Jeffrey Dahmer
“Since he was 15, he had a recurring fantasy about a hitchhiker. Three years later, I saw one near my house. I turned around, picked him up, and that was the night it became reality”.
It was 1978. Dahmer was only 18 years old and had just committed his first murder. Years passed before he killed again, but his fantasies did not disappear.
“One thing led to another. I needed increasingly deviant behavior to satisfy my impulses. It made me feel that they were a permanent part of me. It also gave me sexual gratification”.
The victims piled up. The remains, the constant stench of decay, and the neighbors’ suspicious looks—but nothing could stop him anymore… He needed to go further.
“Murder was not the objective. I only wanted to have the person under my complete control, without having to consider their wishes and being able to keep them with me for as long as I wanted”.
For Dahmer, the game began when the person “was no longer there”. He wanted a relationship, but not the consequences. The problem was that a dead victim could never give him what he truly wanted; they had to remain alive, but be unable to leave him.
Then he began experimenting…
—What were you injecting into that hole?
Confession 1971, Jeffrey Dahmer, Milwaukee Police Department
—Sometimes hot water, sometimes diluted acid.
—And what was the purpose of that technique?
—To put the person into a zombie state.
—I didn’t know exactly how to do it, but I was experimenting.
—What do you mean by “zombie state”?
—A state in which they would be willing simply to follow my orders and not want to leave.
But it didn’t work as I had hoped.
“I tried to keep the person alive by inducing a zombie-like state. It never worked completely”. “One thing led to another. Each time, I had to do stranger things to satisfy my instincts”.
Once again, he needed to go further; however, to fulfill his desires, he crossed all his boundaries, until there was no humanity left to respect. He began taking photographs and keeping parts of his victims.
“It was my way of remembering their appearance, their physical beauty. I wanted to keep something of the person with me”.
But even that stopped being enough.
Then came cannibalism.
“I felt that they would become part of me”.
For Dahmer, everything seemed to return to the same obsession: preventing his victims from disappearing from his life.
“I wanted to have the person under my complete control”.
When he was finally captured, he had already murdered 17 men and youths.
Years later, he acknowledged that he did not know where that compulsion had begun.
“To this day, I don’t know what started it”.
But he also did not try to blame anyone else.
“The guilty person is sitting in front of you. He is the only one. Not my parents, not society, not pornography. Those are merely excuses”.
And he acknowledged something even more disturbing:
“I probably would have continued. I can’t think of anything that would have stopped me”.
“I did not do it out of hatred. I hated no one. I knew I was sick or evil, or both”.
In the end, Dahmer described in his own words what his fantasies had ultimately become:
“I should have stayed with God. I tried, I failed, and I created a holocaust”.