[eerie music playing]
- [phone rings] - [dispatcher] Fire department.
[woman] Yes, could you send an ambulance on the corner of 25th and State?
[dispatcher] What's the problem?
[woman] There's this butt-naked young boy or man, or whatever.
He's still out, and people's trying to help him stand. He can't stand.
He has no clothes on. He's very hurt.
- [dispatcher] Is he awake? - [woman] He ain't awake.
They trying to get him to walk, but he can't walk straight,
can't even see straight.
- [woman] Anytime he stand up, he falls. - [dispatcher speaking indistinctly]
- [dispatcher] 25th and State? - [woman] Yeah.
- [dispatcher] All right. Okay. - [woman] The one-way. Okay. Bye.
[tape rolling]
[police sirens wailing]
What happened that night, it's unbelievable.
[McCann] Here's this young man, naked, outside Dahmer's apartment building.
He had not a stitch of clothing on.
Two people summoned the fire department and the police
because some of them saw he had blood running out of his rectum.
[Anne Schwartz] He had a scrape on his knee.
He was clearly dazed from something.
[Causey] Why is this boy,
naked, bleeding, and incoherent
on the streets of Milwaukee?
[theme music playing]
[uneasy music playing]
We had a mall called the Grand Avenue,
and Jeffrey Dahmer was in the mall all the time.
We would see him in the food court,
walking up and down the mall.
He took pictures of people,
and he'd say,
"You look like a model. Want me to take your picture?"
[tape rolling]
Dahmer was sitting having pizza and a beer
when he saw an attractive young man,
Konerak Sinthasomphone, come by,
whom he engaged in conversation.
He offered the young man $50
to pose for pictures.
And the young man
agreed to go back to Dahmer's apartment with him.
[Meuler] In the apartment, Dahmer hands him this drink
with the amount of Halcion that was able to
render him unconscious for a while.
Dahmer wanted to keep this victim alive as long as he could.
[Dr. Smail] In my sessions with him,
Mr. Dahmer told me what he wanted was somebody perfectly compliant,
who would stay with him without fear of leaving.
[Jeffrey from recorder] There were a few where I tried the drilling technique.
And I did the drilling with him too.
[Dr. Smail] You did?
[Jeffrey] Mm-hmm.
[Dr. Smail] At what point?
- Uh... - Before the officers came or after?
[Jeffrey] Yeah, before the officers came.
Jeffrey told me about, uh, Konerak,
and how he made some adjustments and changes in his method
in an effort to make him into a zombie
that would actually live.
[Dr. Dietz] Dahmer drilled a hole in his skull,
injected muriatic acid
and was waiting to see if he'd succeeded this time,
because the others died from that injection.
[Dr. Smail] How far you think you penetrated with the drill?
- [Jeffrey] All the way to the brain. - [Dr. Smail] Two or three inches?
- [Jeffrey] Yeah. - [Dr. Smail] And you went straight down?
- [Jeffrey] Right. Mm-mm. - [Wendy] Nothing came out?
- [Dr. Smail] No fluid of any kind? - [Jeffrey] No fluid that I could see.
And no bleeding either.
[Wendy] Konerak actually was able to function to a limited degree.
[Jeffrey playing from recorder] He was groggy and everything.
He wasn't dead or anything, and he talked.
I thought maybe I'd be able to keep him that way.
Jeff would just tell him what he wanted him to do, and it worked.
What Jeff didn't take into consideration was the fact
that he might run outside of the apartment.
Dahmer went out to get liquor. He often did while doing these crimes.
In this particular case, he left to get some beer at a nearby bar.
[Anne] While Dahmer is out getting beer,
Konerak takes the opportunity to run out of the house
and up the alley.
That's when a neighbor looks out her window and sees him.
The women call the police.
The police arrive,
and Konerak is now sitting
with a blanket around him at the scene.
And the officers are approaching to find out what's going on.
[Causey] Police officers tried to question Konerak.
Konerak can't really communicate his side of the story
'cause he's been drugged.
[Boyle] There was nothing that would indicate
that there was a hole in his head that Dahmer put there.
There was no blood flowing from it.
And while that was going on, Dahmer came up the street.
These young women interceded.
They asked Konerak, "What's your name?" He couldn't talk.
[indistinct police radio]
That's when they got between them and said, "Stay away from him."
Two 18-year-old Black girls protecting him from Dahmer.
The police don't listen to those girls.
They didn't even take their names.
Kept telling them to be quiet. That they'd arrest them if they kept talking.
Dahmer grabbed his arm and said, "No, he's my boyfriend,"
and started to take him back.
[Causey] Dahmer figured that, as a white guy,
"I could tell these officers my version of the story."
And I have to believe he believed that because he knew that,
"I'm white, and I could get away with this."
[Wendy] Jeffrey always had a quick response.
It seemed kind of natural to him
to have that ability to manipulate and get himself out of bad situations.
[Boyle] Now you got a naked guy out in the streets,
making noises.
The police thought he was drunker than a billy goat.
So what did they do? They don't just leave him.
They take him into a place of safety,
the apartment from whence he came.
So they go into the apartment.
Konerak sat on the couch as if this was his place.
Konerak's clothes are all in a little pile,
neatly laid out somewhere in the living room.
[Causey] Dahmer shows the officers photographs that he took of this young man
and said that was... You know, that was his lover.
[Boyle] They say, "We're not gonna arrest these two guys for being gay."
"Ain't gonna happen."
[Dr. Dietz] And they left Sinthasomphone on the couch at Dahmer's home
and never looked in the bedroom.
[Anne] Little do those officers know that in Dahmer's bedroom,
Tony Hughes's dead body
is on the bed just laying there.
The police left, and shortly thereafter
Dahmer injected more of this acid
into the brain of Konerak Sinthasomphone.
[Wendy from recorder] What you put in?
[Jeffrey] Konerak, I filled a syringe with muriatic acid.
I used the acid again in a lesser dosage,
but it was still too much the second time after I injected the second amount in.
[ominous music playing]
[Crocker Stephenson] One of the girls who tried to protect Konerak
went home and told her mother, Glenda Cleveland.
[tape rolling]
[dial tone rings]
- [cop] Milwaukee Police. - [Glenda] Yes, uh...
Uh, there was a squad car, number 50,
that was flagged down earlier this evening, about 15 minutes ago.
- [cop] That was me. - [Glenda] What happened?
I mean, my daughter and my niece, uh,
witnessed what was going on. Was anything done about the situation?
[cop] Nope. It's an intoxicated, uh, boyfriend
of another boyfriend.
[Glenda] How old was this child?
- [cop] It wasn't a child. It was an adult. - [Glenda] Are you sure?
[cop] Ma'am, I can't make it any more clear. It's all taken care of.
[ominous music playing]
Sinthasomphone died.
He died within an hour after the police left the apartment.
Konerak Sinthasomphone
was 14 years old and was one of the youngest of Dahmer's victims.
[Boyle] If they thought for a moment that he was at risk,
they would never have let him go back with Dahmer, ever.
The police officers had been told to be respectful
of the gay community in Milwaukee.
And I think they probably were thinking they were being respectful,
and not bringing a heterosexual bias
to the situation.
[Ross] Whatever the police did,
obviously, it wasn't enough.
[Causey] You have a number of African Americans
basically saying that this young man is underage,
that he didn't appear to be in his right state of mind.
People say they were doing their jobs, just doing the best they could.
That falls very far short of what they should have done.
If they'd run his name, they'd have found he was on probation
for assaulting a Laotian boy,
who would turn out to be Konerak's brother.
How... How does this happen?
[reporter] Twice victimized by Jeffrey Dahmer,
one of Konerak's brothers had been molested by Dahmer three years ago.
The family came to America 11 years ago
with dreams of a better life.
Instead, Jeffrey Dahmer has given them a grisly nightmare.
He said, "It... It seems almost more than coincidence."
However, it was something
that really shocked Jeff when he heard that.
He just was... was floored by it.
[Jeffrey from recorder] The Eurasians, it's just amazing they were brothers.
It's... It's incredible.
I can't believe it.
- [Wendy] Are you saying it's his brother? - [Jeffrey] Mm-hmm.
- [Wendy] You know what his name was? - [Jeffrey] No.
Sure don't.
It's a horrible tragedy for the Sinthasomphone family.
A sexual assault victim
and a separate murder victim in the same family.
It's hard to fathom what that family had to go through
at the hands of Jeffrey Dahmer.
[tape rolling]
[Anne] After Dahmer was arrested in July of '91,
the community was in an uproar when they found out
that the police had released Konerak back to Dahmer.
[phone ringing]
[Crocker] Glenda Cleveland called the police station
again and again over the next week or so.
She said, "My daughter saw this boy naked,"
just believing that he had been sexually assaulted.
I was a young reporter at the Sentinel when the Dahmer case broke.
Somebody wanted to talk about Dahmer, and I said, "I can talk to you."
The person on the phone was Glenda Cleveland.
She tells me this story that they had tried to protect this boy,
and the police wouldn't listen to them.
I called a captain at the police station.
I was expecting him to just deny it, but they didn't.
They said, "Yes, this matter's under investigation."
How could the police give that boy back to that man?
[Walter Farrell] They handed that minority male back to Dahmer,
but they took the word of the white male over five Black witnesses.
I have concluded that the officers failed
to properly perform their duties as required by the rules and regulations
of the Milwaukee Police Department.
[Anne] The two police officers, John Balcerzak and Joe Gabrish,
were fired from the Milwaukee Police Department.
[Causey] It was turmoil in the police department. The city was torn.
Some people supported the officers.
We are behind our police officers 100%.
[clapping]
[reporter] Much of the white community is not convinced
that racism is a problem in the police department.
They are rallying behind the police, even as the charges grow louder.
I personally feel that there is equal and fair treatment done
throughout the community by our officers. They're trained that way.
I don't think that the officers
made a decision based upon any race,
any homophobia.
Obviously in retrospect, the officers made a mistake,
but there was a lot of people that Dahmer had conned.
And he conned those officers that night.
And I'm sure those officers
have second-guessed that many times.
[Anne] People have pointed to the radio transmission by the officers
right after the contact.
[cop] The intoxicated Asian naked male...
[cops laughing]
[cop] ...was returned to his sober boyfriend.
It'll be a minute. My partner's gonna get deloused at the station.
You hear officers laughing in the background.
I think that what they did was a travesty.
[Causey] That gets back to the root of how we view homosexuality.
Gay people were made fun of. They were the butt of the joke.
[Anne] But then the two police officers
went to circuit court to appeal their firing.
The court agreed with them,
reinstated them with back pay.
[Fleming] The Konerak Sinthasomphone case
shed a spotlight on Milwaukee.
This was telling them a lot about their community.
It was telling them a lot about the police protection
that they were offered.
This was a very scary episode.
[tape rolling]
[suspenseful music playing]
After Mr. Dahmer killed, uh, this young Laotian lad,
bodies were piling up in his apartment.
[Anne] Dahmer went on to kill four more people.
[Crocker] At first, it was nine years between his homicides.
Then it was months. After Konerak, it was weeks.
[Jeffrey from recorder] An hour before I had to go to work,
I was trying to decide whether to strangle him then,
or keep him alive during the night.
And I chose the latter and missed work.
And was fired that Sunday.
And that was the domino.
The first domino that started the whole chain reaction falling.
[Vernell Bass] He had started drinking more
and spiraling down.
I noticed that I wasn't seeing him
as often as before he lost his job.
And I would actually go to knock on his door to check on him.
And I would notice the peephole would go dark.
Then it'd go back light.
And I knew that he came to the door,
and that he saw me.
He knew that it was me knocking on the door,
and he didn't open the door for me.
So I... I took it upon myself
to think that he wanted me to go away,
which I did.
[Wendy] A couple of the doctors said, "Yes, he was definitely an alcoholic."
He had an addictive personality.
I think he had the same addiction to the killing.
As it grew and grew and grew,
he needed it more and more and more.
He reached a point of time
where he was consistently having to go out
and deal with yet another individual,
and not disposing of the other ones he'd already killed.
[Jeffrey plays from recorder] When I was dismembering him in the tub,
I didn't finish the job in one night.
I was in too much of a rush to get it done.
[Boyle] He was getting so overwhelmed with what he was doing
that he had no more control of the scene.
[Wendy] He was showering with two people in the bottom of the tub.
I asked him, "Why didn't you get rid of the bodies before you went after another?"
He said, "I couldn't help it. I needed the excitement of it."
It was important that I was nonjudgmental,
and that I didn't put him into a position
that would stop him from talking.
But hearing the graphic detail from Jeffrey Dahmer
was a challenge.
- [from recorder] Did it excite you? - [Jeffrey] Yeah, it did.
Yeah, just to see the inside.
[Wendy] It grew through time
where it wasn't just having sex with a corpse,
but it was opening the viscera of the body
and... and, uh, having sex right there
with the insides of the person.
There were times where it was
very, very difficult to listen to,
and to pretend like, you know, uh, this isn't affecting me.
[Jeffrey plays from recorder] I almost got in trouble because
that smell apparently alerted neighbors.
[Bass] One night, I was sleeping,
and this horrible smell woke me up about 2:30 in the morning.
And I opened the door,
and I could see a mist.
You ever watch a movie, a scary movie where you're in the graveyard,
and they got the, you know, coming up? That's what I saw.
I closed the door,
I took a towel, and I covered the bottom of the door.
So then I went back to bed.
And when I woke up, I told my wife Pam about the smell,
and she said, "I'm gonna find out today where it's coming from."
Later, she said,
"I sniffed the door hinges."
"And the smell's coming from Jeff's apartment."
She took a lawn chair, and she sat in our apartment with our door open,
waiting for Jeff to come home.
When he came home, she confronted him about the smell.
And he said that his freezer had quit working,
and the meat spoiled in his freezer.
And so I asked him,
"Don't you got a warranty on that thing? How long have you had it?"
[Wendy from recorder] Did they ever come and inquire?
- [Jeffrey] Yeah, they did. - [Wendy] What happened?
[Jeffrey] I told them the freezer went on the blink.
[Dr. Dietz] He used a variety of means to keep what he could
of the men he found attractive.
And that included taking photographs of them
when they were unconscious or dead,
removing parts of them that he would preserve.
And it included eventually
some cannibalization.
[Wendy from recorder] Did you select what you decided to keep?
How did you select that?
[Jeffrey] Just the meatiest-looking parts.
The parts with the least amount of fat.
- [Wendy] So the biceps, thighs, calves? - [Jeffrey] Right. Mm-hmm.
[man] The eating of victims is part of the very disturbed thinking that developed
once Mr. Dahmer gave up on the idea that he could fight the urge to kill.
There were various body parts he'd thought about eating,
including a human heart.
[Wendy from recorder] So you took out the heart and the liver,
and you preserved that and his thigh.
What did you do with the rest of it then?
[Jeffrey] I kept about 50 pounds. The rest went in the trash.
[Wendy] How many pounds would you estimate you've eaten?
Total, about...
ten.
At one point, he drank human blood, again,
somehow thinking in his disturbed way that this was gonna connect him
with the blood of the people that he was consuming.
His thinking was, "Somehow, if I ingest these souls,
they will still live on through me."
[Wendy from recorder] If anybody looked it looked like you just stocked up.
[Jeffrey] So it looked just like supermarket meat.
I froze it for a while.
Maybe a month.
Or not that long. A couple weeks.
Oh my God. I had no idea
that this is what was occurring right across the hall
from where we lived.
Everyone in the building felt suckered.
We all felt that Jeffrey Dahmer had played us.
It's really hard
to become fond of someone
to find out that actually that person had a dagger in your back.
I thought this guy was my friend.
[reporter 1] People who live in the building are in a state of shock tonight.
They simply cannot believe
that a crime of this magnitude was going on right next door.
[reporter 2] The race question in the Jeffrey Dahmer story was raised today,
since most of the murder victims were Black,
and since it happened in a largely Black neighborhood.
The racism is the key because the consistent thing,
above the sex with the corpse, above the number,
is the consistency
that these were Black young men.
Dahmer said his ideal victim was a young, athletic Black male,
but his first two victims were white.
He had Hispanic victims. He had Asian victims.
He was attracted to people of color. This wasn't some hate crime.
He was trying to become involved intimately
with the sort of person towards whom he was attracted.
[Causey] I don't know what was in Dahmer's mind.
Was he a racist? Who cares?
He killed Black people.
He killed people of color.
He killed gay people.
In my opinion, what matters is that he took the lives
of a lot of people that should still be alive today.
[tape rolling]
With today's technology, the trial will be beamed through outer space
to other countries in a matter of seconds.
The line people in England have used is that Jeffrey Dahmer
has made sure that Milwaukee's not just gonna be famous for beer.
It's now gonna be famous for serial killers.
[Jeff Fleming] Dahmer confessed to killing 17 people altogether.
Dahmer entered a plea of guilty.
The only issue now was whether he was sane or insane.
Dahmer's plea was, "Yes, I did the murders, but I'm insane."
[Fleming] The trial was a big event.
It had drawn a lot of reporters. Family members were there.
It was now, you know, the big show.
Michael McCann was the DA at the time that conducted the trial for the state.
[Mccann] Gerry Boyle was Dahmer's defense attorney,
and a powerhouse in delivering an argument to a jury.
And I knew he'd be a tough guy.
[Anne] I can still remember what it was like to sit with the other media
at the Milwaukee County Courthouse
when we were waiting for Dahmer's initial appearance in court.
This was going to be the first time that we were going to see him in person.
We were expecting like, you know, maybe Charles Manson,
but Dahmer was a good-looking man.
He was subdued.
He... didn't look like a serial killer.
[Meuler] I think there was the hope from Dahmer's father
that there's some understanding that he did this
because of a mental disease.
[Wendy] Lionel was hoping that the court could give Jeffrey the help he needed.
[clerk] Everyone please rise.
[gavel bangs]
Hear ye, Circuit court branch 33 in Milwaukee County's now in session,
the Honorable Laurence C. Gram here presiding.
[Mccann] The burden to show the insanity was on the defense.
In an insanity plea, the defense presents first.
Very different from the typical burden of proof.
I accept the responsibility
of proving to you
that this was not an evil man.
This was a sick man.
My duty and my goal were to prove
that he was insane during the commission of these offenses.
That when he killed somebody, he was suffering from mental illness.
And this is what I see about this Jeffrey Dahmer
as a total human being.
A person who's into fantasy, drugging,
keeping skulls in locker, cannibalism,
sexual urges, drilling, making zombies, necrophilia.
[Fleming] Of course, by an average person's view
he was insane. He was a cannibal. He was a serial killer.
But by the criminal standard of insanity,
was he insane?
Did he meet the legal definition? That was an open question.
Before a person can be found insane under the law,
he must suffer from a mental illness or defect,
and they lack substantial capacity
to understand the difference between right and wrong.
Or they're unable to control their conduct
to the requirements of the law.
I went to Chicago, and I got Dr. Wahlstrom and was able to bring him in on the case.
The defendant's personality structure,
his underlying way of looking at the world and himself,
is diagnosed and meets the criteria
for schizotypal and borderline personality disorders.
[Boyle] Tell us what that means.
They have frantic attempts to avoid real or imagined abandonment.
And in this case,
it's the most extreme example of those kind of frantic attempts.
[Wendy] Dahmer didn't want people to leave him,
but to stay with him.
That feeling of abandonment, I think a part of that goes to
why he kept the body parts of his victims.
He saved the bones. He saved the skulls.
He saved the hands.
Jeff indicated that it... it was for a shrine.
[Jeffrey plays from recorder] I have this pedestal.
This black pedestal.
And I had a, uh, black, round top on top of it,
and I had the skulls set up on top of that, around it.
It was just, uh, a remembrance of, uh...
the people. A keepsake of each one of them.
It was my own, yeah, private little world. Yeah.
I had complete control.
That's about the ultimate control you can have.
[Wendy] This is, in fact,
the picture of what he drew.
And as you see here,
he signed it below.
[from recorder] Did you feel by keeping the skulls,
and if you would've actually accomplished this shrine,
that you would've felt less lonely,
like you were being kept company, that they were there?
[Jeffrey] I think that must have, yeah, been, uh, my thinking.
[Wendy] Jeffrey's building the shrine was all about power and control for him.
And that each trait that he liked out of each one of them
was something that was now internalized into his own life.
That was a bizarre delusion that he thought that he could take
the skulls and the bones of victims
and create a power center
in which he would be able to get special powers.
We're trying to win an insanity defense.
This was where he lost control.
We're trying to show that, you know,
he didn't have that rational thought anymore.
[Berlin] I believe he had a mental disease, necrophilia,
a very rare and, uh, possibly dangerous psychiatric condition.
This is a human being with a horrible psychiatric disorder
who is really struggling very hard not to allow that disorder
to bring him to the point where he's harming other people.
Obviously, he lost that battle.
In my professional opinion,
Mr. Dahmer did lack substantial capacity to conform his behavior
to the requirements of law.
But I believe they met, at that time, the statutory requirements
for an insanity defense. And I still believe that today.
I was approached by the district attorney's office
to evaluate Mr. Dahmer.
At the time of each of the killings,
he did have the capacity not to do the killing.
There was no force pushing him to kill.
There was merely a desire
to spend more time with the victim.
If the victim had agreed voluntarily to stay with him,
he would not have done the killing.
That's an indication that he could control his behavior.
I didn't think Dahmer had a mental disease
or mental illness.
Did he know it was wrong?
Well, here's how I'm sure he knew it was wrong.
He said he knew it was wrong at that time.
Every single one of them.
He took steps for every single one of the charged homicides
to make sure that he wouldn't get caught.
They included putting in fake security cameras
to deter people from breaking in while he was at work.
They included disposing of evidence.
They included pulling the curtains while he's dismembering bodies.
The many, many steps to try to evade detection.
And in order to kill,
he had to overcome his inhibition against it by getting drunk.
[Mccann] All the psychiatrists agreed basically
that he was an alcoholic, necrophilic.
Agreed he knew it was wrong, but disagreed he couldn't control himself.
[Wendy] For me, the trial was very
anxiety-provoking.
I was sitting next to... to Jeff.
When he did have questions, he would talk to me.
Wendy Patrickus played a prominent role to soften Jeffrey Dahmer's image.
Having a young woman sitting there
made Jeffrey Dahmer look a little less threatening.
And I think that was part of the intention to show the jury
that Jeffrey Dahmer was not quite the monster many had made him out to be.
[Wendy] I had issues during the course
of representing Jeffrey Dahmer.
I received death threats from a number of different sources.
There was really only one time I felt like some of the threats became real.
One of the victim's family members, when I was out one night,
came after me with a pool cue
because I was representing Jeff.
I said, "You do understand that's just a job. That's a position."
"I didn't kill your brother."
Uh, she couldn't, or wouldn't, discern the difference between the two.
She just, you know, came after me.
It did cause me to, uh, escalate my concern
during the trial,
and pretty much become a homebody at that point.
Dahmer's father and stepmother came every day to the trial.
[Crocker] And you could tell the trial got to them.
Doctor would be on the stand quoting from his confession,
and it was the most appalling information.
You'd see it on his father's face.
And there Lionel Dahmer sat with Shari,
his second wife,
looking behind his son, remaining behind his son.
[Boyle] The trial went two weeks.
He's out of control.
He could not stop.
He was a runaway train
on a track of madness.
It isn't, "Is he sane or insane?"
It's, "Did he prove to a reasonable certainty that he was insane?"
If he didn't, the answer is no.
You don't have to make a finding that he was sane.
You're not being asked to make a finding that he was sane.
You're being asked to make a finding,
"Did he prove to a reasonable certainty that he was insane?"
That's the issue before you.
After all the testimony was in, the jury went in to deliberate.
[reporter] Is Dahmer legally not guilty because of mental disease?
That's what the jury must sort out.
I think juries and people in general are often concerned
if someone's found not criminally responsible,
and they go to a mental institution,
that they're gonna come out and hurt people again.
Even if you're successfully treated while you're in a mental institution,
the court would have to sign off before you re-enter the community.
In a case such as Mr. Dahmer's, I find it exceedingly unlikely
that a court would've approved him going back into the community.
[reporter] Few would place bets on the decision they'll reach.
They're gonna find him insane.
I think they're probably gonna vote that he's sane.
[reporter] Which way do you think the jury's gonna go?
No clue.
It went to the jury on Friday, and it was late Saturday afternoon
before they came back.
They looked at all the evidence. They were very adamant in their decision.
In a hushed courtroom in Milwaukee today, the jury rendered its decision
in one of the most grisly and widely-followed murder trials
in modern history.
The verdict. Jeffrey Dahmer was sane
when he killed and dismembered men and boys
in a gruesome quest for companionship and sexual gratification.
That's something that troubled me.
If a man who is preoccupied with having sex with corpses,
if a man who's drilling holes in the heads of human beings
to try to keep them alive in a zombie-like state
doesn't have a psychiatric disorder,
then I don't know what we mean by psychiatric disease.
How many people does someone have to eat in Milwaukee
before they think you have a mental disease?
[Mccann] I've been trying cases for 38 years as a DA.
I don't find a... a celebratory feeling.
Seventeen people died.
Seventeen families crushed and destroyed.
There's just no room for elation.
But I would've been crushed if he had come back
and found that he was insane.
[Boyle] Dahmer had no reaction to being found sane.
No reaction whatsoever.
None.
[reporter 1] Ms. Dahmer, do you have any comment?
No.
- [reporter 1] Mr. Dahmer? - No.
[reporter 2] We attempted to talk to Dahmer's grandmother
Catherine this morning, but a sign is already posted on the door
saying she is too weak and too troubled to talk about the case.
As far as the verdict is concerned, it wasn't really very surprising.
But I think he had a mental disease, and he needed help.
[tape rolling]
[reporter 3] Families of his victims wept with relief,
knowing that Dahmer now faces a probable prison sentence
instead of a mental institution.
The case against Jeffrey Dahmer comes to a close today
when he is sentenced later this morning in a Milwaukee courtroom.
What do you expect will happen this morning
in terms of Dahmer's sentencing?
We first have the family speak.
Under our state law, each family has an opportunity to express to the court
the impact of this offense on their family.
I think we'll see highly charged emotional statements by the family.
I'm the mother of Anthony Lee Sears.
And I just wanted to know,
you know, just why would it be my son?
Um, I wanna thank the jury. I wanna thank you, Judge.
And just keep this man off the street, please. [sniffles]
I would like to say to Jeffrey Dahmer that he don't know the pain, the hurt,
the loss, and the mental state that he had put our family in.
I don't wanna ever see my mother have to go through this again!
Never, Jeffrey.
Jeffrey, I hate you, motherfucker!
[screams] I hate you!
Jeffrey's out of control!
Don't fuck with me, Jeffrey! I'll kill you, goddamn it!
Look at me, motherfucker!
- Ah! I could kill you! - [judge] Lunch and recess.
Fucking kill you, motherfucker!
[Mccann] She was coming across the courtroom at him,
intent, it appeared to me, to attack him.
He was cool. He kept control.
I would've thought he'd jump up. He didn't.
He just sat there. This is Jeffrey Dahmer under stress.
[Wendy] The judge said to Jeffrey, "Is there anything you'd like to say
in addressing the court before I pass judgment?"
This has never been a case of trying to get free.
Frankly, I wanted death for myself.
I hated no one.
I knew I was sick or evil, or both.
Now I believe I was sick.
I take all the blame for what I did.
I hurt many people.
I've hurt my mother and father and stepmother.
I love them all so very much.
I hope that they will find the same peace I am looking for.
[reporter 4] This left the judge to hand down the stiffest possible sentence
in a state with no death penalty.
Dahmer was sentenced to 15 consecutive terms of life imprisonment.
- [cheering] - [spectator] Yes!
[reporter 5] Finally they had something to cheer about for the first time
since these family members learned of Jeffrey Dahmer and what he did.
[Shirley Hughes] Life goes on.
Maybe what I've learned through this tragedy will help someone else.
And I just thank God for this verdict.
Dahmer identified Steven's picture and was asked how he could be sure who it was.
He told the police, "You always remember your first."
I want him to know that we also remember our first.
Not one day has passed that we've not thought about Steve.
There's a sense of closure in the sense... Especially for the families
that waited years to find out what had happened to their sons.
It's a sad sense of closure,
but it's closure.
[uneasy music playing]
Dahmer was sent to Columbia Correctional Facility in Wisconsin.
[Jeffrey] I dunno what prison systems are like.
I have a picture of a very dreary, gray place.
I was thinking maybe that in prison,
they'll maybe let me do something with growing some kind of a plant.
Uh, I've always had an interest in growing plants.
I had plants at the apartment.
[Murphy] He was put on suicide watch,
so he was placed in a single cell, not in the bullpen.
[Wendy] He told me, "What do I have to look forward to?"
I said, "You know, there's a lot of things that you can do."
"You said you were reading the Bible."
"And you wanted to get back into it."
So he did make those, uh, overt actions
to try and redeem himself in God's eyes.
[tape rolling]
I got a phone call in 1994 from a minister friend in Milwaukee,
who was in Milwaukee at the time,
saying an inmate wanted to be baptized.
He said, "You might wanna sit down for this one."
"His name is Jeffrey Dahmer."
I was nervous about meeting him.
I'd never been to a prison before. I'd never been to a murderer before.
I was sitting there thinking, "Wow."
"I'm in a room with a guy who's killed a lot of young men."
And I looked at his hands. And his hands...
I thought his hands were relatively small compared to my hands.
With those hands, he strangled men,
and yet here I am talking to him as if, you know, we're just normal people.
I said, "Yes, I'll... I'll baptize you."
That seemed to cause him a great deal of relief.
He says, "Well, I was afraid you'd say, 'You are too evil."
"You are too horrible, too wicked to be baptized.'"
Jeff was brought in.
I pushed his head under the water,
and when he came up, I said, "Welcome to the family of God."
On the day of his baptism,
John Wayne Gacy was executed on that same day.
There was a full solar eclipse as well.
Some tried to read into that some kind of mystical, uh, meaning behind all this.
I met him once a week from that point on for about an hour.
It was a matter of growing in his faith,
understanding what his faith was about, and then continue each week.
Jeffrey Dahmer lives in that building back there.
Disciplinary Segregation Two.
Now, he has a job, mopping and sweeping up floors,
and officials hope eventually he'll be able to mix with the general population.
[Ratcliff] On the last day I saw him, it was the day before Thanksgiving.
He gave me a card, and he underlined the word "friend."
It indicated that, uh, he was beginning to understand
what friendship was for the very first time.
[Wendy] After he was in prison for a year,
I went and visited him.
He said, "I'm not gonna do this anymore. I can't just sit here in isolation."
He said, "If I can't interact with other people,
that's gonna be worse than if I died."
He said, "I'm gonna be asked to be put in general population."
I said, "Jeff, you know, you're gonna be dead shortly."
"Because everybody had such strong,
strong views
and opinions about your actions."
"We don't need any further loss of life."
[Jeffrey] I tell you, Wendy. I don't think I'm gonna be able to keep
a level head. I really don't.
Because I've always been one
who needs stimulation, mental stimulation.
Uh...
And I just don't have the patience that I should.
[Wendy] I had a very hard time that day leaving.
And I just said, "Please don't do this."
"You're just not gonna make it."
[suspenseful music playing]
[door closes]
[tape rolling]
In November of 1994, while he was in the prison, he was at the work detail.
He and a man named Jesse Anderson
were assigned to clean up lockers in the gym.
Christopher Scarver, a man who my office had convicted of murder
a number of years earlier, was on the same work detail.
He took the barbell from the exercise room
and bludgeoned Dahmer over the head with that weapon.
The information I received from the prison was
he did not resist the attack.
[Berlin] The irony in all of this is that the first time that Mr. Dahmer killed
was when he picked up some weight lifting equipment
and took the life of Steven Hicks.
The whole thing came full cycle.
[thuds]
[Crocker] He was in general population within a year of when he was killed.
It was surprising that Dahmer lived that long.
[anchor] Dahmer's father Lionel joins us.
Tell me, you told me that you were at work
when your wife called to say your son had been injured.
What then happened after that?
She had called and... and hit me with the news
that... that Jeff had passed away
that morning about ten o'clock.
I just couldn't believe it. I...
I started sobbing and... and, uh, shaking.
[Wendy] I was very upset.
You can't help but become close with somebody
when you spend that many days, weeks, months with them.
Some suspected that the prison system had deliberately undertaken
to execute Dahmer,
and the governor, very wisely,
immediately ordered a commission to investigate it.
[reporter] This prison has nearly 3 dozen video monitors, electronic steel doors,
yet somehow 25-year-old Christopher Scarver
allegedly managed to elude the elaborate security system.
[Ratcliff] One went to answer a phone call the other was listening to music.
It was ridiculous no one was around.
[Ross] I used to work in prison.
We watched them bathe. We watched them eat and sleep.
We watched them pee and poo.
Any time they moved, we were there.
Dahmer was one of the most celebrated prisoners in the western hemisphere.
How is it that so prominent a prisoner could be executed in the prison?
There was a study, and, uh, the commission said there was no crime involved,
that there was no conspiracy, no inside job to get rid of Dahmer.
They have given him good, fair, uh, care.
They've guarded him. Uh, they knew the potential dangers.
It's not the prison's fault.
Jeff, for all that he was a killer,
could never defend himself.
[Mccann] I... I could not celebrate when he was killed.
I can understand why some might, but I felt nothing but sadness.
A sad story with a sad ending.
[somber music playing]
[Wendy] Jeffrey Dahmer was a very complex person.
He was a very hurting individual
that felt soulless, felt empty.
[from recorder] Did it enter your mind that it seemed a waste to destroy somebody
who looked so nice while they were still alive?
[Jeffrey] Yeah, it did.
I felt that it was...
a waste that I couldn't keep them longer without having to kill them,
but I didn't know any other way to make them stay
and to control them.
I had no choice in the matter.
[Wendy] Did you, uh, feel emotions of any kind?
[Jeffrey] I felt a lot of...
a great deal of remorse.
[Wendy] I don't think Jeffrey ever found out
a good enough answer for him
as to why he did what he did.
He said, "Through all of these forensic doctors I'm talking to,
if one of them could give me a reason why."
"I really would like to know."
But with his death, I knew he would never find out why.
[Berlin] We can easily just say this is an evil monster.
"Why'd he do it?" "'Cause he's evil." "How do we know?" "'Cause he did it."
It's just a label masquerading as an explanation.
[Wendy] There were still things that I wanted to know about him,
things I wanted to talk to him about.
It was a waste of an opportunity
for people to study what made him tick.
They were horrific, terrible things that he did,
but if he really couldn't control his conduct,
let's find out what's going on here.
Maybe we can all learn something as a society.
[Boyle] Jeffrey Dahmer, he didn't care.
He had no sympathy for them.
He had no remorse.
And far as I know, he never felt bad for the people he harmed,
all the damage he did.
[Fleming] Dahmer's victims had very little recourse in the end.
And the family members who had survived,
there was very little to compensate them for their losses.
But what was left was Dahmer's property that had been taken out of his apartment.
[reporter 1] That's when a judge ordered
that Dahmer's possessions, including his instruments of death,
be auctioned off to the highest bidder.
The proceeds would be divided among the victims' families.
[Fleming] A philanthropist purchased everything on behalf of the victims.
[reporter 2] Milwaukee businessman Joe Zilber
launched an effort to buy everything and destroy it.
Zilber reached out to fellow business leaders, politicians,
and prominent Milwaukeeans.
They raised $400,000 and purchased all the items.
[Joe Zilber] They're upset that a situation would have to occur
where these terrible, terrible items
would go on a public auction block
in a very highly visible,
worldwide way.
[reporter 3] The items were then loaded into a garbage truck
and taken to an undisclosed landfill
in Illinois.
[Mccann] He took lives for a few hours of sexual pleasure
of persons that had done him nothing evil, or toward which he would have no ill will.
He took their life.
That's the tragedy.
I would hope the world would forget about Dahmer,
and he would become a part of the ash bin of history.
[revving]
[birds chirping]
[Bass] All the tenants living in the Oxford Apartments,
we held a meeting to decide on what we were gonna do.
And we decided that we didn't want to live there anymore.
[Shirley] It will give me relief
to know that the young men that died here,
their souls and their body, will seem at rest with this down.
[reporter 4] So the Oxford will be razed,
and it is hoped the tragic memories born here can be buried forever.
[reporter 5] What many call a symbol of pain and senseless violence
will no longer be so visible to the city of Milwaukee
and the families of Jeffrey Dahmer's victims.
[Fleming] I can understand Milwaukee wants to put this case behind it.
I think it's important, though, to understand
that there are people out there who do horrific things.
Evil is real.
Jeffrey Dahmer not only killed his victims,
but he hurt a community.
The pain of Jeffrey Dahmer's killings hurt Milwaukee.
The... The families were people that we saw on TV.
The neighborhood was a neighborhood that we knew.
[chanting]
[Anne] This was a case that exposed
a lot of racial issues,
a lot of different biases,
both in the police department and the community that is Milwaukee.
[chanting]
[Crocker] What Dahmer was doing was he was feeding on the undetectable
in our community, and he was protected by the institutions
that were supposed to be protecting these weakest, most vulnerable people.
He preyed on them, and the police did not protect them.
Whatever we learn, it's not gonna be worth what these families have suffered,
but let's not just throw it away.
It's important to get this right,
to talk about this in a way that gives dignity to these victims.
[Causey] We can't go back and fix what happened back in 1991
and prior to that when he started killing people.
What you can do, though,
is have people talk about what happened,
so we don't fall into the same traps and shed light on it,
so the crime that we see on a daily basis stops or slows down.
The poverty, the high crime,
the fact that we don't care about the disadvantaged,
all those things provided a playground for him to operate in.
To prevent something like that from happening again,
you have to address these issues
today.
[Connor] There's always gonna be that pain,
that remembrance of what happened.
We're always gonna do the "what-ifs."
You know? Where would they be now?
What kind of life would they have had? You're always gonna miss that person.
[Ross] Humanizing the individuals
who lost their lives
is important.
Recognizing that each one of those young men
had a mother,
a father,
had sisters and brothers
that loved them and still miss them.
[somber music playing]
They were just trying to do
what we're all trying to do.
Survive.
Live and enjoy the life that they'd been given.
They had a life
that they loved.
I think it's important to tell their story.
Nobody deserves to die like that.