Original subtitles

It's the most unspeakable of crimes.

- Cannibalism is so taboo, you can't wrap your head around it.

- The idea of consuming human flesh is unbelievable.

- People have to take a step back and recognize

that human beings can indeed do that.

And for many, cannibalism conjures up the name

of one man.

- Jeffrey, I hate you, motherfucker!

I hate you!

- Jeffrey Dahmer personifies every one of our fears.

The flesh, the bones, the Polaroids.

- It just kept getting worse and worse, and worse.

But this carnal act is more common than you think.

So where is the line between fantasy...

- There are people practicing all of these kinks all the time.

...and flesh eater?

- He was actively eating human meat.

And what drives those like Dahmer

and his bloody brethren

to indulge in this ultimate taboo?

- He's like a shark that's had the taste of blood.

He was never going to stop.

- I lived in Milwaukee all my life.

She was called Drug City because of the crime.

There's a lot of drugs, a lot of murders.

Drug City had it all.

Looking for a safe home,

Vernell and his wife, Pamela,

move into the Oxford Apartments in October 1989.

- It was a very nice place to live.

They didn't just let anybody move into those apartments.

And that was a good thing.

Within a few days, Vernell meets several neighbors,

including the tenant across the hall

in apartment 213.

- I noticed that he was a white guy,

which seemed a little bit odd

because we were in

a predominantly black neighborhood.

He seemed very pleasant.

He introduced himself as Jeff.

But six months into his lease,

Vernell starts to notice a foul odor

in the apartment building.

- I can best describe it as meat rotting in the sun.

It had gotten so bad, I went into our linen closet

and I grabbed a bath towel.

And I rolled it up and placed it in the gap

between the floor and the door.

Vernell's wife soon traces the stench

back to the source.

Their neighbor Jeff's front door.

- She told me that she was sitting in a chair in the hall

waiting for him to come home.

I felt bad for the white boy for the meet an angry black woman.

He said that his meat had soured in his freezer,

and I didn't believe he had any reason to lie.

Come to find out that that wasn't the deal at all.

Police found a grisly scene.

A human head plus several more skulls and parts of bodies.

- One of the nation's worst mass murder cases ever.

- Inside apartment 213.

- That's when I met Jeffrey Dahmer.

And after that, I never, I never saw Jeff again.

Jeff was not real.

Jeffrey Dahmer, that was real.

- Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment was a series of nightmares.

If you opened the door to his bedroom,

you would see a dead body decomposing next to the bed.

You go into the refrigerator, you open it up,

human meat all inside of the refrigerator.

You have a severed human skull inside of the freezer,

and a pot filled with severed penises

on the stove.

He was actively consuming human flesh.

- I remember when he got arrested.

I was around 10 years old.

And I didn't think that any human could ever do

the things that I was hearing Jeffrey Dahmer did.

So it really changed my perspective,

and I know millions and millions

of kids' perspective on what is the boogeyman.

What does the boogeyman look like?

Now, we have to look out for the guy in the khaki pants

with the button-down shirt.

- I was working for Inside Edition

and the story came in.

And my first instinct was to say,

I've gotta find out about that story.

I've gotta know who did this and why.

- I think what was most remarkable

about Dahmer's early life is how unremarkable it was.

Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1960,

Jeffrey Dahmer moves with his family to Bath, Ohio

when he is eight years old.

- Bath, Ohio was a great place. And there wasn't crime.

There weren't problems.

So I think Jeff had everything available to him

that most kids would want growing up.

With parents and a brother,

and a nice home, and good schools.

The offspring of a chemist and a stay-at-home mom,

Jeffrey and his younger brother, David,

grow up in modest, middle-class comfort.

- Jeff played in the band.

He wrote for the school paper.

He was on the tennis team.

I think his parents, especially his dad,

tried to get him involved with

activities and make some friends,

and not be just off on his own all the time.

Still, there are some activities

that young Jeff enjoys more than others.

- He had an interest in dead bodies of animals.

He lived in a wooded area.

You'd find inevitably some dead animals there.

But he didn't go out hunting. He didn't go out and shoot them.

- Once he found a dead dog and he completely

skinned the animal. He dissolved the head in acid

until he could get all the skin off of it,

then he took that skull and he stuck it on a pole

outside of his shed of collectables.

- You know, there's a lot of kids who are interested

in human biology, and to some degree

that's exactly what he was interested in

was animal biology.

- He did well in biology classes and, you know,

he had his little chemistry lab at home.

I actually thought he might have someday

become a medical doctor or something.

Though his father is aware of his new hobby,

Jeff finds little guidance within the Dahmer home.

- His parents are what you would call emotionally distant.

- Jeffrey's mother, Joyce, she had really bad depression.

And the only time he would see his father

was when he was coming home from work.

But even in those family environments,

his mother and his father were constantly fighting.

- Some children take this lack of attention

and they become hams, or jokey people

looking for validation outside of their home.

- One of the things I clearly remember about Jeff Dahmer,

is that you'd be standin' there

talking to somebody by your locker just doing nothing,

and he'd just stoop over

and put his head on your chest and say,

I wanna listen to your heart.

One time he stole the fetal pig in eighth grade biology class.

- Dahmer was a little bit of a prankster in high school.

And he managed to get himself into the honor club photo

when he wasn't really in the honor club.

- Of course, that's an infamous photo now because his head

was blacked out in our yearbooks by the yearbook editor.

And that's Jeff Dahmer.

I'd say that at that time, no one really cared.

It's just Jeff being goofy and it's okay.

He had good manners and he treated people nice,

so he was never suspected as a troublemaker.

But soon, Dahmer's childish behavior

makes it difficult for him to fit in.

- Jeff Dahmer did have a feeling of alienation

because he knew that he was different from other kids.

He knew he had different feelings and desires.

He's also starting to realize

he's attracted to other men.

- When Jeffrey was 13 years old, he had engaged

in a romantic physical relationship

with a boy in his neighborhood,

and this was the first inclination to Jeffrey

that he was in fact gay.

- In 1976, '77, '78 nobody talked about, ah,

being gay or sexual feelings.

They didn't. Who could they tell?

They couldn't tell their parents.

They couldn't tell school counselors.

- He wasn't able to express, uh,

his desire to have sex with men after he hit puberty.

He had to shove it down, and he had to keep it quiet.

- By the time he was 14, he was already crippled

with this feeling of otherness, so he would just pound beers

or pound alcohol before going into school

because it allowed him to kinda feel normal.

- Jeffrey's alcoholism starting from such a young age

was definitely a warning sign,

but no one could possibly predict

how much worse things were going to get.

- You know, some people live good lives

and become successful and raise families.

And other people become Jeff Dahmer

and go down a road of no return.

Years before Jeffrey Dahmer

first feasts on human flesh,

he's a tortured high school student

hiding his homosexuality.

- Jeffrey Dahmer was the loneliest man in the world.

He could not explain his inner fantasies

to his young friends,

and they overwhelmed him every single day.

- He really drifted away from all of us,

and his grades went way down.

He lost interest in going to classes.

He lost interest in doing most anything.

And he was drinking every day.

But it's a seminal event

during his senior year of high school

that tips Dahmer past the point.

- Jeff's parents divorced our senior year,

and Mrs. Dahmer moved to Wisconsin

with his little brother.

And I guess there was some kind of court order to sell the house

in the divorce proceedings and so Jeff's father had to

move out of the house, too.

He moved in the Ohio Motel in Bath and lived there.

And then Jeff was living in the house

by himself while it was up for sale.

- His parents are now gone from the home,

the divorce was underway, it provided the opportunity

for him to be alone in the family residence

- Dahmer has this profound sense of loneliness and isolation

that he's trying to fill, but he doesn't quite know how.

- Jeffrey Dahmer I don't think ever had a true friend,

and that's what he was searching for.

That same year, in the spring of 1978,

Dahmer finds a way to fill the void.

- Jeffrey Dahmer was obsessed with this jogger.

Every day he's been watching this jogger go by.

- He had frequently had the fantasy

of maybe he could get this jogger to come in

and be sexual with him.

But the day Dahmer decides to finally

put his plan into action, the jogger never shows.

So, he sets out in search of a new target.

- His desire to have people stay with him,

it was just so tangible.

He didn't care about who they were as a person,

he just cared about their physical form.

- He was left to his own devices,

and he was drinking heavily,

and he saw a young man that was essentially an opening

to make his fantasies real.

Steven Hicks was 19 years old, hitchhiking, as many kids did.

- Jeffrey Dahmer picked up Steven Hicks

and said that he would offer him a ride,

but he offered to go back to Jeffrey's house first

to have some drinks.

And Steven accepted it.

- Dahmer brought him home.

They start to drink.

He makes a move on Steven Hicks.

And Steven Hicks tells him that he isn't gay.

That's all it takes to send Dahmer over the edge.

- For Jeffrey Dahmer, with his particular temperament

and makeup, he's trying to fill with sex

and trying to make intimate connections,

but mostly it's about power and control.

- He grabbed a barbell, and he beat him to death

in what he called a moment of passion.

High school senior Jeffrey Dahmer

has just crossed the Rubicon, graduating to stone-cold killer.

- As Mr. Hicks lie dying, uh,

Jeffrey Dahmer strangely enough wasn't satisfied.

He saw the dead body after, uh, after Hicks had bled out

and he became aroused,

and he masturbated on the victim.

- The part of him that knew it was wrong

and knew there were consequences to his actions

was probably scared about what was going to happen to him.

But that thrill, that high that he's chasing

is just too irresistible.

- Once he realized how aroused he was

at the sight of a lifeless corpse,

there was no turning back.

It is the beginning of a recipe of complete and utter horror.

But Dahmer's depravity doesn't end there.

- Dahmer then proceeded to do what he did

to countless animals in his shed.

He figured out he needed to get rid of this body,

and so he dismembered it.

Using a paring knife, he removed his arms and his legs,

and he separated them into a bunch of different garbage bags.

- Jeffrey Dahmer's willingness to manipulate carcasses

and play with dead animals

can be an early indicator of a psychopath.

They are lacking a connection to humanity,

a, a certain empathy.

It's definitely a red flag. No doubt about it.

Dahmer's affinity for dead animals

is not uncommon among cannibals.

This same predilection was adopted

by another famous flesh eater,

29 year old, Luka Magnotta.

- Luka Magnotta is a, let's call him an amateur model

that, uh, uploaded videos of himself

murdering cats to Facebook.

- Luka Magnotta was all about seeking attention.

He wanted all eyes on him at all times.

- When you see his first video that he uploaded,

he's messing with cats, he's killing cats.

It's absolutely horrific.

And it goes all the way to him finally killing a human being.

On May 25, 2011,

Magnotta posts an 11-minute video of himself

repeatedly stabbing an unknown man with an ice pick.

He then uses a knife and fork

to remove his victim's flesh and eat it.

- It's very much like a drug addiction.

I'm gonna do X amount of drugs the first time,

but then I'm gonna need to do more and more and more

as it goes on.

- Luka Magnotta didn't just wanna heighten his crimes,

he also wanted to heighten his fame,

which is something that's unique to serial killers nowadays,

especially with the rise of the internet.

- That same week, Magnotta ships the remains of his victim

to the headquarters of Canada's various political parties.

- He's tempting the cops, daring them to catch him.

Killers like Luka Magnotta,

they go try to get the thrill-seeking

by wanting to get caught.

Sometimes even fantasizing

about the moment they get caught.

Because if you're caught, like sure, yeah,

you're caught for murder

and yeah, you might go to jail or be put to death, but man,

are you gonna have that spotlight

for one glorious 15 minutes of fame.

Six days later,

the attention-seeking cannibal gets his wish.

After fleeing Canada and triggering

a highly-publicized worldwide manhunt,

Magnotta is arrested in a Berlin internet cafe

while surfing for stories about his own media coverage.

He's extradited to Canada,

stands trial, and is found guilty

of murdering the man he ate,

his 21-year-old lover, Jun Lin.

Magnotta's currently serving a life sentence.

Unlike Luka Magnotta,

Jeffery Dahmer prefers to avoid the spotlight.

After killing and dismembering his first victim, Steven Hicks,

Dahmer fears he will be caught.

- Dahmer, at this point in his development,

is still shy with what he's doing.

So he's going to try to get rid of the evidence.

With his victim in several garbage bags,

Dahmer sets out to dispose of the remains at the dump.

But en route, his worst fear comes true.

He's stopped by the police for erratic driving.

- They flashed the light into the back of his car

and said, what's in the bags back there?

Dahmer calmly explains to the officer

that he was having trouble sleeping,

so he decided to get a jump

on his weekly trash duty.

- Obviously, Jeff Dahmer

was very good at hiding this dark side of himself.

He was able to convince people, talk his way out of things,

appear relatively normal.

- The police just give him an

aw, shucks, you just get out of here.

You watch yourself gettin' home.

Jeffrey Dahmer's so freaked out,

he drives back to his house with the remains.

This time, Dahmer leaves nothing to chance.

- He then dissected it further, pounded the bones

into piece, small pieces, and then spread it out

over the 1 1/4 wooded acres of his home.

This wouldn't be the only time

Dahmer narrowly escapes being caught in the act.

- He's proven to himself that he can do it

and get away with it.

So how do I find this, this high again?

Some believe Dahmer's dark desires

were biologically predetermined.

- You could say that Jeffrey Dahmer's

fate was sealed almost at birth.

When his mother was pregnant with him,

she took 27 pills a day,

including growth hormones, estrogen, progesterone,

uppers, downers.

- Could that trauma while his mother was pregnant with him

have damaged his brain while he was in utero?

It is a possibility.

For now, Dahmer quiets his demons.

After graduating from high school in 1978,

his struggles become more normal.

- The story of Dahmer's after high school life

reads like the story of millions and millions of people

who are trying to find themselves.

Dahmer attends Ohio State University,

but once again, struggles to fit in.

- He enrolled into college, which he actually

did flunk out of after a year

because of his alcoholic tendencies,

and after that, his father forced him

to go into the Army.

- He became an Army medic, was dispatched to Germany,

but the drinking problems

surfaced while he was in the military.

And after a period of time, a year or so, he was sent home.

But coming home to Ohio doesn't help either.

- There were some problems there at home drinking,

and the father thought Dahmer would be best served

by going to live with the grandmother.

In December 1981, Jeffrey moves to Wisconsin

to live with 77-year-old Catherine Dahmer.

- The hope was that maybe a,

a change of venue would be helpful.

Dahmer seems to take well

to his new environment,

finding new ways to suppress his feelings of otherness.

- The grandmother was a spiritual person,

and she seemed to have a beneficial influence on him.

Dahmer said he started reading the bible,

started thinking about these things,

and assessing what he had done.

- Religion was like his last effort on trying to fix

what he thought was broken, which was being gay.

And he really dove into that,

and spent a lot a time studying religion,

going to church, and everyone around Jeffery

thought that this was going to be a really good thing for him.

Now, 21-year-old Dahmer lives under the radar,

doing his best to play the part

of a dutiful, church-going grandson.

But below the surface, evil is rising.

- He continued to push down

these darker demons that he held within.

But keep in mind, what happens in the darkness comes to light.

In the spring of 1982,

Jeffrey Dahmer is living

with his grandmother in West Allis, Wisconsin

and struggling to keep his dark fantasies at bay.

He already has one murder under his belt

and is fighting the urge to commit further unspeakable acts.

But he has yet to find the taste for human flesh.

- He still felt the quote, unquote,

"remorse" about Steven Hicks into his adulthood.

And he knew he had to do something,

because his thoughts weren't going away.

The Bible didn't help it, and the booze

actually made it worse.

Desperate to act out on his dark desires,

Dahmer finds a partner who won't fight back.

- So he stole a mannequin from a department store,

and he treated it as if it was his boyfriend.

He would go out with it. He'd leave it in his car.

He'd sleep with it in the bed.

- This wasn't some fun senior prank.

This was for Dahmer's own sexual purposes.

- Pygmalionism is the psychological condition

of falling in love with one's own creation.

Dahmer has this mannequin as a kind of stop-gap measure,

somebody he can impose his will on that won't fight back.

Dahmer keeps this new obsession

close to the chest,

storing the mannequin in his closet whenever he's away.

But it's only a matter of time

before his dark secret is exposed.

- One day his grandmother went into his room,

opened his closet, and was shocked and disturbed

at seeing this mannequin.

So she completely freaked out and forced him to get rid of it.

Now Dahmer must find new ways to get his kicks...

outside the home.

- He did a lot of public exposure

where he exposed himself to young boys

on more than one occasion.

He was a public masturbator as well.

- He goes to a state fair,

and he gets arrested for exposing himself.

- And then later, he exposed himself to two boys in a park,

and that led to a prosecution.

Still, Dahmer doesn't murder anyone else,

for now.

- Dahmer had great impulse control

combined with complete and utter lack

of impulse control.

Just him trying to present himself as normal.

That must have not been easy to do

when you're hiding all of these dark thoughts.

To keep his mind busy,

Dahmer takes a job at the Ambrosia Chocolate Factory

in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in January, 1985.

- He was a reliable worker. Did good work.

He was able to mix hundreds of different mixtures

of the cocoa that went into the different

orders of chocolate that the company produced.

None of Dahmer's coworkers have any idea

of the dangerous sexual fantasies filling his head.

But as his desire grows stronger,

Dahmer seeks out a new lover

in the strangest of places.

- One day he saw the obituary of a man who had passed away

in a motorcycle accident.

And just by looking at the picture of this man,

he completely fell in love with him.

So he ended up going to where this body was buried.

- He did try to dig up the body.

He made an attempt and dug down maybe a little bit.

- It would be bad enough

if I were to go and desecrate a grave,

dig up a body, vandalize a tombstone.

That would be sacrilege and offensive to people,

but now we're adding on

this other layer of sexuality on top of it.

In the end, the ground is too hard,

and Dahmer quickly aborts the effort.

But the beast inside of him awakens.

Dahmer continues his quest for a submissive lover.

He heads to nearby Milwaukee,

where he discovers a thriving gay community.

- The bar scene was amazing.

Second Street was the main drag in the '80s.

It was very gay friendly.

People who, uh, didn't care about what other people thought.

Dahmer does his best not to draw attention.

Still, he manages to stand out in the crowd.

- He would always hang out by the cigarette machine.

Sat back in a little alcove.

And he would sit there and watch people.

I'm the kinda person, if I see someone standing around

countless times, you know,

I'm gonna go up and say something to 'em.

And I walked by him just nonchalantly

and go, smile, It's not that bad.

And he kinda smiled and I was like, what's your name? Jeff.

And, you know, we talked a little bit

and I said, yeah, I see you here a lot.

I'd see him looking at somebody. I'd say, you like that one, huh?

You know, he'd give a little smile once in a while.

I thought he was a very shy person.

Goldie's not the only one

to take note of the tall, blonde man in the corner.

- A lot a people would like the way Jeffrey looked.

And they would talk about him and wanna go talk to him.

And I always said, well talk to him.

I've talked to him before, you know, he's a nice guy.

At least I thought so.

- Jeffrey was not someone

that would appear to be a threat to anyone,

and so when he would approach these men at bars,

he didn't seem like someone that anyone should be afraid of.

And that really worked in his advantage.

But when Dahmer migrates

over to the gay bath houses nearby,

the reception isn't quite as welcoming.

- Bath houses were a place that you could go

and anticipate you would meet a sexual partner.

But the men there found Jeffrey Dahmer

to be incredibly creepy.

So Dahmer finds his own way

to gain companionship.

- He'd say, here have a drink of my, whatever he'd be using.

The guy would take the drink and pass out.

And Dahmer would then sexually exploit him.

- Many of the men that would go to that bath house

were on the down low.

Many of them had families, I am sure of it.

So they couldn't tell anybody what happened to them.

That's a whole 'nother level of trauma

that Jeffrey Dahmer put upon these men.

But then Dahmer overplays his hand.

- The bath house operator finds a man unconscious in there,

has to summon an ambulance.

The guy's taken out to the hospital.

They realized he was drugged.

The owners soon trace the victim back to Dahmer.

- They were able to identify Dahmer

and said, that's it, no more in the bath house.

You can't come in the bath house.

But the ban does little to stop Dahmer.

He continues to drug men at the bars,

then brings them back to nearby hotels

to have his way with them.

- He can't enjoy himself

when the other person is conscious,

because they'll say, you're weird, Jeffrey.

Why are you so drunk, Jeffrey?

He wants total control.

Though Dahmer sedates his prey,

some cannibals prefer their victims awake.

- There are people who actively search out the concept

of being consumed, and vice versa.

People who are looking for willing dinners.

In 2001, 40-year-old Armin Meiwes

isn't shy about what he's looking for.

He posts a personal ad online for a man he can cannibalize.

- His whole thing was he wanted consensual cannibalism.

He wanted his victim to agree to allow Armin to eat them.

Incredibly, an engineer from Berlin

by the name of Bernd Brandes enthusiastically replies.

- They arrived at his home. They got intoxicated.

He chopped off his penis. He cooked it.

They ate it together.

His victim was then saying, I'm feeling pretty woozy.

He then put him in a bathtub and then, uh,

drained his blood until he was dead.

Over the next 10 months,

Meiwes continues to take sexual pleasure

out of eating Brandes's flesh.

In all, he consumes nearly 50 pounds of his victim's body.

- It's interesting because the argument there is,

was this really murder?

It was cannibalism, but was it murder

because they both agreed to it?

But when Meiwes returns to the internet

in search of a second victim,

authorities are alerted to his crime

and arrest the man who will become known

as the Rotenberg Cannibal.

- The idea of somebody consuming us for food

is so far out of our grasp of reality

that it just shocks you.

People have to take a step back

and recognize that human beings can indeed do that.

By November 1987, Dahmer has not yet crossed

into forbidden realm of cannibalism.

But with eight years passing since his first kill,

his need to control another living person is escalating.

- He meets Steven Tuomi at a bar

and goes back with him to the Ambassador Hotel.

- Dahmer gave him the drink that rendered him unconscious,

and then sexually abused him, set upon him sexually.

But just when things are heating up,

Dahmer makes a major mistake.

- What appears to have happened is that Mr. Dahmer

accidentally drank some of this Halcion-laced drink himself.

Dahmer soon passes out.

The next morning, he wakes up to find he's covered in blood.

- So, it was while he was himself intoxicated

after eight years of trying not to kill

that he killed again.

- The slow process to cannibalism

has now been accelerated immensely.

After the second murder, he is back

and he's more powerful than ever.

Jeffrey Dahmer has spent eight years

trying to convince himself that he will not kill again.

Then, in November 1987,

he wakes up to a shocking discovery

in a Milwaukee hotel room.

- Steven Tuomi was dead in that hotel room.

He had been beaten to death.

- He was black and blue.

And Jeffrey realized that in his blackout state

he had murdered Steven Tuomi.

- Dahmer claims that he has no memory of it whatsoever.

Now, I don't know how much credence to give that

because immediately upon discovering this dead body

Jeffrey Dahmer took action.

- Dahmer went out and got a large suitcase,

brought it back and packed this young man into the suitcase

and summoned a cab.

The cab driver came and helped him down

with the suitcase, and actually said to him,

what do you got, a dead body in here?

Dahmer takes the cab to his grandmother's house

where he gets right to work butchering the body.

- Physically it's very difficult to cut up a body.

It's hours and hours of work, and it's messy work,

which takes, uh, a lot of strength.

But this time,

Dahmer doesn't dispose of his entire victim.

- He keeps the skull. The skull was significant

in Jeffrey Dahmer's progression as a serial murderer.

- There have been some serial killers

who've actually taken trophies

as though this is the fruits of my, my labor.

That really was not what was going on with Mr. Dahmer.

This was him trying to hold on and stay close in his mind,

to those whom he had victimized.

- He masturbated inside of the skull.

He would look at the skull and fantasize about the crime

that he committed.

Yes, maybe Tuomi is dead, but at least he has his skull.

And with the skulls come the memories.

It's not long before even this prized possession

starts losing its luster for Dahmer.

- He's worried about the consequences,

so he's going to shatter these bones.

He's gonna pulverize them

Two months later, he seeks out another victim,

14-year-old Jamie Doxtator.

- Jeffrey approached it with a different angle this time.

He said, listen I'll give you $50.

Just come back to my apartment with me,

and let me take your picture. And obviously as a 14-year-old,

Jamie's not thinking worst-case scenario.

- You're in downtown Milwaukee, and this white, timid guy

come to you flashing money in your face,

sure you're gonna go with him.

But once he gave them that drink to knock 'em out,

then the game was over. Checkmate.

Dahmer follows the same pattern with the teen

as his previous two victims.

He roofies, rapes, and strangles his prey

before dismembering him and keeping a memento.

Once again, the skull.

- Dahmer killed this boy in his grandmother's house.

He realized that he could get away with this stuff anywhere.

Dahmer hasn't crossed into the realm

of cannibalism just yet.

Still, his hunger grows stronger.

Dahmer actively begins searching for prey

within Milwaukee's gay bars.

- There becomes a point of no return.

He's like a shark that's had a taste of blood.

There really is no going back for Dahmer.

Just three months after killing the teen,

Dahmer homes in on 22-year-old Richard Guerrero.

- Richard was a young man, got into a lot of the bars.

I would do shows. He'd come and watch them.

We became friends that way.

He had that aura about him

where, you know, he was a good kid.

- Jeffrey Dahmer brought Richard Guerrero

back over to his grandma's house.

He got him inebriated. He drugged his drink.

While he was, uh, out of it,

Jeffrey Dahmer strangled him to death.

But this is where Jeffrey Dahmer

starts to take things up to the next level.

- Here we have the beginning of a whole new path

that Jeffrey Dahmer opened up for himself.

- Necrophilia is the desire to have sex

with a dead person's corpse.

When we start describing having sex with a person's dead body,

we are now objectifying a human.

A dead person cannot give consent.

- Necrophilia's about power and control.

If you think your sexual desires are so perverse

that nobody would relate to them or understand them,

then having sex with a dead body is a way to, uh,

have that sexual relationship without somebody fighting back

or speaking against it.

- Jeffrey Dahmer thought, I'll kill someone

and I'll feel better.

I'll dismember them and I'll feel better.

Then he thought, that didn't work,

so he would have sex with the corpse.

It just kept getting worse and worse and worse.

Friends in Milwaukee's gay scene

soon notice Guerrero's absence.

- We were wondering what was going on

because there was a few people disappearing.

But Richard told us that he was gonna get a job.

And a lot of us figured that he, he's doing good at his job.

He's working and, you know, helping his parents out.

We were all happy for him, you know,

but we never realized that he was actually gone.

It's not long

before Dahmer returns to his hunting grounds,

secretly searching for his next victim.

And on April 23, 1988,

he finds it in a stranded motorist,

Ronald Flowers.

- His car wouldn't start.

So Jeffery Dahmer wanted to help him get his car started.

So he invited Ronald Flowers

back to his grandma's house for some coffee.

And what do we know about coffee with Jeffrey Dahmer?

Uh, it does the opposite at Jeffrey Dahmer's house.

It puts you to sleep, right?

So, he laced it with Halcion, gave it to him.

But just as his victim's passing out,

Dahmer receives an unexpected visitor.

- He hears, Jeffrey, is that you?

His grandmother was still home.

And his grandmother was asking what the noise was all about.

His grandmother had been home the entire time.

- That ended it. He couldn't go ahead.

The risk the grandmother would ask,

what happened to that young man? So he didn't kill that guy.

Dahmer waits for Flowers to lose consciousness.

Then drops his would-be victim off at the county hospital.

- In the hospital, Ronald Flowers

told the police what happened.

They arrested Jeffrey Dahmer,

and once again he talked his way out of it.

Ronald Flowers was the only victim

who escaped and survived,

and could have gotten Dahmer arrested

if the authorities had believed him.

- You find out later on that you survived Jeffrey Dahmer,

it's the ultimate nightmare come true.

There was a little bit of a trust built.

You hope we're looking out for each other.

And Jeffrey Dahmer manipulated that trust.

The Flowers incident also breaks Dahmer's trust

with someone else, his grandmother.

- Tensions are escalating.

She knows he's bringing guys home.

She knows that something smells terrible,

but every time she asks him

she doesn't get a straight answer.

And on top of that, worst of all,

he won't go to church.

- He realized that if he was going to keep going

the way that he was,

he needed to do it in the privacy of his own home.

So, he ended up moving into his own apartment

living by himself.

- Mr. Dahmer's moving out of his grandmother's house

and into a place of his own was certainly a setup

that was gonna enable him to spiral out of control.

It's September 1988,

and serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer

has already stolen the lives of four men.

Though he has not eaten any victims yet,

when he leaves the confines of his grandmother's home

for his own apartment in downtown Milwaukee,

he takes his bloodlust to a new level.

- Every decision that he made

whether conscious or subconscious

was to at one point give himself the opportunity

to fulfill his darkest sexual fantasies.

Just one day after his move,

Dahmer once again gives into his macabre desires

when he approaches a 13-year-old boy.

- Jeffrey Dahmer lured him to his apartment by saying

he would pay him $50 if

he would pose for pictures in the nude.

- And so, the two of them ended up going back

to Jeffrey's apartment together.

Jeffrey made him coffee,

tried to make him feel as comfortable as possible.

The teen knows he's in too deep

when Dahmer suddenly asks if he can listen to his stomach.

- And this boy saw an opportunity to run

and he took it.

So he grabs his backpack and he runs out the door.

- He gets out. He runs away.

He goes to the police. He's obviously in bad shape.

- Luckily, this boy remembers where he was with Jeffrey.

So he points police

into the direction of Jeffrey's apartment.

Police go and knock on the door.

Jeffrey was there and he was arrested.

- Dahmer was charged by our office

with sexual assault on this child,

on this 13-year-old boy,

and was found guilty by the judge.

- It's almost this sigh of relief

of like, yes, he's finally been caught.

He's finally off of the street.

But it's only Dahmer's first known offense.

- He had a very slick, smooth-talking lawyer.

He went to trial. The lawyer helped him out.

- The judge gave him one year work release

and five years probation. Certainly, Dahmer did not

unburden himself to any psychologist or social worker

about what he had been doing,

and whatever examination was conducted

did not give rise to belief that he was a serial killer.

But before he starts serving his time,

Dahmer's determined to get one more fix.

- You think that Jeffrey Dahmer might be scared

or chastened by the fact that he was sentenced to a year,

but instead, before he goes to prison,

he acts again.

After meeting 24-year-old Anthony Sears

at a club, Dahmer takes him home

and subjects the aspiring model to his usual routine.

- He thought Sears was the hottest man he has ever seen.

Usually when someone says you're attractive,

you take it as a compliment,

but if Jeffrey Dahmer says you're attractive,

you gotta take it as a threat.

- They drank. He kills him.

He dismembers him. And he saves some body parts.

But when it comes time to get rid of the body,

Dahmer finds it harder to let go.

- With the murder of Anthony Sears,

that's when necrophilia wasn't enough.

So, he would keep Anthony Sears' skull,

and he'd put it in a bag, and he'd take it with him to work.

- Keeping some of the body parts

and carrying them around to work,

Dahmer's able to keep it with him

as a kind of security blanket.

The only thing Dahmer finds satisfaction from

is the mutilation, and the murder,

and the rape of his victims.

And by keeping a piece of them, he can keep some of that high

until he can go back out into the streets to do

what he really wants to do.

Dahmer stores the skull inside his work locker.

And in May 1989,

when he begins his one-year work release sentence,

Dahmer takes comfort having access to the skull every day.

- He would go into the locker room at work...

and this is completely real.

He would open up the bag that held Anthony Sears' head,

he would kiss it, and make out with it,

and talk to it.

He would put it back in the bag,

and then he'd go make chocolate

with fresh corpse grime

on his lips.

- That's interesting.

I looked at the, uh, mental health records

of Mr. Dahmer during the period when he was on probation.

They weren't treating him as someone who had necrophilia

because he was not able to bring himself to talk

about that at the time.

- Even the most serious paraphilias

can be counseled out of it.

I think it's very difficult, uh, but it can be done.

If Dahmer said, I want to change.

I believe that with professional help,

it could have been done

even after he'd done a number of slayings.

But he has to wanna do it. That didn't happen with Dahmer.

Instead, Dahmer lets his thoughts fester.

And each new day,

his fantasies grow even more frightening.

Soon, he crosses an even more twisted threshold,

fantasizing about cannibalism.

- Somebody like Jeffrey Dahmer

wants to have absolute control over their victims.

Dahmer realizes if you eat them, they'll always be with you.

And that provides a satisfaction and even sometimes

a sexual component to the psychopath

that, you'll never leave me.

But while Dahmer prefers to dine alone,

some cannibals believe it's a meal that's best shared.

- Natalia and Dmitry Baksheevy claimed that they had

killed 30 people over the course of 18 years.

And not only did they kill them,

they kept them in pickled containers

in their kitchen.

They were seasoning their body parts.

At one point they had decapitated a head,

and decorated it,

and served it as a Christmas dinner.

For years, the married couple

lives under the radar, feeding their frightening

culinary creations to unsuspecting guests.

- It was their secret that they had,

and this is the difference that we see with them,

is typically cannibals tend to be selfish

and they like to commit these crimes

for their own gratification,

but part of Dmitry and Natalia's thing

was giving this to other people.

But when they invite 35-year-old neighbor

Elena Vashrusheva over for a meal,

things don't go according to plan.

- Natalia had assumed that Elena was flirting with Dmitry

and she got really angry about it,

and she ordered Dmitry to kill Elena.

And he basically followed Natalia's orders.

But just days after killing Elena,

Dmitry loses his phone.

It's found by an unsuspecting Samaritan

who stumbles across the grisly photos,

and immediately turns them over to police.

When the phone's eventually traced back to Dmitry,

it links he and Natalia to their neighbor's murder,

bringing an end

to their 18-year reign of terror.

Like the Russians, Dahmer's been able

to live under the radar for more than a decade.

But his taste for human flesh is only beginning.

In the spring of 1990, he's released on parole

and finally ready to act out on his darkest desires.

- He got a cheap-as-possible apartment.

He was in walking distance from his job.

Jeffrey Dahmer simplified his life

to make it easier for him to be a serial killer.

By 1990, serial killer, Jeffrey Dahmer

has rented an apartment

right inside his preferred kill zone,

Milwaukee's Walker Point neighborhood.

No one knows Dahmer already has five kills under his belt.

Or that he's beginning to fantasize about cannibalism.

- We lived in apartment 214

and Dahmer lived in apartment 213.

Jeff seemed to be a lonely person.

Very alone.

Seemed like the only highlight in his life

was him going to work at the chocolate factory.

He worked third shift,

meaning that when he got home from work,

I had already left my apartment to go to work.

- Jeffrey Dahmer just sounds like a

relatively shy Midwestern guy.

You can't even think that he would be fantasizing

about cutting people up and eating them.

But there are a few signs

that something is off with this new neighbor.

- Whenever I would want a cigarette

and didn't feel like going to the store,

I would go and knock on his door and he invited me in.

He always had a lock on his bedroom door.

I assumed that he was protecting his TV,

you know, things of value. And he had a camera

mounted in the corner of his living room.

Vernell doesn't know that cameras

have become a big part of Dahmer's grisly fun.

One week after moving into the Oxford Apartments,

Dahmer brings home 33-year-old Raymond Smith.

Dahmer drugs and kills his unsuspecting victim.

But this time, Dahmer's increasingly macabre behavior

takes an even darker turn.

- He would pose the bodies in intricate,

oftentimes very graphic positions,

and take pictures of them.

- Photographs wind up having two-fold representation.

One, it's a souvenir that I can look at and reminisce later,

but two, it is a visual representation

of my murder design.

After I have had my way with them,

I have created them into what I want them to be.

I have put them into position. I've killed them.

I have submission and control over them.

- Everything that he felt on the inside

began to manifest itself inside of his tiny Milwaukee apartment,

the Polaroids, the flesh, the bones, uh,

in some cases there were just bodies there still.

And all of these things really brought home

a sexual arousal, uh,

that he perhaps wasn't getting it any longer.

When he's finished, Dahmer saves Smith's skull

and places it inside a filing cabinet.

Over the next four months, he does the same

with two more victims, his seventh and eighth.

Still, he stops short of eating them.

- At this point in time, Jeffrey has killed eight people.

And he is still getting away with it.

So Jeffrey's ego kept getting boosted after each kill.

- Many of these men were reported missing,

but because of their color

and because of their sexual orientation,

police said, oh okay, thanks.

What are we supposed to do about that?

- Milwaukee had its growing pains in the '80s.

We had a police chief at the time

that he didn't get along

with the gay community whatsoever.

- It was an obvious bias that the police had.

They did not look into these crimes

as deeply as they should.

Well, they should change their lifestyle

if they don't wanna get murdered.

27-year-old Edward Smith is no exception.

- I met Eddie at a house party.

And um, we almost hit it off immediately.

He always wore a sheik, so we nicknamed him the Sheik.

There was one time that Eddie saw Jeffrey.

And he was like, oh he's hot. I said, I can introduce you.

You know, and unfortunately, I introduced them.

When you're out there all the time doing shows

and, you know, having fun, you know,

you don't really realize how very vulnerable you are.

I mean, how can you tell a serial killer?

You know?

After that, they were hanging around for a good,

I would say three, four or five weeks.

And Eddie was with Jeff.

And then after that, um, no one really seen Eddie again.

Eddie's family and friends

come looking for him,

canvassing the bars where he is known to hang out.

- I was like, where's Eddie? You know, where's Sheik?

Like, we haven't seen him.

Word on the street

is Eddie was last seen with Jeff Dahmer.

- Jeff was drunk one night, and we're like,

Jeff, where's Eddie? You know, we're looking for him.

His sisters are here looking for him.

Have you seen Eddie?

And he said something real stupid like,

yeah, they found him in Racine in three pieces.

But Dahmer knows very well where Eddie is.

- He removed Eddie's head

and tried to dry it out in the oven,

and it shattered the skull.

And according to Jeffrey, he had never felt

so much remorse in his life.

And I really do think it's because

he had slipped so fully

into his fantasy that, that was,

that was Eddie to him.

Dahmer's heartbreak

only propels him to find his next victim.

And the next.

And people are starting to notice.

- He is keeping their bodies in his apartment.

He is preserving them. And they're stacking up.

You can only imagine the smell

that was coming from Jeffrey's apartment.

- Perhaps there was a much darker reason

to keep those body parts as well.

By 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer has lost touch

with his family and childhood friends.

- I mean, we never thought of Jeff Dahmer

after high school, hardly. He was out of the picture.

He wasn't like a close friend. He wasn't like somebody

that you were thinking about all the time at all.

At our 10-year class reunion,

we were sitting around at a table

and talking about people that didn't show up,

and Jeff Dahmer's name came up.

We're like, yeah, whatever happened to that guy?

And somebody at our table said,

oh, he's probably a serial killer.

Little do they know Dahmer's created new friends.

A macabre collection of skulls and body parts.

- There is some connection between collecting skulls

and body parts, and cannibalism.

Wanting that person to be with you forever,

and again, wanting that power

and that immense desire for control.

And it's with his next victim

that Dahmer forever sears his place

as the monster in our collective nightmares.

- Ernest Miller represented the next step

in his depraved behavior

because after he killed him and dismembered him,

he cooked him, and he ate him.

- That's when the cannibalism started.

The keeping of the body meat for his consumption was new.

And it shows the natural escalation of his crimes.

And it became a part of his sexual act

where he spent a long time

like cooking it and seasoning it.

And he would eat a chunk of it. And then the act of him doing it

would then make him sexually aroused again.

- Something like this that is so taboo,

it makes you sit there and go, why did he do this?

Like, what drives a person to that point?

- There are songs we listen to every day that talk about like,

I could eat you to pieces. We say that to children.

And this is so common, there's even a name for it.

Vorarephilia. Vorarephilia is the fantasy

and the desire to be consumed or to consume others.

But those who truly practice vorarephilia

know there's one key distinction from cannibalism.

It's all fantasy.

- Once it crosses that line of fantasy and it actually becomes

a place of violence or harm to the folks that are involved,

it is no longer vorarephilia.

Violence against someone else, that is the taboo.

- Jeffrey is doing this because he wants to

not feel alone anymore.

He wants to feel like he has control.

He doesn't wanna feel rejected. He wants to feel like

his victims are going to stay with him forever.

- I assumed that he was lonely and was in need of a friend.

On one occasion, his apartment door was open,

and I could see inside.

And I saw a tall, black guy sitting in Jeff's apartment

and they were drinking beer.

Later that night,

Vernell recalls seeing that same man

disappear with Dahmer down the hall.

- I remember tellin' my wife. Well, hey, he got a friend.

You know, but it did turn out that,

that was one of his victims.

His ninth. 22-year-old David Thomas.

This time, Dahmer changes up his routine.

He takes Thomas' body, and for the first time in years,

simply discards it.

- It is just so unbelievable

to think that somebody in an apartment

in Milwaukee would have the gall to murder this many people

and throw the human body away like it was rotten meat.

It just shows you how inhumane Dahmer was,

how little he respected human life,

of how often he's been murdering,

of how normalized he's made murdering,

and just how purposeful he acts.

Dahmer's not the only serial killer

to go down this morbid path.

Ed Gein, the Butcher of Plainfield,

was the king of the macabre

back in his Wisconsin hometown.

- Ed Gein was a grave-robbing serial killer.

And he's the famous inspiration for

"The Texas Chainsaw Massacre", "Psycho".

Of all of the characters that you'd cover in true crime,

Ed Gein could be, very accurately,

described as a ghoul.

And he was an all-around weird guy.

Driven by loneliness,

Gein began stealing body parts from graves at the age of 41,

the first of which belongs to his own mother.

- He wore his mother's body.

Like he dug her up and he turned it into a suit,

and he wore it for fun.

- He finds ways to act out his sexual compulsions

for human mutilation, and power and control.

And he keeps these souvenirs

and these body parts, and these skins.

But it's not until 10 years later in November 1957

that the people of Plainville catch on to his crimes.

After the disappearance of a local hardware store owner

leads police to Gein, he is arrested

and his 195-acre farm is searched.

There, police not only find the headless, gutted corpse

of their missing woman, but also the body parts

of at least 15 other women

that had been fashioned into clothing,

furniture, and other pieces of frightening decor.

- Ed Gein and Jeffrey Dahmer are both similar in that.

'Cause in a way they had a childlike curiosity

about the human body.

Dahmer made his entire apartment a trophy case.

When he went into that home, he could experience

every single moment of every murder

again and again and again

just sittin' on the couch.

By 1990,

Dahmer's brazen behavior becomes reckless.

And neighbors are getting suspicious.

- This one particular evening on a Tuesday, I had gotten in,

and as I was entering the building,

I heard a hand tool running in Jeff's apartment.

I couldn't distinguish if it was a saw

or if it was, um, a drill.

I said, man, what is he building over there?

As I was entering the apartment, coming into the door,

I could hear Jeff very clearly

stating, see what you made me do!

Over the last three decades,

serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer

has left a trail of death and destruction

wherever he's gone,

and has even started eating his victims.

But the disappearances of these men

within Milwaukee's gay community don't go unnoticed.

- Everyone was speculating

'cause there were a few people disappearing.

They were coming from Madison to look for people.

I mean, they were in the bars every week.

You know, passing out fliers. Cops were nowhere to be found.

- And that's what allowed Jeffrey Dahmer

to operate in secrecy for so long,

because one thing about the gay scene at the time, too

was that guys used to kinda disappear all the time.

Because guys would have to go to another city to a gay bar,

so they could be gay in that city

and not be seen in their hometown.

And so nobody asked these questions about them.

Dahmer continues cruising the clubs.

But his behavior's becoming increasingly erratic.

- Jeffrey got a little bit too drunk once in a while

and he was asked to leave the bar a couple of times.

So Dahmer turns to the streets.

There, he propositions

14-year-old Konerak Sinthasomphone

with money to pose nude.

Konerak is the older brother of the boy

Dahmer was sentenced to jail

for sexually assaulting three years ago,

making the boys the only members of the same family

targeted by the serial killer.

- This boy comes back to his apartment.

Dahmer takes pictures of him. And he injects him.

He rapes him.

- This is when the Jeffrey Dahmer story

really jumps the shark.

Jeffrey Dahmer says to himself, this is just not working for me.

I'm not getting what I want out of this.

I'm not feeling any less lonely.

Um, as a matter of fact, my apartment stinks.

I need to figure out a way to make a permanent partner.

He wants someone silent, like a mannequin.

- Dahmer comes up with this idea

that if he can turn these men into zombies,

then he can keep them under his control,

and they'll stay with him.

What he does next is right out of "Frankenstein."

He gives Konerak a homemade lobotomy.

- You just imagine being these poor victims,

and you have someone drilling in your skull,

and then dumping hydrochloric acid in your brain.

And the whole point is to make a sex zombie out of you.

And it's just... It is so beyond.

He thought he was actually improving in some ways

by saying well, I'm not gonna kill 'em.

I'm just gonna try to make a zombie out of them

so we can have sex.

- You would think on face value, oh my god,

you are a sadist

because you are drilling holes into somebody's head, right?

But for Dahmer, that's a means to an end.

Dahmer wants to create an intimate partner

that won't leave and abandon him.

Somebody that's a, a willing, complaint companion

that he can have absolute control over.

An ultimate submissive.

But Dahmer can't do this work sober.

An alcoholic since age 14,

he must get drunk to perform his unspeakable acts.

So halfway through the process,

he decides to step out for some beer.

- So Dahmer left the apartment,

went to a liquor store several blocks away.

This young Asian boy got out onto the street

with no clothes on.

- I noticed a image from afar. And I thought I was trippin'.

It was a person that looked completely naked.

When I got up close, I was able to tell, you know,

it was a male and that he was pretty young.

He was falling. He was staggering.

He couldn't talk. I'm askin' him,

like what happened to you? Are you ok?

Like where are your clothes?

And he just, he couldn't say anything.

He just kept reaching for me, you know, like a baby.

Clearly he got away from somewhere.

He was bruised up and he was bleedin'.

He needed help.

And so, I decided that I would go and dial 911.

He's been beaten up real bad and he's fell down.

And people was tryin' to help him stand, and he can't stand.

He's butt-naked. He has no clothes on.

He is very hurt.

As I was speaking to them, they was asking me questions.

Then there was this man who appeared.

And I didn't know, um, who he was.

He just immediately grabbed the boy

and was trying to just take him.

I actually mentioned that on the 911 call.

I said, well, uh, a guy has come up

and he's trying to take him.

And they said, well, help is on the way.

Don't let him take him.

I went back.

I'm listening to the man talk to the boy

and he was saying, pull yourself together.

And I told him, I said, I just called 911.

Help is on the way.

And he was literally trying to drag him.

And I'm like, why are you taking him?

Like help is on the way. I'm like, do you know him?

And he was like, you know, you need to stay out of this.

This has nothing to do with you.

We was like doing a, like a tug a war.

I just felt like something wasn't right.

I just felt like I shouldn't let him take him.

But when police arrive,

they don't share Cola's concerns.

- The 14-year-old victim, he's already had a hole

halfway drilled into the top of his head.

He was bleeding, screaming.

Jeffrey Dahmer is like, yeah, he looks young,

but this is my 20-year-old boyfriend.

We were having some BDSM sex.

That's why he's bleeding.

- I butted in and I tapped one of their arms,

I said, excuse me,

I don't think he knew him because...

And they was like.

And this one officer told me

that he had been investigating eight years

and he didn't need an amateur pokin' in his business.

I even saw one of the officers

pat Jeffrey Dahmer on his back.

- Dahmer brings the cops back to his apartment

and shows the officers Polaroid pictures

of this 14-year-old boy nude to prove to the officers

that they were indeed in a sexual relationship.

As Dahmer showed them the Polaroids,

he also had a corpse on his bed rotting.

- The cops commented that it smelled like

someone took a shit on the living room floor.

The cops essentially give the victim back to Jeffrey Dahmer

and then they left. They did not care.

- Here you have a young man bleeding from his behind,

beat up a little bit, and you're giving him back

to his lover who just probably beat him up?

I don't get that.

- The intoxicated Asian naked male

was returned to his sober boyfriend.

- You would think any rational officer would say,

well, number one, that's child pornography,

and number two, you're coming with us.

But instead they said, oh, I guess that proves it.

You guys must be lovers. And they simply left.

- The Milwaukee Police Department,

they weren't looking hard enough

because he was gay

and I think the police wanted to stay as far away

as they could at that time

from the gayness aspect of it.

- I'm thinking like, this is crazy

why they don't wanna listen to me?

This boy is in trouble. He is with the wrong person.

If they would've just did a check, you know,

how they run people name

constantly all the time, procedure,

they would of noticed like, oh my, this is a pedophile

who was on probation because he had molested

Konerak Sinthasomphone's brother.

It's just so many things that didn't happen

that should have happened that night.

- The way that justice is handed down

is oftentimes reflective of the way

that we look at marginalized folks.

We start to hear the stereotypes,

sex workers, black people,

Asian people. They can't be believed.

They're dramatic. They're over exaggerating.

And uphold the stereotype of a white man.

Safe, good, not causing any trouble.

I was only trying to help them.

You know, it was their idea. Um, I'll take it from here.

- So many times, Jeffrey Dahmer was an inch away

from being stopped and yet he never was.

Unchecked, Dahmer continues his quest

to transform Konerak into a sex zombie,

drilling another hole in the boy's head.

But the second attempt simply kills the 14-year-old

and further emboldens the killer cannibal.

- He was just becoming more and more out of control.

More and more disturbed in his, his thinking.

After the police had come into his apartment,

you'd think he'd have left that apartment.

He still stays there.

- He was actively eating people. And it'd become a habit for him.

He had put together meals

that were inside of his refrigerator.

But then also like he made that whole pot of penises.

That's real.

He did cook up a bunch of severed penises in a pot.

- He has no indication of being busted.

He doesn't particularly fear law enforcement.

Obviously he would, he just simply goes up to them

and talks to them.

If you're Dahmer at this point, why would you stop?

- This isn't a madman out of control.

This isn't a man that doesn't know what he's doing.

This is a man that knew it was wrong,

knew he had to be under stress

and he performed superbly under stress.

But as the months go by,

Dahmer's starting to get sloppy.

- The smell in the hallway, it was a smell

that you could not ignore it.

It was atrocious.

The smell was coming from Jeff's apartment.

He had been warned about the smell twice.

- At one point he started falling asleep

at the chocolate factory

and that was because of his nighttime activities,

his nocturnal depravity, he couldn't stay awake.

And they fired him for sleeping on the job.

With his world falling apart,

Dahmer slips deeper into fantasy.

- He had began taking victims, spray painted skulls.

And that was the beginning of what would become

a shrine to his victims,

of course for his own sick pleasure.

The murder museum Jeffrey Dahmer was creating

was just another reminder of how much he demanded control.

He never wanted the memories to go away.

That's why he has the pictures. He has the skulls.

- Think of somebody who's addicted to drugs, who,

yes, they're chasing the high.

Yes, they're doing the drugs every day,

but on another level, they just want it

to all be over. They want it to end.

They don't wanna keep running on this treadmill anymore.

- You almost wonder if at some point,

do you wanna be caught?

By May of 1991,

serial killer, Jeffrey Dahmer

has murdered at least 17 men and boys

over the course of 13 years.

And eaten several of his victim's body parts.

To commemorate his achievement, he builds a horrific shrine.

- Jeffrey Dahmer had a ritualistic altar,

what he viewed as a throne that he would sit on

like as an emperor of his one-bedroom apartment.

He was submerged in his crimes.

- A shrine of skulls is almost a museum.

It's a way to kinda look back on your career of murder and mayhem

and take measure of it and appreciation.

And I'm not just looking at one murder and one thing I've done,

I'm looking at it in it's entirety.

On July 22, 1991,

Dahmer attempts to add one more skull

to his collection.

- Dahmer encountered a man named Tracy Edwards.

They picked up alcohol and he took Edwards with himself.

They went back to Dahmer's apartment.

That was obviously gonna be his next victim.

- He comes into the apartment.

He smells an awful smell, which smells like rotting meat.

He's like, somethin's goin' on here.

He's backin' his way out of the house.

But the cannibal is determined

to not let him leave.

Edwards tries to escape and the men struggle.

- He had the wherewithal to know

that trouble was right around the corner,

to realize that he was looking at, at the face of evil,

and to do something about it.

Edwards knew he had to get out of there as fast as possible.

Then Edwards sees his chance.

- Tracy Edwards was a street-savvy guy

and was able to escape.

He went down the street.

He had a handcuff hanging, and he stopped to a police car.

Edwards tells police a freak was holding him captive.

- Before I knew it he threw a handcuff on me,

and had a big blade up under my heart, you know,

tellin' me if I don't do what he says

he's gonna kill me, you know?

He took his mind, and the blade, off me for a moment, you know.

And then I knew then

it was my time to make my move, you know?

That if I didn't take my chance

then I would never get out this place, you know?

He then leads authorities

back to the Oxford Apartments.

- Dahmer opens the door.

They say, do you have a key to these handcuffs?

He says, yeah, they're in the bedroom.

- Jeffrey Dahmer assumes, I can get away with anything.

I can't be caught in my universe.

The cops, they're like, this place reeks.

And they look and see

a series of Polaroids that he had pinned up

like it was from his vacation

of a bunch of posed, nude, decapitated bodies.

The cop just looks around.

He gets his walkie talkie. And he's like,

I need some backup.

Dahmer knows

there's no talking his way out of things this time.

- Finally, Dahmer is arrested.

He says to the police, for what I did I should be dead.

As officers file into the one-bedroom apartment,

no amount of training can prepare them

for the chamber of terror they discover.

- They found severed lips in the apartment.

They found detached penises, uh, in jars.

Uh, obviously they found numerous skulls.

They found numerous bones.

Uh, they found brain matter.

Uh, they found a full human head.

The amount of murder memorabilia

that was crammed into this small Milwaukee apartment,

it is just unreal to think about.

Especially for those living right next door.

- I could see that it was a lot of activity going on

at his apartment.

And one of the officers told us

that we have to evacuate our apartment.

And I immediately asked the officer

if Jeff was ok.

And he responded, yeah, that fucker's ok.

And that's when he started to tell me

about the activity inside apartment 213.

I was more shocked than anything.

And then it went, it went,

it went from shock to embarrassment,

because we were duped.

When you think that you know someone,

and then you come to find out that you really don't.

- The bags and the barrels of human flesh

and all of the instruments that Dahmer had used to,

to dismember corpses, it was just coming out in droves.

Like you couldn't even imagine

that someone could commit this act

in such a tiny place,

and then all of this

unbelievably graphic, gory stuff.

News quickly spreads

that a serial killer cannibal has been caught in Milwaukee.

Inside a second floor apartment,

police found a grisly scene.

- After about maybe a half hour

watching them through the glass

taking out the boxes, the smell was leaving as well.

And by that morning,

they had gotten out all of the boxes.

And the smell was totally gone.

The next day, police question Jeffrey Dahmer,

knowing he's the only person

who can explain the horrors inside his home.

- Dahmer started talking right away.

He was fully cooperative with the police.

He gave full confession.

Even though police only discover various parts

of 11 different victims inside his apartment,

Dahmer confesses to murdering 17 men and boys,

dating back to 1978, when he killed his first victim,

Steven Hicks, in Bath, Ohio.

- As you can imagine,

the parents whose children had disappeared.

The first family, the slaying in Ohio,

that family waited 13 years.

Where is our son?

For those families, if you try to add up

the pain that's involved, it's enormous.

- After the names came out, police at the time

asked me to look at some pictures

and, um, there was one picture,

it was definitely Eddie.

And I found out it was Jeffrey Dahmer

when they showed his face and said his name.

He killed Eddie. He really did kill him.

Um, I, oh my God, I introduced them.

You know, I...

I lost it from there.

You know, I blame myself.

For a long time I did,

but I finally realized it wasn't my fault.

Who would have known what brings a human being

to do something like this to somebody else?

For Dahmer's defense attorneys,

this is a clear case of insanity.

And in January 1992,

that's exactly how they encourage him to plead

as Jeffrey Dahmer goes to trial

for 15 counts of first-degree murder.

- When the defendant enters a plea of insanity,

there are two phases to the trial.

The first trial is, was the crime committed?

Did he commit the murder?

The second phase, was he insane when he did it?

Proving the first is easy,

especially since Dahmer left so many witnesses behind.

- Like, he was listening to my heart, because at a point,

he told me he was gonna eat my heart.

- Hearing from people who had been victimized

by Jeffrey Dahmer was horrible.

The details were unbearable.

But proving that Dahmer was insane

is not as simple.

- If you can commit an organized and premeditated crime

knowing what you're doing, you're not insane.

And that is what Jeffrey continued to do

time and time again with each of his murders.

The lawyers have delivered

their final argument.

It's up to the jury to say what will happen to Jeffrey Dahmer.

He was pleading guilty, but insane

in the killing 15 young men and boys.

Jacqueline Adams reports from Milwaukee.

Jeffrey Dahmer never took the stand.

But the prosecution doesn't buy it.

- Dahmer told him that at the time he killed

each of these vic...15 victims,

he appreciated that it was wrong to kill the victim.

Your life, your life, your life for my sexual satisfaction.

- He's fooled a lot of people.

Please, don't let this

murderous killer fool you.

- When I finally got to interview Jeffrey,

he told me that if he was on the outside

he would have kept killing.

Nothing would have stopped him.

Do I think Jeffrey Dahmer was sane?

Well, not by your or my definition of sanity,

but the court found him to be sane.

After a two-week trial,

Dahmer is found guilty.

He's convicted of 15 counts of murder

and sentenced to 15 consecutive terms of life imprisonment.

- The sorrow and anger of the victims' families

was heartbreaking.

- You took my mother's oldest grandchild from her.

And for that I can never forgive you.

I hope you, I hope you can deal with what you done.

You are a diablo...

That means, the devil, the pure devil,

that walked our streets and was loose.

- The pain that you caused my family,

that was my baby boy that you took away from me.

- My mother gave five beautiful kids.

We lost, you destroyed the baby of the family.

- Why? You know, why would it be my son?

- The last family that got up was a young woman

and she lost control of herself.

- Jeffrey, I hate you, motherfucker! I hate you!

This is outta control.

Don't fuck with me, Jeffrey, I'll kill you!

Goddammit, look at me motherfucker!

I could kill you!

- He didn't react at all.

- How could you blame them

for being angry by what this monster did?

But the story of Jeffrey Dahmer

doesn't end with his prison sentence.

Two years later, in November 1994,

the most depraved serial killer cannibal in American history

is beaten to death by a fellow inmate.

- He was smashed over the head with a barbell,

and that's how he died.

And interestingly enough,

that's how he killed his first victim.

So maybe his death was just revenge.

But even in death,

Jeffrey Dahmer still haunts our collective psyche.

- Not only did Jeffrey Dahmer kill 17 people,

he ate some of those people. He is a necrophile.

This man committed the worst crimes

that a human being can commit.

- The whole idea of cannibalism

is something that is so grotesque

that people can't wrap their head around it.

People are fascinated by things

that they can't quite seem to understand.

- Jeffrey Dahmer viewed us

as a series of body parts just walkin' around.

We were not people to him.

We are just meat.