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,

and his routine becomes even more twisted.

Why did you photograph them?

- It was my way of remembering their appearance,

their physical beauty.

I also wanted to keep some--

If I couldn't keep them there with me whole,

at least I felt that I could keep their skeletons.

And I even went so far

as planning on setting up an altar

with the ten different skulls and skeletons.

- And what was the purpose of the altar going to be?

- Uh, as a sort of memorial,

a point where I could...

I don't know.

It's so bizarre and strange, it's hard to describe.

A place where I could collect my thoughts

and feed my obsession.

- This is a sketch of the altar drawn by Jeffrey Dahmer.

- The altar was not

of any religious ritual involved.

It was as a memory of the people that he had killed.

There just seemed to be an absence

of any moral compass in the man at all.

He was an evil man.

- And in Jeffrey Dahmer's mind,

this macabre ritual has a purpose,

and it's something he has no trouble describing

down to the goriest detail.

- I was branching out.

That's when the cannibalism started,

eating of the heart and the arm muscle.

It was a way of making me feel that they were a part of me.

At first, it was just curiosity,

and then it became compulsive.

- Contrary to what one might expect

of some wild frenzy of consuming raw flesh,

what he did was to cook a filet of biceps

that he'd kept in his freezer,

sit at a table, and make a meal of it

while looking at photographs of that person alive.

- Up next, Jeffrey Dahmer's most terrifying idea yet.

- I tried to keep the person alive

by inducing a zombie-like state.

It's 1990, and Jeffrey Dahmer

is in the middle of a killing spree,

which continues uninterrupted and unnoticed for years.

He was pulled over by the police

with body parts in his car.

He had been arrested for exposing himself

and for sexual assault on a minor.

He was caught drugging men at a bathhouse.

And still he wasn't stopped.

Emboldened by these multiple close calls,

his violent compulsions begin to evolve,

intensifying and becoming more and more perverse

as he preys upon men in Milwaukee.

How did you live that double life?

How did you go to work?

How did you have

a normal relationship with your family?

- When you try to keep a terrible secret, like I was,

it warps every other aspect of your life.

But I managed to-- I managed to go to work,

conduct myself just like anyone else would.

- Well, I've been surviving mostly on McDonald's food.

It's just so much easier just to pop into the restaurant.

But like I've said before, it gets too expensive,

and I have to start eating at home more.

- Even his neighbors were fooled.

- I don't know where he was getting them guys from,

but he would take them in his apartment, you know?

And there were a couple of them

that I didn't see them come out of there,

and I had asked him about that.

He said, "Oh, well, maybe you were in the bathroom

or something like that, 'cause they're gone."

- Why was it so easy, though, for you to hide it all?

- I desensitized myself to it.

I--I--

I...

[exhales]

I don't know. I went to great lengths.

I bought security systems,

installed them myself in the apartment.

I had a video camera in the corner of the room,

installed locks on the doors,

sirens and stuff

in case anyone broke in to the apartment.

- I was there,

and because I taught the boys how to clean

and take care of a home,

I went through the refrigerator, the bathroom,

behind the shower curtain.

The fridge was fine.

The bathroom was fine.

Nothing had taken place at that time.

- They said it was absolutely clean, perfect.

- Right.

- How'd you hide from them?

- Everything was locked up,

either in the freezer or in the file chest.

And so there was no evidence laying in the open.

There was nothing abnormal about the look of the apartment.

- Dahmer's father, Lionel,

is talking about his son after years of silence.

He says he wants to share his thoughts

on Jeffrey's terrible deeds one last time.

- Everything that he did was...

You know, he seemed like a very normal person.

He covered up so much.

And I wish that I had really pushed harder

to find out what he's thinking

in his--about everything.

- You need to understand at that point

in Lionel's life, he was very, very naive.

If there's no communication,

you don't know what the truth is.

- Did his father know that at times,

his son was keeping secrets?

Yes.

But could he, in his wildest dreams,

have imagined that the secret was

that he was a serial killer who had necrophilia

and had killed 17 people?

I can't imagine that's the case.

- And what's just as puzzling is the fact

that neither the authorities nor the general public

had any idea a serial killer

was systematically removing men

from the streets of Milwaukee.

- Every year, many young men disappear.

They have a fight with their girlfriend,

get fired from the job,

have a fight with the family, and leave.

And they're gone a couple weeks and come back home.

They give it very different investigative efforts

compared when a young woman disappears.

No one had even a suspicion that a serial slayer was afoot.

- By the spring of 1991,

Dahmer's victim count reaches double digits.

He lures 17-year-old Curtis Straughter

from a bus stop, then strangles him to death.

Next, Dahmer would move on to a new obsession.

- Mr. Dahmer had been sexually aroused

by the idea of having sex with a dead body.

He also, at times, had fantasies

about having sex with what he referred to

as "zombies," human beings that existed

somewhere between being dead and being alive,

something he later on actually ended up acting upon.

- His experiments lead to the death

of his 11th victim, Errol Lindsey.

A month later, he fails again,

this time with 31-year-old Tony Hughes,

a deaf man who Dahmer communicates with

through written notes.

- I tried to keep the person alive

by inducing a zombie-like state...

By injecting first a dilute acid solution

into their brain or hot water.

And it never did completely work.

- Could someone like you be stopped?

Could you be helped?

- No, I was--

I was dead set on going with this compulsion.

It was the only thing that gave me any...

any satisfaction.

- He later shares the details with a forensic psychologist.

- After two failed attempts at creating zombies,

Dahmer tries for a third time in May 1991.

That would lead to his closest call yet.

- He looked like a little kid.

He had a towel around,

and it had blood,

and he had blood running down his leg.

- The boy is 14-year-old Konerak Sinthasomphone.

Injured and drugged, he escaped

when Jeffrey Dahmer left the apartment

to buy beer.

In a terrible twist of fate, he's the younger brother

of the boy Dahmer was arrested for molesting

three years earlier.

- What had already happened

that the police couldn't possibly have known

is that Mr. Dahmer had drilled a small hole

in the skull of this young man

and poured a caustic substance into it,

thinking that he now created a zombie.

- They didn't see the drillings into the head

that he had conducted.

Apparently, it was under the hairline.

- The incoherent boy is with the police

when Dahmer returns,

but instead of fleeing the scene,

he acts as cool as ever.

- Dahmer went right up to the police and says,

"This is my lover.

"If you come, I'll take you back to my apartment.

Here's his clothes."

They were all folded on the couch.

- Mr. Dahmer did keep his wits

and persuaded them by showing some pictures

that this young lad had voluntarily taken

that these were just two consenting homosexual adults

engaging in sexual activity.

I don't think the police recognized the age

of this young man at that time.

- The body of the last victim, Tony Hughes, is still there,

but the police don't look around.

Instead, they leave the boy in the apartment with Dahmer.

- Did that play an element in it,

that there were homosexuals involved, possibly?

I can't assess that.

I think that would be a harsh judgment.

- During the incident where the police were called...

- Mm-hmm.

- And the young boy was returned to you,

that didn't wake you up at all?

The police on your doorstep?

- They were--they were in the apartment.

They were actually in the apartment,

and there was a dead young man in the bedroom

on the floor.

I couldn't believe it when--

when it turned out that they--they--

they didn't see anything.

I just--I couldn't believe it.

And yes, it did shock me but not enough to quit.

That's how strong the compulsion was.

- Any neighbors with lingering suspicions

are assured by the police

that nothing is out of the ordinary,

as you'll hear in this 911 call.

- Well, the next day, Dahmer killed him.

- Konerak Sinthasomphone was Dahmer's 13th victim.

Up next...

Did you like feeling evil? - No.

No, I didn't.

After the close call

After the close call with the police

in May of 1991,

Jeffrey Dahmer's killing accelerates

to a dizzying pace.

Within a week, he murders 20-year-old Matt Turner

and 23-year-old Jeremiah Weinberger.

Only ten days later, he strangles

24-year-old Oliver Lacy.

- Things just began to deteriorate.

He became like a killing machine out of control.

There were just body parts, at the end, all over the place.

- Before long, his neighbors report a foul stench

coming from somewhere on their floor.

- Ooh.

I can't even describe it.

It's a horrible smell.

I know me and Jeff went up and down the hallways, smelling--

you know, trying to see where it was coming from.

- The landlord eventually tracks the smell

to Dahmer's apartment.

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

Then he told him, "My meat spoiled."

And then the third time,

the manager came up and told him--

complained about the smell, he told him,

"You're gonna be evicted next month."

- I went in to help him clean up,

and he told me--he said, "It's the freezer over there

"that my grandma has sent me some meat,

"and I put it in there, and I went back to her house,

and I forgot to plug it in."

I haven't been around no dead people.

I don't know anything about how they smell.

He had a very good disguise.

That's what it was.

- Jeffrey Dahmer begins to miss work

and is fired from his job at the chocolate factory.

Killing becomes his only function in life.

Two days later, 25-year-old Joseph Bradehoft

becomes Dahmer's 17th and final victim.

Three days later, Dahmer's reign of terror

comes crashing to a halt.

- Oh, Lord. [chuckles]

That was not a good night for me.

I was home by myself, and Jeff was having--

Jeff was having some company or something,

'cause I could hear music, a radio or something playing.

- The company she hears is Tracy Edwards,

a man Jeffrey Dahmer met at a mall

and convinces to come back to his apartment.

- He was out of Halcion,

so he had handcuffs,

and he persuaded Edwards to get one handcuff on,

and he said he wanted to photograph him in bondage,

so he wanted to put the other one on.

Well, Edwards says,

"You're not gonna put that second one on."

- At the trial, Edwards gives a harrowing account

of the night's events.

- He told me to lay down face down,

put both of my hands behind my back.

I kind of, like, laid on my side.

For some reason, I guess God told me not to lay flat down

and let this person handcuff me, so I didn't.

He kind of laid across me,

put his head across my chest at that point

like he was listening to my heart,

'cause at that point, he told me

he was gonna eat my heart at that point.

The "Exorcist" movie was playing at that time.

- This was part of Jeffrey Dahmer's ritual.

He would watch "Exorcist III" before every murderous outing.

- I felt so hopelessly evil and perverted

that...

that I actually derived a sort of pleasure

from watching that tape.

- Did you like feeling evil?

- No, no, I didn't.

But I had tried to overcome the thoughts,

and it worked for a while, but eventually I gave in.

- Jeffrey took him into his room.

They were both sitting on the bed.

And Dahmer was rocking back and forth

and kind of humming, making noises.

[ominous music]

- I said, "Well, at least I'm gonna die trying.

I'm not just gonna sit here."

And then I just-- for some reason, I said,

"Well, I need to go to the bathroom,"

and he didn't follow me at that point.

And I ran out.

- He goes up to a squad car, says, "Hey,

can you help me take this handcuff off?"

The police ask him what's happening.

They try. They can't.

So they head back to Dahmer's house

to get the key.

- So they went back to the apartment with Edwards.

Dahmer, of course, was drinking or drunk.

- In an open dresser drawer in plain sight

are close to 80 Polaroids documenting Dahmer's victims--

naked, posed, and dismembered.

- Officer yelled, "Get the cuffs on him"

or something like that.

And the other one came out in the hallway,

and I was running down that way to get out of the way,

'cause I said, "I don't know what they're doing.

I don't know what they found."

- We're investigating a homicide that's occurred

in the apartment building

in the 900 block of North 25th Street.

- It's obvious that there is-- has been a number

of human specimens found within the apartment.

- The evidence collected

is straight out of a horror film:

severed heads, bleached skulls,

a 57-gallon vat of acid used to dissolve human flesh.

And inside the refrigerator,

neatly packaged body parts ready for consumption.

What was the turning point for you

that made you suddenly realize

that you had done something terribly wrong,

something you should be sorry for?

- It was the night of the arrest.

I have no memory of what happened

during the s the srs

before the last victim ran out of the apartment.

I heard a knock on the door, and the police were there

with the last victim.

They asked me where the key was to the handcuffs.

I was--my mind was in a haze.

I sort of pointed to the bedroom,

and that's where they found the pictures.

And they yelled, "Cuff him."

I was handcuffed.

And it was just the realization

that there was no point in trying to hide--

hide my actions anymore.

The best route was to help, help the police

identify all the victims

and just make a complete confession.

- Well, at 3:00, I got a phone call.

They had a subject in custody

that had skulls in his apartment

and body parts, at which time

I immediately said, "You're screwing with me."

I went in and introduced myself to Jeff,

and he immediately said,

"When you find out what I did, you're gonna want to kill me."

Then we says, "Well, let's start from the beginning."

And he said, "Well, that was a long time ago."

And we said, "What--what year?"

And he says, "'78."

- Starting with the disappearance

of Steven Hicks back in Bath, Ohio,

Dahmer describes every murder in detail

all the way up to Joseph Bradehoft

just days before the arrest.

It starts to become clear that Dahmer had a type.

- Interestingly enough, disproportionately,

Dahmer's victims were African-American.

- 10 of your 17 victims were black.

Were they racially motivated crimes?

- It was not racially motivated.

It was not sexual preference.

It was just to find-- an obsession

with the best-looking young man I could find.

- The only time I saw Dahmer get mad

is when he was accused of being biased against blacks.

It wasn't true.

He just was crazy sick.

- Everyone in the law enforcement,

ranging from the policemen who arrested him

to the attorney,

thought he covered up everything

so extremely well

that they had no idea of what was going on in his mind.

- We didn't hear about the extent

till it came out in the papers and he was in jail.

It's not a pleasant experience to go through.

But my concern was taking care of my husband.

- But Lionel's main concern was his mother,

who lived in the house

where murders three, four, and five were committed.

- All the four newspapers,

they were camped out across the street,

and it was just endless.

- She just couldn't imagine.

She just--it didn't register how bad it was.

We kept it from her, but when she finally was told,

she finally succumbed to dementia.

- Despite the terrible effect

the discovery of Jeffrey's crimes had on the family,

they wanted to go to trial.

- At that time, I was thinking

that the mystery could be solved as to why he did these things

by being examined by a psychologist.

As it turned out, it--

it seemed to me a useless exercise.

I know the real reason:

there was a lack of connection with our creator.

- Up next...

How should you be punished?

- Well, there's no question

that I deserve the death penalty.

In early 1992,

serial killer Jefferey Dahmer is about to stand trial

for 15 of his 17 murders.

But this trial isn't to establish guilt.

That has been weighed.

This is to determine sanity.

His family wants him declared insane

so he can be treated by mental health professionals.

- All rise. [gavel bangs]

- Despite the pain of hearing the details

of their son's crimes,

the Dahmers never miss a day in court.

- If you look at the early films of Jeff in court,

you'll see him in this striped shirt,

looking somewhat like a vagabond.

Well, I took Lionel's suit in, and we gave it to Jeff.

He went to court looking like a gentleman.

[tearfully] Because he was our son.

- Hearing about the crimes was just horrible.

I mean, it was just overwhelming.

And all we could do was sit there and listen

with the hope that the psychologists that were involved

could find out what caused him to do these things.

But I think, in the end, the reason

that caused him to do what he did--

he just wasn't with God.

- Jeffrey Dahmer told me he never wanted to go to trial.

He just wanted to go to prison and take his punishment.

But that didn't happen.

You're wearing glasses now.

- Right.

- You didn't during the trial.

Why not?

- I--I didn't want to--

I felt uncomfortable looking anyone in the face.

I didn't want to...

see anyone's face clearly.

It helped me dissociate myself from what was happening.

- Dahmer didn't have to look, but he did have to listen.

- He tried tasting the flesh and the heart.

He reported that it had a beef-like flavor.

- Do you still feel

those same urges?

Do you still feel that compulsion, that obsession?

- I wish I could say that it just left completely,

but no, there are times when I still do--

still do have the old compulsion.

- Could someone like you be stopped?

Could you be helped?

- No, I was--

I was dead set on going with this compulsion.

It was the only thing that gave me any--

any satisfaction.

- Jerry Boyle argued

that Dahmer was like a locomotive out of control,

speeding down the track as he killed more people,

lost any sensitivity to it.

That would come under the hypothesis, then,

that he was insane,

'cause he couldn't control what he was doing.

I can understand that someone might say,

"He must be crazy."

I can understand that.

He was not.

- Did the defendant, Jeffrey L. Dahmer,

have a mental disease?

Answer: no.

[people cheer]

- Ultimately, the jury finds Dahmer guilty

and legally sane at the time of the murders.

After the verdict, the families of the victims

are allowed to address the killer.

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

I hate you!

This is out of control!

- One woman in particular really got angry.

What did you think when she was doing that?

- I couldn't blame her a bit.

I'm surprised there wasn't more of that.

- You know, there's nothing that you can say to someone

who is extremely distraught

except to give them empathy

and try to convince them

that you really do care very, very much.

And I do.

- [yelling]

- Mr. Dahmer, you do have the right

to address the court at this time.

- Your Honor, I know that you are about to sentence me.

I ask for no consideration.

Thank you, Your Honor,

and I am prepared for your sentence,

which I know will be the maximum.

- The court will impose the mandatory life sentence...

[dramatic music]

Plus an additional ten years

on the habitual criminality.

- With the death penalty not an option in Wisconsin,

Dahmer is given more than 15 life sentences

equaling 936 years.

Soon after, he's extradited to Ohio...

- To the charge of aggravated murder...

- Where he's convicted for the murder

of his first victim, Steven Hicks.

Dahmer is never charged with the 1987 murder

of Steven Tuomi.

Although he claimed responsibility,

Dahmer says he was blacked out during the act,

and there was no further evidence

linking him to the crime.

It was the only murder he confessed to

that he was not convicted of.

Regardless, the sentences are more than enough

to put minds at rest.

Jeffrey Dahmer would spend the rest of his life

behind bars.

- When he had first gotten locked up down there,

he wanted me to come down there and see him.

But by then, I was terrified of him.

I know Jeffrey who used to stay across the hall from me.

That Dahmer guy is somebody else.

No.

- He confided that he stayed up all night

and slept all day

because he couldn't face the daylight

and the memories of the brutal crimes

that defined his life.

- Usually wake up at 6:30 in the morning,

go eat breakfast,

and then sleep until noon,

wake up for lunch,

and sleep until about 4:00 in the afternoon,

eat dinner,

and then spend the greater portion of the night

watching TV.

- But how does a family even attempt

to reconcile the thought

that a man who is their own flesh and blood

is also the most evil criminal imaginable?

- I had these many, many discussions with him

on the phone.

It was always Shari and I

who would visit him at the prison,

and Shari was extremely instrumental

in bringing Jeff and I and her together

into a very loving relationship.

- He was very embarrassed about being in prison.

He would try to hide his handcuffs.

He was embarrassed.

He apologized, but you have to understand

he's not--

he's not going to sit there and bleed about his crimes.

- It really was irrelevant, at that point,

to talk about.

- No, no.

What would it serve to be angry with him?

- I try not to think too deeply about anything,

because then I get depressed.

I try to figure out why this happened,

what started these thoughts in my head

at such a young age,

whether this has any-- any meaning to it

or whether this is all just a horrible coincidence,

you know, all the events in my life.

I feel that I'm better off here

than I was on the outside, doing what I was doing.

- You're glad you're in prison.

- I think it's best for everyone, right.

- As prisoners often do,

Dahmer turns to God while behind bars.

- Got a phone call.

It was from a minister friend of mine in Milwaukee

who said that there was an inmate

who wanted to be baptized.

I said, "Okay, I've never done this before, but sure.

What's his name?"

He said, "You better sit down for this one.

It's Jeffrey Dahmer."

- Up next...

What do you think happens after you die?

- Right. That's the big unknown.

- Sentenced to almost

- Sentenced to almost a millennium in prison,

convicted serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer

embraces religion.

He asks Roy Ratcliff,

then a minister in the Church of Christ,

to baptize him.

- He'd begun to think more deeply,

and that was primarily to save his soul,

to get his soul right with God.

- Dahmer's father, Lionel,

by now a devout Christian himself,

uses this opportunity to bond with his son.

- I told him that there are

many, many, many people in this world

who think that Genesis, the first book of the Bible,

is some type of a myth instead of actual history.

And he ordered roughly 13 books

on the evolution-creation controversy,

and he became convinced,

and then he attempted to follow through

and live as holy a life as he could.

- But at the same time, Dahmer told me

he never conquered his deadly impulses.

If you were out on the street now,

would you still be committing the crimes?

- Probably.

If this hadn't happened,

there's no doubt I probably would be.

I can't think of anything that would have stopped me.

- Jeff told us when he was in prison

that he should never be turned loose,

because he would do the same thing again.

Now, that requires a great deal

of soul-searching and honesty.

- You know the families of the victims

don't believe in your conversion

or your sorrow.

- Oh, right.

And if I was on the-- on their end of the table,

I wouldn't either.

Ultimately, I'm accountable to the Lord Jesus Christ.

He'll be my final judge.

- Can your sins be forgiven?

- The Lord Jesus Christ's shed blood

is powerful enough to wipe out even my sins.

- One of the most beautiful things that occurred

when Jeff was in prison, if you can call it beautiful--

I made friends with one of the victims' sisters,

and I was able to get her in to visit Jeff.

As nervous as Jeff was,

he was able to tell her how her brother died.

And she needed that for closure.

- And she ended up saying that she forgave Jeff,

because she knew that it was something

that was completely overpowering Jeff.

- How should you be punished?

- Well, there's no question

that I deserve the death penalty.

I've wondered myself

why I don't have the death penalty.

That's what I deserve; I deserve death.

- What do you think happens after you die?

- Right. That's the big unknown.

I've thought of--I've had thoughts of suicide.

But I just haven't been able to carry them through.

So I don't know what the future will hold.

- Mr. Dahmer was the subject of an attack

at the Columbia Correctional Institution.

- He was beaten to death in prison yesterday.

- The slaying ended a life of sadism, serial murder,

and cannibalism.

- Dahmer is beaten to death by a fellow inmate.

Ironically, he's killed by a barbell,

the same object he'd used on Steven Hicks

16 years earlier.

For the first time, Jeffrey's father talks

about his son's death.

- How did his death affect me?

- It--

I was brought into a room

where he was lying

after being bludgeoned.

And it struck me so emotionally

that I touched him and I said, "Oh, Jeff.

"Jeff.

Jeff."

It was extremely emotionally devastating

just to see him.

Disregarding all of the horrible things

that his demented state caused him to do,

I was at least very, very glad

that he had done what we believers believe.

- Lionel said that his son didn't put up a fight

when he was attacked.

Well, when I talked to Jeffrey, it was clear

that he wanted to die.

He said he even considered suicide.

But after embracing Christianity,

he felt that, of all things, would be too great a sin.

- I love the human beings

who have been in my life and who may have failed.

I have failed.

But the important thing is,

you love who the true human being is,

and you take that with you to your grave.

- I'm very, very proud that in the end,

he did everything that was required

for the initial salvation.

I believe he's with God.

He forgave Jeff

according to what's said in the Scriptures,

and therefore I forgive Jeff.

- Originally, I didn't believe in the concept

of evil, but now I do.

I'm talking about someone who exhibits

unbelievable cruelty on others

simply for their own purposes,

I think is a pretty good definition of evil.

And I think it's a pretty good understanding

of Jeffrey Dahmer.

- For more about "Dahmer on Dahmer,"

go to Oxygen.com.