He is one of the most infamous serial killers in modern history. Jeffrey Dahmer, necrophiliac and cannibal, murdered 17 men and boys over the course of 13 years. But what was going on in the mind of this monster?
Are killers born evil, or do they become evil over time? My name is Dr. Eric Hickey. I'm a criminal psychologist by trade, and my areas of expertise are homicide.
It's extra time in psychopathology. I work on the dark side, pretty much. Dr. Hickey has an unusual connection to the Dahmer case that no other criminal psychologist has. I became involved with the Dahmer case many years ago. I happened to be in a store.
I saw a man who looked unusual. So I just walked over to him and started talking to him. And he said he was from Chicago.
I said, what brings you to California? And he said, my mom tried to kill herself. And I came out to help her.
I said, I know who you are. You're Jeffrey Dahmer's brother, aren't you? So we became friends.
I met his mother and interviewed her. And oh my gosh, that just led to so many other things. Because of that, that moment in the store, it led to a whole other avenue of investigation.
Let's start from the beginning. Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer was born on May 21st, 1960 to Lionel Dahmer and Joyce Annette Rocky Dahmer. As a child, Dahmer was often isolated.
Both of his parents struggled with depression and fought constantly throughout their marriage. So Jeffrey had a difficult childhood. There was problems in the home between the husband and wife.
There wasn't a close-knit family. He didn't have the attachment that most people have growing up, and he felt alone. Of course, one day he comes home, I think when he was 17, his mother was gone.
She took David, the son. Younger son and left and that was traumatizing for him. The young Dahmer was painfully shy and withdrawn.
He also displayed an interest in dead animals, dissecting carcasses and collecting chicken bones and bleaching them. He stated that this process excited him. This is not uncommon with any child that experiences trauma and it's certainly a common trait among many serial killers.
When we talk about animal abuse... Setting fires, these are results of childhood trauma, a lack of attachment. Children can't express themselves, they can't tell you what's really bothering them, so they'll often set fires or hurt animals.
That's their voice. This is a cry for help. The piece that we never talk about is the fantasies that fuel the fire.
Dahmer's trauma and fascination with dead animals began to interact with his blossoming sexuality. He became obsessed with having control and power. It was also around this time that he realized he was gay, which made him feel ashamed and confused.
He really was very conflicted as well. He was lonely, conflicted, had lack of attachment. All these things kind of set the groundwork for where he would go. Very interesting process because it wasn't one day he just woke up and said, I'm going to kill him.
Killer, I mean, he built into that over the period of several years. As you recall, in this case, he had fantasies about killing a young man. Over time, fantasies become behavior. Started having obsessive thoughts of violence intermingled with sex. And it just got worse and worse.
I didn't know how to tell anyone about it, so I didn't. I just kept it all inside. He had a desire to be with someone who had been buried. So in paraphilic terms, he had this sexual fantasy about being with someone who was unconscious. Merriam-Webster defines paraphilia as a pattern of recurring sexually arousing mental imagery or behavior that involves unusual and especially socially unacceptable sexual practices.
Now there's different kinds of paraphilia, right? There's the non-criminal paraphilia. People get into latex, they get into plushies and furries, things like that. We do know by the time that young men reach the age of 18, 99% of them...
have masturbated themselves into oblivion. We know that for a fact, okay? I'm always being concerned about that 1% who didn't.
What happened to them? Are they lying? What happened? About 10% of American males are involved with different forms of paraphilia. Four of those 10 men are actually into criminal paraphilia.
I mean, about half of those then get into the very, very violent types of criminal paraphilia. In high school... Dahmer began drinking heavily to cope with his dark fantasies. He was known to play pranks and fake epileptic fits.
By the time he was 16, he began fantasizing about what it would be like to have sex with a dead body. Jeffrey had a lot of fantasies. He didn't share those fantasies.
Over time, fantasies become behavior. So nobody wakes up in the morning as a necrophile. It's a process of becoming.
People get into these fantasies and the fantasies develop. We're all sexual beings. We all have to find ways to be sexual. But there are groups of people in our society who are not comfortable in their own skin.
They're not comfortable talking to other people. Now, there's a reason why he was more comfortable with dead people because he lacked the skill set to be intimate. In such low self-esteem, he was so insecure in his own life.
that eventually he became more comfortable with people who then could not, who would not reject him. They were dead. It was only a matter of time before Dahmer enacted one of his fantasies. In June 1978, three weeks after high school graduation, Dahmer picked up hitchhiker Stephen Hicks and brought him back to his father's house.
The two shared a few drinks, but when Hicks tried to leave, Dahmer bludgeoned him with a barbell. Dahmer proceeded to have sex with the body. Before dismembering and disposing of it.
When Jeffrey killed Stephen Hicks, it was, I'm sure, a great relief for him. He finally got to act out his fantasies. He already knew how he was going to do it.
I mean, he had planned out his fantasies first. And so he knew that this was the right time and moment to grab him, lure him in, and kill him. And now he gets to be with the body. And finally, that was his level of intimacy. He gets to be intimate with the body, which...
Most of us take for granted normal relationships, but now this person is dead. They're not going to reject him. They're not going to laugh at him.
They're not going to make him feel insecure. He gets to do what he wants to do. I think that really set the stage for later on in his life as he fantasized.
After high school, Dahmer joined the Army but was discharged in 1981. Then, Dahmer moved in with his grandmother and worked the graveyard shift at a local chocolate company. Dahmer wouldn't kill again for almost 10 years. How is it possible that someone like him is able to control his urges?
Did he find other ways to satisfy himself? So that's when I went to meet Jeffrey Dahmer's mother. That was a really interesting interview that we had. So I know that Dahmer had been doing something bad during all those years when he hadn't been killing. And she said, well, he did tell me, because at the trial, at his trial, it didn't come out.
But I'll tell you now, in confidence, what he told me. And I'm going to quote her. She said, you know, he would go to, he would look at young men who'd been killed in a car accident, they'd died of illnesses, he would go to the viewings, then he would go to the funerals, then he would go to the cemeteries where they were buried, and at night he would dig them up to have sex with them. That was his, that was always his words to me.
That kept him. occupied for several years. So he kept the fantasies going and actually acting out how many he had sex with.
I don't know. She doesn't know. She didn't know.
But certainly the whole fantasy development about being with someone who'd been buried was really, really important to him. But grave robbing couldn't satisfy his urges for long. He even owned a mannequin at one point, but it wasn't the same thing.
In 1987, Dahmer's killing career would resume and he would take the lives of 16 additional men and boys. Often, he'd pick them up at gay bars, bathhouses, and porn shops and take them back to his apartment for a drink. He was very low profile.
He'd just meet people, he was very friendly, invite them to his home. Sure, come over and have a drink. Then he would spike the drink and they'd become unconscious.
In the beginning, it wasn't that way. The men went to his home. They stayed with him for a few days. He didn't kill them immediately.
It's when they said they had to leave, that's when he knew he had to kill them because he couldn't allow them to abandon him. to reject him. Many of Dahmer's victims shared a similar profile. They were mostly men of color who were in peak physical condition, or in Dahmer's words, had a Chippendale body type. I think he deliberately selected men in places that he thought these men would not be missed.
And there may have been this piece, and I'm speculating on this, they chose men of color because he wasn't a man of color. And that way... He wouldn't be a suspect because if these men of color were being disappearing, they'd be looking for someone else, a man of color who might be doing it.
And he certainly didn't fit that description. Once his victim was unconscious, Dahmer would strangle them, then proceed to have sex with the body. But because Dahmer engaged in these activities within the confines of his apartment, he had the freedom to explore other sexual desires as well.
He would dismember the bodies, sleep next to the corpses, and cut holes in the torso to use it for sex. He decapitated and castrated his victims, would clean the flesh off their bones and collect the skulls. He drilled holes into his victims'heads in an attempt to turn them into zombies.
So a great question is, how does a person desensitize themselves to the point where they can actually kill people and have sex after they're dead? Why would somebody want to do this? Well, their need is so great to be with somebody, even if they're dead, at least it is a form of intimacy. Yeah, think about that.
It's a pretty dark place to be in your life. But people are there. There are people who do this, and I've interviewed them. In a huge escalation of his behavior, he also began to eat the flesh of his victims. So there's different forms of cannibalism, and some is not sexual.
We know there have been Indian tribes and so forth. They have eaten their victims, but it wasn't sexualized. We know in some cases, as in the case of Jeffrey Dahmer, there was a sexual component to it. Now, there is the blood part where he sampled the blood. So blood itself is a type of paraphilia.
I'm sure he tasted it. And from there, it was very easy to then taste the flesh. And of course...
You know, terrible thing to say, but it tastes like chicken. I mean, it was something that they explored. And so when he realized it didn't taste bad, then he kept advancing in that and doing more of that. So Jeffrey ate penises. I mean, he ate internal organs.
And he was, in some ways, I guess, socializing, if you will. He was lowering their bodies. And he had some favorite victims, people he preferred. Physically, they were becoming part of him. He drank their blood.
They were part of him and now he eats their flesh. It was all part of this, I need to feel powerful. I need to feel I'm normal.
All of this was working towards one grandiose plan that Jeffrey Dahmer had in his mind. A fantasy that would eclipse everything before it. So this drawing by Jeffrey Dahmer details his fantasies.
This end of the table, he had one fully articulated skeleton. On the other end, another one was in the bathroom, that he was still taking the flesh off the bones. And then all these heads on this table behind him, he says, I could sit in this black chair, surrounded by my friends, my best friends, and they could never leave me because they were physically part of me and emotionally they were part of me. He said, when I could sit in that chair, he said, I would finally feel powerful. Those are his words.
I would feel powerful. But the truth is, you never feel comfortable in your own skin. Jeffrey Dahmer was almost caught several times.
One of his victims, Conorak Synthesimphone, even escaped at first and was found by police in the middle of the night. However, Dahmer managed to convince officers that they were lovers, and the police let Dahmer go. He had practice, and the more practice he did, the easier it became. There was no turning back.
There was escalation, absolutely, which would eventually, he knew, he knew intellectually that an end was coming. Absolutely, he knew. Just before midnight on July 22, 1991, a would-be victim of Dahmer's, Tracy Edwards, escaped from Dahmer's apartment where he had been captive, with handcuffs dangling from one arm. He alerted police, who accompanied him back to Dahmer's apartment. When they went to his house, we had body parts cooking on the stove.
I mean, all kinds of, we had them body parts in drawers. I mean, you can imagine the stench going to that apartment. You can imagine the two police officers who walked into that apartment and realized that Jeffrey was standing behind them.
And they were looking at these body parts. I would love to have interviewed them. What they must have thought. Wait a minute, look at all these heads and the guys behind us.
But Jeffrey knew it was over. He could have killed them. But he wasn't. He knew the end was coming.
When the police arrived, he knew he was going to give it up. There was no struggle from him at all. Yeah, he got me.
Dr. Hickey recalls the first thing Jeffrey Dahmer's mother told him when they met. And the first thing she said, she said, my son never tried to hurt anybody. He killed them, but he never tried to hurt them, which was absolutely true. Every necrophile I've ever interviewed or researched, none of them ever tried to hurt the victims. They just killed them.
I'd say 95% of them are not sadistic because they want the corpse to be with the corpse. I interviewed a guy, Larry Hall. Larry Hall was a convicted serial killer who confessed to the murders of 35 women and young girls. And Larry was a necrophiliac killer.
I said, so Larry, when you had the victims down on the ground and you strangled them from behind, did you ever look to see their faces? Or when you had them up against a tree in the woods and you're strangling them, did you ever look at their faces? He says, no, why would I do that? Because he wasn't interested in their suffering. He just needed them to be dead.
So Jeffrey Dahmer never intended to hurt his victims, ever. If you look at some of his interviews, he talked about how pathetic his life was, what a waste his life was. There was no sadism.
What he wanted was to be with somebody, and so killing them was the process of getting to be with somebody. Soon after his arrest, Jeffrey Dahmer confessed to the murders. The case went to trial in early 1992, where a parade of psychiatrists took the stand in Dahmer's case, diagnosing him with paraphilia, borderline personality, schizotypal disorder, and a history of suicide. and sexual sadism. But was Jeffrey Dahmer a psychopath?
Jeffrey Dahmer was definitely not a psychopath. Not even close. Because every necrophile I've interviewed or researched, none of them are true psychopaths. So Jeffrey was a sociopath.
And the difference, there's quite a big distinction, and I train law enforcement to understand these distinctions. A true psychopath is someone usually who's very sadistic. They have no empathy.
They manipulate, they control people. And certainly we see some of that with sociopaths. But sociopaths are very emotional.
They still love their moms. They still have emotional attachments. So is it possible then that Jeffrey Dahmer felt guilty for the crimes he had committed? Jeffrey never felt badly specifically for the victims.
I think he recognized that there was a dead zone within himself. I think... Most men, I can't speak for women, have a place where we can go where we don't feel badly about anything.
We can go there, but most of us don't go there because it's pretty scary to know you can look at someone suffering and you don't feel badly about it. You know, Jeffrey had this dark spot in him, which grew and grew and grew, and that's where he lived his life, was in this dark, dark zone. On a personal note, I call that evil. I think Jeffrey became a very evil person. Was he a bad person?
It's complex. On November 28, 1994, Jeffrey Dahmer was killed by another inmate at the Wisconsin prison where he was serving his life sentences. When I met with his mom, eventually she told me that he finally said to her on a phone call, he said, I don't want to be in prison anymore. But I also know I'm too dangerous to be on the streets.
Because he knew if he was back on the streets, he'd probably do it again. Maybe three weeks later, he was dead. And I think that when he was attacked, it was probably a relief for him. Dahmer was a big guy.
He could have handled himself. The man who attacked him actually killed Dahmer and another man at the same time. I think he had a lead pipe. Dahmer could have fought back, but he didn't. I'm sure he did not fight back.
He wanted to die, and this was his way out. I think had he not been killed, that he would have eventually taken his own life. Absolutely, he would have killed himself.
As he said in his own words, my life was pathetic. I think he wanted to end that pathetic life, recognizing all the harm he had done to his family, to the community, to our nation. I mean, it was just so overwhelming for him, I think, that he just knew that what's the point of being alive? I think he'd gotten past fantasizing about killing people. So, when we talk about Jeffrey Dahmer, was he born a killer or made one?
So when we talk about Jeffrey Dahmer, we have to talk about nature versus nurture. Actually, nature and nurture. I think that in his case, there was some chemical depression in the family. I think he probably inherited some of that.
His father was depressed, his mom was depressed, and I think that helped set the stage for the lack of attachment. Now, keep in mind, we're all different, so we don't... all cope with stressors the same way. Some people handle stress better than others.
And when we talk about biology and genetics, we have to realize that you inherit things genetically. Temperament, schizophrenia, perhaps, you know, pass on to families. You have to have the nurturing part.
Nature kind of loads the gun and nurturing pulls the trigger. So I think as we go down that pathway, we have to understand it's not just one quick, simple answer. It is complex.
And all the Psychiatrists who studied his case would agree that there was multiple things that were involved. So, was there anything that could have been done to prevent this? He's a very needy person, and he didn't know how to express himself very well.
I mean, he's very sad in some ways, because a lot of this could have been avoided had there been early intervention. But he didn't have people to turn to, and he didn't know how to do it. And by the time he should have, could have. He was already deep into his fantasy world. Parenting is so important.
Most people who have troubles like that don't become murderers. He really made some choices. It wasn't like he was mentally ill.
He knew exactly what he was doing. He just allowed himself to go down that pathway because his need to be with people was so great. There's a lot of things along the way, but he made his own decisions.
As he crossed those lines, he got to a point where there was no return. He could never go back. And he became much more comfortable with the idea of being people who are dead.
And that, of course, was a game changer for him and for our nation. It is over now. This has never been a case of trying to get free.
I didn't ever want freedom. Frankly, I wanted death for myself.