Conversations with a Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes (2022) s01e02 Episode Script

1
After the first time
that Mr. Dahmer killed,
he then went for nine years
without killing.
But then after this hiatus,
he wakes up in the Ambassador Hotel
with a dead body next to him.
He then had what I'd refer to
as a religious conversion in reverse.
He began to think,
"Maybe there's a devil."
"Maybe it's my destiny
to carry out the work of the devil."
He began engaging
in all kinds of bizarre incantations.
He began relating to parts of movies
that seemed to suggest
there were evil forces out there.
Return of the Jedi
was one of them.
He really identified with the Emperor.
He wanted like that mind control.
He had those, you know, yellow eyes.
So Jeff found some place where he could
get contacts that were yellow eyes.
And so before he would go out at night,
he would put the contacts in.
He had to get himself charged up
by trying to emulate
a devil or evil person
to fulfill his fantasies.
People go to
these gory horror movies to
to get a glimpse
of what of what they show in the movies.
The only difference is
I did it for real.
My relationship with Jeff
grew over time.
As we went on,
I got to know different facets of him.
There was a lot of conflict within him.
He went a very long time
where he didn't commit any murders.
But after he met Steven Tuomi,
his control over the issue was gone.
And that's a slippery slope.
So at what point in time
did you totally give in
to these feelings altogether
and not try and change anything?
After the Ambassador.
That really got things in full swing.
Eventually, he got to a point
where he went over the cliff.
And there's no coming back.
And four years later,
that reckless behavior
is what ultimately led to his arrest.
The Dahmer case is
something we had never seen in Milwaukee.
It was an unreal moment
in my reporting career.
That night back in July of '91,
on the 22nd,
Milwaukee police officers
were on their nightly tour of duty.
They came outside of
of Dahmer's apartment
just down the street in their cruiser.
And that's when
Tracy Edwards approached them.
Tracy Edwards was wearing boxer shorts,
and a handcuff hanging down on his wrist.
So the officers were talking to him,
and he started to share
this kind of fantastical story
about where he had just been.
About this weird white dude
that he had just had contact with.
Dahmer chose his victims
by a certain body structure.
He would offer them money,
and they would let Dahmer
take photos of them.
But he'd say,
"You have to come to my apartment."
That night, Tracy Edwards agreed
to come over to Dahmer's apartment.
Tracy, first of all,
he's a very nice fella,
and he was very, very street-smart.
And he told us about
how Jeffrey was acting that night.
And he'd suddenly realized
that he wasn't going there
for photography.
He was going there for something worse.
When they were in the bedroom,
Dahmer slapped one cuff on him,
and Edwards moved
so he couldn't get the other cuff on him.
And Jeffrey put on
that Exorcist III movie.
Dahmer was starting to get into the movie.
So he wasn't concerned
about the other cuff.
He started this crazy motion,
sitting and rocking
back and forth in a chair,
and making these strange noises,
and talking like in tongues.
Tracy started acting
like they were buddies,
'cause he knew he had to get away
or he was gonna get killed.
I told him I gotta go to the bathroom.
As I was walking past the guy, I hit him.
Then I ran for the door,
and God had to be with me, right?
'Cause he had, like,
eight different locks on that,
and I just picked the right lock
out of all of them.
Tracy flagged down
a Milwaukee police squad.
At first, he just wanted the handcuff off.
I don't think he wanted
to give a lot of information
as to how the handcuff was put on him.
Because it was different handcuffs
than Milwaukee police used,
their keys actually
didn't even work in it.
So they went back to the apartment,
both to get a handcuff key,
and also to investigate.
When Dahmer answered the door,
he was intoxicated.
He allowed the officers in.
The officers checked the bedroom,
found a knife under the bed
that Dahmer threatened Tracy Edwards with.
Tracy Edwards had made
the comment
about Dahmer saying that there was
a head or heads in the refrigerator.
The officer opened it
and saw the head in the refrigerator
with the head looking up,
and he screamed.
He literally screamed.
He eventually retired,
kept dreaming about it.
He couldn't handle it.
Dahmer was taken into custody.
He was taken down to police headquarters.
When I arrived at the scene
and met the night shift lieutenant,
Roosevelt Harrell, he was just shaking
his head and gave me a briefing
how unbelievable it was.
It's a very, very small apartment,
but a tremendous amount of evidence.
The scene itself was gruesome.
The tools that were at the apartment
were hacksaws, screwdrivers,
other tools that he would use
while he was dissecting the victims.
I thought it was gonna be a routine scene,
and when I arrived,
the, uh, law enforcement officer
took me into Dahmer's apartment.
Forensic pathologists
are used to seeing trauma,
but this was something different.
Looking around the room, you could tell
people had fear on their face.
And in the years that have passed,
I have come to believe
that that is a time
that I actually encountered evil.
And I can't describe it,
but it is a feeling of human depravity.
As we went through
these various drawers and containers,
my feeling is that
I was not doing a crime scene,
but I was dismantling Dahmer's museum.
It was obvious that Dahmer had collected
some of the body parts
from the individuals that he had killed.
Desiccated genitals, you know, human hair.
We found plastic bags
that contained tissue.
I was able to identify
a human heart,
and other types of skeletal muscle tissue.
And then, in that bedroom,
there was three intact skeletons
that had been decapitated.
And 11 human skulls.
Then it all of a sudden hit me.
"We have a serial killer in Milwaukee."
It was just so extreme.
It was almost unbelievable.
But you knew it was believable
because we had all the evidence there.
When I was in the bedroom,
I noticed this large, plastic blue vat.
And as I moved it and shook it,
there was a sloshing of liquid,
as well as some heavy weight.
So I asked to have the HAZMAT team come in
and remove that
in case there was any chemicals
or other harmful materials
that were there.
Early the next morning,
I headed to the police headquarters
and got a rundown on
what Dahmer had been saying.
And so then we started
to go through the time frame.
That started what was many weeks,
in fact, uh, months of investigation.
His attorney would be there and say,
"Jeffrey,
I'm gonna advise you not to talk."
And every day he would sign
a waiver saying, "No, I wanna talk."
We were in the jail,
and he was just going through each of them
as he could remember, going back in time.
I always kept my feelings
completely to myself.
And, uh, so this is a sort
of learning experience for me.
It feels like
you've been open with me.
Mm-hmm.
It gets easier as you practice.
Can you answer for me what
was it that caused you to wanna kill them?
The underlying force, I think,
was obviously a warped sexual drive.
Just a constant feeling of emptiness,
and not being able to find
anything in life that really gave me
a sense of hap happiness,
peace, or fulfillment.
I was always searching for something more.
One night I went out,
and I met this I guess he's Indian.
And he was standing there.
Said he was waiting for the bus.
Do you remember what his name was?
No, I don't.
In January of 1988,
Jeffrey Dahmer, while living
at his grandma's house, went out,
and he met James Doxtator, who was 14.
He was in front of a gay bar
at the bus stop.
Dahmer asked him to come back
to his grandmother's house with him.
Doxtator named his price,
which was $50 for sex.
- Where was Grandma?
- She was upstairs, sound asleep.
I asked him, "How late can you stay?"
And he said,
"Uh, not later than early morning."
And it was already
approaching early morning.
Okay.
What was going through your mind?
I just
wanted to keep him. I guess
that's the best way to describe it.
He would mix the potions
that would render the person asleep.
and use the sleeping pills.
He would give them five or seven of them
in a coffee drink.
Maybe maybe with some alcohol
put in there.
My thoughts obviously weren't, uh
the thoughts of a sane person at the time.
Uh, I would've rather he'd stayed alive,
but strangling seemed
to be the way to keep him.
He would kill somebody.
The body would be upstairs in the bedroom.
The grandmother would wake up,
and Jeffrey would come down
and have breakfast with her.
The body's upstairs in the bedroom.
Jeffrey would chitchat
with his grandmother
and send her off to church.
There's just a total detachment.
He kept the corpse of Doxtator
in his grandmother's fruit cellar
for about a week.
And when alone in the house
would bring out the body
and make sexual use of it.
What corpses, mannequins,
and unconscious people
all have in common
is they don't make demands,
they don't complain,
and they don't leave.
For Dahmer, that's the big one.
There's no person
I've ever known of
that was as lonely a human being
as Jeffrey Dahmer.
I'd say,
"Jeffrey, do you have any friends?"
"No."
"Did you ever go to a movie with a guy?"
"No."
"Do you ever go to a party?" "No."
He had no friends,
so he wasn't talking to anybody.
All I got was a picture
of a shell of a human being.
He had no sense about anything
other than satisfying this desire
to have sex with a dead
or an unconscious human being.
This whole situation has forced me
at how I've lived my life.
You never saw that at the time?
I may have
seen it. I chose to ignore it, bury it,
submerge it under the compulsion
that was driving me.
Jeffrey was very intellectually curious
about anatomy.
The interest occurred very young,
even when he was in third or fourth grade.
When Jeff and I were young,
we would often go hiking in the woods.
And we'd often come across
bones in the ground,
and he just took a particular interest
in some of the anatomy of these animals.
He would spend time
out in this little shack in the yard,
where he collected animals.
And that garden shed
was at one point
used to hold a bone collection.
Squirrel bones or rabbit bones,
or whatever you find out in the woods.
He had it all nicely displayed
on some building tables in this shed.
He'd already cleaned off
any flesh that was on them.
Personally, it was nothing that I was
interested in collecting myself.
Jeff found it interesting.
What he was interested in
at that age
was more along the lines
of amateur taxidermy.
But in the process of that,
it happened to him
that he became interested
in the internal organs.
It was a morbid interest, obviously.
All right.
And what did you start with?
Just, uh, roadkill,
dogs,
uh, possums.
He certainly had a fascination
with cutting open the animals,
wanting to look at the insides.
You know, see how everything laid out.
In ninth grade, I dissected a baby pig.
After we were done with dissection,
took the pig's head home
and took the flesh off,
and kept the skull for a while.
Why, I don't know.
He wouldn't kill any animals.
He would find dead animals,
and he would do it.
This was all part of his fascination
with a dead body.
It's all that
he was interested in.
It became an obsession for him.
He had this wall
between himself and other people.
No emotionality at all.
Somebody who is unable
to attach himself to other people.
I'm not even sure whether or not
I was capable of a real
sense of love, even back then.
I ain't sure if I am now.
You don't know how to love.
Is that what you're saying?
I'm not sure I do, no.
A person who can love,
I don't think would do these things.
The morning after
Dahmer had been arrested,
the sun was rising,
the nighttime police officers
were heading off,
and the daytime officers were coming on.
The alley behind Dahmer's apartment
was crowded now
with some media people,
but mostly with residents
who'd been evacuated
from Dahmer's apartment building.
It's important for a crime reporter
to have connections,
the inside scoop in a police department.
And one of my friends
in the police department
told me Dahmer's name.
And that was not public at the time.
I wanted to get away from the crime scene
to the computer system
at the district attorney's office.
In that computer system,
I could type in Dahmer's name
and find out his history.
And sure enough, there's a case,
a felony case, of sexual assault.
I was able to go through the records
and find out he was represented
in that case
by an attorney named Gerry Boyle.
Dahmer had been a known commodity
to the police department.
I met Dahmer
for the first time in 1988.
He had been charged
with sexual misconduct with a young boy.
Saw this, uh, Eurasian guy
walking down the street in the afternoon.
Asked him if he wanted to make
some money, $50. He said, "Yes."
"For pictures." We went back.
He stripped down to his underwear.
I took two pictures of him,
one on the bed
and one standing up, I think.
And I was drinking some coffee
with Irish Cream Mist in it.
And I gave him some,
and it had sleeping pills in it.
And, uh, he drank some.
The whole time, he stayed there
maybe an hour at the most.
Said he had to be going.
I paid him the $50.
And he left.
Why did you let him go?
Because I had no knife.
I had no intention of of injuring him.
I just wanted to stay with him
and and, uh, lay with him for a while.
He told me he liked
listening to people's stomach.
Then I was on the bed still,
and then he came more like leaning down,
and then he start
He put his ears to my stomach.
The boy was able to escape.
Got to his home in a drugged condition.
His parents were quite concerned.
Eventually, took him to the hospital
and called the police
because he appeared to be drugged.
Our office prosecuted Dahmer
for the boy's victimization.
Dahmer was convicted of drugging
and sexual enticement of the youngster.
At the time,
Dahmer was brought to my attention,
I was chief psychologist
for Department of Corrections,
Milwaukee region.
While he was awaiting sentencing,
I said I would just do a brief evaluation
to get a sense of the status
of what we were working with.
Jeffrey was guarded, angry,
and uncooperative from the start,
showing up a half hour late,
hoping that I wouldn't
have waited for him.
He would just stare at me,
uh, with a very cold, icy, angry stare
for the entire interview.
But he still gave
a lot of very important information,
just based on his behavior.
His personality pattern
was of an individual who uses people,
sees them as objects,
does not have any empathy.
My recommendation said that this person
is too dangerous to be in the community.
This person should be incarcerated
at this point.
The judge, in the end,
listened to Jeffrey's speech,
which was quite moving.
He basically in a nutshell said,
"Oh, this is terrible."
"Uh, I'm sorry.
It's never going to happen again."
His sentence was a year work release.
Work release in our state is a program
where you can work during the day
the regular work hours,
and then you're in county jail
while you're not working.
Jeffrey Dahmer was employed
at the Ambrosia chocolate factory.
Our office took the position said
he should be sentenced for six years.
So we disagreed with the judge on that.
I thought I was pretty aware of people
that I couldn't be fooled.
He plenty fooled me, I'll tell ya.
He fooled everyone.
When we look
at the Jeffrey Dahmer case,
there are a number of failures
by the system,
whether it's probation and parole,
whether it's law enforcement,
or whether it's the courts,
that failed to protect the victims.
The boy was only 13 years old
when this happened.
Thirteen years old.
There was no way of really knowing
that he had already murdered people.
But when I initially heard
what the judge had done,
my sense was, "Oh okay.
Well, we're gonna get him back."
"There's no way
we're not gonna see him again."
He had months
between the time he was convicted,
and the time he would start
to serve his sentence.
It was in that interval
that he continued cruising gay bars
and was doing one-night hookups.
- Still living at Grandma's?
- Right.
Okay.
Two months before I was to go
into the work release center,
it was closing time at La Cage.
Was it one of your regular bars?
And struck up a conversation
with this, uh, Black guy.
- What was his name?
- I think his name was Tony.
I think.
That's what he told me
his name was anyway.
Tony.
Tony Sears was about 23 or 24.
Tony Sears was a model.
He was very attractive,
and he was always immaculately dressed.
Had the most beautiful hair.
Back in the day,
we called them Jheri curls.
He was always upbeat,
always energetic.
He was always out for an adventure,
always wanted to do something new.
You just never knew
where your night was gonna go,
but you knew
you were gonna have a good time.
Tony did not have a car,
and so I would go pick him up,
and we would go out to the bars.
So it was a typical Saturday night.
I picked him up at his apartment.
And we were barhopping.
Some point through the evening,
we decided to go our separate ways.
We had our agreement
that at the end of the night,
we're gonna meet at this spot.
So that's what we did.
When the end of the evening came,
we met up back right on the corner
that we always did.
And he had this other guy with him.
He wasn't over good-looking.
I wouldn't say he was ugly.
He had just blond hair.
Uh, he was wearing glasses.
We just sat on the corner
and talked a bit about our evenings,
who we bumped into, where we went.
That sort of thing.
Tony wanted to go to breakfast
'cause he always wanted to have fun,
never wanted the night to end.
We had a really nice breakfast,
and then we're dropping them off.
He said it was at his house.
He had a friend, a white man, with him.
And his friend had a car.
And then during the car ride,
he's very affectionate,
apparently very drunk.
And we drove
to 57th and Lincoln.
He had me drop them off
just at the corner.
There was no specific house or anything.
It was literally an intersection.
Then they hopped out.
I said goodbye to Tony
and reminded him
that if he needed a ride to call me
before such and such a time.
They just walked up the street,
and I drove off.
When you did go out that night, though,
and you met this guy,
and you decided he seemed a nice guy.
Hmm.
What came into your mind
that you wanted to ask him back?
Did you become fearful in any way
that it was gonna happen again?
Hm. No. I I thought that
it would just be a regular night.
I brought him back.
My judgment isn't always so good
when I'm drinking,
especially when I drink a lot.
Jeffrey brought Tony Sears
to his grandmother's house
in West Allis,
where he was residing at the time.
And we went up to the bedroom
and laid around.
He was making some comments
about it getting to be early,
and he'd have to leave.
I went down and made a cup of coffee
with the pills.
He fell asleep,
and that's when I strangled him.
His grandmother slept through it,
had no idea.
His wanting to have a companion
but not wanting them to leave
was very big.
It was very powerful for him.
Did it ever
get into your mind at that time
that in fact, you had lost him
rather than keeping him?
Hmm.
I suppose that that realization
did hit me, yeah, but
- When?
- After they were dead.
How did that feel?
Unfulfilling.
It felt like a waste.
He always had a way that he found
to dispose of the bodies.
He had a nice-looking face, so I
With the head, I cut that off,
put it in a large, white barrel,
filled it up with acetone,
and that preserved the head.
Why did you do that this time?
Well, just branching out
into different variations.
He kept the full head, not just the skull,
and he also kept his genitals.
And he put them in an airtight container.
And he put it in his locker
at the chocolate plant where he worked.
Most of this time,
Dahmer was sitting
in a correctional institution,
at least at night,
and was on work release.
This was safer than having it
at Grandma's house,
where somebody could stumble upon it.
You kept
the genitals, and you kept the head?
Mm-hmm.
Did you still feel
as though you had your companion?
This all is so bizarre
sounding now to me.
You think you loved Tony?
Yeah, I could say that if I knew
how to love, I would have loved him.
It was a matter of trying
to preserve what I had left of him.
- What were you hoping for?
- Um
I hoped he would just dry out
and stay looking like he did in life,
but it didn't work out that way.
By that time, it was fairly obvious
that it didn't look like Tony anymore.
- It was just all shriveled up.
- Okay.
But did it still excite you?
No, not as much.
The excitement was wearing off.
I was contacted by Tony's sister.
They called and just asked
if I'd heard anything from Tony.
And I told them,
I said, "No. We were out on Saturday."
"I haven't heard from him."
And that was kind of our conversation.
I would say probably a day or two later,
I got another call that they wanted
to file a missing persons report.
Because they hadn't heard anything at all.
In the beginning,
I was the the prime suspect
for the reason that I was
the last person to see Tony alive.
Tony's family would ask me things like,
"Are you giving us all the details?"
"Does this other person really exist?"
"Or were you just with Tony?"
It was questions like that that started
to take a turn with the family.
I also had a lot of friends
that I had for quite some time
that started thinking the same thing.
That, you know,
maybe I had done something to Tony.
Then the police came back
and started coming to visit me,
and starting asking questions.
More about what happened that night,
where we went, where he was dropped off.
One of the things that I was forced to do
during the investigation
was go with police officers
to the different bars
to see if I could recognize
who this blond mystery person was.
At that time, the relationship
between the gay community and the police
was not the greatest at all.
I thought for sure they would send
at least plain-clothed officers.
They were in full uniform.
Guns, hats, badges.
You know, he whole thing.
I actually had some of the bar owners
ask me,
"You really don't need
to come back here," type thing.
The friends are all questioning
what's going on and what's happening.
So at at some point through all that,
um, I decided I had to kind of just
get a fresh start.
I basically left
my life in Milwaukee behind
and moved out of the city.
I really cared for Tony.
Tony was a great guy.
You know, I figured he and I were gonna
be friends for quite some time,
and, um
I'm sorry.
You know, there's a lot of "what-ifs."
Just the fact that
some of my actions
that I did that evening
Um
I helped this happen to Tony.
You know, I kinda wish
I wish could take it all back
and make the evening end
in a different way.
While Jeff Dahmer remains
in police custody,
held on multiple homicide charges,
the DA's office has already started
its investigation
into the formal case
against the alleged murderer.
A few days after he was arrested,
my boss, Gerry Boyle, wanted someone
to walk through the apartment.
He just wanted to make sure that
we were watching what they were doing.
And I was nominated as such.
Walking up to the door to his apartment
and going inside,
what went through my mind was,
"How could anybody ever live in here?"
The mattress was still there,
sopping in blood.
The carpeting, uh, bloodstains.
Wall, bloodstains.
The odor in there
was a culmination of death,
with the humidity, the blood.
It was awful.
I had to leave and luckily,
at the end of the hallway
was a fire exit with a staircase,
so I could run out there and, um
the gagging turned into throwing up.
I was the only woman.
The male officers that were there,
they all stood there,
and they all laughed.
They're like, "How you doing on this now?"
"You wanted to come to a crime scene.
This is what we get."
It was, um
terrifying to see
that this was real.
Who knows? At that point,
you know, maybe all of this was a facade
and him being polite to me.
And I started to think about that.
What he couldn't control,
his own little demon inside,
is what we actually saw in his apartment.
After I got out
of the work release center,
I moved out of Grandma's
and into this apartment.
While I was looking for an apartment
that looked halfway decent,
I saw the Oxford Apartments,
and, uh walked in.
They had a "for rent" sign in front.
And, uh, I moved in
in May of '90, I guess.
Had the movers bring my TV, and uh
and a big chest that I had
with all my possessions in it.
Things you had at Grandma's house?
Mm-hmm.
In my mind, I had my own place,
someplace nice and private
where I could just take someone back,
drug them, and then strangle them.
Milwaukee has always been
one of those types of cities
where it's very hypersegregated.
Blacks lived on one side of the town,
while whites lived on the other side
of the town and in the suburbs.
And Dahmer lived in this apartment complex
called the Oxford Apartments,
but it was a lot of African Americans
who lived in that building.
The first time that I met Jeff
we had been living there
for maybe maybe two weeks or so.
And he made it known to me
that he had just moved from West Allis,
and that he had broken up
with his girlfriend.
And I took a liking to him
because he looked so clean-cut.
He looked so mild.
He looked like a young Clark Kent.
He was the only single white male
in the building.
I never thought it to be strange or weird
that he was there.
To me, he was just an average guy
trying to keep his head above water.
There was one time
when I did try to introduce him
to a lady.
She lived downstairs,
and she had a crush on Jeff.
And so she told me, she said,
"Why don't you see
if your neighbor across the hall
wanna come over and play cards with us?"
So I went and knocked on his door.
I said, "I'm over here playing cards.
Hey, man, I'm getting my butt kicked."
"You know, by these women."
"I could really use another guy
who would come and help me."
And he straight out told me
that he didn't wanna come over.
So I said, "Well, one of the women there,
she kind of like you."
"And it'd be a chance
for you guys to talk."
He flat-out told me
that he was not interested
in talking to her.
I thought, "Well, hey.
This guy must really, really be stuck on
that other woman in West Allis."
It didn't take very long for me to notice
that Jeff was a loner,
and that he kept to himself.
And he he wasn't a party type guy.
- You and Timmy.
- That's right.
- And who is this?
- Jeff.
- That's cousin Jeff.
- Hey.
Yes.
Jeffrey was able to fool people
in situations where it was
critically important to do that.
Looks like a bunch
of satisfied people sitting around here.
Even with Grandma or his dad.
Of course,
you woke up at what, eight this morning?
Then you you cleaned up your apartment
so you could show us what it looks like.
Yeah, I want you to come over
if you feel like it.
I haven't done any dusting or vacuuming.
I do that on Sundays.
Dahmer could be an engaging person.
He enticed many people into his apartment.
But they had no idea
they were walking into a viper's nest
when they went to his apartment.
Is this the first person
you took pictures of?
Yeah, yeah.
The nickname was "Cash D," I think.
I don't know his real name.
What did you use to take
the pictures? You had a camera?
It was a Polaroid.
A Polaroid camera.
In Dahmer's apartment,
there were a number of albums
that were present,
and these were a series
of organized Polaroid photographs
that depicted Dahmer's previous victims
before, during, and after dissection.
Jeffrey took the photos
of individuals that he favored the most.
He put them in different poses
because it would show the physique.
There were various parts
of various individuals
that he favored more than other ones,
and so he took photos of it.
- How long did this last?
- About an hour.
- Of just taking photographs?
- Mm-hmm.
When I saw the Polaroids
that Jeffrey took,
I I was horrified.
Some of them were very intense.
To see people cut in real life,
it takes on a whole different, uh, scope,
a whole different level.
I had nightmares with it.
But I wanted to stay professional.
I I was just thinking, you know,
"How am I gonna get through this?"
"I don't have anybody
to talk to about it."
It just
felt like a waste to me to destroy someone
that looked so nice.
But by that time, I had no choice.
He was dead,
and I had to find some way
to dispose of the remains.
He now realized he had a different problem
than at he had at his grandmother's house
because he wasn't gonna be able
to use a sledgehammer
to break up bones in an apartment.
A day or two later,
I went out and bought
this large, 80-gallon kettle
from one of the restaurant's supply.
He could then boil
what was left of the body.
And this began
his more sophisticated production
of body disposal.
I mean, makes you sick
even talking about it,
but he'd get rid of the
the bones in acid.
That's why you got a huge barrel?
So you could put
the acid in for the bones?
Yeah, that It was
a trash barrel. It's
So you put the bones in there,
and it would just
Turn into a slush
that then could be
scooped out into the toilet
and flushed down.
- What did you do with the skull?
- Kept that.
- Where'd you keep it?
- In the closet area.
Jeff became more than just
the neighbor across the hall.
I liked him because I felt
that he had a soft heart.
There was one time
when my sister was getting married.
I didn't have any money
to get a gift for her.
I knocked on Jeff's door,
and I told him, "You know, I'm getting
ready to go to my sister's wedding."
And I said, "Is it possible you can
loan me some money to get her a gift?"
He gave me $60.
Told me, "Don't even worry about it."
He said, "Get your sister something nice."
I knew nothing about his past.
How many people know
what their neighbor does
once they go inside and close their door?
You can only go by
what you see,
and what you hear from out of their mouth.
Jeff, what do we know
about the suspect? He's 31 years old?
He's 31 years old.
Neighbors talked briefly about him
to me during the night.
They said they didn't really know him.
They described him as strange, a loner,
uh, but they did say he had a job
and worked every day.
The night of his arrest,
we had no idea of why they were there.
And when I asked one of the officers,
"Is Jeff okay?"
He said, "Yeah, that fucker's okay."
I was standing there
watching them take the body parts
that were in little small boxes.
A little bit bigger than a shoe box,
all brown.
Taking the boxes out
two and three at a time.
Two and three at a time,
taking the boxes out.
Turns out that Jeff
is actually Jeffrey Dahmer,
who has murdered men
inside apartment 213.
The parts, box after box
of dismembered human remains,
were taken away
Now the job is to identify the victims.
At this time, we have no identifications
on any of the, uh, specimens
that we have recovered.
At that time,
there was no such thing as DNA
that was accessible
to a routine, regular medical examiner.
So we were using dental analysis,
and fingerprints,
and personal effects,
uh, tattoos, surgical scars, etc.
in our trying to identify these victims.
Putting the skeletons back together
was like putting a puzzle together.
Forensic anthropologists
could tell us age, race, sex,
and also help us interpret
some of the injuries that we were seeing.
Once investigators here
are able to put together
physical descriptions of the victims,
that information will be fed
into a computer
and cross-referenced with the descriptions
of missing persons around the country.
Now there had been reports
of a number of missing persons
over the previous year and a half.
And so we had a manifest
of potential victims.
After Jeffrey was arrested,
we have 300 calls a day from people
asking what happened to their child,
or if he knew anything
about their children.
People are concerned tonight,
people who lived in the area,
people who have loved ones
who have been missing in this case.
They have started showing up
this afternoon
at the scene of that crime
at 25th and Kilbourn.
We were just out here looking,
just by chance.
It might not be so, but it might be so.
We're looking for leads ourself.
We would check
with the medical examiner
who tried to put the parts together.
Once we had that information,
and if we had a picture of him,
we would show the photos to Dahmer
in an attempt to identify these people.
It was a monumental task.
He would explain in great detail
every victim.
There certainly were victims
that we would not have been able
to connect to Dahmer
without his cooperation.
Henry Smith has searched
for his brother in gay bars
in both Milwaukee and Chicago,
but so far has turned up nothing.
It was often you walk in a bar
and people say,
"Child! Another one missing."
And you say, "What? Who's missing now?"
Because Milwaukee's so small,
especially the Black gays.
So if you didn't see somebody
for two, three weeks,
you figured they'd moved.
But then it was almost
I would say weekly,
somebody else was saying,
"So and so is gone."
I was seeing Eddie Smith all the time.
And all of a sudden, he was gone.
Me myself, I don't
I don't think he's out there.
Carolyn Smith is praying
that her fears don't come true.
Her 28-year-old brother Eddie
was last seen a year ago on June 16,
the day he went to go watch
Milwaukee's Gay Pride parade.
Eddie's sister came to the bar.
She would ask people. She had pictures.
She was like,
"He would have called somebody."
"I know he would have called me.
I talk to my brother every day."
While Ernest Miller
grew up here in Milwaukee,
he was about to return to Chicago
when he suddenly disappeared.
Ernest Miller, another young man.
Ernest had a good soul.
He was very creative.
So of course, when Ernest came up missing,
that was talk in the bars too.
Eighteen-year-old
Curtis Straughter lived in this home
with his grandmother on the north side.
She last saw him about five months ago.
In those days,
you could buy cigarettes
in a cigarette machine in the bars.
They used to have missing persons posters
on the cigarette machine.
These were missing posters of adults
who had completely vanished.
And their family members, their friends
were trying to track them down.
Fight back! Fight AIDS!
But the years in which Dahmer
was most active in Milwaukee
coincide with years
where the number of AIDS deaths
in Wisconsin increased ten times over.
So people would literally just disappear.
Were they dead?
Were they sick? Had they moved away?
No one would know.
Gay rights right now!
Gay rights right now!
Gay rights right now!
Dahmer had a rare opportunity,
a rare window in time
where people were vanishing
in the community,
but no one knew why.
Jeffrey Dahmer was known
to the Hughes family too.
Friends of Tony Hughes, a deaf-mute,
have told Tony's mother and sister
that they saw Tony leave this bar
with a blond man.
Tony was unable to hear or speak,
but he'd write notes.
He always had a pad and paper.
Whenever you were in his presence,
you wanted to have fun
because he was having fun.
Tony knew Jeff for a long time.
And Tony and Jeff had had relations.
Tony told me so.
It was Memorial Day weekend of 1991.
Tony Hughes and I
were together in a bar called The Phoenix.
We were sitting at the bar
having cocktails,
and Jeff came in the back door.
Jeffrey Dahmer.
When Jeff walked in,
Tony got up from the bar
and approached him.
Tony left me and went
to follow Jeff on the dance floor.
And that was the last time
I saw Tony Hughes.
Jeff discussed
all of the victims with me.
However, it takes time
to get that rapport and that trust
until you really feel like you can discuss
all those inside secrets with people.
With the deaf-mute guy,
I wanted to keep him with me,
so I gave him the drink
with the pills in it.
He fell asleep,
and I wanted to see
if I could, uh, think of a way
to keep him with me
without actually, you know, killing him.
Once we got to that point
where he felt real comfortable with me,
there was, in fact, additional things
that came out from him
that didn't come out with the police.
And so, uh
I had a drill at home.
And, uh
It's gonna sound bad,
but, uh
Should I say it or not?
I took the drill while he was asleep
and drilled a small hole in his skull,
to see if I could,
uh, make it so that he would, uh
just sorta be like, uh, in a zombie state.
I think he truly believed
that if he could keep one of them alive,
like doing this crude lobotomy,
that it would be sufficient
to satisfy his needs.
I was flabbergasted.
I mean, to hear that
was more than I could stand.
In fact, one of the psychologists, uh,
that we were working with,
uh, Kenneth Smail, I I made him stay.
Jeff, where did you get that idea?
Uh,
it came from my own thoughts.
Uh
Just in my own thinking
that I thought maybe it would work,
because I didn't wanna keep
killing people and not have anything left
except the skull.
He wanted to take the person's will away
is the way he would put it.
It's astounding. It's jaw-dropping.
He then injected muriatic acid
through that hole in the skull.
Mr. Hughes died from that injection.
It wasn't necessary to strangle him later.
And Dahmer kept the skull long term.
In fact, that was one of the skulls
still in his apartment
at the time of his arrest.
It saddens me
every time I think about
any of those gentlemen.
Because like everybody else
during that time,
they were trying to find themselves.
They weren't expecting to get killed.
These were, in most cases,
uh, poor, gay men
who probably didn't have
a large support system,
or whose support system
when they said that,
"My loved one is missing,"
the attention was not given to them
the way it should've been.
Authorities are wondering
how anyone could have committed
these gruesome acts,
just as others in Milwaukee are wondering
how police couldn't have known.
Especially since Dahmer was
a convicted sex offender out on parole.
I was in the bars often.
Nobody asked me about anybody.
I didn't have any police officer,
any detective,
come up to me and say,
"What do you know
about this person or that person?"
This wasn't a couple of months
or a couple of weeks.
This went on for years.
How could one man kill
so many for so long
without being detected by police?
The answer in part, according to some,
is a law-enforcement community
which is slow to investigate
gay-related crime.
If the victims had been white
and straight,
the search would have been more in-depth,
more specific.
Bitter charges of racism,
a belief many of the killings
could've been stopped.
It just shows you the feeling
towards the minority community,
like we're a burden.
The families that didn't think
the police did enough
To be honest, I think
some of them might have had a point.
I think there was this feeling,
it's a 20-year-old guy
that was going to the bars
and picking up guys.
And so who knows where he is?
There's a real question
as to whether the police department
sufficiently followed up
on those missing people.
Did they just assume
that they were into trouble
and not worth following up on?
If they would have listened
to people of color,
they could have really saved
a lot of young people's lives.
I went out
and bought a five-foot square freezer.
What made you think
that you wanted to do this?
Because I was preparing
for more.