GRILLING DAHMER Quotes

“He was truly a loner; in fact, phone company records showed that during the entire time he lived at the Oxford Apartments address, not a single phone call was placed to his residence. The more time I spent with him chronicling the facts around his activities, the more I felt sorry for him. He was a pathetically lonely and inept human being. He was unable to make a real connection with anyone and was totally self-absorbed. His lifestyle was a continuous hedonistic pursuit of pleasure. All his time, effort, energy, and money went to his overwhelming desire for a warm, compliant human body, with alcohol fueling his every move.”
― Patrick Kennedy, GRILLING DAHMER: The Interrogation Of "The Milwaukee Cannibal"

“Jeff, I have here a report from your employer at the chocolate factory. It says that they gave you notice of termination. They were also wondering if you placed anything other than the prescribed ingredients into the batches of confections you were mixing.” Dahmer sat back quickly in surprise. “What do you mean? They think I put some body parts into the candy? What kind of monster do they think I am?”
― Patrick Kennedy, GRILLING DAHMER: The Interrogation Of "The Milwaukee Cannibal"

“Your Honor, it is over now. This has never been a case of trying to get free. I didn’t ever want freedom. Frankly, I wanted death for myself. This was a case to tell the world that I did what I did not for reasons of hate; I hated no one. I knew I was sick or evil or both. Now, I believe I was sick. The doctors have told me about my sickness, and now I have some peace. I know how much harm I have caused. I tried to do the best I could after the arrest to make amends, but no matter what I did, I could not undo the terrible harm I have caused. I feel so bad for what I did to those poor families, and I understand their rightful hate. “I decided to go through with this trial for a number of reasons. One of the reasons was to let the world know that these were not hate crimes. I wanted the world and Milwaukee, which I deeply hurt, to know the truth of what I did. I didn’t want unanswered questions. All the questions have now been answered. I wanted to find out just what it was that caused me to be so bad and evil. But most of all, Mr. Boyle and I decided that maybe there was a way for us to tell the world that if there are people out there with these disorders, maybe they can get some help before they end up being hurt or hurting someone. I think the trial did that. I should have stayed with God. I tried and failed, and created a holocaust. Thank God there will be no more harm that I can do. I take all the blame for what I did. I hurt so many people and I am sorry. In closing, I just want to say that I hope God has forgiven me. I know society will never be able to forgive me. I ask for no consideration.”
― Patrick Kennedy, GRILLING DAHMER: The Interrogation Of "The Milwaukee Cannibal"

“Dahmer said that the first time he ate human flesh was in May 1990.”
― Patrick Kennedy, GRILLING DAHMER: The Interrogation Of "The Milwaukee Cannibal"

“I was getting my knife sharpened at the cutlery shop in the mall,” he said. It was where he originally bought the knife. The store had a policy of keeping your purchase razor sharp, so he occasionally brought it back in for a free sharpening. “Anyway, it was that day that I met this Asian male. He was alone and really nice looking, so I struck up a conversation with him. Well, I offered him fifty bucks to come home with me and let me take some photos. I told him that there was liquor at my place and indicated that I was sexually attracted to him. He was eager and cooperative so we took the bus to my apartment. Once there, I gave him some money and he posed for several photos. I offered him the rum and Coke Halcion-laced solution and he drank it down quickly. We continued to drink until he passed out, and then I made love to him for the rest of the afternoon and early evening. I must have fallen asleep, because when I woke up it was late. I checked on the guy. He was out cold, still breathing heavily from the Halcion. I was out of beer and walked around the corner for another six-pack but after I got to the tavern, I started drinking and before I knew it, it was closing time. I grabbed my six-pack and began walking home. As I neared my apartment, I noted a lot of commotion, people milling about, police officers, and a fire engine. I decided to see what was going on, so I came closer. I was surprised to see they were all standing around the Asian guy from my apartment. He was standing there naked, speaking in some kind of Asian dialect. At first, I panicked and kept walking, but I could see that he was so messed up on the Halcion and booze that he didn’t know who or where he was. “I don’t really know why, Pat, but I strode into the middle of everyone and announced he was my lover. I said that we lived together at Oxford and had been drinking heavily all day, and added that this was not the first time he left the apartment naked while intoxicated. I explained that I had gone out to buy some more beer and showed them the six-pack. I asked them to give him a break and let me take him back home. The firemen seemed to buy the story and drove off, but the police began to ask more questions and insisted that I take them to my apartment to discuss the matter further. I was nervous but felt confident; besides, I had no other choice. One cop took him by the arm and he followed, almost zombie-like. “I led them to my apartment and once inside, I showed them the photos I had taken, and his clothes neatly folded on the arm of my couch. The cops kept trying to question the guy but he was still talking gibberish and could not answer any of their questions, so I told them his name was Chuck Moung and gave them a phony date of birth. I handed them my identification and they wrote everything down in their little notebooks. They seemed perturbed and talked about writing us some tickets for disorderly conduct or something. One of them said they should take us both in for all the trouble we had given them. “As they were discussing what to do, another call came over their radio. It must have been important because they decided to give us a warning and advised me to keep my drunken partner inside. I was relieved. I had fooled the authorities and it gave me a tremendous feeling. I felt powerful, in control, almost invincible. After the officers left, I gave the guy another Halcion-filled drink and he soon passed out. I was still nervous about the narrow escape with the cops, so I strangled him and disposed of his body.”
― Patrick Kennedy, GRILLING DAHMER: The Interrogation Of "The Milwaukee Cannibal"

“Our scars have the power to remind us that the past was real.” Hannibal Lecter, Red Dragon by Thomas Harris.”
― Patrick Kennedy, Grilling Dahmer: The Interrogation Of "The Milwaukee Cannibal"

“continuing. “You’re not going to believe this, but it was me. I’m the officer that stopped him that night. I remember shining my flashlight on those garbage bags. I just can’t believe”
― Patrick Kennedy, Grilling Dahmer: The Interrogation Of "The Milwaukee Cannibal"

“It was later released that after his death, Dahmer’s brain was examined at the request of his parents. Nothing abnormal was found. Later, Lionel and Joyce Dahmer fought a court battle over the brain, with Lionel coming out the victor. The brain was cremated along with the rest of Dahmer’s remains.”
― Patrick Kennedy, GRILLING DAHMER: The Interrogation Of "The Milwaukee Cannibal"

“On November 28, 1994, Dahmer was sent with two other prisoners to clean a bathroom at the Columbia Correctional Institute in Portage, Wisconsin. Inmate Christopher Scarver first beat Jesse Anderson, the other prisoner, in front of Dahmer before turning his weapon, a grip from a barbell weight, on Dahmer, who put up no resistance. Coincidentally, it was the very same kind of weapon Dahmer used against his first murder victim at age eighteen.”
― Patrick Kennedy, GRILLING DAHMER: The Interrogation Of "The Milwaukee Cannibal"

“Dahmer was a marked man from the day he entered the penitentiary. His murder in prison was inevitable, and Dahmer would have been told this prior to being moved out of solitary. His desire to be around other people must have outweighed his fear of being killed, or he simply didn’t care anymore.”
― Patrick Kennedy, GRILLING DAHMER: The Interrogation Of "The Milwaukee Cannibal"

“Instead, at eighteen, he felt his life was over for what he had done (his first murder), and that he didn’t deserve to be happy or successful. So alcohol, which he had already established as his escape, and he began to go through the motions of life until his dark fantasies took over. He always believed that a turning point in his life happened while in the haze of a lonely, alcoholic, sexless, emotionally bankrupt life. The simple act of an anonymous man at the public library—who tossed Dahmer a note offering to give him a blow job in the bathroom—caused him, at that moment, to decide to abandon the legitimate life he had created and instead pursue sex, and finally achieve love and physical relationships on his terms. He didn’t follow the man, but it seemed to have triggered a crisis of conscience in Dahmer, so deep that he finally admitted to himself that he was and always had been attracted to men, and in turn, that some men were attracted to him. He decided to live a lie no longer, and knew that he “wasn’t fooling anybody.” Further, the incident seemed to reawaken his lustful desire to engage with unconscious or dead bodies—to do whatever he wanted with the corpses of men.”
― Patrick Kennedy, GRILLING DAHMER: The Interrogation Of "The Milwaukee Cannibal"

“He felt that what he had done could never be forgiven and he was destined to go to hell, so it didn’t matter if he killed more people.”
― Patrick Kennedy, GRILLING DAHMER: The Interrogation Of "The Milwaukee Cannibal"

“Due to Dahmer’s notoriety, he was placed in solitary confinement for twenty-three hours a day in a cell, with one hour outside for physical activity. For a lonely man who craved companionship, this must have been nearly impossible to bear, and within a short period of time, he requested to be placed with the general population. He knew that it was a certain death given his infamy. Prison also reawakened Dahmer’s reliance upon and interest in religion, as he once again tried to “get his life right” as he put it, as he had when he lived with his grandmother and attended church regularly.”
― Patrick Kennedy, GRILLING DAHMER: The Interrogation Of "The Milwaukee Cannibal"

“Serial killers usually choose vulnerable victim types, such as senior citizens, children, women, or people who live high-risk lifestyles. Dahmer’s victims were different. These were healthy, physically fit young men who only became vulnerable through intoxication and drugging. These men were young, athletic, social, and, in some cases, gay or bisexual, but not people normally perceived as physically vulnerable, and who didn’t perceive Dahmer as a threat. He incapacitated these otherwise capable men by drugging them until they passed out, therefore always creating a completely vulnerable victim.”
― Patrick Kennedy, GRILLING DAHMER: The Interrogation Of "The Milwaukee Cannibal"

“One must realize the effects of long-term alcohol abuse on the body and mind. The effects of alcohol on the brain, especially chronic drinking, are fairly well documented—it can affect mood, personality, motivation, and ambition, which explains some of Dahmer’s inability to pursue education or training in any meaningful way. Chronic substance abuse can also affect one’s ability to empathize or sympathize with others; it made Dahmer uninterested in the world around him. It suppressed his curiosity about life, people, and events, and any emotion or sensation he had was stifled under the weight of alcohol. It can also make a person less inhibited, so that when he approached young men, police, or his neighbors, Dahmer could come across as more interesting and engaged in the world, but it was a false reality.”
― Patrick Kennedy, GRILLING DAHMER: The Interrogation Of "The Milwaukee Cannibal"

“A critical time in Dahmer’s life often mentioned by family, high school acquaintances, and others who studied his upbringing was when his parents split up and divorced. Kennedy explained that when Dahmer was eighteen and living at the house in Bath, his father had moved out and already lived with his girlfriend, who later became his wife and Dahmer’s stepmother. His mother decided to leave Ohio and took Dahmer’s younger brother David with her. Because relations between Dahmer’s parents were strained, it seemed that each came and went without notifying the other of their plans. Dahmer was still completing his final year of high school, so he remained in Ohio. Dahmer was left in the family home alone for an extended period of time, and during this time, he committed his first murder. Much has been made of this period of so-called abandonment when Dahmer was on his own, but Kennedy said he never really bought it. “He was eighteen years old, for heaven’s sake. It wasn’t like he was a little kid unable to fend for himself.”
― Patrick Kennedy, GRILLING DAHMER: The Interrogation Of "The Milwaukee Cannibal"

“Dahmer seemed incapable of participating in a stable relationship, so instead chose to pick up partners for casual encounters, or, in most cases, offered his victims money to pose for photographs at his apartment. Not surprisingly, the inability to maintain healthy relationships is common amongst many serial killers.”
― Patrick Kennedy, GRILLING DAHMER: The Interrogation Of "The Milwaukee Cannibal"

“Dahmer’s preferences, when it came to the male physique, were slender and lean, yet athletic and slightly but not overtly muscular young men. Because so many of Dahmer’s victims were African American or, for the most part, men of color, it was at first presumed that Dahmer hated non-Caucasians. Dahmer denied that any of the murders were racially motivated, and said that what led him to approach the men he did was whether or not he was attracted to them; but, even more importantly, that they met the physical requirements that stimulated him the most. Investigating detectives found no indications that Dahmer had problems with people of color. Dahmer emerged as truthful as far as the detectives determined, yet not necessarily always immediately forthcoming.”
― Patrick Kennedy, GRILLING DAHMER: The Interrogation Of "The Milwaukee Cannibal"

“Dahmer was pathetic and incredibly selfish as he began the process of trying to find sexual pleasure and companionate happiness with another man, only to discover that what he really wanted was a completely incapacitated and compliant sexual partner who fit the very specific body type that he deemed perfect.”
― Patrick Kennedy, GRILLING DAHMER: The Interrogation Of "The Milwaukee Cannibal"

“Dahmer was later diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (sometimes and more recently known as emotionally unstable personality disorder), but if you analyze the definition, many of the behaviors and symptoms have also been used to describe his mother Joyce, including sometimes irrational fears of abandonment, low self-esteem, unexplained anxiety, and depression, which must have affected him in childhood and as he grew up.”
― Patrick Kennedy, GRILLING DAHMER: The Interrogation Of "The Milwaukee Cannibal"

“Forensic psychiatrists have often pointed to this period in Dahmer’s development—a time when adolescent boys start to sort out their sexuality and what is attractive to them—as when Dahmer began to confuse and combine his feelings of attraction with his interest in the insides of animals. While experimenting with deceased animals, this became intermingled with his sexual development. He may have known at a young age that he was gay, but for fear of upsetting his family, he did his best to repress those feelings. Dahmer may have also realized from an early age that his sexual interests involving viscera were deviant, and that what stimulated him was unusual and likely not what others around him found arousing. At an age when young men are stimulated by sexually graphic photographs or films, dating, and developing an early-stage sex life, Dahmer was dismembering road kill, watching horror movies, and fantasizing about sex with incapacitated men.”
― Patrick Kennedy, GRILLING DAHMER: The Interrogation Of "The Milwaukee Cannibal"

“Dahmer was a sensitive, shy, and immature young man. He lacked motivation, passion, and ambition—that perhaps can be blamed in part on his habitual drinking problem. There doesn’t seem to be any evidence that he attempted to equip himself for a more productive life, and he always allowed alcohol to take over and ruin any progress he did make. Eventually, his crimes, once embarked upon, would become the focus of his entire world.”
― Patrick Kennedy, GRILLING DAHMER: The Interrogation Of "The Milwaukee Cannibal"

“One year, a group of students, including Dahmer, traveled to Washington, DC, to see the sites and visit important landmarks. While on this trip, someone dared Dahmer to make a crank call. He contacted the offices of then Vice President Walter Mondale and managed to charm his way into an invitation for Dahmer and his fellow high school classmates from Ohio to meet the VP.”
― Patrick Kennedy, GRILLING DAHMER: The Interrogation Of "The Milwaukee Cannibal"

“As he became a teenager, there is strong evidence that he began to drink alcohol on a regular basis. It was not at all unusual for Dahmer to show up to school with a paper cup of alcohol taken from his parents’ house that he sipped from before school started for the day. This could explain some of Dahmer’s lack of motivation and the desire to be left alone, as well as his low ambitions as far as deciding what he wanted to do with his life. Dahmer drank to ease the pain of his loneliness, and perhaps to make it easier to be around other teens, to ease or lessen the anxiety. It was also likely a distraction from the problems that were going on at home when his parents fought.”
― Patrick Kennedy, GRILLING DAHMER: The Interrogation Of "The Milwaukee Cannibal"

“As a child, Dahmer is not known to have tortured or killed animals, which is common in the childhoods of notorious killers. However, Dahmer is known to have collected, inspected, and dissected the corpses of dead animals he found in the woods or road kill from the streets near his family’s Ohio home. While escaping his parents’ fighting at home, young Dahmer rode around the slightly isolated neighborhood on his bike or hiked the woods behind his house. Dahmer was fascinated by animal corpses, the innards, the bones, and the decaying flesh. He found a bag or box, and using a stick, picked up dead animals. Once alone, he picked at the dead animal, examining its insides, removing the organs, and extracting the bones. He asked his father about using chemicals to burn away fur and flesh, thereby leaving the bones completely cleaned. His father, a chemist, believed he had a prodigy with an interest in chemistry in his midst, and so encouraged him.”
― Patrick Kennedy, GRILLING DAHMER: The Interrogation Of "The Milwaukee Cannibal"

“He was a desperately lonely and introverted man whose killing was not the end but rather a means to an end. For Dahmer, it was about obtaining attractive male bodies for sex and then having the company of their corpses. Dahmer was also noted for taking responsibility for his crimes, unusual among killers who often hold back information in an effort to frustrate and confuse investigators, or in an attempt to hold on to some power over authorities by playing games. There are also the publicity-seeking narcissistic serial killers who write letters to the press before they are caught, such as Dennis Rader (the BTK Killer), and David Berkowitz (the Son of Sam), or who leave manifestos behind if they plan to kill themselves, be killed, or get away. If anything, Dahmer did all he could to avoid drawing attention to himself, obviously in order to avoid detection, but also because he was ultimately not one who really craved fame and attention. Like Ted Bundy, most serial killers blame others, maintain their innocence, and try to minimize their culpability at every opportunity. Dahmer told an Inside Edition interviewer in January 1993, “The person to blame is the person sitting across from you. Not parents, not society, not pornography. Those are just excuses.”
― Patrick Kennedy, GRILLING DAHMER: The Interrogation Of "The Milwaukee Cannibal"

“Jeffrey Dahmer’s crimes against his victims were not about instilling fear, sadistic torture, or abuse. Dahmer killed because he had insatiable urges: lust, power, and complete sexual control over a passive male partner.”
― Patrick Kennedy, GRILLING DAHMER: The Interrogation Of "The Milwaukee Cannibal"

“November 29, 1994 | by Don Terry | Reuters CHICAGO—Jeffrey L. Dahmer, whose gruesome exploits of murder, necrophilia and dismemberment shocked the world in 1991, was attacked and killed on Monday in a Wisconsin prison, where he was serving 15 consecutive life terms. Mr. Dahmer was 34, older than any of his victims, who ranged in age from 14 to 33. He died of massive head injuries, suffered sometime between 7:50 and 8:10 A.M., when he was found in a pool of blood in a toilet area next to the prison’s gym, said Michael Sullivan, secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Corrections. He was pronounced dead shortly after 9 A.M.”
― Patrick Kennedy, GRILLING DAHMER: The Interrogation Of "The Milwaukee Cannibal"

“The Oxford Plaza Apartments building, located at 924 North 25th Street in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was torn down. All the former residents had to find new homes.”
― Patrick Kennedy, GRILLING DAHMER: The Interrogation Of "The Milwaukee Cannibal"

“McCann had recommended the maximum sentence possible for each count and Judge Gram obliged, factoring in an additional one hundred and fifty years for being a habitual criminal. Jeff received a sentence of 936 years. He would not be eligible for parole until the year 2928. It was a ridiculous sentence, but the gallery burst into spontaneous applause and shouts of joy as court was adjourned.”
― Patrick Kennedy, GRILLING DAHMER: The Interrogation Of "The Milwaukee Cannibal"