Killer Stories with Harvey Guillén - Jeffrey Dahmer Special Pt. 2

Episode Date: December 23, 2019

It was a murderous rampage that could have possibly been prevented. Although Jeffrey Dahmer failed numerous times to turn his life around, his multi-year killing spree also went ignored by his family, neighbors, sentencing judges, and court-appointed therapists. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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advised. This episode includes discussions of murder, sexual assault, and violence against children that some people may find offensive. We advise extreme caution for children under 13. In the spring of 1987, Dr. Evelyn Rosen was assigned a new court-ordered patient. The previous September, 26-year-old Jeffrey Dahmer had been arrested for the third time in 18 months, this time for indecent exposure. It was clear from day one that the young man was troubled, but his answers to the Milan clinical multi-axial inventory were even more alarming than expected.

Among the statements Dahmer marked as true, lately I've begun to feel lonely and empty. Ideas keep turning over and over in my mind and they won't go away. Looking back on my life, I know I have made others suffer as much as I have suffered. I have strange thoughts I wish I could get rid of. Dr. Rosen's prognosis, there is no doubt at this time that he is a schizoid personality disorder who may show marked paranoid tendencies. He is definitely spooky.

She hit the nail on the head. In the days between Dahmer's court-mandated therapy sessions, he committed his second, third, and fourth murders. Hi, I'm Greg Poulson. And I'm Vanessa Richardson. Every Monday, Vanessa and I co-host serial killers, a Pardcast original. This is part two of our three episodes special on Jeffrey Dahmer, the Milwaukee Cannibal. At Pardcast, we're grateful for you, our listeners. You allow us to do what we love.

Let us know how we're doing. Reach out on Facebook and Instagram at PARCAST and Twitter at Pardcast Network. And if you enjoy today's episode, the best way to help us is to leave a five-stress. our review wherever you're listening. It really does help. In the last episode, we discussed Dahmer's upbringing, his troubled adolescence, and his first murder to try and understand why he became a killer. In part two, we'll be asking a different question. Could he have been stopped? We'll look at Dahmer's own failed attempts to turn his life around, and the multi-year killing spree that was ignored by his family, neighbors, sentencing judges, and court-appointed therapists.

In part three, we'll follow Dahmer's final descent into madness and the events that finally led to his arrest. Then we'll look at the media frenzy surrounding his trial and what it says about our culture. With the murder of Stephen Hicks in June of 1978, Jeffrey Dahmer had thrust himself into a nightmare from which he could never return. The 18-year-old was still living in his parents' house in Bath Township, Ohio, and his parents were still nowhere to be found. For the rest of the summer, he was alone with the memory of killing Hicks and the horror of what he had become. It's hard to say whether he was more affected by what he'd done to Hicks

or what he'd done to himself by having to cover up the murder. People often assume that killers like Dahmer are completely devoid of empathy and incapable of regular emotions. Whether or not that's true is impossible to quantify. Years later, when Dahmer was asked if he was remorseful for his crimes, he said, yes, I do have remorse, but I'm not even sure myself whether it's as profound as it should be.

But the sheer fact that he was so upset about the first murder seems to suggest that he wasn't as cold-blooded as we'd like to believe. He clearly knew right from wrong. He knew that killing was bad, and at least for a time, he struggled with the bizarre compulsion he felt to violate those moral rules. He ultimately lost that battle.

But in the years after he killed Stephen Hicks, we can't ignore that Dahmer did try to keep his violent side in check. And by charting the next phase of his life, his evolution into a serial killer starts to seem less than inevitable. In September 1978, Lionel Dahmer finally returned to check on the family. For the past several months, he'd been living at a motel just 10 miles away.

The moment he stepped in the front door, he realized something was seriously wrong. The house was covered in beer cans and liquor bottles. There was no food in the fridge. When he asked Jeff where his mother and brother were, he simply shrugged and said, They moved out. Finally, a few years too late, Lionel realized his son had a serious drinking problem. He immediately moved back in and tried to help Jeff get his act together. Despite his protests, Lionel enrolled Jeff in college at Ohio State University.

Within weeks, he was moving into his dorm and starting classes for the 1978 fall semester. Supposedly, Jeff was majoring in business, but he was still drinking so much. that he could never get up to go to class in the morning. When he was alone, he wept, thinking about what he'd done to Stephen Hicks. After only a couple of months, it was clear to everyone that college was not for Jeff.

He dropped out at the holiday break and went back home. With options dwindling, Lionel suggested that Jeff joined the army. The regimented structure of military life might be good for him. At the very least, he'd have to stay sober through boot camp.

So just four days after Christmas, Jeff left for training at Fort McClellan in Alabama. By the next June, he was shipped out to West Germany, which the U.S. was occupying during the Cold War. Predictably, once he was through the rigors of basic training, Jeff was back to drinking himself into a stupor. His poor performance got him discharged by early 1981, barely two years after he enlisted. He was given a one-way ticket back to the same time. States. When he was asked where he wanted to land, he chose Miami. He'd never been to Florida before, but he figured the warm weather and sunshine might cheer him up. Now 21 years old, Jeff spent the summer in a motel room near the beach. He got a job at a sandwich shop and spent his off hours

soaking up the sun. But within a few months, his constant drinking had caused him to lose his job. By the end of the summer, he couldn't afford his motel room. He packed up the few possessions he had with him and found a spot to sleep on the beach. Lying there on the cold shore, as drunk and miserable as ever, Jeff realized he could never run away from his problems. He needed help. He finally gave in and called his father. In September of 1981, Jeff moved back into his family house in Ohio,

but being in those familiar surroundings only made things worse. Just two weeks after he moved back to Ohio, he was arrested for disorderly conduct at a Ramada Inn. He was drinking from an open bottle of vodka in the hotel bar and vehemently refused to leave, even after the police were called. This was Dahmer's first arrest, so he was let off with a citation, but the incident was the last straw for Lionel. They'd done everything to help Jeff turn his life around, but all their attempts had failed. If they couldn't get through to him, maybe his beloved grandmother could. Jeff respected Catherine Dahmer, whom he called a very sweet lady and a perfect grandmother. When asked directly if he loved her, he replied,

Yep, she's lived in that house a long time, which is about as close to an expression of love as Jeffrey Dahmer ever got. So in December 1981, Jeff was sent to live with Catherine and Millwall. Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Removed from his familiar surroundings, he made a vow to put his life back together and walk the straight and narrow. Catherine was a devout Christian. Jeff, of course, was a gay murderer. But he started reading the Bible and tried to banish those sinful desires, both the homosexual and the homicidal. For about two years, he had considerable success. With a steady course of Bible study and church attendance, his nightmarish thoughts about Stephen Hicks finally receded into the background.

And then, one ordinary afternoon in 1984, Dahmer was reading a book at the public library when a man walked by and slipped him a note. It read, Meet Me in the Second Level bathroom. I'll give you a blowjob. Jeff was astonished. He'd never been proposition before. But his surprise quickly turned to panic. He was at the precipice of a slippery slope.

First, it's a brief hookup in the library bathroom. Then the deluge of gay thoughts will come flooding back. Then he's thinking about bones and dismemberment. And the next thing you know, he's standing over another dead body. So he told himself, not today. It would take more than that to throw Jeffrey Dahmer off his righteous path. But the close encounter had reawakened something. He couldn't keep all his sexual desires repressed forever.

Maybe he could find another outlet, a substitute for an actual human lover. While walking through Southridge Mall one day, he found exactly what he was looking for. A male mannequin beckoning him from a department store window. It wasn't exactly a person, but it was person-shaped, and it couldn't get up and walk away. maybe this mannequin would be enough. So, right at closing time, Dahmer hid inside the store until the last employees had locked up and left. When the coast was clear, he undressed the mannequin,

put it in a massive sleeping bag cover, and carried it right out of the store. He took a taxi back to his grandma's house, and that was that. Unfortunately, after only a few weeks, Grandma Dahmer found the mannequin in his closet. She talked to Lionel who talked to Jeff, who explained that he'd simply stolen the mannequin as a prank. He promised to return it to the store and Lionel let it go. But with the mannequin out of the picture, Jeff had to look for another option. It occurred to him that if he wanted a corpse, he didn't necessarily have to

kill anyone. He could simply disinter a recently deceased body from the cemetery. He tried that, but digging up a grave isn't as easy as it sounds. On the first night he attempted it, he realized the ground was too solid to dig through with a single shovel. He quickly gave up, went home, and never tried again. He'd tried alcoholism, college, the Army, Miami, religion, mannequin theft, and grave robbing. There was only one option left. He needed a living man. Luckily, Milwaukee was the perfect place to find one. Coming up, Jeffrey Dahmer enters the nightlife.

Now back to the story. In 1985, Milwaukee's gay culture was thriving. Despite a history of conflicts with the police, the recent emergence of AIDS and a generally repressive cultural atmosphere, the LGBT community had carved out a firm place in the city. By the 1980s, Milwaukee had 123 gay bars and counting, all of which operated openly under Wisconsin's first-in-the-nation-laws, anti-discrimination laws.

Into this flourishing scene came 25-year-old Jeffrey Dahmer. The last time he tried to pick up a man, it had ended in rejection, homicide, and a close call with highway patrol. Since then, he'd been fighting down any trace of his sexuality, worried that one thing might always lead to another. Luckily, there was a place where hookups could be conversation-free, the bathhouses, male-only saunas that were thinly veiled venues for anonymous sex. Dahmer was a pretty good-looking guy by Milwaukee standards, so he didn't have any trouble soliciting partners. But sex by nature is reciprocal.

And that was a problem for him. As we discussed last week, Domer was motivated by the need to dominate and possess another person. His lifelong isolation and secrecy made it difficult to relate to others. So the pressure of meeting another person's needs was exhausting for him. What he wanted, really, was someone who would just lie there and be quiet. So in June of 1986, Domer found a solution. He got a prescription for sleeping pills, mixed them into a bottle of liqueur, and brought it with him to the bathhouse. He would partner up, pour the other man a drink, head into a private room.

About half an hour later, they would fall unconscious, leaving him in full control of the situation. For the most part, he would just lie next to them and masturbate, without feeling the need to violate them any further than he already had. sometimes he would fall asleep next to them with his head on their chest and listen to the heartbeat. Obviously, some of the men realized they'd been drugged and complained to the management. Others didn't say anything at all. It's common for victims of sexual assault to feel too ashamed to report the incident to the authorities. That problem was only magnified by the fact that the victims in question were gay. According to Gary Hollander, who served on a...

a Milwaukee commission into police community relations. In the years prior to Dahmer's arrest, the LGBT community had tried to remain off law enforcement's radar in order to avoid the kind of police harassment that had been common in the past. Up until 1983, sodomy had been a crime in Wisconsin, and even a few years after that law was stricken from the books, going to the police about a sexual incident at the bathhouse would create more problems than that. than it solved. As for the bathhouse owners, whose venues had been raided countless times over the years, their main priority was keeping themselves out of the police's crosshairs.

If the cops found out there was a serial rapist on the loose, they'd never know peace again. By Dahmer's count, he managed to drug at least ten men at the same bathhouse over the course of a year. All the while, the management quietly ignored it. in 1987, a young man accidentally overdosed on the pills and was hospitalized for a week. That was the last straw. Dahmer was officially banned from the bathhouse. But still, no one called the police, not even the man who'd been hospitalized.

Bizarrely, even after word got around that Dahmer was drugging people, he was still a welcome presence at the local gay bars. His main haunt was Club 219. A loud, bustling dance club that was either the first or second hottest spot in Milwaukee, depending on which side of the local rivalry you believed. Typically, Jeff took up a stool at the bar and just sat there, alone, watching the drag shows and strippers until closing time. He never mingled, rarely struck up a conversation.

He seemed troubled, but in a harmless and almost vulnerable way, it was disarming. Usually, Dahmer didn't make a moment. move until the club was about to close and everyone was trickling outside. At that point in the night, it didn't take much to convince his target to come home with him. Bringing men home to Grandma Dahmer's house was a risky proposition. So instead, he rented a cheap room at the Ambassador Hotel, an Art Deco City landmark that had decidedly fallen from glamour in the past couple of decades. From there, Dahmer repeated the same routine he'd mastered at the bathhouse, pour them a drugged drink, get down to business, and wait for them to fall asleep.

Once again, no one ever made a formal complaint. In fact, he even ran into some of the men he'd previously drugged while he was out at the bars, and they were perfectly cordial towards him. But all the while, Dahmer's rap sheet was expanding in other directions. Over the past year, been arrested three times. In April 1985, he earned a disorderly conduct charge after threatening to shoot a bartender who refused to serve him. Four months after that, he got a citation for giving the finger to a police officer on the street. Then, in September 1986, he was charged with indecent exposure after two 12-year-old boys caught him masturbating by the river. This last arrest got him stuck in court-ordered counseling for his sexual deviance and impulse control issues.

It was the first time he'd ever seen a psychiatrist, and it may have been too late to do him any good. According to his therapist, Dr. Evelyn Rosen, he was extremely uncooperative during sessions. He wouldn't talk about the incident that led to his arrest. He wouldn't talk about his personal life. Sometimes he refused to speak at all for the entire 50 minutes. session. Of course, he couldn't tell us therapist about all the crimes he hadn't yet been arrested for. Eventually, Dr. Rosen diagnosed him with schizoid personality disorder, which we discussed last week. It's defined in the DSM-5 as detachment from social relationships and a restricted range

of emotional expression. Dahmer was also sent for an evaluation at the University of Wisconsin's clinical psychology department. There, Dr. Kathy Bose concluded that he could become a psychopathic deviate or sociopath. She noted, without some type of intervention, which is supportive, he could gravitate toward further substance abuse with possible subsequent increased masochism or sadistic tendencies and behaviors. She had no idea how correct she was. While Dahmer was attending his court-ordered therapy, he continued to lure men back to his hotel room and drugged them. On November 20, 1987, his chosen target was Stephen Tuomi, a 25-year-old restaurant cook from a small town in Michigan. They met outside Club 219 right after closing time, went back to the Ambassador Hotel, went to bed.

And the next thing Jeff knew, he was waking up with a terrible hangover, and black and blue blue, bruises all over his arms. Stephen was lying under him, with his head dangling over the edge of the bed, and blood trickling from his mouth. His chest was beaten so badly that it was completely caved in. As hard as he tried, Dahmer couldn't remember a thing about what had happened, even years after the fact. Either he'd killed Tuomi in an unconscious state, or he'd completely erased.

the memory from his mind. He recalled, I felt complete shock, shock, horror, panic. I just couldn't believe it happened again after all those years when I'd done nothing like this. It had been more than nine years since the murder of Stephen Hicks, and in that time, Dahmer hadn't hurt anyone. He still had violent fantasies, but he'd been able to stop himself from acting on them. Until now, when they inexplicably found a way out. It's hard to say with certainty what happened here. It's always possible that Dahmer was just lying about forgetting to avoid sharing the details.

But given how thoroughly he recalled his other 16 murders, that seems a bit unlikely. Another possibility is that he was experiencing dissociative amnesia. This is when an individual is unable to recall a certain event, usually of a traumatic or stressful nature. Given how severely Dahmer's first murder affected him, it's possible his mind blocked out the memory of killing Stephen Tuomi to avoid the same guilt and stress or to avoid taking responsibility for what he'd done. Dissociative amnesia is often seen in people with personality disorders, including schizoid, schizotyple, borderline, and antisocial personality disorders, all of which Dahmer was diagnosed with at various points.

Jeff spent five hours pacing the hotel room, chain smoking cigarettes, trying to figure out what had happened and how to get himself out of this mess. Finally, by 1 p.m., he settled on a solution. He put the do-not-disturb sign on the door, hoping the maids would heat it, and slipped out to Woolworth to buy the biggest suitcase he could find. Then he came back to the hotel, stuffed Tuomi's body into the store, suitcase and lugged it out to the curb. He called a cab to take him back to Grandma Dahmer's house, where he'd have more space to dismember the corpse. The driver helped him lift the heavy

suitcase into the trunk, commenting, what do you got in there? A body? Domer replied, yeah, I do. By the time they got to the house, Grandma Domer was already asleep. Jeff took the suitcase down to the fruit cellar where no one would find it, and went to to bed. It had been a strange enough day already. He'd saved the disposal for later. This was on November 21st, a Saturday, and five days before Thanksgiving. The entire clan would be coming over that week, leaving him no time or privacy to deal with the body. So while the Dahmer's ate Thanksgiving dinner, Stephen Tuomi decomposed inside a suitcase in the cellar. below. By Saturday, everyone was gone, and Jeff was faced with the unpleasant task of dismembering

a weak-old corpse. He'd spent an anxiety-ridden weekend cutting the body into pieces. The bones he wrapped in an old sheet and smashed into dust with a sledgehammer, the head he wanted to keep as a souvenir. As a child, Jeff's father had shown him how to boil chicken bones in a bleach solution to clean them. Now he tried the same method on Stephen Tuomi's skull. Unfortunately, the bleach left the skull too brittle, and it had to be thrown away with the rest of the remains. On Monday morning, he left the remains in garbage bags on the curb, and they were spirited away to the dump. No charges were ever made for Stephen Tuomi's murder. There was no body to support an indictment. After the corpse was gone and his hands were clean, Damer had to decide how to move

forward. For nine miserable years, he tried to keep his violence at bay by drinking, by reading the Bible, by placating himself with animal bones and mannequins and temporarily drugged partners. But the dam had burst, and if he kept bottling his fantasies up, it was bound to happen again. he might as well stop fighting it. By this point, all the restraints holding him back had fallen off. For years, he didn't kill because he didn't have an opportunity. Now he had a wide pool of victims, a foolproof process to lure them in, and a basement where his work wouldn't be disturbed.

He hadn't killed because he was afraid of being caught. it was clear now that he could get away with anything. He hadn't killed because it was morally wrong, but if there was a God, he clearly was not listening to Jeffrey Dahmer's prayers for help. And if there was no God, no afterlife, and no larger meaning to human existence, what did it matter when or how someone died? In Dahmer's words, if a person doesn't think there is a God to be accountable, to, then what's the point of trying to modify your behavior to keep it within acceptable ranges?

After this, we'll see how far Dahmer fell down a black hole of his own creation. Now, back to the story. After his second murder in November 1987, 27-year-old Jeffrey Dahmer gave himself over to violence. He recalled, these thoughts are very, very important. powerful, very destructive, and they do not leave. After the fear and the terror of what I'd done had left, which took about a month or two, I started it all over again. From then on, it was a craving, a hunger, a compulsion. In the early morning hours of January 16th, 1988, Dahmer met a young man named James Doxtator, outside Club 219. Six feet tall, sporting a mustache and lingering outside a bar in the middle of the night. An observer might guess

Docs Tater was in his late teens. In reality, he was only 14. Dahmer offered Jamie $50 to spend the night with him. Jamie accepted, and they went back to Grandma Dahmer's house. She was a heavy sleeper. They spent the rest of the night together. And at about 4 a.m., Jamie said he had to be getting home. That was when Dahmer mixed him a spiked drink, held him in his arms until he fell asleep, and strangled him. As soon as the sun rose, Dahmer hid the body in the cellar and went upstairs to have breakfast with his grandmother. For the next few days, between his night shifts running the mixer at Ambrosia Chocolate Factory, he would go down to the cellar and lie next to Jamie's body, enjoying it for as long as he could.

But after four or five days, Grandma noticed the smell coming from downstairs. Once again, it was time for disposal. Cut off the flesh, sledgehammer the bones, hose the blood down the drain in the basement floor. The next morning, he showed up to another court-ordered therapy session with Dr. Rosen, as if nothing had happened. A month later in February 1988, Dahmer tried the same routine with 27-year-old Bobby Dwayne Simpson, who he met at a bar called The Phoenix. The drugs wore off earlier than expected, and Bobby woke up, still perfectly alive. Dahmer let him leave without incident.

The next night, Bobby went back to the Phoenix and recounted the story. The man at the bar stool next to him turned around and said, he drugged you too. Once again, the stigma and distrust of police kept Dahmer's surviving victims from pressing charges. And even if they had come forward, it's unlikely that anyone would have connected the druggings with what was about to become a wave of disappearances.

On March 24th, Richard Guerrero, age 22, became Dahmer's fourth victim. him. The very next weekend was Ronald Flowers Jr., age 25. As soon as they came inside the house, a voice called from upstairs. Is that you, Jeff? Grandma was awake, and she could hear the two sets of footsteps downstairs. Jeff shouted back, yes, Grandma, I'm just going to make myself a cup of coffee. She went back to bed. Jeff did make a cup of coffee, which he drugged and gave to Ronald. But with Grandma awake, murder was too risky. The next morning, before the pills had completely worn off, he helped

Ronald out of the house and to the bus stop. Two days later, Ronald woke up in a hospital with no memory of how he got there. By the time he was found, there were no drugs left in his system and no signs of sexual assault. He told the police the last thing he remembered was going home with Jeffrey Dahmer. The next day on April 5th, the police came to interview Dahmer. He denied doing anything wrong

and insisted that Ronald had just had too much to drink. He'd helped into the bus stop in the morning, and whatever happened after that, Jeff couldn't say. Without any real evidence to the contrary, the police had to let him go. September 26, 1988, 13-year-old Somsock's in Fossampong was walking home from school when Dahmer approached him, claiming he was looking for a model to pose for photos. He'd pay $50 for the hour. Somsoc asked him whether these would be nude photos or fully clothed.

Dahmer said it didn't matter. He seemed friendly enough, so Somsok agreed. Dahmer had recently moved out of his grandmother's house and was living in his own apartment. He brought Somsoc over, and after snapping a few polaroids, he made some sedative-laced coffee. But before the drugs had kicked in, he started trying to take off Somsoc's clothes. Realizing where the situation was going, Somsoc bolted for the door. He ran all the way back to his own house before passing out unconscious. The boy's parents called the police. Somsok was able to show the officers to Dahmer's apartment.

After a quick search, they found the Polaroid photos he'd taken and a bottle of sleeping pills. Finally, after drugging untold dozens of young men, Dahmer was arrested for a second-degree sexual assault. He spent only six days in jail before Lionel pulled together the money for his bail. This latest arrest meant another round of court-ordered psychological evaluations. Dr. Charles Lodi described Dahmer as insignificant psychological distress, anxious, tense, and depressed, with deep feelings of alienation.

Dr. Norman Goldfarb gave a second opinion. He was a seriously disturbed young man. The pressure he perceives seems to be increasing and he must be considered impulsive and dangerous. He was right. In the few months between his arrest and his sentencing, Domer killed again. March 25, 1989, Jeff met 24-year-old Anthony Lee Sears at a bar. They went back to Grandma Dommers' house and spent the night together.

When Tony tried to leave in the morning, Jeff drugged him and strangled him. This time, while disposing of the body, Domer kept the full head as well as the genitals. He called a taxidermist and asked for tips on preserving flesh. On that advice, he went to Ace Hardware and bought a 10-gallon plastic bucket and several bottles of cleaning acetone, a solvent that breaks down oils. After a week in the acetone solution, the body parts were a little dry, but still lifelike. He put them in a wooden box in his closet for safekeeping. As his court date approached, it looked as though this murder,

like all the others, would go completely undetected. And then, on the day of his sentencing in late May, Lionel stopped by to pick Jeffrey up. He happened to notice the wooden box in the closet and asked Jeff what was inside. If his father opened that box, everything was over. He tried to hedge by saying there was nothing in it. And even if there was, it was none of Lionel's business. Jeff was a grown man. He just turned 29 two days ago.

Couldn't he have any privacy in his own room? Lionel wasn't buying it. His alcoholic, sex offender son, had lost any right to privacy. He insisted that Jeff opened the box. Finally, Jeff admitted the truth. There were pornographic magazines inside. He didn't want to open it because grandma was right downstairs and it might upset her.

He promised he'd show Lionel the contents later, if he really wanted to see. Amazingly, it worked. Once Lionel had left, Jeff took the severed head and penis out of the wooden box and stored them in a small metal cosmetic case. By the time Lionel came back, the box was full of magazines, pornographic but perfectly legal. As for the metal case, Jeff stored it in his locker at Ambrosia Chocolate Factory. At his hearing on May 23rd, he was sentenced to one year in prison with work release, effective immediately. He could keep going to the factory six days a week.

But every night, he had to be back in his cell where he was left alone with his thoughts. At this point, Dahmer had lost any hope that he would overcome his compulsion to kill. Nothing could change whatever was going on in his mind. The only way out was suicide. which he considered but couldn't bring himself to do. Lest we give Dahmer too much credit, if he truly wanted to stop killing people, he could have just spoken up about the five murders he'd committed

and resigned himself to a lonely life in prison. It seems he was more upset about the pain he was personally going through than the pain he was causing others. In the end, he made the selfish choice. He would keep indulging his impulses even at the expense of other lives. He wrote an ironically contrite letter to the judge, asking for leniency in his sentence.

It read, Sir, I have always believed that a man should be willing to assume responsibility for the mistakes that he makes in life. What I did was deplorable. The world has enough misery in it without my adding more to it. Lionel Dahmer wrote his own letter, urging the court to send Jeff back to therapy.

He wrote, I sincerely hope that you might intervene in some way to help my son, whom I love very much, and for whom I want a better life. This may be our last chance. For his part, Sohmsak Sintasempoen and his family wrote a letter begging the judge not to let Dahmer off the hook so easily. They believed he was dangerous and should be watched wherever he went. But in the end, it was Jeffrey's not.

it was Jeffrey Dahmer who prevailed. He was released two months early in March 1990. Dahmer had been convicted of a Class C felony, punishable by up to 40 years in prison. He only served 10 months of work release before walking free. It's difficult to understand how this could happen, but the most common explanation is that Dahmer was white, and the Synthasom Pons were Lausian immigrants. Milwaukee is one of the most segregated cities in the United States. At the time, the Milwaukee Police Department was 80% white, and 86% of the county's prison admissions were non-white.

The judge and parole board might not have consciously considered Dahmer's race, but there is ample evidence that racial bias affect sentencing for prisoners. For example, a 2014 study of Milwaukee County records found that 41% of white people arrested for drug possession were let go without being prosecuted compared to only 27% for black people. So, since Dahmer was white, middle class, intelligent, and fairly good at manipulating others, his word was apparently considered more valuable than that of a family of Asian immigrants. and the word of several psychiatrists, who painted him as dangerous and disturbed. Now that he was back on the streets, Dahmer was determined to change absolutely nothing about his behavior. The fear that had gripped him after his first murder, nearly 12 years ago, had now completely evaporated. He recalled, that's what happens when you think you don't have to be accountable to anyone.

You think you can hide your activities and never have to account for them. It can lead to anything then, which it did. In our next episode, we'll follow the final year of Dahmer's murderous career. As his body count climbed, the lack of attention from authorities only became more egregious. If you enjoyed this episode, check out our podcast, Serial Killers, which you can listen to for free on Spotify or wherever you. you listen to podcasts. To stream serial killers for free on Spotify, just open the app and type serial killers in the search bar. And don't forget to follow us on Facebook and Instagram at

Parcast and Twitter at Parcast Network. We'll see you next time. Dahmer is a special Parcast Studios original episode created by Max Cutler. It is executive produced by Max Cutler, sound design by Russell Nash with production assistance by Ron Shapiro. Carly Madden, Freddie Beckley, and Paul Mahler. This episode was written by Kate Gallagher, with writing assistance by Drew Cole, and stars Greg Polson and Vanessa Richardson. Want to hear something spooky.

Some monster, it reminded me of Bigfoot. Monsters Among Us is a weekly podcast featuring true stories of the paranormal. One of the boys started to exhibit demonic possession. Stories straight from the witnesses' mouths themselves. Something very snake-like lifted its head. out of the water. Hosted by me, your guide, Derek Hayes. Somehow I lost eight whole hours.

Listen now on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. A beloved 75-year-old man washing up, getting ready for bed, is brutally beaten and killed. Despite an exhaustive investigation, the killer avoids arrest and then strikes again. I'm Global News crime reporter Nancy Hicks. You might listen to a lot of true crime. podcast this year, but they're not Crime Beat. Search for and follow the award-winning podcast Crime Beat on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and wherever you find your favorite podcasts.