Original subtitles

Jeffrey: I did what I did not for reasons of hate.

I hated no one.

I knew I was sick or evil or both.

I should have stayed with God.

I tried and failed and created a Holocaust.

♪♪

♪♪

Hey, everyone. I'm Hill Harper.

Jeffrey Dahmer is one of the most depraved

and dangerous serial killers in recent memory,

not only because of the number of young men he killed, 17,

and what he actually did to his victims,

but because Jeffrey Dahmer was able to hide in plain sight

for years, committing murder after murder after murder.

He had everyone fooled -- judges, police, friends,

even his own family.

You see, by the spring of 1991, 12 young men had gone missing.

No one had connected the dots, not even the police.

There was a serial killer on the loose in Milwaukee,

and no one knew.

This is "How It Really Happened."

♪♪

A woman in an apartment building called police to say,

"There's a young man running in the street

without any clothes on."

Dr. Jentzen: Concerned neighbors came around him

and were offering assistance to him.

At that time, he appeared to be confused and disoriented

and basically looked intoxicated.

Casarez: The neighbors are there.

The police are there,

and everybody's trying to figure out what's going on,

and then suddenly, Dahmer arrives on the scene.

Balcerzak: He stated that his roommate had been drinking

and had passed out on the couch of the apartment,

and that that's where he had left him

when he had gone to a local tavern

to obtain some beer or cigarettes.

Dr. Jentzen: Dahmer convinced them that he and Konerak

had a consensual and intimate relationship

and that he would take him back to the apartment.

"Konerak is drunk.

Let me take him back up to my apartment.

Everything will be fine."

Casarez: What no one knew at the time

was that Dahmer had just met this kid.

He offered him money to come back to his apartment with him.

This kid had been drugged

and was trying to escape his captor.

Dr. Jentzen: Konerak, he was in a comatose state,

and then he revived, left the apartment

and was outside naked.

Dahmer is coming back literally from the liquor store

with liquor and encounters the police with his victim.

Balcerzak: He appeared to be calm.

There was nothing to suggest

that he was not as he was presenting himself to be.

Schwartz: So the officers go up to the apartment,

and they don't see anything that gives them pause.

They see Konerak's clothes folded

over the side of the couch.

They see an apartment that's not out of "Architectural Digest,"

but it doesn't look like something untoward

had been happening there.

He manipulated those officers that night.

Casarez: The police see no reason to arrest Dahmer.

They just say to him, "Take care of this kid,"

and then they leave.

Immediately after the officers left, Dahmer killed Konerak.

They escort this boy to his death,

essentially handing him over to Jeffrey Dahmer

who proceeds to kill him and dismember him.

Reporter: Konerak Sinthasomphone was just 14 years old,

the youngest in a family of Laotian refugees.

He's the boy who was spotted naked and bleeding,

running from Jeffrey Dahmer.

The investigation further discloses

that the police department individuals who responded

failed to conduct a basic proper police investigation

into the matter.

If the police would have only checked Jeffrey Dahmer's record,

they would've found that he's a registered sex offender

who was on probation for sexually assaulting a boy,

and it's almost impossible to imagine,

but that victim was the brother of Konerak.

Reporter 2: One of Konerak's older teenage brothers

had been molested by Dahmer three years ago.

So the whole thing was full of some very strange, like,

what-are-the-chance kind of coincidences.

Casarez: What police didn't know at this time --

Jeffrey Dahmer was in the middle of a killing spree.

If the police had gone into the next room,

they would have found a dead body.

Reporter 2: Even as police officers

talked to Dahmer in the living room,

the body of his latest victim lay just a room away.

He was so quiet, so reserved.

You wouldn't have believed in a million years

that he was a serial killer.

Never would you believe it.

Banfield: Dahmer was a master manipulator,

and he probably got that way because he knew he had thoughts

that were just too dark to share,

and he began to fantasize about what it would be like

to have sex with men who were dead or unconscious.

Dr. Dietz: What Jeffrey Dahmer wanted

was a man who looked good to him,

which basically meant nice face, good biceps, good physique,

who would accept him,

not force him to do things he didn't want to do,

allow him to lay with them all night long and not leave.

Casarez: Jeffrey Dahmer had sick fantasies of having sex

with a dead or unconscious lover,

but in the earlier years,

he really tried to find alternatives to killing them.

Dr. Dietz: And the things he tried --

he would scan obituaries for young males who had died,

and he tried to dig up their graves,

but the ground was frozen, so that didn't work.

Another strategy he tried

was to steal a mannequin from a department store

by hiding out until after closing hours.

He wanted to have it there with him as a substitute person.

He tried every strategy he could devise to find

a substitute for that voluntary partner

who would lay there and not leave.

♪♪

Eventually, none of those strategies satisfied him,

so he began to target live victims.

Dr. Dietz: The next strategy he tried

was to administer a sedative

to men that he found attractive.

Dr. Jentzen: Before Dahmer went out for an evening,

he knew that he was going to be trying to find a victim,

and he would prepare a drug concoction

of benzodiazepines, valium.

Meuler: He picked up victims at such a variety of places,

you know, adult bookstores, the gay bars, on the streets.

I mean, you -- you know,

you have to have a little bit of con man in you to do that.

Schwartz: Dahmer would strike up a conversation with these men.

"How you doing?"

He talked to them a little bit.

What he was trying to find out

is if this was something who would be missed.

If someone said, "I haven't spoken with my family in years,"

that was the kind of person he was looking for.

Dr. Jentzen: And when he brought a victim back,

he would offer the individual the drink,

and that would sedate them,

and then he was able to take control of them.

McCann: And then do what he wished with them,

and they were completely under his control.

They couldn't resist.

They couldn't say, "No, I don't like this or don't want that,"

so it was his desire to dominate,

to completely dominate.

Casarez: This was Dahmer's M.O. for years --

picking men up and drugging them,

but in 1987, the M.O. changed.

He lured a man to his hotel room.

Schwartz: Dahmer met him in Milwaukee.

He took him to the Ambassador Hotel.

They had sex.

Dahmer says that he blacked out,

and when he woke up in the morning,

he woke up next to Steven Tuomi's dead body.

Banfield: Later, Jeffrey Dahmer talked about that night

with Stone Phillips on "Dateline NBC."

He was hanging over the side of the bed,

and I have no memory of beating him to death,

but I must've,

and that's when it all started again.

And once it started again, you found it impossible to stop.

Right. That -- that's when the --

the obsession went into full swing.

After he got a taste of it, that's when he went out

and starting actively looking for victims,

one after the other.

He was very, very calculating, the way he picked out victims,

the way he covered his tracks

so that victims couldn't be linked to him.

You know, he thought that out.

Casarez: This is a guy who'd been living a double life

since he was a kid,

trying to be normal on the outside

but holding secrets on the inside

as he told NBC's "Dateline."

Talking about it, I don't think,

would've made that much difference

because like I said, there were things going on in my head

that I would've never opened up

and talked about with anybody.

He had developed a fascination fairly early

with the idea of skeletons and dissection.

It's pretty frightening that he was thinking that way

way back then, and the rest of us had no clue.

King: Tonight, exclusive -- the parents of Jeffrey Dahmer.

Their son was one of America's most notorious serial killers.

Now, in an exclusive interview, his parents,

Lionel and Shari Dahmer, speak out on what went wrong

to turn their handsome, soft-spoken son into a monster.

King: Why are you coming on?

I really want to tell parents about what I think

they should look for in rearing their children.

That could help a lot of people?

Yeah.

And you support that, Shari?

Shari: Oh, absolutely, anything that we could do

to circumvent or prevent another Jeff would be a blessing.

Because it can't be easy. It is not easy.

It would be easier to forget about it...

Absolutely. ...if you can, right?

But no one allows us to forget about it.

What was he like as a teenager?

He had a small circle of friends

who liked to play gags and joke around a lot.

Practical jokes?

Yeah.

Kukral: In high school, Jeff Dahmer sort of became

attached to my group of friends.

We sort of adopted him, you could say.

We found him an interesting guy because of his sense of humor.

I remember him running down the hall and yelling,

"Tornado! Tornado!

Tornado! Get down on the floor!

Everybody get down on the floor!"

And then just walking down the hall calmly after that.

We thought things like that were really funny that he did.

One of my best friends from high school is John Backderf,

and he wrote a book called "My Friend Dahmer,"

a graphic novel,

and that book basically shows our high school days

at Revere High better than anything else,

better than anything I can tell you.

Casarez: What his high school friends didn't know

and what his family didn't even know

was that Jeffrey Dahmer wasn't what he seemed to be.

He was hiding something.

He had developed a fascination fairly early

with the idea of skeletons and dissection.

Lionel: At the age of 12 to 14, we found out

that he had been collecting dead animals, roadkill,

riding around the rural roads and collecting them in bags.

He would take them home, and he'd cut them up,

and the colors fascinated him.

The colors of the internal organs of the dead animals

got him all excited.

Dr. Dietz: And he had the additional problem

that he was growing up in Ohio,

discovering he was gay at a time when this was very repressed

and not something that he could come out freely about.

Banfield: In the book "My Friend Dahmer,"

it really lays out the struggles

that Jeffrey Dahmer had in high school,

the struggles to fit in,

the struggles that he had fighting off

those twisted fantasies,

and he tried to explain his bizarre behavior

when he did an interview with "Dateline NBC."

I think it was around age 14 or 15,

I started to have --

having obsessive thoughts of --

of...violence

intermingled with sex.

The rest of us had no clue

that he was thinking about killing someone

or having sex with someone or their body at that age.

Well, what we learned many years later

was that Jeff Dahmer had an obsession with a jogger

that ran by his house.

Casarez: What nobody knew at the time, including the jogger,

was that Jeffrey Dahmer

was having fantasies about abducting him.

Dr. Dietz: He was planning to hit the jogger

over the head with a heavy object,

drag him into the bushes and have his way with him.

He had hidden in shrubbery, hoping to attack him

and prepared to attack him, but he never got the nerve.

That was pretty frightening to realize that we were around him

when his mind had these visions going on in it.

Jeffrey Dahmer knew that his sexual urges were sick.

They were twisted, but he couldn't tell anybody.

His solution was alcohol.

Kukral: He was drinking in the parking lot before school.

He was drinking out of booze in his briefcase

that he carried around, which was sort of weird.

When Jeffrey was in his senior year,

his parents' marriage was really falling apart,

and his dad ended up moving out.

King: How did Jeff take it?

Jeff, I think, he had --

he told me that -- that it disturbed him very much.

Kukral: Senior year, he drifted away from us.

I think that his academic record started to fall apart,

and he stopped going to a lot of classes

the end of our junior year, senior year.

I think Jeffrey Dahmer really lost it

when his parents divorced,

and his mother took off with their younger son

and moved somewhere else

and left Jeffrey Dahmer alone in the family home.

Banfield: Later, Dahmer explained it in his confession.

He states that it was at this time

he started to have strong feelings of being left

all alone and strong desires

of not wanting to have people leave him.

That not-leaving-him was an important issue to him.

Velez-Mitchell: Being abandoned in the family home

while dad's gone and mother leaves with the younger brother

to start a new life -- that's the moment he broke.

He snapped.

The world became a dark and awful place,

and everybody was his enemy.

Banfield: Shortly after his graduation,

Jeffrey Dahmer was driving around and passed Stephen Hicks,

and something told him to turn back around, and he did.

Stephen Hicks was on his way to a rock concert that night,

and Stephen Hicks never made it to that rock concert.

Dahmer took Stephen Hicks back to his parents' empty place,

and they were drinking beers together,

and that's when something went horrifically wrong.

There was an altercation because Stephen wanted to leave.

Jeff had made a pass at him, and Stephen wanted to leave.

Dr. Dietz: Dahmer took a barbell

and banged him over the head with it,

and this was his first encounter with how much work it is

to dispose of a human corpse.

Reporter 3: Police say Hicks

was a hitchhiker picked up by Dahmer

when he was just 18, the victim killed in a bedroom,

his body dismembered in a tight crawl space.

Banfield: He killed Stephen Hicks.

He cut him into pieces.

He put him into garbage bags.

This is where it all could've ended.

Dahmer was on the way to the dump with Hicks' body...

[ Siren wailing ]

....and he's suddenly pulled over by police.

Murphy: You know, you stop him for a violation.

You know, he wasn't drunk, so they let him go.

Boyle: Incredible.

Here, the first time he kills a human being,

and the cops pull him over, and they say he wasn't nervous.

"What were you doing?"

"I'm taking garbage to the dump."

He was as cool as cool could be.

That was a close call for Dahmer

and a missed opportunity for society.

Casarez: Mike Kukral remembers giving Dahmer a ride home

about that time and dropping him off

right in the driveway of his parents' empty home.

Kukral: What I didn't know at that time,

there would be no way to know it,

was that when I gave Jeff Dahmer a ride home that night,

there was probably a body in his house,

the body of Stephen Hicks that he had killed.

I never thought that would be the last time I'd see him.

Banfield: Just a couple of weeks after high school,

Jeffrey Dahmer had already killed his first victim.

He was pretty aimless, didn't know what he wanted to do,

and it was actually his dad that pushed him to go to college.

Kukral: He did go to Ohio State for one semester or one quarter

in the fall that fall, and all he did was drink

and not go to classes, and that was the end of that.

Lionel: He came back home,

and I then proceeded to take him to the Army.

He served, and he came back from boot camp

looking like just a wonderful physical specimen.

We were encouraged.

Reporter 4: Less than three years after joining the Army,

Dahmer was kicked out for excessive drinking.

What happens after the Army?

Lionel: He kept getting into trouble.

Eventually, it got so bad that we sent him

to his grandmother's house...

To your parents? ...in Wisconsin.

McCann: That's when he came under grandmother's influence

and kind of straightened out his lifestyle.

She had him going to church,

and he abstained from many of these activities.

Lionel: For a while, it went very well.

My mother cooked for him, and he finally found a job

at a chocolate company,

but then things started to occur.

His drinking accelerated, and the killing accelerated.

It was only a matter of time before Dahmer would trip up.

Jeffrey Dahmer had already killed five young men

by the time his grandmother threw him out in 1990.

He moved into his own apartment

in a seedy neighborhood of Milwaukee,

and that's when things really started to spin out of control.

No longer accountable to anyone,

Dahmer was now free to give into his most twisted,

sadistic fantasies, like some horror movie come to life.

♪♪

Dahmer was one of the few Caucasian people

that lived in that neighborhood,

and he moved into an apartment building

where it was almost all African Americans.

And when he moved into apartment 213,

nobody knew what was happening behind that door.

Velez-Mitchell: Jeffrey Dahmer's crimes were escalating.

His dismemberment rituals were getting more and more grotesque

if that's even possible.

Dr. Dietz: He'd lay down plastic

and was preparing to dismember the body,

but he hated doing so,

so much that he had to get drunk

to overcome his aversion to it.

Banfield: Dahmer hated disposing of his victims,

and he came up with an idea that was more horrific

than anything he had already done.

It was a way to keep his would-be victims alive.

My brother was Errol Lindsey.

He was 19 years old.

He left home, going to get a key made,

and he just never came back.

He never came back.

Errol Lindsey was Dahmer's first experiment.

Errol was just like the normal kid trying to hustle up,

you know, on money and however he could get it, you know?

Dr. Dietz: He met this individual

approximately March of '91

on the corner of 27th and Kilbourn.

He offered this individual money for posing and to view videos.

Errol was not gay, you know, and if he was gay, I --

you know, he was still my brother,

and I still would love him, but he wasn't gay.

I don't know what it took to get him to his house.

What Jeffrey did to Errol Lindsey was so beyond the pale,

I mean, you really can't write this stuff.

He started drilling holes in the skulls of people who are alive!

Dahmer talked about this period in an interview

with "Inside Edition."

I tried to keep the person alive

by inducing a zombielike state...

...by injecting, first,

a dilute acid solution into their brain

or hot water.

Schwartz: In his mind, he was trying to create

a kind of a zombie, someone in a zombie state.

He wanted these people to stay with him.

He didn't want them to leave,

and he didn't really want them to die.

Harris: My brother was not an angel.

I know that, but he didn't deserve to die

the way that he did.

Schwartz: After Errol Lindsey was killed,

Dahmer killed six more people

in the span of about three months.

Casarez: Dahmer talked about the end of his killing spree

on an interview with "Dateline NBC."

The killing was just a means to an end.

That was the least satisfactory part.

I didn't enjoy doing that. Stone: Mm-hmm.

That's why I tried to create living zombies

with the muriatic acid and the -- and the drill.

Dr. Dietz: Late in his killing spree,

he was in an uncontrolled drinking binge

that made him fall behind in his schedule of disposing of bodies.

Meuler: He would often call in sick that Monday

because he would be working on disposing of the bodies,

and -- and if you looked at the early timeline,

he always spaced it out.

He would never bring another victim in

until other victim had been disposed of, if you will.

His drinking accelerated, and the killing accelerated.

It was only a matter of time before Dahmer would trip up.

Meuler: He just became very desperate,

and there was less planning as it went on.

After killing 17 victims over 13 years,

Jeffrey Dahmer met a guy named Tracy Edwards.

McCann: Dahmer had picked him up,

persuaded him to come to his home.

Edwards, deciding he was in danger,

wanted to get out of there.

Dahmer had gotten a handcuff on.

Velez-Mitchell: He handcuffed the guy with one cuff,

and then there was sort of this elaborate negotiation

where the guy said he had to go to the bathroom.

Tracy Edwards would've been number 18.

Edwards: I knew something was about to happen,

so I suggested that I go to the bathroom.

I just seized the opportunity.

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

I'm not just gonna sit here," you know?

Man: What'd you do, son?

I hit him, and I ran towards the door,

and he, like, was right there, tried to grab me,

get me back in there.

Velez-Mitchell: He races to the cops, and he says,

"Get this handcuff off me!"

Edwards: I told the policeman that this freak,

this crazy guy, was trying to hurt me.

The key wouldn't fit, so they got --

so they went back to Dahmer's apartment

to get the key to let -- get the handcuff off.

On the way -- on the way, Edwards told them,

"By the way, he wouldn't let me look

in the refrigerator for some reason."

Dahmer was there. He had been -- he was drunk.

He opened the door. He says, "Come on in."

Dahmer lets them in, unlocked this thing,

and the cop walks over and looks in the refrigerator,

and there's a floating flesh skull.

Banfield: When police showed up at Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment

to check out Tracy Edwards' story,

they walked into a human slaughterhouse.

Dr. Dietz: There were whole heads in the refrigerator,

and there were fillets of biceps in the freezer.

It was kind of clear the jig was up

when you're found with so much in your apartment,

and there's really no way out.

♪♪

Dr. Jentzen: There was a large, silver,

stainless-steel cooking pot,

and in the bottom of that cooking pot

were two severed hands.

There were binders of Polaroid photographs

that basically depicted individuals

before and after death.

Bass: The pictures were horrific.

It was like someone setting a stage with mannequins,

but these aren't mannequins.

These are human beings.

Schwartz: Imagine these police officers standing there

and trying to take this in,

trying to process what was going on.

There was no crime scene ever like this

for the people that responded that night.

The types of revulsion that one feels when you --

when you witness something like this firsthand

cannot be described.

Schwartz: Back in 1991, you show up at a crime scene.

People have the boom boxes out.

They're yelling.

This was eerie in how quiet it was,

especially when the barrels started coming down the stairs.

Dr. Jentzen: In the corner

was this large 50-gallon plastic container,

and it turned out that there were four intact skeletons

in that container, and at that time,

we made the decision that we would contact a Hazmat unit

to transport that container.

The actual crime-scene investigation

was more like dismantling a museum

rather than an actual crime scene.

Jackson: So the police arrest Jeffrey Dahmer

just before midnight,

and by 1:30, he's at the Milwaukee police department,

talking and talking and talking like he had never talked before.

Boyle: I think he wanted to talk to us so much

was because he'd never had someone to sit down

and actually relate to, and during that questioning,

we caught a semblance of who was killed,

what time and when and the order they were killed.

Jackson: Over the next six weeks,

Jeffrey Dahmer spent 166 hours confessing in graphic detail

to all the murders he'd ever committed

and all the sick things he'd ever engaged in,

including cannibalism.

Dr. Dietz: He got the nickname "The Milwaukee Cannibal,"

but that was a small part of his M.O.

and of his desires

and was a late arriving part

and really sprang from his thought

that it was such a waste to have brief time with these men

and then for them to disappear,

and the idea of eating a part of them

was the idea of incorporating a part of them into himself.

And we had secretaries that were typing our reports

that couldn't type them.

They couldn't take it, so they had to see

a psychiatrist about it.

Jeffrey Dahmer, the man officially charged

in four murderers in Milwaukee

but at the center of nearly a dozen others,

confessed to more killings Monday.

And by July 24th, we had a full confession for 17 murders.

♪♪

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,

we now begin an odyssey.

The details are grisly and graphic and sickening.

Jeffrey Dahmer's odyssey of sex, murder and cannibalism

is unfolding in an Milwaukee courtroom.

McCann: In this case, his plea

was not guilty by reason of insanity,

so the only issue was, "Was he sane when he did it?"

Jackson: The foundation of an insanity defense is,

does the defendant know right from wrong?

And clearly, in this case,

Jeffrey Dahmer did know right from wrong because,

"A," he elaborately planned these crimes,

and, "B," he elaborately covered them up.

Cold-blooded planning for sexual satisfaction.

"Your life for my sexual satisfaction."

I pointed out how carefully everything had been planned.

He was not a man out of control.

The manifestations of homicidal maniac,

he did not show.

Boyle: I tried to persuade them that somewhere along the line,

he got to the point where he was unable to control his conduct.

He was a runaway train on a track of madness.

There was a locomotive engineer running the train.

It wasn't out of control, and the engineer was Dahmer.

To show that Jeffrey Dahmer was mentally ill and out of control,

his defense attorney puts Tracy Edwards on the stand.

Reporter 5: Tracy Edwards lived to tell about it,

and tell he did in court Friday,

describing how Jeffrey Dahmer underwent

an almost physical transformation

from nice guy to would-be killer.

Man: Now, when you got to his apartment,

how was he acting?

Just like a normal everyday person, you know, friendly.

This guy is so nice, and all of a sudden, you know,

it's like, he's pulling knives and handcuffs and all on me.

Where was the knife pointed?

When I was on the floor, he had it pointed

at my groin area at that time.

Then he was telling -- he didn't want people to leave him

or abandon him.

His face structure seemed different.

You know, his body structure,

it's like it wasn't him anymore, you know?

It's like it was a totally different guy there.

He kind of laid across me,

put his head across my chest at that point.

What was he doing with his head?

Like he was listening to my heart because at a point,

he told me he was gonna eat my heart at that point.

I just sat stunned and motionless

listening to all these things, but inside,

I was practically losing my cookies.

Banfield: The whole trial took less than three weeks,

and as is customary,

he got a chance to address his victims,

and his victims' family members

got a chance to let him know how they felt, too.

Jeffrey, I hate you.

[Bleep] [Bleep] I hate you!

♪♪

"In regard to the death of Richard Guerrero,

did the defendant, Jeffrey L. Dahmer,

have a mental disease?"

The families were very emotional.

This was three weeks of hearing the most awful information

about how your loved one died

that most of us can't even imagine it,

and now, the end is coming.

Judge Gram, Jr.: "Did the defendant, Jeffrey L. Dahmer,

have a mental disease?

Answer -- no."

Jeffrey Dahmer's 3-week sanity trial

came to an end this afternoon.

Most of the jurors rejected the defense claim

that Dahmer was a sick man.

Judge Gram, Jr.: "In regard to the death

of James E. Doxtator..."

Schwartz: When the judge was reading the decision

by the jury,

he went through every victim's name and then said the decision.

Judge Gram, Jr.: "In regard to the death of Anthony Sears..."

Schwartz: The families would just weep.

Harris: I was there.

I was sitting in with the rest of the families,

and I think we all were in shock that day.

♪♪

And then came the victim impact statements.

You took my 17-year-old son away from me.

I'll never get a chance to tell him that I loved him,

and for that, I can never forgive you.

I hope you --

I hope you can deal with what you've done.

Schwartz: Dahmer didn't look at the people.

He looked straight ahead the whole time.

I'm mad.

This is how you act when you are out of control!

For the most part, the family members

who gave their victims' impact statements

maintained their composure,

but then one of the sisters of Errol Lindsey let loose.

I don't want to ever see my mother have to go

through this again, never, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey! I hate you!

This is out of control!

Don't [bleep] with me, Jeffrey! I'll kill --

Harris: My sister,

I guess she just wanted to let him know how she felt,

you know, to see the hurt on my mom's face every day,

and, I don't know, she just -- she lost it.

She just lost it.

You don't have to...

Jackson: So after the families

gave their gut-wrenching victim impact statements,

Jeffrey Dahmer addressed the court.

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.

I have seen their tears,

and if I could give my life right now

to bring their loved ones back, I would do it.

I am so very sorry.

He was just a person who had descended into another world

and had no emotion left

and no empathy or sympathy for anyone else.

He had gone through a lot of big changes

and was just far off the deep end.

I know my time in prison will be terrible,

but I deserve whatever I get because of what I have done.

I didn't ever want freedom.

Frankly, I wanted death for myself.

Jeffrey Dahmer stood up today in Milwaukee county court

and asked for the maximum, and he got it --

15 consecutive life sentences, no parole for 936 years.

Schwartz: Dahmer went to prison in '91.

He went to the Columbia Correctional Institution

in Portage, Wisconsin.

It's a maximum-security prison.

Casarez: In prison, Dahmer found God.

He even got baptized.

No one really heard about him for nearly three years,

but that all changed one day in 1994.

Jeffrey Dahmer was himself attacked and killed this morning

as he and another inmate were cleaning a prison toilet.

Schwartz: Dahmer was arguably the most high-risk prisoner

at the institution,

and another inmate, Jesse Anderson,

were together cleaning a bathroom.

Christopher Scarver, who was an inmate

who was there for murder, grabbed a barbell from the gym,

went into the bathroom and beat both Jeffrey Dahmer

and Jesse Anderson to death.

Preliminary findings of the pathologist were

that Mr. Dahmer died as a result of blunt-force injury of head.

Jeffrey Dahmer was beaten so badly

that not even the people treating him

knew who he was until after he was pronounced dead.

Casarez: Reactions to Dahmer's death

were what you would expect.

Of course, families of his victims

were relieved that the nightmare was over.

It shows today that he paid

for what he had did to these childrens out here.

I don't feel anything.

I'm numb right now.

Harris: I looked at him with a lot of hate in my heart.

I really hated him.

I hated that man.

I hated him for what he did to our family.

My family has never been the same behind that,

never been the same.

In closing, I just want to say that I hope God has forgiven me.

I know society will never be able to forgive me.

This was a case to tell the world

that I did what I did not for reasons of hate.

I hated no one.

I knew I was sick or evil or both.

Jeffrey Dahmer's defense attorney

hoped his client would be found insane.

That would've landed him in a psychiatric hospital,

where doctors could've studied his urge to kill.

No one ever got to study Dahmer's brain.

A judge ruled against preserving it after his death,

and it was ultimately destroyed.

We'll never know what drove Jeffrey Dahmer to kill,

but even if we did, it would've been too late

for 17 families who lost their loved ones.

I'm Hill Harper.

We'll see you next time on "How It Really Happened."