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You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about him, Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker DTK. Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host journalist and author Dan Zufanski.
Good Evening. In the late hours of July twenty second, nineteen ninety one, Detective Patrick Pat Kennedy of the Milwaukee Police Department was asked to respond to a possible homicide. Little did he know that he would soon be delving into the dark mind of one of America's most notorious serial killers, the Milwaukee cannibal, Jeffrey Dahmer. As the media clamored for details, Kennedy spent the next six weeks sixteen
hours a day locked in an interrogation room with Dahmer. There, the thirty one year old killer described in lurid detail how he lured seventeen young men to his apartment, where he strangled, sexually assaulted, dismembered, and in some cases, cannibalized
His victims. In Grilling Dahmer, The Interrogation of the Milwaukee Cannibal, the reader is taken on a horrifying tour into the mind of evil as Kennedy patiently, meticulously listened to unspeakable horrors so that a monster would be taken off the streets forever. The book they were featuring this evening is Grilling Dahmer, The Interrogation of the Milwaukee Cannibal, with my special guest journalist and author Robin maharaj Welcome back to
the program, and thank you so much for this interview. Maharaje.
Thank you very much.
Dan, thank you so much with this book, Grilling Dahmer. Why don't you tell our audience how you came to be involved with Patrick Kennedy and ultimately involved with this incredible story.
Well, quite a few years ago, probably back about almost eight nine years ago. You know, I was working as a freelance writer. I always had a full time job, but I was always, you know, sort of hungry to be writing all the time, and so I was working as a freelance writer. And I guess it was around the time I turned forty and I thought, you know, I've been sort of tackling lots of different topics, and it's fabulous because you do get to learn about a
lot of different things. But I kind of got to a point where it's like, you know what, I just really want to focus on the things that I'm really interested in and I kind of feel like I know a lot about So true crime, of course, was one of those things, and I thought, I'm just going to try and tackle an article and write a true crime
article into sort of see how it goes. So I chose Jeffrey Dahmer because I had seen something listed and it was kind of like, you know, the the top ten most evil people in history, and for whatever reason, Dahmer was number three. So there was like Stalin Hitler Dahmer, and I was like, you know, I know he was a bad guy. I know he did some really monstrous things, but really was he the most you know, third most
evil person in the history of the world. So it kind of made me want to explore him a little bit and do some you know, background check on him and research a little bit more about the case. I mean, I was familiar obviously with who Jeffrey Dahmer was, and I knew sort of the highlights of the story and the crimes that he had been you know, I had been charged with and eventually was in prison for. But I didn't really know that much about him. So I
decided I wanted to do an article about him. And one of the reasons that I kind of felt a little bit of the difference between him and sort of other killers that you know, you've profiled in books on your show. It's I just sort of felt like, you know, this is a guy who he was killing, but it was really a means to an end because he was really a neclophiliac and he really just wanted those bodies, And ultimately, really we really wanted was companionship. He wanted
a person. He wanted somebody there to be with him because he'd never really experienced love. He didn't really like conflict, he didn't really like confrontations, so he didn't really want a true partner, someone that he could be conversing with and challenging him at all. He just really wanted somebody there who he could talk to and do things with. So but I found, you know, his place of coming was really out of a place of love, out of a place of need and loneliness. So to me, I thought,
that's something I want to explore. So I contacted a few people and eventually I found myself in touch with Patrick Kennedy through email, and he seemed to be kind of interested in my take on it, and he said, you know, I have notes and reports and different things that I've kept over all these years. Maybe it'll help you. So, as it turned out, he became a source for my
interview and I ended up going down to Wisconsin. I met with him, we did the interview, he showed me all of these notes and everything that he had, and we even talked about possibly collaborating on something a book together. My goal was that, you know, this is his story and he just needs some assistance to kind of get it through to fruition finished and then maybe to be
looked at by a publisher. But as it turned out, five days after we met in Wisconsin, he Patrick had a heart attack and died, And so I did eventually go on with my article. I sent it to his widow and she said, you know, you did a really nice job here, and I think that you kind of had an understanding of how Patrick felt about Dahmer. Why don't you just take the notes, take whatever you have there, and just see what you can do with it. If it becomes a book, great, But she wasn't really prepared
to do anything, like she didn't have the experience. I don't think she really even had the ambition or the drive necessarily to turn this into a book. She said, it'll probably just go into a desk drawer otherwise, you know. So with that, I said, you know, not only is this an interesting story that should really be told, but it's also now kind of a legacy for Kennedy because to me, he was a detective who just happened to be responsible for in interrogating one of the most notorious
serial killers in American history. But really, he Patrick had an interesting story as well.
Yes, so you talk about his background, fourth generation police officer, and then his rise in the police ranks itself till that point when he was slated for the interrogation of Jeffrey Dahmer by his lieutenant at that time, and after he died and you corresponded with his widow, Really what you were left with was the description, the total description of Jeffrey Dahmer's confession, but also his complete interaction as he was the main detective along with another detective, but
he was absolutely the main detective in erit in interrogating Jeffrey Dahmer. So what you did have from Patrick Kennedy's widow was essentially how he did this, what Jeffrey Dahmer had said, and he was able to obtain identification of all the victims with Jeffrey Dahmer's cooperation, and yeah, identification and details about all all of the murders to corroborate his confession that Patrick Kennedy elicited from him.
M hmm. Yeah. So Dahmer very quickly felt the rapport obviously with Kennedy and said, you know, I'll talk, but I only want to talk to you. And so there was something there that I think it was to Patrick saying, you know, like hi, you know, like introduced themselves and he wasn't going to rough them up. Like there was a couple of other detectives who had kind of tackled him because they realized, you know, we've got somebody here who seems to be dangerous. And this is all of
course in Dahmer's apartment. By the time, Kennedy, who was a plain closed detective, showed up. You know, he'd been sort of wrestling with the cops a little bit. He was handcuffed and they got a mop and I think he was just like a friendly face all of a sudden, and Dahmer e Ben said, are you going to beat me up too? And Patrick said, no, whine, I'm just gonna I'm just gonna hang out with you for a little bit and then we're going to take you downtown
and then I want to talk to you. I want to hear what you have to say.
Tell us a little bit more about Patrick Kennedy's background concerning his religious upbringing and before we talk about his assignment to interrogate Jeffrey Dahmer and his plan on how he would interrogate him.
Well, Patrick was a Catholic, and I mean a Catholic I think all through his life, right up to the end of his life, and you know, I think he was a practicing Catholic. He found a lot of fallows in the church. And in fact, even before you know he was embarking on any kind of career, when he was a young man or you know, like late teens, early twen he's trying to decide what he wanted to do with his future. He really contemplated actually becoming a priest.
You know, he was that involved with the Catholic Church. I think he actually did some scholarship stuff with a religious school that he went to and attended. So he was really, you know, very very involved in in you know,
the Catholic Church. And then Patrick had a drinking problem, like he was an alcoholic, and so when it came time where he decided, okay, I'm just going to you know, I want to beat this, i want to get past this, it was really through the church, Like he went through a counseling kind of program through that was offered to the church. So it was a really important part of
his life. You know, I would say, I think the idea of the confessional I think was important to Patrick, and I think that idea of making it, you know, a place of sort of comfort for that person, I mean, no matter what it is that they're confessing to, you know, just kind of be there and say like, I'm not here to judge you, I'm just here to listen to
what you have to say. That was definitely the way that Kennedy kind of, I think became sort of a somebody that Dahmer could or felt that he could talk to, because we're talking about Dahmer, who most people who knew him, the few people that knew him, and those that knew him really well, would say, you know, under any kind of type of pressure or authority where you know, he felt he was being confronted, he would just shut down, like he just would not talk. He had nothing to
say to anybody, and that was it. So the idea that Patrick could say, well, do you know, do you want some coffee? How about a cigarette? Have you eaten at all, you know lately? Can we get just sounded like this was all sort of a humane thing that Patrick was doing, and that I think Dahmer responded to. Patrick knew as well, because of him being an alcoholic or recovering alcoholic himself, very quickly recognized in Jeff, like
this guy I think has got a drinking problem. Like when he showed up, like when he came to the police station, I think he was just sobering out from an evening the night of drinking. And I think Patrick recognized that right away and said, you know, do you think you have a drinking problem? Jeff? And just said yeah, and Patrick said, you know, this is something that we can we can talk about, so between religion and sort of is there a God and what role does God
play in your life? Plus alcoholism and sort of the effects that that has had in terms of, you know, decisions and things that he would make. I think for Dahmer's. In Dahmer's case, it kind of gave him energy, It kind of gave him confidence and some courage a little bit. And often he would say when it came to dismembering bodies and the things that he was doing, he'd often have to be very drunk in order to be able to do that. So yeah, so they'd sort of connected
along the way. But Patrick, before he became a police officer, he did come from a family of cops, but he actually went into social work first, and he was working with ex convicts and they were doing a program where they were working on houses. So they were teaching these guys' skills like construction and electrical work and plumbing, and then they would fix up houses in Milwaukee, sell them, use the money that they made and buy another house
that needed to work on. And so this was to give these guys like something to do, something that wasn't criminal, and also to teach them some skills. So he did that for quite a long time, but his family was growing. He got married very young. He had his first child when he was very young, like nineteen twenty years old. So by the time his third child came along, and we're talking Catholic private schools, he needed a her career. He needed a career that was going to pay him
a little bit more money. So I think that's when he decided to join the police force. And he also kind of felt, like, you know, I know the scheduling, I know how it works, I know what it looks like to be a cop, because again, his father was a police officer, so he kind of knew what was expected of him. And yeah, so he very quickly, Like I mean, I think he went up the ranks and became a homicide detective pretty young when he encountered Dahmer for the first time. Packed with thirty seven.
You talk about this July twenty second, nineteen ninety one, and anybody that has ever followed any true crime story or Jeffrey Dahmer story knows, so we don't have to go through it again. But this is Tracy Edwards is found by police. So he flags down police with a handcuff around one arm, and he doesn't really he just wants to getandcupped unhandcuffed, and so he directs the police to the nearby apartment of Jeffrey Dahmer, and he doesn't
want any criminal charges. He just wants the key to the handcuffs, and Jeffrey Dahmer can't produce that, so there's a scuffle with police. After they take a look around, they see some polaroids of dismembered people, and so while they are going through, Milwaukee Police Department is going through there and the first thing they do is they look in the fridge and they see a severed head in the fridge staring at them. But Kennedy is not at
the home itself. He is interrogating Jeffrey Dahmer. So the thing is obviously one of the main issues always, if not the main issue is when the issue of whether this person will ask for an attorney. So obviously Dahmer says, I don't want to be uncooperative, but do you think I should get a lawyer? So what is the what does Patrick Kennedy do, because this is a big issue. What does he say to Jeffrey Dahmer to convince him to keep talking and not talk to a lawyer.
Well, you know, he kind of uses his Dahmers you know, first statement, which is, you know, I really want to try and help you guys, and you know, if I can help you to tell you, you know who these guys were, help you identify it. Like he really they were saying, this is what we need from you, and he is kind of agreeing to it. Pat actually did go to the apartment though he actually, I mean he did the interrogation and everything, and he wasn't the first
police officer on the scene. There were some like uniformed cops that were there with Tracy, but they've quickly called homic audism as they found the head. And Pat was actually at the police station with his partner and they were just getting ready to start their shift and they
got that call. They got that call you got to go check out this apartment, something about ahead in the freezer or fridge and you know it's probably nothing, but you need to go and look at you know, we'll go check it out and just say that we did it kind of thing. And so that's how he ends up at the apartment, and you know, yeah, Jeff had been kind of roughed up a little bit. He was already handcuffed. But that was actually when they first were introduced.
And I think that's too when Dahmer kind of realized, Okay, well maybe this maybe I can talk to this guy, you know, and so he kind of stuck with him the whole time until they got to the police station, and that's when Dahmer said, you know, I'll talk talk, but I only want to talk to him. And so then Pat's boss said, Okay, you know, you're on this guy. You're like glue. The thing about the lawyer, though Attitude asked about, was I guess somebody saw these things on
the news. They saw the name Jeffrey Dahmer, and so they actually called Jeff's dad. You know, Jeffrey was sort of saying to Pat, you know, do I need a lawyer? He was kind of a hemming and hauling a little bit, not sure. I kind of want to talk to you. I kind of want to keep going here. But I guess he was realizing I'm in really hot water. But it was actually Lionel, Jeff's father, who was in Ohio, heard about what was going on and said, you know,
I'm going to get a lawyer for my son. So he phoned a lawyer that they actually already had had some experience with. I mean, Jeff had been in some trouble before, nothing like this, but had had a lawyer before. So he got that lawyer and he came down and I guess this was really sort of the standoff almost, you know, the lawyer saying I don't want my client talking anymore. They're saying, well, he didn't hire you. You know, somebody else had hired you, and we got to find
out from Jeff what he wants to do. So you know, I guess they could have said, well, your lawyer's here, maybe you better just shut up, but they really wanted to. I mean, they wanted to continue him talking, and they were doing everything they could to kind of keep him, you know, communicating with them. So they said, well, you can.
Talk to us.
I mean, you can have your lawyer here, your rights can be you know, looked after. But if you sign the or Sayodlpie's paper that you want to continue talking to us and helping us, then you don't have to go away to your lawyer. You can sit here and still talk to us. So that's what he ultimately did. Though during the interrogation, the lawyer did have his assistant sitting in through pretty much everything, like she was there while he was confessing.
You right though, that he uses the He talks to Jeffrey Dahmer and realizes that Jeffrey Dahmer does not want to go to the bullpen with everybody that's been arrested that night. So he says, well, you can go down there if you want, but I know, he realized he does doesn't want to go down there, so he says to him, you can continue talking. We can just talk about your past, to talk about your family. So he
just encouraged him to talk. So there was an interesting ploy that he did that now all by himself in that room with Jeffrey Dahmer. He used that his Catholic upbringing, his experience in alcoholics anonymous. How did he use these aspects of his own personal life to be able to reach to Jeffrey Dahmer to plead to Jeffrey Dahmer to help in this investigation? And what was that help that they actually wanted once they did get this confession from him.
Well, you know, he was using religion, he was using a little bit of family, he was using the idea of dreanking, and I mean, I mean he didn't really want to come off and he didn't really want Jeff to be sort of suddenly thinking, hey, if I just blame alcohol, then suddenly I'm not quite so responsible. Like he wanted him to sort of own it a little bit. But but yeah, I mean he really sort of, you know, sort of said, well, maybe this, you know, affected you,
Like maybe all this drinking and everything affected you. And certainly, like in terms of all those the major things that happened in Dahmer's life, like you know, schooling and going on to college and then Army like everything, he'd washed out because he had this, you know, consistent drinking problem.
So I think I think what Pat did was he actually shared a lot of his own story, which I can't really think of them and the detective homicide detectives that would do that, you know, like they kind of sort of they just want to hear from the suspect. They don't necessarily want to share anything about their own lives. But I guess for whatever reason, you know, Pat fufelt as though this is some way I can reach this
this guy. And so some of that helped I saying in terms of just you know, kind of using a bit of it as an excuse, some of it as you know, a bit of you know, having him question why he was doing what he was doing. But really, as you said, just get him talking, just kind of get in to go through each of the stories of each of the men that he met, and how did he manage to convince them to come back, because don't forget, I mean, that's essentially how he operated. He wasn't going
around abducting people from the street. He was making connections with people very quickly McMahon and saying, why don't you come back to my place and we'll have some drinks or we can watch a movie or whatever. And I mean, you know, that was kind of remarkable. They needed Dahmer though, they really needed Dahmer because back in ninety one, I mean sure DNA was accessible, but not nearly as accessible as it is now. And they didn't necessarily know ill.
I mean, they didn't have like a list of potential victims because people hadn't I mean, some people had maybe been reported missing, but I don't think the Milwaukee police really took those missing reports all that seriously because I think they looked at these photos of these very strong, healthy looking men and saying, well, you know, whoever this guy tangled with, I'm sure this person you know, was the one that came out successful. They just didn't think
of these as potential victims. Whereas Dahmer was making them very docile. He was giving them drinks, but they were laced with drugs. So these guys were very docile and willing to kind of just you know, be a victim for Dahmer. But yeah, they needed Dahmer to identify those people because between photographs and what Dahmer was telling them about dates, he's actually pretty good about remembering, Oh, I remember meeting this guy at the mall. You know was summertime.
And this is basically the rules that I used to get him to come back to my apartment.
This he's an opportunity to stop for a second for these messages.
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We were talking about the ploys and the techniques that Patrick Kennedy employed to get this incredible confession, to be able to identify all of the victims in the end, and it took, like you say, to the six weeks speaking to them every day. One of the things that was instrumental was the what Jeffrey Dahmer felt when speaking
to Patrick Kennedy. He did not want to He didn't want Patrick Kennedy to feel, to feel, Patrick Kennedy to judge him, and so Patrick Kennedy used a non judgmental attitude towards everything that Jeffrey Dahmer said, and even some of the times, as you write in this incredible detailed confession, that there was times he had to walk out and walk out of that room and didn't even believe what
he was being told till he got confirmation. But the biggest thing that he used was that non judgmental attitude. And when Jeffrey looked at him or his partner later on, they had that look of no, not the disgust that they probably would feel, that they just had this non judgmental attitude.
Yeah, Like I think it was, you know, everything that he was telling them, you know, from the point of like, oh I started to skin, you know, skin the victims, or I was you know, taking the bones away, or I decided you know, like, I really like this victim, so I wanted to experiment with eating this for you know, eating them. I mean, you can't I can only imagine what these affects are thinking, because I'm sure on the one hand, they thought this guy's crazy and I mean
he's just you know, making up these stories. But as you know, and as they found out from you know, medical examiner and and sort of what they were finding in the apartment because of course, once they got him, you know, secured at the police station, they were starting to go through this apartment. Dahmer didn't even realize that right away, you know, he kind of sat up in his chair. I mean, they're going to my apartment. Now, you know, it's like, well, of course we found a
separate edit you fridge. We got to find out what else is there. But yeah, I mean it was just like, you know, incredible, like just when you sort of think, okay, well, it couldn't possibly get any worse than this, it somehow did. But yeah, they absolutely they kept it professional. They kept it very you know, calm, soothing, and I mean partly it was Jeff like, I mean, he wasn't a belligerent,
rude suspect I mean he was actually very polite. You know, he was, you know, kind of engaging, you know when they try to point out a little bit when he sort of had a bit of a sense of humor, you know. I mean, he wasn't an unpleasant person to have to spend. I mean, what he did was unpleasant, but I mean he himself was actually, you know, kind
of just an ordinary guy. So probably wouldn't have gone quite so smoothly had he just said, you know, f the cops, I'm not talking to anybody, and you know, like started lying to them, you know, or are telling them exaggerating or maybe sort of not giving all the information. I mean, he did kind of omit things occasionally, but I mean he always came forward with the truth. You know, they if they asked him about something, then he would tell them. But as you said, you know, he was
kind of worried. I mean, after all a sudden done, he was kind of worried about what they would think of him.
M hm. In this incredible interrogation, Jeffrey Dahmer at some point gets real relaxed, and Detective Murphy and Patrick Kennedy listened to these incredible stories. But of course they want to go chronologically through all of his victims. So he starts with June nineteen seventy eight in Ohio, and he talks about being pulled over by an officer with garbage bags in the back seat. And he's not really pulled over any specific reason, but the officer, this Richard Munsey,
is questioning him. So in this interrogation, Jeffrey Dahmer is telling them about an officer in Ohio in nineteen seventy eight that pulls them over. So tell us just a little bit more about this story that probably many people know. But also that Patrick Kennedy, once he hears this, needs to get verification of this story. So tell us just a little bit about the victim and then the verification of this incredible story.
Sure well, there in June that this would have been around the time that jeff was graduating from high school. He was basically on his own. He was living in Ohio. He was living in this very nice house that his parents had. His parents were in the process of divorcing. They'd been kind of separated, and they were in the process of divorcing. His father had actually moved on with another woman who then became Jeffrey's stepmother, and in fact they were married for a very very long time afterwards.
And then but his mom, she ended up taking the younger brother to Wisconsin. She wanted to go and be a little bit closer to her family. So here's jeff in Ohio, and you know, he's like eighteen nineteen years old. And I think I always suspected that he kind of arranged this a little bit that I think his mom, who was so upset with his dad, said, you know, like call your father and tell them that we're gone and that you're on your own here. I don't think
he did that right away. I think he kind of just said, you know, I kind of been like being in this household by myself. There was access to booze, he could kind of come and go as he wanted. No one was really putting any pressure on him. So he was sort of living in this house for several weeks before his dad came and then just that he was living on his own and wondering where, you know,
why why he didn't called for sooner. But anyways, while this, while this period of time was that he was on his own, he had been out driving and he picked up a hitchhiker, and there was a young man named Stephen Hicks, and he was actually on his way to a music festival, but he had his sum out, and so Jeff picked him up and they started chatting, and he said, why don't you come back to my house.
I've got booze there. We could maybe smoke a little pot whatever and just kind of hang out, listen to music, kind of hang out for a while. So this guy went along with it, and so I think Jeff was quite attracted to the guy, and you know, they were having conversations about school, about summer music whatever, and drinking and just kind of hanging out and partying a little bit. Well, eventually this guy said, you know, I got to go because I want to get back onto the highway and
continue onto my music festival. And Jeff didn't want him to go. He didn't want him to leave. So they ended up wrestling around and kind of fighting a bit, and Jeff picked up a like a barbell candle, so that the metal part of the barbell and struck this kid in the head and so he the course was unconscious. And then Jeff, I think he did some things first of all, and then he ended up strangling this young man,
and he was quite freaked out. You know. Of course, this was his first time ever doing anything like this, and so he was, you know, I think, on the wine hands, very sexually excited, but at the same time, he was also terrified because what happens if somebody finds out. So he ended up destroying this young man. He cut up the body and there was into body parts, and he put these body parts into these big bags. And one night, very late, he was out driving and this cop,
this officer Mundy, pulled him over. And I think the reason he actually stopped him was because it was like a quiet kind of country road and there was this one car that was kind of not really swerving, but it was kind of just not driving all that straight. So the guy's on a probably some teenager who's been drinking. I better pull him over. So sure enough it was Jeff, and you know, he was a young kid, teenager, and so he said to him, you know, have you been
drinking tonight, young man? And Jeff said, well away. Earlier I was hanging out with a friend and we had a couple of beers. But you know, I'm not drunk now. And so the officer sort of had his flashlight and he's looking in the car and he's like, what's with all these bags in the back seat. So Jeff, very quickly, thinking on his feet, said well, actually it's their garbage bags, and that's where I'm headed now. I wanted to go
to the dump. My mom asked me to do this earlier, and I'd forgotten, and she's really upset right now because she and my dad are going through a divorce, and I just thought this would kind of cheer her up. That's why I kind of, you know, did something that she had asked. So kind of a lame excuse, I guess. But anyways, somehow, with the charm and the politeness whatever, Jeff was able to sell this story. So the guy basically said, well, you know what, the dump is closed.
You can't leave bags outside, so you better just head home. He did take the license plate information and the license you know of Jeff down on a note pad or whatever, but he basically just sent him on his way, no ticket,
no citation, just a warning. And so Jeff made it home, and I guess she was so terrified about the idea of maybe being caught again that he actually unpacked all these bags and he crushed the bones and the body as much as he possibly could, and then he scattered what he could in the back woods behind this house in Ohio, so there was kind of a woodsy area, so he just kind of like put the body out there. And so fast forward thirteen years or so, and we're
now in nineteen ninety one. Jeff's been arrested and he's in custody and he's explaining to the detectives of these victims and sort of how it all unraveled in terms of how he managed to find these men in Milwaukee. But he did say, I had this earlier killing which happened in Ohio. So he went through and he told
them the whole story. So they said, well, we're going to have to bring somebody from Ohio just to verify, because they wanted to go through in Ohio missing records, you know, as far as missing men from that era from the late seventies, and to see how many people could fit that description. So this detective from Ohio in this period of time, when the detectives in Milwaukee are talking to Chess, they bring this detective in and he's got photos and they're out on the table and he's
showing Dahmer, and Dahmer picks him out right away. He said, this is the guy right here, Stephen Hicks. And so that's you know, that's kind of how they identified that one. And when he was describing with this officer from Ohio exactly what happened, you know, like I killed them, and then I tried to get rid of the body in these garbage bags, I got stopped, and then I ended up just going home and scattering the bones and the
body parts in my backyard. The officer who had come from Ohio later was talking with the two detectives and said, you know what that was me. I was the detective that stopped him. And it was actually Monsie that they in nineteen ninety one sent from Ohio to Wisconsin to verify, either verify or discredit what this guy was telling them. So they were kind of I mean, Murphy Patrick's partner was said to go, hey, you could have stocked this
same way back in nineteen seventy nine. And the guy was horrified, of course, but Kennedy very wisely, i think, and very kindly said to him, you know what, he's lied, and he's fled a lot of people, so don't feel too bad. But when they did go back to Ohio and they searched the grounds of the backyard of this house where a Dahmer had lived as a young teenager, they did find actually the remains after all those years, and they actually found a little piece of a retainer
that belonged to the victim. So between that they were able to go to the family who for thirteen years had no idea what happened to their their son, their brother, you know, their cousin just you know, he went off to a music festival and just disappeared and never heard it was never heard from again. Well, they finally were able to get the answers as to what happened and confirmed that he in fact was a victim back in nineteen seventy eight.
Yes, and that's incredible. Also May twenty six, nineteen ninety one. Again, anyone that has ever looked at this Dahmer story is aware of this. Nine one one call woman calls to report a young man naked, beaten up, can't stand up, needs help. Meanwhile, and she gives this young man she thinks he is a boy, a windbreaker to cover up two teen girls come over as well, and the police officers come and basically don't really appreciate so much of the women telling them what to do or what they
should look at. And they try to question the boy, but he is slurring his words. He can't really communicate to the police officers. And then Jeffrey Dahmer comes on the scene walking with a six pack and waltzes into this crowd of people and tells the police that it's his boyfriend, and certainly he's not young, and he's in his twenties and he's a boyfriend and often this has happened before. He's naked and drunk and runs out of
the apartments and he's had to go get him. So the police, despite the women trying to intervene, go back to the apartment. And so Dahmer was able to convince them that it was his boyfriend by showing them photos
of this consenting person in various provocative poses. He couldn't find the identification, but the police officers seemed to be impatient, or at least it seemed that Jeffrey Dahmer's explanation made a lot of sense, and they released this intoxicated or this young boy slurring his words, had not realizing that he was not realizing he was a boy and thinking
he was an adult. And then they left, and of course the famous conversations with the nine on one officer and also the dispatcher for everyone to know that they were very callous about the event also though, but May twenty sixth, nineteen ninety one, very much like the June nineteen seventy eight, when Patrick Kennedy and Detective Murphy are listening to these confections. He's horrified to realize that again these police officers released this Latian boy back to the
clutches of Jeffrey Dahmer. So he quickly.
Helped him back to the apartment and right back into the hands of a serial killer. Yeah.
Yeah, And so Patrick has again he's horrified because he knows that he's going to have to someone is going to have to confront these police officers, and this kind of information is going to be released, and these police officers are going to have to well, they will realize what they did that evening any kind of confirmation. Yeah, and you talked about Patrick Kennedy too, keeping Jeffrey Dahmer talking during this interview and Jeffrey did not want to
talk to other people. There was, as you write, many or a couple times when there was people FBI agents wanted to talk to them. The attorney Boyle had sent his assistant, Wendy Petrickis, and Patrick Kennedy did an admirable job in telling her, well, he hasn't requested for an attorney, so we're not going to let you talk to him.
We're not finished with our investigation. But then, as you write, a far more experienced her boss, attorney Boyle, comes down to the police station, and you write about how Patrick Kennedy deals with this attorney and his request to speak to his client. Tell us how Patrick Kennedy deals with this attorney and what this attorney actually gets as a result, maybe not what he wanted.
Well, I mean I think that Boyle was basically just you know, like get my client out of there, you know, like arrest him if you're going to, but I don't want you talking to him anymore. And they basically just sick, you know, he's grown like I mean, you know, yeah, you've got to call from the dad and you know him he has been a client of yours previously for some other you know interractions that Jeff had had done.
But you know, like we you know, he's willing to talk to us, and we are going to continue questioning him. And so I think Boyle, you know, I mean, he was really upset and frustrated, and you know, I mean, of course they don't they don't know all yet that's sort of coming. I mean, it's just sort of starting to unfold. So they don't really even know yet how
bad it's getting. I mean, they just they just know it's bad, but they don't necessarily know the number of victims and what exactly Jeff was doing with these victims, and you know how many close calls there had been, you know, where Jeff maybe could have been caught earlier. You know, they don't know any of that yet. So I mean, I think Kat just really stood his ground, and I mean personally he knew like, I think I
can get through to this guy. I think I can talk to Dahmer and I can get him to confess. I mean, he likes me. He's he's expressed, you know, like when I leave the room, he's where are you going? Are you coming back? Like he's very much. There was something in there. There was a rapport there and Pat was not just going to let the lawyer kind of come in and do his singing and dancing and risk away as the client. He was determined that this is gonna,
you know, this is going to happen. Because Dahmer wanted to talk to the police. He said, he seems like he's ready to confess. So they agreed. They did agree that somebody, like some legal representation should be in the room and sorry the Dahmer went along with that as the detectives as well. And I guess from that point of view, it was like, you know, we don't want to we want to make sure that when this case, whatever happens, goes to court, we want to make sure
that you know, uh, we haven't violated Jeff's right. But they didn't. I mean, he said, I want to continue talking to you. I know my lawyers here. I know he wants me to stop talking and to shut up, but I want to keep talking. And he said I want to help, Like at this point, I'm caught, there's really nothing I can do. I know I'm going to be going away for life. I want to help to to identify who these guys were and don't forget. You know, at this point, Dahmer is kind of like coming out
of this you know, boozy drunken state. You know, he's sort of starting to realize like the implication of what's going to happen, and once he knows they're going through my apartment, all of my secrets are going to come out, you know, Like he was basically just yeah, I'm I'm going to do what I can to make amends as
soon as I can. You know, there's really nothing he could do to to fully you know, be forgiven for what he had done by certainly not by the victims' families or anything, but I meant at least he could do I guess he felt was to identify who the victims were.
Well, we kind of skip over the brilliance of Patrick Kennedy planting these ideas in Jeffrey Dahmer's head to the point where he leaves the room and comes back and Jeffrey Dahmer says, you know, basically, I think I know how to make amends. You know, after he plants these ideas that the only way to make amends to really again to do something favorable out of this situation. It was horrible was to identify the victims for the families so that they could have that peace of mind. And
so he agreed to that. But Patrick planted all of these ideas for that something beneficial could happen from this. And what I also, you don't really write about, but we have to realize that Patrick Kennedy is a handsome man. He's six foot seven and two hundred and sixty five pounds with you, as you write, a very gentle nature. Now, Jeffrey Dahmer, in this interrogation, it's incredible how again, this vicious, remorseless, psychopathic killer is very vulnerable and childlike in that room.
Even though he's an articulate, intelligent man, he is very vulnerable.
And Patrick Kennedy at least uses that fact to be able to reach Jeffrey Dahmer at first, when like you said, he was in a sort of a drunken stupor still and then he kept coming out of it, and they kept feeding him coffee and cigarettes, and as you write as well, that cigarettes and coffee were again part of the motivation Jeffrey Dahmer thinking that he had a you know, had a nicotine addiction, so cigarettes and coffee and later on doughnuts and just a non judgmental, even friendly discourse
many times. And as you write too that when he was writing out the confection, when they wanted to get all of the details so they were able to identify the victims, that those details, those incredible details were forthcoming. For Jeffrey Dahmer, he acted, you write, or Patrick writes that it was like therapy to him. He seemed like he was talking to a therapist during this entire again many many weeks of interrogation.
Well, you kind of have to think, like all of this is kind of kept as inside Dahmer, and you know, regardless of what you think of him in terms of as a person, I mean, you know, there must have been some sort of I mean, he must have known, Okay, well I'm done. I mean, I'm going to be in prison and that's it. I'm We're going to see the light of day. And I also have to live with what I've done. People are going to be referring to
me as a monster. My family, you know, they're going to be affected because of the last name and that that connection. You know, they're always go, oh, you know, Dahmer, you really did Jeffrey Dahmer, and you know, so, I mean there was definitely I think there must have been some relief in a way for Dahmer to just be able to kind of like get it all out, you know, like I mean, probably he in the worst way. He never thought he'd ever have to, or he wouldn't want
to do that. But I think in that particular interrogation room, with that particular detective at work, I mean, Jeff could have all I mean, he could have shut down. That was sort of one option. The other one is that, you know, he was a very like kind of a charming guy, like he could be charming when he wanted to, very polite, you know, yes, or nostre, very deferential, and I mean he could have just like said all these
nice things to Kennedy, but lied, you know. I mean, that's how he managed to get away with you know, the cop in Ohio and the cops on the street, with the young Layishan boy and other people where he was a you know, parole officers in the past, and other people where he was able to just kind of like a everything's a okay, nothing to see here, nothing to worry about here, you know what I mean, Because he was just sort of a nice guy. They all
kind of a app you know. If anything, he was boring and bland, you know, as far as they were concerned, like nothing, this guy is not capable of really anything, you know, other than some of these little skirmishes and things that he had been involved with previously. So I mean, I always think it's a fine line because I know a few people have said to me, well, you know, I mean, once they had him, I mean, what else was he going to do? Of course he was going
to confess. Not necessarily he a could have shut down. He also could have just lied and lied and lied, you know, and just denied at all, you know. But I mean, not only was he confessing. There's actually there was one large that they ended up dropping. Like they had a victim. They had I think they had a name, and he had actually identified somebody, but they couldn't find
anything of this victim. Like in the other the cases of the other victims, there was either a skull, or there was a driver's license, or there was something that belonged or was part of the victim that they could say, Okay, he was he's guilty and he killed this person because
we have something of that person. Well, there was one victim that they had absolutely nothing of that person, and so they decided to know what, We're not going to charge him for that because we really, you know, if it should come that, you know, he appeals or whatever, that could cause a problem later on because we don't
really have any evidence of this. So he was actually confessing to crimes that he had committed where they really couldn't have pinned anything on him because they had no truly had no evidence of it than just his words. But they attempted a few times, you know, they sort of thought, this is this seems a little too easy, you know, like he's just kind of forthcoming and whatever
it is we're asking him, he's telling us. And so they did attempt to try and trick him a couple of times, just to see if they could catch them in a lie something that they knew that they didn't think he knew that they knew. But every single time they tried to catch them or or came and a lie, he divided them. He was actually really, really brutally honest.
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slash murder to start your ritual today. Now we're talking about some of the things that Jeffrey Dahmer was saying in this interrogation, this brilliant arrogation by Patrick Kennedy. He
had gained Jeffrey Dahmer's trust. We always mentioned that there was times when they were asking questions, but this was further on in an investigation when they discovered that there was body parts in the fridge, and so they wanted to ask him about those body parts, about the idea, the notion that he would be eating some of his victims, and they asked him why he hadn't told them, why he hadn't divulged this material earlier. What was Jeffrey's Dahmer's response to that question.
Well, basically, he was concerned that they would think less of him somehow, that he didn't want to admit that he'd been catabalizing some of the victims, you know, that that was just too horrible, and that they would probably start to judge him, or that they wouldn't want to talk to him anymore, and that you know, that was the end of that. So he didn't didn't admit that
right away. He didn't tell them that, but when the medical examiner started talking to the detectives and saying, you know, like based on what you're he's telling you about numbers of victims and what we're finding, there's some discrepancy here. Plus we're finding like cuts of body parts in the fridge wrapped up like in butcher block paper like it's meat, and they weren't really finding a lot of food in the fridge, mostly just these packages. So I guess they
kind of came to that conclusion. So they did ask him about that and said, you know, there's there's something else happening. Were you doing this? And then he did admit it, but he was kind of concerned that they were going to just say, hey, that's it, We're done with you and you know that that would just be really too too much, too too that he'd gone too far.
Though. Also the about the boxes of myriadic acid, he also had this fifty seven gallon blue plastic what can you call a bin.
Not a bin, drummer container, yeah, drum.
Yeah, container Yeah, in his room. But what they asked them about the myriadic acid, but they also found a drill and drill bits. So now they in this interrogation there's also talk of what he does with the drill.
Right, Well, they found these tools, and then they also had found like he had Dollar had this kind of a weird idea of eventually kind of building a bit
of a shrine. He even had pictures that he drew out for them and that he had had and I guess they found in his notes where you know, he had sort of envisioned this, you know, big black chair almost kind of like Darth Vader, you know esque, and then he had these like skulls that were going to be kind of lined up, some of them were going to be painted, some of them were going to be natural. But he had this all kind of figured out, and
so they did know this. So in the summer, these skulls that there were holes in them that had been where a drill had been used. So they said, you know, what's that about, and he said that Initially, before he actually was killing victims, what he really had wanted to do was to basically incapacitate a man that he liked and basically keep that person with him so they would
kind of be half dead, half alive. That he would drill something and pour water into their brain and it would just kind of like just make them not be able to talk, communicate, fight, you know, whatever that they were just going to be. He could lead them around the apartment, if you will. He could set them in a chair, he could come home from work, tell him
about his day. He could, you know, fix dinner while they're sitting the victims sitting there, you know, and you know, then he put them to bed and they could do things to the body. He didn't really want a dead body. He wanted an incapacitated body. But the few times that he did try this, it didn't work. Like one person he was actually able to keep alive for quite a few hours, but when he got home he had laid out this person on a bed and that by the time he got home, this person had died, so it
was unsuccessful. And what he was trying to do with this drilling of you know, drilling and holes in the head, but essentially what I called it, or what I referred to it as he wanted like a zombie boyfriend, you know. He wanted somebody that he could love, that he could feel with the affectionate to him, but he could basically just sort of manipulate and do with what that person
whatever he wanted. But it just that didn't work. So then he ended up going as far as drugging them and then suffocating them and then he would be able to do whatever he wanted with the body, because that would that was ultimately his goal, because he wanted the body.
You you write very interesting thing that I'd never read before that he he said that the reason he wanted to rape them and he didn't want he didn't enjoy anal sex himself. He enjoyed all the other aspects of touching and kissing, oral sex, but he didn't like anal sex. So he wanted the ability to be able to ape them and do whatever he wanted with the body, but he did not want to have to reciprocate, especially that anal sex. So I see him seems like not great
reasons for murder. But through this entire interrogation, Pat Kennedy gets him to ask him for his motivations. What is the motivation for keeping the heads? For example, he would.
Ask hmmmmm, Well, you know, he had these kind of strange reasons for things. You know, sometimes it was well, I really liked this victim, you know, you know, I thought he was really sexy, and I liked his body especially, or you know, you know, there's other victims that he didn't really care so much about, so you know, he kind of just disposed of them, but not necessarily want to keep body part, maybe some other kind of little
trophy just to remind himself of the encounter. But you know, he was he kept things like he kept skulls, and as I said, he was sort of had this idea of a shrine with that. Yeah, so he yeah, I mean, I don't think it's unusual for killers like Jeff to keep things. But in terms of his motivation, like it was kind of like what I mentioned earlier in that you know, he wanted a very compliant partner. He also didn't want those people to leave. That was his big thing.
Like I think Dahmer had a lot of issues with regard to abandonment. And even this is maybe stemming from when he was a younger person in that you know, he was living at home with his family, his dad. He didn't come from a bad background, like I mean, his parents were carrying, they had money, There was some wealth there, you know, So I mean, I don't think that he and his brother kind of lacked for anything.
But what they did have in terms of a family unit was a dad who was very much a workaholic and he was very very much involved with the work that he was doing, so he wasn't around a lot. And he also had a wife. And then therefore, Jeff and his brother had a mom who did suffer from mental illness, and so there were times when she was in a psychiatric hospital or the times that she was at home, sometimes she was you know, just not really available.
Was that really present, because she'd be sleeping or she'd be have taken some medication, so she wasn't really you know, the times that Jeff remembers of his parents are mostly they were fighting. You know, that was the thing that he remembered the most. But you know, his dad was gone at different times. You know, he's either working or he was off with his girlfriend then became his wife. The mom left, you know that she just kind of threw up her hands with this marriage and she took
off with the younger son. So there was like abandonment things where people were constantly leaving him. And so when he decided I want to try and find a partner, that was his thing, as long as they don't leave me. And so there was one insistance I mentioned in the book where he met somebody who had actually come in
from out of town. I think they met at a bus stop, like a Greyhound bus bump or something, and this guy was in from Chicago, and so Jeff invited him to come and stay with him, and they went, you know and had some drinks and they went out and did some shopping, they made dinner. I mean, they had kind of like a weekend together almost, if you will. And I mean Jeff said it was like the closest
thing to a really chip he'd ever really had. Well, Sunday night comes this guy, like, I got to get back to Chicago because I'm to do it work tomorrow, and that's when Jeff's acted, you know, He's like, I didn't want him to leave, so he said, we'll have one more drink, and that's when he laced it. The guy passed out, Jeff strangled him and that was it. He was gone, now, never to be seen again.
What was contained in these interrogations, these confessions, though, was something not so understandable when you talk about, well, he just was a lonely guy and he wanted these people to stay with him, and that's why he killed them.
But there is other things that don't jive with that so much, in that his sexual feelings for every bit of that dismemberment process he talked about slicing the body open from the neck to the genitals and pulling out the viscera and sticking on the chest and the poor cops that had to see those photographs of this outside of the body, and also that he had the particular interest in the hearts of many of these victims as well well, or at least a few of them anyway,
And also just every bit of this he talked about, like intercourse with the viscera.
So yes, yeah, there was some very very strange things going on there. And I mean again that does go back to Dahmer's you know, kind of childhood in that he was very interested in roadkill. You know, like, hey, he lived in this kind of like country type setting and he didn't refers anyone knows, he never killed any animals, but you know, he was very very interested in going and picking up road kill. He would, you know, stupid or scrape it off the road and throw it into
a bag and bring it home. And he had this kind of like shed thing that was on their property that he would go and he would take these dead animals and you know, he would dismember them. And he liked the jars of different things that he would put things in, experimenting basically like putting acid in and seeing how long it would take for the fur and the skin to come off of say a cat, so and that just being left with the bones. Like he was really very interested in sort of what he called the
insides of things, the insides of dead things. And a few people who you know, talk with them, psychiatrists, psychologists, those those kind of people who had that kind of experience and education. We're sort of thinking that, you know, like this interest in all this stuff about dead people or dead things and the insides of things kind of meshed around the time that he would have been maybe going through puberty. So somehow this sort of jived with
his sexuality that he found. I mean, most people would find this completely distasteful, but I mean he found that sexually arousing those those inside organs or those those viscera pieces of the body. I mean, part of him had to be really drunk in order to do what he was doing, but I mean that was what he was very interested in. That was what he really was interested in, was the insides of dead things.
As he said, absolutely, with this confession, through this interrogation, they were over the course of all those weeks, they were able to identify and for example, they had the Munsey come with photos and to come to Milwaukee to be able to speak with Patrick Kennedy and look at the evidence that Dahmer provided. But they were able to get closure on seventeen murders thanks to Jeffrey Dahmer, weren't they.
Yeah? Yeah, And as they said, you know, like this was before DNA, this is before they had a list of potential victims. You know, they were really I think in a lot of ways kind of shooting in the dark.
They had to find photographs, they had to you know, they did go and look through some missing missing people report, but they also had like mugshots, you know, And I mean it was just kind of like really kind of a scramble to sort of figure out and piece together who these victims were, because it wasn't just I mean, it was kind of a different story in a way,
like if you think about say Bundy. I mean, there were bodies, right, there were bodies that were being found, and they had women victims that were being identified, and they but they didn't know who the killer was. You know, it was just these body parts, and they figured there was somebody that was out there attacking women of a
certain age that looked a certain way. In Dahmer's case, like they come across Dahmer first, and then it's all kind of unfoolds after that, and then the sort of trying to piece together He's saying, oh, well, I said, well lot of men, you know, and this is kind of how I did it. And they're trying to figure out, Okay, who did you kill who? And how do we find
out who those people are? And again, at a time when DNA was just not something that they could just you know, randomly, Oh, let's get this person in and maybe it's a relative of this person who says they're missing. You know. It was really really more of a puzzle in terms of trying to figure out who all these
folks were. They were actually quite amazed at Dahmer's recall in terms of like he could say, oh, I remember meeting this guy at this place around this time, you know, and so they were like, wow, So I mean he's actually I mean, obviously these were meaningful encounters for Dahmer, but I mean he actually had a pretty good memory.
M hmm.
It's interesting too when he talks about living at his grandma's house and at first, you know, looking for work, and then and then also going to church with his grandma and you know, she was a very religious person. But on the weekends and knowing her schedule, he would meet men on Fridays, want to keep them late the Sundays.
Knew the trash was going out Monday, so he routinely did things like picked them up, drugged them, dismembered them, destroyed them, disposed them, broke up the skeletons with a sledgehammer. He found ways of effectively disposing of his victims.
M h, very much, so, very much so. I mean some he kept. I mean they were in his apartment, you know. But I mean between the said drums and you know, throwing away and flushing down the toilet some smaller pieces of body, you know, he was at and accountabilizing obviously that yeah. I mean there was very little I mean, aside from what they found in the apartment
that he was hanging on to specifically. You know, it was a head, it was a skull, it was this bone or that bone because he liked the look of it or the way it felt, or you know, it was just something that meant something to him. But I mean, for the most part, he was actually able to dispose of most of his victims. And and no one kind of come across it and say, oh my god, you know,
I think we've got body parts here. We better hopeful call of the police and then having them investigate and figuring out, you know, like how did this body get here? And who's our perpetrator. I mean, he he was not on anyone's radar, Like, I mean, there wasn't a though, I remember someone just recently saying to me, like, you know, how could you have gotten away with so much when people knew there was a serial killer in their midst. It's like they didn't know that there was a serial killer.
I mean there was, Yeah, there was the missing men, you know that. I'm sure in some cases people were reporting, but again they were like, you know, this is a healthy young man, Like this man's not going to get into any trouble, Like he probably just ran off, or he decided he didn't want to live in Milwaukee anymore.
You know, he's just gone. And they police didn't really do that much to sort of I mean, they might have taken a report or whatever, but I mean I don't think they were really searching for any of these these guys. There did seem to be a little bit of knowledge within the gay community, Like I remember reading or seeing an interview with somebody who said, you know, there would be guys that would come to these clubs and then every once in a while I'd be like, hey, we haven't seen so.
And so in a while.
I wonder where he is. But I mean, no one really suspected that anything was going on where they were being killed. Maybe just oh, they're probably not hanging around here anymore. They maybe they moved or you know, they're just maybe they're in a different area of the city. You know, they were able to come up with reasons why, you know, suddenly someone who was there one day was not the next.
You rte that this the confession that he was giving, was leaked to the press by a janitor that worked in the District attorney's office. They thought it might have been Patrick Camas. He didn't say anything, didn't submit to any interviews, but this convention was leaked to the press. And this story, as anybody knows, was just massive because
of the DeSales that were emerging. Heads and fridges and accounibalize accountable, cannibalism and necrophilia get everyone's attention and the pressly it really exploded over this case, didn't it.
Absolutely, And because of the timing been occurring in like nineteen ninety one, that's when he was arrested, was in July of ninety one, so thirty years ago this summer for your information in case you didn't do the math, but yeah, so like thirty years ago, and like at that time, that's when like CNN and some of these twenty four hour news stations were just kind of kicking off, right. So I think when they, you know, there's this story
of a potential serial killer in Milwaukee, they did. They had the world's media show up for all the reasons that you mentioned, but I think also too, just because of that cycling, they needed stuff to be showing, you know, hour after hour, and they needed cases to follow, and they needed a story where there was going to be developments and press conferences, and so I mean, I think this case, you know, as horrible as it was, and as terrible as it was for all the family members
and victim's families, you know, the news media really kind of jumped on.
It at the same time. And I remember remarking saying this to you as well as that Silence of the Lambs is huge and now turned into a real franchise. But Silence of the Lambs was a very very successful book and very successful movie just months before this. You know, real life, that's right, you know, life imitates art, right exactly.
I think the movie came out in like February of nineteen ninety one, and Deaf was caught in July, so it's got People Magazine the week after he was arrested, referred to it as, you know, a real life Silence of the Lambs nightmare in Milwaukee, and so they really jumped on that, you know, the idea of a serial killer.
And I mean, you know, people remember the cannibalizing and the necrophilia of Dahmer, but you know, there was a period in there where he was actually skinning some of his victims, and he had said to the detectives, you know, I thought it might be kind of cool to just wear the skin, you know, And I mean that's not that different from what the movie, the plot of Silence of the Lambs is, So yeah, definitely people made that connection of like, wow, you know, like what is going
on in terms of like this tiny little apartment in Milwaukee and all this evil that just was happening.
You know, now, Patrick Kennedy through this whole thing. There are people one psychologist says to him, Oh no, the FBI says to him and his partner Murphy that they were suffering from Stockhold's Stockholm syndrome, meaning they got too close to Jeffrey Dahmer and they couldn't be objective. Tell us what you write about the effect of this whole thing on Patrick Kennedy, but also calls for him to see a psychologist. Just tell us a little bit about that.
Yeah, well, I think the FBI, I mean, you know, the way that they're portrayed in the book, I think is, you know really much how Detective Kennedy and his partner sort of saw this and she's like, you know, this is our case and we don't really need these guys to come in because they were saying all sorts of things. You know, you guys are getting too close to the suspect. You know, they were also quite amazed and thought really put forward the idea like how do you know he's
operating alone? Like how do you know that he doesn't have like a partner who's complicit in all of this? And you know, they were making some suggestions that you know, Kennedy and his partner couldn't they couldn't really put their finger on like why that they just knew that that wasn't the case, like they guess, I guess because they felt they knew Jeff well enough to realize this guy's a looner, Like he doesn't have really any friends, and you know, certainly he's not going to serve bring a
friend into what he was doing. I mean, what he was doing was all very on his own, very isolated. It was all for his own pleasure. He was a very selfish person, you know, and it was all just for meeting his own needs, even if it meant killing somebody else. So yeah, so I mean they kind of scoffed that a little bit, you know, in terms of they certainly didn't feel as that they were getting too
close to the suspect. I mean they felt that they were using I wouldn't say manipulating Dahmer, but I mean that they were sort of using things that they felt that Dahmer would would respond to positively, and that they you know, they would just sort of keep you know.
I think in a way too, it was almost like Patrick did be kind of become a friend to Jeff and maybe knowing like there was a guy who probably doesn't have a lot of friends, and if I kind of pretend to be his friend, you know, maybe it'll
get us a little further. His wife, actually, Kennedy's wife, was quite concerned about his mental state and dealing with all of this case, and was really worried that he was going to actually become an alcoholic again, that he was going to start to drink again, even after being sober for a really long time. But he said, this case is just so awful, like I could see you being driven to drink, and Pat wasn't really worried about that, you know, and but she really is all I want
you to go to counseling. I think he should see somebody. They actually did bring in, I think a psychiatrist or a psychologist or someone to come talk to them, but for the most part they kind of just said, you know what, we think we can handle this, you know. I mean, it was a pretty atrocious case, but I think for the most part they really did feel that
they could handle it. The case really was with Kennedy for a long time after and fact, I would almost say, like right up until just before he died, because he and I were even discussing like maybe this could be a book someday. But yeah, I mean, for years and years afterwards, people who wanted to do an interview or to talk about Jeff and would come to the Milwaukee Police Department to say, who can we speak to He was like the Dahmer detective, you got to go, you
got to talk to Kennedy. He's the Dahmer detective, and so you know, he was constantly sort of being asked about the case. What was Jeff really like? How did you manage to hear all of these horrible things? And like not want to throttle the guy. Kennedy went on to continue his work as a police officer and a
homicide detective for ten years. He did that, I think up to two thousand and one, and then he decided he wanted to go back to school, and so he went back to college and he actually became a criminologist and then started teaching other people who were wanting to
go into law enforcement. But he said to me one time, he said, you know, the first week when kids would start showing up, the students would start showing up, he said, I always had like three hundred students because they would say, oh my god, this is the guy, the Dahmer detective. You know. So he would say, you know, yeah, I'm going to kind of use a little bit about how we worked with Dahmer in order to fall the murders, you know, and figure out who all these people were.
But it's not going to be the only thing I'm talking about you know, there's other things that I'm going to be teaching here. So you know, he was always kind of associated with this, you know, like he was always associated with the Dahmer case. And as I said, right up until you know, a month before or less than a month before he passed away, he was at a film festival that I met him at in Madison, Wisconsin, and it was about there was a documentary about the
Dahmer case. So he was asked to be part of a Q and A. And then you know, he and I were talking first about my article and then possibly working on a book together. So I mean, this was a career changing, life changing case. And I always you know, to me, the remarkable or one of the remarkable things about it is that just that idea of how like a phone call or a certain thing can happen to you and it can just change the trajectory of your life. You know, he gets this call, he and his partner
there next step on the run. Okay, homicide, potential homicide. You guys have to go check it out. But I mean it could have been another detective just as easily, right, But here it was Patrick, and here he happened to be the right detective for this particular suspect, and then they went from there.
There was talk, and there always would be when you get somebody like this, it's accused of seventeen murders, that there's other jurisdictions that are interested in potentially speaking to him. One was because he did do a military term in Germany, that they might want to speak to people that in
there about unsplved murders and clear their books. But it was very interesting that you write how Jeffrey Dahmer responded the things like a request from Hollywood, Florida police regarding the disappearance and murder of Adam Walsh, who was found much later, just his head was found nineteen eighty one, disappearance from a seer store, which I have everybody knows is that John Walsh then became this victim's advocate and America's most wanted the host of him, producer or co
producer of that program. What was Jeffrey Dahmer's response to that there was other victims and other jurisdictions despite his confession, Well.
You know, well, I guess I guess he felt as though, like I'm telling you guys everything, you know, like I told you everything that you need to know, and you know, all the victims that I've explained and described, you know,
these are the only victims that there are. I don't think any police anywhere they came across a killer like him, you know, anyone who'd committed more than one murder would And also to like say, you know, not a domestic murder for example, where a spouse is killing another spouse, but when it's like a stranger on stranger kind of case, I think that it's pretty much protocol that they will do a history of who that person is, all the different places that they lived and where, all the different
cities that they were in and maybe visited during this period of time that they think crimes are being committed, and they will see are there any other victims homicide and unsolved cases where you know, there's sort of things match up in terms of, you know, the kind of victim that was profiled, or certain circumstances or mo's you know, is there anything that's similar that we can maybe see if this person happened to be there and could have
potentially been responsible for that current unsolved crime. They did know that Patrick had been in Florida, and it was around that time that Adam had gone missing. And I guess because of the fact that they found Ahead and then when they were investigating Jeff ten years later, they were head related. I mean they found a head in the fridge and they found skuld So they just really felt like, this is a good tip. You know, we really think that we've got somebody here. So they asked
him about it. They brought people from that police department to Milwaukee to sort of question jeff and ask him about it. He was actually very offended, you know, because he said, you know, these are like, this is a little boy, this was like a six year old boy, because I'm only interested in men. They did point out to him that some of his victims had been, you know, mid teen age, but he always maintained I thought they
were older. Like there was a fourteen year old. He thought he was like more like eighteen or nineteen, and another one that was seventeen. He thought it was in his early twenties. When he saw the picture of Adam Wall, she said, this is like a little kid, and I'm not interested in little kids.
Yes, you wrote too that Jeffrey Dahmer is very concerned about what Patrick Kennedy thought of him, and also Detective Murphy, but also society at large and his family would think once they discovered all the details of his murders and the other details like necrophilia. But despite that he had received correspondence while he was in jail. Was he surprised at the celebrity itself and the kind of celebrity that he received.
To be honest, I don't really know. I mean, I guess initially it probably did surprise him a little bit because he was coming to these interrogation meetings in the interrogation room, and he was saying, you know, I'm getting all these letters. I'm getting somebody who's asking me to review a book about another serial killer, you know. And I think after he was incarcerated, you know, he was like the most infamous prisoner they had where he was, where he was being kept, and so he was getting
all these letters and everything. So I think initially probably would be the same for anybody, except for those that are really seeking out publicity. Some serial killers really love the publicity that they get. But I mean, in Jeff's case, I think it was pretty much benign about the whole thing. But once he did start to get people wanting to correspond with him, or sending pictures or saying things like you know, like they just were interested in him because
of the celebrity, I guess. But you know, I think initially it kind of was surprising to him and puzzling. He didn't really understand it. But then as time went on, I think he kind of enjoyed it a little bit. You know, like they said that somebody had gone to see him when he was in prison, well not gone to see him, but had gone to see another person in prison and happened to see Jeff when he was there, and they said, you know, he's you know a little
bit different than when they had first met him. You know, like he was he was well known in that prison. You know, people would walk by and be whispering, Oh, that's Dahmer. You know, that's Jeffrey Dahmer, or Hi Jeff. You know, everyone seemed to know who he was and what his name was. For the first part of his incarceration, he was in isolation. But you know, he was not happy in prison. I mean, he said, I deserve to be here. In fact, he felt he deserved to die
for what he had done. But he said, you know, they don't have the death penalty in Wiscon and so he was going to be facing years and years of his life in jail, probably the rest of his life in jail. And he was just, you know, like he didn't like it there. He was not happy there. So eventually he did ask to be put into the general population, and they all said to him, like the officials at the prison said, you know, it's a death sentence, Jeff.
You know you are a marked man. People don't like you here, you know, because of the celebrity, because you're so famous. You know, we don't want to do that to you. But he insisted, and he said I'll take my chances. So I think he knew that actually he was marked and that someone would eventually get him. And when he was attacked, he actually didn't have any defense wounds on him at all. And that's a very hard
thing to do. If someone's attacking you with something, you know, your instinct is to stop that right, to stop the blows. And he didn't have any marks on him, any bruises or anything. So he basically allowed himself to be beaten.
It was you do write that he said that he had found religion in prison, found God in prison. So he continued, I guess with the work that Patrick Kennedy did saying that listen, this is how you can make amends to God and to these people's you know, victims
of these families, but most importantly to God. So it seemed like Jeffrey Dahmer went along that path while he was in prison and then must have contributed to the decision for him to take himself out of protective custody, as you say, spite advice and contrary.
Yeah, I think that in the end, you know, he did find some peace, some you know, whatever piece he could, you know, through religion. Like he seemed to get quite involved in the you know that with the prison chaplain
there got to know him pretty well. And I think, you know, I think that I mean, he was very shy, like jeff was a very shy person, but I mean I do think he liked to have these kind of conversations, you know, and to hear what other people thought about religion and you know kind of how that fit into his mindset and and you know, I mean I guess too it was something to do, maybe something to focus on while he was in prison.
It's very interesting too when you write that Kennedy observes when Jeffrey Dahmer recalls and recounts the crimes, especially when they've got him to go through chronological order and then remember everything he could, so he undertook its task very seriously. And then Patrick noticed that he would go into sort of a trance almost reliving some of the stuff. But he would definitely sound almost robotic and be in a trance recalling what he had done so long before.
Right almost you know, very emotionless, really just kind of you know, with the facts, you know, and not really sort of expressing remorse, you know. I mean, I think he was remorseful, but I don't think he really expressed it when he was describing what he was doing. It was very mechanical the descriptions.
Yeah, it's interesting to the support that his family still had for him during this and then afterwards.
M Yeah, well, his dad I think is probably the most visible and the most vocal in terms of supportive jeff and and you know, he kind of came out right from the beginning of you know, very apologetic to the victims of the families and apologizing really for what his son had done, but you know, he never stopped
caring and loving his son. I think Lionel Jeffrey's dad, Lionel Dahmer, really just truly believed that there was mental illness and that you know, he had gotten mental illness from his mom's side of the family, and that that had somehow affected jeff In in terms of what he became. His brother kind of disappeared, he changed his name and as far as I know, I mean, he might keep in touch with the family, but I mean, I don't think he has anything to do with jeff The mom apparently, Joyce,
she was living in California. She's passed now, but she initially like everything was sort of happening when it was all unfolding in Milwaukee, and they were sort of, you know, day after day discovery more and more. She retreated. She didn't really have anything to do with him at that point, but she did get in touch with him as he was proceeding to court and then afterwards, like she would have a Sunday night or every second Sunday night calls
with him once he was in prison. So she did kind of rally around and support him towards the end, not what he did obviously, but just in terms of like, this is my son and when he was killed, she said, you know that that should make everybody happy. Now you know he's been he's been beaten to death and he's dead now, so that should you know, that should put everybody's mind at ease. And I mean she was saying this in kind of a angry kind of a way.
You know, I think she believed it, you know, I mean, yeah, he was you know, he deserved to be in prison for all this time, but he didn't deserve to die the way he did.
Yeah, And so tell us just a little bit about this manuscript. Just tell us a little bit more about your interaction with Patrick Kennedy's widow and this project here presently growing domer.
Yeah, well, I after I had done this article, and this is after, you know, pat had passed away. He had a heart attack at home and he was by himself. Actually, because the widow that I'm talking with, her name is Patricia. This is actually Patrick's second wife. So this is not the wife that he was married to during the time that he was investigating Dahmer. That was his first wife and the mother of his three children. But this second wife Patty is the one that I was dealing with.
And so after Patrick's passing, and I had sent her a message just really express expressing my shock and remorse and you know, sadness that she had lost him so suddenly, so abruptly. He was only fifty nine years old, he had had just had like a little bit to go. Maybe a month earlier his sixth grandchild was born. So I mean, this was just, you know, a man kind of cut out in the middle of his life. And so I was really shocked by the whole thing and
really kind of quite upset. So I expressed this to her, but I said, you know, I do want to go with the article, and so I said, once it's done and published, I will send it to you. So I did, and she came back to me and said, you know, like you did a nice job in terms of, you know, really kind of getting a good idea of sort of the relationship between Dahmer and Kennedy. And she said, you know, I'd like you to just take the notes, take everything that Pat lent you or gave to you, and just
do whatever you can with it. So it took a couple of years to kind of sort of put it all together. I mean, it's all Patrick's voice, but I mean there was just some areas that needed to be kind of, you know, organized and coordinated and something sleshed out. There was a quite a bit of the personal life part of his story that I thought, Matthew, let's just
stick with this investigation. So I caught that out, and yeah, basically just really wanted to kind of tell the whole story of Dahmer, but also to use it as an opportunity to be a bit of a legacy to Kennedy as well. So just at the back there's a little bit of a very brief bio about Patrick's life and legacy,
and yeah, just basically it kind of just all came together. Initially, I had some help, and this book did come out initially in nineteen or sorry, twenty sixteen with a titled Dahmer Detective, but it was very very small print runs, but a lot of demand for it, a lot of people contacting me and saying, you know, I'd love to get my hands on a copy of that book if it's possible, And just through some mutual friends that are into true crime and really read a lot of it,
I was able to connect with the fantastic folks that while Blue Press, and they took a look at it and said, yeah, well we'll reissue it for sure. So that's how that all kind of came about. And that came about very quickly, Like it was just earlier this year that I had sent them some stuff with the idea of you know, hey, would you guys like to do something with this? That they came back and said absolutely.
And I think also to being the thirtieth anniversary, there's also the Netflix film that's going to be coming out I think next year about Dahmer, like an episodic show about Dahmer. So, you know, it's amazing to me that, you know, there's still so much interest in this story, but there really is. There's a lot of people who are quite fascinating by Dahmer, interested to know more about him and trying to figure out like why he was
the way he was. I don't know if this book helps to that extent, but certainly by having access to somebody that really did get to know Dahmer very well and talk about his crimes and sort of what happened there, I think that that's, you know, an important part of Patrick's story, and it was I didn't want it to not have anything happened to it because he passed away. I said, you know, there's no reason why his story
can't still come out. So I made it kind of a personal labor of Love's mission to get Patrick's story out there anyway I could.
Absolutely, it's an extraordinary look at one of the most brilliant police investigations ever and one of the most important ones, given the gravity of everything and what was at stake, because if a lawyer might have been able to speak to him, especially given that the DNA without his cooperation, there's just no way this story would been told. But
also the identification of many of those victims. It's also a glowing tribute to Patrick all of his police work, and also just a tribute to what he was able to gain from Jeffrey Dahmer. And now this book, Grilling Dahmer is for all those people that think they know about the Jeffrey Dahmer story. Without this interrogation, and without Patrick Kennedy's interrogation, we would not get to realize so many of the things that we now believe and know
about Jeffrey Dahmer. So I think this is essential reading Grilling Dahmer for anybody that thinks they know the entire story. So I want to thank you very much Robin Maharaj for coming on and talking about your new book, Grilling Dahmer, The Interrogation of the Milwaukee Cannibal on Wild Blue Press and just tell us where they might take a look at this, and also when is the release date?
Well, it's coming out later this year. I don't know if I have the exact release date. But people can actually order the the e book that's available on Amazon, and they can also go I think go right through the publisher, so Wildloopress dot Com and yeah, I think Amazon, and it'll be available I'm sure in bookstores and yeah, it'll be out there.
And the ebook is available right now.
It is available now.
Yeah, Okay. I want to thank you very much Robin Mahraj Grilling Dahmer, The Interrogation of the Milwaukee Cannibal. It's a brilliant book. Thank you so much for this interview. You have a great evening. Good night.
Yeah, thanks Dan, take care, Bye bye bye.
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