Original subtitles

- Your Honor, it is over now.

[eerie music]

I know society will never be able to forgive me.

♪ ♪

I know the families of the victims

will never be able to forgive me

for what I have done.

- Jeffrey, I hate you, motherf---er!

I hate you!

- For sexual pleasure, he took the life

of a human being.

- He told us how he cooked them,

what they tasted like.

- Never would I have believed

that he was a killer, ever.

- Well, you're looking good.

- I have to start eating at home more.

♪ ♪

- We're investigating a homicide.

- What would lead a human being

to take 17 lives?

- He was more normal than we want to think he was.

- No one had a clue as to what was happening

for over a decade.

- When you killed these men,

afterwards, were you repulsed?

Were you upset?

- No, it--

At the time, it was--

it was almost addictive.

- I don't consider myself a victim.

I consider myself a survivor.

- As a 17-year-old kid,

would you really get that out in your unit

that Jeff Dahmer raped you?

- I know Jeffrey

who used to stay across the hall from me.

That Dahmer guy is somebody else.

- You must understand we protect our family.

He was our son.

- He fooled so many people

as to his real feelings.

- I knew I was sick or evil or both.

[siren wailing]

- For years, a serial killer

had been preying on the city of Milwaukee.

Finally, in the summer of 1991, it all comes to an end

when a frightened man in handcuffs

approaches police.

He leads them to the home of Jeffrey Dahmer.

- We're investigating a homicide which occurred.

- Obviously that there is-- has been a number

of human specimens found.

- The victim count? 17.

- Police were lead there by a man who told them

he had been attacked with a butcher knife.

- The details are shocking.

- Sources close to the case say

the motive includes elements of sexual violence

and cannibalism.

- Jeffrey Dahmer

is a quiet chocolate factory worker

who confesses to the most gruesome crimes.

- Jeff Dahmer is apologetically admitting responsibility.

- Do you know what started it?

Was there any kind of incident that you can remember?

- To this day, I don't know what started it.

And the person to blame is sitting right across from you.

That's the only person--

not parents, not society, not pornography.

I mean, those are just excuses.

- I'm Nancy Glass.

In 1991, I'm sitting in a newsroom,

and a story comes in

that there's been a serial killer in Milwaukee.

He killed people, he dismembered them,

and, worse, he was a cannibal.

Well, at first, you just don't believe this.

I mean, you got to look at it twice.

And then, as a journalist, you say,

"I really want to get this story."

So I started communicating with Jeffrey Dahmer's parents

and built a relationship with them.

Eventually, Jeffrey and I started writing back and forth.

And then, a year and a half later,

I found myself sitting opposite him

at the Columbia Correctional Institute in Wisconsin.

You know, people always wonder, was I afraid of him?

Well, I wasn't, because by the time

I was sitting opposite him, his killing spree was over.

In fact, he appeared to be completely normal.

That was actually what was so unsettling.

Were you molested?

- Never. Never.

- In your childhood, you have any memories

of anything that you would associate

with what you became?

- No, that's the strange thing.

I can't pinpoint anything.

- So there was nothing in your childhood--

- No, no abuse--

no physical abuse, no verbal abuse.

It was a normal childhood in a good home.

Something went awry in my thought life.

I don't know why.

- There's no single history

that causes someone to become a serial killer.

Many of the individuals who are serial killers,

not all of them but many,

have had very traumatic early life experiences.

In Mr. Dahmer's case,

none of that seemed to be present.

- Jeffrey's father, Lionel, now in his 80s,

wanted to talk to us about the boy he knew.

But he only agreed to an on-camera interview

if he could wear sunglasses.

In his mind, they make him less identifiable.

- He loved the place that we lived in,

and it was a heavily wooded place.

He enjoyed

his small group of friends.

- He was raised in a somewhat affluent family.

His father had a doctoral degree in chemistry.

The family lived on a 1 1/4 quiet, wooded acres

with a pond.

- While Jeffrey indicated

nothing in his childhood

could have fueled his desire to kill,

according to Lionel and his wife, Shari,

who'd been part of Jeffrey's life

since he was 18,

there was something that affected him

even before he was born.

His mother, Joyce, struggled with mental illness

and took 27 pills a day when she was pregnant with Jeffrey,

including antidepressants, growth hormones,

and progesterone.

- Doctors met with us, and they said

those medicines could have affected the fetus.

And when Jeff was born,

the grandparents were not allowed to hold the baby.

Joyce didn't want anybody touching the baby

or breathing on it.

She was afraid of germs.

They virtually had no contact with Jeff as a baby.

- In my conversations with Lionel,

he told me that in infancy,

Joyce herself rarely touched Jeffrey

except to change his diapers or hold him for a photo.

- There was so much illness with his mother at that time.

She was involved with gestalt therapy

at a local mental health center,

wandering around in the dark, touching people.

Nothing--nothing helped.

- In the midst of this,

Lionel and his first wife, Joyce,

have a second child.

- Jeff noticed that when his younger brother was born,

Jeff no longer had fairy tales from his mother,

stories read at night, and tucking him in.

Jeff felt somewhat left out.

- We were moving at the time,

and he had to leave his favorite kitten behind.

And going to a new school and being only six years old,

he became a little bit more shy,

much like I was in my youth.

- During his adolescence, Dahmer develops a hobby

that would raise eyebrows in the years that followed.

Were you obsessed with dead animals?

Is that true?

- I was interested in taxidermy in high school

and experimented with preserving the bones

of dogs and things like that.

And whether that had anything to do

with the escalation of the crimes, I don't know.

- He went into further detail

in this interview with a forensic psychologist.

- There are numbers of young people

who might have those same kinds of interests

and don't end up being serial killers.

So in retrospect, had I spoken with him as a teenager,

I don't know that either he or I

would have predicted at that point

that he was gonna end up

being the serial killer he turned out to be.

- Now, I lived with this young man.

He lived in our home.

He had his father's intelligence.

And on the phone,

you could not tell Jeff or Lionel apart.

Jeff was always very gentle, very kind.

- In high school, friends begin to notice

Jeffrey is becoming a different person.

- Jeff's behavior began to be so strange

that I felt very uncomfortable being with him alone.

He liked to act, in his words, "crazy."

He would just start

shrieking,

or he would twist himself up

in a grotesque way

and run with a limp,

almost like Quasimodo.

And I remember one time asking him

why he behaved this way, and he said,

"I just like to shake people up."

- I remember when we had our senior pictures taken,

he got into a lot of the group photos

that he was not a member--

the National Honor Society group.

Whoever was in charge of that in those days,

they blacked out his face, and it's really creepy.

- I had a classmate who said,

"Years ago, we thought that photo was hilarious.

And it's not so funny anymore."

- His brazen behavior continues in the classroom.

- He was drinking beer.

Sometimes he kept it in his locker,

and I guess he kept beer in his car.

Did teachers do anything about it?

Did they know about it?

I'm sure some teachers knew about it.

- I remember distinctly one morning

sitting in class next to Jeff, who had his cup of scotch.

And I said, "Jeff, what is that?"

He just tossed his head back

as though it was no issue at all,

and he said, "It's my medicine."

There was a collective sense of blinders going up,

that people didn't notice

because they didn't want to notice.

- According to Dahmer,

alcohol was a way to drown his growing dark desires.

- I started having these obsessive thoughts

when I was about 15 and 16,

and they got worse and worse.

- What were your fantasies about?

- [sighs]

They were sexual fantasies of control, power,

complete dominance.

They became reality.

- Was there pleasure in that fantasy?

- There was excitement,

fear, pleasure all mixed together.

- He found certain male joggers attractive

and sought opportunities to watch them

and fantasize about them as they jogged past.

There was one particular man

that he would fantasize about having sexual contact with,

but he had no concept of how to make a relationship

with this or any other man.

- He took a bat,

sawed it off and fashioned it as a club,

hid in the woods,

anticipating that he would assault this man.

[dramatic music]

- Teenage Jeffrey sits nervously,

waiting to attack.

But the jogger he has his eye on

doesn't pass that day.

♪ ♪

His first target has slipped away,

but his next wouldn't be so lucky.

Up next, the growing desire to kill

is only the beginning.

- I had had fantasies about picking up a hitchhiker

and taking him back to the house

and having complete control and dominance.

In the spring of 1976,

high school sophomore Jeffrey Dahmer's

first planned assault fails.

He's 15, a time when most teenagers

are worried about school and making friends.

And he's already on a path toward his terrible crimes.

- I had normal friendships in high school,

but after that, I started in with the alcohol, drinking,

a lot of solitary drinking,

and really never had any close friendships after that,

after high school.

Just sort of lived in my own thought life,

fantasy world.

- As high school ends, his parents divorce,

and his mother takes off with her younger son,

leaving Jeffrey alone in the house.

- Jeff was left behind

with no money and spoiled milk in the fridge.

I came into the family

at the tail end of Lionel's divorce.

They'd been separated two years.

Lionel was living out of a motel.

Jeff was detached at that point.

He felt somewhat abandoned.

- The first time anybody asked me

about his parents, I was struck by the fact

that I could only answer, "I never knew he had parents."

He just seemed like he was kind of a satellite

floating alone.

- He did not like that feeling.

He didn't like his parents leaving him.

And it's in that context

that he committed his first homicide.

- You do sound, though, like the kind of person

who could have said to himself,

"This is wrong.

I must stop."

- I always knew that it was wrong, but...

after the--the first--

The first killing was not planned.

I was coming back from the shopping mall

back in '78.

I had had fantasies about picking up a hitchhiker

and taking him back to the house

and having complete control and dominance over him.

- Dahmer's violent fantasies Dahmer's violent fantasies become reality- become reality

when he crosses paths with 18-year-old Steve Hicks

looking for a ride to a nearby rock concert.

- He picked up a young man that was hitchhiking

and offered him a good time

if he wanted to just stop and visit with him

for a little bit.

Jeffrey Dahmer was attracted specifically

to this individual because he wasn't wearing a shirt.

Throughout the evening, they drank alcohol,

and I understand there might have been marijuana involved.

Finally, Steve Hicks said that "I should be going."

- He said, "We drank, he wanted to leave,

and I hit him with a barbell, and I killed him."

He says, "I didn't want him to leave me."

- For sexual pleasure,

he took the life of a human being.

- All of Dahmer's victims were men.

His attraction to men

is what both motivated and repulsed him.

- Never understood it.

There was no use trying to fight it,

because I couldn't rid myself of it.

It was--it was too powerful and persistent.

- Do you dislike it?

- Yes, it's caused a lot of problems

for me.

A lot of conflicts and unanswered questions.

- Jerry Boyle was Dahmer's lawyer.

He believes that Jeffrey's sexuality

did not lead him to violence.

- He was just really very forthright with me.

It is my first belief that if he was a heterosexual,

he would have killed girls.

- After Dahmer dismembers Steven Hicks's corpse

and stuffs the remains in a deep drainage pipe

in his parents' backyard,

he panics and decides to dig up the body parts

and dispose of them elsewhere.

- He decided late at night towards midnight

to drive it to a local dump.

He was so nervous

that he was driving erratically,

and he was stopped by a police officer.

Mr. Dahmer kept his wits about him.

He told the police officer

that his parents had recently divorced.

He said he couldn't sleep

and wanted to take a garbage bag

to the garbage dump.

The police officer shined a flashlight inside

and saw a green garbage bag.

[ominous music]

- The officer had no reason whatsoever

to believe that there was anything unusual

other than he might have been a little bit nervous.

But most people are nervous when there's a traffic stop made.

- Jeff was very good by that point

at convincing adults for whatever it was

he wanted to convince them of.

- Jeffrey Dahmer definitely was a manipulator.

He was able to convince

not only the individuals to come to his place,

but he was also able to convince people

that nothing was wrong

when there was something very wrong.

- It all could have ended at that moment.

But in the first of many close calls

when he could have been stopped,

Dahmer's let off with only a ticket.

- He took him home,

smashed him all up,

and he spread the bones in the woods.

- Steven Hicks's parents reported him missing in 1978

but don't get any answers until 1991,

when Dahmer confesses.

- That family had no idea what had happened

to their 18-year-old son.

He disappeared off the face of the Earth.

Talk about inflicting pain if you're a parent.

- Later that summer,

Lionel and Shari moved back into the Dahmer home

with 18-year-old Jeffrey.

- He would come home a time or two

pretty well loaded.

If he was totally drunk,

he would forget where he took his dad's car.

We had to track the car down several times,

because Jeff just drew a blank.

- Frustrated, Lionel forces Jeffrey

to enroll in college.

- I attended Ohio State University,

and Jeff did as well.

The last time I saw him,

he was laying on the sidewalk, passed out dead drunk.

I went over to him, and I tried

to shake him into consciousness.

And I kept saying,

"Jeff, wake up. Wake up."

I knew then that Jeff was gone.

- We found out he was drinking at school and failing out,

so we brought him home.

We took Jeff for psychiatric care.

We took him to institutions.

But as the old saying goes,

you can lead the horse to water, but you can't make it drink.

- I was just thinking

of normal-type, everyday things

that I could encourage him on to do.

And the Army was

the logical place, I thought.

- During this time, Jeffrey claims

his violent impulses remained quiet.

What happened to you in the nine years in between

that you were able to stop,

that you were able to control yourself?

- Just wasn't an opportunity

to fully express what I wanted to do.

There was not just the physical opportunity

to do it then.

- While investigators never had any reason

to doubt Dahmer's claim,

for the first time, two of his fellow servicemen

are making accusations

the public has never heard before.

Up next...

- As a 17-year-old kid,

would you really get that out in your unit

that Jeff Dahmer raped you?

After one failed semester

After one failed semester in college,

Jeffrey Dahmer's dad implores his son

to find a direction in life.

He decides to enlist in the Army.

Jeffrey says his evil urges were quieted

while in the service

and he hoped it would remain that way.

But according to those he served with,

they did not.

We've uncovered two victims

who've agreed to speak for the first time.

- You know, you really don't know someone

until you live with them.

- Billy Joe Capshaw was Dahmer's roommate

for 15 months while stationed in Baumholder, Germany.

He arrived to replace someone else in Dahmer's unit,

Preston Davis.

- We were out on a field exercise.

It was a two-week exercise.

And the last three or four days of the exercise,

our vehicle broke down.

During that timeframe,

I was drugged and sexually assaulted by Jeff.

- Preston says the attack haunted him,

and he eventually unraveled.

- My career went downhill after this.

I got a DWI in 1985 in the military.

I had a rocky marriage with my first wife.

I wound up getting out of the military in '86,

divorcing her, became estranged from my son.

Substance abuse.

Alcohol abuse.

That's what a lot of victims do

to try to suppress that pain.

- But Preston wasn't the only victim.

Billy Capshaw shared a room with Dahmer

for over a year

and says he faced an even more intense ordeal.

- He had me tied up, naked, to a bunk, you know,

and was...

beside me, naked hisself,

and holding me like I would hold a woman.

He raped me, sexually molested me.

He tortured me.

The attacks, the things like that,

were continuous and almost every day.

- Billy told us his shame over what was happening to him

kept him quiet.

- There's guys in there

and they got guns, and they're mean.

They've been to Vietnam.

As a 17-year-old kid,

would you really get that out in your unit

that someone raped you?

- The fact that Dahmer would be so open

about all of his crimes

yet never address these allegations

only creates more questions.

Why did he leave this out?

And what else could there be that we don't know about?

- The fact that he didn't disclose

the incidents in the military

just doesn't surprise me.

Jeffrey Dahmer wanted to talk about

what he wanted to talk about.

- In March of 1981,

Dahmer is discharged from the Army

not for violent behavior but for excessive drinking.

- Was I disappointed in-- of course.

I was disappointed in his inability

to achieve something,

you know, in normal working or living.

- That fall, 21-year-old Jeffrey Dahmer

moves back into his parents' home

in Bath, Ohio.

Directionless, he continues to drink heavily.

His father and stepmother push him

to get professional help.

- I did as much as I thought I could.

He seemed to be

an alcoholic,

so we got help that way

and that sort of thing.

- Lionel would drop him off,

and Jeff would go out the back door.

So he wasn't going for counseling.

And we reached a point where we said,

"We're going to send you up to Grandma's house for a while

and see if you can get your life together."

- Dahmer's grandmother believes that through God,

Jeffrey will change his sexuality.

So he attends church

and gets a job drawing blood at a local blood bank.

But at this point, his depraved urges

become harder and harder to control,

and he acts out.

He exposes himself to a group of women and children

at the Wisconsin State Fair and is arrested.

In court, he appears remorseful,

which will become a routine for him,

and all he gets is a fine, $50 plus court fees.

At this point, Dahmer tries to find a substitute for killing,

and what he settles on is truly disturbing.

- His goal was finding the partner

who would lie there all night

so that he could have the illusion

of all the time in the world to be close to that person.

And his strategies for finding that partner

were creative and varied

but mostly ineffective.

They included scanning obituaries,

going to the funeral if there was a viewing

to see if it was someone he'd find attractive,

and then trying to dig up the grave.

[ominous music]

On the two occasions that he did that,

the ground was too frozen.

He couldn't get anywhere trying to dig it up.

He found an attractive store mannequin.

He hid in a restroom in the department store

till after closing, stole the mannequin,

managed to get out of the building,

took the mannequin home to his grandmother's house,

and for some period of time was satisfied

lying next to the attractive mannequin.

♪ ♪

His grandmother found the mannequin

and disposed of it.

- He spent a number of months,

if not longer, going to gay bath houses

in both Chicago and Milwaukee.

He would slip Halcion into the drinks

of men that he would meet there.

They would fall asleep.

He would fondle them, pretending in his own mind

that they were dead.

- That was satisfying to him for a time.

But he gave too much of the drug to one of the men.

- The bath house operator

couldn't wake one of these fellows,

had to call to get medical help.

They realize that Dahmer's doing this,

so they banned him from the bath houses.

- Once again, he could have been stopped,

and once again, he wasn't.

- When I moved to Milwaukee in '81,

I started reading pornography,

going to the bookstores.

Eventually, that lead to

frequenting the gay bars.

And then I--

One time, I brought this young man

back to the hotel room, the Ambassador Hotel,

was just planning on drugging him

and spending the night with him.

I had no intention of hurting him.

When I woke up in the morning, he had a broken rib here.

It was heavily bruised.

Apparently, I had beaten him to death with my fists.

- And you have no memory of it. - I have no memory of it.

But that's what started the whole spree all over again.

- He tells me it wasn't premeditated

and that he then needed to find more time

in order to dispose of the body.

- It has been nine years since his last kill.

And in what seems like an instant,

he goes into a mode that is familiar to him:

the cover-up.

Up next, Dahmer's crimes escalate,

and the bodies are piling up.

- I was saving body parts

such as skulls and skeletons.

In the fall of 1987,

Jeffrey Dahmer wakes up in a hotel room in Milwaukee.

He is in bed with the bludgeoned body

of his second victim.

He says he has no memory of killing the man.

- He had to sign in

for a second night

in order to now have time to get rid of the body

by stuffing it into a suitcase

and ultimately removing it.

- He took it to his grandmother's house

to put it in the basement

until he was able to cut it up and get it in the garbage.

And he knew the routine of the garbage men,

so he'd cut it up Sundays while Grandma went to church,

have it in the garbage by Monday,

and it would be gone.

- Police would later determine

the victim was 24-year-old Steven Tuomi.

He'd recently moved to Milwaukee

from northern Michigan

and met Dahmer after he finished his shift

at a local restaurant.

- I had these obsessive desires and thoughts,

wanting to control them, to...

I don't know how to put it.

Possess them permanently.

- And that's why you killed them.

- Right, right,

not because I was angry with them,

not because I hated them

but because I wanted to keep them with me.

And as my obsession grew,

I was saving body parts

such as skulls and skeletons.

- At his grandmother's,

Dahmer's desire to kill escalates.

He takes two more lives in the winter of 1988,

raising his victim count to four.

James Doxtator is only 14 years old

when Dahmer lures him with the promise of $50

to take a few pictures.

And six weeks later,

it's 23-year-old Richard Guerrero.

Both face the same fate:

drugged, strangled, dismembered.

It's at this time Dahmer hones his craft

in disposing of bodies,

learning how flesh dissolves in acid

and bones would need to be crushed up

and tossed in the trash.

According to Lionel, his grandmother objects

to the smells coming from the basement

but apparently doesn't figure out what's going on.

Or maybe she just doesn't want to.

- I would send Lionel up to his mother's house

to deal with problems,

but I really wasn't aware at that time

that Lionel was too naive to handle the situation.

Lionel didn't believe his son was doing anything wrong.

- He was doing strange things.

We thought it was with roadkill.

That's what he told us,

and I--I believed him.

But I said, "Jeff," you know,

"your grandma just can't take this sort of thing.

You really need to move out."

- Now on his own,

Jeffrey Dahmer's free to give in to his urges.

Just one day after moving into his own apartment,

Dahmer brings home a 13-year-old boy,

drugs and fondles him.

Dahmer is arrested

for sexual assault against a minor.

This is the boy's testimony.

We should warn you it's shocking and disturbing.

- How did the authorities find out about this?

Well, for some reason, when the boy wanted to leave,

Dahmer let him go.

- We talked about the incident that he was involved in.

It was pretty clear to me

that he was a little bit different.

- Jerry Boyle is hired by Lionel and Shari Dahmer

to represent Jeffrey in this case.

- I think my son was a freshman in high school

at the time.

I think he could have whipped Dahmer in a minute.

Never would I have believed

that he was a killer, ever,

because there was nothing to indicate to me

that he was that way.

I mean, it just wasn't there.

- Dahmer's ability to deceive

is only matched by his desire to kill.

Between his conviction in January of 1989

and his sentencing in May, he is not deterred.

Dahmer takes his fifth life,

24-year-old Anthony Sears, on March 25th.

This murder marks a depraved turning point

in Dahmer's process.

- I kept the mummified head and skull

of one of the victims

in a carrying case in my locker at work.

- Were you almost flaunting it?

- Yes, but that's how strong the compulsion was.

That's how bizarre the desire was.

I wanted to keep something of the person with me.

- But during the sexual assault trial,

no one had any knowledge of that,

which is why Jerry Boyle fought to keep Dahmer a free man.

- The outcome in the case was,

Jeffrey admitted to everything he was accused of,

except he was vehement in saying

that he never touched a child.

I didn't believe what he was telling me,

but my job is to try and figure out what do for him

and for society

by getting him a sentence that made sense,

and I think we did that.

- He fooled his attorney

that was representing him.

He fooled so many people as to his real feelings.

Unfortunately, I didn't realize it at the time.

- Dahmer avoids jail time.

Instead, he's given work release

and mandatory time with a mental health professional.

Another close call,

another opportunity where he could have been stopped.

And once again, he acts remorseful.

He writes to the judge.

"What I did was deplorable.

"The world has enough misery in it

"without my adding more to it.

"Sir, I can assure you

that it will never happen again."

We now know nothing could be further from the truth.

- He would go see a psychiatrist

and not say a word for ten sessions,

and they'd let him walk out the door.

Probation officer, he'd say,

"You have these feelings of, you know,

sexual perversion and all that?"

He says, "No, I read books and masturbate to that."

He's out there killing people.

- Up next...

Do you ever think about your victims?

- Uh, I've often wondered why I haven't had

more dreams or nightmares about what I've done.

By May of 1989,

Jeffrey Dahmer's body count is at five.

Then he is sentenced

to one year in a work release program

for the drugging and fondling of a 13-year-old boy.

He claims during that time, there were no killings.

After he's released and on probation,

he finds a new place to live, somewhere off the beaten path.

- I had asked him

a number of times, "Why are you down here,

"you know, when you can go somewhere else

"and stay, like, in West Alice at your grandmother's house

"or something like that?

"And you would rather be here,

where you're surrounded by blacks."

And that's all that was over there,

was black people and some Asian people.

He was like, "I like it better down here,

'cause I can keep more to myself."

- Pamela Bass, who lives across the hall from Dahmer

in the Oxford Apartments,

develops a soft spot

for the man she would describe as an unassuming bachelor.

- You know, me and my husband at that time

were trying to get him a girlfriend,

because we thought that, you know,

he was over there by hisself, and he didn't get out much,

and all this here kind of stuff.

So he said, "No, no, I'm fine.

I just want to work and be left alone."

[ominous music]

- Within a week of settling in to apartment 213,

Dahmer lures 32-year-old Raymond Smith

home for a drink,

laces it with drugs, strangles him to death,

and dismembers his body.

A month later, Dahmer repeats the process

on a 27-year-old acquaintance, Edward Smith,

raising his victim count to seven.

Before you went out to pick up a man,

was there any kind of ritual you went through?

- I'd go to the nightclubs, drink,

watch the strip tease shows.

And if I didn't meet anyone at the bars,

I'd go to the Bath clubs

and meet someone there,

offer them money,

and we'd go back to the apartment,

have a few drinks.

I'd have the sleeping pill mixture

already prepared.

The person would drink it, fall asleep.

And that's when they would be strangled.

- The question of how Mr. Dahmer chose his victims

I don't think is a complicated one.

He tried to find people that were attractive to him

and who were willing

to go with him voluntarily.

He wasn't jumping out of cars and attacking people and so on.

- The men he's inviting back

don't want to just lie there.

They want to get it on, get it over with,

and get going.

He found that enormously frustrating.

Some of them rolled him.

Some of them were nasty to him.

He didn't want to get into an argument

or get into a fight or get robbed.

He wanted somebody to lie there with him.

But he was picking the wrong guys

to try to achieve that,

so he began drugging them at his apartment.

- He wanted his victims to be still and quiet

so he didn't have to face their humanity.

- It's a process. It doesn't happen overnight.

When you depersonalize another person

and view them as just an object,

an object for pleasure

instead of a living, breathing human being,

it seems to make it easier

to...

do things you shouldn't do.

- It struck me that classifying murder

as a "thing you shouldn't do"

minimizes the horror and brutality

of Jeffrey Dahmer's actions.

- Dahmer drugged his victims,

so they weren't pleading for their lives.

They weren't crying out in pain

as he inflicted a torture on them.

So he was in many ways different,

frighteningly different.

- Do you ever think about your victims?

- Uh, I've often wondered why I haven't had

more dreams or nightmares about what I've done.

For some reason, it's like it's blocked off

from part of my mind.

If I dwelled on the subject all the time,

I would...

I wouldn't be able to function.

- In talking to Jeffrey Dahmer,

I realized that one of his most peculiar traits was,

no matter how well he knew his victims,

he didn't view them as people.

That's why, in his 160-page confession,

he could describe everything he did to them

in excruciating detail

but he couldn't remember their names.

Up next.

- Told us how he cooked them.

What they tasted like.

- He seemed like a very normal person.

He covered up so much.

I was branching out that's when

the cannibalism started.

He just was crazy sick.

Things just began to deteriorate.

He became like a killing machine out of control.

It just seemed to be an absence

of any moral compass in the man at all.

- I didn t believe in the concept of evil.

And, now I do.

No one, no one had a clue

as to what was happening for over a decade.

[eerie music]

♪ ♪

- He became like a killing machine

out of control.

- There just seemed to be an absence

of any moral compass.

He was an evil man.

- The manager came up

and complained about the smell.

He told the manager, "Well, my fish died."

- He had a very good disguise.

- It's a process; it doesn't happen overnight

when you depersonalize another person

and view them as just an object, an object for pleasure,

instead of a living, breathing human being.

I had these obsessive desires and thoughts,

wanting to control them.

- He immediately said, "When you find out what I did,

you're gonna want to kill me."

- You love who the true human being is,

and you take that with you to your grave.

- He seemed like a very normal boy.

He covered up so much.

- Murder. - Necrophilia.

- Zombies. - Religious ritual.

- Vats of acid. - Body parts.

- Aroused. - Consuming.

- Willing. - Cooked them.

- Bad people. - [tearfully] He was our son.

from Jeffrey Dahmer tting across

in a small prison meeting room.

And face-to-face,

I can see how he got away with his terrible crimes.

He appears completely normal.

That's what made him so frightening.

In the second half of our conversation,

he talks about the most vicious acts--

cannibalism, murder, dismemberment--

in the most casual way.

He even says he's sorry.

He sounds thoughtful.

He sounds sincere.

But Jeffrey Dahmer was a psychopath.

When you killed these men,

afterwards, were you repulsed?

Were you upset?

- No, it--at the time, it was--

it was almost addictive.

It was almost...

a surge of energy.

I wouldn't have to worry

about any of their needs or anything.

I just had complete control of the situation.

- The right way to think of him

is as having necrophilia.

Now, usually, we think of necrophilia

as being about corpses.

I think it's more than that.

I think it is control

over the completely passive, compliant partner

that he could fondle, hug, touch, and lie with

as long as possible.

- He always said he didn't enjoy murdering people.

He said that. I don't doubt that.

But he enjoyed getting sex,

and he enjoyed getting it against their will,

and he did what he had to do to get it.

- He told me his motivating force

was to have sex with a partner who wouldn't leave him.

But more than that, he wanted to be the aggressor,

and he didn't want to be touched.

What do you want to say to the families of the victims?

- I had no intention of hurting them.

I was--I--

I was extremely selfish.

I was only thinking of myself,

my own pleasure, my own...

perverted desires.

- In the meantime, he has men dying.

To dispose of them required dismembering them.

He hated this process.

But if he drank enough,

he could lay down sheets of plastic

and begin the process of cutting

and the hard work of dismembering

and putting body parts in vats of acid.

- When the bodies were still in your apartment,

there was no time when you would see them

and say, "This is grotesque"?

"What have I done?"

- There were times. There were times.

But the compulsive obsession with doing what I was doing

overpowered any feelings of revulsion.

- In September of 1990,

Dahmer's victim count is seven,

and he would have yet more bodies to dispose of.

22-year-old Ernest Miller is a dance student

he meets outside a bookstore.

Dahmer murders the talented dancer,

stuffs his entire skeleton

in the bottom of a filing cabinet

in his apartment

and his heart and biceps in his freezer.

Three weeks later,

Dahmer brings home and strangles David Thomas,

a 22-year-old man he meets outside a mall.

He has claimed nine lives,