Transcription
I desensitize myself to it. I I don't know. I went to great lengths. He is pure evil, but you'd never know it by looking at him; but when you hear him, that's another story. His killing field was Milwaukee, and he got away with murder for more than a decade. But how could any of this happen? For the first time ever, Nancy Glass is here, inside the world of Jeffrey Dahmer.
Bill: When I sat down opposite Jeffrey Dahmer for this interview, I wondered what he would tell me, how hard it would be to get him to discuss his horrific crimes. What I found was that he was very forthcoming; he volunteered details that may be difficult to hear. I began by asking what he wanted from the men he picked up.
"I had these obsessive desires and and thoughts, wanting to control them, to—I don't know how to put it—possess them permanently. And that's why you killed them, right?"
"Right. Not because I was angry with them, not because I hated them, but because I wanted to keep them with me. And as my obsession grew, I was saving body parts, such as skulls and skeletons."
Jeffrey Dahmer is recalling his monstrous past. Almost two years ago, in this little apartment in Milwaukee, police discovered the grisly remnants of one of the most horrible crime sprees in American history. Jeffrey Dahmer, an unassuming chocolate factory worker, would eventually confess that he had seduced, murdered, and dismembered 17 young men. He even ate some of his victims' body parts. Pete instantly became the center of worldwide media attention—a serial killer unmasked. There were protests and press conferences in Milwaukee as people tried to understand how this could have happened in their midst. How did Jeffrey Dahmer get away with murder after murder for 13 years? How did a boy born into a hard-working, middle-class family turn into the worst kind of monster imaginable? In this exclusive interview, we put those questions to Jeffrey Dahmer himself. We met with him at the maximum-security prison where he is serving his sentence of 999 years. For the first time, he talks about his crimes and gives us a chilling look inside the mind of a serial killer.
"It's a process that doesn't happen overnight. When you depersonalize another person and view them as just an object, an object for pleasure instead of a living, breathing human being, it it seems to make it easier to do things you shouldn't do."
The reason why Jeffrey Dahmer was able to get away with his crimes was because of just what you are seeing here. Jeffrey Dahmer is intelligent and articulate; that is what makes him so frightening. But if you listen carefully to his words throughout this interview, you realize it is a thin disguise.
"You do sound though like the kind of person who could have said to himself, 'This is wrong, I'ma stop.'"
"I always knew though that it was wrong, but after the the first the first killing was not planned. I was coming back from the shopping mall back in '78. I had had fantasies about picking up a hitchhiker and taking him back to the house and having complete control and dominance over him."
The hitchhiker's name was Steven Hicks; he was just 18. Jeffrey took him to his parents' house. There, he strangled him with a barbell, dismembered the body, and hid it in a drainpipe. It was Jeffrey Dahmer who gave those details to the police in his confession. No one no one had a clue as to what was happening for for over a decade. During that time, Jeffrey Dahmer joined the Army and was sent to Germany. He was eventually discharged for a drinking problem and returned to Ohio.
Nine years after Stephen Hicks' murder, the killing began again.
"What happened to you in the nine years in between that you were able to stop, that you were able to control yourself?"
"Just wasn't an opportunity to fully express what I wanted to do to do. There was just not that the physical opportunity to do it then. And I started when I moved to Milwaukee in '81. I started reading pornography, going to the bookstores. Eventually, that led to frequenting the gay bars. And then I one time I brought this young man back to the hotel room—the Ambassador Hotel—was just planning on drugging him and spending the night with him. I had no intention of hurting him. When I woke up in the morning, he had a broken rib. Here I was heavily bruised. Apparently, I had beaten him to death with my fists."
"And you have no memory?"
"No memory of it. But that's what started the whole spree all over again."
Dahmer says he snuck the corpse of his victim, Stephen, to me out of his hotel room in a suitcase. Then he took it to his grandmother's house, where he cut up the body and put it in plastic garbage bags.
"When do you kill these men? Afterwards, or you repulsed, upset?"
"No. It at the time it was it was almost addictive. It was almost a surge of energy. I wouldn't have to worry about any of their needs or anything. I just had complete control of the situation."
But Jeffrey Dahmer was out of control. The urge to kill had overpowered him. As police later learned, he wasn't satisfied with his victims' death; he wanted more.
"Why did you photograph them?"
"It was my way of remembering their appearance, their physical beauty. I also wanted to keep something if I couldn't keep them there with me whole. I at least I felt that I could keep their skeletons. And I even went so far as planning on setting up an altar with the ten different skulls and skeletons."
"And what was the purpose of the altar going to be?"
"Uh, as a sort of Memorial point where I could—I don't know—it's it's it's so bizarre and strange, it's hard to describe—a place where I could collect my thoughts and feed my obsession."
"When the bodies were still in your apartment, there was no time when you would see them and say, 'This is grotesque, what have I done?'"
"There were times. There were times, but the compulsive obsession with doing what I was doing overpowered any feelings of revulsion."
This man, with a quiet, almost shy demeanor, became a master manipulator who was able to lure strangers he met at gay bars to his apartment. He was even able to con the police into returning a 14-year-old boy to him after neighbors called 911 that the child was in the street naked and bleeding. Dahmer convinced the police that he and the boy were simply having a lover's quarrel—executed boyfriend of another boyfriend wasn't a childhood open. After the police left, Jeffrey Dahmer murdered that boy. Connor axe into some phone.
This man says he had a near-fatal encounter with Jeffrey Dahmer.
"He wanted to take some picture of my back. He hit me with a Robert hammer on my neck."
He was lucky to escape because, by then, the killing had become almost routine.
"Before you went out to pick up a man, was there any kind of ritual you went through?"
"I go to the nightclubs, drink, watch the strip, TV shows. And if I didn't meet anyone at the bars, I'd go to the bath clubs and meets meet someone there, offer them money, and we'd go back to the apartment, have a few drinks. I'd have the sleeping pill mixture already prepared. Person would drink it, to fall asleep. And that's when they would be strangled."
Watching the movie Exorcist 3 was also part of his ritual; it put him in the mood for murder.
"I felt so hopelessly evil and perverted that that I actually derives a sort of pleasure from watching that tape."
"Did you like feeling evil?"
"No. No, I didn't. But I tried to overcome the thoughts, and it worked for a while, but eventually I gave in."
While Jeffrey Dahmer may say things today that make it seem like he understands what went on in his mind, he does not. All he can do is tell you what happened, but he cannot stop whatever it is that drove him to kill in the first place.
"Do you still feel those same urges? Do you still feel that compulsion, that obsession?"
"I wish I could say that it just left completely, but no. There are times when I still do still do have the old compulsions."
Jeffrey Dahmer says as time went on, his mind became more and more warped, and yet he was clever enough to continue to elude police and lure young men to his apartment. We should warn you, the details are very graphic.
"I started having these obsessive thoughts when I was about 15 and 16, and they got worse and worse."
"What will your fantasies about?"
"They were sexual fantasies of control, power, complete dominance."
"They became reality?"
"Was it pleasure in that fantasy?"
"There was excitement, fear, pleasure, all mixed together."
Jeffrey Dahmer fulfilled his fantasies by murdering and dismembering 17 young men. In time, his desires became more extreme, his deeds more grotesque. Listen to him talk about the most unnatural things in the most matter-of-fact of ways; that's when you realize that none of it has touched him.
"I was branching out; that's when the cannibalism started—eating of the heart and the arm muscle. It was a way of making me feel that they were a part of me. At first it was just curiosity, and then it became compulsive. Then I tried to keep the person alive by inducing a zombie-like state by injecting first dilute acid solution into their brain or hot water, and it never did to completely work."
"Could someone like you be stopped? Could you be helped?"
"No. I was I was dead set on going with this compulsion. It was the only thing that gave me any any satisfaction."
He became so warped by his evil impulses that he even took a victim's head with him to work at the Ambrosia Chocolate Factory.
"I kept the mummified head and skull of one of the victims in a carrying case in my locker at work."
"Were you almost flaunting it?"
"Yes. But that's how strong the compulsion was. That so bizarre the the desire was I wanted to keep something of the person with me."
Jeffrey Dahmer exhibited some disturbing behavior early on. He began drinking heavily as a teenager, dropped out of college, was arrested for indecent exposure, disorderly conduct, and fondling a thirteen-year-old boy. Tragically, one of his murder victims would be that boy's brother.
"Do you know what started it? Is there any kind of incident that you can remember to this day?"
"I don't know what started it. And the person to blame is sitting right across from you. That's the only person—not parents, not society, not pornography. I mean, those are just excuses."
His 13-year crime spree finally ended when this man, Tracy Edwards, brought the police to the infamous apartment. Like the others, he had gone there with the promise of money.
"He was listening to my heart because at a point he told me he was gonna eat my heart. At that point I hit him and I ran."
"What was the turning point for you that made you suddenly realize that you had done something terribly wrong, something you should be sorry for?"
"It was the night of the arrest. They have no memory of what happened during the six hours before the last victim ran out of the apartment. They heard a knock on the door, and the police were there with with the last victim. They asked me where the key was to the handcuffs. I was my mind was in a haze. I sort of pointed to the bedroom, and that's where they found the pictures. They yelled, 'Cuff em!' I was handcuffed, and it was just the realization that there was no point in trying to hide hide my actions anymore. The best route was to help help the police identify all the victims and just make a complete confession."
When it was revealed that most of the victims were Black or homosexual, people in Milwaukee were incensed. Many felt that was why he went after them and why the police didn't seem to care when their families reported them missing. Ten of the 17 victims were Black.
"Were they racially motivated?"
"What was not a sexual preference. It was just to find an obsession with the best-looking young man I could find."
Well, you just heard him say that his sexual preference had nothing to do with the killings. He has not come to terms with his homosexuality; never understood it.
"There was no use trying to fight it because I couldn't rid myself of it. It was it was too powerful and persistent."
"Do you dislike it?"
"Yes. It's caused a lot of problems for me, a lot of conflicts and unanswered questions."
The conflicts remain with him, and so do his compulsions, but in prison he finally cannot act on his savage desires.
"If you were out on the street now, would you still be committing the crimes?"
"Probably. If this hadn't happened, there's no doubt I probably would be. I can't think of anything that would have stopped me."
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