The Jeffrey Dahmer Files (2012) Movie Script
These guys haven't eaten yet today. Wanna see 'em eat?
Yeah.
Alright, so lemme grab some goldfish here.
You gotta keep 'em well fed. If you don't feed 'em
often enough, they will eat each other.
This was basically a mini-disaster.
And a disaster is basically any, uh, episode
that, uh, overwhelms your existing resources.
And a disaster could be two people, uh, in a car accident
if you're a small office.
Or it could be, um uh... three hundred people, uh,
in--in a major crash.
So a disaster is different things to different
people at different times.
And at--for us, at this time, this was a disaster.
Everybody always wants to think that when the shit
hits the fan, you're gonna be courageous, right.
We-we hope so. All through the academy,
you have those dreams, right.
That you're going to show up when someone's being shot
or killed or raped and take charge and be the hero and
That when a dangerous situation comes or the shit hits
the fan, where someone has to stand up and act
that you're gonna have the courage to do that.
And until you are actually put in a situation like that,
you don't know how you're gonna react, right.
You hope that you're gonna react.
Well, in the Catholic church,
or my father always told me that
Courage was simply fear that has said its prayers.
-Hey.
-Hi.
I can show you what we do have.
Have some new friends?
Yeah.
Alright, so, this is kinda what we have.
Kind of a large container with a lid.
-Okay, thanks a lot.
-Yeah, sorry.
Back in those days, everything was open.
You know, they even had kids selling drugs.
Twelve and thirteen year olds.
We're having a big problem with crack.
And um, I was using too, so it made it difficult.
I don't think it was so much in our
building, but it was around us.
Well you're lookin' good.
Grandma was saying that she thought that you got
quite a bit thinner, but you look fit. I dunno.
Well, I've been surviving mostly on McDonald's food.
-It's just so much easier just to pop into the restaurant, but
-Yeah.
Like I said before, it gets too expensive, and
-It does.
-I have to start eating at home more.
I don't think about a person's life or what they could be,
I think about, um, when I'm talking to their families later on
after the autopsy, and I'm giving them--the families information
um, you know, I express my uh--my condolences to the family, and--and, uh--and my--
I express how sorry I am that this happened to them, but I don't
I don't process every case, and uh
and think about a person's life after I've done an autopsy.
I, myself, was involved in--I didn't--I got shot at.
People wanted to know why I didn't shoot back.
I was too busy getting the heck out of the way.
I, myself, was involved in several occasions where people shot at me.
It became kind of a wake up call, right.
Because I was not--I was always a big guy.
I played sports--I played sports in college.
But I wasn't a fighter guy. Because of my size, people
didn't--I really didn't have to get in fights, right?
We used to mainly sit in the backyard.
You know, on the steps and
We'd have our little grill out there and
cookin'--stuff like that.
We'd be hanging out in the back and he'd come in and...
One day I saw him trying to take a bag of trash out or something like that
and I spoke to him.
And we had a little, you know, conversation, "How you doin',
how long have you been here?
Why are you over here with all these black people," you know?
It was close to his job, so that's why he had moved there.
Kind of friendly, but kind of, uh, introverted.
He didn't have too many friends in the building,
but he would always speak to me.
-Hey, how's it going?
-Good.
-I'm Andy.
-Hi.
-Brian.
-I'm Jeff.
-From Eye In The Sky, here to give you
-Oh.
-Here to give you a quote.
-Right, right.
So how this works is, I've a few pamphlets
here--our different types of cameras.
I'll let Brian take a few measurements and I'll
be able to give you a rough estimate.
Um, what rooms are you looking to protect?
-Just this room.
-So we have multiple cameras to choose from.
Active cameras, hidden cameras, wireless cameras, body-worn cameras.
So you can see the differences between these two cameras.
You have a list of features down here.
I started cooking and sometimes I would give him a
sandwich or somethin' when he was on his way to work.
Or I would like go to his house, come in and
have a beer with him or something.
It was alright, in the beginning.
He would give me little things, like he had a trunk
that he said his grandmother gave him that he
brought in a cab to the apartment.
It was a 6-feet something--kind of a trunk.
And I remember when he brought it in,
he was having trouble trying to get it in
so I had to open up my door so he could turn it.
He was kind of kind-hearted to people, you know.
He would share what he had with you.
It was one of those nights where the humidity was high.
It was really thick, heavy, mucky.
As we pulled into the apartment,
and went into the foyer, which is a
kind of a big glass enclosed foyer where it had
steps and an elevator to go up to the three stories.
As soon as you walked in there, you could
smell that funky, putrid smell of death.
And the way I like to describe death is--the
smell of death--is that
you may have smelled rotted animals or something like that
but a good, you know, ripe body that's been
lying around for a while, has a unique smell
that I can only refer to as when I think about coffee,
'cause I'm a coffee drinker.
And if you know what coffee smells like, and then you
are taken--whisked away someplace--to an an island,
for thirty, forty, sixty days; where you don't have any coffee
But then all of a sudden you come back and you smell coffee,
you immediately know, "Wow, that's coffee."
I mean it just comes to you, right? That's how the smell
of death is, at least for me. I can tell.
We were in the bed sleepin', 'cause I remember
my husband had to get up and go to work in the morning
He usually left about six o'clock. So it was
about eleven, and Jeff, of course, was over there.
He's got someone in his house.
You can hear his music playing, but his door was open.
The police came there and could I hear them outside my door talking.
One of the officers said "Hey man, get the fucking cuffs"
and they were scufflin' with him,
but he howled like uh animal that I'd never heard before.
Just a...
loud screeching--un-human..
And I flew and jumped in the bed with my husband
and pulled the covers up over my head.
I said I don't know what's going on over there,
but something is going on over there with Jeff.
He said, "Well, call the police".
The police are already over there.
-Hi.
-Hi.
Can you, uh, pop the trunk?
I have some luggage.
-Sure.
-Thanks.
-You wanna hand?
-No, that's okay. I got it.
-Hi, how are you?
-Good.
Could you take me to the Oxford apartments, please?
I remember a stench, uh odor--uh, formaldehyde?
Something like that. Some preservative or something you could smell.
Sickness, death--something.
I remember standing at the hallway, looking at this officer
and he was just standing there like this.
And I was standing...
And a gust of wind came out and whooohhhhh
...went around my body and knocked me on my knees.
And he started throwin' up.
I could see a police officer whom I knew.
As I walked down there, I noticed that his
uniform was in a totally disheveled state,
besides perspiration all over, soaking through his...
But that his 'Sam Browne' had been twisted and that
uh, his tie was askew,
and his hair was kinda stickin' up and
he was sweating profusely,
and his eyes were, I mean, they were big.
They were as big as saucers.
Very unlike Officer Mueller. I said,
"Rolf, what's going on here?"
And all's he could say to me was, "Go look in the refrigerator."
Could you put your chin on there? Thank you. Good.
Right at the light, please.
-And what are you doing now?
-I work at a chocolate factory.
When I became a detective, I had already
been a police officer for nine years,
and I had seen a lot of horrific things, right.
And I also knew, at this time, that the suspect
was under arrest and hog-tied,
that I had two large police officers armed,
and I was armed and my partner was there was armed.
So I knew that I was not in any danger.
From time to time, we'll be called out, um...
by investigators and law enforcement
to identify and examine uh... body parts
or some kind of uh--of decaying flesh
that are found that may uh...
end up being human or non-human.
And on many occasions, what we find is
that there is something that is non-human.
That is in--in such a decomposed state that it looks human.
For example, hunters will kill a bear
and the feet and paws, uh... mimic almost uh--ah...
very closely, uh, the--the skeletal structure of a human.
So it's many--on many occasions, those are--
those are misinterpreted.
It what empty in the main part of the refrigerator,
except for a cardboard box.
And inside that cardboard box was a freshly, it looked like--severed African American male's human head,
with eyes and the mouth opened like--like this.
I also noticed in the back was an
open box of Arm & Hammer baking soda.
My mom used to do that to keep the refrigerator fresh.
And then on the door that I opened up, there was condiments:
mustard, ketchup, A-1 sauce, that kind of stuff.
I will admit that from the bottom of my feet to the top of my head, I--everything in body said
you know, "You--you gotta get the hell outta here, right?"
Let's get a boss here.
This is bigger than me.
Hey, Pete? We've got 'em coming out of this... house.
Within five minutes, Lieutenant Harrell came.
And after he saw the head in the refrigerator and backed up,
he looked at me and said,
Pat, I want you take this prick downtown.
He goes, "I want you to stick with him.
I don't want anybody else to talk to him."
He goes, "I don't want you to leave his side. I don't care if he's gotta go to the bathroom--I want you to hold his dick."
He goes, "But I want you to stay with this guy
and don't let anybody else talk to him."
I'm sure they done found somebody,
s-somebody done set Jeff up.
They had tried to get him, or somebody got killed
at Jeff's house or something like that.
I never thought that Jeff had did anything.
We put him back in the farthest interrogation room.
Our interrogation rooms are like nine by twelve, cinder
block, with a metal table and two chairs. That's it.
The first thing he said to me is,
"You're not gonna let anybody hit me anymore, are ya?"
And I said, "No", I said,
"Naw. No one's gonna hit you no more."
I said, "As a matter of fact, no one else is gonna talk to you but me."
I said, "Before we get started, I'm gonna go get myself a cup of coffee. Would you like one? Would you like a cigarette?"
And to that, he said, "I would love both. I'd love both."
The apartment was a one bedroom small, uh,
efficiency-type apartment
and there were large police officers that were taking
pictures and doing their investigation, recovering evidence
and it was difficult to move around the apartment.
Chaos. It was chaos. And there
were--officers were everywhere.
People were everywhere. Cameras.
Everybody else flew outside to talk
to the camera people, you know.
I wanna be on TV. Let's go get on TV.
And I'm goin', "I'm not goin' out there. All them
people out there and we don't know what's goin' on."
Sometimes you'll go to a crime scene,
and there might be some joking.
People talking about, you know, basketball games
or what they were gonna do over
the weekend or something, but....
This was different.
In that, I think people were very much, um,
absorbed with, uh, what they were seeing
and, I think, how they were feeling.
So it was uh--it was--it was very quiet.
I put my hand out, I said, "My name
is Pat Kennedy." Well, I said, "I'm Pat.
And I'm the one who's gonna be talkin' to
you about the head in the refrigerator."
And at that point, he said to me, "I really don't think
that it's in my best interest to talk to you about this."
So to me that was kinda weird, right?
'Cause if they're 'no' people, it's like "Aye, fuck you",
you know? "I ain't sayin' shit", right?
'Yes' people um... will be defeated.
But I had never had anyone, you know--without sayin'
I want a lawyer, which happens a lot...
I had never had anyone say it quite like that.
I mean very polite and very to the point.
Obviously, a command of the English language.
I don't think it's in my best interest for me to talk to you about that.
Air conditioner's a fossil.
I found it when I moved in.
Weighs 200 pounds and the base plate's busted off.
I'm pretty sure that it's just gonna shoot
silicone straight into my lungs.
-Hey, what's up, buddy?
-Hey, I'm here to pick up my barrel.
Oh, all right. You, uh, you have your car here?
No.
Oh, you're just gonna walk off with it?
Yeah.
-Alright. Here you go man, yup.
-Alright.
Thanks.
He started asking me,
"Well, what'll happen to me if I don't talk to you?"
description of our booking process,
And as I was describing it, he was kinda nodding and I
could see that he was familiar with the booking process.
and then he said to me, he goes,
"Well, there'd be any way that I'd be able to get my own cell?"
and as soon as he said that, then I knew he was
familiar with the booking process, right?
Because the only time people get their own cell--at least in the
Milwaukee Police Department at that time--
is if they were completely nuts and couldn't be
trusted around other people,
or if they were a juvenile and we didn't have a place to hold 'em 'til we could put 'em someplace, they had to be separated.
Uh, otherwise, everybody went to the bullpen,
which was a disgusting place to be, right?
It's stinky and it's smelly and it's packed,
and you could be sitting next to a murderer as well as a drunk driver.
It was--it was just--and I could,
I picked up that he was afraid of the bullpen.
Um, I said, "Well..." I said, "Tonight is a very busy night.
I think every cell is full and that bullpen is packed.
So you can stay here and talk to me," and already he
saw that he had a cup of coffee going and the cigarettes,
I said, "Or," I said, "you know, you can go..."
There was a, uh, portable freezer that was in the front room,
and it was, uh, almost out of place in its position and um
whether you would even see that in someone's small apartment.
We really kinda walked around it for the longest time before
I guess we had the nerve to open it up and see what was in it,
but um, we didn't anticipate anything, but then once we
opened up the container and saw another,
another, uh, head in there,
it became, you know, uh, it became real for us, I think.
You wanna make him uncomfortable, but not too
uncomfortable, so you're, you're positioning, right?
You're close enough to get intimate if you want,
but far enough away where they're not feeling
threatened, right? But able to... um...
As I'm talking to him, I--I said,
"Well, we can talk about other things, then," right?
So from there, uh, we did have a lengthy conversation about many things.
The first thing we talked about was his job at the chocolate factory,
and why he picked the position off of 25th Street and State.
It was a bus route. He could get on the bus and be
at his chocolate factory in five minutes.
He lived where he lived because it was affordable,
and he said he liked to spend his money on his activities,
on his recreational activities, which he enjoyed.
Gay night clubs, and he said he ate out most of the time.
We also had a long talk about religion.
I'm being a Catholic and I spent five years in the seminary, uh,
I knew some stuff about Martin Luther and the Lutheran
religion, and we got in--he was actually knowledgeable.
We talked about it, and that sent us into a whole discussion
about God and whether or not there was a God. Um...
From that discussion about God
where we were talking about a higher power--which he did believe there was a higher power.
He didn't know if it was God or the devil--he knew there
was something out there more powerful than him.
That also got us into a discussion about alcoholism,
because I noticed that he was, uh, that he was drunk, and
couple of times during the thing he would blurt out, you know, "I can't believe this has happened to me."
And I'd say, "What are you taking about?" he was like,
I can't believe I'm sitting here--I can't believe I got caught!"
And I said, 'Well, what did you think?"
he goes, "I just got drunk."
He goes, "I lost control. I just got drunk, otherwise
I wouldn't be here."
And he wasn't telling me what was happening,
but he would--kept referring to alcohol.
And because, as noted, I have had my problems with alcohol,
at that point I started trying to tell him that probably the
head in the refrigerator had something to do with alcohol.
If in fact you are an alcoholic, alcoholism is a disease.
And, then he started making tacit admissions like "Well, for what I've done there's no excuse," or something like that.
Not saying what he did, but little tacit admissions
where I knew he was starting to crack a little bit.
He was starting to come forward.
-You just need to be checked out?
-Yeah.
Actually, could I get a box too?
Um, last time I used a bag, and I was riding the bus home and the bag ripped open,
and the bottles just kind of were all over the bus,
and I wondered if I could get a box this time?
-Yeah, I'll go grab one.
-Thanks.
Can I write a check?
Yeah, that's fine.
$5.39.
And then they started bringing all these things out and putting them in the hallway.
Like office supply boxes.
Ten, then there's twenty, and then there was fifty, and
then there were sixty, and they were stacking
them up in the hallway on top of each other.
As I was going back and forth out to the coffee bar,
the lieutenant would keep coming up to me and saying,
"Is he saying anything to you? Is he saying anything to you?"
"No, he's still, you know, we're talking all this shit." Uh,
"Does he ask for a lawyer?"
"No, he hasn't asked for a lawyer."
Went back in, and finally when it got to the point after about
two hours,
the lieutenant knocked on the door and came in and said, "Hey, Pat, can I talk to you?"
and he pulled me out, and I said, "What's going on?" He said, "Well,
we're finding that big tank that you
saw in his bedroom that's sealed,
and there's all kind of boxes that say muriatic
acid, flammable, extremely dangerous, caution.
We're seeing wires sticking in the wall
from all the electronic devices that he had.
The--the C.I.B.--the criminal investigation--the forensic
people are afraid that there's a booby trap,
or that if they move something it's gonna blow up
or is something rigged or explosive?"
The best way I can describe it is we were dismantling someone's museum.
Is that when we were walking down the hallway,
in a small closet, there was a large stainless steel cook pot,
and when we looked in there, there was, um, some human hands and,
uh, male genitalia that had been dried or desiccated.
"They don't want to move anything until you ask him."
So, I went back in, I said, "Hey, Jeff," you know, I said,
"Our--our forensic guys are out at your apartment and they're afraid--
they're seeing the big five, five-gallon boxes that say
muriatic acid, explosives, dangerous.
they're seeing all the electronic devices hooked into your walls," and
all of a sudden you could see the realization. He goes, "You mean, you're in my house, searching my house?"
and I said, "Well, if we're not, we're going to, Jeff."
I said, "Of course." I said, "There's a homicide there, we're gonna go through everything in that house."
We found three skulls that were spray-painted with this
gray, granite-like texture paint,
and I, um, was impressed with how, um,
professional they looked, and I--
It was hard for me to conceive of these being skeletonized remains because they didn't appear to be that.
And it wasn't until my assistant, Dr. Teggatz had taken out his pocket knife and removed some of the paint that we could see-
on the teeth, we could actually see that there was enamel on the teeth.
And that was the first time that I fully realized
that we had additional three, uh, bodies
because those were, you know, human skulls.
I can't believe that he's done something to someone else, I said, "Can't be, can't be."
And they keep bringing all these things
out and what are in these pots and...
...stuff? I remember asking him, and
he had told me in a pot there... penises.
And then there are boxes with penises in them, and
there are all these pictures of people. And...
...bodies. These are not living people.
The typical homicide interrogation lasts about three-and-a-half hours
before they start to crap out. This is about three hours in,
we had been talking--three hours and ten minutes in,
when he finally said, "Well, you're gonna find out everything now,
so it's no sense. I might as well tell you."
so I thought, "Okay, great."
So I took out my pen and I got the
paper to start writing stuff down,
and he said to me, "But Pat, when I tell you what I'm gonna tell you,
first of all you probably will hate me." I said, "Jeff...
I've seen a lot of evil stuff," right, "There's nothing you have done that would freak me out," right?
I said, "I've talked to a lot of murderers."
I said, "Besides that, I don't believe in judging people. We had this discussion about
God," and I said, "I'm not here to judge you.
That's not what it's all about. I'm here to solve this problem."
And then he said,
"Well, when I tell you this, Pat, you'll be famous."
Now you're gonna wanna stop by, have me tighten, realign those for ya.
-Okay.
-That'll help keep 'em problem-free.
-Okay.
-Alright?
-Thanks a lot.
-Oh, thank you.
Alright, back to you.
He said, "If I'm going to tell you about it,
I might as well start at the beginning."
And that's when I took out my pen to write down,
and that's when he started telling me about his first homicide back in Bath, Ohio; 13 years previous,
when he was 18 years old.
So I put my pen down,
and then he told me about going to Ohio State.
He goes, "I already mentioned that,"
but he mentioned that when he came here he started
talking about his second victim at the Ambassador Hotel
that he drugged and beat to death, but he didn't remember.
And then he went into, like, two or three other,
uh, victims that he was talking about and
I didn't write anything down because I truly believed he was
bullshit, right?
That he was, uh... truly insane, right? That he was gonna--
he hadn't even talked about the head in the refrigerator, which is all I really cared about, right?
Let's see, we had two... three... seven--
I believe we had seven skulls, five skeletons, um...
and then, um, some dissected hands and then photographs.
So I went out to get coffee, and then this guy
came to me again. He said, "Pat, is he talking?"
and I said, "Well, yeah, he's talking now." I said,
But he's telling me he's killed like three or four people,
and he hasn't even talked to me about the head in the
refrigerator. I think he's insane. I think he's a bullshitter."
And that's when Lieutenant Vahl looked
at me and goes, "No, no, Pat," you know,
"Mike called. They found six heads in the freezer and they got body parts and penises."
And I said, "You--what?" he goes, "No, there's
many more than one victim in this, Pat." I said--
so I went back in with a whole new attitude, right?
And I took my pen out and I said, "Well, let's start over
again, Jeff. Let's start back... [laughs] with Bath, Ohio."
-How's it going?
-Good.
-Could I get a bottle of rum, too?
-Sure.
Cheap one down there.
-This one?
-Yeah, thanks.
-This gonna be it?
-Yep.
-$10.75.
-Can I write a check?
Yeah, that'll work.
-Hey, how you doing tonight?
-Good.
-We just wanted to get a room.
-A double or single?
-Uh, double.
-Okay. Uh, that'll be $38.50.
Is that for one night?
-Yep.
-Okay
So you ever been here before?
Uh, I think, like, once, but I was, like, 12 or 13,
somethin' like that.
-Did you stay overnight?
-Uh, did I stay overnight?
I think so--like, something my parents were doing--even though we live here they like to do all those crazy things sometimes.
-I've only eaten here.
-Yeah, it seems nice enough, though.
There was this large, blue, uh,
container that was uh, in the corner,
and when we moved that around, it
kind of, uh, sloshed back and forth,
so we knew that there was some fluid in there,
but we didn't really know what was in it.
Um, and I didn't want to open that at the scene, nor--
and--and I had, um, I had concerns about transporting that ourselves.
I had a vision that we would drop it or somehow it would be
seen on TV.
We're always concerned about removing, um, decedents from crime scenes
and making sure that it's done in a sensitive way,
and that we don't disrupt the body, or have cause to, you know, drop it or lose control.
When I turned to the law-enforcement officer, I said
well, you know, "Call the hazmat."
they said, "Well, we really don't have one.
We contract with them," and I said, "Well, we need them
down here,"
and so it turned out that there was just these two young guys.
They were in their early 20s.
It looked like they were, you know, totally unprepared for
what they were seeing,
but they really rose to the occasion and they did a really good job.
It looked like that was the last thing that they had thought
they were gonna be involved in that night.
Lieutentant Roosevelt Harrell.
Uh, we're investigating a homicide at the 900 block of
north 25th Street in an apartment building.
Uh, we have taken evidence out of the building by the medical
examiner.
We do have one suspect in custody.
There's a strong possibility there might be additional
homicides...
From there, we talked until about 10:30 the next morning,
and by that time he had given me the basic rundown of 15 victims.
I was trying to comprehend what was going on,
pushing my sanity,
because how could he be doing all this kind of stuff right over here,
right in the midst where there are all these people that you got--neighbors,
you got senior citizens living downstairs from you,
you have people like me who was befriending you,
and you are over here... cutting up
human bodies? Eating body parts.
I have eaten a sandwich from you.
I have probably eaten someone's body part.
How dare you do this to me?
Police in Wisconsin this morning are investigating a
grisly discovery in a Milwaukee apartment...
Police have found skulls in the refrigerator and lots of
dismembered body parts stuffed in cabinets and...
Police were led there by a man who told them he had
been attacked with a butcher knife...
...he may have killed as many as 18 people, most of them
male.
How many people will be in your party?
Alright.
And, okay, so will that be a, uh,
smoking room, or a non-smoking room?
Okay, uh, yes.
and can I get your last name?
That next day, I don't wanna talk to nobody.
I don't wanna see nobody. I didn't even want to talk to my husband at that time.
I remember he had gotten up and went to work and left me by myself
in this house, with all these body parts stacked up around my door.
The whole apartment building was in terror.
I'm Dr. Jeffrey Jentzen. Uh, J-E-N-T-Z-E-N, the medical
examiner.
At the present time, the
personnel from the medical examiner's office are continuing to attempt to establish the identification.
We have at this time, the, um--established there are 11, uh, bodies,
victims that were recovered from the apartment.
Um, these consist of...
I think it was hard to, um, come to realizations at that time...
Is there a sexual aspect to the killing?
-I wouldn't want--I couldn't comment on that aspect.
-Any evidence of cannibalism?
Again, there's not anything that would be inconsistent...
When we take photographs at scenes,
we do that because when you go to a crime scene, you can't possibly process all the information you're seeing.
You become somewhat myopic.
There was so much information and there was so much evidence,
it was hard to understand and put everything into perspective.
And so we use photographs so we can go back over them and look at the evidence again and again and again
and make judgments and see things again for the first time.
When I got home I was very excited, right?
Very excited.
Um, and as I walked in the front door,
my wife was sitting on the edge
of the couch, watching the TV,
which was just blaring at nothing but Dahmer, Dahmer, Dahmer, and... [inhales]
you could tell she was visibly shook up.
And the first thing she said to me when I walked in the door
is, "Please tell me you're not involved in this."
And I said, "What, are you kidding?" I said, "I'm the man."
I said, "I got the confession." I said, "I'm in the middle of this."
I said, "I'm going day shift. I'm going back to talk to him tomorrow."
Oh, and... at the time I didn't want to argue about it, right? I mean, it caused quite a bit of strain,
and she really didn't want me to talk to the kids about it, which I didn't want to,
but it was all over the news, so you really couldn't get away from it.
He's confessed to perhaps some of the most gruesome murders in United States history...
The next day when I was opening the blue container,
I started removing decomposing skeletons, and, uh,
it was--it was rather, um, unsettling
to be removing, you know, three skeletons from that container.
He had asked to see me that next day 'cause they asked him
or something, "Did you want to see someone?"
and he had said that, "Well, I'd like to talk to my neighbor."
and I said, "I'm not going down there.
I don't want to talk to him. He wasn't my friend." You know, "He was...
he just used me like he used everyone,
you know, so, you are so alone."
Before Jeff was put in a cell I had made a deal with him
that he would not talk to a lawyer until he helped me identify all the victims.
...that seems striking to me is his willingness--and his
attorney's willingness--to discuss the details of the case.
All we've heard so far--and they are grisly details indeed--those are only the surface details. Those are only the broadest...
As an investigator, when someone is put back in a jail
cell, you can't just go and talk to 'em the next day.
That's against their constitutional rights.
The only way they can talk to you is if they request to talk
to you.
And this gives a little insight into the relationship that I
built with Jeffrey,
and the fact that he bought into this relationship as his means of salvation.
No one could sleep in their own apartment. No one closed their doors.
That next night we were all like, "Oh, my God, where are we
gonna sleep at?"
Well, "Everybody, let's just go down and sleep in the front."
So we had a big area where the elevators come up on the floors.
Everybody went up to the front of the building in their pajamas
with their pillows and their blankets and laid in the floor.
There was glass all on the one side
there, so you could see outside,
but all you could see outside were people,
on the street, on the lawns.
They were camping out. They were just everywhere.
...take their pictures or just stare.
This parade of gawkers is only part of the pain for these people...
...planning to move because their lives and their home become a sick tourist attraction.
Many are intent on moving. It's an option that, for the short term, seems to make sense.
I'm thinking about it.
I'm, really, I'm just tired.
And I had had a couch that Jeff had gave me, this red couch.
So I had the couch in my house, and there were people that were willing to pay
50 bucks to come in and sit on my couch.
Or this other guy had a glass that Jeff had drank some water out of.
These people were actually paying just to hold it.
I'll be right back.
-Thanks for waiting.
-No problem.
At the end of that third day of talking to him before he was gonna go into court,
he said to me, you know, "I'm a little bit concerned. I mean, I have to go to court tomorrow," and
he already knew by then that there was news media all over the place
'cause I was bringing paper-- "Hey, look what they're saying about you,"--every day I'd bring the paper in, right?
he was concerned about, you know, that he looked all greasy and funky, and
"Am I gonna have to go in this paper dress suit?"
Uh, this picture we have of Jeffrey Dahmer is 1982,
so it'll be interesting to see how his appearance has changed in the intervening years.
He will be appearing in a courtroom here...
So I went home that night and I had--my oldest boy
at the time was a sophomore in high school
and he was damn near 6'1", 6'2", 185 pounds.
So I asked him, I said, "Hey, Pat, do you have any-
a shirt and some pants that you don't like?"
and of course he pulled out this blue striped shirt and he goes,
"Yeah, this one you gave me for Christmas that I will never
wear," he goes, "Yeah, you can have this one,"
and also he had a pair of black jeans that he gave me, right?
So, the next day when I went in, as we were preparing for court,
I gave those to Jeffrey Dahmer, and he put 'em on.
There's Jeffrey Dahmer, the man in the striped shirt is the defendant.
He is--this apparently a part of his decision to, as he put
it, tell the whole truth...
That's the shirt that is on people magazine,
the blue and white striped shirt where people say, "Oh, look how he's dressed like a tennis player," and
they made all these assumptions about his choice,
but that was my son's shirt and pants that he wore there.
All right, thank you.
They took him back into the judge's chambers and their individual cell where they hold prisoners.
He started to get
out of those clothes and get in--'cause now he's gonna go over to the county so he's putting on his orange jumpsuit.
He tried to hand me back the shirt and the pants, and
at the time I said, "Nah, Jeff, you know, that's all right, you can keep 'em."
I was on the north side at the grocery store,
and this man spotted me in a car and he had all these cars come around me.
And these people were trying to talk to me
that they were--they said, "We are victims,"
"He killed my brother," or "He killed my son,"
and all of this, and I'm trying to explain to them, "Well, I had nothing to do with it.
You should be telling this to your police department, or to
your health department.
Why are you blaming us?"
You know, or, "Why are you blaming me? Well, I didn't do anything,"
You know, and they said, "Well, that's it!"
To me, it was probably that they just wanted something, just--
I gotta put this on somebody.
They were looking at me as not a victim too,
Because I had said, "I was a victim, too, just like you're a victim."
Yep, I got it.
-Oh--good morning, sir.
-Hi.
-Good morning.
-Hi.
-Good morning, sir.
-Hi.
Just like to check out.
Alright.
Okay.
-And how was everything?
-Good.
Great.
You know, like, who would have thought that this
was what was happening?
And like they were saying, "Well, maybe you should have
called the police or called the health department."
We called the health department.
They came out, they checked--of course Jeff wasn't home.
Police--we called the police. They'd come down there and,
"Well, there's nothing we can do. We can't go in this man's house."
And he had all these locks on his door. Like he had six other locks that he had put on his door and stuff, so
they weren't gonna go in there, you know. They were like, "This guy ain't bothering nobody," you know,
"Let's go. He's not doing nothing. Look at what y'all are doing."
They brought in this guy named Dennis Murphy, a crusty old prick from the day shift, right?
Excellent homicide investigator. Him and I were always together,
taking him back and forth, for safety reasons, as well,
but also to make sure that all the T's were crossed and all the I's were dotted
'cause I was a rookie homicide detective.
And the plan was to identify each and every victim.
...hopes that evidence collected at the scene might help identify the victims.
It was a huge undertaking.
Don't forget at this time, in '91, the human genome had been broken down
but it was not readily being used in law enforcement, especially for these type of purposes, so
what we had to do is take information from Jeffrey Dahmer
and try to corroborate it with the body parts that we found in his apartment.
And let's not forget that some of his victims, there was no body parts--he didn't save anything.
Well, essentially all of the bodies that we had were either skeletonized or had been previously dissected.
There were no intact bodies.
We had to remove the paint lacquer from the painted skulls.
Dr. Stormo was able to do that with just regular paint remover.
We found that we would have to go out to the hardware stores
to get equipment to kind of work on these bodies ourselves.
First we would determine a date that he picked his victim.
Then we would take his identification of the victim,
and he would give us race, sex, age, height, weight.
And from there we would pull all the missings of anybody who fit that description,
a month or two before that date or a month or--
and then from there, detectives would have to go and look--if they were adults,
has this person come back? Is this person alive? Have you heard anything about 'em, right?
And from there we would try to get photographic arrays,
either from our own records if they had one, or if we could get it from the family.
And then we would make photographic arrays and take in to Jeffrey,
and then he would narrow it down by pictures.
And so we contacted the forensic odontologist, Thomas Johnson,
who had worked with the office for a long time.
So he was mainly involved in doing the dental identifications.
Once we had the teeth exposed, Dr. Johnson was able to take dental photographs and x-rays.
and we started the process of working with the police department
as they brought in suspected unidentified bodies or unidentified persons.
We were able to get their dental records and Dr. Johnson started the process of identifying those.
It took time, right? It took six weeks.
But we were able to narrow it down
through outside corroboration and through the information he gave us and working with the medical examiner's office,
to identify each and every one of the victims. Even some of the victims where there was nothing.
The officers in question came in contact with Jeffrey Dahmer in May
while responding to a battery call.
At the time, dahmer told police the 14-year-old was not a child but an adult,
and that the two were lovers. Police returned the boy to Dahmer's custody.
Dahmer now says he killed the boy minutes later.
I went through a period there where I could not sleep.
I would drink, like, maybe two fifths, I could go to sleep,
but I would pass out. It was like an unconscious--you know,
just to--just to let the brain not think about anything, because that was what I was trying to get to.
I was tired of thinking about this all the time.
Whenever I would come out of the interrogation room during those six weeks there was always detectives
that would come up to me and say, "Hey, what is he saying?"
They would take pictures of Jeffrey Dahmer in the paper and pictures of me from the paper
and superimpose them to make like a cartoon, and put it on my desk.
You know they said lewd things, right, like I let him stroke me off,
or you know, that I allowed him to perform... uh, you know.
-Thanks, guys.
-Thanks.
My sister called my mother, she said, "Look at TV, Ma."
Isn't this Pamela's building in Milwaukee?
...public outcry followed, accusing police of racism and insensitivity to gays...
And she saw all the swarm of people around me,
so she knew that she couldn't--"I can't get to her."
And I remember I finally got through to her on the phone,
she told me, "Don't watch TV, Pamela. Don't read none of this."
As chief, both I and the entire department must accept responsibility for the inadequate...
It was, it was just...
I don't know. I don't even know what to say about this thing.
This city of Milwaukee to me just lost--they cared nothing about the Black community as a whole.
They weren't showing it back then.
This was a fairly unique crime scene
and autopsy for a forensic pathologist,
because we had immediate access to Dahmer.
Dahmer was talking to and conversing with law enforcement.
He had basically admitted his guilt and culpability,
and was assisting law enforcement in the investigation.
When we found an injury, we would call up law enforcement,
and then they would inquire of Dahmer what we found and corroborate our findings,
which is a very unique situation for a forensic pathologist to have.
Immediate confirmation of what you're seeing.
He wasn't always forthcoming with everything, but
when I questioned on--him on something that we had found out from additional information on the case,
he would be able to expound on it,
and things that he told us, we were able to check and verify to see that he was in fact telling the truth.
As I was examining and dissecting the cranium or the head area,
I noticed that there was some hemorrhage around a hole that had been drilled in the skull.
and hemorrhage in a forensic sense means that an injury occurred when there was a blood pressure.
when a person is injured and they're in a post-mortem state or after their--their, uh, heart stops beating,
there's not a lot of blood that gets pushed into the tissue.
But the fact that there was hemorrhage around the area led me to believe that it may have been an injury that had been,
uh, incurred before death.
and so I examined the brain tissue and I did find that there was a wound tract,
or a track through the brain tissue that looked hemorrhagic. And so, um
I recovered that area, photographed it, and then looked at it under the microscope,
and what I found was that there was an inflammation in that track.
and so when we see inflammation that means that there was a time factor that happened
between the time of obtaining the injury, and the time the person died.
Dr. Jentzen was concerned-- "Well, how did these holes get into peoples' skulls?"
Jeff, although he told us he was cutting open people and disposing of the body,
he didn't tell us that he was attempting to create a zombie
until we presented him with the evidence that there was what appeared to be holes drilled into the top of these skulls.
We looked at that with the neuropathologist who was an expert in brain anatomy and tissue,
and we made the diagnosis that this injury had been inflicted while the person was alive,
and that the person had survived for some time after receiving that injury.
And he even shook his head when he told me, he goes, "It was a weird kind of a thought I had
that I could create someone who I wouldn't have to go out and kill.
I drilled in their heads and I experimented with different
things."
He goes, "I would go down about a quarter of an inch with a
quarter-inch drill bit.
And then I would fill up a basting needle. I tried first a mixture of soilex and hot water.
I thought if I shot that in there, it might affect part of
the brain that would stop them from talking,
and stop them from being demanding, but just being alive,
being a docile sex partner.
However, everyone I tried it with died eventually."
It was all up in the air 'bout what they were gonna do with the building.
First it was "We're gonna sell the building," or "We're gonna keep the building."
But at the end, they tore that building down so quick it was like you blinked your eyes and it was gone.
Me and this older guy, we were the last two to leave,
because he said he wasn't going. He had been there for like twenty-some years.
And he said, "They're taking away my house, all because this stuff happened? That doesn't have anything to do with me.
I didn't do anything, so I'm not going anywhere."
He tried to stay there right up until the end. They needed police to escort him out of there.
Part of getting him to confess and
and performing, uh, this, uh--this service for the people of Milwaukee, uh, put me in intimate relationship with this guy,
Where I actually formed a relationship with this guy, right? Where I actually started to feel sorry for the prick, right?
I mean, he was a pathetic guy, right? I mean, uh,
I felt bad for him, and I felt bad that I felt bad for him, right? Like, here's a--
why do I have empathy for this guy? And
what is it in me that makes me relate to this guy, right?
And all the jokes that people made, which I brushed off,
I guess at that point I kind of started thinking about those things.
The entire confession is gonna to be talked about by Detective Kennedy.
and I ask you if you look at that briefly...
all my energies went into it.
I remember thinking a couple of times,
you know, Jeff--when he would talk about going on the hunt for somebody pleasurable and attractive, and
how, when he got away with it, it gave him more power and made him feel better and, uh...
It wasn't till later on when I thought, well, there are--there was a little bit of, uh, parallels going on in my own personal life.
I mean, I had moved out of the house, um, after 18 years of being married.
There's numerous opportunities in law enforcement for promiscuity anyways, uh, believe it or not.
And then with some of the additional, uh, interest in this case,
uh, at least locally, um, for a time people recognized my face.
-...Jeffrey Dahmer?
-That's correct, sir.
-And as far as you're concerned you've had opportunity to look at this confession...
Hey, you're that Dahmer dude.
And then they said, "Hey, look, everybody, over here." This is that--the Dahmer detective."
And then all kinds of people swarmed around me and were pattin' me on the back, and
I remember I was like, "Whoa, this is really weird."
They gave everyone the choice of moving to housing--housing projects.
So you got to pick which one you moved to, and I moved to Parklawn.
And it just seems like when they find out who you are, it just started all over again.
You know, or people were trying to befriend me that were just trying to see if I had anything that they could get
that they could sell.
Or maybe get a story out of you that I can tell.
Just to say, "Well, hey, I met her. I know her."
You may remember, John, back in the very early '90s, the Jeffrey Dahmer case in Milwaukee.
Took a dozen young men over time into his apartment, cut 'em up, put 'em in a vat, you know,
abused them, tortured them, uh, ate them. Cannibalism.
Uh, if you had his raincoat right in front of you, would you want to put it on?
Uh... no, I wouldn't want to put it on, but--but, uh...
Why not? It's just a raincoat.
It is. It's just--and maybe, you know, that's probably, maybe some residual brain activity there, um...
Coming down.
The way I usually do this demonstration in public is I offer, you know, 50 bucks,
you know, if people will put on an old sweater or cardigan--of a killer,
-but I don't tell 'em it's a killer.
-Oh.
So all the hands shoot up.
Uh, but then I say, "Would you still wear it if it belonged to Jeffrey Dahmer?"
And most hands rapidly come down. You make this instant decision. It's as if your emotions are kicking in.
And of course there's no kind of scientific--or there's nothing in the cloth,
but psychologically we do have this idea that the essence of someone evil could almost contaminate the physical world.
And I think that's a very pervasive and very powerful intuition.
It was like everything started coming together. I started to get a complete picture of what was going on down there,
but you really don't want to see it because it's too horrible for anybody to imagine.
You would think if someone asked you to write a horror story, this would be some of the stuff that you would write.
And... he, he lived it, and he made us participate in it.
[clears throat] Thank you.
[shivers] Whew.
On Saturday it took a jury only five hours to find that Jeffrey Dahmer was sane
on all 15 counts of murder...
After he was found guilty and was gonna be reprimanded to the state,
I went back to say good-bye to him.
And I shook his hand, I said good-bye,
and he said--he goes, "Pat, you know, I'm really gonna miss talking to you. I'm gonna miss you."
And I said, "Yeah, yeah, Jeff." At the time I was kind of making light of it.
It sounds weird now talking about it 19 years later,
but at the time it was--it was like the culmination of everything, right?
So it turns out that you're in the middle of this really big case where you're being treated like... a freaking king, right?
People are patting you on the back and telling you what a great job you're doing, and
you're day shift, and, uh...
All of a sudden it's over with, and now I'm just sitting in this
one-room efficiency apartment downtown,
with no furniture and no friends,
it's getting dark out, and it's my birthday, right?
Uh, I don't think I had a phone set up yet either, right, so I couldn't even, you know, talk to my kids on the phone.
That night I did have a time to kind of, uh...
I guess I'm kind of embarrassed to say... [chuckles] I did kind of, like, break down a little bit.
I was incarcerated at that time. I was in jail,
I think doing time for a ticket or something.
So I remember being in jail, and it came on TV
that, um, Jeffrey Dahmer and the Anderson guy had been beaten and killed, and
everybody stood up and cheered and hugged and kissed everyone.
And I was sitting there and I was crying.
And I got up and went to my room and locked myself in
and I said, you know, I didn't understand it,
but I was looking at them like, "How can you cheer? This is a life."
I was crying so uncontrollably, I had one of the police guard
ladies came in and she's like,
"Pamela, what's going on?" she said, "Oh, I know who you are now," she said, "I see," she said. So,
she said, "But, you know, you're probably the only one who's crying for him now. Nobody else is."
I have a hard time figuring why would people would go to some of these movies and--
and see, uh, chainsaw murders and other types of macabre, uh, stories and...
tales.
I think the last scary movie I saw was The Exorcist, and that's probably 20,30 years ago,
but I don't go to scary movies.
Yeah.
Alright, so lemme grab some goldfish here.
You gotta keep 'em well fed. If you don't feed 'em
often enough, they will eat each other.
This was basically a mini-disaster.
And a disaster is basically any, uh, episode
that, uh, overwhelms your existing resources.
And a disaster could be two people, uh, in a car accident
if you're a small office.
Or it could be, um uh... three hundred people, uh,
in--in a major crash.
So a disaster is different things to different
people at different times.
And at--for us, at this time, this was a disaster.
Everybody always wants to think that when the shit
hits the fan, you're gonna be courageous, right.
We-we hope so. All through the academy,
you have those dreams, right.
That you're going to show up when someone's being shot
or killed or raped and take charge and be the hero and
That when a dangerous situation comes or the shit hits
the fan, where someone has to stand up and act
that you're gonna have the courage to do that.
And until you are actually put in a situation like that,
you don't know how you're gonna react, right.
You hope that you're gonna react.
Well, in the Catholic church,
or my father always told me that
Courage was simply fear that has said its prayers.
-Hey.
-Hi.
I can show you what we do have.
Have some new friends?
Yeah.
Alright, so, this is kinda what we have.
Kind of a large container with a lid.
-Okay, thanks a lot.
-Yeah, sorry.
Back in those days, everything was open.
You know, they even had kids selling drugs.
Twelve and thirteen year olds.
We're having a big problem with crack.
And um, I was using too, so it made it difficult.
I don't think it was so much in our
building, but it was around us.
Well you're lookin' good.
Grandma was saying that she thought that you got
quite a bit thinner, but you look fit. I dunno.
Well, I've been surviving mostly on McDonald's food.
-It's just so much easier just to pop into the restaurant, but
-Yeah.
Like I said before, it gets too expensive, and
-It does.
-I have to start eating at home more.
I don't think about a person's life or what they could be,
I think about, um, when I'm talking to their families later on
after the autopsy, and I'm giving them--the families information
um, you know, I express my uh--my condolences to the family, and--and, uh--and my--
I express how sorry I am that this happened to them, but I don't
I don't process every case, and uh
and think about a person's life after I've done an autopsy.
I, myself, was involved in--I didn't--I got shot at.
People wanted to know why I didn't shoot back.
I was too busy getting the heck out of the way.
I, myself, was involved in several occasions where people shot at me.
It became kind of a wake up call, right.
Because I was not--I was always a big guy.
I played sports--I played sports in college.
But I wasn't a fighter guy. Because of my size, people
didn't--I really didn't have to get in fights, right?
We used to mainly sit in the backyard.
You know, on the steps and
We'd have our little grill out there and
cookin'--stuff like that.
We'd be hanging out in the back and he'd come in and...
One day I saw him trying to take a bag of trash out or something like that
and I spoke to him.
And we had a little, you know, conversation, "How you doin',
how long have you been here?
Why are you over here with all these black people," you know?
It was close to his job, so that's why he had moved there.
Kind of friendly, but kind of, uh, introverted.
He didn't have too many friends in the building,
but he would always speak to me.
-Hey, how's it going?
-Good.
-I'm Andy.
-Hi.
-Brian.
-I'm Jeff.
-From Eye In The Sky, here to give you
-Oh.
-Here to give you a quote.
-Right, right.
So how this works is, I've a few pamphlets
here--our different types of cameras.
I'll let Brian take a few measurements and I'll
be able to give you a rough estimate.
Um, what rooms are you looking to protect?
-Just this room.
-So we have multiple cameras to choose from.
Active cameras, hidden cameras, wireless cameras, body-worn cameras.
So you can see the differences between these two cameras.
You have a list of features down here.
I started cooking and sometimes I would give him a
sandwich or somethin' when he was on his way to work.
Or I would like go to his house, come in and
have a beer with him or something.
It was alright, in the beginning.
He would give me little things, like he had a trunk
that he said his grandmother gave him that he
brought in a cab to the apartment.
It was a 6-feet something--kind of a trunk.
And I remember when he brought it in,
he was having trouble trying to get it in
so I had to open up my door so he could turn it.
He was kind of kind-hearted to people, you know.
He would share what he had with you.
It was one of those nights where the humidity was high.
It was really thick, heavy, mucky.
As we pulled into the apartment,
and went into the foyer, which is a
kind of a big glass enclosed foyer where it had
steps and an elevator to go up to the three stories.
As soon as you walked in there, you could
smell that funky, putrid smell of death.
And the way I like to describe death is--the
smell of death--is that
you may have smelled rotted animals or something like that
but a good, you know, ripe body that's been
lying around for a while, has a unique smell
that I can only refer to as when I think about coffee,
'cause I'm a coffee drinker.
And if you know what coffee smells like, and then you
are taken--whisked away someplace--to an an island,
for thirty, forty, sixty days; where you don't have any coffee
But then all of a sudden you come back and you smell coffee,
you immediately know, "Wow, that's coffee."
I mean it just comes to you, right? That's how the smell
of death is, at least for me. I can tell.
We were in the bed sleepin', 'cause I remember
my husband had to get up and go to work in the morning
He usually left about six o'clock. So it was
about eleven, and Jeff, of course, was over there.
He's got someone in his house.
You can hear his music playing, but his door was open.
The police came there and could I hear them outside my door talking.
One of the officers said "Hey man, get the fucking cuffs"
and they were scufflin' with him,
but he howled like uh animal that I'd never heard before.
Just a...
loud screeching--un-human..
And I flew and jumped in the bed with my husband
and pulled the covers up over my head.
I said I don't know what's going on over there,
but something is going on over there with Jeff.
He said, "Well, call the police".
The police are already over there.
-Hi.
-Hi.
Can you, uh, pop the trunk?
I have some luggage.
-Sure.
-Thanks.
-You wanna hand?
-No, that's okay. I got it.
-Hi, how are you?
-Good.
Could you take me to the Oxford apartments, please?
I remember a stench, uh odor--uh, formaldehyde?
Something like that. Some preservative or something you could smell.
Sickness, death--something.
I remember standing at the hallway, looking at this officer
and he was just standing there like this.
And I was standing...
And a gust of wind came out and whooohhhhh
...went around my body and knocked me on my knees.
And he started throwin' up.
I could see a police officer whom I knew.
As I walked down there, I noticed that his
uniform was in a totally disheveled state,
besides perspiration all over, soaking through his...
But that his 'Sam Browne' had been twisted and that
uh, his tie was askew,
and his hair was kinda stickin' up and
he was sweating profusely,
and his eyes were, I mean, they were big.
They were as big as saucers.
Very unlike Officer Mueller. I said,
"Rolf, what's going on here?"
And all's he could say to me was, "Go look in the refrigerator."
Could you put your chin on there? Thank you. Good.
Right at the light, please.
-And what are you doing now?
-I work at a chocolate factory.
When I became a detective, I had already
been a police officer for nine years,
and I had seen a lot of horrific things, right.
And I also knew, at this time, that the suspect
was under arrest and hog-tied,
that I had two large police officers armed,
and I was armed and my partner was there was armed.
So I knew that I was not in any danger.
From time to time, we'll be called out, um...
by investigators and law enforcement
to identify and examine uh... body parts
or some kind of uh--of decaying flesh
that are found that may uh...
end up being human or non-human.
And on many occasions, what we find is
that there is something that is non-human.
That is in--in such a decomposed state that it looks human.
For example, hunters will kill a bear
and the feet and paws, uh... mimic almost uh--ah...
very closely, uh, the--the skeletal structure of a human.
So it's many--on many occasions, those are--
those are misinterpreted.
It what empty in the main part of the refrigerator,
except for a cardboard box.
And inside that cardboard box was a freshly, it looked like--severed African American male's human head,
with eyes and the mouth opened like--like this.
I also noticed in the back was an
open box of Arm & Hammer baking soda.
My mom used to do that to keep the refrigerator fresh.
And then on the door that I opened up, there was condiments:
mustard, ketchup, A-1 sauce, that kind of stuff.
I will admit that from the bottom of my feet to the top of my head, I--everything in body said
you know, "You--you gotta get the hell outta here, right?"
Let's get a boss here.
This is bigger than me.
Hey, Pete? We've got 'em coming out of this... house.
Within five minutes, Lieutenant Harrell came.
And after he saw the head in the refrigerator and backed up,
he looked at me and said,
Pat, I want you take this prick downtown.
He goes, "I want you to stick with him.
I don't want anybody else to talk to him."
He goes, "I don't want you to leave his side. I don't care if he's gotta go to the bathroom--I want you to hold his dick."
He goes, "But I want you to stay with this guy
and don't let anybody else talk to him."
I'm sure they done found somebody,
s-somebody done set Jeff up.
They had tried to get him, or somebody got killed
at Jeff's house or something like that.
I never thought that Jeff had did anything.
We put him back in the farthest interrogation room.
Our interrogation rooms are like nine by twelve, cinder
block, with a metal table and two chairs. That's it.
The first thing he said to me is,
"You're not gonna let anybody hit me anymore, are ya?"
And I said, "No", I said,
"Naw. No one's gonna hit you no more."
I said, "As a matter of fact, no one else is gonna talk to you but me."
I said, "Before we get started, I'm gonna go get myself a cup of coffee. Would you like one? Would you like a cigarette?"
And to that, he said, "I would love both. I'd love both."
The apartment was a one bedroom small, uh,
efficiency-type apartment
and there were large police officers that were taking
pictures and doing their investigation, recovering evidence
and it was difficult to move around the apartment.
Chaos. It was chaos. And there
were--officers were everywhere.
People were everywhere. Cameras.
Everybody else flew outside to talk
to the camera people, you know.
I wanna be on TV. Let's go get on TV.
And I'm goin', "I'm not goin' out there. All them
people out there and we don't know what's goin' on."
Sometimes you'll go to a crime scene,
and there might be some joking.
People talking about, you know, basketball games
or what they were gonna do over
the weekend or something, but....
This was different.
In that, I think people were very much, um,
absorbed with, uh, what they were seeing
and, I think, how they were feeling.
So it was uh--it was--it was very quiet.
I put my hand out, I said, "My name
is Pat Kennedy." Well, I said, "I'm Pat.
And I'm the one who's gonna be talkin' to
you about the head in the refrigerator."
And at that point, he said to me, "I really don't think
that it's in my best interest to talk to you about this."
So to me that was kinda weird, right?
'Cause if they're 'no' people, it's like "Aye, fuck you",
you know? "I ain't sayin' shit", right?
'Yes' people um... will be defeated.
But I had never had anyone, you know--without sayin'
I want a lawyer, which happens a lot...
I had never had anyone say it quite like that.
I mean very polite and very to the point.
Obviously, a command of the English language.
I don't think it's in my best interest for me to talk to you about that.
Air conditioner's a fossil.
I found it when I moved in.
Weighs 200 pounds and the base plate's busted off.
I'm pretty sure that it's just gonna shoot
silicone straight into my lungs.
-Hey, what's up, buddy?
-Hey, I'm here to pick up my barrel.
Oh, all right. You, uh, you have your car here?
No.
Oh, you're just gonna walk off with it?
Yeah.
-Alright. Here you go man, yup.
-Alright.
Thanks.
He started asking me,
"Well, what'll happen to me if I don't talk to you?"
description of our booking process,
And as I was describing it, he was kinda nodding and I
could see that he was familiar with the booking process.
and then he said to me, he goes,
"Well, there'd be any way that I'd be able to get my own cell?"
and as soon as he said that, then I knew he was
familiar with the booking process, right?
Because the only time people get their own cell--at least in the
Milwaukee Police Department at that time--
is if they were completely nuts and couldn't be
trusted around other people,
or if they were a juvenile and we didn't have a place to hold 'em 'til we could put 'em someplace, they had to be separated.
Uh, otherwise, everybody went to the bullpen,
which was a disgusting place to be, right?
It's stinky and it's smelly and it's packed,
and you could be sitting next to a murderer as well as a drunk driver.
It was--it was just--and I could,
I picked up that he was afraid of the bullpen.
Um, I said, "Well..." I said, "Tonight is a very busy night.
I think every cell is full and that bullpen is packed.
So you can stay here and talk to me," and already he
saw that he had a cup of coffee going and the cigarettes,
I said, "Or," I said, "you know, you can go..."
There was a, uh, portable freezer that was in the front room,
and it was, uh, almost out of place in its position and um
whether you would even see that in someone's small apartment.
We really kinda walked around it for the longest time before
I guess we had the nerve to open it up and see what was in it,
but um, we didn't anticipate anything, but then once we
opened up the container and saw another,
another, uh, head in there,
it became, you know, uh, it became real for us, I think.
You wanna make him uncomfortable, but not too
uncomfortable, so you're, you're positioning, right?
You're close enough to get intimate if you want,
but far enough away where they're not feeling
threatened, right? But able to... um...
As I'm talking to him, I--I said,
"Well, we can talk about other things, then," right?
So from there, uh, we did have a lengthy conversation about many things.
The first thing we talked about was his job at the chocolate factory,
and why he picked the position off of 25th Street and State.
It was a bus route. He could get on the bus and be
at his chocolate factory in five minutes.
He lived where he lived because it was affordable,
and he said he liked to spend his money on his activities,
on his recreational activities, which he enjoyed.
Gay night clubs, and he said he ate out most of the time.
We also had a long talk about religion.
I'm being a Catholic and I spent five years in the seminary, uh,
I knew some stuff about Martin Luther and the Lutheran
religion, and we got in--he was actually knowledgeable.
We talked about it, and that sent us into a whole discussion
about God and whether or not there was a God. Um...
From that discussion about God
where we were talking about a higher power--which he did believe there was a higher power.
He didn't know if it was God or the devil--he knew there
was something out there more powerful than him.
That also got us into a discussion about alcoholism,
because I noticed that he was, uh, that he was drunk, and
couple of times during the thing he would blurt out, you know, "I can't believe this has happened to me."
And I'd say, "What are you taking about?" he was like,
I can't believe I'm sitting here--I can't believe I got caught!"
And I said, 'Well, what did you think?"
he goes, "I just got drunk."
He goes, "I lost control. I just got drunk, otherwise
I wouldn't be here."
And he wasn't telling me what was happening,
but he would--kept referring to alcohol.
And because, as noted, I have had my problems with alcohol,
at that point I started trying to tell him that probably the
head in the refrigerator had something to do with alcohol.
If in fact you are an alcoholic, alcoholism is a disease.
And, then he started making tacit admissions like "Well, for what I've done there's no excuse," or something like that.
Not saying what he did, but little tacit admissions
where I knew he was starting to crack a little bit.
He was starting to come forward.
-You just need to be checked out?
-Yeah.
Actually, could I get a box too?
Um, last time I used a bag, and I was riding the bus home and the bag ripped open,
and the bottles just kind of were all over the bus,
and I wondered if I could get a box this time?
-Yeah, I'll go grab one.
-Thanks.
Can I write a check?
Yeah, that's fine.
$5.39.
And then they started bringing all these things out and putting them in the hallway.
Like office supply boxes.
Ten, then there's twenty, and then there was fifty, and
then there were sixty, and they were stacking
them up in the hallway on top of each other.
As I was going back and forth out to the coffee bar,
the lieutenant would keep coming up to me and saying,
"Is he saying anything to you? Is he saying anything to you?"
"No, he's still, you know, we're talking all this shit." Uh,
"Does he ask for a lawyer?"
"No, he hasn't asked for a lawyer."
Went back in, and finally when it got to the point after about
two hours,
the lieutenant knocked on the door and came in and said, "Hey, Pat, can I talk to you?"
and he pulled me out, and I said, "What's going on?" He said, "Well,
we're finding that big tank that you
saw in his bedroom that's sealed,
and there's all kind of boxes that say muriatic
acid, flammable, extremely dangerous, caution.
We're seeing wires sticking in the wall
from all the electronic devices that he had.
The--the C.I.B.--the criminal investigation--the forensic
people are afraid that there's a booby trap,
or that if they move something it's gonna blow up
or is something rigged or explosive?"
The best way I can describe it is we were dismantling someone's museum.
Is that when we were walking down the hallway,
in a small closet, there was a large stainless steel cook pot,
and when we looked in there, there was, um, some human hands and,
uh, male genitalia that had been dried or desiccated.
"They don't want to move anything until you ask him."
So, I went back in, I said, "Hey, Jeff," you know, I said,
"Our--our forensic guys are out at your apartment and they're afraid--
they're seeing the big five, five-gallon boxes that say
muriatic acid, explosives, dangerous.
they're seeing all the electronic devices hooked into your walls," and
all of a sudden you could see the realization. He goes, "You mean, you're in my house, searching my house?"
and I said, "Well, if we're not, we're going to, Jeff."
I said, "Of course." I said, "There's a homicide there, we're gonna go through everything in that house."
We found three skulls that were spray-painted with this
gray, granite-like texture paint,
and I, um, was impressed with how, um,
professional they looked, and I--
It was hard for me to conceive of these being skeletonized remains because they didn't appear to be that.
And it wasn't until my assistant, Dr. Teggatz had taken out his pocket knife and removed some of the paint that we could see-
on the teeth, we could actually see that there was enamel on the teeth.
And that was the first time that I fully realized
that we had additional three, uh, bodies
because those were, you know, human skulls.
I can't believe that he's done something to someone else, I said, "Can't be, can't be."
And they keep bringing all these things
out and what are in these pots and...
...stuff? I remember asking him, and
he had told me in a pot there... penises.
And then there are boxes with penises in them, and
there are all these pictures of people. And...
...bodies. These are not living people.
The typical homicide interrogation lasts about three-and-a-half hours
before they start to crap out. This is about three hours in,
we had been talking--three hours and ten minutes in,
when he finally said, "Well, you're gonna find out everything now,
so it's no sense. I might as well tell you."
so I thought, "Okay, great."
So I took out my pen and I got the
paper to start writing stuff down,
and he said to me, "But Pat, when I tell you what I'm gonna tell you,
first of all you probably will hate me." I said, "Jeff...
I've seen a lot of evil stuff," right, "There's nothing you have done that would freak me out," right?
I said, "I've talked to a lot of murderers."
I said, "Besides that, I don't believe in judging people. We had this discussion about
God," and I said, "I'm not here to judge you.
That's not what it's all about. I'm here to solve this problem."
And then he said,
"Well, when I tell you this, Pat, you'll be famous."
Now you're gonna wanna stop by, have me tighten, realign those for ya.
-Okay.
-That'll help keep 'em problem-free.
-Okay.
-Alright?
-Thanks a lot.
-Oh, thank you.
Alright, back to you.
He said, "If I'm going to tell you about it,
I might as well start at the beginning."
And that's when I took out my pen to write down,
and that's when he started telling me about his first homicide back in Bath, Ohio; 13 years previous,
when he was 18 years old.
So I put my pen down,
and then he told me about going to Ohio State.
He goes, "I already mentioned that,"
but he mentioned that when he came here he started
talking about his second victim at the Ambassador Hotel
that he drugged and beat to death, but he didn't remember.
And then he went into, like, two or three other,
uh, victims that he was talking about and
I didn't write anything down because I truly believed he was
bullshit, right?
That he was, uh... truly insane, right? That he was gonna--
he hadn't even talked about the head in the refrigerator, which is all I really cared about, right?
Let's see, we had two... three... seven--
I believe we had seven skulls, five skeletons, um...
and then, um, some dissected hands and then photographs.
So I went out to get coffee, and then this guy
came to me again. He said, "Pat, is he talking?"
and I said, "Well, yeah, he's talking now." I said,
But he's telling me he's killed like three or four people,
and he hasn't even talked to me about the head in the
refrigerator. I think he's insane. I think he's a bullshitter."
And that's when Lieutenant Vahl looked
at me and goes, "No, no, Pat," you know,
"Mike called. They found six heads in the freezer and they got body parts and penises."
And I said, "You--what?" he goes, "No, there's
many more than one victim in this, Pat." I said--
so I went back in with a whole new attitude, right?
And I took my pen out and I said, "Well, let's start over
again, Jeff. Let's start back... [laughs] with Bath, Ohio."
-How's it going?
-Good.
-Could I get a bottle of rum, too?
-Sure.
Cheap one down there.
-This one?
-Yeah, thanks.
-This gonna be it?
-Yep.
-$10.75.
-Can I write a check?
Yeah, that'll work.
-Hey, how you doing tonight?
-Good.
-We just wanted to get a room.
-A double or single?
-Uh, double.
-Okay. Uh, that'll be $38.50.
Is that for one night?
-Yep.
-Okay
So you ever been here before?
Uh, I think, like, once, but I was, like, 12 or 13,
somethin' like that.
-Did you stay overnight?
-Uh, did I stay overnight?
I think so--like, something my parents were doing--even though we live here they like to do all those crazy things sometimes.
-I've only eaten here.
-Yeah, it seems nice enough, though.
There was this large, blue, uh,
container that was uh, in the corner,
and when we moved that around, it
kind of, uh, sloshed back and forth,
so we knew that there was some fluid in there,
but we didn't really know what was in it.
Um, and I didn't want to open that at the scene, nor--
and--and I had, um, I had concerns about transporting that ourselves.
I had a vision that we would drop it or somehow it would be
seen on TV.
We're always concerned about removing, um, decedents from crime scenes
and making sure that it's done in a sensitive way,
and that we don't disrupt the body, or have cause to, you know, drop it or lose control.
When I turned to the law-enforcement officer, I said
well, you know, "Call the hazmat."
they said, "Well, we really don't have one.
We contract with them," and I said, "Well, we need them
down here,"
and so it turned out that there was just these two young guys.
They were in their early 20s.
It looked like they were, you know, totally unprepared for
what they were seeing,
but they really rose to the occasion and they did a really good job.
It looked like that was the last thing that they had thought
they were gonna be involved in that night.
Lieutentant Roosevelt Harrell.
Uh, we're investigating a homicide at the 900 block of
north 25th Street in an apartment building.
Uh, we have taken evidence out of the building by the medical
examiner.
We do have one suspect in custody.
There's a strong possibility there might be additional
homicides...
From there, we talked until about 10:30 the next morning,
and by that time he had given me the basic rundown of 15 victims.
I was trying to comprehend what was going on,
pushing my sanity,
because how could he be doing all this kind of stuff right over here,
right in the midst where there are all these people that you got--neighbors,
you got senior citizens living downstairs from you,
you have people like me who was befriending you,
and you are over here... cutting up
human bodies? Eating body parts.
I have eaten a sandwich from you.
I have probably eaten someone's body part.
How dare you do this to me?
Police in Wisconsin this morning are investigating a
grisly discovery in a Milwaukee apartment...
Police have found skulls in the refrigerator and lots of
dismembered body parts stuffed in cabinets and...
Police were led there by a man who told them he had
been attacked with a butcher knife...
...he may have killed as many as 18 people, most of them
male.
How many people will be in your party?
Alright.
And, okay, so will that be a, uh,
smoking room, or a non-smoking room?
Okay, uh, yes.
and can I get your last name?
That next day, I don't wanna talk to nobody.
I don't wanna see nobody. I didn't even want to talk to my husband at that time.
I remember he had gotten up and went to work and left me by myself
in this house, with all these body parts stacked up around my door.
The whole apartment building was in terror.
I'm Dr. Jeffrey Jentzen. Uh, J-E-N-T-Z-E-N, the medical
examiner.
At the present time, the
personnel from the medical examiner's office are continuing to attempt to establish the identification.
We have at this time, the, um--established there are 11, uh, bodies,
victims that were recovered from the apartment.
Um, these consist of...
I think it was hard to, um, come to realizations at that time...
Is there a sexual aspect to the killing?
-I wouldn't want--I couldn't comment on that aspect.
-Any evidence of cannibalism?
Again, there's not anything that would be inconsistent...
When we take photographs at scenes,
we do that because when you go to a crime scene, you can't possibly process all the information you're seeing.
You become somewhat myopic.
There was so much information and there was so much evidence,
it was hard to understand and put everything into perspective.
And so we use photographs so we can go back over them and look at the evidence again and again and again
and make judgments and see things again for the first time.
When I got home I was very excited, right?
Very excited.
Um, and as I walked in the front door,
my wife was sitting on the edge
of the couch, watching the TV,
which was just blaring at nothing but Dahmer, Dahmer, Dahmer, and... [inhales]
you could tell she was visibly shook up.
And the first thing she said to me when I walked in the door
is, "Please tell me you're not involved in this."
And I said, "What, are you kidding?" I said, "I'm the man."
I said, "I got the confession." I said, "I'm in the middle of this."
I said, "I'm going day shift. I'm going back to talk to him tomorrow."
Oh, and... at the time I didn't want to argue about it, right? I mean, it caused quite a bit of strain,
and she really didn't want me to talk to the kids about it, which I didn't want to,
but it was all over the news, so you really couldn't get away from it.
He's confessed to perhaps some of the most gruesome murders in United States history...
The next day when I was opening the blue container,
I started removing decomposing skeletons, and, uh,
it was--it was rather, um, unsettling
to be removing, you know, three skeletons from that container.
He had asked to see me that next day 'cause they asked him
or something, "Did you want to see someone?"
and he had said that, "Well, I'd like to talk to my neighbor."
and I said, "I'm not going down there.
I don't want to talk to him. He wasn't my friend." You know, "He was...
he just used me like he used everyone,
you know, so, you are so alone."
Before Jeff was put in a cell I had made a deal with him
that he would not talk to a lawyer until he helped me identify all the victims.
...that seems striking to me is his willingness--and his
attorney's willingness--to discuss the details of the case.
All we've heard so far--and they are grisly details indeed--those are only the surface details. Those are only the broadest...
As an investigator, when someone is put back in a jail
cell, you can't just go and talk to 'em the next day.
That's against their constitutional rights.
The only way they can talk to you is if they request to talk
to you.
And this gives a little insight into the relationship that I
built with Jeffrey,
and the fact that he bought into this relationship as his means of salvation.
No one could sleep in their own apartment. No one closed their doors.
That next night we were all like, "Oh, my God, where are we
gonna sleep at?"
Well, "Everybody, let's just go down and sleep in the front."
So we had a big area where the elevators come up on the floors.
Everybody went up to the front of the building in their pajamas
with their pillows and their blankets and laid in the floor.
There was glass all on the one side
there, so you could see outside,
but all you could see outside were people,
on the street, on the lawns.
They were camping out. They were just everywhere.
...take their pictures or just stare.
This parade of gawkers is only part of the pain for these people...
...planning to move because their lives and their home become a sick tourist attraction.
Many are intent on moving. It's an option that, for the short term, seems to make sense.
I'm thinking about it.
I'm, really, I'm just tired.
And I had had a couch that Jeff had gave me, this red couch.
So I had the couch in my house, and there were people that were willing to pay
50 bucks to come in and sit on my couch.
Or this other guy had a glass that Jeff had drank some water out of.
These people were actually paying just to hold it.
I'll be right back.
-Thanks for waiting.
-No problem.
At the end of that third day of talking to him before he was gonna go into court,
he said to me, you know, "I'm a little bit concerned. I mean, I have to go to court tomorrow," and
he already knew by then that there was news media all over the place
'cause I was bringing paper-- "Hey, look what they're saying about you,"--every day I'd bring the paper in, right?
he was concerned about, you know, that he looked all greasy and funky, and
"Am I gonna have to go in this paper dress suit?"
Uh, this picture we have of Jeffrey Dahmer is 1982,
so it'll be interesting to see how his appearance has changed in the intervening years.
He will be appearing in a courtroom here...
So I went home that night and I had--my oldest boy
at the time was a sophomore in high school
and he was damn near 6'1", 6'2", 185 pounds.
So I asked him, I said, "Hey, Pat, do you have any-
a shirt and some pants that you don't like?"
and of course he pulled out this blue striped shirt and he goes,
"Yeah, this one you gave me for Christmas that I will never
wear," he goes, "Yeah, you can have this one,"
and also he had a pair of black jeans that he gave me, right?
So, the next day when I went in, as we were preparing for court,
I gave those to Jeffrey Dahmer, and he put 'em on.
There's Jeffrey Dahmer, the man in the striped shirt is the defendant.
He is--this apparently a part of his decision to, as he put
it, tell the whole truth...
That's the shirt that is on people magazine,
the blue and white striped shirt where people say, "Oh, look how he's dressed like a tennis player," and
they made all these assumptions about his choice,
but that was my son's shirt and pants that he wore there.
All right, thank you.
They took him back into the judge's chambers and their individual cell where they hold prisoners.
He started to get
out of those clothes and get in--'cause now he's gonna go over to the county so he's putting on his orange jumpsuit.
He tried to hand me back the shirt and the pants, and
at the time I said, "Nah, Jeff, you know, that's all right, you can keep 'em."
I was on the north side at the grocery store,
and this man spotted me in a car and he had all these cars come around me.
And these people were trying to talk to me
that they were--they said, "We are victims,"
"He killed my brother," or "He killed my son,"
and all of this, and I'm trying to explain to them, "Well, I had nothing to do with it.
You should be telling this to your police department, or to
your health department.
Why are you blaming us?"
You know, or, "Why are you blaming me? Well, I didn't do anything,"
You know, and they said, "Well, that's it!"
To me, it was probably that they just wanted something, just--
I gotta put this on somebody.
They were looking at me as not a victim too,
Because I had said, "I was a victim, too, just like you're a victim."
Yep, I got it.
-Oh--good morning, sir.
-Hi.
-Good morning.
-Hi.
-Good morning, sir.
-Hi.
Just like to check out.
Alright.
Okay.
-And how was everything?
-Good.
Great.
You know, like, who would have thought that this
was what was happening?
And like they were saying, "Well, maybe you should have
called the police or called the health department."
We called the health department.
They came out, they checked--of course Jeff wasn't home.
Police--we called the police. They'd come down there and,
"Well, there's nothing we can do. We can't go in this man's house."
And he had all these locks on his door. Like he had six other locks that he had put on his door and stuff, so
they weren't gonna go in there, you know. They were like, "This guy ain't bothering nobody," you know,
"Let's go. He's not doing nothing. Look at what y'all are doing."
They brought in this guy named Dennis Murphy, a crusty old prick from the day shift, right?
Excellent homicide investigator. Him and I were always together,
taking him back and forth, for safety reasons, as well,
but also to make sure that all the T's were crossed and all the I's were dotted
'cause I was a rookie homicide detective.
And the plan was to identify each and every victim.
...hopes that evidence collected at the scene might help identify the victims.
It was a huge undertaking.
Don't forget at this time, in '91, the human genome had been broken down
but it was not readily being used in law enforcement, especially for these type of purposes, so
what we had to do is take information from Jeffrey Dahmer
and try to corroborate it with the body parts that we found in his apartment.
And let's not forget that some of his victims, there was no body parts--he didn't save anything.
Well, essentially all of the bodies that we had were either skeletonized or had been previously dissected.
There were no intact bodies.
We had to remove the paint lacquer from the painted skulls.
Dr. Stormo was able to do that with just regular paint remover.
We found that we would have to go out to the hardware stores
to get equipment to kind of work on these bodies ourselves.
First we would determine a date that he picked his victim.
Then we would take his identification of the victim,
and he would give us race, sex, age, height, weight.
And from there we would pull all the missings of anybody who fit that description,
a month or two before that date or a month or--
and then from there, detectives would have to go and look--if they were adults,
has this person come back? Is this person alive? Have you heard anything about 'em, right?
And from there we would try to get photographic arrays,
either from our own records if they had one, or if we could get it from the family.
And then we would make photographic arrays and take in to Jeffrey,
and then he would narrow it down by pictures.
And so we contacted the forensic odontologist, Thomas Johnson,
who had worked with the office for a long time.
So he was mainly involved in doing the dental identifications.
Once we had the teeth exposed, Dr. Johnson was able to take dental photographs and x-rays.
and we started the process of working with the police department
as they brought in suspected unidentified bodies or unidentified persons.
We were able to get their dental records and Dr. Johnson started the process of identifying those.
It took time, right? It took six weeks.
But we were able to narrow it down
through outside corroboration and through the information he gave us and working with the medical examiner's office,
to identify each and every one of the victims. Even some of the victims where there was nothing.
The officers in question came in contact with Jeffrey Dahmer in May
while responding to a battery call.
At the time, dahmer told police the 14-year-old was not a child but an adult,
and that the two were lovers. Police returned the boy to Dahmer's custody.
Dahmer now says he killed the boy minutes later.
I went through a period there where I could not sleep.
I would drink, like, maybe two fifths, I could go to sleep,
but I would pass out. It was like an unconscious--you know,
just to--just to let the brain not think about anything, because that was what I was trying to get to.
I was tired of thinking about this all the time.
Whenever I would come out of the interrogation room during those six weeks there was always detectives
that would come up to me and say, "Hey, what is he saying?"
They would take pictures of Jeffrey Dahmer in the paper and pictures of me from the paper
and superimpose them to make like a cartoon, and put it on my desk.
You know they said lewd things, right, like I let him stroke me off,
or you know, that I allowed him to perform... uh, you know.
-Thanks, guys.
-Thanks.
My sister called my mother, she said, "Look at TV, Ma."
Isn't this Pamela's building in Milwaukee?
...public outcry followed, accusing police of racism and insensitivity to gays...
And she saw all the swarm of people around me,
so she knew that she couldn't--"I can't get to her."
And I remember I finally got through to her on the phone,
she told me, "Don't watch TV, Pamela. Don't read none of this."
As chief, both I and the entire department must accept responsibility for the inadequate...
It was, it was just...
I don't know. I don't even know what to say about this thing.
This city of Milwaukee to me just lost--they cared nothing about the Black community as a whole.
They weren't showing it back then.
This was a fairly unique crime scene
and autopsy for a forensic pathologist,
because we had immediate access to Dahmer.
Dahmer was talking to and conversing with law enforcement.
He had basically admitted his guilt and culpability,
and was assisting law enforcement in the investigation.
When we found an injury, we would call up law enforcement,
and then they would inquire of Dahmer what we found and corroborate our findings,
which is a very unique situation for a forensic pathologist to have.
Immediate confirmation of what you're seeing.
He wasn't always forthcoming with everything, but
when I questioned on--him on something that we had found out from additional information on the case,
he would be able to expound on it,
and things that he told us, we were able to check and verify to see that he was in fact telling the truth.
As I was examining and dissecting the cranium or the head area,
I noticed that there was some hemorrhage around a hole that had been drilled in the skull.
and hemorrhage in a forensic sense means that an injury occurred when there was a blood pressure.
when a person is injured and they're in a post-mortem state or after their--their, uh, heart stops beating,
there's not a lot of blood that gets pushed into the tissue.
But the fact that there was hemorrhage around the area led me to believe that it may have been an injury that had been,
uh, incurred before death.
and so I examined the brain tissue and I did find that there was a wound tract,
or a track through the brain tissue that looked hemorrhagic. And so, um
I recovered that area, photographed it, and then looked at it under the microscope,
and what I found was that there was an inflammation in that track.
and so when we see inflammation that means that there was a time factor that happened
between the time of obtaining the injury, and the time the person died.
Dr. Jentzen was concerned-- "Well, how did these holes get into peoples' skulls?"
Jeff, although he told us he was cutting open people and disposing of the body,
he didn't tell us that he was attempting to create a zombie
until we presented him with the evidence that there was what appeared to be holes drilled into the top of these skulls.
We looked at that with the neuropathologist who was an expert in brain anatomy and tissue,
and we made the diagnosis that this injury had been inflicted while the person was alive,
and that the person had survived for some time after receiving that injury.
And he even shook his head when he told me, he goes, "It was a weird kind of a thought I had
that I could create someone who I wouldn't have to go out and kill.
I drilled in their heads and I experimented with different
things."
He goes, "I would go down about a quarter of an inch with a
quarter-inch drill bit.
And then I would fill up a basting needle. I tried first a mixture of soilex and hot water.
I thought if I shot that in there, it might affect part of
the brain that would stop them from talking,
and stop them from being demanding, but just being alive,
being a docile sex partner.
However, everyone I tried it with died eventually."
It was all up in the air 'bout what they were gonna do with the building.
First it was "We're gonna sell the building," or "We're gonna keep the building."
But at the end, they tore that building down so quick it was like you blinked your eyes and it was gone.
Me and this older guy, we were the last two to leave,
because he said he wasn't going. He had been there for like twenty-some years.
And he said, "They're taking away my house, all because this stuff happened? That doesn't have anything to do with me.
I didn't do anything, so I'm not going anywhere."
He tried to stay there right up until the end. They needed police to escort him out of there.
Part of getting him to confess and
and performing, uh, this, uh--this service for the people of Milwaukee, uh, put me in intimate relationship with this guy,
Where I actually formed a relationship with this guy, right? Where I actually started to feel sorry for the prick, right?
I mean, he was a pathetic guy, right? I mean, uh,
I felt bad for him, and I felt bad that I felt bad for him, right? Like, here's a--
why do I have empathy for this guy? And
what is it in me that makes me relate to this guy, right?
And all the jokes that people made, which I brushed off,
I guess at that point I kind of started thinking about those things.
The entire confession is gonna to be talked about by Detective Kennedy.
and I ask you if you look at that briefly...
all my energies went into it.
I remember thinking a couple of times,
you know, Jeff--when he would talk about going on the hunt for somebody pleasurable and attractive, and
how, when he got away with it, it gave him more power and made him feel better and, uh...
It wasn't till later on when I thought, well, there are--there was a little bit of, uh, parallels going on in my own personal life.
I mean, I had moved out of the house, um, after 18 years of being married.
There's numerous opportunities in law enforcement for promiscuity anyways, uh, believe it or not.
And then with some of the additional, uh, interest in this case,
uh, at least locally, um, for a time people recognized my face.
-...Jeffrey Dahmer?
-That's correct, sir.
-And as far as you're concerned you've had opportunity to look at this confession...
Hey, you're that Dahmer dude.
And then they said, "Hey, look, everybody, over here." This is that--the Dahmer detective."
And then all kinds of people swarmed around me and were pattin' me on the back, and
I remember I was like, "Whoa, this is really weird."
They gave everyone the choice of moving to housing--housing projects.
So you got to pick which one you moved to, and I moved to Parklawn.
And it just seems like when they find out who you are, it just started all over again.
You know, or people were trying to befriend me that were just trying to see if I had anything that they could get
that they could sell.
Or maybe get a story out of you that I can tell.
Just to say, "Well, hey, I met her. I know her."
You may remember, John, back in the very early '90s, the Jeffrey Dahmer case in Milwaukee.
Took a dozen young men over time into his apartment, cut 'em up, put 'em in a vat, you know,
abused them, tortured them, uh, ate them. Cannibalism.
Uh, if you had his raincoat right in front of you, would you want to put it on?
Uh... no, I wouldn't want to put it on, but--but, uh...
Why not? It's just a raincoat.
It is. It's just--and maybe, you know, that's probably, maybe some residual brain activity there, um...
Coming down.
The way I usually do this demonstration in public is I offer, you know, 50 bucks,
you know, if people will put on an old sweater or cardigan--of a killer,
-but I don't tell 'em it's a killer.
-Oh.
So all the hands shoot up.
Uh, but then I say, "Would you still wear it if it belonged to Jeffrey Dahmer?"
And most hands rapidly come down. You make this instant decision. It's as if your emotions are kicking in.
And of course there's no kind of scientific--or there's nothing in the cloth,
but psychologically we do have this idea that the essence of someone evil could almost contaminate the physical world.
And I think that's a very pervasive and very powerful intuition.
It was like everything started coming together. I started to get a complete picture of what was going on down there,
but you really don't want to see it because it's too horrible for anybody to imagine.
You would think if someone asked you to write a horror story, this would be some of the stuff that you would write.
And... he, he lived it, and he made us participate in it.
[clears throat] Thank you.
[shivers] Whew.
On Saturday it took a jury only five hours to find that Jeffrey Dahmer was sane
on all 15 counts of murder...
After he was found guilty and was gonna be reprimanded to the state,
I went back to say good-bye to him.
And I shook his hand, I said good-bye,
and he said--he goes, "Pat, you know, I'm really gonna miss talking to you. I'm gonna miss you."
And I said, "Yeah, yeah, Jeff." At the time I was kind of making light of it.
It sounds weird now talking about it 19 years later,
but at the time it was--it was like the culmination of everything, right?
So it turns out that you're in the middle of this really big case where you're being treated like... a freaking king, right?
People are patting you on the back and telling you what a great job you're doing, and
you're day shift, and, uh...
All of a sudden it's over with, and now I'm just sitting in this
one-room efficiency apartment downtown,
with no furniture and no friends,
it's getting dark out, and it's my birthday, right?
Uh, I don't think I had a phone set up yet either, right, so I couldn't even, you know, talk to my kids on the phone.
That night I did have a time to kind of, uh...
I guess I'm kind of embarrassed to say... [chuckles] I did kind of, like, break down a little bit.
I was incarcerated at that time. I was in jail,
I think doing time for a ticket or something.
So I remember being in jail, and it came on TV
that, um, Jeffrey Dahmer and the Anderson guy had been beaten and killed, and
everybody stood up and cheered and hugged and kissed everyone.
And I was sitting there and I was crying.
And I got up and went to my room and locked myself in
and I said, you know, I didn't understand it,
but I was looking at them like, "How can you cheer? This is a life."
I was crying so uncontrollably, I had one of the police guard
ladies came in and she's like,
"Pamela, what's going on?" she said, "Oh, I know who you are now," she said, "I see," she said. So,
she said, "But, you know, you're probably the only one who's crying for him now. Nobody else is."
I have a hard time figuring why would people would go to some of these movies and--
and see, uh, chainsaw murders and other types of macabre, uh, stories and...
tales.
I think the last scary movie I saw was The Exorcist, and that's probably 20,30 years ago,
but I don't go to scary movies.