, planned it well,
34:22laid in the equipment, got the drugs that he used, knowing that he worked or thought he was insane.
34:26The way he conducted himself was in a way that it seemed that he was sane and that's what we wanted
34:32to get across to the jury. Mike employed the help of psychiatry expert Dr. Philip Resnick.
34:38The more bizarre the crimes such as involving cannibalism, the more the lay public wants to think
34:45that guy had to be out of his mind. But in looking at it from the actual strict definition
34:52of insanity, generally the diseases of paraphilias like necrophilia, where someone has trouble
35:00controlling themselves, are not viewed for the most part as diseases which qualify for insanity
35:08because of the social implications. One of the points that I made as a consultant is even if you have
35:15necrophilia and even if you have trouble controlling your impulse, the majority of necrophiliacs will select
35:25a setting where they can accomplish this without homicide. So some become assistants in morgues or
35:34assistants in pathology labs where they may have access to dead victims. Others will actually disinterer
35:42bodies after they're buried so that one does not have to actually kill to exercise the necrophilia's
35:52impulse and that's one of the reasons I felt that he didn't qualify for insanity. The trial was
35:57essentially a debate between specialist psychiatrists about the mental state of Dahmer who sat watching
36:04the whole thing play out over two weeks. Dahmer was very calm in court. When you talk of you assessing
36:10a person by what you see, no one studying him would believe he was insane. He was in con, he was watching
36:15what was going on. He wasn't reacting in any negative way. He conducted himself in a very rational
36:21way, a very proper way. This was a case to tell the world that I did what I did not for reasons of
36:28hate. I hated no one. I knew I was sick or evil or both. Now I believe I was sick. On February 15th,
36:37the jury had reached a verdict on Dahmer's sanity. Someone like Dahmer comes along who has never been
36:43in a psychiatric hospital and alleges insanity. Juries are going to be skeptical of it and then
36:51when it's all in the form of his sexual drive rather than a traditional psychosis where someone's out of
36:59touch with reality and he's taking careful steps to cover his tracks, it's very difficult to succeed
37:05with insanity with that type of case. Jeffrey Dahmer was ruled to be sane by the jury. On February 17th,
37:131992, Judge Lawrence Graham sentenced him to life imprisonment for each of the 15 counts against him.
37:20When the verdict was announced in court, there was a great shout from the gallery, especially from the
37:28victim's families that cried. I was pleased in the sense, happy, not exuberant, but happy that this danger
37:34was removed from our community, that the jury had not been hoodwinked, that the jury realized
37:38this chap was not insane. The state of Wisconsin does not have the death penalty, but Dahmer would
37:44have to serve a minimum of 936 years. He was immediately sent to the Columbia Correctional Institute
37:52in Portage. Three months later, on the 1st of May 1992 in Ohio, Dahmer was also found guilty of murdering
38:00Stephen Hicks in 1978 and given yet another life sentence. Dahmer always said that he was compelled
38:08to kill, that there were urges. He said, I had urges that I could not control. He also said that even
38:16though he was in prison, he was relieved that the killing was done, he still had the urges. They didn't
38:25go away. He was just in a place where he couldn't act on them. Locked away for the rest of his life,
38:33Dahmer found comfort in the Bible, and by 1994, he decided to get baptized. The prison called on local
38:41minister Roy Ratcliffe. So I was quite surprised to be escorted to a little room and left alone,
38:48and then Jeff comes to the room, and he closes the door, and then there's he and I sitting together
38:54across the table, and I'm thinking for a moment, wow, I'm in a room with a man who's killed several
39:00people. So yeah, that was a little bit disconcerting, but I was there for a purpose and for a reason,
39:05so I wanted to find out what was going on and to see what I could do to help. So my fears were set
39:10aside primarily because of my focus on what I was trying to do. Jeff was a normal guy, courteous,
39:15very respectful, uh, to me. When we shook hands, I noticed his hands were really small,
39:21looking at his hands and thinking, wow, these are the hands that, uh, strangled people. These are the
39:25hands that murdered people. These are the hands that dismembered people. On May the 10th, 1994,
39:31the same day that notorious serial killer John Wayne Gacy was executed, Jeffrey Dahmer was baptized
39:38in a prison bathtub. Then the door opened, and I walked into the room, and Jeff had already crawled
39:43into the tub, and the only thing that was above the water was just simply his head. And so I, I
39:48baptized you in the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit for the forgiveness of your sins,
39:52and pushed his head down under. And then when he came back up, I said something I often say to people
39:56when I baptized them. I said, welcome to the family of God. He said, well, thank you very much.
40:01But just six months after his baptism on November the 28th, 1994, Dahmer and another convicted murderer,
40:10Jesse Anderson were attacked and killed by a fellow inmate. Christopher Scarver took a barbell,
40:18went into the bathroom, and beat both Jeffrey Dahmer and Jesse Anderson to death.
40:24There were a number of people who felt that Jeffrey Dahmer got exactly what he deserved.
40:29And I called his mother. She said, well, now everybody got what they want. The monster is dead.
40:34And then she said, I mean, he was my son. He was my boy. It was a terrible, terrible death in that sense
40:42there. But for some people, it was a relief. They were glad because all they could think about
40:46are the crimes he committed. They're not thinking about what I'm thinking about is, here's a person
40:50who's trying to serve God as best as he can. And now his life is being taken from us.
40:54I mean, some people see some sort of poetic symmetry in the fact that Dahmer's first murder was the one
41:02in which he bludgeoned the teenage hitchhiker Stephen Hicks to death with a barbell and that he himself
41:09died in a very, very similar way. The apartment on North 25th Street that housed Dahmer's macabre
41:17collection of victims' remains and where 12 young men lost their lives was demolished in November 1992.
41:26But Dahmer's twisted legacy has been impossible to wipe out. He has become one of the most infamous
41:33serial killers in the world. I think of Dahmer as sort of like the flip side of somebody like Mozart.
41:40How do you account for somebody creating that kind of music? Ultimately, how do you account for somebody
41:46who is luring young men to his apartment and drilling holes in their skull and injecting
41:52brains with muriatic acid to turn them into zombies? There's something there ultimately inexplicable.
41:58Jeffrey Dahmer committed some of the most evil acts that I have ever written about or heard about
42:06or seen on a television show because they were real. I don't know if he was sane or insane because
42:14that's not my training to figure that out. But I can absolutely say that he did
42:22some of the most evil acts known to man.
42:25Dharmer's crimes would not feel out of place in a perverse horror movie. He was a man who killed to
42:32satisfy his unhealthy sexual perversions, keeping parts of his victim's skeletons as trophies and eating
42:40their organs. Jeffrey Dahmer truly is the stuff of nightmares and unquestionably one of the world's
42:47most evil killers.
42:57things.
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