If you’ve read or watched interviews with serial killers, most of them either come across
as slightly deranged or at least very creepy.
But the focus of today’s show we must admit seems kinda likable in the interviews.
Watch the one in 1994 where Jeff tells all while sat next to his loving father.
“My childhood wasn’t filled with any great tragedies” he told the interviewer, but
then explained his predilection for dissecting dogs and cats as a kid.
It could have led to a normal hobby like taxidermy, he added.
But it didn’t, and soft-spoken Jeff turned his efforts towards killing and taking apart
human beings in an unimaginable fashion.
“I acted on my fantasies and that’s where everything went wrong,” he said.
Today we’ll see how wrong it went, in this episode of the Infographics Show, The Story
of Jeffrey Dahmer - The Milwaukee Monster.
If you’ve seen the recent movie about our killer, called “My Friend Dahmer,” you’ll
see he is portrayed as a bit of a loner in school with some strange habits.
He has few friends, but he doesn’t seem to have violent impulses… you’d probably
not even notice him if you went to the same school.
The movie was based on a graphic novel by the same name written by Derf Backderf (pen
name).
He researched Dahmer, and this is what he had to say, “There are a surprising number
out there who view Jeffrey 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.”
So, how did the quiet boy become a twisted serial killer?
Well, as you already know, Dahmer had a penchant for dissecting animals that he had found on
the road.
After dissection, he would often dissolve the bodies in a barrel of chemicals.
This was at his family home in Ohio.
Dahmer has called this time of his life intense, stating that his mother was often frantic
and his dad always busy.
He got little attention at home, and this seems to have been a catalyst to his problems.
Psychologists might say Jeff grew up within a dysphoric family, which kinda means a family
mess.
It’s said at one point the young Dahmer had even tried to take his own life.
He had a few buddies, and they would later tell the authorities, media, and book writers,
about how Jeff would find bugs and small animals and dissect them.
Dahmer has admitted that he wanted to see how they “fitted together”.
His dad said as a kid his son fell in love with bones; he loved hearing the sound they
made and spent much of his time looking for them.
Yep, perhaps the busy father should have looked into this morbid fascination with dead bodies
and their different parts.
The writing was on the wall, but it’s said his dad, who was an analytical chemist, just
thought Jeff had a curious mind – as all scientists should.
But despite all his weirdness, he played tennis regularly and was in the school band for a
while.
He also turned up to school sometimes stinking of booze.
He was a bit of a class clown, sometimes acting out seizures or pretending he had cerebral
palsy; this became known as “Doing a Dahmer.”
This was when he was in his early teens.
It’s then that the real trouble started.
Jeff realized that he was gay sometime around the age of 14.
Due to the prevailing culture of the time, he had to keep that secret.
He would sometimes watch a male jogger run down the road while he was hidden in the bushes.
He fantasized about this guy, but he wasn’t thinking about candlelit dinners and nights
in front of the TV watching “Happy Days.”
No, young Jeff jumped the shark, so to speak, and imagined somehow making this runner unconscious
and then having sex with the lifeless body.
He even once planned to actually go through with it, waiting in the bushes armed with
a baseball bat, but the jogger didn’t run that day.
At age 17, with his parents still screaming at each other continually, his grades going
downhill and his drinking getting worse, Dahmer was at the height of his unhappiness.
He did graduate, though, right at the time his parents divorced.
It’s right after graduation, a matter of a few weeks, that Dahmer graduated from dissecting
animals to dissecting humans.
At age 18, he picked up a guy, Steven Mark Hicks, who was hitchhiking to a place called
Lockwood Corners, Ohio, to see a concert.
He was 18, the same age as Jeff.
So, it doesn’t seem out of the ordinary that this young guy would agree to go back
to Dahmer’s pad and do some drinking.
Only Jeff wasn’t too happy when the guy called his own bell and said he should go.
No, Jeff didn’t like that at all.
He knocked the kid out with a dumbbell and then finished him off by strangling him with
the bar of the dumbbell.
He then masturbated over the corpse.
When that was done, he chopped-up the body and put various parts in bags and buried them.
Later he would dig up the parts and slice the flesh from the bones.
He then crushed those bones and scattered what was left in woodland, like one would
scatter the ashes of someone they loved.
That was Jeff’s first murder, and as we say, it’s hard to believe the man in the
interviews could sit in his house pairing flesh from bones.
From that date in 1978 until he was arrested in 1991, he would kill 17 people, so we can’t
detail every murder.
What we will say is that Dahmer has few equals in the milieu of the total depravity.
He didn’t kill for a while as he enlisted in the army.
That lasted from 1978-1981 as he was kicked out for his heavy drinking.
At the time, the army didn’t know, or chose not to believe, that Jeff was a rapist.
He worked in the medic unit with a guy of similar age named Preston Davis.
Davis believes Dahmer drugged him and raped him.
He later told the press: “I was raped by Jeffrey.
I am just thankful to be alive to tell the story.”
He was replaced by a 17-year old called Billy Joe Capshaw, who bunked with Dahmer.
Capshaw later told the press that Dahmer tied him up and raped him several times.
“I was there for another 17 months with Jeff, being raped and tortured.”
Capshaw said he had even used a rape kit to prove it to his officers, but it seems the
army didn’t believe him.
Once Dahmer is out of the army, what does he do next?
During the years until his next murder, you could say he was still active, regarding his
devotion to being evil.
He drugged young men and then had sex with their unconscious bodies.
It’s thought he did this around a dozen times.
He also fantasized about digging up dead bodies and doing things to them.
This of course was not convenient and so Jeff was about to start making his own dead bodies.
He waited until 1987, and then killed and dismembered another young man while living
with his grandmother.
Again, he masturbated over the corpse.
He took it a step further, though.
Dahmer always said that he didn’t mean to kill the first of those victims at his Gran’s
place and just woke up with a bloodied dead man in his bed.
Nonetheless, he didn’t exactly get on the phone to the cops and frantically explain
that there’d been a terrible accident.
On the contrary, he chopped up the body, put the parts in a suitcase, and then boiled the
flesh from the severed head in chemicals.
When he had a shiny skull at the end of his cooking, he used that as a masturbation tool.
After a while, he crushed that and scattered the bits.
While staying with his grandmother, he killed again, employing a similar modus operandi
of drugging, strangling, having some kind of intercourse with the corpse, dismembering
the body, and keeping the skull after boiling.
One lucky guy he brought home didn’t get killed, only because his gran discovered that
Jeff had company that evening.
His grandmother quickly threw him out because he was a drunk, and because he brought young
men home late at night…and because for some reason she smelt something foul emanating
from Jeff’s room.
As you can imagine, when living in his own place, things got worse.
He was actually arrested and later charged for drugging and sexually molesting a 13-year
old, and then arrested on a similar charge again, but prior to being sentenced, he killed
again.
This time he found a very handsome chap who was a male model.
He met him in a gay bar, and even though Dahmer said he had not intended to kill that night,
he felt he didn’t have much choice as the model came and flirted with him.
Again, after flaying the dead body and smashing up the bones, Dahmer got rid of what was left.
Only this time he kept the genitals and head, fully preserving them in acetone.
He said he did this just because the guy was so good-looking.
In 1989, he got 5 years’ probation for his sexual offense with children.
This is when he went on a bit of a killing spree, almost always drugging young guys and
making his unique kind of love to the corpse, then flaying the bodies, or dissolving the
parts in acid, and sometimes keeping the skulls.
He was building a skull collection, something the cops would later find to their horror.
He branched out, too, in terms of what he did to the bodies.
Sometimes he would take photos of himself with the dead (you can see some online), and
sometimes he would just keep the heads for a while and chat with them and kiss them.
He would also take photos, sometimes at each stage of the dismembering process.
But perhaps the pinnacle of Dahmer’s weirdness was when, after drugging one young man, he
decided not to kill him outright, but to drill a hole through his skull, pour in warm water,
and so render the victim in a vegetative state.
Then he could have a kind of living slave.
Dahmer would always say later that all he wanted was company and for the men not to
leave.
However, his victim woke up and was not exactly vegetized, telling to Dahmer, “I have a
headache.
What time is it?”
Apparently, it was time to die, as Dahmer gave him more spiked drink and strangled the
man.
He tried this again with a 14-year old, only this time injecting hydrochloric acid into
the young boy’s skull, the frontal lobe to be exact.
He then took the semi-conscious boy to his bedroom, where his previous victim’s body
was still laying.
It’s said the boy saw the corpse but was too messed up to do anything.
Dahmer left the boy alone at one point to get some more beers, only to find on his return
that the kid was out in the street talking to three women.
They noticed the boy was bleeding from his backside and that he was in a bad way, but
when a cop turned up, Dahmer said the kid was his boyfriend.
The cop didn’t even think to investigate.
Unbelievably, despite the women’s protests, the cop told Dahmer to wrap the kid up and
take him back home.
That he dutifully did, and injected the kid’s brain again with more acid.
This time he died.
Dahmer kept this skull and added it to his skull collection.
He killed again and again, and not surprisingly the neighbors complained of a stink and also
noise pollution, saying that some dude uses a chainsaw at night indoors.
Dahmer had so many body parts, and sometimes he would leave the fresh dead around so long
he got a maggot infestation.
With one body, he tried keeping it for weeks in water and salt, so he could keep it fully
intact, but that didn’t work.
It should be known that Jeff kept cuts of human flesh and organs in the fridge, so he
could later eat them.
There’s even a story in the media about one of his neighbors who to this day thinks
the meat sandwich Dahmer gave her could have been human meat.
Dahmer finally met his match with a man called Tracy Edwards, whom Dahmer almost killed but
the sensible Edwards, who was 32 at the time, knew what was coming.
He assured Dahmer he wasn’t going to leave him, even though Dahmer had picked up a knife,
used handcuffs on him (on only one hand), and Edwards knew what the foul smell was and
what the steel drum had been used for.
He stayed with Dahmer 5 hours with a swinging handcuff as Dahmer occasionally held a knife
to him and even said he was going to eat his heart.
When he got his chance, Edwards punched Dahmer and ran for it.
He told cops what had happened and what he had seen, and two cops went to Dahmer’s
place.
There they found the polaroid’s, with an astonished cop telling his partner that they
were certainly not fakes.
Dahmer tried to fight but was held down, whereupon a search was performed, and a fresh head with
flesh was quickly found.
Dahmer then told the stunned cops, “For what I did I should be dead.”
Investigators searching the house later found hearts, other organs, hands, penises, bits
of tissue, an entire torso, skeletons, and of course skulls.
For his handy work he got 15 consecutive life terms in prison.
He admitted everything and every detail, some say so he would get away with being insane.
That didn’t happen.
Psychiatrists said he was sadistic and had antisocial personality disorder, but he was
sane.
They also said he was amiable, charming and amusing to chat with.
Inside prison, he read a lot of books and turned to religion, and even though he’d
been separated from the general population, he persuaded the authorities to move him with
the others.
That was Dahmer’s downfall, as he was murdered by fellow inmate and fellow murderer Christopher
Scarver with a metal bar from the weight room.
Scarver killed another guy, too.
Dahmer’s killer later told the press that he wasn’t happy about what Dahmer had done,
but was also bugged out that Dahmer would make what looked like severed body parts from
prison food as a way to piss off other prisoners.
It’s even said he added ketchup to his macabre art to imitate blood.
We’ll leave you with a Dahmer quote: “The killing was a means to an end.
That was the least satisfactory part.
I didn't enjoy doing that.
That's why I tried to create living zombies with uric acid in the drill, but it never
worked.
No, the killing was not the objective.
I just wanted to have the person under my complete control, not having to consider their
wishes, being able to keep them there as long as I wanted.”
This is a long show, but we think the crazy story of Dahmer deserves it.
Countless plays, books, films, TV shows, and documentaries have been made about this man.
So, what do you think about him?
Can you explain why he would do the things he did?
Is there anyone worse in terms of utter strangeness?
Let us know in the comments!
Also, be sure to check out our other video called The Golden State Killer - What Do We
Know About Him!
Thanks for watching, and, as always, don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe.
See you next time!