You know, there's a specific kind of fear that
comes from the unknown, the monster under the
bed, the shadow in the alley, the thing that
jumps out at you from the dark. But looking at
this absolute mountain of documents we have on
the desk today, the psych reports, the trial
transcripts, the witness statements, I think
there's a much deeper, more unsettling fear we
need to talk about. It's the fear of the known,
isn't it? Exactly. It's the fear of the monster
who isn't hiding under the bed, but the one standing
in the living room. The one who waves to you
in the hallway. Yes, holding a bag of groceries.
The one who is polite. We are talking, of course,
about Jeffrey Dahmer. The Milwaukee cannibal.
The Milwaukee monster. And you're right. The
terror here isn't just the gore. And believe
me, there is plenty of that. It's the dissonance.
It is. If you look at the FBI profiler notes
or, you know, the interviews with his neighbors
that we've pulled, nobody described a raving
lunatic. They described a man who was quiet.
A man who was normal. Until he wasn't. And that
is exactly our mission today. We are not just
recounting the crimes. I think everyone has seen
the headlines of the Netflix series. We are taking
this stack of source material to answer a different
question. How does that transition happen? How
do you go from a shy boy collecting animal bones
in the woods to a man building a literal altar
of human skulls in a downtown apartment? We're
looking for the progression. And to do that,
we have to look at the failures, not just his
internal psychological failures, but the external
ones, the family, the school system, the army,
and maybe most importantly, the police. Oh, absolutely.
Because when you read these transcripts, specifically
the police logs from 1991, you realize Dahmer
didn't just slip through the cracks. The cracks
were canyons, and he was practically waved through
the gates. Before we open the first file, we
do need to be very clear with you listening right
now. The source material we are covering today
involves extreme sexual violence, dismemberment,
and cannibalism. It is graphic. It is. We are
going to treat this with the analytical distance
it requires, but the facts themselves are brutal.
If you are not in the headspace for that, this
is your warning. It is heavy, but it's necessary
context if we really want to move beyond the
sensation and understand the pathology. Okay,
let's start where the psychiatrists started during
the trial. The origin story. Nature versus nurture.
Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer, born May 21, 1960, in
Milwaukee. Yeah. You look at the early reports,
and honestly, it seems confusing. Was he neglected?
Was he loved? the sources seem to argue with
each other they do and that contradiction is
actually the first key insight we have reports
from neighbors saying he was a beautiful energetic
child but then we have later accounts specifically
from his father lionel describing a household
that was just thick with tension right his mother
joyce is described in these psychiatric evaluations
as a hypochondriac someone and this is a quote
greedy for pity greedy for pity that is a very
specific very loaded phrase it paints a picture
of a woman who needed constant emotional validation.
It suggests a home environment where emotional
energy was a finite resource and the mother was
consuming most of it. Lionel was a chemistry
student studying at Marquette. Often gone. So
he wasn't really present. Not consistently. So
you have a young Jeffrey Dahmer in a house that
feels unstable. He later told psychologists,
and this is in the Prinke and Burgess reports,
that he felt unsure of the solidity of the family.
Wow. That is a profound thing for a child to
sense, that the ground beneath them isn't solid.
But plenty of kids grow up in tense households
and don't become serial killers. Yeah. There's
a specific medical event in the timeline that
keeps coming up as a turning point. Yeah. He
was four years old. Just before his fourth birthday,
a double hernia surgery. Now, we have to contextualize
this. In 1964, pediatric anesthesia and pain
management, well, they weren't what they are
today. Not at all. But it's not just the physical
pain. It's the psychological impact. Before the
surgery, teachers and parents say he was happy,
energetic. After. It's like a switch flipped.
How so? What was the change? What do the reports
say? He became timid, subdued. One of his teachers
actually wrote a note, we have it here in the
school records, mentioning signs of neglect or
abandonment. So he felt abandoned by being left
at the hospital. Exactly. He felt that by being
left there, even if it was for his own good,
he had been discarded. And when he came back,
he didn't trust the world anymore. It's interesting
you use the word discarded because... That theme
of abandonment seems to drive everything that
comes later, that fear of people leaving him.
Precisely. And what does a four -year -old do
when he feels the living world is unreliable,
when people leave? He turns to things that can't
leave, things that are static. Which brings us
to the fiddlesticks. When I read this in the
notes, the hair on the back of my neck stood
up. It's such an innocent -sounding word for
something so morbid. It is. And it shows that
his pathology was sensory from the very beginning.
He's four years old, playing under the porch,
and he sees his father pulling out these old
animal bones that had accumulated there, probably
from civet cats or raccoons. Most kids would
be grossed out. Jeffrey was thrilled. But not
just by seeing them, right? It wasn't visual
for him. No, it was auditory. It was the sound.
He took these bones and rattled them in a bucket.
He loved the clatter. He called them his fiddle
sticks. He told a therapist years later that
the sound gave him a feeling of power and solidity.
I see. Living things are unpredictable. They
are soft. They leave. Bones are hard. They are
permanent. They make a sound you can control.
That is a fascinating psychological distinction.
So he wasn't attracted to the violence at that
age. He was attracted to the permanence. Exactly.
And this obsession, it escalates. He's not just
finding bones anymore. He's looking for them.
He's exploring roadkill. He wanted to see, in
his own words, how they fit together. So it was
a curiosity about the mechanics of it all. It
was. This is a crucial distinction we need to
make. He wasn't a sadist at this age. He wasn't
torturing animals for pain. He wasn't the kid
pulling wings off flies. No. He was a necrophile
in the making. He was interested in the objectification.
of the body, the mechanics of it. He wanted to
know how the machine worked once the life was
gone. There's a story here involving a dinner
table conversation that I think perfectly illustrates
the tragedy of his upbringing. The chicken bone
incident. It reads like a dark comedy sketch,
but it's real life. It really does. You have
Lionel, the father, who is a chemist. He loves
science. He's been distant, you know, studying
for his PhD, and he wants to connect with his
strange, quiet son. A chance to bond. He sees
an opening. So Jeffrey comes up to him one night
after dinner and asks, Dad, what would happen
if I put these chicken bones in bleach? Then
Lionel lights up. Exactly. He thinks, my God,
finally, the boy is showing an interest in science.
He's curious. So Lionel takes him to the garage.
He teaches him the proper chemical mixtures.
He shows him how to bleach bones to preserve
them. He thinks he's raising a biologist. And
Jeffrey is learning taxidermy for his future
trophies. It's just a heartbreaking disconnect.
The father is teaching methodology. The son is
feeding a pathology. Wow. And Jeffrey started
collecting roadkill, bleaching the bones. And
this is where it gets ritualistic. He started
mounting. skulls on makeshift crosses in the
woods behind their house. That's moving beyond
curiosity. That is worship, or at least creating
a sanctuary. It was his world. He had no friends.
The family was shouting at each other inside
the house. So he went into the woods, surrounded
himself with death that he had cleaned and controlled,
and he felt safe. Let's jump forward to adolescence.
The family moved to Ohio Bath Township. Jeffrey
is in high school. Now, usually this is where
the loner narrative kicks in. But Dahmer wasn't
invisible, was he? He actually made a spectacle
of himself. This is the mask we talked about.
By high school, he realized he was different.
He was realizing he was gay, which in rural Ohio
in the 1970s was a source of massive internal
shame. A huge secret to carry. A huge secret.
And he knew he had these dark thoughts. So he
created a character, the class clown. The source
material calls it doing a Dahmer. Right. It was
a performance. He would go into the hallways
or the cafeteria and fake epileptic seizures.
He would comport his body, make groaning noises,
pretend to have cerebral palsy. And people laughed.
They laughed, but it was that uncomfortable,
nervous laughter. You know, he was the court
jester. He would do it at the local mall. He
would do it in class. It was a way to get attention,
but it was also a barrier. How so? If everyone
is looking at the clown, nobody is looking at
the person underneath. Nobody asks the clown,
hey, are you okay? There is one anecdote from
a school trip to Washington, D .C. in 1977 that
honestly blew my mind. It suggests a level of
confidence or maybe sociopathy that doesn't fit
the shy boy profile at all. The vice president
prank. It is legendary in the source material.
He's on a class trip. He bets his classmates
that he can get a private tour of the White House.
He finds a phone, calls up the vice president's
office, Walter Mondale at the time. Walter Mondale,
right? And he claims to be a journalist or a
student representative. He talks his way past
the secretaries with pure confidence. And it
worked. He got the tour. He walked out and showed
his classmates the souvenirs. It proves that
he had a chameleon -like ability. He could mimic
authority. He could mimic charm. He could look
you in the eye and lie so convincingly that you
would open the door for him. And that skill becomes
deadly later on. Absolutely deadly, especially
when he's dealing with the police. While he's
pulling these pranks, he's chemically unraveling.
The drinking started early. Very early. age 14,
and we aren't talking about sneaking a beer at
a party. We're talking about hiding liquor in
his jacket lining during school hours, drinking
scotch in first period. In school. In school.
He told a classmate once when he was caught sipping
from a flask in history class, it's my medicine.
Medicine. That implies he knew he was sick. He
knew something was wrong. He was anesthetizing
himself. He was trying to drown the fantasies
because the fantasies were shifting. It wasn't
just about attraction anymore. He was fantasizing
about a partner who was unconscious, a partner
who couldn't speak. He started fantasizing about
dissection. And this brings us to the first time
he tried to make the fantasy real. The jogger.
This is a sliding doors moment. A real fork in
the road. It is. He fixated on a male jogger
who ran past his house every day. He found him
attractive. But Dahmer didn't want to ask him
on a date. He took a baseball bat and hit him
in the bushes. Oh, wow. He waited for hours.
His plan was to knock the man unconscious and
drag him into the woods. But the jogger never
came. Not that day. He changed his route or took
a day off, and Dahmer went back inside. But the
intent was locked in. The psychological barrier
had been crossed. He was ready to hunt. He just
needed a target. And then the environment collapses.
1978, the year he graduates, the year his parents
divorced. It was a nuclear divorce. It was bitter.
It was loud. Lionel moved out to a motel. Joyce,
the mother, won custody of the younger brother,
David, and moved back to Wisconsin. And in the
chaos, they essentially forgot about Jeffrey.
They just left him. He had just turned 18. So
legally, he was an adult. But functionally, he
was a spiraling alcoholic with untreated psychosis.
And they left him alone in a big house in the
middle of the woods with a stocked liquor cabinet
and no supervision. It's a powder keg. And the
fees lit just three weeks after graduation. June
18th, 1978. Stephen Hicks. Stephen Hicks was
a tragedy of... Wrong place, wrong time. He was
18, just like Dahmer. He was hitchhiking to a
rock concert. Now, you have to remember, in 1978,
hitchhiking was common. Yeah, people did that.
Dahmer pulls over. Now, at this point, Evian
suggests Dahmer doesn't have a plan to kill him.
He just sees a guy he's attracted to. He wants
company. He invites him back to the house for
a beer. And Hicks goes, why wouldn't he? It's
a pier. A guy his age. A nice house. They hang
out. They drink. They listen to music. But eventually,
Hicks wants to leave. He has a concert to get
to. And this is the trigger we talked about earlier.
Abandonment. He didn't want him to leave. That's
what he said. He wanted to leave and I didn't
want him to leave. That is the core of it. Total
control. If Hicks leaves, Dahmer is alone again.
And that's when he attacks. Dahmer picks up a
10 -pound dumbbell and strikes Hicks from behind.
He strangles him. And then the transition is
complete. The boy who collected roadkill takes
over. The disposal of Stephen Hicks is horrifyingly
efficient for a first -time killer. I mean, most
18 -year -olds can't even clean their room, let
alone dispose of a body completely. It's because
he had practiced. He dissected the body. He buried
the remains in the backyard. Later, he dug them
up, crushed the bones with a sledgehammer, and
scattered them in the ravine. With a sledgehammer.
He dissolved the flesh with acid. He used the
techniques his father taught him combined with
the anatomy he learned on the animals. It was
clinical. Now, usually in these stories, once
the killer breaks the seal, they can't stop.
The floodgates open. But Dahmer stops. There
is a massive gap in the timeline here. Nine years.
Why? It's what criminologists call failed normalcy.
The murder of Hicks scared him. It really did.
He didn't want to be a monster. He wanted to
be normal. So he tried to do what normal young
men do. He went to college. Ohio State University.
How did that go? Disaster. Total disaster. His
GPA was .45. He was drunk all the time. He failed
every single class except riflery. Riflery. Riflery.
So his father, trying to discipline him, says,
join the army. And the army took him, even with
that record. They did. And ironically, they trained
him as a medical specialist. So now the government
is formally training him in anatomy. He served
in West Germany. And this period is... It's debated.
Officially, he was discharged for alcohol abuse.
His drinking was legendary, even by Army standards.
But there were rumors. There were rumors, and
later some unproven allegations that there were
unsolved murders in his vicinity in Germany.
But nothing ever stuck. Nothing ever stuck. So
he's discharged. Discharged and sent home. A
failure in college, a failure in the Army. He
ends up in West Allis, Wisconsin, living with
his grandmother. Catherine Dahmer. By all accounts,
a sweet, religious woman. She's the only person
Dahmer ever seemed to genuinely love. She took
him to church. He tried to be a good grandson.
He got a job at a blood bank. Then a chocolate
factory, ambrosia chocolate. At the basement.
The basement became his new woods. He started
drinking again. And the fantasies came back darker.
He stole a male mannequin from a department store.
A mannequin? Think about the psychology of that.
He brought it home and kept it in the closet.
He wanted something that looked human but had
no will, no voice, no ability to leave. The perfect
compliant partner. The perfect partner. Grandma
found it. She was terrified. She made him throw
it out. But that didn't stop the urge. He started
going to gay bathhouses in Milwaukee. And this
is where he starts refining the method, the drugging.
Yes. He realized he didn't have the social skills
to keep people and he didn't want to negotiate
with them. So he started crushing sleeping pills,
Hellshawn, into drinks. He called it zombification,
though at this stage it was just rendering them
unconscious so he could use their bodies without
them resisting. He's turning them into objects.
Exactly. He said in his confession, I trained
myself to view people as objects of pleasure.
And in 1987, the dam breaks. Stephen told me.
This is the blackout murder. Yes. Dahmer meets
Tuomi at a bar. They go to a hotel. Dahmer had
the drug drink ready, but he claims he drank
too much himself. He says he blacked out and
woke up the next morning and Tuomi was dead.
His chest was crushed in. Did he intend to kill
him? Dahmer claimed no. He claimed it was an
accident of rough sex or a drunken rage he couldn't
remember. But here is where the monster in the
living room comes in. He didn't call the police.
He bought a large suitcase. He folded Tuomi's
body into it, took a taxi back to his grandmother's
house, and dragged it into the basement. While
his grandmother was upstairs making tea. Living
her life. This is the horror of the West Allis
years. He killed three men in that house. James
Doxtater. Richard Guerrero. He was dismembering
them in the basement sink, boiling the bones
on his grandmother's stove, telling her it was
taxidermy chemicals or work stuff from the chocolate
factory. The deception is just... Staggering.
And there was one moment where the two worlds
collided. Ronald Flowers. This story gives me
chills every time. This is one of the most chilling
what -ifs. It is. He brought Ronald Flowers home.
He drugged him. Flowers was groggy, basically
helpless. But then Grandma Catherine comes down
the stairs. She sees the man. She says, is that
you, Jeff? She starts fussing over the guest.
Ah, he doesn't look... Well, let me make him
some coffee. She inadvertently intervened in
a murder. She broke the spell. She stayed with
them. Dahmer couldn't kill him with her watching.
He let Flowers go. Flowers woke up later in a
hospital groggy with no memory of how he got
there. He actually reported it to the police,
but without evidence. No physical injury, just
a blackout. Nothing happened. It's amazing how
many times he was almost caught. In 1988, he
was caught. For molesting a child. The older
brother of a future victim, tragically. This
should have been the end of it. The system had
him. He was convicted. But the judge, Judge William
Gardner, gave him work release. Work release
for a sex offense involving a minor. The judge
felt Dummer was productive because he had a steady
job at the chocolate factory. So he slept in
jail at night, but during the day he was free,
he could walk around, and once he was out on
probation, he moved into the apartment. The Oxford
Apartments. Apartment 213. May 1990. He moves
in and he brings a box with him. Inside the box
is the mummified head of one of his victims,
Anthony Sears. He puts it in his new closet.
He is now completely independent. No parents,
no grandma. No rules. Let's describe this place
because it becomes a character in the story.
It wasn't a dungeon. It was a regular apartment
building. It was a low -income housing unit in
a predominantly African -American neighborhood.
Dahmer was one of the few white tenants. The
neighbors describe it as smelling terrible almost
immediately. The smell of death. And chemicals,
bleach, incense. He always had an excuse. My
freezer broke and the meat spoiled. My tropical
fish died. I'm doing varnish work. And because
he was polite and because people generally don't
want to confront their neighbors, especially
a quiet, weird neighbor, they let it slide. And
in 1991, the slide turns into an avalanche, a
murder factory. It was a spree. He was killing
almost weekly. He would go to a bar, lure a man
back, drug him, strangle him, dismember him.
He targeted ethnic minority men almost exclusively.
Now Dahmer always claimed he wasn't racist. He
did. He said he was just attracted to a specific
body type. But we have to look at the results.
A white man preying on black, Asian and Latino
men in a marginalized community. It creates a
dynamic where the police were less likely to
investigate missing persons reports aggressively.
Absolutely. It is the less dead phenomenon. It's
a sociological term. Society cares less about
certain victims. Cess workers, minorities, gay
men in the height of the AIDS epidemic. Dahmer
was swimming in a pool of victims that the system
was already ignoring. He knew nobody was coming
for them. And his methods. They weren't just
killing anymore. He was experimenting. The drilling.
I struggle to even say the words because the
cruelty is so specific. This is where we see
the depth of his loneliness and his madness.
He didn't just want a dead body. A dead body
rots. It can't hug you back. He wanted a living
zombie. A living zombie. He drilled holes into
the skulls of living victims, Errol, Lindsay,
Conor X, and the Sumphone, and injected hydrochloric
acid or boiling water directly into the frontal
lobes of their brains. He was trying to lobotomize
them. He wanted to white their will. He wanted
to keep the motor functions, the breathing, the
movement, but remove the person. He wanted a
companion who would sit there, never leave, never
judge, and never speak. It never worked. No.
It killed them, usually slowly and painfully.
And then he would consume them. He ate hearts,
livers, biceps. He told the psychologist he wanted
to make them a permanent part of me. So if he
ate them, they couldn't leave him. It's a desperate,
twisted attempt at connection. This leads us
to the single most infuriating, heartbreaking
moment in this entire case. The moment the system
didn't just fail, but actively participated.
May 27, 1991. This is the moment that haunts
Milwaukee. It is the moment where the mask worked
too well. Domerick goes out to buy beer. Conorac,
who is only 14 years old, has been drugged and
drilled. But he wakes up. He manages to stumble
out of the apartment. He does. He's naked, bleeding
from the head, unable to speak clearly. He collapses
in the street. Two women, neighbors, find him.
Sandra Smith and Nicole Childress. They are heroes.
They call 911. They say, there is a child here.
He is hurt. He is naked. The police arrive. Officers
Belshazzar and Gabrish. And then Dahmer comes
back. And he puts on the mask. He walks up, calm,
cool, collected. He tells the officers, oh, I'm
sorry. This is my friend. He's 19. He's just
really drunk. We had a lover's spat. He's 14.
He's bleeding. And the women are screaming this.
The women are pointing out that the boy is bleeding
from his rectum. They are shouting, he is a child.
And the police. They ignore the black women.
They listen to the polite white man. I can't
believe it. They actually threatened to arrest
the women for interfering with police business.
And they take the boy back inside. They physically
escorted Conorac's synthesis phone back into
apartment 213. They walked him into the slaughterhouse.
They stood in the living room. They even commented
on the smell. Dahmer said, broken freezer. They
bought it. They left the boy there and walked
out. It makes you sick to hear it. to know that
the officers were standing feet away from a decomposing
body in the next room and they handed a living
victim back to his killer. It gets worse. We
have the transcripts of the police radio banter
after they left. They were joking. They were
laughing about delousing themselves because they
had to touch the intoxicated Asian. They were
joking about it. They made homophobic jokes about
the lovers. It was racism and homophobia, clear
as day. And because of that prejudice, Conorac
died. Dahmer killed him minutes after the police
left. And he went on to kill four more people
after that. Four people who would be alive if
those officers had done their job. Exactly. That
was May. He wasn't caught until July. That's
two more months of terror because of that failure.
So how does it finally end? July 22, 1991. Tracy
Edwards. Tracy Edwards was a survivor. He met
Dahmer at a bar, went back to the apartment for
money to take photos. Dahmer managed to handcuff
one of his wrists, but Edwards got a bad vibe
immediately. The smell. The smell hit him. He
saw the boxes of acid, the blue drum in the corner.
And Dahmer pulls a knife. He puts the knife to
Edwards' chest. He's acting erratic. He's chanting.
He puts on the movie The Exorcist III. He tells
Edwards, I'm going to eat your heart. How did
Edwards keep it together? He played the game.
He saw that Dahmer needed reassurance. So Edwards
said, it's okay, Jeff. We're friends. I'm not
going anywhere. He kept him calm. He waited.
And the moment Dahmer looked away, Edwards punched
him in the face and ran. He got out. He flagged
down a patrol car, officers Roth and Mueller.
And this time, the officers didn't just walk
away. Edwards led them back. They went up to
the apartment to get the key for the handcuffs.
Officer Mueller is standing in the bedroom. He
looks under the bed and sees a knife. Then he
sees an open dresser drawer. The Polaroids. Dozens
of them. Dahmer documented everything. dismembered
bodies, posed corpses, steps of the process.
Mueller looks at them, walks into the living
room, shows his partner one of the photos and
says, these are for real. And the struggle begins.
They tackle Dahmer, they pin him down, and then
they start to open things. They open the refrigerator.
A severed head on the bottom shelf. It was a
house of horrors. Four severed heads in the kitchen,
seven skulls in the bedroom, hearts in the fridge,
a torso in the freezer, and that blue drum in
the corner. It was filled with acid and three
decomposing torsos. The medical examiner later
said it was more like dismantling a museum than
a crime scene. And that's a perfect segue to
the shrine, because Dahmer confessed that he
was building something specific. He had plans
drawn up. We have the sketches here in the file.
Describe it for us. What was he building? A black
table adorned with skulls. Incense burners. He
planned to paint the entire skeletons of two
victims and place them on either side as sentinels.
He had a special blue lamp. He's going to hang
over it to create a mood. What was it for? What's
the purpose? Meditation. He told police he wanted
to sit in a black chair in front of it and draw
power from them. He felt that if he was surrounded
by their remains, he wasn't alone. He was the
king of a silent kingdom. That is horrifying.
He said if he had been arrested six months later,
it would have been finished. It goes back to
that idea of ownership. He was creating a world
where he was the god, surrounded by his subjects.
Precisely. So, the trial. 1992. The evidence
is overwhelming. He confesses to everything.
So the question isn't, did he do it? It's, is
he sane? Guilty but insane. That was the plea.
The defense had to prove that he had a mental
disease that made him unable to control his actions.
They brought in experts to testify about necrophilia,
borderline personality disorder, schizotypal
personality disorder. They painted him as a sick
man, a passenger in his own body. But the prosecution,
led by Dr. Park Deeds, had a devastating counter
-argument, and it centered on the alcohol. This
is the brilliance of the prosecution Dietz argued.
If Dahmer was truly compelled by an unstoppable
urge, why did he need to get drunk to do it?
The evidence showed Dahmer would drink heavily
before a murder. Liquid courage. Exactly. Dietz
argued this was liquid courage. He was drinking
to suppress his conscience. If he had to suppress
his conscience, that means he had a conscience.
And if he had a conscience, he knew it was wrong.
That's a compelling point. He was choosing to
kill. He was choosing to overcome his inhibition.
That implies choice. The jury agreed. They found
him sane. 15 life sentences. No death penalty
in Wisconsin. He goes to prison. Columbia Correctional
Institution. He was kept in solitary at first.
But interestingly, he adjusted. He received fan
mail. Money. And he had a religious conversion.
A genuine one. It seems so. He met with a minister
weekly. He is baptized in the prison whirlpool.
He started questioning whether it was a sin for
him to keep living. He seemed to be seeking an
exit. And on November 28, 1994, he found it.
Or it found him. He was on cleaning duty in the
gym. The guards left him unsupervised for 20
minutes. Just 20 minutes. He was with two other
inmates, Jesse Anderson and Christopher Scarver.
Scarver. Christopher Scarver was suffering from
severe schizophrenia. He believed he was the
son of God. He had a newspaper clipping of Dahmer's
crimes in his pocket. He confronted Dahmer. He
asked him, did you really do these things? Did
Dahmer fight back? No. He didn't even yell for
the guards. Scarver took a 20 -inch metal bar
from the weight room. He bludgeoned Dahmer to
death. Reports say Dahmer just accepted it. He
effectively committed suicide by inmate. And
his mother's reaction. Joyce Dahmer, it breaks
your heart in a different way. She said, now
is everybody happy. It was the bitter end to
a bitter story. The victim's families finally
had closure, in a sense. The monster was dead.
The aftermath is just as messy. The building
was demolished. The lot is still empty today.
The victim's family sued. There was a horrible
moment where they almost auctioned off Dahmer's
possessions, his tools, his fridge, to pay the
families. A market for murderabilia. Exactly.
But a civic group raised money to buy the lot
and destroy the items so they wouldn't end up
on some collector's shelf. And even his brain
was a point of contention. His mom wanted it
studied by scientists to see if there was a biological
cause for his evil. His dad wanted it cremated
to put it all to rest. The judge sided with the
father. It was cremated. So what does this all
mean? We've walked through the timeline. We've
seen the escalation, the fiddlesticks, the mask,
the failures of the police. What is the takeaway?
When you close that file, what stays with you?
It's the invisibility. We like to think monsters
look like monsters. We want them to have horns.
We want them to be drooling maniacs. But Dahmer
was the guy who helped jumpstart your car. He
was the guy who politely explained to the police
that his friend was drunk. He used our social
contracts against us. He used our politeness
against us. Exactly. The police officers at the
Synthesum phone scene didn't want to be rude
to the nice white man. That desire to be polite,
to not pry, to respect privacy, that is where
he hid. He hid in the blind spots of our civility.
It makes you wonder, who are we standing next
to in the elevator? And how much do we miss because
we are afraid to ask the awkward question? And
are we listening to the vulnerable people screaming
for help or are we listening to the calm voice
telling us everything is fine? That is a thought
that will keep me up tonight. Thank you for walking
us through this darkness today. Stay safe. We'll
see you in the next Deep Dive.