Dahmer Quotes

It was strange that in some sort of Jeffrey Dahmer meets Ghandi way I was able to love myself for hating myself. It seemed like a warped sense of love. But it was love without conditions.

The project I did last year was on Jeffrey Dahmer,' I said. 'He was a cannibal who kept severed heads in his freezer' 'I remember now,' said Max, his eyes darkening. 'Your posters have me nightmares. That was boss.' 'Nightmares are nothing,' I said. 'Those posters gave me a therapist.

I want to find a designer that can represent me. I want to find a celebrity that reflects me. So far I’ve been dressing in cotton-polyester blends. It’s what Jerffrey Dahmer wore.

just…like the way he smells. I look at him and I find myself wondering what his skin tastes like.”  “Oof. Easy, Dahmer,” Adam said. “Maybe don’t start with that.

Jesus, I smell like Jeffrey Dahmer's refrigerator.

You don't have body parts there do you?" my mother interrupted. "I don't want to open the fridge and find a head on the shelf" Rodney laughed. "No Justina, it doesn't look like Jeffrey Dahmer's hideaway.

He was a nobody. One of those shy kids who turned into social invalids when that first blast of adolescence hit, meekly accepted their fate, and became invisible.

If this guy turns out to be the next Jeffrey Dahmer, promise me you’ll avenge my death?

It is hard for me to believe that a human being could have done what I have done.” Jeffrey Dahmer 

Shower while there were two dead bodies in the bathtub, and he was sane. He drilled holes in the heads of living people to make them his unresisting companions, and he was sane. He ate a bicep which he fried in a skillet, tenderised and sprinkled with sauce, and he was sane. For hours he lay with corpses, hugging them, cherishing them, and he was sane. He kept eleven assorted heads and skulls, and two complete skeletons, for eventual use in a home-made temple, and he was sane.

There were the things he used to sustain life: a box of fish food. And the things he'd used to take it: a pair of nickel-plated handcuffs.

you never think about what serial killers eat, do you? I mean, other than Jeffrey Dahmer.

Reality poisons the spring of fantasy, whereas fantasy, when it erupts into the real world, brings destruction in its wake.

You know Dahmer was a cannibal. You think he was a zombie?” Tom smirked. “I’m no expert, but not all cannibals are zombies.

I think in some way I wanted it to end, even if it meant my own destruction.” —Jeffrey Dahmer

An academic definition of Lynchian might be that the term "refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former's perpetual containment within the latter." But like postmodern or pornographic, Lynchian is one of those Porter Stewart-type words that's ultimately definable only ostensively-i.e., we know it when we see it. Ted Bundy wasn't particularly Lynchian, but good old Jeffrey Dahmer, with his victims' various anatomies neatly separated and stored in his fridge alongside his chocolate milk and Shedd Spread, was thoroughgoingly Lynchian. A recent homicide in Boston, in which the deacon of a South Shore church reportedly gave chase to a vehicle that bad cut him off, forced the car off the road, and shot the driver with a highpowered crossbow, was borderline Lynchian. A Rotary luncheon where everybody's got a comb-over and a polyester sport coat and is eating bland Rotarian chicken and exchanging Republican platitudes with heartfelt sincerity and yet all are either amputees or neurologically damaged or both would be more Lynchian than not.

It's my belief that Dahmer didn't have to wind up a monster, that all those people didn't have to die horribly, if only the adults in his life hadn't been so inexplicably, unforgivably, incomprehensibly clueless and/or indifferent. Once Dahmer kills, however - and I can't stress this enough - my sympathy for him ends. He could have turned himself in after that first murder. He could have put a gun to his head. Instead he, and he alone, chose to become a serial killer and spread misery to countless people. There are a surprising number out there who view Jeffery Dahmer as some kind of anti-hero, a bullied kid who lashed back at the society that rejected him, This is nonsense. Dahmer was a twisted wretch whose depravity was almost beyond comprehension. Pity him, but don't empathize with him.

Was she always that friendly?" I joke. "She saw Robert. At least I got that out of her." "Maybe she buried him in the backyard." "Stop." "Did you smell it in there?" "Yes." "That wasn't a normal smell. That wasn't the sort of something's-gone-bad-in-the-garbage smell. That was the sort of Dahmer-next-door smell." "Stop it." "I'm serious," I say. "It's probably just some dead animal." "Oh, well, in that case, it's fine.

I don't even know if I have the capacity for normal emotions or not because I haven't cried for a long time. You just stifle them for so long that maybe you lose them, partially at least.

It’s amazing how much a human being can hide from another human being.

Then again, Jeffrey Dahmer had been attractive, so good looks weren’t exactly the best scale of measurement for an individual’s mental health.

Good people do bad things all the time. Even Jeffrey Dahmer had a mother.

Dahmer said that the first time he ate human flesh was in May 1990.

Fear does funny things to people. Shit, Dahmer was cooking and eating people in the middle of an apartment building. Imagine what you can get away with in a no man’s land.

The only way to be sure of never losing the ones you love. The Dahmer Method. Extreme, but effective.

And let's stop calling them "sex offenders," as if their crimes had anything to do with sex. (Perhaps Jeffry Dahmer was a "food offender.")

Oh no, what if I have a second-coming of Jeffrey Dahmer stalking me?

Zombie,” which he’d adapted from Joyce Carol Oates’s 1995 novella by the same name. She, in turn, had based her work partly from the life and crimes of cannibalistic serial killer, Jeffrey Dahmer.

Imagine the thoughts of serial killer and mutilator Jeffrey Dahmer when he ended up in prison. He felt great remorse, which he confessed on several occasions. He had ruined his life beyond repair. If Wisconsin had the death penalty, he would have earned it. Who could he turn to except God? Certainly no human would hear the cries of his heart and believe the depth of his sorrow. Only God could.

His social life, which should have been expanding, narrowed to a circle that was no larger than his mind, an imagined world in which his friends were phantoms, his lovers mere lumps of unmoving flesh.

You don't kick people out of the family. That's why it's family. Even Jeffrey Dahmer's family still loved him. There is nothing that you could have done to warrant being expelled from your own family.

Jeff, I have here a report from your employer at the chocolate factory. It says that they gave you notice of termination. They were also wondering if you placed anything other than the prescribed ingredients into the batches of confections you were mixing.” Dahmer sat back quickly in surprise. “What do you mean? They think I put some body parts into the candy? What kind of monster do they think I am?

there's a part in the essay that kind of does this academic "Let's unpack the idea of Lynchian and what Lynchian means is something about the unbelievably grotesque existing in a kind of union with the unbelievably banal," and then it gives a series of scenarios about what -- what is and what isn't Lynchian. Jeffrey Dahmer was borderline Lynchian...what was Lynchian was having the actual food products next to the disembodied bits of the corpse. I guess the big one is, you know, a regular domestic murder is not Lynchian. But if the man -- if the police come to the scene and see the man standing over the body and the woman -- let's see, the woman's '50s bouffant is undisturbed and the man and the cops have this conversation about the fact that the man killed the woman because she persistently refused to buy, say, for instance, Jif peanut butter rather than Skippy, and how very, very important that is, and if the cops found themselves somehow agreeing that there were major differences between the brands and that a wife who didn't recognize those differences was deficient in her wifely duties, that would be Lynchian -- this weird confluence of very dark, surreal, violent stuff and absolute, almost Norman Rockwell, banal, American stuff, which is terrain he's been working for quite a while -- I mean, at least since -- at least since "Blue Velvet.

It was a level of obliviousness, or perhaps denial, that was scarcely imaginable, and yet it was real. It was as if I had locked my son in a soundproofed booth, then drawn the curtains so that I could neither hear nor see what he had become.

...she's just an Italian momma. She worries a lot." "Dude, whenever she knew you had a date, she'd call during the day while you were at work, leaving you those disturbing messages—reading off detailed descriptions of what Jeffrey Dahmer did to his victims." "She actually still does that." Gabe cringed, looking over at me. "She only wants me to be safe. The whole gay thing wasn't easy for her." "Boo hoo," I said, "You're queer, not cancerous. She's had plenty of time to get the hell over it.

How did the government spend three million dollars trying to find out if Jeffrey Dahmer was crazy? Three million dollars! Let me tell you something, when I’m president I will make one very simple law. Anytime you eat three or more people, you’re crazy!

It’s impossible to say. Normal motives don’t necessarily apply to psychopathic personalities. Jeffrey Dahmer murdered and cannibalized seventeen people, three of whose skulls were found in his refrigerator.” “That’s perfectly rational behavior,” said Desh sarcastically. “He just didn’t want them to spoil.

I had this dream in which I was having a cocktail party, and it was in a big room. I was standing at the door saying hello to people, and Jeffrey Dahmer walks up and I say, ‘Oh Jeffrey, please go on in, it’s right in there.' And then I say to myself, I just put Jeffrey Dahmer in a room with all my friends.

I did not see that there was much more I could do for Jeff. He was now totally in the hands of other people. They would decide what he wore, what he ate, where he slept, what medication, if, any, he received. My fatherly duties had been reduced to the provision of a few small services, none of them basic. As a father, my role had almost disappeared.

Most of his face had been hidden by long, greasy bangs, and he mumbled in a low voice that made him difficult to understand. From what little Kyosuke had been able to make out, Usami had killed one person, but he mostly spent his time at the podium reciting strange names that Kyousuke didn't recognize like Jeffrey Dahmer and Ed Gein... Maybe they're actors?

t's hard for me to believe that a human being could have done what I've done, but I know that I did it.

I think in some way I wanted it to end, even if it meant my own destruction.

Madness has its own logic.

When I was a little kid, I was just like anybody else.” “I made my fantasy life more powerful than my real one.” “I carried it too far, that’s for sure

Having OCD, and tending to see things as either black or white and in perfectionistic terms, as well as being overconscientious, he was extremely hard on himself and insisted that he somehow be guaranteed that he would not one day snap and act on his thoughts. At one point, Frank told me that he was now concerned that he was feeling too little anxiety, which made him think that perhaps he was a sociopath without a conscience after all and would end up like Jeffrey Dahmer!

Heart disease is the Jeffrey Dahmer of modern ailments. It kills more than 25 percent of us. That’s one person in the United States dying of it every 37 seconds. Expanding fitness just a bit—the equivalent of a person improving their max running speed from five to six miles an hour—reduces the risk of heart disease by 30 percent, according to the American Heart Association. Next is cancer. It kills 22.8 percent of us. The most fit people face a 45 percent lower risk of dying from the disease, according to a study in the Annals of Oncology. Then we have accidents. They take 6.8 percent of us. If a person is in a serious car accident, being in shape drops their chances of dying by 80 percent, according to a study in the Emergency Medical Journal. If the docs have to operate—regardless of whether it’s an emergency or a planned surgery—fitter people also face fewer surgical complications and recover faster than unfit people, say scientists in Brazil.

FURIOUS FAVOR I wonder if David would be allowed in our churches today. In most cases, when a church member has an affair, he is shunned at best or mistreated at worst—even if he repents. But David doesn’t just have an affair. He lusts, covets, fornicates, lies, and gets another man hammered. Then he tries to keep his dirty little secrets by murdering the husband of the woman he “loves.” I doubt I’ve met anyone as sinful as David. Have you? He breaks half of the Ten Commandments in a single episode. And he doesn’t repent until he’s caught. But when Nathan shoves his prophetic finger into David’s chest and rebukes him, David falls to his knees and admits his guilt. And right then, at that moment, God rips open the heavens to reach down and touch David’s soul with stubborn delight. God eagerly forgives David for his sin, and all of it is buried at the bottom of the sea, never to be remembered again. There is no hiccup in God’s furious favor toward David. So why do repentant sinners still bear the stigma of “adulterer,” “divorced,” or “addict” in our churches today? It’s one thing if they don’t repent. But quite often we shun repentant sinners, like Jeffrey Dahmer, whose crimes we just can’t forget. “He’s the former addict.” “That’s the divorced mom.” “Here comes the guy who slept with the church secretary.” For some reason we love to define people by the sin in their lives—even past sin in their lives—rather than by the grace that forgave it. It’s no wonder that David pens the last sentence in Psalm 23: “Surely goodness and mercy shall [hunt me down] all the days of my life” (Ps. 23:6).

This was the end of some of those friendships. They were left behind, artifacts of youth, boxed up with my comic books, my sketchbooks ans journals, and the rest of my teenage mementos. Only a select few of my high school comrades, like Mike, would remain lifelong pals.

Dahmer was as manipulative and calculating as the other killers we've covered in this book, demonstrating a keen understanding of how to evade capture the vast majority of his victims were Black men, not because Dahmer was exclusively attracted to the them but because he knew that police were much less likely to investigate their disappearances. In this, he was absolutely correct, harkening back to the "less dead" theory we discussed in Gacy's case. When you add gay and poor to that victim profile as many of Dahmer's victims were, you've got the perfect trifecta of investigative apathy.

He was truly a loner; in fact, phone company records showed that during the entire time he lived at the Oxford Apartments address, not a single phone call was placed to his residence. The more time I spent with him chronicling the facts around his activities, the more I felt sorry for him. He was a pathetically lonely and inept human being. He was unable to make a real connection with anyone and was totally self-absorbed. His lifestyle was a continuous hedonistic pursuit of pleasure. All his time, effort, energy, and money went to his overwhelming desire for a warm, compliant human body, with alcohol fueling his every move.

Two days after his twelfth birthday, a fortnight before his father was jailed for debt, Charles Dickens was sent to work in a blacking factory. There, in a rat-infested room by the docks, he sat for twelve hours a day, labelling boot polish and learning the pain of abandonment. While he never spoke publicly of this ordeal, it would always be with him: in his social conscience and burning ambition, in the hordes of innocent children who languished and died in his fiction. Pete thinks we all have a blacking factory: some awful moment, early on, when we surrender our childish hearts as surely as we lose our baby teeth. And the outcome can't be called. Some of us end up like Dickens, others like Jeffrey Dahmer. It's not a question of good or evil, Pete believes. Just the random brutality of the universe and our native ability to withstand it.

In any discussion of serial killers, a few notorious names—those of the most prolific killers—always get mentioned. Ted Bundy admitted to killing thirty women, but it could well have been more. Gary Ridgeway, also known as the Green River Killer, was convicted of murdering forty-eight, but later confessed to others. John Wayne Gacy was convicted of killing thirty-three people. Jeffrey Dahmer was convicted of murdering and partially ingesting fifteen people. David Berkowitz, New York City’s “Son of Sam,” shot and killed six people. Less well known but significant are Dennis Rader, who killed ten people in Wichita, Kansas, and Aileen Wuornos, portrayed by Charlize Theron in the film Monster, who killed six men. Wayne Williams was convicted of killing only two men, but he is believed to have killed anywhere from twenty-three to twenty-nine children in Atlanta. Robert Hansen confessed to four murders but is suspected of more than seventeen. Juan Corona was convicted of murdering twenty-five people. Their crimes are all horrific, and the number of victims is heartbreaking. But all these most notorious serial killers stand in the shadow of Dr. Kermit Gosnell. Strangely, Gosnell appears in no list we have found of known U.S. serial killers, though he is the biggest of them all. In reality, Kermit Gosnell deserves the top spot on any list of serial murderers. He’s earned it.

Your Honor, it is over now. This has never been a case of trying to get free. I didn’t ever want freedom. Frankly, I wanted death for myself. This was a case to tell the world that I did what I did not for reasons of hate; I hated no one. I knew I was sick or evil or both. Now, I believe I was sick. The doctors have told me about my sickness, and now I have some peace. I know how much harm I have caused. I tried to do the best I could after the arrest to make amends, but no matter what I did, I could not undo the terrible harm I have caused. I feel so bad for what I did to those poor families, and I understand their rightful hate. “I decided to go through with this trial for a number of reasons. One of the reasons was to let the world know that these were not hate crimes. I wanted the world and Milwaukee, which I deeply hurt, to know the truth of what I did. I didn’t want unanswered questions. All the questions have now been answered. I wanted to find out just what it was that caused me to be so bad and evil. But most of all, Mr. Boyle and I decided that maybe there was a way for us to tell the world that if there are people out there with these disorders, maybe they can get some help before they end up being hurt or hurting someone. I think the trial did that. I should have stayed with God. I tried and failed, and created a holocaust. Thank God there will be no more harm that I can do. I take all the blame for what I did. I hurt so many people and I am sorry. In closing, I just want to say that I hope God has forgiven me. I know society will never be able to forgive me. I ask for no consideration.

I was getting my knife sharpened at the cutlery shop in the mall,” he said. It was where he originally bought the knife. The store had a policy of keeping your purchase razor sharp, so he occasionally brought it back in for a free sharpening. “Anyway, it was that day that I met this Asian male. He was alone and really nice looking, so I struck up a conversation with him. Well, I offered him fifty bucks to come home with me and let me take some photos. I told him that there was liquor at my place and indicated that I was sexually attracted to him. He was eager and cooperative so we took the bus to my apartment. Once there, I gave him some money and he posed for several photos. I offered him the rum and Coke Halcion-laced solution and he drank it down quickly. We continued to drink until he passed out, and then I made love to him for the rest of the afternoon and early evening. I must have fallen asleep, because when I woke up it was late. I checked on the guy. He was out cold, still breathing heavily from the Halcion. I was out of beer and walked around the corner for another six-pack but after I got to the tavern, I started drinking and before I knew it, it was closing time. I grabbed my six-pack and began walking home. As I neared my apartment, I noted a lot of commotion, people milling about, police officers, and a fire engine. I decided to see what was going on, so I came closer. I was surprised to see they were all standing around the Asian guy from my apartment. He was standing there naked, speaking in some kind of Asian dialect. At first, I panicked and kept walking, but I could see that he was so messed up on the Halcion and booze that he didn’t know who or where he was. “I don’t really know why, Pat, but I strode into the middle of everyone and announced he was my lover. I said that we lived together at Oxford and had been drinking heavily all day, and added that this was not the first time he left the apartment naked while intoxicated. I explained that I had gone out to buy some more beer and showed them the six-pack. I asked them to give him a break and let me take him back home. The firemen seemed to buy the story and drove off, but the police began to ask more questions and insisted that I take them to my apartment to discuss the matter further. I was nervous but felt confident; besides, I had no other choice. One cop took him by the arm and he followed, almost zombie-like. “I led them to my apartment and once inside, I showed them the photos I had taken, and his clothes neatly folded on the arm of my couch. The cops kept trying to question the guy but he was still talking gibberish and could not answer any of their questions, so I told them his name was Chuck Moung and gave them a phony date of birth. I handed them my identification and they wrote everything down in their little notebooks. They seemed perturbed and talked about writing us some tickets for disorderly conduct or something. One of them said they should take us both in for all the trouble we had given them. “As they were discussing what to do, another call came over their radio. It must have been important because they decided to give us a warning and advised me to keep my drunken partner inside. I was relieved. I had fooled the authorities and it gave me a tremendous feeling. I felt powerful, in control, almost invincible. After the officers left, I gave the guy another Halcion-filled drink and he soon passed out. I was still nervous about the narrow escape with the cops, so I strangled him and disposed of his body.

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.’ Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

When an airplane navigates through the sky it works its way along a route composed of beacons and waypoints – invisible signposts in the sky – which are defined by geographic coordinates. They constitute the pilot’s map of the world. Flight computers are programmed into these waypoints which are put into the systems before take-off. Assuming these coordinates have been programmed correctly, the plane will go from point A, passing through the designated waypoints, before arriving at point B without a hitch. However, if any of these waypoints are wrong, the aircraft will deviate from its flight programme and its destination which can prove fatal. Life for each of us contains thousands of waypoints; signposts that hopefully provide us with directions as to what to do, how to go about things and where to go next – our decision-making processes. But what happens when our own onboard computer, our brain, has initially been programmed with data that is corrupt and socially unacceptable. How are we able to make life decisions – correct decisions that is?

Now, can we get on with this? I have a four o’clock I wish to attend to. We always butt fuck Jeffrey Dahmer on Christmas Eve, and I’d hate to miss it.

Hey, TG,” Reid says, holding up a piece of toast. “You watch that new documentary on Dahmer?” “Dude, you know the rule,” Kirby says. “No talking about cannibalism while we eat.

I just…like the way he smells. I look at him and I find myself wondering what his skin tastes like.” “Oof. Easy, Dahmer,” Adam said. “Maybe don’t start with that.” “Don’t start with anything. He thinks you kill people,” Atticus said, practically apoplectic at that point. “He does kill people?” Adam reminded.

Dahmer was employed at a local candy company and his job was to mix ingredients during the processing part of the operation.

In the autumn after his graduation, Dahmer enrolled at Ohio State University but spent most of his time drinking and drunk. He rarely went to class and never completed assignments. He was kicked out of school after the first term. His father and he began to argue about his drinking and his father threatened to throw him out of the house. During one of their discussions, his father mentioned that the military might provide some direction to his life, thinking it would make a man out of him. Dahmer never wanted to become a soldier, but he loved his dad and wanted to please him; besides, he thought it would be an opportunity to see the world and maybe forget about the dismembered body in the woods. Jeff signed up for four years and received training as an army medic. Boot camp was difficult, but it challenged him mentally and physically. He began to feel good about himself and was too busy to think about his secret. He deployed to Germany and bunked with several other soldiers. After his shift, he had a lot of free time and began to frequent the beer gardens. His drinking soon accelerated and eventually got him into trouble.

only way he knew to dull the pain. He was disciplined numerous times before receiving an honorable discharge. After a short stint in Hollywood, Florida, where he drank away the remainder of his military pay, he returned to Ohio to live with his father and stepmother. By now, he drank every day, which caused a stir in the household. His father convinced him that he’d be better off if he moved in with his grandmother. She owned a large house in the Milwaukee area and lived all alone. He could be his own man there and look after his grandmother in her old age. Jeff felt this would be an opportunity for a new start and moved in with his grandma.

After learning the ins and outs of the gay bar scene, he found it surprisingly easy to meet and spend time with other gay men, often bringing them back to Grandma’s basement for sex. Other times, he secured a hotel room downtown to take his one-night stands.

During the day, he fluctuated from the sheer terror of exposure to the exhilarating high of recalling his deeds. He stated that just thinking of these events gave him great pleasure and he masturbated as he did so. The fact that he had gotten away with it made him feel powerful, almost God-like. Nobody knew what happened; he had his little secret, his own little world that no one knew about, and he was in complete control. He began to feel that he couldn’t be caught, that since he had already gotten away with killing two people, he could do it again. He wondered about the killing part of it. Was it subconscious, deliberate, or what? He decided to kill again, only this time, he’d plan the whole thing. Jeff said that he became aroused just thinking of what he planned to do and how he planned to do it.

Dahmer was a third-shift worker at a chocolate factory and found it difficult to sleep during the day. He remembered reading in the newspaper that President George H. Bush used a new drug called Halcion to help him sleep during the tension of the Gulf War. Jeff went to a doctor and convinced him to give him a prescription for the sleeping pill. It worked like a knockout drug, putting him to sleep quickly. He wondered how these pills might work on his weekend pickups.

For the first time in his life, he was in complete control. He knew what he did was wrong, but there weren’t any consequences, no punishment, no one to answer to. How could there be? No one knew but him.

I loved having these guys with me and making love to them. Their warm bodies were under my complete control, but after killing them, I felt empty, and the task of disposing their bodies was no easy job. When it was done, I felt empty and alone.

I knew I was lucky to go undetected and I was afraid my luck would run out. I feared that I would be caught, but the allure of a warm body, one that would not leave at the end of the night, stayed with me, and I constantly thought about killing again.

One day as I sat and drank, I saw this young Asian male. He was a little younger than I would have liked, but he was eager and willing. I offered him fifty bucks to come home with me and let me take some nude photographs of him. We drank some rum and Cokes and I took some Polaroids, but he was very young and not that developed sexually, so I didn’t kill him. He must have told his parents because about two hours after he left, the police were at my door, found the photos I took, and arrested me. I thought this was it, that everything would come out, but the cops were only interested in the photos I took of the Asian kid and nothing else. I remember that my father was upset when I called from jail, but he got me a lawyer. I made a plea arrangement in court and was put on work release for about a year.

Dahmer described his knife as a special one he had purchased at a cutlery shop in the downtown mall just for this purpose. He discovered through trial and error at Grandma’s that a good knife was mandatory for the job. It was a six-inch serrated blade with a black plastic contoured handle, and he kept it razor sharp. He placed the body in the bathtub, letting the blood flow down the drain as he severed the flesh from the corpse. He cut the flesh into small pieces and flushed them down the toilet. He told me that the skeletal remains were the most difficult to dispose of, so in preparation for his next kill, he purchased a large plastic garbage pail. “I cut the cartilage and tendons at the joint and pulled the bones apart, placing them in the container. Then I covered them with several gallons of muriatic acid. That’s what’s in those boxes you asked about,” Dahmer said. He explained that after a few days in the acid, the human remains became like a mush and he could easily flush it down the toilet. This eliminated placing the discarded body in the trash and lessened his chances of discovery. “I knew now that I was in it till the end, and this one was so sexually satisfying that I began to feel remorse that it was over so soon. It seemed a shame to get rid of the whole body, so I decided to keep his head.

Yeah, Jeff, what’s with the skulls?” I told him the lieutenant had said they found skulls and heads along with other body parts all over his apartment. He seemed eager to continue. “Well, I wanted to keep those guys with me,” he said nonchalantly. “But after a while, they gave off an awful smell; as a matter of fact, the smell was a problem that I constantly had to deal with. So I bought a large ten-gallon soup kettle at the mall and began boiling the heads in a solution of hot water and cleansing soaps. After being in the solution for about an hour, the hair and flesh just boiled right off and left the skull. I kept the finished ones in my closet. Any clothing, jewelry, identification, or other property of the guys that I brought home, I cut up and threw out.

Dahmer explained that most of his pickups occurred on Friday nights. That way, he could keep the body around and have sex with it until Sunday evening, when he cut up the body. The trash men came early Monday morning and took away everything. At times like this, he just cut up the body into fillets to throw out and placed the disarticulated skeleton into the rubber trash container with the acid until it became sludgy and then he could flush it down the toilet.

When Richard was asked recently how to avoid becoming the victim of a serial murderer, he said, “You can’t. Once they are focused on you, have you where you are vulnerable, you’re all theirs. Dahmer used to invite you home for a drink, and the next thing you knew, he’s eating you. Same thing with John Gacy: he’d put on his clown face, do a couple of tricks, and suddenly he had you handcuffed and in his control. What people can do is not trust someone you don’t know and to always be aware of what’s going on around you. When you drop your guard—that’s when a serial killer moves.

I’m pretty sure that this is the guy I met the night before Easter in 1989. You see these?” He picked out Polaroids depicting a severed penis, a black male’s scalp with a large Jheri curl still attached, and a painted skull. “These belong to him.” This was the first time he kept his victim’s body parts. He met Anthony Sears at closing time in front of a dance club called La Cage. He was with a friend, a white man, and after accepting Dahmer’s offer to come home with him, the friend gave them a ride to 57th and National. They walked the remainder of the way to Grandma’s, and Dahmer gave him the drink mixed with Halcion. He had sex with him before and after death. On Easter Sunday, while Grandma attended church, Dahmer dismembered the body by severing the flesh, keeping the individual’s scalp, genitals, and skull. He wanted to preserve these body parts, so he went to a hardware store and told the clerk he was interested in drying and treating a wild rabbit pelt. They informed him that acetone would do the trick, and he purchased some. After cleaning the body parts, Dahmer treated them with the acetone for preservation. “It actually worked quite well, as you can see from the pictures. When they were dried, I wore his scalp. It helped me to fantasize and remember the night I was with him. I could suck on his penis and masturbate.

He thought for a while before beginning. “I think it was October of 1990. I was walking on Wisconsin Avenue when I met him. I struck up a conversation and asked if he wanted to come home to my apartment for some cocktails. I also mentioned that I would pay him a hundred dollars if he let me take some nude pictures of him. He agreed, and we walked to my apartment, where we engaged in some light sex and I gave him the drink. Soon he was out, and I made love to him for about an hour or so. I decided that I would kill him, and used my hands to strangle him until he stopped breathing.” Murphy interrupted by placing the Polaroid picture found on the table in the apartment. It depicted the victim straddled on his back over the side of a bathtub. There was an incision made from the bottom of his chin to the top of his genitals. The viscera was pulled out of the body and lying, as if on display, on top of the torso. The colored Polaroid was shocking. The moist, red entrails glistened, revealing the intestines and internal organs. “What’s this all about?” Murphy said, pointing to the ghastly sight. Dahmer picked it up and shrugged. “I wanted a picture of his insides, so I placed him in the bathroom and cut him open. I pulled the viscera from his body with my hands. The look and feel of it gave me unbelievable pleasure, and I masturbated and made love to him by placing my penis in it, like having intercourse.” He took a long, slow drag from his cigarette without looking up as the rest of us sat in silence. We had identified our sixth victim: David Thomas. Murphy, serious as ever, finally broke the silence. “How did you dispose of this one? Did you keep any of his parts?” Dahmer answered that he became leery of placing the bones and flesh in the trash for fear of discovery. This is when he began to use the muriatic acid. He tried to save the skull by boiling it; however, he wanted to speed up the drying process and used a higher oven temperature. The increased heat popped the skull into smaller sections. Because it was ruined, he threw it into the acid. There were no remaining parts of this victim.

The list was astounding. There were ten heads in all: one full head in the refrigerator, four skulls in a small floor freezer, three painted skulls in metallic colors, and two that were bone-dry white. Those that were still relatively identifiable were matched with either police or family photos. The large blue hermetically sealed industrial drum from the bedroom contained severed human flesh and four completely dismembered bodies covered in a solution of muriatic acid. There were sets of hands, a human scalp, and two well-preserved penises found in plastic pails hidden in the closet. A four-drawer metal filing cabinet from the living room contained the entire skeletal structure of a victim. The bones inside had been treated with the various solvents and were immaculately clean. There was a variety of knives. One had a large contoured black plastic handle with a six-inch serrated blade and the word Bushwacker molded into it. There was a small drill with several bits, numerous handsaws, forks, plates, and a stovetop broiler adapter, all encrusted with human bone and flesh and trace blood evidence.

The most disturbing revelation was the numerous fillets of flesh wrapped in individual plastic sandwich bags and neatly stacked in the freezer compartment of Dahmer’s refrigerator.

returned to find Murphy motioning me into the captain’s office. “Sit down, Pat. I want to talk to you guys a minute.” Domagalski told us the medical examiner identified the individually wrapped pieces of flesh as biceps, thighs, livers, and hearts. The utensils, plates, and broiler adapter all pointed to the conclusion that Dahmer must have been eating his victims.

The medical examiner had found what appeared to be the markings of a tenderizing instrument on the pieces of biceps and thigh. The markings corresponded with a wooden meat tenderizer recovered from the scene. The paper-thin cuts of individually wrapped heart and liver made it look as though he was storing the “food” for later use.

I bought a small floor freezer about a week before that to store the bodies of my victims if I was pressed for time or too tired to dispose of them right away. This was the first time I used it. I folded his body into it and kept it there for a few weeks before I cut off the flesh and placed him in the muriatic acid. I kept the head and tried to dry it out after boiling it like the other one I told you about, but the oven must have been too hot because the skull started exploding, so I had to throw it in the acid. I remember feeling the whole event was a waste of time because I couldn’t keep anything of him and that was the whole point, to keep them with me.

As a child, Dahmer is not known to have tortured or killed animals, which is common in the childhoods of notorious killers. However, Dahmer is known to have collected, inspected, and dissected the corpses of dead animals he found in the woods or road kill from the streets near his family’s Ohio home. While escaping his parents’ fighting at home, young Dahmer rode around the slightly isolated neighborhood on his bike or hiked the woods behind his house. Dahmer was fascinated by animal corpses, the innards, the bones, and the decaying flesh. He found a bag or box, and using a stick, picked up dead animals. Once alone, he picked at the dead animal, examining its insides, removing the organs, and extracting the bones. He asked his father about using chemicals to burn away fur and flesh, thereby leaving the bones completely cleaned. His father, a chemist, believed he had a prodigy with an interest in chemistry in his midst, and so encouraged him.

As he became a teenager, there is strong evidence that he began to drink alcohol on a regular basis. It was not at all unusual for Dahmer to show up to school with a paper cup of alcohol taken from his parents’ house that he sipped from before school started for the day. This could explain some of Dahmer’s lack of motivation and the desire to be left alone, as well as his low ambitions as far as deciding what he wanted to do with his life. Dahmer drank to ease the pain of his loneliness, and perhaps to make it easier to be around other teens, to ease or lessen the anxiety. It was also likely a distraction from the problems that were going on at home when his parents fought.

One year, a group of students, including Dahmer, traveled to Washington, DC, to see the sites and visit important landmarks. While on this trip, someone dared Dahmer to make a crank call. He contacted the offices of then Vice President Walter Mondale and managed to charm his way into an invitation for Dahmer and his fellow high school classmates from Ohio to meet the VP.

Dahmer was a sensitive, shy, and immature young man. He lacked motivation, passion, and ambition—that perhaps can be blamed in part on his habitual drinking problem. There doesn’t seem to be any evidence that he attempted to equip himself for a more productive life, and he always allowed alcohol to take over and ruin any progress he did make. Eventually, his crimes, once embarked upon, would become the focus of his entire world.

Forensic psychiatrists have often pointed to this period in Dahmer’s development—a time when adolescent boys start to sort out their sexuality and what is attractive to them—as when Dahmer began to confuse and combine his feelings of attraction with his interest in the insides of animals. While experimenting with deceased animals, this became intermingled with his sexual development. He may have known at a young age that he was gay, but for fear of upsetting his family, he did his best to repress those feelings. Dahmer may have also realized from an early age that his sexual interests involving viscera were deviant, and that what stimulated him was unusual and likely not what others around him found arousing. At an age when young men are stimulated by sexually graphic photographs or films, dating, and developing an early-stage sex life, Dahmer was dismembering road kill, watching horror movies, and fantasizing about sex with incapacitated men.

Dahmer was later diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (sometimes and more recently known as emotionally unstable personality disorder), but if you analyze the definition, many of the behaviors and symptoms have also been used to describe his mother Joyce, including sometimes irrational fears of abandonment, low self-esteem, unexplained anxiety, and depression, which must have affected him in childhood and as he grew up.

Dahmer was pathetic and incredibly selfish as he began the process of trying to find sexual pleasure and companionate happiness with another man, only to discover that what he really wanted was a completely incapacitated and compliant sexual partner who fit the very specific body type that he deemed perfect.

Dahmer’s preferences, when it came to the male physique, were slender and lean, yet athletic and slightly but not overtly muscular young men. Because so many of Dahmer’s victims were African American or, for the most part, men of color, it was at first presumed that Dahmer hated non-Caucasians. Dahmer denied that any of the murders were racially motivated, and said that what led him to approach the men he did was whether or not he was attracted to them; but, even more importantly, that they met the physical requirements that stimulated him the most. Investigating detectives found no indications that Dahmer had problems with people of color. Dahmer emerged as truthful as far as the detectives determined, yet not necessarily always immediately forthcoming.

Dahmer seemed incapable of participating in a stable relationship, so instead chose to pick up partners for casual encounters, or, in most cases, offered his victims money to pose for photographs at his apartment. Not surprisingly, the inability to maintain healthy relationships is common amongst many serial killers.

A critical time in Dahmer’s life often mentioned by family, high school acquaintances, and others who studied his upbringing was when his parents split up and divorced. Kennedy explained that when Dahmer was eighteen and living at the house in Bath, his father had moved out and already lived with his girlfriend, who later became his wife and Dahmer’s stepmother. His mother decided to leave Ohio and took Dahmer’s younger brother David with her. Because relations between Dahmer’s parents were strained, it seemed that each came and went without notifying the other of their plans. Dahmer was still completing his final year of high school, so he remained in Ohio. Dahmer was left in the family home alone for an extended period of time, and during this time, he committed his first murder. Much has been made of this period of so-called abandonment when Dahmer was on his own, but Kennedy said he never really bought it. “He was eighteen years old, for heaven’s sake. It wasn’t like he was a little kid unable to fend for himself.

One must realize the effects of long-term alcohol abuse on the body and mind. The effects of alcohol on the brain, especially chronic drinking, are fairly well documented—it can affect mood, personality, motivation, and ambition, which explains some of Dahmer’s inability to pursue education or training in any meaningful way. Chronic substance abuse can also affect one’s ability to empathize or sympathize with others; it made Dahmer uninterested in the world around him. It suppressed his curiosity about life, people, and events, and any emotion or sensation he had was stifled under the weight of alcohol. It can also make a person less inhibited, so that when he approached young men, police, or his neighbors, Dahmer could come across as more interesting and engaged in the world, but it was a false reality.

Serial killers usually choose vulnerable victim types, such as senior citizens, children, women, or people who live high-risk lifestyles. Dahmer’s victims were different. These were healthy, physically fit young men who only became vulnerable through intoxication and drugging. These men were young, athletic, social, and, in some cases, gay or bisexual, but not people normally perceived as physically vulnerable, and who didn’t perceive Dahmer as a threat. He incapacitated these otherwise capable men by drugging them until they passed out, therefore always creating a completely vulnerable victim.

Due to Dahmer’s notoriety, he was placed in solitary confinement for twenty-three hours a day in a cell, with one hour outside for physical activity. For a lonely man who craved companionship, this must have been nearly impossible to bear, and within a short period of time, he requested to be placed with the general population. He knew that it was a certain death given his infamy. Prison also reawakened Dahmer’s reliance upon and interest in religion, as he once again tried to “get his life right” as he put it, as he had when he lived with his grandmother and attended church regularly.

He felt that what he had done could never be forgiven and he was destined to go to hell, so it didn’t matter if he killed more people.

Instead, at eighteen, he felt his life was over for what he had done (his first murder), and that he didn’t deserve to be happy or successful. So alcohol, which he had already established as his escape, and he began to go through the motions of life until his dark fantasies took over. He always believed that a turning point in his life happened while in the haze of a lonely, alcoholic, sexless, emotionally bankrupt life. The simple act of an anonymous man at the public library—who tossed Dahmer a note offering to give him a blow job in the bathroom—caused him, at that moment, to decide to abandon the legitimate life he had created and instead pursue sex, and finally achieve love and physical relationships on his terms. He didn’t follow the man, but it seemed to have triggered a crisis of conscience in Dahmer, so deep that he finally admitted to himself that he was and always had been attracted to men, and in turn, that some men were attracted to him. He decided to live a lie no longer, and knew that he “wasn’t fooling anybody.” Further, the incident seemed to reawaken his lustful desire to engage with unconscious or dead bodies—to do whatever he wanted with the corpses of men.

Dahmer was a marked man from the day he entered the penitentiary. His murder in prison was inevitable, and Dahmer would have been told this prior to being moved out of solitary. His desire to be around other people must have outweighed his fear of being killed, or he simply didn’t care anymore.

On November 28, 1994, Dahmer was sent with two other prisoners to clean a bathroom at the Columbia Correctional Institute in Portage, Wisconsin. Inmate Christopher Scarver first beat Jesse Anderson, the other prisoner, in front of Dahmer before turning his weapon, a grip from a barbell weight, on Dahmer, who put up no resistance. Coincidentally, it was the very same kind of weapon Dahmer used against his first murder victim at age eighteen.

It was later released that after his death, Dahmer’s brain was examined at the request of his parents. Nothing abnormal was found. Later, Lionel and Joyce Dahmer fought a court battle over the brain, with Lionel coming out the victor. The brain was cremated along with the rest of Dahmer’s remains.

He sat and smoked deliberately, as if he were finished with his recital. I directed him to tonight’s activities. “Tell me about tonight, Jeff. What happened?” He sat up again and appeared eager to tell me. “Well, Pat, it’s weird. I was out of Halcion, but I still wanted to be with someone warm and alive. I went to the mall downtown and started drinking at a pub on the third floor. I met the guy there; we had a few beers together and talked. I figured that he was a willing prospect, so I offered him fifty bucks to come back to my apartment and let me take some pictures of him in the nude. He agreed. I figured I’d ply him with booze until he passed out and then I would kill him, but this guy could really drink. I was getting drunk and knew that if I wanted him, I would have to try something else. I asked him to let me take some bondage pictures of him, thinking that if I could handcuff him behind his back, he would be mine. Then I could knock him out by hitting him over the head or something, I don’t know. I was drunk and not thinking straight. Anyway, I got one cuff on him but he wouldn’t let me cuff his other hand. I got mad and tried to force his other arm behind his back and into the handcuffs. We began to struggle, nothing big, just some wrestling around on the floor. Even though he was a little guy, I couldn’t get the best of him, so I grabbed the knife to stab him, but he got loose and ran out the door. “I was too drunk to chase him. What else could I do? I don’t really remember what happened next. I think I passed out for a while until I heard a knock at the door. It was two big policemen and they were asking for the handcuff key. I could see the little Black guy behind them. He had the one cuff on and said that he didn’t want to prosecute—he just wanted the cuffs off. I fumbled around but couldn’t find the damn key. The cops were getting impatient waiting at the door, so they entered and began to look around. I think one of them found my Polaroids and said something to his partner. The fat cop walked over to the refrigerator and started to open it, and I knew this was it, so I tried to stop him. I’m not sure what happened next; I just know that I got the shit beat out of me. I tried to fight back but it didn’t seem to faze them, and now here I am with you, Pat.

I asked about the apartment and stated that I was surprised to see so many cleaning agents. “Yeah, that was a constant problem for me. The smell was awful. I tried to keep the bodies with me for as long as I could after I killed them, but after a day or so, they started to rot, depending on the temperature of my room. Summers were really the worst because I didn’t have air conditioning. When you fillet the flesh from the body, it gives off a horrendous odor. Several times the neighbors complained of the smell, so I constantly had air fresheners around. I even kept a fan going, using it as an exhaust for the fumes, pointing it out the bedroom window.” I interrupted, “I suppose all the cleansers I saw were used to clean up the blood?” Dahmer shook his head no and said that cutting up the bodies was a dirty job, but after a while, he had it down to a science. “I cut the body open in the bathtub and let gravity work to draw the blood down the drain.