Conversations with a Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes sees the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer confess to his gruesome crimes in tapes that were not made public till now. The documentary series is now streaming on Netflix.
Warning: This article contains heavy spoilers
Plot summary
Lawyers, reporters, lieutenants, psychiatrists, neighbors, and everyone else involved during the trial of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer come together to talk about the events that led up to his sentence and the state of mind the killer possessed.
Milwaukee police arrested Jeffrey Dahmer in July 1991 and uncovered his personal gallery where he preserved the heads, skulls, bones, and much more of the young men he killed.
As the tapes recorded by Wendy Patrickus played, Jeffrey Dahmer and the cast of the show talked about the killer’s childhood.
As a child, he had no trauma that would have caused him to do what he did until his parents got separated. He became a loner after that.
Once he hit puberty, Dahmner figured out that he was attracted more to men. Soon, he started having fantasies where during intercourse, the other person is completely submissive to him.
That fantasy led him to believe that he could attack a man who used to jog around his neighborhood. Jeffrey never got his hands on that man, but he did look forward to doing that to someone else.
He soon found a man hitchhiking and invited him to his house with nobody around. After spending some time together, the man wanted to leave, but Jeffrey insisted he stay.
When the man resisted, Jeffrey took a barbell and hit him on the head, thus claiming his first victim. Over the years, Jeffrey killed a total of 17 victims in his life before being caught.
All he wanted was to fulfill his fantasies by making the boys he invited in to stay. He even opted to keep them alive by drilling into their brains, hoping they would come back as zombies.
While the victims’ families sought justice, the court found itself debating whether this man is a sane person or not, leading up to his sentence.
Conversations with a Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes ending explained in detail:
Did the court determine whether Jeffrey Dahmer was sane or insane?
Dahmer’s lead defense attorney, Gerald Boyle, tried to prove to the court that when Dahmer killed somebody, he was suffering from mental illness.
The psychiatrists who evaluated Dahmer came to the conclusion that he was an alcoholic and necrophilic. Dahmer even agreed that what he did was wrong, but he also confessed that he couldn’t control himself.
The trial went on for two weeks. The juries had to sort out if Dahmer was legally not guilty because of mental disease.
The verdict came that Jeffrey Dahmer was sane while he was committing these murders. Therefore, he will be facing a prison sentence, not a mental institution.
Jeffrey, on his side, stated that he also wanted death for himself. He believes he is sick and takes all the blame for what he did.
Jeffrey’s want for death forced the court to hand him 15 terms of life imprisonment, and he was sent to the Columbia Correctional Facility in Wisconsin.
How did Jeffrey Dahmer die?
During his time in prison, Dahmer got himself baptized, and after a year, he wanted to get out of isolation. He thought of interacting with people.
He requested a shift to the general population, but his lawyer, Wendy Patrickus, told him that he is going to die shortly there. Everyone had strong opinions against him and they hated him.
In November of 1994, Dahmer was assigned to clean up lockers in the gym. A prison inmate named Christopher Scarver was on the same work detail.
Scarver took a barbell from the exercise room and bludgeoned Dahmer to death. In a prison with an elaborate security system, an inmate killed another inmate and nobody found out about it.
Some suspected that it was the prison system that took the job of executing Dahmer.
What happened after Jeffrey Dahmer’s death?
A study and a commission said there was no crime or conspiracy involved in the death of Jeffrey Dahmer during his time in prison.
Dahmer’s properties from his apartment, including his instruments of death, were auctioned off to the highest bidder, and the proceeds were divided among his victims’ families.
A philanthropist purchased Dahmer’s items on behalf of those families. These items were later sent in a garbage truck to be destroyed in an undisclosed landfill.
The tenants, who lived in the apartment Dahmer did, left, and the place was razed as well.
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