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A Haunted Genetic Architecture Pt. 1
11 Plays1 month ago
Content warning: sexual assault, ableism, murder, necrophilia, cannibalism, pedophilia, homophobia, racism, police violence/neglect.
We’re backkkk!!!!!! After a long hiatus caused by multiple huge life changes on both our ends, we bring you our first story recorded in two separate continents. It’s a heavy one - we’re covering the Jeffrey Dahmer murders. But as is always true with us, it’s less about the violence itself and more about the historical context these murders and the state’s response (or lack thereof) are situated in. You’ll learn about 1970s Queer Black history was like in MKE in the 70s, including the ‘Stonewall’ of Milwaukee that happened 8 years before Stonewall. We unearth the brutality of police negligence and also do a deep dive framing Dahmer’s violence as a microcosm of European conquest, colonialism, and slavery. (Stay tuned for Part 2, which will go deep on victim stories, the fall out of the murders on the community, and some amazing theses about the socio-political implications of this case we found while digging deep into this story).
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Transcript
Introduction and Personal Updates
00:00:13
Speaker
Hello. Hi. You're listening to Unpacking the Eerie. We've got a penchant for some dark shit, but are routinely left unsatisfied with the way that these stories are told.
00:00:24
Speaker
So here we app about scary stories and scary people. And also the considerations of power dynamics, social, racial, and economic justice that are often left out.
00:00:35
Speaker
Join us as we explore the unnerving, nuance, depth, and packets of hope. Join us as we unpack the eerie
00:00:53
Speaker
We're back. We are back. Well, for returning folks, hi For folks who've never listened to this before. Welcome to Unpacking the Eerie.
00:01:04
Speaker
Yeah. We've taken a break for about a year and a lot of changes have happened in between that year. yeah we don't live in the same continent anymore. but Yeah. Akshi, where are you?
00:01:17
Speaker
I am in India. I am on the other side of the world as of like 10 months ago. This will be our first episode recording remotely.
00:01:29
Speaker
The time gap is gigantic. I'm in fresh 10.30 a.m. And I'm in fresh 11 p.m. But it is fresh for me because sometimes I get like this surge of energy.
00:01:44
Speaker
At like 11 p.m. I don't feel tired. That's amazing. woo I don't feel as bad for taking our sweet time.
Podcast Hiatus and Global Issues
00:01:53
Speaker
We haven't recorded in a year, partially due to these gigantic shifts.
00:01:57
Speaker
Also, you know, I just want to name that the last time that we checked in there, we were towards the beginning of an ongoing genocide that is still happening in Palestine. we had shared a roundtable discussion that was graciously recorded by um friend Micheline and her friends and colleagues, all Palestinian and all talking about their experiences coming from different places in Palestine, but also have a different like historical timeline there, along with resistance efforts. And so if you haven't listened to that, i gonna do a plug to
00:02:33
Speaker
you know, please uplift their stories. It was really generous to come share. It's a wonderful two part series. And I think part of the reason we are paused was partially due to that. I think it felt weird to be creating and promoting during a time where our attention, you know, maybe ought be in other places. And then, of course, we had this election in the United States where We are descending towards fascism in kind of a quick pace. Not that the U.S. wasn't already, you know, some would argue that we were already in like soft fascism for a really long time and maybe hard fascism in particular communities for the entire time.
00:03:18
Speaker
But yeah, that's like the water that we're swimming in. And so we're just we're we're bringing it back.
Introduction to Jeffrey Dahmer
00:03:24
Speaker
But I'm excited to get back into it. We decided to record this episode six months ago, so you can see the pace that we're moving.
00:03:34
Speaker
Slow. Before we get started, I also just want to highlight that there are a ton of people over the years who have gifted us generous contributions via ah Patreon, and some folks have stayed. Makes a lot of sense that a lot of people bounced because we haven't been creating.
00:03:52
Speaker
I do want to emphasize that I'm really grateful for anyone who may even accidentally still be donating a couple bucks every month. It does help us keep this podcast hosted. you guys help me pay for mic.
00:04:09
Speaker
ah Yeah, that's very nice. Yeah. Also, we do donate still 25% of everything that we make, every payout that we get. to you know what cause that's related to the topic. So your money is not going nowhere. It's going places. And we really appreciate you.
00:04:28
Speaker
Yeah, excited to be back and to dig into it So on July 22nd, 1991, 32-year-old man in Milwaukee, Wisconsin ran out onto the street, found a police officer and let them know he needed help because he had just escaped from a man who was trying to murder him.
00:04:54
Speaker
Cops followed him back to the apartment that he was in. And when they walked in, they found photos of dismembered bodies, found a dismembered head in the refrigerator.
00:05:07
Speaker
And the home was that of 31-year-old Jeffrey Dahmer. So we're covering Jeffrey Dahmer. This story for us often comes up in conversation because...
00:05:20
Speaker
There's such sensationalism around Jeffrey Dahmer and it's seldom really covered in a way that feels just. So much of it is just focused on like, why why was he like that? And just like kind of making him into a celebrity. Very gross.
00:05:35
Speaker
It'll be less about the gruesome details. You can find that literally anywhere. It'll be more about what surrounds it. And I'll hand it over to you. The context.
00:05:46
Speaker
The context.
Dahmer's Early Life and Behaviors
00:05:49
Speaker
rewind rewind from 91 all the way back to the 1960s jeffrey dahmer was born may 21st 1960 to lionel herbert dahmer a chemistry student and joyce annette dahmer a typewriting instructor Lionel was German and Welsh and Joyce was either Norwegian or German and Irish.
00:06:19
Speaker
I saw all three of those, but they were white, ah white European. He was described as an energetic and happy child. But when he was four, he had to have a surgery for a double hernia.
00:06:34
Speaker
And it's noted that he just became a lot quieter after that. Lionel was a chemistry student and then later research chemist and during Jeffrey's childhood was doing his PhD. So he was just absent quite a lot. Joyce was on prescription drugs apparently when she was pregnant and also had postpartum and depression and other sorts of mental health issues after he was born. Her ex-husband says that she was a hypochondriac and quote unquote demanded a lot of attention.
00:07:07
Speaker
it was also the 60s. So let's keep that in mind. Apparently she refused. so So her husband said that she refused to touch Jeffrey when he was a baby because she was afraid of contracting germs.
00:07:22
Speaker
But that doesn't really track with how later in life she used to work with HIV and AIDS patients, or maybe she just like was different by then. So I've also seen in some places that his dad also might have had depression. He did have a brother I'm not going to talk about a lot because he really doesn't want to be associated with Jeffrey and changed his name and, you know,
00:07:44
Speaker
Yeah, let him live his life. But between the ages of six and eight for Jeffrey, they moved around frequently. And then they finally ended up settling in this suburb in Ohio called the Beth Township of Akron.
00:08:00
Speaker
And it had a population of about 4,500. So very small town vibes. very small town vibe They were pretty well off. They lived in a three bedroom house with two and a half bathrooms and it was surrounded by woods.
00:08:14
Speaker
He and his dad had this father son activity together where they would bleach connective tissue and hair off of rodent corpses.
00:08:25
Speaker
when they found animals that had died under their house. So I guess his is... They would bleach them? Yeah. They would like bleach the bones, you know?
00:08:36
Speaker
Yeah. Kind of like, what is it when people stuff animals? Taxidermy? I guess it's like kind of somewhat similar to that, but they would, yeah, find corpses underneath the house of like rats and stuff and they would do this as an activity together and since his dad was the chemist he was like excited that he was I guess into science why are fucking white people so freaky and then they call it science like what the hell is I have a whole tangent about this later but
00:09:08
Speaker
There's such freaks and they call it science. like Yes. Oh my gosh. Like the body world guy. yeah i want to do an episode about that because why fuck is there like an appetite for exhibits of people's literal nervous systems and muscular yeah sports.
00:09:31
Speaker
They're playing music. And I'm just like, whose bodies are these? That's very weird. Just call it what it is. It's like Mirror episode, honestly. Just say that you're necrophilic. Related to that, Jeffrey, when he was little, used to carry around a little pail full of bones. And his family used to call them his fiddle sticks.
00:09:51
Speaker
This is why when people are like, there was no signs, I'm like, there were signs. Anyways. He's just some quirky kid, huh? He's just... So in grade school, apparently, he gifted tadpoles to one of his... I'm just going to share some weird stories from his childhood, essentially. So in grade school, he gifted tadpoles to one of his teachers who, I guess, gave it to another one of his classmates, and he felt very...
00:10:20
Speaker
rejected and angry by that so he went to the friend's house and then killed the tadpoles by pouring motor oil into the jar and setting them on fire um they said they did not see any warning signs at all but he did have a compulsion to kill and mutilate animals.
00:10:39
Speaker
He killed his own dog. He killed his own dog. And he definitely was obsessed with collecting animal carcasses. So he would like pick up roadkill and do kind of the same stuff that him and his dad used to do together.
00:10:54
Speaker
He told a psychiatrist later on that when he was younger, he had like ah very high libido and was like constantly fantasizing about doing harm and also like having fantasies about necrophilia.
00:11:08
Speaker
as well and that it took up like most of his day. When he was 13, he was actually, and I watched this movie that's like mostly just about his adolescent life, like when he was in high school and they did portray this in the movie.
00:11:22
Speaker
And for some reason, the person who plays Jeffrey Dahmer is like a Disney Channel star. i forget his name, but just weird casting as per usual. He was obsessed with this male jogger and would sometimes hide with a baseball bat on the on his route.
00:11:38
Speaker
um hoping to make his first kill, but I think one of the times that he was like prepared to do that, the jogger just didn't show, so it didn't happen. He also started drinking quite young.
00:11:51
Speaker
he i think he started drinking when he was about 13, His parents also used to fight a lot, you know, and I think when he was 17, they got divorced and his mom left and took his brother with him. And I guess he felt abandoned when that happened.
00:12:09
Speaker
that would have been like his senior year of high school. So I was just sort of looking into like... whether there's been like research or just like any theories on like why he might be the way that he is. And i did find one paper written by this person called Tamara Higgs that was about psychopathy and neglect.
00:12:31
Speaker
And in it, she states how the average serial killer's profile is white male, low middle income in his twenty s or thirty s with a history of childhood abuse or neglect, is sociopathic or psychopathic, is a chameleon to his environment and appears normal to others. That's sort of like typical traits of a serial killer.
00:12:52
Speaker
For him, I mean, his parents were, you know, kind of preoccupied, weren't really around that much for him. There were some rumors that he had maybe experienced sexual abuse from a peer in his neighborhood, but his dad said that was like very much not true. so there's some just iffiness around that. I don't even know where that comes from because I don't think that it comes directly from Jeffrey.
00:13:17
Speaker
Classic, his parents said that they didn't see any warning signs, but he actually has two out of the three McDonald's triad, which is cruelty to and animals and fire setting. He did say later on that when he was 14, 15, he had fantasies of death that were intermingled with sex.
00:13:37
Speaker
And that's sort of when he knew he had sort of reached a turning point. I'm just thinking about how like women and girls and trans kids are way more likely to experience like severe abuse in their families of origin, but they are not the yeah serial killer profile, right? So it's not just about whether neglect or abuse is present. It's also about like,
00:14:06
Speaker
the world that we live in and who gets enabled to do shit like this. I'm going to go into his like adolescent high school time now. So he went to Revere High School and this is sort of like when he starts to make friends.
00:14:22
Speaker
And that's what this whole movie is about that I watched is he makes friends with the student named John Backdorf, who was an aspiring artist. Him and his other friends formed what they called Dahmer Fan Club.
00:14:37
Speaker
And so in the movie Friends with Dahmer, they show this film. fan club. They just think he's funny because he makes ableist jokes and pretends like he has an intellectual disability.
00:14:51
Speaker
The movie is actually based on a graphic novel that Durf wrote after all of the stuff about him came out. In retrospect, he says there was always some a darkness about him that was really quite repellent.
00:15:05
Speaker
And he said, i was okay hanging out with him. If there was other people around, i was never going to be alone with him. But they did things like sneak him into school photographs. He actually said that he was the one who inserted himself into the friend group.
00:15:17
Speaker
They said they found him entertaining and kind of dangerous and unpredictable. And for them, that was funny, I guess. He apparently skipped school a lot and also carried around a styrofoam cup. Not sure what he was drinking from there, but since he's been...
00:15:36
Speaker
considered to be an alcoholic since he was like 13, I'm guessing probably alcohol. But even people that he went to high school would say things like we would have just never expected, even though he was clearly being very strange and concerning when he was in high school too.
00:15:52
Speaker
So I listened to this podcast called the dark side of the land podcast, where they interview his, they interview his former teacher and a former classmate. His former teacher was Al Smeshko, who taught PE and health and coached football and basketball. And he had him as a student twice in ninth and 10th grade.
00:16:16
Speaker
His first impression of him was that he wasn't very athletic, wasn't a troublemaker, to some extent seemed like a loner and didn't have a lot of friends. In health class, he also seemed sort of the same and didn't really interact with the rest of the students.
00:16:34
Speaker
During his senior year, he actually found him with a six pack of beer at like 10 a.m. m on the school grounds. And he told the teacher, I got problems.
00:16:45
Speaker
And so the teacher took him to the guidance counselor because he asked to be taken to the guidance counselor. And he said that he was struggling because his parents were getting divorced and the guidance counselor said he seemed depressed.
00:16:59
Speaker
And that was, I guess, kind of it, you know. So
First Murder and Military Service
00:17:02
Speaker
there were opportunities where like people who were in positions to maybe do something about it could have done more, but it seemed like they didn't.
00:17:13
Speaker
The nonchalance is just really wild because... oh, 17-year-old drinking a six-pack of beer at 10 a.m. in school property. Totally normal, I guess. I guess. And then that's the response to parent's divorce? like Yeah.
00:17:30
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. No inquiry? Like, doesn't seem normal. Yeah. No inquiry. Thanks. Yeah. So the former classmate described him as goofy and funny and that he would sit at their table and do goofy stuff to make us laugh.
00:17:48
Speaker
but And he would imitate people and he got good grades and was interested in biology. He did this weird thing once. He wanted money for beer, so they paid him to play pranks on people at the mall.
00:18:03
Speaker
like going up the escalator the wrong way or knocking off people's glasses of water in restaurants. And then he did something there. It was just like the way they described the story was just really weird.
00:18:16
Speaker
He went to this health food store where they were giving out samples of flaxseed or something like that. And he just kept taking the samples and filling his mouth with them. And then once his mouth was like completely full of them, he screamed, I'm allergic. And then he just like spit them all out and walked away.
00:18:33
Speaker
It's weird in like a bad, weird way. Yeah, where you're like, what's going on? Well, it's interesting because I find this behavior pretty consistent with – I'm thinking of some instances of people who actually – i feel I felt had the capacity for harm.
00:18:54
Speaker
And like the things that they outright did if you were to just talk about them in isolation, feel strange. like Like they don't know how to engage in normal humor.
00:19:08
Speaker
yeah And they they make really strange jokes and people kind of brush it off, especially men brush it off as like social awkwardness or now in like other spaces, neurodivergence or something like that. yeah But I think that people o have been on the other side of more dangerous behavior actually have a knowing, like a felt sense that there's something else happening underneath these like weird, this weird sense of humor.
00:19:40
Speaker
When I was hearing the stories, I said, yeah, this person strikes me as someone who feels dangerous. And I have actually very little information about the dangerous things that I think that they're capable of. yeah But then when the story started converging, I felt really validated in that there was something else actually underneath the joking.
00:20:00
Speaker
Anyway. Yeah, so that reminds me of how last weekend I was hanging out with some new friends, some of whom were younger than me, and I was giving them some 30-year-old wisdom, and I said, listen to your gut when it tells you something's wrong.
00:20:18
Speaker
You will find out in due time what your gut was trying to tell you, and you don't always have to stick around to know why you're having the bad feelings. Right. You don't need evidence.
00:20:30
Speaker
No, no. You can just get out of there. It's fine. You don't need to know. I think it's hard because i saw someone post online about one of the most insidious things white patriarchy has done is to weaponize ah people's intuition.
00:20:49
Speaker
You make people question their own intuition to make them feel like it's not valid or not real. And you need acene obscene amounts of evidence to back up. the idea that they could be right when our intuition actually evolved from like you know centuries and centuries and centuries of survival survival instinct yeah uh-huh it comes from our lizard brain that's like danger no danger you know but anyway back to jd as i will refer to him
00:21:22
Speaker
because I've never heard anyone refer to him that way. and I don't like saying his name. Okay, JD. So this guy who they were interviewing in this podcast said that the last time he saw him was a couple of weeks after graduation. He gave him a ride home after a party. And this also is a weird story because they live in like a super small town in Ohio and he was driving home from a party and he saw JD walking down like a completely pitch black road at 1 a.m. by himself.
00:21:52
Speaker
And so he stopped and he was like, do you need a ride home? And he was like, sure. And he said that he wasn't really talkative and he seemed kind of drunk. And this guy didn't get out of the car, just talked to him a little bit and then left and never saw him again.
00:22:07
Speaker
And he he said in this interview, like he didn't kill anyone that he knew. They were all random people. So like, I don't think he would have ever or done anything to like me or anyone that we knew and high school. He also said he was smart.
00:22:19
Speaker
Interestingly, when the news came out about him, he just saw the last name Dahmer and his immediate thought was Jeff's dad killed someone and not that Jeffrey killed someone, which I thought was interesting.
00:22:33
Speaker
Wild story, but like the last one I'll say about him in high school. There was this fetal pig that they had in their biology class in school that someone stole.
00:22:46
Speaker
And for weeks, the principal was like go on the speaker at the school being like, whoever stole the fetal pig, please bring it back over and over again. They never found out who it was. And then when JD was in prison, confessed that it was him that stole the fetal pig from their biology class and nobody knew that he was the one that did it.
00:23:09
Speaker
Which I'm like, maybe the person who collects roadkill is the person that stole the fetal pig from the class. Like, hello, anybody there? Yeah, what's the disconnect?
00:23:21
Speaker
This is so wild to me. not. The belief in white innocence runs so fucking deep they can't even fucking imagine. Totally. Or the complacency in the comment of like, it's not going to happen to me, so I was safe, so therefore he's not dangerous is such a is such like a common, I think, internalized narrative in people with privilege.
00:23:43
Speaker
Mm-hmm. of like, you know, I'm actually not invested in this thing because it doesn't impact me. And what they mean is that my safety is not compromised. Therefore, they are not a public safety concern. There was this boy I went to high school with who was suspended many times for for espousing Nazi beliefs.
00:24:00
Speaker
Okay. And they were just like, he's just, you know, being silly, you you know, suspended for a few days. He had also been talking about wanting to like blow up the gym and all of this stuff no action no action and then actually one day we had a school shutdown because a librarian found him in the library acting funny and they asked what was in his backpack and it were all it was all the components that you would need create like your own that's so scary yeah and he had shared that he had plans to put it under the bleachers during one of the you know
00:24:37
Speaker
Oh my God. Yeah. I remember it very vividly because it was a day after my 18th birthday. And and so yeah, we couldn't leave French class his library and found him.
00:24:48
Speaker
They were just like, it's just silly guy. and I don't know what happened after that. I don't think anything did really happen because he didn't actually put the pieces together to make the bomb. And then teachers were told to tell students that he actually didn't have a bomb.
00:25:02
Speaker
And that there's no evidence to show that he was going to do that because they didn't want parents to be upset. But the components are there and the pattern was there. And I don't know where he is or what he's doing. But.
00:25:15
Speaker
Oh, my gosh. Terrifying. So i will pass on to you to tell us what happens next. Okay. So I actually don't have a ton of info. So this might be kind of quick.
00:25:27
Speaker
And then. okay So he's at the end of his high school time. And at age 18, 1978, in Bath Township, Ohio, he commits his first murder. Stephen Hicks, it occurred very shortly after he graduated high school.
00:25:45
Speaker
And during this time, he's becoming increasingly unstable. His alcoholism is pretty intense. And he becomes extremely isolated. you know, in the process. His mom had and brother had left at this point. And for some reason, his dad was also not living in their house. So he was just kind of by himself.
00:26:04
Speaker
Did you watch Dahmer the show the whole thing? No, I didn't. Okay, the Evan Peters show was I did. i did watch it. It took me a long time to finish it. It was extremely hard to watch.
00:26:17
Speaker
Evan Peters is excellent in that he is very scary. But I you fucking hate this guy the whole time. There's nothing redeeming. Like it's very hard to watch. I think that they tried to be accurate in the storytelling, whether or not that happens, I'm not really sure.
00:26:34
Speaker
But, you know, in the movie or in the show, his dad is kind of shown as like someone who's like, he did this taxidermy stuff with him, but then was reluctant and feeling like maybe it was his bad that he was dead.
00:26:50
Speaker
you know, being weird with the animals and that it wasn't actually him doing that. And and think he did see that he had an alcohol problem and didn't know what to do about it And I think that, you know, he is the only thing maybe keeping him in check or distracted during this time. And so when he's, yeah, when he's i home, there's no way he's going to bring someone home and murder someone.
00:27:17
Speaker
there. Right. The the window's smaller. yeah Yeah. Where that's possible. so Opposite of body doubling. um my God. The opposite of body doubling. Thank you, Akshi. Yeah.
00:27:30
Speaker
Oh my gosh. i do have some information about Stephen a little bit that came up. He was born 22nd, 1959. He was from Coventry Township, Ohio, suburb of He was from coventry township ohio suburb of akron he was described by friends and family as friendly, kind and trusting.
00:27:50
Speaker
He was known to be an easygoing young man for a love of music. He had just graduated from high school in 1978, so he was planning to go to college, but you know spending the summer having a time yeah he was trying to go to a concert that day yeah he was trying to go to concert and you know people were her hitchhiking during this time because they were you know yeah so 70s you know just trusting that people weren't going to murder them i guess especially if you're a dude you're like especially if you're a dude
00:28:23
Speaker
Yeah, i have some thoughts on that. So basically, he picks him up, he invites him to his house and bath for a drink. That's typically how it always starts. It's like, do you want to have a drink and hang out?
00:28:36
Speaker
This guy is like, you know, I'm in festival vibes. Sure, why not? And they were hanging out for a few hours before this guy tries to leave. And it sounds like j d doesn't want him to go. i was just going to say, i don't know why I'm having like that image from Pearl where she's like, why are you leaving me?
00:29:02
Speaker
That's exactly right. JD and Pearl, similar vibes. Actually, Yeah. Right? Because she's like keeping her mom's dead body and like props her up at the chairs.
00:29:16
Speaker
ah Yeah. That family's, yeah, that family's German too. I wonder if there was something. True. True, true. Interesting. You know, like movies, they don't do things unintentionally. others And then there's like a like a cultural piece too around containment and all of this stuff. But wow, I'll never be able to not see that.
00:29:36
Speaker
He's doing Pearl shit. The why are you leaving me? Yeah. Yeah, totally. Why did you change? Yeah. they're like, what are you talking about? She's very clearly clocking that they're uncomfortable.
00:29:47
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, I don't know how many details to share, but he was bludgeoned to death and he was dissected and he buried the remains behind his family's home. Several weeks later, he dug up the remains and then he dissolved them in acid.
00:30:01
Speaker
He crushed the bones and then scattered them in the woods. Hicks was dismissed as a runaway, not someone who was, you know, hitchhiking and going to a ah concert and then going to college, which, you know,
00:30:17
Speaker
Maybe that was the cop's way of, quote unquote, not wasting resources. But, you know, his family really pushed for an investigation that never really happened.
00:30:29
Speaker
And of course, these details, they probably found out much later when he was in trial. I don't know whether this was when he first buried it in the woods or when he was taking it.
00:30:44
Speaker
to like the second time but he was pulled over for a traffic violation when he had bags in his car that had his room stephen hooks's remains and in it and the cops literally asked him what he had in the bags and he said it's trash that I'm taking to the dump and he told them that his parents had just gotten divorced and that he was just driving around to think and so They just wrote him up for being left of center driving and then let him go and didn't check the bags or anything.
00:31:21
Speaker
That sounds right. Like literally the first person. And 16 more people were killed after this. so I mean, it's a really solid way for him to be like, oh, I got to do this thing and I was even stopped and nobody thought. I got away with it. Yeah. Right. Like I can do this.
00:31:41
Speaker
Yeah, you're so right. It's one of those stories where I'm just like, you can see, actually, this is like a community accountability issue, because actually everybody is culpable for not following up on all of these things that could have been addressed.
00:31:55
Speaker
I'm sure there were missing posters in all of this. And, you know, if he's seeing on TV that someone is getting cast off as a runaway and that they're not going to come back and look for them because of it, it makes a lot of sense that he would make the connection that, oh, if I'm strategic about who I choose to target, no one's going to be looking for them. They'll never find me.
00:32:16
Speaker
In Inside Edition in 1993, he said, i always knew that it was wrong. The first killing was not planned. So he just he was acting on impulse. I was coming back from the shopping mall back in 78. I had fantasies about picking up a hitchhiker, taking him back to the house and having complete dominance and control over him.
00:32:34
Speaker
you know, I was thinking about how when we talked about Catherine, we're talking about how patriarchy is actually... at the crux of so much of why she was able to do that for so long. I still think that, you know, white supremacy and patriarchy are clearly also doing a disservice to everyone, including the main beneficiaries, white men.
00:32:52
Speaker
Like he was still made vulnerable by the cultural expectations that, you know, that white men are always like kind of safe.
00:33:03
Speaker
And that of course they, there's like, you know, he was a runaway and he's fine. He's somewhere doing his own silly thing because young people do that. You know, like, I think there's a disposability there.
00:33:17
Speaker
And then also, like, you know, white men are taught that you can be trusting and that you are because you are invincible. hmm.
00:33:31
Speaker
So even if like his intuition was maybe like something's not right, he was probably like, yeah you know, like that was irrelevant. He was probably like, I'll be fine. Yeah. I'll be fine. Yeah. Who's going to target me, you know?
00:33:44
Speaker
And apparently, you know, like Stephen's parents were really outspoken. Richard Hicks came out much later when the media frenzy happened. And, you know, the case was unsolved for 13 years. They knew that something was wrong. Yeah.
00:33:58
Speaker
Yeah. And they were also really affected by the fact that, you know, their son's murder was like, not really noted at all or anybody's murder really it was about the sensationalism of jeffrey and his behavior but apparently he became a richard hicks he became an advocate for stronger missing persons cases and oh push for better support systems of the families whose you know loved ones had disappeared during that time and beyond and so
00:34:30
Speaker
I don't know what came of that after, but that's his first murder where he, I'm sure he's feeling like he's feeling invincible now, but actually he doesn't engage in another murder until 1987, which is like nine years later.
00:34:48
Speaker
and part of this is probably because the opportunities weren't there. Shortly after this, his, he goes to, he gets into Ohio state and he's there for only one term. ah He drops out because he had a problem with drinking.
00:35:04
Speaker
I think that his grades suffered because of it. And his father is really pissed about it. And he urged that he enlisted in the army, which, you know, is always helpful.
00:35:15
Speaker
Right. It's helpful all the time. go go and Go to the army to learn about structured violence, actually. Totally. Channel all that rage.
00:35:26
Speaker
ah I mean, the ah military is incredibly skilled at sharpening people's ability to dehumanize the other, quote unquote, so that they can be effective. You're right.
00:35:39
Speaker
So, you know, another place of culpability. and So he was stationed in Germany for some time and Eventually, he was, again, he was discharged because he had problems with excessive drinking, not because he was sexually assaulting soldiers, which he also did. oh my gosh.
00:35:59
Speaker
They said he has a drinking problem. He can't be here. But never mind. He was, i mean, it was documented. A serial rapist. forward A serial rapist, yeah. And again, he's like, oh, people got a problem with my drinking, but not a problem with my violence. And so no big deal, which I'll hand it back to What the hell?
00:36:16
Speaker
Oh my gosh. Late twenties, early thirties. Right. So he comes back to Ohio because he's discharged due to drinking in September 1981. And he initially moves in with his dad and his stepmom, but only for a little bit after which he moves to live with his grandma in this place called West Alice, um Wisconsin.
00:36:44
Speaker
And apparently she's the only family member that JD liked his grandma. In 1982, he was working as a phlebotomist, but he was laid off and then he was unemployed and living with his grandma.
00:36:59
Speaker
During this time, also in August of 1982, he was arrested for indecent exposure. There's like a lot of this kind of stuff where he gets arrested for indecent exposure or molestation.
00:37:11
Speaker
But this first time was at Wisconsin State Fair and he it was in front of 25 people. And He was fined $50 for that. 1985 is when he starts to go to gay bars and bath houses and just places that a lot of the queer community in Milwaukee is, you know, spending time at.
00:37:35
Speaker
So I'm just
Milwaukee's Social Context
00:37:36
Speaker
going to create a little more of that. context and environment and step back from JD for a little bit. I was really curious as to like the LGBT history in Milwaukee was and I was surprised to find like a lot of ah very rich history that is part of Milwaukee. So I found out about this event, which happened eight years before Stonewall called the Black Knight Brawl.
00:38:05
Speaker
And it happened on August 1961 at this bar in Milwaukee called the Black Knight, which was one of Milwaukee's most popular gay bars. It was somewhere that was like known to be super, super inclusive of like anyone and everyone, people that were genderqueer and also like queer in their sexuality.
00:38:26
Speaker
And it was very rare to find a space like this at that point of time. So the the community was very protective. of the space and who they let in to it. So on August 5th, four 20 year old servicemen checked out of the tavern and were forcibly removed.
00:38:44
Speaker
This woman, Josie Carter, was there that night, stated that they only came in to cause trouble. They tried to fight the bouncer when he tried to kick them out. And so Josie, who is a black trans woman, went out with a beer bottle ready to knock them out.
00:39:01
Speaker
And she said that this man turned on me. I thought I can't let him put his hands on me. He was big and he kept coming at me. i thought he would kill me. In that moment, I could fight off an army in a bathrobe. I let him have everything that was in that bottle and he went down.
00:39:17
Speaker
So she beat him up. And so they fled the bar, but they said they were going to like bring their friends and come back. So everyone at the bar basically just got ready for this. They were like, all right, we're ready to fight.
00:39:30
Speaker
And they Josie said, like, we did not run from a fight. We did not run from nothing. And wouldn't you know it, those big ass mothers came back and just tore apart the bar looking for little old me and my husband.
00:39:45
Speaker
because their buddy got beat up. the It didn't last very long. It was an intense fight, and one of the patrons of the bar had a lot of lacerations when he was thrown through a broken window, and another experienced a concussion when he was hit on the head with a bar stool.
00:40:04
Speaker
But thankfully, no one died, and in the end, there was about $2,000 in losses that was reported by the bar, including the bar's entire bottled liquor inventory, an electric organ, ah jukebox, and all of the windows.
00:40:20
Speaker
The F word was used by these servicemen to refer to people at the bar. And the cops came and took them to jail, the four servicemen.
00:40:33
Speaker
And even said the cops said to them, you have no business coming down here and harassing these people. During this time, there were literally laws that were that prohibited cross-dressing and had been in like the books since like colonial times.
00:40:51
Speaker
And so the police were empowered to apprehend queer folks and inspect and arrest any individual who they thought were not wearing biologically gender appropriate clothing, which is which is wild. So yeah, this article that I read, they were they said, today we can't even imagine the bravery and boldness that was required to live a transgender life in mid-century Milwaukee.
00:41:17
Speaker
And Josie Carter says, oh, I was so proud of myself. But when I went back to the bar and grab the door handle. I realized my whole finger was pushed all the way backwards. I didn't even notice it during the fight. I just kept fighting. We all did.
00:41:33
Speaker
So the the area that this bar was in was called the Fruit Loop because there was a ton of gay bars around there. But sadly, in 1966, this area was demolished and a freeway was built.
00:41:46
Speaker
The community moved further south and Milwaukee's second gayborhood was formed at Second and Pittsburgh. By the late 1970s, there were about a dozen gay and lesbian bars in this area. So a lot. And I feel like a lot of people came from other places in the Midwest to Milwaukee because it was kind of like a haven of that area of the country. And a lot of the queer activists at the time compared Milwaukee to New York and San Francisco and were like trying to
00:42:16
Speaker
make it on the same level as that for for queer folks, which I never knew that. Did you know that? No, this is new to me. yeah Yeah, thank you for unearthing this. I'm sure people who like live in the Midwest maybe know know more about this.
00:42:31
Speaker
but And I'll share another quote by Josie. She said, have never lived in fear. All someone can do is beat me up. But believe me, if I see them again anywhere, i will walk up to them, tap them on the shoulder and say, remember me?
00:42:45
Speaker
And they'll remember me. I promise you that. What's really awesome is 2023, they placed a historic marker and landmark in Milwaukee that tells the tale of the Black Knight uprising.
00:43:00
Speaker
And at the end of the marker, it says, Josie's courage was a call to action. When the servicemen returned later that night, they faced over 70 customers who heroically defended their safe space from invasion.
00:43:13
Speaker
In 2021, the Wisconsin LGBTQ project obtained official civic commemoration to ensure the uprising will never be forgotten. This is a first marker honoring a Black transgender person in Wisconsin.
00:43:28
Speaker
Wow. Badass. Yeah. So that's some of the positive history. Now i'm going to get into some of the more depressing shit because of course it's the There was not only like a big LGBTQ community in Wisconsin, but also the city's Black population had increased during this period of time due to what's called the second Great Migration, which is a lot of Black folks leaving the South.
00:43:58
Speaker
And after World War II, Black folks from states like Mississippi and Arkansas migrated to Milwaukee for better job opportunities. And actually, in this time period, the city's Black population more than doubled, growing from 8,821 1940 to 21,000 eight thousand eight hundred and twenty one in nineteen forty to twenty one thousand 722 in 1950.
00:44:24
Speaker
The city was very segregated and redlined and black families lived in the north side in like houses that were extremely dilapidated and it was known as the inner core while white residents quote unquote fled to the city's inner suburbs.
00:44:43
Speaker
There was a lot of racial exclusionary policies and redlining and predatory lending practices, kind of typical stuff that kept black people out of other neighborhoods.
00:44:55
Speaker
um And of course, the police targeted the black community. They did this by targeting interracial heterosexual relationships, which I guess were illegal at this time.
00:45:06
Speaker
enforcing curfews and also quote-unquote vagrancy laws, which is like homelessness-related laws. And as the Black population grew, so did the white cries that something had to be done to quote-unquote fix the city, which they now believed was in moral decay.
00:45:23
Speaker
Of course, the media was also part of this. And they frequently we blamed Black migration to Milwaukee as the reason for increased crime rate in the city. And the media also helped criminalize the city's residents, sort of sensationalizing that they were like living morally offensive lives, quote unquote.
00:45:46
Speaker
Actually, in the 1940s, the Milwaukee Journal frequently used phrases such as, quote unquote, slaves of lust and, quote, menace of sex perverts,
00:45:57
Speaker
in editorials discussing the growing LGBTQ and other forms of quote-unquote deviant sexuality. There was also a psych sexual psychopath law that was introduced in 1946 that would allow anyone who was a quote overt homosexual to be committed to an institution until they were cured of their quote-unquote deviancy.
00:46:25
Speaker
Yikes. Yikes. So it's like media, police, and then like legal frameworks that are already marginalizing this LGBTQ folks. And when you think about Black LGBTQ folks, it's like the intersection of two already very marginalized groups.
00:46:45
Speaker
So the passage of these sexual psychopath laws were apparently designed to diffused the threat of a growing minority presence in Milwaukee.
00:46:59
Speaker
And Wisconsin was one among 12 states that passed such laws between 1937 and 1950. So, of course, by the 1960s, there's four and a half times more police in the Black North side compared to the neighboring majority white district.
00:47:15
Speaker
And at this point, there's just been years of police violence against Black residents. And one such case was in 1958, where a Black man named Daniel Bell was murdered by a white police officer, Thomas Grady.
00:47:32
Speaker
He shot him in the back and then planted a knife on him. And after a 20-year cover-up, he confessed to this in 1979 and was convicted of reckless homicide and perjury.
00:47:44
Speaker
And of course, because of this, there's like a huge fear and distrust between the Black community of Milwaukee and the police, and they often didn't report crimes committed against them.
00:47:56
Speaker
Interestingly, by 1982, Wisconsin became the first state in the country to pass sexual orientation anti-discrimination legislation. and this was because there was a huge presence of queer activism in Milwaukee. And the only reason that happened was because of the advocacy towards it. There was a lot of LGBTQ organizations that were present at this point.
00:48:19
Speaker
So I want you all to just sort of like keep this conversation. context in mind as we go into Jeff, JD, and what he was up to in the 1980s in Milwaukee.
00:48:32
Speaker
I'm also thinking about the AIDS crisis. Yeah, I was thinking about that too. Yeah, which I have just a little bit on not a lot. So I very briefly kind of looked over,
00:48:44
Speaker
you know The AIDS crisis in Wisconsin in particular, and just like many other places in Milwaukee, the racial disparity between folks who got treatment for HIV AIDS, there's an extreme gap.
00:48:59
Speaker
In 1983, people of color accounted for 33% of new HIV diagnoses, like access to sexual health, services and that kind of thing was less available, sexual education and then follow-up treatment, not to mention that medical trauma is so intense and in communities of color, especially Black communities here in the United States, that it makes a lot of sense that people would not be accessing their doctors.
00:49:27
Speaker
And it was quite in new at the time, to Right. So were probably like unsure about whether it was serious enough to weren't going to doctors and things like that. Yeah, lots of misinformation.
00:49:42
Speaker
this This statistic says that by 2019, that this percentage rose to 86%. Wow. So the disparities in care are still very present, actually.
00:49:55
Speaker
And the people who still continue not to get adequate care are people of color in a pretty intense way. I was just going to say, like, just even going through this history, I feel like there's echoes of it happening again now yeah like this is decades ago, but there's still stuff like this happening to the same exact communities, you know.
00:50:20
Speaker
And with all of the change that happened has happened, there's still so much change. violence and disparity. 86% is so significant. And that far outnumbers the percentage of people of color that actually yeah are huge Milwaukee. And I don't have the demographic breakdown. They use people of color in a really broad way.
00:50:40
Speaker
So I'm actually not sure what they mean by that. Well, they note that people of color in Milwaukee are also more likely to have a low income status, limited access to healthcare, areas that they're going to school are not well-funded, so education is under-resourced.
00:50:56
Speaker
There's
Dahmer's Crimes in Milwaukee
00:50:58
Speaker
a higher percentage of people of color who are homeless in comparison to the white population. And we know that houselessness in and of itself is a risk for sexual violence. I don't think that I worked with so many. When I did DV and sexual violence work,
00:51:16
Speaker
I don't think I worked with anybody who was experiencing homelessness who had not been sexually assaulted during that time. You know, we we talk about HIV AIDS within the context of gay oppression, queer oppression, which is valid.
00:51:31
Speaker
And also there's all of these other factors that people don't ever really think about, like how yeah i mean how people are assaulted at like. really alarming rates. Yeah, just like the intersectionality different people's identities and their experiences and what puts them more at risk.
00:51:50
Speaker
And I mean, when I was doing this research also, I like clocked that it was around the same times as the HIV AIDS epidemic. And I was like, damn, the queer community in Milwaukee really be going through it because not only is there The AIDS epidemic.
00:52:08
Speaker
But then there's also this fucker. Yeah, they had to be concerned about AIDS, the police, and Jeffrey. The media, general society.
00:52:19
Speaker
But yeah, during this time, the crisis was initially labeled as the gay-related immune deficiency. ah Yeah, grid. Yeah. Uh-huh. There were calls for quarantine.
00:52:30
Speaker
There was employment discrimination. People were getting fired because they didn't know how it was transmitted. And so like the homophobia, very intense. Yeah. But this connection to what you were sharing about the advocacy work and the community building, community organizing, Wisconsin's response was actually one of the, they were kind of the earlier responders to AIDS. They,
00:52:53
Speaker
The state formed a task force in 1983, which was a lot earlier than a lot of other places and implemented confidentiality protections for HIV testing. So they were trying to encourage people to get tested without fear.
00:53:07
Speaker
or at least the people who are pushing for this part. But, you know, that's incomplete because they're also saying that the the healthcare care system was not really responsive to, again, quote unquote, marginalized groups with HIV AIDS, especially folks who were Black, Latino, or openly gay. They faced barriers to basic services.
00:53:29
Speaker
Yeah, that's that. Just getting hit from all angles. Yeah. Right. And so, you know, similarly, like people were struggling anyway, people who are living in the intersections of race, sexuality and poverty we're at heightened risk for really dying just by living during this time.
00:53:52
Speaker
That was also who Jeffrey really targeted. There has to be like some mix extreme ties to like his psyche and how he was like, look at how much they don't fucking care.
00:54:04
Speaker
Right? Yeah. That made him feel like he could really escalate because he does escalate in the 80s in particular. it feels very congruent with this same time.
00:54:16
Speaker
Great segue. So as I said before, around 1985 was when JD started going to gay bars and gay bathhouses and just sort of like inserting himself into the LGBT community in Milwaukee in the north side, specifically in a predominantly gay neighborhood, a predominantly black neighborhood.
00:54:39
Speaker
And what he was doing when he went to these gay bathhouses was he was drugging people and sexually assaulting them. And it happened so many times that his membership to the bathhouse was revoked.
00:54:54
Speaker
And this he said that the reason he did this was he found it frustrating that his partners would, quote, move during sex. It's honestly terrifying because i'm like I've always kind of thought about roofing as such a common practice that we're just like drilled into our heads to cover our drinks. And I definitely know multiple people who've been roofied.
00:55:19
Speaker
And everybody that I know knows multiple people who've been roofied. It's such a common practice. And I always wondered what the tie between that and necrophilia was because why are you feeling...
00:55:31
Speaker
aroused by someone who is unable to respond to you yeah yeah I was just I just was reading this book where there's a significant plot line of like ah young boys having a group chat where they talk about saying girls a lot of whom through drugging. And I'm just like, this makes me so suspicious of like any man.
00:55:57
Speaker
Cause I'm just like, what kind of group chats you n that we don't know about, you know, what kind of conversations are being had? and like, I know there's this, I haven't watched adolescence yet, but I know that there's like something called the manosphere on the internet and stuff, which is like where incels get radicalized.
00:56:20
Speaker
So very scar scares it really scares me, honestly, because I feel like they're uplifting each other's violent tendencies. And we don't know about it because it's happening in these like private channels at a much larger degree than it was before because of technology. So freaks me out.
00:56:39
Speaker
I always think about this study, which maybe I've talked about on here before. I've definitely shared it with you before because i'm I think about it all the time. I learned about it in undergrad. It never left my mind.
00:56:52
Speaker
They did a study with, I think, college-age men. Don't know what the racial demographic was, but I would assume that it was largely white men.
00:57:03
Speaker
But basically, what they did was they put, like, an EKG on their and they... and they yeah they were asked to just look at a series of photos.
00:57:17
Speaker
And what they found was that overwhelmingly the men, when they looked at a tool or like a hammer or like a couch, like an object, there's a part of your brain that lights up and your prefrontal cortex is dark.
00:57:33
Speaker
yeah Right. Cause you're not trying to figure out what's going on with the object. But they also found that when they looked at photos of women, especially women who were dressed in bikinis and whatnot, the part their prefrontal cortex goes dark and the same parts of their brain that are assessing for tools and objects ah is the same part of the brain that's lit up when they're looking at women.
00:57:56
Speaker
And they did not find that to be consistent when they were looking at photos of men. So there is literally biological wiring that is happening to people we raise to be men. Yeah.
00:58:10
Speaker
um That literally dulls or removes their capacity to see women as human beings. And I think about it all the time. And that is just frightening.
00:58:23
Speaker
I think about it all the time. There's another study in my head that I think of when they surveyed white people with similar vibe, except they were showing them photos and videos of people who are being hurt.
00:58:36
Speaker
They found that white people, the party the part of your brain that lights up when you feel pain yourself, it lights up when they look at other white people who are being harmed. But when they showed them videos or photos of people of color being harmed, the part of their brain goes dark.
00:58:53
Speaker
Wow. so you know, combination, white man. Yes. The suspicion is high. And I just don't know the level of work that you would have to do to rewire your brain to receive people differently. The work is and immense. Like you would have to be so fucking dedicated all day, every day for most pretty much all of your life.
00:59:21
Speaker
i think Which is why probably quote-unquote best men that you meet are people that have a lot of sisters or are friends with a lot of women.
00:59:31
Speaker
Right, because they see them as people, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And they have probably rewired their brain through those experiences that they've had Sad, disappointing.
00:59:42
Speaker
Very sad, very scary. so yeah no i don't know. i can never find those experiences. studies I would look for them every so often, but I remember they were seared in my brain. yeah Yeah. I mean, they're very specific, so I'm sure ah that they are real in somewhere.
01:00:01
Speaker
But wow. Thanks for sharing that. Yeah. So yeah he was... SA-ing people that he met in bathhouses and he had his membership revoked after he did this and this is late 1985 and shortly after this he actually tried to dig up a body of an 18 year old corpse and take it home but then he gave up on this plan because I think he probably didn't think it through and ah lots of logistics there so like Shana said
01:00:37
Speaker
behavior is starting to escalate. September 1986, he is again charged with disorderly conduct because he is masturbating in front of two boys.
01:00:50
Speaker
He told authorities that he was just urinating and he was sentenced to one year probation and to undergo counseling, but I'm pretty sure that never happened. um Again, many instances in which things could have happened and the reason why he was not reported to the police because he was essaying people is because of the horrific context in which the Black queer community is living in Wisconsin with no trust at all for the police. And I'm i'm sure that they would have done absolutely nothing about it.
01:01:28
Speaker
even if they had. So this comes to September 1987 when he murders his second victim. this His name was Stephen Tuomi. He was 24 years old, grew up in Ontonagon in the upper peninsula of Michigan, and he worked as a short order cook in a Milwaukee restaurant.
01:01:51
Speaker
Jeffrey's goal apparently was to drug him and sexually assault him. What he says is the next day he awoke to find his dead body covered in bruises next to him and that he blacked out and has no memory of the murder happening. I really don't know how that how true that is. Like he lies a lot. He's manipulative person. So, but he ends up transporting the body to his house.
01:02:16
Speaker
grandmother's house and disposes of everything in the trash except for the head.
01:02:24
Speaker
I just noticed like similarities to Gary Ridgway in how he was targeting sex workers because he knew that no one would care or notice that they were going missing and he would be able to get away with it for much longer in in that context and how JD did the same, preying on queer communities of color and how the police were very indifferent to violence that was happening within these communities and victim blaming as well of like, if you're gay, you know, you should expect violence because that's the quote unquote lifestyle you're signing up for.
01:03:03
Speaker
was several years after he murdered Stephen Hicks that this second murder happened. And after that, I think he just, he felt really confident in himself. And January, 19, January, 1987, he, Jamie years old, was murdered. was murdered.
01:03:22
Speaker
And the
01:03:26
Speaker
was murdered and march twenty fifth nineteen eighty nine anthony sears twenty six was murdered and These were all people that he murdered while he was living at his grandma's house.
01:03:40
Speaker
And I will go a little more into who these folks were later on. He clearly is getting more bold and he's clearly escalating. And I think for a lot of cases like this, there's always a point at which like there's an escalation because one, they feel like they can get away with it. But then also I think that there's like a adrenaline chase.
01:04:03
Speaker
That happens where they're like, I want more and I want more and I want more. Really gruesome and horrible come 1990. It was already gruesome and horrible, but you know, he's getting experimental now.
01:04:17
Speaker
He moved into apartment 213 at a place called the Oxford Apartments in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It's on the north side, which Akshi mentioned is a racially segregated area.
01:04:28
Speaker
a really under-resourced area, historically Black neighborhood. on purpose. He moved there on purpose, absolutely. He moved there on purpose, and I think that he had fetish for Black men in particular. Yes, 100%. Like, that feels really clear.
01:04:42
Speaker
Later in his interviews, he was talking about how he only killed the pretty ones. And he said it with, like, a – I don't know. I remember being struck by it because he said it with, like, a resentment – Like there was all of this internalized anti-blackness and internalized homophobia that was living inside of him that he resented himself for being attracted to black men.
01:05:05
Speaker
And I think that we see this a lot with violence against transgender women. I think that a lot of the times people who kill them are people who are attracted to them and then they are angry. and extremely violent projection, basically. It's like you hate hate yourself and you're taking it out on this person. Yeah.
01:05:23
Speaker
I'm thinking about this quote by Alok Menon. They have this really beautiful way of framing that that kind of violence is occurring because you hate the beauty and the softness that you see in me.
01:05:39
Speaker
Wow. That you cannot locate within yourself and that you cannot love within yourself. And that feels really resonant. And this feels related. Anyways, so this this place and and in the North Side becomes like the primary site for where all of the murders happen, the ones that are he's most well known for. And this is also where the site of that first story we shared at the beginning or actually shared at the beginning where he gets caught 12 of his 17 known targets over the span of roughly 14 months happen here i'm going to just name who these people are actually does have more details about who these people were
01:06:22
Speaker
um And there stories that we'll share later on in the in the episode. But for now, I'm just naming who they were. so May 1990, Raymond Smith, years old. 1990, Ernest Miller, 22.
01:06:33
Speaker
September 1990, Thomas, 23. February 1991, Curtis Slaughter, 17 years old. september ninety ninety ernest miller twenty two september twenty fourth ninety ninety david thomas twenty three february eighteenth ninety ninety one curtis slaughter seventeen years old April 7th, 1991, Errol Lindsay, 19.
01:06:53
Speaker
May 24th, 1991, Tony Hughes, 31. May 27th, 1991, Konorak Synthesomphonae, hope I'm saying that right, who's 14 years old, and I'm going to go deeper into his story in just a moment.
01:07:08
Speaker
June 30th, 1991, Matt Turner, 20 years old. think this is July 1991, Jeremiah Weinberger. 19th, 1991, Joseph Bradehoft, 25 years july twelfth ninety ninety one oliver lacey twenty four and july nineteen ninety ninety one joseph bradihoft twenty five years old I wanted to put a spotlight on Konarak's story.
01:07:29
Speaker
He's a 14-year-old boy, and I think that this is a story that we have more details on. And so you've heard about Jeffrey, you're likely to have heard about this particular story.
01:07:40
Speaker
Konarak was a Laotian boy who He was one and of nine children, and i think his family was financially struggling at the time, and so Jeffrey lured him with the promise of paying him.
01:07:56
Speaker
he did that with a lot of people. yeah right? He said, I'm going to take your photo. I'll pay you. Yeah. Yeah. And actually, he didn't know that he had done this to Konorak's older brother years prior when he was like 12 or something like that. He got away, but he did he did take photos of him and he did molest his brother.
01:08:20
Speaker
But in in the show, again, which I'm not sure if all the details were... aligned perfectly but in the show they show him kind of talking to his family to say that he was gonna and his brother is like clearly still traumatized from the whole thing but because his brother got away and he did get money i think i think that he thought it was an opportunity to bring money back home to his family ah yeah i don't yeah i don't think he saw him as like a
01:08:51
Speaker
a danger in that way. and it sounded like he was willing to risk some ah traumatic experience to bring money back to his family, which I think just speaks to how they were struggling at the time.
01:09:04
Speaker
But he's a child, really. 14. yeah fourteen so yeah. And so JD, you know, has him at his house, drugs him. Essentially, he's like, trying to lobotomize him.
01:09:17
Speaker
And Konorak ends up being able to run out naked and he's he's bruised, he's disoriented and he's bleeding. um So the sight was really alarming. There was nothing about this that looked okay.
01:09:35
Speaker
Yeah, and he's like a child as well. He's a child, yeah. So ah Glenda Cleveland, who I'll get to, is Jeffrey Dahmer's neighbor, who I also saw in a documentary quoted saying that he used to offer her sandwiches and she always thought he was kind of off. And now she thinks that the sandwiches absolutely had human meat in them.
01:09:58
Speaker
So she was like... suspicious the and entire time and she had made many complaints to the police about him which they never ever responded to but cleveland's daughter sandra smith and niece nicole childress ran into conorac in this state outside of jd's apartment and so after they told glenda they called the police to you know respond to the situation. The police that showed up on the scene, their names are John Balcerzak and Joseph Gabrish.
01:10:37
Speaker
They assume that this was JD's lover. he goes, oh, he's just a little drunk. He doesn't really speak English. he He acts like this. He's fine. I just want to take him back to my house.
01:10:50
Speaker
And the two young women who are like clearly like, do you see this? He's like, can barely walk, he's bleeding, he's a child, are completely ignored.
01:11:01
Speaker
And they're not only ignored, the police- This so rage-inducing. The police not only dismiss the situation, they were they walk him and Konorak back to his house.
01:11:17
Speaker
They said it was a lover's quarrel. Which- Which I'm guessing he has incriminating shit in his apartment. 100%. 100%. So I think they were dismissing it as domestic violence.
01:11:34
Speaker
Which, you know, the failure to respond to domestic violence is high as well. Right. They never checked his ID. They never ran his record, which they would have seen that he at least had other run-ins that were really...
01:11:50
Speaker
I actually read that he was convicted for molesting his brother. And so they would have realized that if they ran his name. Right. And I'm also just thinking about how I just said that this neighborhood has four and a half times the number of cops as any other neighborhood in Milwaukee. Right.
01:12:10
Speaker
Yeah, the juxtaposition between this and the over-policing extreme brutality is really stark. Yeah. Yeah. And the way that I'm sure that they were probably criminalizing queer folks as well.
01:12:23
Speaker
Yeah, they they took him back to the apartment. They ignored the very clear evidence that this boy was bleeding. And there was foul smell, foul smell that the neighbor had repeatedly. It's just so many red flags.
01:12:38
Speaker
I know. So many. The neighbor Glenda would literally call and say they're screaming. There's a horrible smell that I cannot describe coming through the vents and coming outside of the door.
01:12:49
Speaker
And they never responded. and so when they brought him in this boy back, they had to have been able to smell that. But like the decomposing bodies. i bet they didn't like make reports that she had stated this. Yeah.
01:13:05
Speaker
Probably not. Yeah, because then if they had those, they would be like, yeah, we should maybe not leave this child here. Oh, God.
01:13:17
Speaker
It's not even like incompetence. It's like... Yeah, blatant disregard for Yeah. for a lot if yeah yeah I would go out on a limb and say that police know what de come decomposing bodies. course they do. Yeah. like More than the average person.
01:13:35
Speaker
After they do that, they apparently joked about it on the police radio. a lover's quarrel made some homophobic jokes. And it's said that he murdered Konarak within the next hour.
01:13:50
Speaker
Yeah, the officers is giving him also like more sort of like, oh, it's so easy for me to get away with this, you know, right? The evidence is there and still nothing.
01:14:02
Speaker
Yeah. yeah Yeah. The officers were suspended, but then they were later reinstated with back pay. I have a little bit about them because I was like, what the fuck? Yeah.
01:14:12
Speaker
There's all of these police to respond to like the moral depravity of the city and like. Sexual deviancy. Uh-huh. And this is the response.
01:14:24
Speaker
This doesn't count as sexual deviancy though. i I guess not. Or it's not their problem or business or I'm not really sure. Yeah. I mean, he's a woman that's like charming and manipulative and they're like, yeah, you're fine.
01:14:39
Speaker
You're safe. I don't even think he's charming. Everybody knows he's weird. ah fair. Just. They just don't find him threatening. ah Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you already spoke about like the context of the police force at the time the early 1990s. There's like tough crime. Like there's a.
01:14:59
Speaker
like what there's ah a new set of tough on crime policies that were ushered in to, you know, respond, which of course, like, you know, the racialized profiling, no officer accountability, and outright negligence to the things that actually mattered.
01:15:19
Speaker
Broader context during this time is, you know, organizers and activists, they were pushing to advocate against the increased aggressive tactics, the underreporting of officer wrongdoing, and the complete lack of transparency in the way that they were operating and doing their investigations.
01:15:36
Speaker
They were failing to take complaints seriously, especially from the Black community in Milwaukee. And very clearly that ties to the way that they dismissed and dismissed and dismissed all of the red flags that were happening.
01:15:52
Speaker
There's no real way to know the rates because there was no real documentation. They didn't. They just didn't. little bit about John Balzerak. He was reinstated ninety ninety four in 1994. In 2005, he was elected president of the Milwaukee Police Association, the police union representing Milwaukee officers. He served and in that role until 2009.
01:16:15
Speaker
And then he was in the Milwaukee Police Department until he retired in 2017. Chillin'.
01:16:21
Speaker
Joseph, the other officer, left the Milwaukee Police Department. He joined the Grafton Police Department in 93. He was promoted to captain. In 2019, he was named interim police chief.
01:16:35
Speaker
um After the last chief, retired. And he was on the force until October 10th, 2019, which is 26 years of service. six years I am flabbergasted.
01:16:48
Speaker
Yeah. Zero consequences. Zero. Rewards. Rewards. Yeah. Yeah. Uh-huh. So that's that.
01:16:59
Speaker
Speechless and flabbergasted. Yeah. Yeah. It's all very enraging. It's all very enraging. And it says a lot about like, we're like, oh my gosh, violence. And we're just living in violence all the time. Right.
01:17:12
Speaker
Having a lot of cherry picking about what violence we feel is permissible or normal. There's this quote from Glenda Cleveland. She said, we knew something was wrong. The smell, the screams. We called the cops. They did nothing.
01:17:28
Speaker
I'm
Colonial Violence Parallels
01:17:29
Speaker
going to give a little overview of the kinds of things he did to people, not to be... gratuitous, but because i have some connections to make about how his behavior really mimics legacies of colonial violence. They're actually pretty on par. They mirror each other. It's like he it's like it lives in his bones. It's like it lives in his body, the way that it was so natural for him to engage in the same strategies that European colonists have done for over a century to non-white bodies.
01:18:01
Speaker
For all of his victims, he a lot of them, he he said that he wanted to create them into zombies, quote unquote, through acid injections. He kept the remains as trophies.
01:18:12
Speaker
He typically lured victims with promises of money or companionship, like we said, and then he would drug them. He would lock them in the house. He would kill them and he would dismember them in the apartment.
01:18:24
Speaker
He preserved and kept their body parts in this freezer, including skulls and skin and organs. He also cannibalized some of the bodies, and then he also painted some of their heads and put them on display in his apartment as decoration.
01:18:38
Speaker
He repeatedly stated that his desire was to keep them close forever by consuming them and trying to um preserve their parts. So the way that he's sexualizing death in control, I think, is very much a byproduct of like, yeah, older colonial violence.
01:18:57
Speaker
Want to reiterate that throughout this period, he went unnoticed. He nearly nearly all of his victims were working class men and boys of Not unnoticed, his neighbor noticed.
01:19:08
Speaker
Right. Unnoticed. and Unnoticed by people who had the power to intervene. exactly. But you're right. He did not go unnoticed. I'm sure a plenty of people. Unnoticed or indifferent by the people in power. We don't know, but seems like the second one to me.
01:19:25
Speaker
Maybe both. Yeah. You know, cause I could see people in his community being like, couldn't possibly, couldn't fathom someone who was chill with me and is like this goofy guy. Like I perceive him to be so unthreatening that it threatens my own self-concept weirdness.
01:19:39
Speaker
sense of reality to consider that, you know, right? Yeah, like his high school friend who was like, he would have never killed me. Right. Yeah. Like, I don't think that's the point, but yeah glad you feel safe. Yes.
01:19:53
Speaker
ah he And, you know, like most of them were queer, some were houseless, some were involved in survival sex work, main targets in the end being predominantly gay black men.
01:20:06
Speaker
And he gets to sustain this like benign vibe. They called him well-mannered. They called him soft-spoken. They called him pleasant. Yeah. So I'm going to go on a tangent now about cannibalism, because I think this kind of blend of fetishization and brutality, all of which is based in extreme dehumanization and objectification of non-white bodies, is actually just really basic colonial history. So we're going to bring it to the top, actually.
01:20:36
Speaker
i first I first looked at the internet to be like, okay, what are examples of cannibalism in European history? And there's actually quite a lot. The first thing that came up was on the practice of medical cannibalism.
01:20:54
Speaker
And I found all of this information about how from the Middle Ages to through the Renaissance and maybe a little beyond that, Europeans widely prac practiced cannibalizing mummies.
01:21:08
Speaker
Egyptian mummies were very prized, it said. Thousands were ground up and sold in apothecaries. They called it mummia.
01:21:20
Speaker
They thought it had healing properties. It feels like it shouldn't be real, but all of this feels like it shouldn't be real. So there was a true misunderstanding of Arabic medical texts, they said, which described the use of bitumen, which is like they say it's a resinous substance.
01:21:38
Speaker
So I wonder if it read the resin that's used in mummification practices, that was the thing that they said had healing properties, but they're not translating correctly, you know, because... Oh, God.
01:21:55
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. they yeah They confuse this with the actual mummy themselves. um It's kind of funny in like a dark way.
01:22:09
Speaker
It just seems so absurd that they were even trying to look to do something like this in the first place. And they were like, you know what this probably says is that we should consume the mummy. It's like that's...
01:22:25
Speaker
You know, they were living rough out there in Europe for some time. They were probably looking rough and smelling rough and all of these things. and
01:22:35
Speaker
you know, like the practices were just horrific. I was reading that in the Victorian era, rat's nest comes from literally – Like ladies wanted their giant hair and they put fucking lard in it so that it would stay up and you know you weren't bathing regularly or washing your hair regularly and rats would literally make a home out of.
01:22:57
Speaker
Yeah. Oh my god. People must smell so bad. it must be fucking stinky and everything every every bit of history over and over shows that like they show up and they're just like they're stinky they come with disease And they do it to like communities who have regular bathing practices. And you know what I mean? And so my water to clean their booties.
01:23:21
Speaker
Right. So I'm just part of me always feels like the act of racism is actually just an act of envy. Feeling like and seeing that people are living better, that they're actually looking beautiful because they're taking care of themselves, that maybe they're looking younger or maybe that they're living longer, you know, because they have different infrastructures. And instead of it being that, oh, maybe they have different practices than my people do and I could learn from that.
01:23:51
Speaker
it becomes, oh, they have these things. It must be magical. it must be something inherent over there. And I'm going to consume it. It's mine. Yeah.
01:24:02
Speaker
You know, that that feels consistent. So yeah, they started fucking apothecaries sold powdered mummy as medicine. They said it treated everything. They said headaches, the plague, a cure.
01:24:16
Speaker
And it was a practice for people from all social stratas, wealthy people, poor people. They were all looking for mummy powder because they thought it was going to fucking cure them.
01:24:28
Speaker
This is internal bleeding healed. Oh my
01:24:37
Speaker
oh my gosh. Absurd. It's just like a mass delusion. It is mass delusion. What if whiteness is just folia de, but like forever?
01:24:49
Speaker
a massive scale. Yeah. I'm not sure. Because this is so wild. It really connects to, I'm thinking about the asylum, whatever. And you look at the list and you're just like, political excitement, menstrual derangement. This is so wild. um Bad whiskey, like, yeah girl, what are you talking about?
01:25:10
Speaker
you know? It makes me think that they're like tripping or like high off of something. They're fucking confused and violent.
01:25:22
Speaker
Yes. for For a long time. Yes, for a very, very long time. But, you know, we talked about the... meeting Yeah. In the Lizzie one, the Elizabeth one, we talked about, you know, the Middle Ages.
01:25:35
Speaker
so gnarly. They didn't bond with their kids. They're being incestuous. We learned that Blue Eyes is actually byproduct of incest. They love these, like, torture practices.
01:25:49
Speaker
What's with the torture, man? Yeah. I went to a torture museum. yeah and Don't ask me why i did that. I was in Chicago. i was by myself. It kept popping up on my phone. i said, you know what? What the fuck else am I doing? yeah I've never gone to one of these. It was horrifying. wouldn't do it again. The vibes were very bad.
01:26:09
Speaker
But all, you know, 80, 90% of all of the featured items and mechanisms and practices, they were all from Europe.
01:26:23
Speaker
And The ones, it's interesting because the most popular torture practices, a lot of them were actually stolen ideas from folklore they learned about in other countries.
01:26:37
Speaker
So what, they just go to other countries and take the most brutal manifestations. Yeah, violent that they hear. Uh-huh. And then they make it, they said, it's mine now.
01:26:50
Speaker
Cultural appropriation of torture. Not cultural appropriation of torture. This is just so wild. I was like, I need to get out of here. And this is so wild. But also a lot of it looked like BDSM. And I was like.
01:27:01
Speaker
Yes, that makes sense. I'm like, whoa, what is the what is the inheritance that is BDSM? And how does it connect? Because it would make a lot of sense that you would have to.
01:27:17
Speaker
trick your body into receiving pleasure from pain if pain was something that was inevitable and happening to you at really intense levels.
01:27:28
Speaker
But that's neither here nor there. If someone has some analysis around that, would love to hear. Okay. Mummified remains were also used in art. Mummy brown, a pigment made from ground mummies, was popular among some European artists.
01:27:44
Speaker
Yeah, the artifacts, they became prized collectibles for personal cabinets of curiosity, and they put them in museum displays. This mummy obsession increased after Napoleon's 1798 Egyptian campaign, which apparently sparked what they call Egyptomania, a widespread obsession with all things Egyptian.
01:28:07
Speaker
I have heard of this before. i I recorded the first episode of my tarot podcast and I was going into the history of tarot. And it was around the same time that Egyptomania was happening and they were connecting the two of like the cards might have come from Egypt because...
01:28:28
Speaker
It was around the same time that people in Europe were flipping out about Egypt. That would track. Yeah. Travelers, collectors, they brought mummies back to Europe. They're fucking grave robbing, bro.
01:28:41
Speaker
That's such cursed behavior. That's like cursed for generations. On boats and stuff. Like that's well how they're bringing it back. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
01:28:52
Speaker
Bought them from local markets or straight up just like robbed graves. Yeah. I just don't understand how you can think that that's like not going to bring such bad energy. And that's also like just such a such a disrespectful thing to do. like But it kind of connects back to like if you view certain humans as an object, then you're not seeing them with the same respect.
01:29:16
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. So the, the normalization of this practice actually expanded to the, to, to this idea of medical cannibalism.
01:29:26
Speaker
They then, you know, they were down to eat anybody. They often sourced from the quote unquote, most vulnerable people who are poor, people who were executed for a crime, enslaved people and people who are otherwise deemed unworthy or other in society.
01:29:46
Speaker
You know, they talked about how this practice reinforced and reflected the social hierarchies established by European, pre-European colonialism and slavery during the subjugation of Ireland. Also, colonizers exhumed Irish skulls to ground into powder.
01:30:03
Speaker
for sale across Europe. And I tried to find information about how this was practiced during slavery and which is reflected in their other stuff too. Like they would collect, you know, hair clippings from lynchings. They would, i mean, Washington, George Washington, his teeth are not wood.
01:30:22
Speaker
His teeth are the teeth of enslaved people. my gosh. They made dentures out of their teeth. And so cannibal, cannibal adjacent things happening all the time. Those things are well-documented.
01:30:33
Speaker
And so I'm just like, you know, Jeffrey is in good company because this is so consistent. I have some gross stuff about keeping bodies as trophies that I could not stop thinking about when I was reading about the things that he did to people.
01:30:46
Speaker
Colonial forces in Africa and elsewhere, frequently beheaded, local chiefs. They frequently beheaded resistance leaders and warriors.
01:30:57
Speaker
They would collect their skulls as trophies and they would bring them back to Europe as symbols of victory and conquest. And sometimes those skulls would then be displayed museums or kept in private collections. Wow.
01:31:16
Speaker
Parallels are striking. They're striking, no? I was like... ah This is just ancestral. He's getting in touch with his ancestors, you know? They keep talking about like body parts as ornamental objects.
01:31:30
Speaker
They also practice scalping indigenous people, which is, you know, interesting because I think that there is the, the lore that white people like to put out is that indigenous people were scalping each other and scalping them, but actually the practice of scalping was happening by the colonizers.
01:31:48
Speaker
It's always a projection. Always. Always. They institutionalized the practice of scalping indigenous people, British and Spanish colonizers would.
01:31:59
Speaker
They kept them as trophies and proof of like their military superiority, or they would bring them back to claim rewards for bounty. Yeah. Massachusetts issued a lot of scalp bounties in the 18th century.
01:32:13
Speaker
and practiced this continuously through the conquest of California. California actually is a site of like one of the most devastating indigenous genocides in the country. I don't feel like people talk about it that way because California is held up as this like liberal place.
01:32:32
Speaker
The erasure is really intense. And not to mention like missions and all that, like there's so much going on in California. yeah They also had human zoos in early 19th and early 20th centuries. ah Europeans and Americans displayed colonized people.
01:32:47
Speaker
in human zoos. Millions attended these, millions. And so, you know, I'm thinking about like, there's the people who do the egregious violence and then there are millions of people who have the appetite for it.
01:33:04
Speaker
Yeah. And feel like that's also really mirrored in the public spectacle people have created around JD and his violence. Totally. Or they call him his crimes, but not like yeah like the way that he took human life and desecrated their bodies and stole people of their loved ones. You know what i mean? Like they're like his crimes. Yeah.
01:33:26
Speaker
There's that. And then there's also trophy hunting and colonial game. so be top be Beyond, you know, beyond humans, colonizers, they also engage trophy hunting of animals as a yeah symbol That they had conquered.
01:33:44
Speaker
Lands and people. like They would bring taxidermy. Always run me the wrong fucking way. I don't like it. It feels disrespectful. Oh I hate it. and they yeah They would do this as a way to show. That they like conquered a place.
01:33:57
Speaker
And they often you know displayed these. In museums as well. And collecting. and they would collect like heirlooms. and whatever They would collect everything. and so Including people's bodies. But also like the bodies of.
01:34:10
Speaker
animals that they exotic quote unquote animals that they have killed that may have been sacred to the people especially yeah seemed like some sick joy that they were getting and so i also was making the connection to like the mcdonald triad and mutilation of animals and curious about if that's actually rooted specifically in these behaviors right you know what i mean yeah So I found a couple articles.
01:34:40
Speaker
One is from a book called Confronting Colonial Objects, Histories, Legacies, and Access to Culture. This article was written by Karsten Staun. It's called Collecting Humanity, Commodification, Trophy Hunting, Biocolonialism.
01:34:56
Speaker
And it starts with a story. And this is very disturbing, but it feels... Relevant sometimes to not shirk details because think that there is a tendency to minimize or like choose to disappear the just like depravity of colonial violence and people are not recognizing that this is ah something that echoes.
01:35:22
Speaker
through this day. And that actually, i don't know that there's a level of reparations that is possible for the harm that has happened. And even, you know, even the most basic reparations, there's always pushback.
01:35:36
Speaker
And so the story that's that they open with is a chest of Herero skulls was recently sent by troops from German Southwest Africa to the pathological Institute in Berlin, where they will be subjected to scientific measurements.
01:35:50
Speaker
The skulls from which Herero women have removed the flesh with the aid of glass shards to make them suitable for shipment come from Hereros who have been hanged or who have fallen.
01:36:02
Speaker
This cruel and distanced description of the collection of human remains by Germans in Southwest Africa forms a part of the memoirs of an officer of the German protective force called the Schutz Troop published in 1907.
01:36:17
Speaker
It's connected to a popular image, namely a colonial postcard, which shows officers from the notorious Swakomund camp loading the Herero skulls designated for German museums and universities.
01:36:31
Speaker
They say that the sober tone of the text and triumphant image depicting skulls piled up like brick stones illustrate the dehumanization of human remains and colonial violence and the degrading methods of collection and preservation, creating an entire industry of trade of body parts.
01:36:48
Speaker
Oh my gosh. The mix of colonial ideology and racial science. See science. They keep calling it science, medical cannibalism, racial science. It's not, it's just depraved.
01:37:00
Speaker
Yeah, at the peak of colonial period of the colonial period prompted not only a stark increase in the removal of cultural objects, but also a new era in collection of human remains. Thousands of humane remains, ah in particular from allegedly quote-unquote extinct or quote-unquote primitive populations, were collected in colonies and transferred to scientific, anthropological, or military museums and laboratories.
01:37:28
Speaker
human skulls turned into the quote-unquote holy grail of 19th century race theory. Human remains constituted biocapital, sought by public institutions, private collectors, and colonial administrations in order to remap the human space.
01:37:43
Speaker
The study of crania, facial angles, or jaws served to investigate human differences through biological criteria. This And they put it in quotes also, colonial corporality was driven by global networks involving physicians, curators, traders, profiteers, colonial officials, military doctors, or missionaries in museums.
01:38:04
Speaker
It was supported by colonial expansion, Darwinist theories, desires for anthropological objectification, strife for national national prestige, or for educational purposes.
01:38:15
Speaker
It provided an additional incentive for trophy taking and collection of human remains from burial sites. battlefields prisons or internment camps remains were commissioned exchanged traded as ah objects between institutions and individuals and this person names this as the most violent emblem of colonial conquest later in the article they talk about how many indigenous culture and indigenous cultures human really remains remains are sacred right and treated as people rather than objects even after their passing
01:38:48
Speaker
connecting past and present, and collectors treated remains obviously as objects. Indigenous populations regarded as research material for anthropological classification or show objects.
01:39:02
Speaker
Many remains were collected without consent in violation of local laws, customs, and belief systems. Of course. Yeah. They also note that the collection of human remains started long before the peak of colonial expansion, that trophy taking has been an inherent part of warfare. And then also, as we noted earlier with the mummies, that was before these examples.
01:39:25
Speaker
Mm-hmm. owns of body parts were collected under the umbrella of science to explain differences between nations or to classify human races by anatomical difference. That's where like the practice of phrenology comes from.
01:39:40
Speaker
In particular, non-European human skulls became fetish objects. Military physicians, explorers, missionaries, anthropologists were mandated to obtain skulls. They were collected in military operations, detention programs camps, hospitals, or again...
01:39:56
Speaker
taken from burial sites. They also noted these practices were in contrast to standard quote unquote civilized behavior and military codes of honor. Like these are things that they would simultaneously say is like actually like not a part of the code of honor.
01:40:14
Speaker
And yet They had like a quota for it still. Right. They were like morally banned, but then also practiced all the time. Yeah.
01:40:26
Speaker
sometimes in alleged response to mutilations of bodies or headhunting by quote unquote non-civilized enemies so they used they said and this is where i think all of the rumors come from is that they were like oh no they did it first no they were cannibals no they were scalping no they were beheading our people And I just don't think that that's, yeah, I don't think that's consistent. Right.
01:40:50
Speaker
Said they continued by saying trophy hunting or mutilation were both a cause and consequence of colonial conflict. They're striking parallels between colonial context. Examples may be found under British, Belgian, French, Portuguese,
01:41:04
Speaker
and German colonial rule. Silenced element of British colonial practice with such practices, when those practices became public, they were often condemned by home audiences.
01:41:14
Speaker
However, they formed a part of the rationalization of colonial violence, right? Like people were enraged to hear that maybe ah other communities were doing this to their people when actually the story was the opposite.
01:41:27
Speaker
And then they use that as a way to mobilize and get a lot of support from people back home to continue colonial conquest as if people deserved it. Like manufacture consent.
01:41:38
Speaker
Exactly. And then they talk again about how they were used to crush resistance efforts or insurgencies in Asia and Africa. For example, during the uprising in 1857 in India, British commanders condemned rebel leaders to death by cannonade.
01:41:54
Speaker
The force of explosion mutilated bodies and made it impossible to perform funeral rites in the Hindu or Muslim traditions. Sometimes the skulls were preserved. So that feels really intentional too. Like I'm thinking a lot about Palestine and, you know, the intentional use of bombing.
01:42:12
Speaker
yeah Like not only are they decimating an entire, entire lines of families, but they're also, keeping surviving people from the possibility of any type of grieving practice of any type of funeral ritual. They steal their bodies when they find them, then they give them back without organs. Like this feels so consistent. i was um Same shit.
01:42:33
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Yeah. After the Battle of Magdala in northern Ethiopia, 1868, British troops cut hair from a corpse of the Emperor Tawodros II as a trophy.
01:42:46
Speaker
And then it later became part of the National Army Museum in London. The stories go on and on and on. ah One more thing on this note that I wanted to highlight. Another article that I found is that we're talking about this from a military context, which is structural, which is like, you know,
01:43:04
Speaker
attributed to governments and institutions. But what's missing in that is that militaries are made up of individual people who go home to their families.
01:43:17
Speaker
and have And so i found another article called colonialism in the decor. We can't keep sweeping the past under the leopard skin rug. by elliott ross and elliott says around 25 000 colonial officials returned to britain during the mid-20th century alone as formal colonial rule came to an end many others who had lived and worked in british colonies outside of any government role came back to they brought all kinds of stuff with them historians chris jeppesen and sarah longair discovered an assortment of wood carvings paintings drums other musical instruments furniture a set of arrows used as a hat rack
01:43:54
Speaker
In one home, a wash basin had been kept intact. Some items were proudly displayed. Others have been stored away from view in attics and cupboards. There were lion and leopard skins, many ivory ornaments, and elephant feet used as waste paper bins.
01:44:09
Speaker
Just casual in these people's houses. There was a machete shattered by a bullet taken from the body of a slain Land and Freedom Army fighter in Kenya.
01:44:20
Speaker
They were called Mau Mau. In the 1950s, some interviewees devoted Africa rooms in their homes or other ways of consciously using like museum curation and display, such as labeling and glass cabinets.
01:44:34
Speaker
So this just the beginning of this article. And I'm thinking a lot about cultural appropriation. i don't think that when we talk about cultural appropriation, people are often thinking about this violent and you know underbelly as part of it.
01:44:49
Speaker
i think it offers a different way for metabolizing the impact of cultural appropriation when we see that actually has roots here. So the article continues and then talks about how Jeppesen and Longhair interviewed more than 30 elderly former colonial officials in their homes across the UK and found that the world of their youth, often memory memorialized through domestic ornaments and furniture, was frequently fondly remembered as a time and place of family and friendship, of personal ambition and adventure, of love, of hope, to pleasure, desire, and loss.
01:45:26
Speaker
Oh my
01:45:34
Speaker
and brought souvenirs home. These conversations offered a way of understanding how the colonial period is perceived in domestic settings. German historian Britta Schilling defines public memory as being primed through interactions in the public space, media, and institutions, whereas private memory is usually transmitted orally and often within families.
01:45:54
Speaker
It forms a unique archive of stories and anecdotes on the on one hand, but also material relics on the other. Cherished notions of white European innocence and benevolence are sustained through a focus of simple curiosity.
01:46:07
Speaker
They then say it's a apparent from what has been written by these historians that for families who inherit these colonial relics, these items are simply a part of their memories. There's little possibility of extricating the personal Oh, God.
01:46:20
Speaker
and shilling's research members of the po post-colonial generation of some of the most notorious german colonial officials typically their grandchildren remember their ancestors as harmlessly quirky characters oh god Yeah, Klaus van Weisman told me how his relative crossed the Congo Basin on behalf of Leopold II, riding a tamed ox, writes Schilling.
01:46:41
Speaker
Herman van Weisman, who eventually became governor of German East Africa, now Tanzania. However, may he also be remembered for his self-proclaimed acts of violence against natives.
01:46:53
Speaker
But that part, you know. people are not really holding on to. Other examples include Ewald and Nikolaus von Puttkamer showed Schilling, the researcher. a Vast Mansion, their relative, Jesko von Puttkamer, had put in the middle of a jungle during his reign as governor of Cameroon.
01:47:13
Speaker
The German government recalled him in 1907, accusing him of excessive spending and severity to natives during a period of heightened indigenous resistance to colonial rule.
01:47:23
Speaker
But his, like, you know, grandchild or whatever has this affectionate moment where he's sharing this photo photograph of look at this beautiful mansion and they're all of them are like my you know my my whimsical little uncle quirky grandpa you know he may have cannibalized some people but you know it was a phase oh my gosh you know we all have that phase in college is the vibe.
01:47:56
Speaker
Yeah, it is Yeah. but They also talk about how Germany is not alone in fixating on colonial leaders' eccentricities and hobbies at the expense of more troubling political histories. They talked about Winston Churchill's home, which is now a museum.
01:48:17
Speaker
And therere you know the writer says there was no mention that Churchill... Churchill's role in causing the Bengal famine of 1943. The death toll was approximately 3 million.
01:48:32
Speaker
Visitors instead are encouraged to detail Churchill's great fondness for butterflies. Feels like the kawaiification of Japan. 100%. The of Japan.
01:48:47
Speaker
Yeah, that's true. They're like so cute, but also not too long ago. Yeah. Conversations. So cute. Don't remember all the other stuff.
01:48:57
Speaker
Recasting itself through the Kauai culture to evade historical accountability. You know, a lot of accountability needs to be had. Yeah, troubles. Troubles in Japan. But yeah, it's very romanticized over there.
01:49:09
Speaker
Yeah. the The writer then talks about how you can trace a thread from these personal memories to the public framing of colonists as just wide-eyed adventurers who just happen to possess enormous political power over non-European people.
01:49:21
Speaker
Cherished notions of white Europeans' innocence and benevolence are sustained through a focus on simple curiosity. Even the most basic historical facts manage to slip through the cracks in colonial families and the nations to which they belong.
01:49:34
Speaker
It's the way that a man's skull can be taken and displayed in a museum or used to hold novels in place on a shelf. So a lot of parallels. I felt very validated. lot of parallels, yeah. With with ah these findings. love that you went down this rabbit hole because it's very insightful and telling.
01:49:54
Speaker
I have one more but thing. Sorry, talking a lot. That's okay. But this time I asked ChatGBT because I was like having these connections in my head. I said, make an argument.
01:50:07
Speaker
about how Jeffrey Dahmer is just, how his cannibalism and his behaviors are a byproduct of the violence. Okay, let's hear it.
01:50:18
Speaker
And, you know, i tried to ask about epigenetics and stuff. Everybody taught, like any type of historical trauma and the conversation around yeah epigenetics is always about the people who have been traumatized, who people have been colonized. Never through the lens of what do you inherit when you have legacies of conquest.
01:50:38
Speaker
People are not researching. Well, they're starting to research that, but you know, sparse, but they did present these other, concepts that feel good enough, but I can't take credit for finding these. I mean, these ideas in my brain, the connections made chat GPT. So, you know, things i I suppose they talked about two things. They talked about repetition compulsion, which is a psychodynamic theory, right? The drive to repeat a trauma over and over, especially if we're they're unresolved.
01:51:10
Speaker
Chat Gpt took a metaphorical approach they said if Dahmer's ancestors lived by consuming the lives of other people through slavery conquest rape and dispossession then his cannibalism could be a grotesque re-ritualization of those acts metaphorically yeah but I think also literally and literally yeah yeah And then Chachupiti says he didn't need to be taught colonialism. It lives in his cells, his dreams, his compulsions. The lineage of European conquest becomes a kind of haunted genetic architecture, one that reenacts itself not through speeches, but through flesh. And i was like,
01:51:44
Speaker
Chachapiti can never just answer a question straight. No, no, no, no. But also, was like, yeah. Has to be poetic. Well, it has information about me, so I think that it tries to talk to me like I want to talked to. like Yeah.
01:51:59
Speaker
Yeah, I do think that it lives in his body, his dreams, his compulsions, you know? Haunted genetic architecture. Yeah, yeah. So they also talk about the colonial unconscious,
01:52:10
Speaker
which refers to like a deep-seated internal memory. inter Intergenerational trauma, collective memory, combo, colonial unconscious. It's this thing that we share, this unspoken legacy of colonialism that persists in all of our psyches.
01:52:28
Speaker
and throughout society, they name, you know, the legacies include patterns of domination, violence, dehumanization, racial hierarchy, traumas that are not only historical, but also psychological and cultural, shaping behaviors and social structures across generations.
01:52:44
Speaker
And so the the connection that was being made here is the idea that people who are socialized and shaped by colonial histories may unconsciously repeat patterns of violence domination or dehumanization inherited from their colonial past and could be seen as a form of repetition compulsion on interpersonal and collective levels.
01:53:10
Speaker
For descendants of colonizers, the repetition compulsion may manifest as the reenactment of domination or consumption of the quote unquote other. echoing original traumas and dynamics of colonial conquest, even in the original even if the original context is forgotten or repressed.
01:53:26
Speaker
So even if we don't talk about it, even if it's not in our textbooks, even if we would rather not, kind of like all of these people reflecting on their quirky little family members, they don't want to think about how they were, you know? Like they had to disconnect that entirely from their brains. And I don't doubt that people literally cannot and will not believe certain things happened and that their family members were a part of it.
01:53:49
Speaker
Yeah. and and yet there's this embodied knowing otherwise and like a weird like penchant for collecting quote unquote exotic things that they don't understand, you know, why they're doing that.
01:54:03
Speaker
Now, you know, I'm thinking about nonprofit ladies who like have too much African garb in a different way. True, true, true. Oh my gosh. What the fuck is going on there? Rachel Dolezal too?
01:54:14
Speaker
What's going on? Never forget about her. Never forget Rachel Dolezal. She's out here still. She's... Yeah, I wonder what she's up to. Last I heard, she was fired for being on OnlyFans from a school.
01:54:26
Speaker
Yeah, they fired her for being on OnlyFans, not for cosplaying Black person. Wow. Again. like, if someone is on OnlyFans and they're teaching, isn't that just a sign that you need to pay them more? Yes.
01:54:38
Speaker
Out of everything that Rachel has done, they're asking the wrong questions. But anyway...
01:54:47
Speaker
yeah so the reenactment of trauma within relationships and communities that's the connection and when you contextualized looks like personality exactly wow yes yes yeah yeah that's a rash momenticum quote because they're saying that he has like personality disorders and stuff but That's that. That was a lot.
01:55:13
Speaker
but a
Tracy Edwards' Encounter with Dahmer
01:55:14
Speaker
doozy. that's what i got That's what I got lost in. That's why I was behind because I got lost in this. That's fair. That's fair. But hopefully it kept your attention the whole time. Yeah. kept yeah and I mean, I feel like it's very, very relevant and very insightful to the story.
01:55:34
Speaker
So thanks for taking us on that journey. Yeah, for sure. As you were talking, i like one of the last things that I did for research was watch the testimony of Tracy Edwards, who's the person I talked about right in the beginning.
01:55:53
Speaker
and And haven't formed full connections with it, but maybe you can help me out as i get into it. So now we're back to July 1991.
01:56:05
Speaker
ninety ninety one Tracy Edwards is a 32 year old black man. He had seen Jeffrey Dahmer a couple times before then had spoken to him, had said hello.
01:56:16
Speaker
He was at Grand Avenue Mall in Milwaukee on this day with a couple of friends drinking beer. He said that JD approached them and started talking to them.
01:56:28
Speaker
JD told them that he was in the city from Chicago and was taking care of his sick grandma. But he said he was like a professional photographer and then was trying to like ask them like, are any of you guys interested in making money, taking nude pictures, basically modeling for nude pictures.
01:56:49
Speaker
And then he told them like, oh, I'm going to buy all of us like beer, rum and Coke. So like, let's go to the liquor store together. and they go to the liquor store. And while they're there, Tracy Edwards actually runs into his brother and is talking to his brother while JD is with his other friends.
01:57:07
Speaker
Something happens where like it ends up being that his two friends leave to go change. And then they said that they'll come, come back with some girls and Tracy Edwards goes with JD to his apartment.
01:57:23
Speaker
But JD ended up giving his friends a fake address which he finds out later when he reconnects with his friends. So they go to his apartment taking back routes, which JD said would be better, the better way to do it.
01:57:39
Speaker
He said that he seemed normal at first as they were walking there. He was talking to him about the military because Tracy had told him that his dad was in the military and had a military family.
01:57:51
Speaker
He said that he walked into the apartment. There was a foul odor. And he asked him about it and he said a sewer pipe broke. So he said, OK. He also did see acid, which he told him he cleaned bricks with.
01:58:08
Speaker
But I guess like at this point he was like he was just seeming like a really nice guy. So I like really didn't. think that there was anything that he was going to do. So then he offered him a beer and also offered him a mixture of rum and Coke.
01:58:21
Speaker
It's weird because throughout this whole testimony, whoever it is, I think it's the prosecutor, he's stating, you're not a homosexual, though, right? And you didn't know he was asking you to go back there for homosexual stuff, right? Not, not you you didn't know he was going to take you back there to try to kill you, but no, about the homosexual stuff.
01:58:39
Speaker
He takes a couple sips from the rum and coke at this point. And then i guess JD has a fish tank in his apartment and he says something about a fish tank. Tracy turns to look at the fish tank.
01:58:51
Speaker
And then next thing he knows, one of his hands is handcuffed and Jeffrey is holding a knife. It's actually a military knife that looks kind of like a machete. And he has it like on his rip.
01:59:06
Speaker
He tells him, if you don't do what I say, I'll kill you. And he said he seemed like a completely different person. Like it looked like he had a different face structure and a different body. And he looked like a different guy.
01:59:20
Speaker
and he repeats this over and over again. He was at his apartment for like four hours. And every he said every 20 to 30 minutes is when sort of a switch would happen. So at this point, they're in the living room and JD's like, let's go to the bedroom.
01:59:34
Speaker
they go into the bedroom and he sees that there's a drum barrel there. And then he sees that the bed is unmade and that there's a stain on the bed. and he's trying to just continue to talk with him and sort of being friendly as a way to just deescalate the situation.
01:59:52
Speaker
and i guess there was a TV in his bedroom He thinks that when they got first got to the apartment, jeff Jeffrey went in there and turned it on and The Exorcist 3 was playing on VCR.
02:00:06
Speaker
They were just watching it together for a little while. j d said, i mean, Tracy Edwards said that J.D. one minute was nice and then said like he didn't want people to leave or abandon him and then was quiet and would be watching the movie and was also asking Tracy to watch the movie with him.
02:00:26
Speaker
This is where it gets weird. And this is what I was like thinking about when you were talking. I haven't seen The Exorcist 3, so three so i don't know what they're talking about. But there's a part in the movie where a preacher gets possessed by devil, I guess.
02:00:42
Speaker
He wanted to mimic that part of the movie and he's rocking back and forth and chanting. From a spiritual perspective, I do think that something dark and sinister happens and opens inside of you when you disconnect from your humanity in such an extreme way. Like, I think.
02:01:01
Speaker
Totally. i think that's true. Yeah. Yeah. When you're thinking about, like, how in healing work we're talking about, let's reconnect with our ancestors. Yeah.
02:01:12
Speaker
What kind of ancestors are you getting in contact with when you're doing this shit? You know, the chanting, very creepy. Yeah, very. And he said that he kept doing that. So then at one point, JD asks him to lay down face down on the floor and starts to get a bit more aggressive at this point. He said that he was trying to listen to his heart and told him that he was going to eat his heart.
02:01:35
Speaker
And at this point had the machete pointed to his groin area. Tracy Edwards is really, I feel like he's really trying to figure out how to survive the situation. He's multiple times asked to go to the bathroom and he does take him to the bathroom.
02:01:50
Speaker
Towards the end, he asked to go to the bathroom again. and then he says, can we go back to the living room? Because the front room has an AC. And he's I guess they go back to the living room.
02:02:02
Speaker
Tracy Edwards actually unbuttoned his shirt to keep JD more at ease. And then he so he said that he was going out of himself. So I'm like interpreting that as like he was dissociating and that he was again rocking and chanting.
02:02:19
Speaker
And at this point, like he kind of just even let him go. And that's when he got up and he ran towards the door is like when he was kind of in this like kind of dazed out state.
02:02:30
Speaker
Tracy Edwards gets up, hits him, runs out the door, makes it outside, sees Milwaukee PD and says like this crazy guy's was trying to hurt me.
02:02:42
Speaker
The police then go to the apartment. He goes with them. This is when they find what I said in the beginning. They found photos of dismembered bodies, found a dismembered head in the refrigerator.
02:02:56
Speaker
They found seven skulls and four decapitated heads stuffed into the refrigerator. A 57-gallon barrel containing a headless torso and other body parts.
02:03:09
Speaker
that was decomposing with corrosive chemicals at the time. He was also bleaching bones like he had done with his dad when he was younger. And then for some reason, the
Dahmer's Trial and Public Reaction
02:03:20
Speaker
first thing that he said to the cops was, if you ever see Al Smeshko, I want you to thank him for everything he did for me when I was in high school, which is the teacher that they interviewed on that podcast.
02:03:33
Speaker
The teacher was the one that found him outside with the sick pack of beer and then took him to the guidance counselor. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So he never really seems fully there.
02:03:46
Speaker
no I mean, the amount of drinking he's been doing since he was 13 on top of like the extreme acts of violence have to be yeah psychologically damaging in an extreme way. Like I can yeah imagine he just is not there. Yeah, I'm sure he's quite fractured in terms of his his parts and his soul as well, which kind of makes sense with the like, oh, he seemed like a different person. It was interesting that he was like, it looked like he had a different face.
02:04:18
Speaker
um That is interesting. But we we do hear that with DID, that people's literal body chemistry shifts. So that's interesting. Yeah. It's surprising to me that that was not one of the things that he was diagnosed with.
02:04:32
Speaker
um But anyways, I'll get into that in ah in a moment. So like right after he was arrested, he did confess to 17 murders and also admitted to the authorities that he ate his victim's organs and also engaged in necrophilia.
02:04:47
Speaker
On September 10th, 1991, couple months later, pled not guilty by reason of insanity for 15 charges to murder.
02:04:59
Speaker
Unfortunately, one of the bodies was never found, so they didn't charge him for one of the murders, even though he admitted to it And since Stephen Hicks was killed in Ohio, he had to go to Ohio for another trial for murder. for The person's body that was never found was Stephen Tuomi, the second victim.
02:05:20
Speaker
I was like, just curious about the not guilty by reason of insanity charge. And so I just sort of sort of looked into it. It's still a thing. It's called NGRI or not guilty by reason of insanity, but it basically asserts that the defendant was quote, legally insane at the time that the offense was committed. And so did not understand the wrongfulness of the actions In a court, what this means is that someone lacks insight into their mental illness at the time that they committed the crime. So they could have insight during the trial that they didn't have during the moment that they committed the crime.
02:06:01
Speaker
It is one of the most controversial criminal defense strategies and also the least successful. But what I actually found that was very interesting is that even if someone...
02:06:14
Speaker
wins a trial, so is declared not guilty by reason of insanity. It's not that they're free. They are committed to a mental health facility. And usually they get held on an involuntary, indefinite psychiatric hold and oftentimes are incarcerated for the same amount of time or even longer than those who are incarcerated in prison for the same crimes.
02:06:41
Speaker
And because of how the current mental health infrastructure is not set up to house people in this way what ends up happening is that there's like state jails that end up being the place that these people are are put and folks have died in these facilities from neglect and abuse. And I found out that there are only... so they get put in state psychiatric hospital beds.
02:07:14
Speaker
And in the US, there's only 35,000 state state psychiatric beds in the whole country. Well, his lawyer probably didn't find any other...
02:07:25
Speaker
Yes. yeah I mean, do you ever think like, you know, someone's got to be the defense attorney. And they're probably... this guy's probably like, you know, I... i this cool This is all I got for you, you know?
02:07:38
Speaker
Well, what ended up happening is actually on January 13th, they changed his plea to guilty but insane, which is now called guilty but mentally ill plea, which allows defendants to admit guilt while stating that they were mentally incompetent, quote unquote, at the time of the offense.
02:07:59
Speaker
In jurisdictions where this does exist, the process requires the defendant to provide expert testimony demonstrating that and they were mentally incompetent during the crime, which is why he was evaluated by so many different psychiatrists and stuff like this at this point.
02:08:20
Speaker
So this meant that they did not need to have a criminal trial and that the court proceedings would pretty much only be about Jeffrey's mental state. And they only needed 10 out of 12 jurors to agree on his mental state for a verdict to stand.
02:08:35
Speaker
So his trial began on January 30th, 1992. Huge crowds outside of the courthouse. This is the early 90s. So when the 24 hour news cycles had just started. So news outlets were always looking for news to cover and a serial killer trial was a great opportunity for them to report on. You can actually watch his entire trial online.
02:09:04
Speaker
It's on court TV or on YouTube. i I watched parts of it, but not all of it. But apparently people were waiting in line to get seats or get as close to the courtroom as possible. And that there was like a bulletproof glass wall between like the audience and where he was seated, where the defendants and the witness and the judge were.
02:09:28
Speaker
During the trial, many people in the community were really upset with how the police had served or not served the people of color and gay people who were his victims, especially what happened with Conorac Synthesifoam.
02:09:46
Speaker
And these tensions were reflected in the courtroom. The room was also swept for explosives before the crowd filed in, and there were seats that were reserved for victims' family members, as well as Dahmer's father and stepmother.
02:10:04
Speaker
So in his attorney's opening statement, he states that his client was, quote, not an evil man, but he was a sick man.
02:10:16
Speaker
And I'm just going to talk a little bit about go on a small tangent about that. So the definition of psychopathy, according to psychology today, is the absence of empathy, blunting of other affective states, callousness, detachment, and enable them to be highly manipulative.
02:10:36
Speaker
They can appear, quote unquote, normal or even charming, underneath which they lack a conscience. Psychopath and sociopath are often used interchangeably, but a sociopath, I guess, refers to someone with antisocial tendencies that are thought to be rooted in social and environmental factors, whereas psychopathic traits are thought to be more genetic or innate.
02:11:05
Speaker
That said, both genetic and non-genetic causes likely play a role in shaping any person who has these kind of traits. Antisocial personality disorder does overlap with psychopathy, but it's not the same condition.
02:11:19
Speaker
A person can meet the criteria for antisocial personality disorder without showing the core traits associated with psychopathy. Psychopathy Psychopaths are thought to comprise just a fraction of people with anti antisocial personality disorder, which is like 1% of the general population.
02:11:39
Speaker
Psychopathy and sociopathy are also not like diagnostic terms. They're more like sociological terms. So, I mean, with that definition, I feel like he definitely fits that.
02:11:52
Speaker
I found this article. Who is it written by? Mariam Malik Dr. Hafiz Javed or Rahman. And it was called a Killer's Politeness, a Discourse Analysis of Jeffrey Dahmer's Interview.
02:12:08
Speaker
And it basically does like a content an analysis of the interview that he gave. to Inside Edition in 1993. And it basically talks about how he acts calm and is polite and presents himself as this like composed, rational and nonviolent person, which sharply contrasts with the wild and gory aspects of his crime. but They also talk about how this sort of discordancy, which he creates using strategic language, gives him the ability to shape public's perception and shift public photo focus from his monstrous deeds to his humane characteristics that seem relatable.
02:12:59
Speaker
by using subtlety and politeness strategies. He's trying to portray himself as more relatable so that he can get audience sympathy. There's this theory that Brown and Levinson created called politeness theory, and they go into how he uses different strategies from this politeness theory to basically manipulate interviewers and audiences to see him as more human and him saying like, oh, I knew what I was doing was wrong is is part of that as well. And it's like he's describing his actions as simply wrong is like a euphemism, right? Because it's like,
02:13:38
Speaker
Wrong is not the same as, you know, sexually assaulting, drugging, raping, cannibalizing, mutilating. Well, he doesn't have remorse.
02:13:51
Speaker
Yes. He doesn't know what it means. He's saying that he knows it's like socially looked down upon to be violating people and killing people in this way. He doesn't feel bad. Yeah, yeah.
02:14:05
Speaker
So he knows... I guess he has a cognitive sense that it was not ah totally the right thing to do. But I don't there's no felt sense that it was yeah wrong to him.
02:14:17
Speaker
So that makes a lot of sense. He's using language that he can
Psychological Traits of Serial Killers
02:14:20
Speaker
connect with, which is And he also like frames that like, oh, after I was arrested, i i told the police where all the bodies were and I helped to give closure to the families as though like he did that, but he wasn't the one that caused the trauma and pain and loss to begin with.
02:14:39
Speaker
Right. It's like very easy for him to just engage in this control and manipulation and him being like a white man. Interviewers just like eat it up and people just eat it up and are able to like have a cognitive dissonance between what they're seeing in front of them, which is like this person talking in like a monotone, calm, polite way and his like horrific behavior.
02:15:05
Speaker
Horrific deeds. Control and manipulation, charm, social skills, and a high IQ are literally all characteristics of serial killers. And Dr. Elizabeth Yardley, who's the director of the Center of Applied Criminology at Birmingham City University,
02:15:24
Speaker
identifies being skilled manipulators as one of the very common characteristics of serial killers. And she says, apparent vulnerability and the need to please have been used effectively time and again by serial killers as a way of hiding their sinister personality Some of the world's best known serial killers have a frightening ability to manipulate those around them, pressing the right buttons in order to present themselves in a false light.
02:15:49
Speaker
And I mean, his whole trial was about he was trying to argue that he was like, mentally incompetent or what didn't know what he was doing at the time of the murders or he's like mentally ill right and so this just contributes to that same narrative that he's trying to push that like poor me there's something wrong with me and not like i killed 17 people and This is weaponized incompetence to the max.
02:16:19
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And also something I forgot about to to mention in the ah research on cannibalism and repetition, compulsion, colonial unconscious.
02:16:32
Speaker
I was trying to find articles about like what ah kind of epigenetic or biological inheritance is implied by people who perpetrate violence and people who inherit conquest.
02:16:44
Speaker
There are some studies That suggests there's a blunting of affect. and There's more difficulty with guilt or empathy, or there's kind of distorted intimacy in children of perpetrators of large-scale violence.
02:17:00
Speaker
They found this with – descendants of nazis specifically And so there's some suggestion that the moral dissociation that would be required for this kind of domination might rewire your stress responses in a weird way. Yeah, could see that. Maybe reinforce cruelty or dissociation, disembodiment, or the impulse to control.
02:17:27
Speaker
Totally. did They did find that. So that, you know, all paired together feels like...
02:17:34
Speaker
ah Yeah, and the way that he doesn't have emotional responses to anything and just this flat. Yeah, no affect. Always, always. Yeah, flat affect always ah um is very, very disturbing.
02:17:49
Speaker
And I think we don't get to see we like we don't ever get to see the side that like Tracy Edwards saw where that shift happened. But back to the trial,
Trial Outcome and Conclusion
02:18:00
Speaker
what his attorney was trying to argue was that he said he had sex with corpses, he committed cannibalism, he performed lobotomies, but he also suffered from necrophilia, which is also not like a diagnosis technically suffered from necrophilia suffered i don't think he was the one suffering no definitely from necrophilia yeah necrophilia is also not a diagnosis it's technically paraphilia not otherwise specified in the dsm force
02:18:35
Speaker
which is used to describe sexual arousal to object situations or non-consenting individuals, which are outside the range of usual sexual interest. But notably, fellatio and transgenderism used to be qualified under this category as well. so Yeah, the systems, they're homophobic.
02:18:56
Speaker
Systems are very homophobic, very transphobic. very misogynistic. yeah He said this during the trial that he had an obsession with the Emperor and the return of the Jedi and he got yellow eye contacts. I don't know why this was relevant to the trial but he did say that as a way to argue that he was a sick man.
02:19:14
Speaker
The prosecutor outlined ways in which Dahmer had demonstrated control of his behavior, like selecting his victims cautiously, killing them in a carefully controlled environment. And people in the court heard a lot of gruesome details about his actions and how he lured people to his apartment with promises of sex and money in exchange for photos and drug their drinks and then killed them, mutilated them, and sometimes documented these processes.
02:19:43
Speaker
A large part of the trial was testimony from psychologists and psychiatrists about his mental state, and he had various diagnoses proposed as a result of interviews with him and also retroactively psychologists and psychiatrists after the trial have proposed certain diagnoses, including borderline personality disorder, substance use disorder, alcoholism, psychotic disorder, schizotipal personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder,
02:20:12
Speaker
And necrophilia. One of the doctors said he did not meet the legal definition for insanity because he knew what he was doing when he was doing it Dr. Park Elliott Diaz notably said that though Dahmer was an alcoholic, his killings had been well-planned and deliberate.
02:20:29
Speaker
In addition, he pointed out that Dahmer used condoms due to fear of contracting AIDS. So he really planned things out, you know? In Boyle's closing statement, he said of his client, he was so impaired as he went along this killing spree that he could not stop.
02:20:44
Speaker
He was a runaway train on a track of madness. McCann said he's fooled a lot of people. Please, please don't let him fool you. And the verdict was that they 10 out of 12 jurors found him not mentally ill, said that his crimes were organized, premeditated, chose his victims carefully.
02:21:05
Speaker
He was thoughtful when it came to storing body parts in the refrigerator as he planned to eat them later. He targeted men who did not have a car since he knew that missing persons could be traced through their automobiles.
02:21:18
Speaker
Someone who is insane does not have the ability to plan ahead and have forethought and organization to commit suicide. such atrocities. And he was then sentenced to 15 consecutive life sentences and then later tried for murder in Ohio and was found guilty and received another life sentence there.
02:21:38
Speaker
I'll go into this a little bit later, but there was also victim statements that i watched all of them that were part of the trial where family members of the victims came and spoke to Jeffrey. It was honestly really emotional. All of them were black and people of color.
02:21:57
Speaker
A lot of them looked him directly in the eye while they were making their statements. A lot of them cried during it. There was one person that just started yelling and screaming at him and they like pulled her out of the courtroom and he literally just had no reaction and he was just they showed they would show his face every now and then he's just sitting there like no reaction just blank faced looking down very very disturbing but I am glad that the family members had a chance to say say their piece to him it's like a small small very small consolation
02:22:35
Speaker
that they were able to have. So yeah, that's the end of the trial. Okay. It's been a long time. we'll We'll be splitting it into two. For sure. We'll come back. We'll share about more. is that about Okay. And then the victims, and their stories. Yeah.
02:22:53
Speaker
ahll Yeah. I'll share about like the community's response. Cool. And then I was going to about Glenda. Wow. Thanks for staying up so late. Yeah. It's all good. Yeah. We're going to be back with part two.
02:23:03
Speaker
Very, very soon. ah See you then. See you in part two. Hear you then. Hear you in part two. Or you'll hear us. ah but Yeah, we won't hear you. Okay.
02:23:14
Speaker
Bye. Goodbye.
02:23:21
Speaker
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02:23:35
Speaker
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02:23:50
Speaker
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02:24:05
Speaker
Lauren, Val, Micheline, Montana, Daphne, Katie, Tavern, Meredith, April, and Kelsey. We would also like to give some honorable mentions to recent patrons and those who have contributed significantly to unpacking the Eerie.
02:24:23
Speaker
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02:24:34
Speaker
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