If you’ve read or watched interviews with
serial killers, most of them either come across as slightly deranged or at least very creepy. But the focus of today’s show we must admit
seems kinda likable in the interviews. Watch the one in 1994 where Jeff tells all
while sat next to his loving father. “My childhood wasn’t filled with any great
tragedies” he told the interviewer, but then explained his predilection for dissecting
dogs and cats as a kid. It could have led to a normal hobby like taxidermy,
he added. But it didn’t, and soft-spoken Jeff turned
his efforts towards killing and taking apart human beings in an unimaginable fashion. “I acted on my fantasies and that’s where
everything went wrong,” he said. Today we’ll see how wrong it went, in this
episode of the Infographics Show, The Story of Jeffrey Dahmer - The Milwaukee Monster. If you’ve seen the recent movie about our
killer, called “My Friend Dahmer,” you’ll see he is portrayed as a bit of a loner in
school with some strange habits. He has few friends, but he doesn’t seem
to have violent impulses… you’d probably not even notice him if you went to the same
school. The movie was based on a graphic novel by
the same name written by Derf Backderf (pen name). He researched Dahmer, and this is what he
had to say, “There are a surprising number out there who view Jeffrey Dahmer as some
kind of anti-hero, a bullied kid who lashed back at the society that rejected him. This is nonsense. Dahmer was a twisted wretch whose depravity
was almost beyond comprehension.” So, how did the quiet boy become a twisted
serial killer? Well, as you already know, Dahmer had a penchant
for dissecting animals that he had found on the road. After dissection, he would often dissolve
the bodies in a barrel of chemicals. This was at his family home in Ohio. Dahmer has called this time of his life intense,
stating that his mother was often frantic and his dad always busy. He got little attention at home, and this
seems to have been a catalyst to his problems. Psychologists might say Jeff grew up within
a dysphoric family, which kinda means a family mess. It’s said at one point the young Dahmer
had even tried to take his own life. He had a few buddies, and they would later
tell the authorities, media, and book writers, about how Jeff would find bugs and small animals
and dissect them. Dahmer has admitted that he wanted to see
how they “fitted together”. His dad said as a kid his son fell in love
with bones; he loved hearing the sound they made and spent much of his time looking for
them. Yep, perhaps the busy father should have looked
into this morbid fascination with dead bodies and their different parts. The writing was on the wall, but it’s said
his dad, who was an analytical chemist, just thought Jeff had a curious mind – as all
scientists should. But despite all his weirdness, he played tennis
regularly and was in the school band for a while. He also turned up to school sometimes stinking
of booze. He was a bit of a class clown, sometimes acting
out seizures or pretending he had cerebral palsy; this became known as “Doing a Dahmer.” This was when he was in his early teens. It’s then that the real trouble started. Jeff realized that he was gay sometime around
the age of 14. Due to the prevailing culture of the time,
he had to keep that secret. He would sometimes watch a male jogger run
down the road while he was hidden in the bushes. He fantasized about this guy, but he wasn’t
thinking about candlelit dinners and nights in front of the TV watching “Happy Days.” No, young Jeff jumped the shark, so to speak,
and imagined somehow making this runner unconscious and then having sex with the lifeless body. He even once planned to actually go through
with it, waiting in the bushes armed with a baseball bat, but the jogger didn’t run
that day. At age 17, with his parents still screaming
at each other continually, his grades going downhill and his drinking getting worse, Dahmer
was at the height of his unhappiness. He did graduate, though, right at the time
his parents divorced. It’s right after graduation, a matter of
a few weeks, that Dahmer graduated from dissecting animals to dissecting humans. At age 18, he picked up a guy, Steven Mark
Hicks, who was hitchhiking to a place called Lockwood Corners, Ohio, to see a concert. He was 18, the same age as Jeff. So, it doesn’t seem out of the ordinary
that this young guy would agree to go back to Dahmer’s pad and do some drinking. Only Jeff wasn’t too happy when the guy
called his own bell and said he should go. No, Jeff didn’t like that at all. He knocked the kid out with a dumbbell and
then finished him off by strangling him with the bar of the dumbbell. He then masturbated over the corpse. When that was done, he chopped-up the body
and put various parts in bags and buried them. Later he would dig up the parts and slice
the flesh from the bones. He then crushed those bones and scattered
what was left in woodland, like one would scatter the ashes of someone they loved. That was Jeff’s first murder, and as we
say, it’s hard to believe the man in the interviews could sit in his house pairing
flesh from bones. From that date in 1978 until he was arrested
in 1991, he would kill 17 people, so we can’t detail every murder. What we will say is that Dahmer has few equals
in the milieu of the total depravity. He didn’t kill for a while as he enlisted
in the army. That lasted from 1978-1981 as he was kicked
out for his heavy drinking. At the time, the army didn’t know, or chose
not to believe, that Jeff was a rapist. He worked in the medic unit with a guy of
similar age named Preston Davis. Davis believes Dahmer drugged him and raped
him. He later told the press: “I was raped by
Jeffrey. I am just thankful to be alive to tell the
story.” He was replaced by a 17-year old called Billy
Joe Capshaw, who bunked with Dahmer. Capshaw later told the press that Dahmer tied
him up and raped him several times. “I was there for another 17 months with
Jeff, being raped and tortured.” Capshaw said he had even used a rape kit to
prove it to his officers, but it seems the army didn’t believe him. Once Dahmer is out of the army, what does
he do next? During the years until his next murder, you
could say he was still active, regarding his devotion to being evil. He drugged young men and then had sex with
their unconscious bodies. It’s thought he did this around a dozen
times. He also fantasized about digging up dead bodies
and doing things to them. This of course was not convenient and so Jeff
was about to start making his own dead bodies. He waited until 1987, and then killed and
dismembered another young man while living with his grandmother. Again, he masturbated over the corpse. He took it a step further, though. Dahmer always said that he didn’t mean to
kill the first of those victims at his Gran’s place and just woke up with a bloodied dead
man in his bed. Nonetheless, he didn’t exactly get on the
phone to the cops and frantically explain that there’d been a terrible accident. On the contrary, he chopped up the body, put
the parts in a suitcase, and then boiled the flesh from the severed head in chemicals. When he had a shiny skull at the end of his
cooking, he used that as a masturbation tool. After a while, he crushed that and scattered
the bits. While staying with his grandmother, he killed
again, employing a similar modus operandi of drugging, strangling, having some kind
of intercourse with the corpse, dismembering the body, and keeping the skull after boiling. One lucky guy he brought home didn’t get
killed, only because his gran discovered that Jeff had company that evening. His grandmother quickly threw him out because
he was a drunk, and because he brought young men home late at night…and because for some
reason she smelt something foul emanating from Jeff’s room. As you can imagine, when living in his own
place, things got worse. He was actually arrested and later charged
for drugging and sexually molesting a 13-year old, and then arrested on a similar charge
again, but prior to being sentenced, he killed again. This time he found a very handsome chap who
was a male model. He met him in a gay bar, and even though Dahmer
said he had not intended to kill that night, he felt he didn’t have much choice as the
model came and flirted with him. Again, after flaying the dead body and smashing
up the bones, Dahmer got rid of what was left. Only this time he kept the genitals and head,
fully preserving them in acetone. He said he did this just because the guy was
so good-looking. In 1989, he got 5 years’ probation for his
sexual offense with children. This is when he went on a bit of a killing
spree, almost always drugging young guys and making his unique kind of love to the corpse,
then flaying the bodies, or dissolving the parts in acid, and sometimes keeping the skulls. He was building a skull collection, something
the cops would later find to their horror. He branched out, too, in terms of what he
did to the bodies. Sometimes he would take photos of himself
with the dead (you can see some online), and sometimes he would just keep the heads for
a while and chat with them and kiss them. He would also take photos, sometimes at each
stage of the dismembering process. But perhaps the pinnacle of Dahmer’s weirdness
was when, after drugging one young man, he decided not to kill him outright, but to drill
a hole through his skull, pour in warm water, and so render the victim in a vegetative state. Then he could have a kind of living slave. Dahmer would always say later that all he
wanted was company and for the men not to leave. However, his victim woke up and was not exactly
vegetized, telling to Dahmer, “I have a headache. What time is it?” Apparently, it was time to die, as Dahmer
gave him more spiked drink and strangled the man. He tried this again with a 14-year old, only
this time injecting hydrochloric acid into the young boy’s skull, the frontal lobe
to be exact. He then took the semi-conscious boy to his
bedroom, where his previous victim’s body was still laying. It’s said the boy saw the corpse but was
too messed up to do anything. Dahmer left the boy alone at one point to
get some more beers, only to find on his return that the kid was out in the street talking
to three women. They noticed the boy was bleeding from his
backside and that he was in a bad way, but when a cop turned up, Dahmer said the kid
was his boyfriend. The cop didn’t even think to investigate. Unbelievably, despite the women’s protests,
the cop told Dahmer to wrap the kid up and take him back home. That he dutifully did, and injected the kid’s
brain again with more acid. This time he died. Dahmer kept this skull and added it to his
skull collection. He killed again and again, and not surprisingly
the neighbors complained of a stink and also noise pollution, saying that some dude uses
a chainsaw at night indoors. Dahmer had so many body parts, and sometimes
he would leave the fresh dead around so long he got a maggot infestation. With one body, he tried keeping it for weeks
in water and salt, so he could keep it fully intact, but that didn’t work. It should be known that Jeff kept cuts of
human flesh and organs in the fridge, so he could later eat them. There’s even a story in the media about
one of his neighbors who to this day thinks the meat sandwich Dahmer gave her could have
been human meat. Dahmer finally met his match with a man called
Tracy Edwards, whom Dahmer almost killed but the sensible Edwards, who was 32 at the time,
knew what was coming. He assured Dahmer he wasn’t going to leave
him, even though Dahmer had picked up a knife, used handcuffs on him (on only one hand),
and Edwards knew what the foul smell was and what the steel drum had been used for. He stayed with Dahmer 5 hours with a swinging
handcuff as Dahmer occasionally held a knife to him and even said he was going to eat his
heart. When he got his chance, Edwards punched Dahmer
and ran for it. He told cops what had happened and what he
had seen, and two cops went to Dahmer’s place. There they found the polaroid’s, with an
astonished cop telling his partner that they were certainly not fakes. Dahmer tried to fight but was held down, whereupon
a search was performed, and a fresh head with flesh was quickly found. Dahmer then told the stunned cops, “For
what I did I should be dead.” Investigators searching the house later found
hearts, other organs, hands, penises, bits of tissue, an entire torso, skeletons, and
of course skulls. For his handy work he got 15 consecutive life
terms in prison. He admitted everything and every detail, some
say so he would get away with being insane. That didn’t happen. Psychiatrists said he was sadistic and had
antisocial personality disorder, but he was sane. They also said he was amiable, charming and
amusing to chat with. Inside prison, he read a lot of books and
turned to religion, and even though he’d been separated from the general population,
he persuaded the authorities to move him with the others. That was Dahmer’s downfall, as he was murdered
by fellow inmate and fellow murderer Christopher Scarver with a metal bar from the weight room. Scarver killed another guy, too. Dahmer’s killer later told the press that
he wasn’t happy about what Dahmer had done, but was also bugged out that Dahmer would
make what looked like severed body parts from prison food as a way to piss off other prisoners. It’s even said he added ketchup to his macabre
art to imitate blood. We’ll leave you with a Dahmer quote: “The
killing was a means to an end. That was the least satisfactory part. I didn't enjoy doing that. That's why I tried to create living zombies
with uric acid in the drill, but it never worked. No, the killing was not the objective. I just wanted to have the person under my
complete control, not having to consider their wishes, being able to keep them there as long
as I wanted.” This is a long show, but we think the crazy
story of Dahmer deserves it. Countless plays, books, films, TV shows, and
documentaries have been made about this man. So, what do you think about him? Can you explain why he would do the things
he did? Is there anyone worse in terms of utter strangeness? Let us know in the comments! Also, be sure to check out our other video
called The Golden State Killer - What Do We Know About Him! Thanks for watching, and, as always, don’t
forget to like, share, and subscribe. See you next time!
