shortly before midnight on july the 22nd 1991 two milwaukee police officers were flagged down in their patrol car by a man with a pair of handcuffs dangling from one wrist the police had no idea that this bizarre encounter would lead to the arrest of one of the most prolific serial killers in us history that night people were afraid people were whispering under their breaths you know it was the devil it's the devil the man had escaped from a small one-bedroom apartment on north 25th street where the officers went to investigate they found themselves in a living nightmare they saw the body parts and then one of the officers said he heard his scream then he realized later he was the one who screamed when he saw the body without detection 31 year old jeffrey dahmer had killed 17 young men across a 13-year period he hasn't got the same level of repulsion and shock at dead bodies or mutilated bodies that most of us have it was just another aspect of his life jeffrey dahmer had etched his name in history as one of the world's most evil killers [Music] the name jeffrey dahmer has become synonymous with evil between 1978 and 1991 he killed 17 young men and boys by drugging them before strangling them to death as the revelations of the murders came to light it was the behaviour of dharma once he killed his victims that really stunned the world with stories of necrophilia and cannibalism the first journalist to arrive at the crime scene was annie schwartz it wasn't a gory crime scene it was really quite antiseptic it was a very simple one bedroom with a kitchen and a living room and it looked like a regular single guy lived there some dishes in this thing but by and large this was not some chamber of horrors like people you know will describe it certainly not at first look once detectives and officers started searching further that's when they found out the actual horror was in that apartment the story of this macabre killer begins 30 years before his arrest jeffrey dahmer was born in milwaukee wisconsin on may the 21st 1960 the family moved to iowa before settling in ohio in 1966. he lived with his parents who were constantly constantly as he put it at each other's throats you know his mother appeared to have been you know this raging bundle of neurotic behavior of parents were constantly fighting and screaming and you know dahmer himself evidently throughout much of his early life was completely completely ignored by both of them were so caught up in their own psychological turmoil jeffrey dahmer never really made close social links with any of his peers he was a little bit odd and if you you speak to his school friends at the time um he didn't seem to have a lot of empathy for other children so when children would fall over in the playground or get hurt or cry he didn't appear to be affected by that and would sometimes laugh at them so something wasn't quite right with a young jeffrey dahmer feeling ostracized by his family and classmates dahmer spent a lot of time playing alone in the woods surrounding his ohio home well he had a really morbid curiosity with death from quite a young age and this started with a fairly innocent insect collection and he would keep the the bodies of insects inside jars full of chemicals this soon progressed he would go fishing and he was interested in what the fish looked like on the inside so he would chop up the fish to have a look at this dahmer took his fish and cut it open he was fascinated with the inside of the fish and one of his little friends asked him geoffrey why do you why do you what are you doing he said just look at it you know and this you know escalates you know to the point that it's you know he's apparently killing stray dogs and you know decapitating them one of the the young boys in the neighborhood was walking in the woods behind darma's house uh when darma was a teenager and he came across the body of a dead dog and it was mutilated and it was nailed to a tree so there's some early interest in animal anatomy that blossoms into this very very dark obsession and then somehow becomes tangled up with his own sexuality dahmer continued to struggle to fit in at high school and turned to alcohol from a young age well dahmer started drinking when he was at school and one of his former classmates remembered that he used to come in with a cup and he didn't have tea or coffee in this cup he had scotch whiskey in it so this was a quite a disturbing behavior for a teenager there's a thought that in hindsight you ask why more people didn't try to intervene you've got a kid coming drunk to school but back in the 70s when dahmer's coming to school intoxicated nobody thinks gee we better make sure we take care of this because what if he turns out to be a serial killer in the summer of 1978 dahmer's parents finally divorced the breakdown of jeffrey dahmer's parents marriage was quite a tough time for him his parents were were at each other's throats it was not an amicable divorce at all and each of them was forcing him to side with them so he felt very much torn between his his parents so this was a real source of conflict for him and i think at this time children often who have these experiences will retreat into themselves they will preoccupy themselves with things that they're interested in and will lose themselves in in their own fantasy world and i think that's very much what happened with dharma having just recently graduated from high school dharma soon had no one around him at all well in 1978 jeffrey dahmer was 18 his mother had gone away with his younger brother and his father was living in a hotel so he's alone and he's ruminating and he's fantasizing and and things are going to take a turn for the worse quite soon after this on june the 18th 1978 dahmer's fantasy world collided with the real one when he pulled over to pick up a 19 year old hitchhiker called stephen hicks dahmer picked him up and you know invited him back to his house to have some drinks and i guess maybe smoke some dope they were in the basement of his parents home they had had sex and then stephen hicks wanted to leave and that was when dahmer just wanted so badly to have company sounds like such a textbook psychological thing you know abandonment syndrome but this was at the heart of of what made him so needy for company and then when the guy said he wanted to leave dahmer clubbed him on the back of the head with a barbell and then strangled him then ultimately disposed of the body removed all the flesh and eventually dissolved it in acid and pulverized the bones with a sledgehammer this is a really really brutal crime and he disposes of the body parts in the woods behind his house and that's a really symbolic place for jeffrey dahmer because this is a place where he's dismembered animals before where he's displayed mutilated dogs on tree trunks so we're seeing that this place is special to it dharma had experienced taking the life of another human for the first time [Music] i think that the first murder is a real milestone for jeffrey dahmer so he knows now that he's capable of this he knows that he's capable of taking someone else's life so it's not just a fantasy anymore it's now a reality he's gone from harming animals to harming people and he's not going to stop he's not desperate but he becomes accustomed to it he becomes ready to kill again and just kill and kill and kill and kill until he gets caught but it wasn't until 13 years later in august 1991 the dharma was finally apprehended after one of his potential victims escaped from his milwaukee apartment once in custody dahmer confessed to killing 17 young men and boys the man whose job it was to prosecute the relentless killer was milwaukee district attorney mike mccann the word evil doesn't come up very often it just doesn't guilty not guilty did he do it didn't he do it culpability yes but not often evil because evil is almost a moral issue that word came up with dahmer you couldn't help see what he did innocent people strangers to take for a couple of hours of sex to take a human being's life that's so evil so evil dahmer's case made headlines across the world after the details of his grisly confession were leaked a new york times reporter compromised the integrity of a worker at our ability and got a copy of the confession it was a detailed 38-page confession so the details of the gory things he had done again captured people's interests so that's how it it rapidly became a matter of intense interest the confession outlined the life of a deranged serial killer after murdering stephen hicks and desecrating his body in 1978 dahmer didn't kill again for nine years after dropping out of ohio state university after just one semester he was spending most of his days drinking until his father urged him to enlist in the u. s army the alcohol continued as a theme when he joined the army and he moved to germany um one of his his former colleagues remembers him just sitting in his room drinking gin all day long not even leaving his room to eat so there was a real dependency on alcohol in 1981 21 year old dharma was discharged from the army after his drinking rendered him incapable of serving after spending a month sleeping rough on the beaches of florida he returned to ohio but his father had had enough and shipped him off to start a new life in milwaukee wisconsin he was sent to live with his grandmother who is the one adult apparently he had you know something approaching you know a normal affection for i was there he really embarked on this career of horror by 1986 dahmer had been arrested a couple of times for exposing himself in public once in front of a group of children the hopeless alcoholic had managed to find work at a local chocolate factory in milwaukee and was frequenting gay bars and bath houses i think being homosexual affected dahmer in two ways firstly it was a source of shame for him because it was quite a stigmatized social identity at the time but also it enabled him an opportunity when it came to his killing behavior so being homosexual at this time it was something that happened in the shadows it was something that happened underground and this was the ideal place for someone like him to go hunting it was this exposure to the gay scene that seemed to re-awaken the dark sexual urges inside of him and by september 1987 over nine years since the murder of stephen hicks jeffrey dahmer was ready to kill again his idea was to drug people and keep them with him so that they wouldn't they wouldn't answer back to him they wouldn't argue with him they wouldn't fight him they would stay with him that's what he wanted he wanted companionship so he would go to the bars on milwaukee's near south side and he would have conversations with people in these bars and when he was talking to these people these prospective victims he would say so what was it like when you came out how was your family about it so if your response was oh my family has been great they're so supportive i'm very close to my parents that person wasn't going to be a victim but if the person answered my parents aren't speaking to me anymore i'm estranged from my family i'm kind of on my own now that was the perfect victim for jeffrey dahmer because he wanted to choose people who wouldn't be missed between september 1987 and march 1988 dharma killed three men the youngest a 14 year old boy who he paid to pose for nude photographs before drugging and strangling him to death he would dissolve the bodies in acid he cleverly developed a program to destroy the bodies to get rid of the bodies left no evidence this was a very clever killer very clever killer dharma would dissolve his victims presumably to make it easier to dispose of them dissolving tissue and chemicals can certainly interfere with identifying it as human tissue it'll interfere with dna you're really left predominantly with skeletal remains to try and identify features such as age sex race dharma murdered two of the victims at his grandmother's house where he was living his grandmother became aware that he was bringing these young guys back to her house i mean she thought for gay sex obviously she had no no inkling of of the atrocities he was committing on their bodies um although she was complaining also about a foul odor that she noticed on september the 25th 1988 dharma moved into his own apartment on north 25th street in milwaukee and didn't wait long before attacking again the very next day september the 26th he enticed a 13 year old boy back to his home and drugged him one of the methods that dharma used to subdue his victims was to use benzodiazepines the same family of drugs as valium he put them in drinks that would make you woozy sleepy and then eventually go unconscious dahmer sexually assaulted the boy but somehow possibly due to dharma passing out drunk the 13 year old escaped and went to the police in january 1989 he was convicted of sexual assault but the sentencing was delayed until may during which time an unrelenting dharma unbeknownst to the authorities managed to claim a fifth victim the 29 year old served 10 months in prison but when he was released in march 1990 he picked up right where he left off so jeffrey dahmer really did ramp up his offending the scale and the nature of his behavior became all the more grotesque so he wasn't just killing people dismembering them and then disposing of their bodies he started to do some really bizarre things he was in the process of constructing some hideously diabolical shrine in his bedroom out of the skulls and skeletons of some of his victims it's almost as though some bizarre archaic thing had broken through and he was performing or creating some sort of ancient you know human sacrificial temple in this little milwaukee apartment in 1990 dharma killed another four young men his mo was becoming more and more polished he would offer his victims money to go back to his apartment with him to take pictures nude photographs of them and then perhaps to have sex every single one of his victims went with him willingly he would offer them a drink and once he found out what they wanted to drink he kept a lot of a lot of things on hand different kinds of alcohol and that's when he would put a drug in it that would put them to sleep or that would relax them so that they would pass out they would pass out he would then have sex with them while they were passed out do with them as he wished but of course they couldn't do to him then as they approached recovery coming out of it he would strangle them to death it seemed as though dahmer got a thrill not from the murder but from the dead bodies of his victims dahmer liked necrophilia he liked sex with unconscious people he wasn't a slasher in the sense that he took delight in killing his purpose was sex with these people company with these people that's hard to believe he would commit necrophiliac sex acts on the corpses dismember the corpses dissolve parts of the bodies and these vats of acid he had keep certain organs in his refrigerator some of which he would actually cannibalize dahmer said that the cannibalism that he engaged in was born out of a curiosity he wanted to find out first of all what that would be like he also said that there was an element of wanting to make these people a part of him so they would be with him forever dahmer from the beginning you know was driven by this terror of being alone he said he killed his first victim stephen hicks when hicks said he had to go and dahmer didn't want to be alone or there's some desire which is part of normal sexuality you know you love somebody you know somebody will be saying i love you so much i want to eat you up with normal people that's obviously metaphorical but it does express some desire to be so close to the person that you want to incorporate them into you want to merge with them with somebody like dahmer that becomes this very literal horror and the horror only became worse when dahmer began experimenting with his semi-conscious victims he would drill holes in their skulls and put muriatic acid inside to see if he could get them to a zombie state so that that he could keep them alive and subservient to him it's essentially an amateur version of attempting to perform a lobectomy or a lobotomy but it would be an incredibly unpleasant and damaging thing to do to someone's brain if you affect the frontal lobes you will affect personality potentially make somebody docile if he's less accurate you could essentially cause a stroke that could cause paralysis speech problems it really very much depends on which part of the brain is actually damaged but of course that didn't work and his victims died one after another hearing about that is the stuff of horror movies and the fact that it was happening in a city where we were known for manufacturing and beer and a very good midwestern work ethic tight families this isn't the kind of thing that happens here in may 1991 31 year old jeffrey dahmer was in his killing prime he'd already murdered 11 men and had begun collecting bones and skulls from his victims and cannibalizing their organs what would have been a nightmare for most was a fantasy for him and he carefully went about his killings under the radar of the police and the people of milwaukee jeffrey dahmer had a job in a local chocolate factory and i think for him it enabled him to maintain a facade of normality he was just an average joe a regular guy who who went to work every day i think he killed so many people without being caught because of the fact that he looked like everyone else he did what successful serial killers do he blended they blend in with society now he was a caucasian male living in in a predominantly african-american neighborhood but he didn't talk to anybody he'd bother anybody he was barely someone people noticed barely noticed he also was targeting people who he found out might not be missed for most people if they were to commit the type of acts that jeffrey dahmer did they would no way be able to function normally but jeffrey dahmer was not most people he hasn't got the same level of repulsion and shock at dead bodies or mutilated bodies that most of us have it was just another aspect of his life it was not known that we had a serial slayer loose in our city we did not know because he was so cleverly disposing of the bodies the families were reporting the suns were missing but the police were not finding bodies and not infrequently young men something happens in their life they just leave these up and leave town that happens enough that the police don't get weird if it's a woman they'll immediately commit resources to investigate but young men they don't but on may the 26th 1991 dharma came agonizingly close to capture after an encounter with a 14 year old boy dahmer had taken conor x synthesis phone a young asian male who he found attractive he met him in the mall offered him money to go back to their his apartment he went and he began to work the ritual dahmer would drug him and then he began the process of this crude lobotomy and he had drilled a hole in this young man's head he took a break he ran out to get more beer while he was gone conorac ran out of the apartment he was naked he was completely dazed and he was running up the alley next to dahmer's apartment building a woman in another apartment building saw him running up the alley and said there's a boy running up the alley something's going on and then these women call the police and then dahmer appeared and again this is another like remarkable characteristic of these psychopaths is that they have an ability to maintain you know a kind of coolness under the most extraordinarily high pressure circumstances so he walked up to the officers good evening officers he's very polite he's sober and he said this is my boyfriend he came to stay with me we had a little bit too much to drink and he ran out of the house he said how old is he dahmer said he's 19.
and the officers said okay well just to make sure let's all walk back up to the apartment together the cops went and looked around they even peeked into the bedroom where there was a decomposing corpse of one of dahmer's previous victims but you know they took such a cursory look at it they didn't even notice it assuming the couple were having a lover's tif the two police officers left conorac alone with dharma in the apartment building and in the early hours of the morning he murdered the 14 year old boy an opportunity to catch the killer had been missed i think that really speaks volumes about the attitudes of the police at the time in terms of ethnic minorities in terms of young people in terms of the gay community and that was another victim that could potentially have been saved so there's this terrible thing going on behind closed doors and people just aren't seeing it people aren't wanting to see it even the police are not joining up the dots and and finding out what's really going on so this is allowed to just bubble away and get worse after evading capture dharma was free to continue there was two sides really saddam's pleasure that he got from killing his victims so he was a sadist who enjoys the pain and suffering of other people and with sadist that that thrill ends when the victim dies but dharma was also something of a necrophiliac who was interested in having corpses around and doing things with those corpses and that means that the thrill starts with death so he has this continuous fulfillment going on and he's always fully in control and i think that's what's really at the root of jeffrey dahmer its power and its control and it it's the feeling that he has all this knowledge about what he's done and nobody else quite knows what he's up to by july 1991 dahmer's desire to kill had become insatiable in just 16 days he murdered four more men bringing his total number of victims to 17. but dahmer's reign of tenor was about to come to an end on july the 22nd he met a man called tracy edwards while they were together in the apartment uh dahmer threw a handcuff on him this was now the beginning of his ritual dahmer had taken photographs of his victims in various stages of dismemberment polaroids and those were sitting on the dresser inside the bedroom they weren't sitting out in the in the main living room but there was some speculation that tracy edwards had perhaps seen that and he ran out of the out of the apartment in his underwear ran down the street and when he saw the police car tracy edwards has said his intention was just to get the handcuff off that's all he wanted he stopped these cops to say hey can you just get this off of me so he stopped and the officers start talking to him about what he saw and then they said well we should probably check this out let's all go back to the apartment dahmer answered and the minute he saw that it was the police he tried to shut the door on them the police pushed the door open a bit they started struggling with him and then finally he just gave in and that was when dahmer was officially finished he was finished killing and he knew that he was finished the police officers immediately arrested dahmer after finding the remains of some of his victims in his apartment they saw the body parts and then one of the officers said he heard us scream then he realized later he was the one who screamed when he saw the body so they knew they were dealing with a very serious offense dahmer did not resist a little slight resistance but dahmer was taken into custody and the investigation was initiated what followed was an incredible media circus on dahmer's doorstep as unbelievable stories about what was being uncovered inside his apartment were revealed it was so fantastical that you think people are making it up when they're telling you the details but as it turned out they weren't making it up it was it all of the atrocities that we heard about that happened in that apartment really did happen the medical examiner who was called to the scene didn't know what was happening was so strange there was a freezer there bodies parts in the freezer called in a hazmat crew well our television stations cover the police radio when they hear that they dispatch crews there the first day was local television second day national television by the third day it was international television they were able to show video of these items coming out of the front door of this apartment building that's not usual at a crime scene we saw a large blue barrel in which we know that jeffrey dahmer was trying to dissolve body parts they had a refrigerator that was holding skulls and and also was holding body parts so these are coming down the stairs and people were just incredulous to watch it when i wrote the story for the milwaukee journal that morning and it was released in the paper about eight o'clock i think in the morning normally we were an afternoon paper but we went out early with it because it was such an incredible story but no one quite knew the enormity of the crimes until dahmer confessed to detectives at the local police station when i've spoken to the detectives that were working this case they have said this was not a great whodunnit this would have been a whodunit if jeffrey dahmer hadn't confessed to everything when dahmer was arrested there were already a number of bodies in his quarters he gave full confessions to the police detailing this his involvement in 16 separate slayings most of the time he did not know the name of the victims when dahmer remembered a crime that he might not have shared with the detectives he would have the jail call them whether it was the middle of the night or the middle of the day and say i remembered something else please come over dahmer had said he wanted to make sure that he didn't forget anything because he wanted those families to have closure i'm not sure about that i that may be giving jeffrey dahmer more credit than he is is deserved but he did claim to to want to try and remember so that all of those families would would have closure one of the interesting things about dahmer that does differentiate him from other killers of his breed is that he did seem to be capable of a certain degree of remorse and certainly recognized the extent of his depravity although he confessed to killing 16 people in the state of wisconsin dharma was first charged with four counts of murder on the 25th of july 1991 and a further 11 counts were added in august the following month investigators in ohio found teeth and bone fragments belonging to stephen hicks in the woods near dahmer's family home a preliminary hearing was set for january 1992. his legal team were going to argue that the killings were the work of a madman the issue wasn't going to be did he do it or not the issue was going to be was he sane or insane when he did it and his hope was that at least in even one of the cases he could induce the jury to believe that he was insane under those circumstances he would be sentenced not to a prison but to a mental health facility people would say to me mike this guy killed 16 people he was drinking their blood eating parts of their body he must have been crazy it sounds like he's crazy to say that but that's not what the insanity rule is the city wanted justice they wanted to see the man the press were calling the milwaukee cannibal locked away in prison for the horrific crimes he had committed the trial of jeffrey dahmer would be one of the biggest in the history of not just wisconsin but the entire usa my reaction to it then was the same reaction i think that everybody who lived in milwaukee had when they heard about the case no can't be this is milwaukee those kinds of things don't happen here this is the midwest this is a very nice place the trial of jeffrey dahmer began on the 30th of january 1992 and had a front row seat the courtroom was an odd spectacle because court tv was still new in in the game back then and the idea that you would come to court and you'd be on television was still kind of new to people it was the kind of media attention to a trial that milwaukee hadn't seen in a very very long time if ever i can remember so clearly the first time jeffrey dahmer's initial appearance in court when he walked in i think the real fear that people had when they first saw jeffrey dahmer was that he looked like everybody else he was a good-looking young man and he is not the person that you would look at and say stay away from that guy it would be up to milwaukee d.
