“Imagine, if you will, a voice that is resonant and low, apparently laconic, relaxed and articulate, but with palpable overlays of enormous tension and attempts to control what it is that he is saying…”¹

That is the voice Robert “Bob” Ressler spent nearly 10 hours listening to when he interviewed Jeffrey Dahmer in the Fall of 1992. 

Across the course of two days, the criminal profiling pioneer sat beside the “nice, pleasant young man” who was shackled to the table and clad in orange jail jumpsuit. To Ressler, Dahmer seemed candid, co-operative, polite and soft-spoken. A man who “never used a cuss word [and who was] much nicer than myself” – and who Ressler was surprised to see quickly opened up about routine dismemberment, post-mortem Polaroids, sex zombies and cannibalism.

*

He Who Fights Monsters

Robert Ressler set up his own detective agency when he was just nine years old. Admittedly it didn’t much lead to anything and the ‘Lipstick Killer’ – who had murdered two women and one young girl, whilst capturing the attention of young Ressler and his friends – was eventually apprehended by the grown-ups on the Chicago police force. However, the 1940s case of seventeen-year-old William Heirens planted an interest in the psychology of violent offenders which Ressler was to carry with him throughout his career and eventual legacy.

Ressler joined the FBI in 1970 with a background in military criminal investigation and a masters in police administration. The motives behind murder became his primary focus and he figured that psychology – with a pre-emptive understanding of those who might be inclined to kill – could be as useful as forensics and tangible evidence when it came to pursuing violent offenders. Ressler called his methods criminal profiling.

In 1974, he was recruited into the Bureau’s Behavioural Analysis Unit. Here, Ressler expanded on his ideas and a dedicated program was set up based around painting the psychological portrait of a murderer. By 1978, Ressler and his team (including profilers John Douglas and Roy Hazelwood) were applying psychological theory, victimology and crime scene analysis across criminal cases to generate a profile of the perpetrator. Some of these techniques had, in fact, already been used for years by many police officers and criminal investigators without even realising it. Ressler was later credited with bringing the term ‘serial killer’ to American culture². 

Later, in 1985, Ressler helped develop the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (Vi-CAP). Vi-CAP was a computerised database used to track and correlate data on violent offences across the country – allowing inter-and-outer-state connections to be made between criminals and crimes. Previously, a killer who killed in one area and then moved on to another to evade detection, could have remained at large for decades as important clues left behind at a crime scene in Idaho would never have been associated with evidence left behind in Wyoming (for example).

Throughout his career, Ressler spent many hours exploring the minds of those who kill – including many notorious figures such as Ted Bundy, Ed Kemper, David ‘Son of Sam’ Berkowitz, John Hinkley and John Wayne Gacy. In the late 1970s, he and John Douglas interviewed 36 serial killers. The data from that study formed the basis of their theories on organised and disorganised killers – and the personality types and behavioural traits associated with both. 

^{Profile and crime scene differences between Organised and Disorganised killers. As classified by the FBI in 1985}

When he eventually retired from the FBI in 1990, Ressler opened a one-man consulting firm from which he offered seminars, lectures and his professional opinions to law enforcement; mental health workers; corporations facing lawsuits or security threats; and media looking to accurately depict serial killers and the FBI. His highest-profile work, however, involved criminal cases wherein he was called upon to be an expert witness.

It was an accomplished resume which caught the attention of Jeffrey Dahmer’s defence team.

Missed Opportunities

Ressler had already had somewhat of an impact on the Dahmer case before he’d even met the man at the heart of it all. 

Having previously delivered courses in the Milwaukee area to audiences consisting of police officers, attorneys and mental-health professionals, he wasn’t too surprised when a Milwaukee police detective reached out to him in August 1991, thanking him for the information Ressler had previously presented to the detective and his classmates. “Knowing what to look for [in the Dahmer case] has been of great assistance to both me and to the other investigators involved as well,” the detective wrote. However it saddened Ressler when he learnt of the incident involving three MPD officers and fourteen year old Konerak Sinthasomphone. A dazed and drugged³ Konerak had been strong-armed back into Dahmer’s apartment after escaping onto the street when his captor had gone out to get beer. Dahmer convinced the officers the boy was his inebriated nineteen year old roommate. After doing only a cursory sweep of the apartment – and missing the dead body laying on the bedroom floor – the officers left and chalked it up to a domestic dispute. In his book, Whoever Fights Monsters (1992), Ressler vouched for his own courses and “wished that those officers had had the opportunity to attend [one], just as the detective had.” Ressler was confident that, had they been in attendance and more educated in crime scene assessment and the patterns and motives of serial killers, “their initial interview with Dahmer would have been different.” Dahmer killed the Laotian teenager immediately after he was left alone with him again.

What added an additional layer of tragedy to an already awful tale, was that Konerak was the brother of the boy Dahmer had been convicted of molesting back in 1988. Like his brother, Somsak Sinthasomphone had been drugged by Dahmer after the older man had offered him money to pose for photos. Somsak escaped alive and Dahmer was sentenced to a year of part-days in prison. Yet, as Ressler explained:

“There were many reports of young men missing from the area in which Dahmer had taken [Somsak], and enough pieces of evidence to specifically tie Dahmer directly to three of those missing men. But the connections to Dahmer were not made by law enforcement. Had the authorities made good use of the FBI’s VICAP crime analysis system at that time, that connection might well have been more glaringly apparent, and Dahmer might have been prevented from killing more young men.”

The spirit of Vi-CAP also lived on via the belief that the dates Dahmer had called in sick to work (eventually costing him his job) should have been coordinated with missing-persons reports to determine if there were other possible murders he might have committed. Ressler thought employer records of sick leave patterns (and even ordinary vacation leave) should be consulted in areas where a rash of murders or rapes had taken place. Dahmer had indeed been skipping work due to his murderous activities.

Despite lamenting a missed opportunity to educate, Ressler’s realism still sided him with law enforcement and he went on to say that “the Milwaukee police cannot be blamed for such errors in judgement [when] very few law-enforcement officers in the country [had] been trained to recognise the complex dynamics of violent offenders.” Furthermore it was important, he felt, to realise just how savvy Dahmer had been in that situation and that “many serial killers are persuasive charmers.”

The charm offence wore off for Dahmer when he was arrested for the final time two months after the Konerak incident.

Into the Abyss

On the 13th January 1992, attorney Gerald P. Boyle announced to the press that his client was changing his plea from not guilty by reason of insanity to guilty but insane. His client was facing trial for the murder of fifteen⁴ people in Milwaukee (there was not enough evidence for a sixteenth charge) and had been found with the remains of eleven of them in his apartment – along with numerous photographs documenting the display and dismemberment of the bodies. In police custody the previous summer, Dahmer had freely confessed to his crimes – seemingly relieved that they were finally over. Whether Dahmer had actually committed his grisly murders or not was therefore never in question. The question now was: Was he sane at the time of committing them?

The decision to plead ‘guilty but insane’ was apparently made by the defendant himself and fell under a Wisconsin law which permitted that kind of legal manoeuvre when many other states would not. The abbreviated trial was to save the city a lot of time and millions of dollars. It would also permit an outcome that would best serve the public: No matter the verdict, Dahmer would now be residing in a secure facility. The only question now was whether it would be a prison or a mental institution⁵.

The thought of the latter made many people furious. It was seen as insulting to the victims if Dahmer’s actions were given any kind of benefit-of-the-doubt. Geraldine Martin – sister of Dahmer’s fifth victim, Anthony Sears – thought that would be “an easy way out for him” and would provide a more “cozy” environment than prison. Others felt that Dahmer was genuinely mad. Dr. Judith Becker thought that he needed medication and special treatment best administered in a medical environment. 

The prosecution therefore wanted Dahmer deemed sane while the defence was trying to argue that Dahmer had killed during psychotic episodes – when his rational faculties were impaired beyond his power. Ressler knew the legalities surrounding the insanity plea and later wrote that: “the law of Wisconsin is fairly explicit in holding that when someone is in control of his actions, he is considered to be sane.” 

Nevertheless – and despite his friend, renowned psychiatrist Park Dietz, siding with the prosecution – Ressler agreed to consult with the defence. He thought there were “extenuating circumstances” that made Dahmer “grist for the insanity issue” – and felt that:

“Dahmer was a perfect case of a serial killer. He was white, he was male, he was unmarried. Even though he can conform to law and convention on a routine basis, once he starts sinking into his fantasies and allows himself to do that, he reaches a point where he is now prowling [and] looking for a victim. [Then], the minute that young [victim] was in the apartment and the door was closed, Dahmer lost it. At this point, he was driven – emotionally driven – towards his end. And that would be sex with this unconscious, and eventually dead, individual.”

Furthermore, Ressler was intrigued by the type of mixed-bag killer Dahmer seemed to be and wondered if there was “actually an organised killer who [had] lost control during the killing?” As well as being a novel idea, a deviation from established patterns could set Dahmer apart from his killer counterparts and make his circumstances even more extenuating and unique.

Ressler was always against the idea of Dahmer being executed for his crimes on the grounds that “it would serve no purpose for the state to kill him.” When the state of Florida spent 7-8 million dollars on the execution of Ted Bundy back in 1989, Ressler saw that as money that “might have been better used to build a forensic penal facility devoted to the research and study of people like Bundy [and Dahmer], who have so horrendously violated societies trust.” To him (and many of his fellow Criminologists): 

“The death sentence has never deterred violent offenders. It serves only to satisfy the families of victims, and society’s general desire for revenge. If, as in the Dahmer case, we can assure the public that these monsters will not be allowed to complete a few years of incarceration and then slip back into our society – if we can agree to keep them in custody for the rest of their lives – then we will have made progress. Precisely where and how they are kept away from society should not be an issue.”

There was no cause for concern here though: not only did Wisconsin not have the death penalty, but the state of Ohio had introduced theirs in 1981. As Dahmer was later extradited for a murder carried out there in 1978, he was sentenced in accordance with the law of the time in which his crime was committed⁶.

The decision to be part of Dahmer’s defence was met with some controversy. A lot of people – including former members of Ressler’s law enforcement teams – were surprised to hear that an FBI ‘lifer’ wasn’t naturally landing on the side of the prosecution. Ressler shrugged the backlash off as a combination of professional jealousies and a misunderstanding about what his role with Boyle and Dahmer actually meant.

He later clarified that:

“While I could never appear in support of Dahmer’s actions or behaviour, and I do not condone the outrageous acts of killing seventeen people – I understand those acts and Dahmer’s state of mind. My position is neither for nor against Dahmer, but is most definitely for using my expertise to bring all parties to the correct level of understanding where they can fairly adjudicate the matter at hand. What I’m for is a criminal justice system that can most approximately handle such difficult things as the Dahmer case.”

Ressler also thought it important to note that, even though the defence was a highly unusual position for an former FBI agent to take:

“Since leaving the Bureau and becoming a paid consultant and expert witness, I have come to understand that a true expert has but one opinion, and it really doesn’t matter what side wants to call upon that opinion, because it’s based on facts and experience, and cannot be altered to fit either the defense or the prosecution strategies.”

As part of the preparation for the interview that would form that opinion, Ressler took a tour of Dahmer’s apartment, accompanied by officers from the MPD.

He described Apartment 213 as:

“Like stepping into maybe the abyss. Here was a small apartment where the worst horrors that man could even concede of took place… [Dahmer] was piling up bodies in his apartment. He had body parts in the bedroom, he had body parts in the refrigerator, he had bones in file draws, he had heads and skulls in vats of acid. Anybody that would’ve gotten into that apartment at that time – and really looked around with some knowledge – would’ve been horrified that they had stepped into Hell.” 

Ressler also examined some of the evidence – including a copy of one of Dahmer’s ‘shrine’ drawings, which depicted plans for what Dahmer himself described as a ‘power centre’ designed to bring him prosperity and built atop an altar of human skulls flanked by two full skeletons. 

Despite reaching out to him, attorney Boyle was to later admit his concerns for Ressler’s own mental health. Speaking in a documentary from 2002, Boyle spoke sombrely about how:

“The Bob Ressler’s of this word – if they’re not careful – can very much slip into a very bad state of mind. What they are trying to do as a good can really turn into an evil, as far as they’re concerned, because it can have the effect of changing their very spirit and their very essence. And it is a very fine line to walk.”

– Gerald Boyle

Indeed, plumbing the depths of criminal minds did sometimes take its toll on Ressler and his former ‘Mind Squad’ team. Rapid unexplained weight loss, anxiety, nightmares and stress-induced ulcers weren’t unheard of among those who spent hours-upon-hours listening to malevolent subject matter – and Ressler grew to develop a deeper distrust of man’s motives based on the belief that man’s natural instinct is to “do dirt to your neighbour.” It was clear he never lost sight of the dangers of his own work, partly quoting Nietzsche’s warning that “whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster” as the title for one of his books. 

Nevertheless, Ressler was still willing to hear Dahmer talk about his early life and later murders – including acts of necrophilia, attempts to create a living ‘sex zombie’ and a foray into the consumption of human flesh. 

A week after Boyle had given his statement to the press, Bob met Jeff.

Interview with a Cannibal

DAHMER: When my Gramma goes to church for a couple hours, I go down [to the basement] and get [the body]; take a knife, slit the belly open, masturbate; then deflesh the body and put the flesh into bags; triple-bag the flesh, wrap the skeleton up in an old bedsheet, smash it up with a sledgehammer; wrap it up and throw it all out in the trash on Monday morning. Except the skull. Kept the skull.

Despite the gruesome testimony Dahmer gave him, Ressler seemed to genuinely be quite fond of his new subject. “If I met him, not knowing what he was,” Ressler admitted, “I’d introduce him to my son or daughter.” He went onto explain that:

“I was very grateful to have the chance to interview Jeffrey Dahmer. He seemed so normal. He was likeable, there was nothing offensive about him. [I] almost felt a kinship with him. And at the same time, what he was saying was enough to literally curl your hair.”

Though Ressler found Dahmer quite naturally candid, he’d had his own methods to further relax the interviewee. To encourage the chain-smoking Dahmer to carry on with his answers, Ressler would murmur “mmm-hmm” after each phrase Dahmer offered up. He also knew that it was best to start a discussion of difficult matters (such as Dahmer’s potential pedophilia and racism) with an initial inquiry, before digressing to other subjects and then returning to the heavier one. When asked directly whether he was attracted to children, for example, Dahmer said that he wasn’t. Ressler then went to clarify whether the grown men Dahmer liked came in all colours – prompting Dahmer to launch into a fierce denial of race having played a role in his crimes:

RESSLER: So you never had any interest in children? Your preference was what?

DAHMER: Fully adult males.

RESSLER: About your own age?

DAHMER: Mmm-hmm.

RESSLER: White, black and brown.

DAHMER: That’s the thing. Everybody thinks it’s racial, but they were all different. The first one [in Milwaukee] was white, the second one was American Indian, third was Hispanic, the fourth was mulatto. The only reason I picked blacks was because there were a lot of them in the gay bars, and I always ran into a lot of them.

Ressler also didn’t hesitate to let Dahmer know when he found something odd about what the killer was saying – and would express that overt judgement rather than trying to remain objective. Ressler thought that helped Dahmer to feel as though his interviewer was “also looking back with amazement on the odd things that he had somehow been involved in, and from which he now wanted to distance himself.”

For his own part, Dahmer himself seemed equally curious to find out why he had done what he had. Ressler thought Dahmer “could not comprehend how he could have committed all of the atrocious deeds that he knew he had done” – but that being in “the controlled prison environment [allowed him] to realise the extent to which his compulsions and fantasies had taken over his rational mind.”

RESSLER: Why do you think dominance, control, power over others was so important to you? To the average person, those are important factors, but not to carry it to the extent that you have.

DAHMER: If I’d had normal interests and hobbies, like sports or something like that, if I hadn’t been obsessed with doing what I was doing, it probably wouldn’t have been as important. But why I had that, I don’t know. [Long pause] It would make life more attractive, or fulfilling.

RESSLER: Okay. But it’s power and control – out of control, y’know what I mean? D’you realize today that that was not realistic? 

DAHMER: Now I do.

(The skull-and-skeleton shrine was now also, in Dahmer’s own word, “ridiculous”)

Ressler found Dahmer’s seemingly “perverse pride of workmanship” (ie: dismemberment) and matter-of-fact recital “enough to make anyone’s stomach turn” – but he knew that staying with him through such matters could unlock more insight into his personality. 

DAHMER: During dismemberment I saved the heart, muscle, meat from the thigh, arm, bicep… liver… Cut it into small little pieces, washed it off, put it in these clear plastic freezer bags and put it in my floor freezer. Just as an escalation of trying something to satisfy [me]… And I would cook it and then look at the picture and masturbate afterwards.

RESSLER: Afterwards? Did that have any positive effect to that ritual?

DAHMER: It made it feel like they were a part of me. 

When Dahmer started talking about his attempt to turn people into zombies by drilling a small hole in their head with a power drill, then injecting muriatic acid into their brain with a large syringe, such action seemed to Ressler to be “the ultimate expression of Dahmer’s inability to relate in any normal way to another human being”:

“He believed by doing this [zombie experimentation], he could create a person with no mind. A compliant sex object, but alive. He said ‘that way I wouldn’t have to get more victims, I could just keep the sex zombie.’”

Ressler also asked Dahmer about whether he felt connected to such things:

“I asked him his feelings when all this was happening and, you know, was he really enamoured and into this sort of thing? He said no, it was like he was operating in a mechanical fashion and it was as if looking down on himself and watching this occur. This is a clear indication of dissociation. Dissociation carried out to its end would be Multiple Personality Disorder. It was like there were two Jeff’s. One was into the horror of it all and the other was standing back and watching. He said ‘a lead blanket would settle over me and I’d get this very horrible feeling of loss.’”

Despite having acknowledged that he’d always known what he was doing was “wrong” – the interview led Ressler to believe that Dahmer was ultimately mentally ill  – “though at times he appeared to be sane and rationalised his behaviour.”

Looking at the case from the outside prior to meeting him, it had seemed clear to Ressler that Dahmer’s crimes followed a certain predictability found among serial killers: 

“They begin killing cautiously, frightened of their crimes. Then the pace picks up, and they progress to become effective and efficient killing machines. Eventually, they become cavalier and careless, convinced that they cannot be caught by any mortal. They believe they have ultimate power and authority over others.”

Dahmer once admitted that he had considered confessing his first murder to a priest, but had been too afraid to do so, During his interview with Ressler, he also acknowledged fear over his second:

RESSLER: After the Ambassador [Hotel] one, was that… Did you find that pleasurable or was that.. Equally frightening?

DAHMER: No. It was equally frightening.

RESSLER: For what reason was that one frightening?

DAHMER: ‘Cause it was totally unplanned. It was a total surprise to me that it happened.

Later on, the pace of Dahmer’s killings would increase – peaking the year of his arrest when he killed eight times in seven months (with little time separating the last few). At this point Ressler thought Dahmer was “no longer in control. He was just looking for the next victim and trying to clean up the last victim.”

However, he also felt that Dahmer was “special” in that he exhibited characteristics of both an organised and disorganised killer.

To Ressler, Dahmer’s organisation was seen in the way he lured victims with the promises of money, then disposed of their clothing, identification and – eventually – their remains. His disorganisation was seen in his sex with corpses, preservation and mutilation of body parts, consumption of flesh and his later frenzy. Ressler felt Dahmer blurred the lines of the two when he would calculatingly and overtly cruise the gay bars of Milwaukee and Chicago for a victim, despite this leaving him open to potential identification and investigation. And when he would keep body parts inside his home, despite how they would be overwhelming evidence against him if discovered. Ressler had also been surprised when he’d found out Dahmer had just calmly waited for the police to arrive once potential-final-victim, Tracey Edwards, had escaped. No attempt had even been made to destroy any of the evidence that had littered the apartment. To Ressler and his cohorts, this made Dahmer a mixed offender – and one who encompassed so many usually-unrelated dynamics that he was fit to become the prime example of an entirely new category of serial killer altogether. 

In defying the rules of profiling based on murderers from the 1940s, 50s and 60s – Ressler also thought that Dahmer reflected a wider environment which glorified dangerous weaponry and graphic violence in film and television. “We’re moving into a Dahmer era,” he once warned, “where we’re going to see a lot more people like Dahmer.” However, he did go onto say that Dahmer’s own love of violent films – such as Exorcist III and Faces of Death – played no role in causing Dahmer’s behaviour: 

INTERVIEWER: With killers like the vampire-inspired murderers, are any of them reliving a fantasy that they’ve seen on TV or in the movies? And, if so, do you think that the media is in any way to blame?

RESSLER: I don’t think so. These people are pathological and anything will incite them, but some certainly have focussed on film to satisfy themselves and fuel their fantasies.

[Jeffrey Dahmer] told me that he was a great fan of the film [Exorcist III]. Unleashing the demons from Hell and maiming people and all that sort of thing, was very exciting to him. But that really came after his pathology. In other words it did not create it, it just fuelled the fires of his original pathology.

Even with such pathology, Ressler had thought Dahmer was outwardly a nice person and the two had even shared a few laughs. At one point Dahmer suggested Ressler would’ve made a good serial killer himself!

When their interview was over, Ressler told Dahmer to take care and thought the killer had enjoyed his company. He also thought Dahmer smoked too much. Dahmer thought if he got lung cancer it would solve everyone’s problem of what to do with him. Ressler was then left to answer the question he had been hired to try and answer:

“Is Dahmer sane or insane? 

After two days interviewing him, I felt only empathy for the tormented and twisted person who sat before me.”

Muzzled Testimony

Despite his accumulation of insight into Dahmer’s mind – and having been sat directly behind the defendant during part of the court proceedings – Ressler was ultimately never called on to testify at the trial. Milwaukee’s County Circuit judge, Laurence C. Gram Jr., blocked Boyle’s attempt to use Ressler as one of his first witnesses after prosecuting lawyer, Michael McCann, argued that Ressler’s expertise in helping police to identify unknown killers did not apply to a case wherein the killer was already identified. In other words, Ressler was dismissed on the grounds of being a profiler, not a psychiatrist.

After the prosecution argued that Dahmer had known what he was doing and no paraphilic force had governed him to kill, a jury verdict of 10:2 deemed Jeffrey Dahmer sane and in control of his own actions at the time of each murder. Dahmer quietly thanked Boyle for his help while families and friends of the victims celebrated.

Ressler’s unheard conclusion that “there was no way to view this tormented man as having been sane at the time of his crimes” ultimately made no difference to the string of life sentences Judge Gram bestowed upon Dahmer on February 17th, 1992 – all with the idea that the defendant would never again see freedom and would live out the rest of his natural life in Columbia Correctional Institution. A maximum security prison. 

Though the final verdict hadn’t fallen in-line with Ressler’s evaluation that “the more appropriate setting for holding [Dahmer] away from society would be a mental hospital”, he had always gone into the project “glad that no matter what way the court proceedings would go, [Dahmer] would spend the rest of his life in custody.” Nevertheless, the adamancy that Dahmer should never had been found ‘sane’ and that he was, indeed, mentally ill was repeated by Ressler in his 1997 book, I Have Lived in the Monster – which featured two chapters dedicated to Ressler’s ‘interview with a cannibal’ and which cast shade on a society whose “notions of right and wrong [do] not begin to explain the complex reality of what Dahmer did.”

Even five years after meeting him, Ressler still felt that:

“Our society does not seem to recognize gradients in mental illness – when someone is crazy, we expect that person to be wild-eyed⁷, drooling at the mouth, and never in control of his faculties. But there are some insane people who can frequently appear to be functioning, sane human beings, even though deep down, at a fundamental level, they are beyond sanity: Dahmer, in my view, was one of those people.”

Pressing On

A few months after Dahmer had been found guilty of sanely murdering fifteen people in Wisconsin – and another in Ohio – Ressler wrote to him in prison. 

The letter (dated July 18th, 1992) read:

Dear Jeff,

I’m sure you remember me as I worked for Gerry Boyle on your defense early this year. I was disappointed at the outcome of your trial as I felt the mental institution would have been best for you. I feel the local political climate was a heavy factor in the jury decision. 

When you and I last talked, you indicated that you would be open to my visiting you one day with a focus of your cooperation in examining your problem with an eye toward prevention of similar things happening in the future. As you may well know, most of my career with the FBI and law enforcement in general has been dedicated to understanding homicide and violent offenses. I would like to take you up on your offer and plan a visit to see you in the near future.

Please drop me a line and let me know when we can arrange a visit. Do you have to add me to your visitor’s list? I plan to be in your area later this summer in August or September. I have talked to Gerry Boyle about this and he concurs with my visiting you. I understand you have another attorney now; however if you desire a visit, that is your choice alone. 

Please let me know the details as soon as you can as I may be in Wisconsin in several weeks. I hope you are getting adjusted to your new surroundings and routine. I wish you the best and I hope to see you in the near future.

Sincerely,

Robert K. Ressler

P.S. Let me know if I can bring you anything that you need.

Ressler never heard from Dahmer again. Whether that was because his letter got lost among the overwhelming amount of mail and interview requests Jeff received; because talking to an acquaintance of Boyle could’ve proven complicated when Dahmer was now legally represented by Robert Mozenter; or because Jeff just wasn’t feeling up for it at the time, is unclear. However Ressler continued to keep in touch with Jeff’s father and step-mother – sympathising with them, parent-to-parents, on the grounds that “it must be terrible to realise you’ve raised a monster.”

But monster or misunderstood, sane or insane, the effect Dahmer had on Ressler was palpable. A decade later, he admitted that:

“Dahmer changed the way I looked at my entire approach to profiling. For the first time I’d seen an organised killer who lost control in a psychotic episode [and] it taught me that not everything is black and white.”

For Ressler, “the existence of a Jeffrey Dahmer” spurred him to “press on” with his research, in a bid to carry on understanding the ever-challenging human complexities of inhumane acts.

After nearly a lifetime spent in the fight against monsters, he passed away peacefully in his sleep on May 5th, 2013.

Sources:

• Whoever Fights Monsters by Robert Ressler and Tom Shachtman (1992)
• I Have Lived in the Monster by Robert Ressler and Tom Shachtman (1997)
• The Milwaukee Murders by Don Davis (1991)
• FBS International.org
• ‘Robert Ressler’ on Wikipedia
• ‘Serial Killer’ on Wikipedia
• ‘Robert Ressler RIP’ at alanjacobson.com
• ‘Robert Ressler: Psychological Profiling of Serial Killers’ at Crime Traveller.org
• ‘Who Invented the Classification of Organized, Disorganized and Mixed Serial Killers?’ at confilegal.com
• ‘The Organized / Disorganized Dichotomy Profile of Serial Murder’ at Marshall University
• Cult Collectibles
• True Crime Auction House
• Robert Ressler: The Man Who Lives with Monsters (2002 documentary)
• Robert Ressler 2006 interview with Review Graveyard
• Court TV
• The Milwaukee Sentinel, Virginia Daily Press // The News and Advance // Argus-Leader // Potomac News, The Washington Post

With special thanks to Steve Giannangelo.

Footnotes:

1. I Have Lived in the Monster by Robert Ressler and Tom Shachtman (1997). All quotes within the text from here-on-in are in Ressler’s own words (unless otherwise stated) as taken from various sources ↩︎
2. Although Ressler is often credited with inventing the phrase ‘serial killer’ in the early 70s, there are a few instances of the term being used prior to then. Notably by German criminologist, Ernst Gennat, to describe Peter Kurten in 1930 – and by British soldier John Brophy in his 1966 book, The Meaning of Murder ↩︎
3. Konerak also had a small hole drilled into his skull with muriatic acid poured into it ↩︎
4. Dahmer confessed to a total of 17 murders, however was not tried for the 1987 killing of Steven Tuomi due to a lack of discernible evidence tying him to the case. The 1978 murder of Steven Hicks was committed in Bath, Ohio, so Dahmer was to face trial separately there ↩︎
5. If Dahmer was judged insane on at least one of the 15 homicide counts – but sane on others – he would go to a mental institution until deemed well enough for prison ↩︎
6. Prison for Dahmer ultimately did turn out to be a particularly bloody death sentence, however, when in 1994 – not even three years after being given his last life sentence – he was beaten to death by fellow prisoner, Christopher Scarver. Scarver was a schizophrenic who claimed to be the Son of God. In Ressler’s opinion: “Neither Dahmer nor Scarver should ever have been in a prison, but both should have been permanent residents of a mental institution.” ↩︎
7. Indeed, one of the questions McCann had asked the jury was: “Do you think that was a madman . . . A wild-eyed madman?” ↩︎