Born to Kill: Jeffrey Dahmer is a British documentary special which uses American cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer to question whether serial killers are born with the tendency to commit their crimes, or whether it is learnt.
The special originally aired in South Africa on DStv's Crime and Investigation Network on Tuesday 20 March 2007, at 20h40.
It was rebroadcast on C&I on Sunday 16 March 2008, at 19h50. It is an hour long.
Repeats
Monday 17 March: 01h50, 13h50
Synopsis
Jeffrey Dahmer was a homosexual sexual deviant who raped, murdered and ate parts of 17 victims.
Like other killers he managed to elude capture while continuing to carry out his crimes. Like every other sociopath serial killer in history he believed himself to be completely justified in his actions.
How does a man become a serial killer, necrophiliac, cannibal and psychopath? Many of the theories would have you believe that the answers can always be found in childhood abuse, bad parenting, head trauma, foetal alcoholism and drug addiction. Perhaps in some cases these are contributing factors, but not for Jeffrey Dahmer...
Jeffrey Dahmer was born in Milwaukee on 21st May 1960, into the loving household of Lionel and Joyce Dahmer. He wanted for nothing in his formative years, and was a happy child until the age of six, when some minor surgery, which coincided with the birth of his brother, seemed to effect a change on the boy, and he became increasingly insular and lacking in self-confidence.
A career opportunity for his father, around the same period, resulted in the family moving from Iowa to Ohio, and the boy’s insecurities deepened; by his early teens he was disengaged, tense and largely friendless.
He claims that compulsions to murder and necrophilia had occurred to him from the age of fourteen, but it appears that the breakdown of his parents’ marriage, their acrimonious divorce, and the psychological stresses associated with these events may have been the catalyst for turning these earlier thoughts into actions.
Just after he graduated from high school, in June 1978, he picked up a hitchhiker named Steven Hicks, took him home to his parents’ house, where they drank beer and had sex.
When Hicks tried to leave, Dahmer killed him with a blow to the head with a barbell. He dismembered the corpse of his first victim, packed it in plastic bags and buried them in the woods behind the house.
At the same time of his first killing, his alcohol consumption became uncontrolled and, in January 1979, when Dahmer dropped out of Ohio State University after only one term, due to drunkenness, his recently remarried father insisted that he enlist in the Army, and he was posted to Germany.
This drinking problem persisted, until two years later the Army discharged him for alcoholism.
In September 1987 he took his second victim, Steven Toumi, whom he met in a gay bar. He developed a pattern of murder that was to persist for the duration of his thirteen year killing spree: he sought out mostly African-American men at gay meeting places, lured them home to his grandmother’s basement with promises of money or sex, where he would ply them with alcohol laced with drugs, strangle them, have sex with the corpse or masturbate on it, then dismember the corpses and dispose of them, usually keeping their genitals or skulls as souvenirs.
He often took photos of each victim at various stages of the murder process, so he could recollect each act afterwards and relive the experience.
This re-enactment included assembling the skulls and masturbating in front of them, to achieve gratification.
Dahmer’s luck finally ran out on 22nd July 1991, when two Milwaukee police officers picked up Tracy Edwards, a young African-American, who was wandering the streets with a handcuff dangling from his wrist.
They decided to follow up his claims that a "weird dude" had drugged and restrained him, and arrived at Dahmer’s apartment, where he calmly offered to get the keys for the handcuffs.
Edwards claimed that the knife Dahmer had threatened him with was in the bedroom and, when the officer went in to corroborate the story, he noticed photographs of dismembered bodies lying around, which included one of a head in the fridge.
He shouted to his colleague to restrain Dahmer, who fought back fiercely, but was nevertheless subdued.
A subsequent search revealed the head in the fridge, as well as three more in the freezer, and a catalogue of other horrors, including preserved skulls, jars containing genitalia, and an extensive gallery of macabre photographs.
It took only five hours deliberation for the jury to find him guilty, but sane, on all counts, on 17th February 1992.
Dahmer was sentenced to fifteen consecutive life terms, a total of 957 years in prison.