On Conversations with a killer: The Jeffery Dahmer tapes

When the Jeffery Dahmer adaptation was released, I just couldn't get into the series. I felt they were tryna humanise him.

I prefer documentaries when it comes to crime. 

Jeffery really said, "I want to know why I am the way I am." He understood that what he was doing was wrong. In his last statement to court he said "he didn't know if he was sick, evil or both. That he is sorry and hopes prison gives him the peace he has been seeking for through the murders."

In a way, you can understand that Jeffery Dahmer was the way he is. He just didn't have empathy, but he owned up to his crimes. He had self awareness, but he just didn't understand why he had this warped sexual drive. He said it emanated from the feeling of loneliness and his inability to find something in life to give him happiness, peace and fulfilment. He was fully cooperative with the police, provided a very detailed description of all his victims during his investigation.

Watching this makes me even more scared with of the kind of murderer Ted Bundy was. In his conversations with the police, Ted Bundy was literally diagnosing himself as a third person to the police as a psychiatrist. He was analyzing himself as a specimen of study, and never really took responsibility.

Ted Bundy never owned up to killing his victims until a few days before his execution. One thing I've noted though about many of these serial killers like Richard Ramirez and even Ted is they didn't like their childhood, either from domestic abuse, sexual abuse, feeling alone and isolated or a sense of failure.

In the Jeffery Dahmer case, he didn't have an abusive past or a terrible childhood. The only thing that wasn't okay and possibly affected him was the fight between his parents, his mother hitting his father during their fights. Also, he was isolated because the attention was given to his younger brother. He felt lonely. It didn't help that he knew he was gay which was contrary to what was expected of him in the 1970s and 1980s, to be a straight man.

He started fantasizing about sexual experiences with attractive muscular and toned men. And when he couldn't figure out how to approach men like a normal person, he started imagining knocking them off from consciousness in order to now have sex with them. Which of course led to him fantasizing about getting violent sexual fantasies.

His first victim was in 1978. He killed a guy that came over to his place. Chopped off his whole body, and masturbated to this dead male body he killed. And this Jeffery was 18 years old at this point. He would eventually go on to kill and dismember 16 men between 1987 - 1991 when he was caught. He killed victims and basically dismembered their bodies. Collected and kept some token to himself, like dessicated genitals, hairs of victims, human heart, skeletal muscle tissue. He kept 3 intact skeletons that were decapitated in a box, and 11 human skulls. He even went as far as keeping a dead victim full head in his refrigerator. And eventually he would move on to necrophilia, and later on cannibalism. Some of these crimes were even done when he was living with his grandmother. It sometimes escalated to him cutting some slit on different parts of the body, and use the hole for sexual release.

At the beginning, he wanted to get rid of the sinful homosexual cravings. He started going to his protestant church, praying away the gayness to no avail. He eventually stole a male mannequin from a department store, laying and trying to have sex with a mannequin. But it didn't do anything for him, neither did the prayers get rid of his gayness. So he just figured he'd give into this paraphilic inclination. 

He scouted his victims by going to gay bath houses, where gay men met for sex in the 80s. He would go in with pills with drug them in order to have total control without any resistance or demand when he was having sex with them. Apart from the gay bars, he would offer good looking men money to photograph them, then we would drug their coffee at his place. Then have his way with them.

Then, he would take photographs of those he liked. He took before dissection, during dissection and after dissection. And when he was arrested, police were carrying boxes and boxes of the skeleton remains of his victims out from his apartment. He extracted the skeletons by using chemicals to melt away the flesh. Some of this victims, he kept their thighs, calf and heart for eating. He said he kept about 50 pounds of flesh from a victim and as the time of his arrest, he'd eaten 10 pounds off it. He packaged the flesh as beef so it looked like normal beef from the supermarket. And he'd drink the blood of some victims he liked.

To put it in context, the beef image above is 1 pound. So he had eaten like 10 packs of this could be more.

Perhaps the saddest victim was Konerak Sinthasomphone, a 14 year old Laos boy. Dahmer eventually stated this drilling technique where he is trying to keep the victims alive by boring into their skulls and pouring some muriatic acid to keep them comatose, like zombies. His plan is to try to keep his victims alive without killing them. That's what he did to Konerak and while the little guy escaped, 2 black girls called 911. Jeffery eventually came back and told the police officers that a small boy that was naked and had blood coming out of this rectum was his boyfriend. And these white police listen to Jeffery and leave this small boy with small. He was not able to talk coherently because of the lobotomy Jeffery did to his brain and the drugs. A young guy that only followed Jeffery cos he wanted to make some money from modelling. Turns out his brother was even the initial guy Dahmer had been on probation for molesting some years earlier.

Now you might be asking, why wasn't there really investigation in all the missing persons?

1. They were gay men. Even when Jeffery assaulted a 13 year old boy, he wasn't really jailed, cos it was gay

2. This was the 1980s when HIV/AIDS were prevalent. So when gay men go missing, people just think they've either gotten AIDS or moved away to another city

3. Most of his victims were poor black men, who didn't really have family supoort to continue rallying police to look for their loved ones

4. Jeffery looked like a normal guy, worked everyday so people that lived in his apartment block didn't really think him suspicious or anything 

Meanwhile, he also sought forgiveness from God after he was incarcerated. He was reading the bible, and they brought him a priest to baptize him. And the priest welcomed him to Christianity, into the house of God. The priest continued meeting him once a week and he said Jeffery was growing in his faith. Which leaves me wondering, "this heaven you guys are pious for will sure be filled with evil serial killers that just asked God for forgiveness just before their death."

In the end, Jeffery was killed by a black male inmate in jail. An irony that he was killed with a barbell, and Jeffery had also killed his first victim with a weight lifting equipment too. I think his killer did it possibly for retribution because most of Dahmer's victims were black men, which is why I'm optimistic that this Christopher Watts that killed his family will be killed in jail. Prisoners are harsher to inmates that committed crimes against children, and rightfully so.