from I Have Lived With the Monster
Interview with a Cannibal: Jeffrey Dahmer


 

 

Imagine, if you will, a voice that is resonant and low, apparently laconic,relaxed and articulate, but with palpable overlays of enormous tension and attempts to control what it is that he is saying. It was a voice and a manner diametrically opposed to that of John Wayne Gacy.

With Dahmer, the words are squeezed out, one or two at a time, or, at most, phrase by phrase. To encourage him to go on, I would murmur "mmm-hmm" after each phrase, but for ease of reading I have eliminated these in the transcript.

Dahmer wanted to give the appearance of cooperation, and to impress me with the idea that he was looking back on what he had done with some objectivity, as though it had been another and very different person who had committed the murders.

Please keep in mind that it was not my task to get Dahmer to admit his crimes he had already confessed but rather to try and gain some insight into his reasons for the crimes, and into his state of mind at the time they were committed. At the outset of our conversation, I tried to impress on Dahmer that he was in a unique position to provide information that would be helpful in preventing the future crimes of others, and that would be of prime assistance in helping attorney Boyle prepare to properly defend him in court. With the preliminaries over, we started right in on his earliest memories of violence.


RESSLER: This goes back to Bath, Ohio, with your first human offense, of taking a life. Prior to that time... ?

DAHMER: There was nothing.

RESSLER: No assaults, anything like that?

DAHMER: No. Violence against me. I was attacked for no reason.

RESSLER: Give me a short rundown on that.

DAHMER: I was up visiting a friend's, and was walking back home in the evening, and saw these three seniors, seniors in high school approaching. I just had a feeling that something was going to happen, and sure enough, one of them just took out a billy club and whacked me on the back of the neck. For no reason. Didn't say anything, just hit somebody. And I ran.

RESSLER: I imagine that was pretty frightening to you.

DAHMER: Yeah.

RESSLER: Did that stick in your mind for a long time?

DAHMER: Not until... Yeah, it did, for about a year.

RESSLER: So this was the first time that you were involved in any kind of violence, and you were the recipient. Let's go back and discuss your family, the breakup of your family. It's hurtful to a lot of people, to people that have done what you have done, and that becomes an element in your life, as well. So let me ask you: Was there ever a sexual assault against you by any member of your family at any time?

DAHMER: No.

RESSLER: Inside or outside of the family?

DAHMER: NO.

RESSLER: So that was not a factor in your case. Now, I've read about your interest along the lines of dissecting animals and things of that nature. When did that start?

DAHMER: About fifteen or sixteen. It was off and on.

RESSLER: That was after you had been hit by those guys, right?

DAHMER: Er...yes.

RESSLER: Did it start with a biology class in school?

DAHMER: I think it did. We had to do we were dissecting a baby pig.

RESSLER: And how would you describe your fascination with, uh, dismemberment [Dahmer chortles], with the animals, y'know?

DAHMER: It just was... Well, one of them was a large dog found by along the side of the road, and I was going to strip the flesh off, bleach the bones, and reconstruct it, and sell it. But I never got that far with it. I don't know what started me on this; it's a strange thing to be interested in.

RESSLER: Yeah, it is.

DAHMER: It is.


Some interviewers might try to be objective when dealing with a person in this situation, thinking that by doing something else either showing agreement with him or revulsion at his acts they would stop the flow of his conversation. My technique is different. When something is strange, and it feels appropriate in the moment to say so, I express that overt judgment. In this instance, I think, it helped Dahmer to feel as though I, too, was looking back with amazement on the odd things that he had somehow been involved in, and from which he now wanted to distance himself.


RESSLER: Now about the dog, there was something about a head on a stick out behind your house?

DAHMER: That was just done as a prank. I found a dog, and cut it open just to see what The insides looked like, and for some reason I thought it would be a fun prank to stick the head on a stake and set it out in the woods. And brought one of my friends back to look at it and said I'd stumbled upon that in the woods. Just for shock value.

RESSLER: Uh-huh. And how old were you then?

DAHMER: Probably... sixteen.

RESSLER: What year was that?

DAHMER: Around late seventies.

RESSLER: That's interesting.


At that time, I was at the FBI Academy in Quantico, but retained ties to the Cleveland area, where I had worked as an agent for several years. Cops in Ohio forwarded a set of photographs to me, which depicted dismembered and beheaded animals on sticks, in a circle, situated in a wooded area. They wanted to know whether this reflected cult or Satanic activity, and asked if I could provide any clues as to the sort of personalities that might be involved in such activity. Therewasn't enough information for me to really come up with anything at that time. I thought it was adolescents, messing around. During my interview with Dahmer, though, I became unnerved by the idea that I might have had a glimpse into the developing mind of someone who would later become one of the nation's worst serial killers and hadn't known it. Even if I had called attention to the possibility that the perpetrator of the dog-head circle was someone who might later become a fu11-fledged danger to society, nothing would have happened, because the perpetrator was just a juvenile, and his crimes had not yet become fully developed. During the interview, I asked Dahmer whether he had really been involved in this dog-head circle, and he denied it had any significance.


DAHMER: I wasn't into any occult then, it was just a prank.

RESSLER: So you weren't involved in any sort of thing with a group of these heads?

DAHMER: No. Where was it located?

RESSLER: Somewhere south of Cleveland.


Now we were ready to head into the more serious territory, that of the murders themselves. Note, in the following section, how Dahmer applies magical thinking to the story of how he came upon his victim as though events conspired to just sort of make it happen. This kind of thinking tries to absolve the thinker from responsibility for his actions. He has a scenario in his mind, a pickup of a hitch- hiker, and when it begins to happen in real life, he feels he is swept up in it, and has to complete the final parts of it.


RESSLER: You're about eighteen years old when this first murder takes place? Just kinda give me a rundown on that. This guy was a hitchhiker, right?

DAHMER: I had been having, for a couple of years before that, fantasies of meeting a good-looking hitchhiker, and [dramatic pause] sexually enjoying him.

RESSLER: Did that come from any movie or book or anything like that?

DAHMER: It didn't; it just came from within.

RESSLER: From within.

DAHMER: And that just happened to be the week when no one was home Mom was off With David, and they had put up at a mote1 about five miles away; and I had the car, above five o'clock at night; and I was driving back home, after drinking; and I wasn't looking for anyone but, about a mile away from the house, there he was. Hitchhiking along the road. He wasn't wearing a shirt. He was attractive; I was attracted to him. I stopped then passed him and stopped the car and thought, "Well, should I pick him up or not?" And I asked him if he wanted to go back and smoke some pot, and he said, "Oh, yeah." And we went into my bedroom, had some beer, and from the time I spent with him I could tell he wasn't gay. I, uh, didn't know how else to keep him there other than to get the barbell and to hit him, over the head, which I did, then strangled him with the same barbell.

RESSLER: Okay, stop right there. You said that the fantasies you had the fantasies for several years? That would go back to first stage when?

DAHMER: Sixteen.

RESSLER: Do you have any idea at all, in your recollection, of what would start bringing this type of fantasy to mind, of actually taking somebody physically by force or was killing involved, too? Taking a life?

DAHMER: Uh, yeah. It all it all revolved around having complete control. Why or where it came from, I don't know.

RESSLER: Did you feel inadequate in relationships with people, like you didn't, couldn't have relationships that would endure?

DAHMER: In the township where I was at, homosexuality was the ultimate taboo. It was never discussed, never. I had desires to be with someone, but never met anyone that was gay, that I know of; so that was sexually frustrating.

RESSLER: Okay. You say that the guy was going to leave, and you didn't particularly want Him to leave, and that hitting him was a way of delaying him. You took the barbell and what, rendered him unconscious? And what transpired after that?

DAHMER: Then I took the barbell and strangled him.

RESSLER: And after that? Had there been sexual activity before then?

DAHMER: No. I was very frightened at what I had done. Paced the house for a while. Ends up I did masturbate.

RESSLER: Were you sexually aroused by the event? By having him there?

DAHMER: By the captivity.


Dahmer keeps trying to shock me with his homosexuality and his perverse sexual gratification, but I am not going to allow that to happen. On the other hand, I do want him to know that I am following his reasoning, and understand it.


RESSLER: Now he's unconscious, or he's dead, and you have him, and you know he's not going anywhere, and that was a turn-on?

DAHMER: Right. So later that night I take the body to the crawl space. And I'm down there and I can't get any sleep that night, so I go back up to the house. The next day, I have to figure out a way to dispose of the evidence. Buy a knife, a hunting knife. Go back the next night, slit the belly open, and masturbate again.

RESSLER: So you were aroused at just the physique?

DAHMER: The internal organs.

RESSLER: The internal organs? The act of evisceration? You were aroused by the cutting openof the body?

DAHMER: Yeah. And then I cut the arm off. Cut each piece. Bagged each piece. Triple-bagged it in large plastic trash bags. Put them in the back of the car. Then I'm driving to drop the evidence off a ravine, ten miles from my house. Did that at three o'clock in the morning. Halfway there, I'm at a deserted country road, and I get pulled over by the police. For driving left of center. Guy calls a backup. Squad. Two of 'em there. They do the drunk test. I pass that. Shine the flashlight on the backseat, see the bags, ask me what it is. I tell 'em it's garbage that I hadn't gotten around to dropping off at the landfill. And they believe it, even though there's a smell. So they give me a ticket for driving left of center and I go back home.


A peripheral note: I recalled this description by Dahmer of bagging the body in regard to a case in Japan, where body parts were discovered in separate trash bags in Tokyo's Inokashira public park. There, the disposal seemed unique, and worthy of great comment and wonder. But such a method had been used by Dahmer, and by several other serial killers in the United States. What seems highly unusual to one observer is often not unusual at all just something about which most laymen have little knowledge.


RESSLER: Were you nervous when they stopped you?

DAHMER: That's an understatement.

RESSLER: Well, they apparently didn't perceive your nervousness, though, to the point of pursuing the bags, or anything like that. They just got into a routine.

DAHMER: Yeah.

RESSLER: And then you did what with the bags?

DAHMER: Put them back, under the crawl space. Took the head, washed it off, put it on the bathroom floor, masturbated and all that, then put the head back down with the rest of the bags. Next morning we had a large buried drainage pipe, about ten feet long put the bags in there, smash the front of it down, and leave it there for about two and a half years.

RESSLER: When did you come back for it?

DAHMER: After the army, after working for about a year in Miami. When the rest of the family was away, while they were at work, I opened up the drainage pipe, took the bones, smashed them into small pieces scattered them in the underbrush.