Journalist who famously interviewed Jeffrey Dahmer explains why he ate his victims
A journalist who managed to interview with Jeffrey Dahmer while he was in prison has revealed that he told her why he ate his victims after killing them.
Full disclosure – it’s not a great reason.
After all, Jeffrey Dahmer is one of history’s most notorious monsters; he killed 17 people before doing all sorts of unspeakable things to them, including eating parts of their corpses.
Nancy Glass interviewed the ‘Milwaukee Monster’ back in 1993 for CNN’s Inside Edition and said that despite the fact she knew about the atrocities he’d committed, Dahmer seemed ‘completely normal’.
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Now, speaking to Australian radio show The Kyle and Jackie O Show, Glass has opened up on her time chatting to Dahmer, who is back in the headlines because of Netflix’s hit show Monster.
She said that Dahmer cut a ‘desperately lonely’ figure, which might account for the reason that he decided to eat some of the young men and boys that he killed during his spree between 1978 and 1991.
“He said he chose to eat them because he wanted them to be part of him,” she explained. “He was so desperate, so desperately lonely, so ashamed of being gay.”
Further to that, Glass explained that some of the problems came from ‘bonding issues’ from his mother, who wouldn’t allow anyone to touch her son ‘except to change his diaper’.
That was good of her – let them change the nappy but nothing else.
In Dahmer’s mind, Glass argued, he could be with his victims forever if he ate parts of them.
It’s a world view that is seriously hard to understand, but then everything that Dahmer did is quite difficult to comprehend for the rest of us.
Glass explained how she was able to chat to Dahmer, claiming that she always maintained a professional distance from him. However, she said she didn’t approach it any differently to how she would have interviewed anyone.
Speaking directly to the hosts, she said: “You guys interview how many people? And basically I'm the same as you.
“You go at it from a very professional standpoint. When you're you're interviewing a politician. You're careful, right? You don't judge. But ask the question so that everybody listening can judge – and that was my job.”
On how she managed to get the interview, Glass explained how she ‘got to know his family’ before eventually meeting him in prison.
“I was involved with the family for several years. And the father [Lionel Dahmer] never thought anything was wrong [with Jeffrey]. He never noticed it,” she said.
In the end, she gained permission to write to Jeffrey, who responded and opened the door to a meeting.
“The super scary part [was] he seemed perfectly normal. That's terrifying,” she continued.
“It was odd. I mean, you can hear the way he's talking to me is very thoughtful. He contemplated, but he's a psychopath.
“He says to me, ‘I'm sorry for what I did.’ But he's a psychopath. He doesn't even know what those words mean.”
Dahmer was eventually killed by another prisoner in 1994.
Glass believes that was what he actually wanted, telling the pair: “I did ask him are you gonna go to heaven or hell? And he said, ‘Well, that's a good question'.
“He wanted to die. He stayed up all night and he slept all day because he couldn't do his passions.
“So he really wanted to die.
“And he aggravated every other inmate until somebody [fellow prisoner Christopher Scarver] finally killed him.”
Tom Wood