26. A Haunted Genetic Architecture Pt. 1

TRUE CRIME: Jeffrey Dahmer Murders

Content warning: sexual assault, ableism, murder, necrophilia, cannibalism, pedophilia, homophobia, racism, police violence/neglect.

We’re backkkk!!!!!! After a long hiatus caused by multiple huge life changes on both our ends, we bring you our first story recorded in two separate continents. It’s a heavy one - we’re covering the Jeffrey Dahmer murders. But as is always true with us, it’s less about the violence itself and more about the historical and social context these murders are situated in. You’ll learn about 1960/70s Queer Black history in MKE, including the ‘Stonewall’ of Milwaukee that happened 8 years before Stonewall. We unearth the brutality of police negligence and also do a deep dive framing Dahmer’s violence as a microcosm of European conquest and colonialism. (Stay tuned for Part 2, which will go deep on victim stories, the fall out of the murders on the community, and some amazing theses about the socio-political implications of this case we found while digging deep into this story).

Sources

Theme Song Title: Creepy Mood | Artist Name: SoulProdMusic

Chapters

• 4:30 Opening Story - Tracy Edwards
• 5:47 JD's Adolesence
• 27:27 Steven Hicks
• 34:46 JD's Young Adulthood
• 37:26 Milwaukee's "Stonewall": Black Night Brawl
• 44:19 Racism & Homophobia in 1970s Milwaukee
• 54:08 JD Escalates, Banned from Bathhouses for Assault (late 1980s))
• 1:03:45 Early1990s Oxford Apartments
• 1:06:51 Konerak Sinthasophone
• 1:17:06 JD's Violence as a Mirror of European Conquest & Colonialsm

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:53

Hello. Hi. You're listening

SPEAKER_00: 1:08

to Unpacking the Eerie. We've got a penchant for some dark shit. but are routinely left unsatisfied with the way that these stories are told. So here we app about scary stories and scary people. And

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also the considerations of power dynamics, social, racial, and economic justice that are often left out.

SPEAKER_00: 1:28

Join us as we explore the unnerving nuance, depth, and pockets of hope. Join us as we unpack the eerie. We're back. We are back. Well, for returning folks, hi. For folks who've never listened to this before. Welcome to Unpacking the Eerie. Yeah, we've taken a break for about a year and a lot of changes have happened in between that year. Yeah, we don't live in

SPEAKER_01: 2:06

the same continent anymore.

SPEAKER_00: 2:07

Yeah, Akshay, where are you?

SPEAKER_01: 2:10

I am in India. I am on the other side of the world as of like 10 months ago. This will be our first episode recording remotely. The

SPEAKER_00: 2:22

time gap is gigantic. I'm in fresh... 10.30am.

SPEAKER_01: 2:27

And I'm in fresh 11pm. But it is fresh for me because sometimes I get like this surge of energy at like 11pm. I don't feel tired. That's

SPEAKER_00: 2:40

amazing. I don't feel as bad for taking our sweet time. We haven't recorded in a year, partially due to these gigantic shifts. Also, you know, I just want to name that the last time that we checked in there, we were towards the beginning of an ongoing genocide that is still happening in Palestine. We had shared a roundtable discussion that was graciously recorded by our friend Micheline and her friends and colleagues. all Palestinian and all talking about their experiences coming from different places in Palestine, but also have a different like historical timeline there along with resistance efforts. And so if you haven't listened to that, I'm going to do a plug to, you know, please uplift their stories. It was really totally share.

SPEAKER_01: 3:31

It's a wonderful two part series.

SPEAKER_00: 3:34

And I think part of the reason we decided, are paused was partially due to that. I think it felt weird to be creating and promoting during a time where our attention, you know, maybe ought be in other places. And then of course we had this election in the United States where we are descending towards fascism and kind of a quick pace, not that the U S wasn't already, you know, some would argue that we were already in like soft fascism for a really long time and maybe hard fascism. in particular communities for the entire time. But yeah, that's like the water that we're swimming in. And so we're just, we're bringing it back.

SPEAKER_01: 4:17

But I'm excited to get back into it. We decided to record this episode six months ago, so you can see the pace that we're moving.

SPEAKER_00: 4:26

Slow. Keep this podcast hosted. You

SPEAKER_01: 4:58

guys helped me pay for a mic.

SPEAKER_00: 5:01

Yeah, that's very nice. Yeah. Also, we do donate still 25% of everything that we make, every payout that we get to a cause that's related to the topic. So your money is not going nowhere. It's going places and we really appreciate you.

SPEAKER_01: 5:20

Yeah, excited to be back. Let's hop to it. And to dig into it. So on July 22nd, 1991, a 32-year-old man in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, ran out onto the street, found a police officer and let them know he needed help because he had just escaped from a man who was trying to murder him. Cops followed him back to the apartment that he was in. And when they walked in, they found photos of dismembered bodies, Found a dismembered head in the refrigerator. And the home was that of 31-year-old Jeffrey Dahmer.

SPEAKER_00: 6:05

So we're covering Jeffrey Dahmer. This story for us often comes up in conversation because there's such sensationalism around Jeffrey Dahmer and it's seldom really covered in a way that feels just right.

SPEAKER_01: 6:19

So much of it is just focused on like, why was he like that? And just like kind of making him into a celebrity.

SPEAKER_00: 6:26

Very gross. It'll be less about the gruesome details. You can find that literally anywhere. It'll be more about what surrounds it.

SPEAKER_02: 6:35

And

SPEAKER_00: 6:36

I'll hand it over to you. The context.

SPEAKER_01: 6:40

Rewind, rewind from 91 all the way back to the 1960s. Jeffrey Dahmer was born May 21st, 1960, to Lionel Herbert Dahmer, a chemistry student, and Joyce Annette Dahmer, a typewriting instructor. Lionel was German and Welsh, and Joyce was either Norwegian or German and Irish. I saw all three of those, but they were white, a white European. He was... described as an energetic and happy child. But when he was four, he had to have a surgery for a double hernia. And it's noted that he just became a lot quieter after that. Lionel was a chemistry student and then later a research chemist. And during Jeffrey's childhood was doing his PhD. So he was just absent quite a lot. Joyce was on prescription drugs, apparently, when she was pregnant and also had... postpartum and depression and other sorts of mental health issues after he was born. Her ex-husband says that she was a hypochondriac and, quote unquote, demanded a lot of attention. It was also the 60s, so let's keep that in mind. Apparently, she refused. So her husband said that she refused to touch Jeffrey when he was a baby because she was afraid of contracting germs. But that doesn't really track with how later in life she used to work with HIV and AIDS patients or maybe she just like was different by then. So I've also seen in some places that his dad also might have had depression. He did have a brother who I'm not going to talk about a lot because he really doesn't want to be associated with Jeffrey and changed his name and, you know, yeah, let him live his life. But between... The ages of six and eight for Jeffrey, they moved around frequently and then they finally ended up settling in this suburb in Ohio called the Beth Township of Akron. And it had a population of about 4,500. So very small town vibes. They were pretty well off. They lived in a three-bedroom house with two-and-a-half bathrooms, and it was surrounded by woods. He and his dad had this father-son activity together where they would bleach connective tissue and hair off of rodent corpses when they found animals that had died under their house. They would bleach? Yeah. They would bleach the bones, you know? Oh. yeah kind of like what is it when people stuff animals taxidermy i guess it's like kind of somewhat similar to that but they would yeah find corpses underneath the house of like rats and stuff and they would do this as an activity together and since his dad was the chemist he was like excited that he was i guess into science

SPEAKER_00: 9:50

why are fucking white people so freaky and then they call it science Like what the hell is, I have a whole tangent about this later, but there's such freaks and they call it science. Yes. Oh my gosh. Like the body world guy. I want to do an episode about that because why the fuck? Is there like an appetite for exhibits of people's literal nervous systems and muscular sports? They're playing music. And I'm just like, whose bodies are these? It's very weird. Just call it a black

SPEAKER_01: 10:28

mirror episode. Honestly,

SPEAKER_00: 10:29

just say that you're necrophilic related

SPEAKER_01: 10:32

to that. Jeffrey, when he was little used to carry around little pail full of bones and his family used to call them his fiddle sticks this is why like when people are like there was no signs i'm like there were signs anyways just some quirky kid huh He's just... So in grade school, apparently he gifted tadpoles to one of his... I'm just going to share some weird stories from his childhood, essentially. So in grade school, he gifted tadpoles to one of his teachers who, I guess, gave it to another one of his classmates. And he felt very rejected and angry by that. So he went to the friend's house and... and then killed the tadpoles by pouring motor oil into the jar and setting them on fire. They said they did not see any warning signs at all, but he did have a compulsion to kill and mutilate animals. He killed his own dog. He killed his own dog. And he definitely was obsessed with collecting animal carcasses, so he would pick up roadkill and do kind of the same stuff that him and his dad used to do. He told a psychiatrist later on that when he was younger, he had like a very high libido and was like constantly fantasizing about doing harm and also like having fantasies about necrophilia as well and that it took up like most of his day. When he was 13, he was actually and I watched this movie that's like, mostly just about his adolescent life, like when he was in high school, and they did portray this in the movie. And for some reason, the person who plays Jeffrey Dahmer is like a Disney Channel star. I forget his name, but just weird casting as per usual. He was obsessed with this male jogger and would sometimes hide with a baseball bat on on his route, hoping to make his first kill. But I think one of the times that he was prepared to do that, the jogger just didn't show. So it didn't happen. He also started drinking quite young. I think he started drinking when he was about 13. His parents also used to fight a lot. And I think when he was 17, they got divorced. And his mom left and took his brother with him. And I guess he felt abandoned. Yeah. when that happened so that would have been like his senior year of high school so I was just sort of looking into like whether there's been like research or just like any theories on like why he might be the way that he is. And I did find one paper written by this person called Tamara Higgs that was about psychopathy and neglect. And in it, she states how the average serial killer's profile is white male, low middle income in his 20s or 30s with a history of childhood abuse or neglect is sociopathic or psychopathic, is a chameleon to his environment and appears normal to others. That's sort of like typical traits of a serial killer. For him, I mean, his parents were kind of preoccupied, weren't really around that much for him. There were some rumors that he had maybe experienced sexual abuse from a peer in his neighborhood, but his dad said that was very much not true. So there's some just iffiness around that. I don't even know where that comes from because I don't think that it comes directly from him. Jeffrey. Classic, his parents said that they didn't see any warning signs, but he actually has two out of the three McDonald's triad, which is cruelty to animals and fire setting. He did say later on that when he was 14, 15, he had fantasies of death that were intermingled with sex. And that's sort of when he knew he had sort of reached a turning point. I'm just thinking about how, like, women and girls and trans kids are way more likely to experience like severe abuse in their families of origin, but they are not the serial killer profile, right? So it's not just about whether neglect or abuse is present. It's also about like the world that we live in and who gets enabled to do that. shit like this. I'm going to go into his adolescent high school time now. So he went to Revere High School. And this is sort of like when he starts to make friends. And that's what this whole movie is about that I watched is he makes friends with the student named John Backdorf, who was an aspiring artist. Him and his other friends formed what they called the Dahmer fan club. And so in the movie Friends with Dahmer, they show this friendship. They just think he's funny because he makes ableist jokes and pretends like he has an intellectual disability. The movie is actually based on a graphic novel that Durf wrote after all of the stuff about him came out. In retrospect, he says there was always some a darkness about him that was really quite repellent. And he said, I was okay hanging out with him. If there was other people around, I was never going to be alone with him. But they did things like sneak him into school photographs. He actually said that he was the one who inserted himself into the friend group. They said they found him entertaining and kind of dangerous and unpredictable. And for them, that was funny, I guess. He apparently skipped school a lot and also carried around a styrofoam cup. Not sure what he was drinking from there, but since he's been considered to be an alcoholic since he was like 13, I'm guessing probably alcohol. But even people that he went to high school with say things like we would have just never expected, even though he was clearly being very strange and concerning when he was in high school, too. So I listened to this podcast. podcast called the dark side of the land podcast where they interview his they interview his former teacher and a former classmate his former teacher was al smeshko who taught pe and health and coached football and basketball and he had him as a student twice in ninth and tenth grade his first impression of him was that he wasn't very athletic wasn't a troublemaker but to some extent seemed like a loner and didn't have a lot of friends in health class. He also seemed sort of the same and didn't really interact with the rest of the students during his senior year. He actually found him with a six pack of beer at like 10 AM on the school grounds. And he told the teacher, I got problems. And he, So the teacher took him to the guidance counselor because he asked to be taken to the guidance counselor. And he said that he was struggling because his parents were getting divorced and the guidance counselor said he seemed depressed. And that was, I guess, kind of it, you know. So there were opportunities where like people who were in positions to maybe do something about it. Could have done more, but it seemed like they didn't. The nonchalance

SPEAKER_00: 18:04

is just

SPEAKER_01: 18:05

really wild because... Oh, 17-year-old drinking a six-pack of beer at 10 a.m. in school property. Totally normal, I guess.

SPEAKER_00: 18:14

I guess. And then that's the response to a parent's divorce?

SPEAKER_01: 18:19

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No inquiry? That doesn't seem normal, yeah. No inquiry.

UNKNOWN: 18:27

Yikes.

SPEAKER_01: 18:28

yeah so the former classmate described him as goofy and funny and that he would sit at their table and do goofy stuff to make us laugh and he would imitate people and he got good grades and was interested in biology he did this weird thing once he wanted money for beer so they paid him to play pranks on people at the mall like going up the escalator the wrong way or knocking off people's glasses of water in restaurants and then he did something there it was just like the way they described the story was just really weird he went to this health food store where they were giving out samples of flaxseed or something like that and he just kept taking the samples and filling his mouth with them and then once his mouth was like completely full of them he screamed I'm allergic and then he just like spit them all out and walked away It's weird in a bad, weird way.

SPEAKER_00: 19:26

Yeah, where you're like, what's going on? Well, it's interesting because I find this behavior pretty consistent with... I'm thinking of some instances of people who actually, I felt, had the capacity for harm. And the things that they outright did, if you were to just talk about them in isolation... feel strange. Like they don't know how to engage in normal humor and they make really strange jokes and people kind of brush it off, especially men brush it off as like social awkwardness or now in like other spaces, neurodivergence or something like that. But I think that people who have been on the other side of more dangerous behavior, actually have a knowing, a felt sense that there's something else happening underneath this weird sense of humor. When I was hearing the stories, I said, yeah, this person strikes me as someone who feels dangerous. And I have actually very little information about the dangerous things that I think that they're capable of. But then when the story started converging, I felt really validated in that there was something else actually underneath the joking. Anyway.

SPEAKER_01: 21:08

you will find out in due time what your gut was trying to tell you. And you don't always have to stick around to know why you're having the bad feelings.

SPEAKER_00: 21:18

Right. You don't need evidence.

SPEAKER_01: 21:20

No, no. You can just get out of there. It's fine. You don't need to know.

SPEAKER_00: 21:24

I think it's hard because I saw someone post online about one of the most insidious things white patriarchy has done is to weaponize people's intuition. you make people question their own intuition to make them feel like it's not valid or not real. And then you need obscene, obscene amounts of evidence to back up the idea that they could be right. When our intuition actually evolved from like, you know, centuries and centuries and centuries of survival

SPEAKER_01: 21:55

instinct. Yeah. It comes from our lizard brain. That's like danger, no danger, you know?

SPEAKER_00: 22:03

But anyway, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 22:05

Back to JD, as I will refer to him, because I've never heard anyone refer to him that way. I don't like saying his name.

SPEAKER_00: 22:15

Okay, JD.

SPEAKER_01: 22:16

So this guy who they were interviewing in this podcast said that the last time he saw him was a couple of weeks after graduation. He gave him a ride home after a party. And this also is a weird story because they live in like a super small town in Ohio and he was driving home from a party and he saw JD. walking down a completely pitch black road at 1 a.m. by himself. And so he stopped and he was like, do you need a ride home? And he was like, sure. And he said that he wasn't really talkative and he seemed kind of drunk. And this guy didn't get out of the car, just talked to him a little bit and then left and never saw him again. And he said in this interview, like he didn't kill anyone that he knew. They were all random people. So like, I don't think he would have ever done anything to like me or anyone that we knew in high school. He also said he was smart. Interestingly, when the news came out about him, he just saw the last name Dahmer and his immediate thought was Jeff's dad killed someone and not that Jeffrey killed someone, which I thought was interesting. Wild story that like the last one I'll say about him in high school there was this fetal pig that they had in their biology class in school that someone stole and for like weeks the principal was like go on the speaker at the school being like whoever stole the fetal pig please bring it back over and over again they never found out who it was and then when jd was in prison he confessed that it was him that stole the fetal pig from their biology class and nobody knew that he was the one that did it. Which I'm like, maybe the person who collects roadkill is the person that stole the fetal pig from the class. Like, hello, anybody there? Yeah,

SPEAKER_00: 24:08

what's the disconnect? This is so wild to me. I guess not. The belief in white innocence runs so fucking deep they can't even fucking imagine. Yeah. Totally. Or the complacency in the comment of like, it's not going to happen to me, so I was safe, so therefore he's not dangerous is such a common, I think, internalized narrative in people with privilege.

SPEAKER_03: 24:31

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00: 24:31

Yeah. Okay. And they were just like, he's just, you know, being silly, you know, suspended for a few days. He had also been talking about wanting to like blow up the gym and all of this stuff. No action, no action. And then actually one day we had a school shutdown because a librarian found him in the library acting funny and they asked what was in his backpack. And it were all, it was all the components that you would need to create like your own. That's so

SPEAKER_02: 25:17

scary.

SPEAKER_00: 25:18

Yeah. And he had shared that he had plans to put it under the bleachers during one of the, you know. Oh, my God. Yeah. I remember it very vividly because it was the day after my 18th birthday. And yeah, we couldn't leave French class. Librarian found him. They were just like, it's just silly guy. And I don't know what happened after that. I don't think anything did really happen because he didn't actually put the pieces together to make the bomb. And then teachers were told to tell students that he actually didn't have a bomb and that there's no evidence to show that he was going to do that because they didn't want parents to be upset. But the components are there and the pattern was there. And I don't know where he is or what he's doing, but. Oh, my gosh.

SPEAKER_01: 26:04

Terrifying. So. I will pass on to you to tell us what happens next.

SPEAKER_00: 26:11

Okay. So I actually don't have a ton of info, so this might be kind of quick. Okay. So he's at the end of his high school time, and... At age 18, 1978, in Bath Township, Ohio, he commits his first murder. Stephen Hicks, it occurred very shortly after he graduated high school. And during this time, he's becoming increasingly unstable. His alcoholism is pretty intense. And he becomes extremely isolated, you know, in the process. Yeah,

SPEAKER_01: 26:43

his mom had and brother had left at this point. And for some reason, his dad was also not living in their house. So he was just kind of by himself. Did

SPEAKER_00: 26:52

you watch Dahmer, the show, the whole thing? No, I didn't. Okay. I did. I did watch it. It took me a long time to finish it. It was extremely hard to watch. Evan Peters is excellent in that he is very scary, but you fucking hate this guy the whole time. There's nothing redeeming. It's very hard to watch. I think that they tried to be accurate in the storytelling, whether or not that happens. I'm not really sure, but you know, in the movie or in the show, his dad is kind of shown as like someone who's like, he did this taxidermy stuff with him, but then was reluctant and feeling like maybe it was his bad that he was, you know, being weird with the animals and that it wasn't actually him doing that. And I think he did see that he had an alcohol problem, didn't know what to do about it.

UNKNOWN: 27:47

Um,

SPEAKER_00: 27:47

And I think that he is the only thing maybe keeping him in check or distracted during this time. And so when he's- I mean, if his dad is

SPEAKER_01: 28:00

home, there's no way he's going to bring someone home and murder someone

SPEAKER_00: 28:04

there. Right. The window's smaller where that's possible. Opposite of body doubling. Oh my God. Yeah. The opposite of body doubling. Thank you, Akshaya. Oh my gosh. I do have some information about Stephen a little bit that came up. He was born June 22nd, 1959. He was from Coventry Township, Ohio, suburb of Akron. He was described by friends and family as friendly, kind, and trusting. He was known to be an easygoing young man for a love of music. He had just graduated from high school in 1978, so he was planning to go to college, but spending the summer having a time. Yeah,

SPEAKER_01: 28:51

he was trying to go to a concert.

SPEAKER_00: 28:53

Yeah, he was trying to go to concert. And you know, people were hitchhiking during this time because they were, you know. Yeah, it's the 70s, you know. Just trusting that people weren't going to murder them, I guess. Especially if you're a dude. Especially if you're a dude. Yeah, I have some thoughts on that. So basically, he picks him up. He invites him to his house and bath for a drink. That's typically how it always starts. It's like, do you want to have a drink and hang out? This guy is like, you know, I'm in festival vibes. Sure, why not? And they were hanging out for a few hours before this guy tries to leave. And it sounds like JD doesn't want him to go. I was

SPEAKER_01: 29:38

just going to say, I don't know why I'm having that image from Pearl,

SPEAKER_00: 29:45

where she's like,

SPEAKER_02: 29:46

why are you leaving me?

SPEAKER_00: 29:48

You said... that's exactly right jd and pearl similar vibes actually yeah right because she's like keeping her mom's dead body and like props her up at the chairs yeah that family's yeah that family's german too i wonder if there was something true true true interesting you know like movies they don't do things unintentionally and then there's like a like a cultural piece to around containment and all of this stuff. But wow, I'll never be able to not see that. He's doing pearl shit though. Why are you leaving me? Yeah. Yeah, totally. Why did you change? Yeah. And they're like, what are you talking about? She's very clearly clocking that they're uncomfortable. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know how many details to share, but he was bludgeoned to death and he was dissected and he buried the remains behind his family's home. Several weeks later, he dug up the remains and then he dissolved them in acid. He crushed the bones and then scattered them in the woods. Hicks was dismissed as a runaway, not someone who was hitchhiking and going to a concert and then going to college, which maybe that was the cop's way of, quote unquote, not wasting resources.

UNKNOWN: 31:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 31:10

But, you know, his family really pushed for an investigation that never really happened. And of course, these details, they probably found out much later when he was in trial. I don't know whether this was

SPEAKER_01: 31:24

when he first buried it in the woods or when he was taking it to like the second time, but he was pulled over for a traffic violation when he had bags full. in his car that had Stephen Hicks' remains in it. And the cops literally asked him what he had in the bags. And he said, it's trash that I'm taking to the dump. And he told them that his parents had just gotten divorced and that he was just driving around to think. And so they just wrote him up for being left of center driving and then let him go and didn't check the bags or anything. That sounds right. That's consistent. Literally the first person. And 16 more people were killed

SPEAKER_00: 32:15

after this. I mean, it's a really solid way for him to be like, oh, I got to do this thing, and I was even stopped, and nobody thought... Like, I got away with it, yeah. Right. Like, I can do this. Yeah, you're so right. It's one of those stories where I'm just like, you can see, actually, this is like a community accountability issue, because actually everybody is culpable for... Right. Right. In Inside Edition in 1993, he said, I always knew that it was wrong. The first killing was not planned. So he was acting on impulse. I was coming back from the shopping mall back in 78. I had fantasies about picking up a hitchhiker, taking him back to the house and having complete dominance and control over him. I was thinking about how when we talked about Catherine, we're talking about how patriarchy is actually at the crux of so much of why she was able to do that for so long. I still think that white supremacy and patriarchy are clearly also doing a disservice to everyone, including the main beneficiaries, white men. He was still made vulnerable by the cultural expectations that white men are always kind of safe and that, of course, he was a runaway and he's fine. He's probably somewhere doing his own silly thing because young people do that. I think there's a disposability there. And then also white men are taught that you can be trusting because you are invincible. So even if his intuition was maybe like, something's not right, he was probably like, no. You know, like that was irrelevant. He's probably like,

SPEAKER_01: 34:24

I'll be fine.

SPEAKER_00: 34:25

Yeah. I'll be fine. Yeah. Who's going to target me, you know? And apparently, you know, like Stephen's parents were really outspoken. Richard Hicks came out much later when the media frenzy happened. And, you know, the case was unsolved for 13 years. They knew that something was wrong. Yeah. And they were also really affected by the fact that, you know, their son's murder was like not really noted at all or anybody's murder really it was about the sensationalism of Jeffrey and his behavior but apparently he became a Richard Hicks he became an advocate for stronger missing persons cases and push for better support systems of the families whose you know loved ones had disappeared during that time and beyond and so I don't know what came of that after but That's his first murder, where I'm sure he's feeling invincible now. But actually, he doesn't engage in another murder until 1987, which is like nine years later. And part of this is probably because the opportunities weren't there. Shortly after this, he gets into Ohio State, and he's there for only one term. He drops out because he... Had a problem with drinking. I think that his grades suffered because of it. And his father is really pissed about it. And he urged that he enlisted in the army, which, you know, it's always helpful. Right. It's helpful all the time.

SPEAKER_02: 36:06

Go

SPEAKER_00: 36:07

to the army to learn about structured violence, actually. To know all that rage. Yeah. I mean, the military is incredibly skilled at sharpening people's ability to dehumanize the other, quote unquote, so that they can be effective. You're so right. So, you know, another place of culpability. So he was stationed in Germany for some time and- Eventually he was, again, he was discharged because he had problems with excessive drinking, not because he was sexually assaulting soldiers, which he also did. Oh my gosh. They said he has a drinking problem. He can't be here. Wow. But nevermind. He was, I mean, it was documented. A serial rapist. A serial rapist. Yeah. And again, he's like, oh, people got a problem with my drinking, but not a problem with my violence. And so no big deal. Yeah. which I'll hand it back to you

SPEAKER_02: 37:02

for

SPEAKER_00: 37:03

his late 20s, early 30s.

SPEAKER_01: 37:06

Right. So he comes back to Ohio because he's discharged due to drinking in September 1981. And he initially moves in with his dad and his stepmom, but only for a little bit after which he moves to live with his grandma in this place called West Allis, Wisconsin. And apparently she's the only family member that JD liked his grandma. In 1982, he was working as a phlebotomist, but he was laid off and then he was unemployed and living with his grandma. During this time, also in August of 1982, he was arrested for indecent exposure. There's like a lot of this kind of stuff where he gets arrested for indecent exposure or molestation. But this first time was at Wisconsin State Fair and he it was in front of 25 people and he was fined$50 for for that. 1985 is when he starts to go to gay bars and bath houses and just places that a lot of the queer community in Milwaukee is, you know, spending time at. So I'm just gonna create a little more of that context and environment and step back from JD for a little bit. I was really curious as to like the lgbt history in milwaukee was and i was surprised to find like a lot of very rich history that is part of milwaukee so i found out about this event which happened eight years before stonewall called the black knight brawl and it happened on august 5th 1961 at this bar in milwaukee called the black knight which was one of milwaukee's most popular gay bars it was somewhere that was known to be super, super inclusive of anyone and everyone, people that were genderqueer and also queer in their sexuality. And it was very rare to find a space like this at that point of time. So the community was very protective of the space and who they let in to it. So on August 5th, four 20-year-old servicemen checked out of the tavern and were forcibly removed. This woman, Josie Carter, was there that night, stated that they only came in to cause trouble. They try to fight the bouncer when he tried to kick them out. And so Josie, who is a black trans woman, went out with a beer bottle ready to knock them out. And she said that this man turned on me. I thought I can't let him put his hands on me. He was big and he kept coming at me. I thought he would kill me. In that moment, I could fight off an army in a bathrobe. I let him have everything that was in that bottle and he went down. So she beat him up. And so they fled the bar, but they said they were going to bring their friends and come back. So everyone at the bar basically just got ready for this. They were like, all right, we're ready to fight. And Josie said, we did not run from a fight. We did not run from nothing. And Wouldn't you know it, those big ass mothers came back and just tore apart the bar looking for little old me and my husband because their buddy got beat up. It didn't last very long. It was an intense fight. And one of the patrons of the bar had a lot of lacerations when he was thrown through a broken window and another experienced a concussion when he was hit on the head with a bar stool. But thankfully, no one died. And in the end, there was about$2,000 in losses that was reported by the bar, including the bar's entire bottled liquor inventory, an electric organ, a jukebox, and all of the windows. The F word was used by these servicemen to refer to people at the bar and the cops came and took them to jail, the four servicemen. And even said, the cops said to them, you have no business coming down here and harassing these people. During this time, there were literally laws that were, that prohibited cross-dressing and had been in like the books since like colonial times. And so the police, were empowered to apprehend queer folks and inspect and arrest any individual who they thought were not wearing biologically gender appropriate clothing, which is wild. So yeah, this article that I read, they said, today, we can't even imagine the bravery and boldness that was required to live a transgender life in mid-century Milwaukee. And Josie Carter says, oh, I was so proud of myself. But when I went back to the bar and grabbed the door handle. I realized my whole finger was pushed all the way backwards. I didn't even notice it during the fight. I just kept fighting. We all did. So the area that this bar was in was called the Fruit Loop because there was a ton of gay bars around there. But sadly, in 1966, this area was demolished and a freeway was built. The community moved further south and Milwaukee's second gayborhood was formed at 2nd and Pittsburgh. By the late 1970s, there were about a dozen gay and lesbian bars in this area. So it a lot. And I feel like a lot of people came from other places in the Midwest to Milwaukee because it was kind of like a haven of that area of the country. And a lot of the queer activists at the time compared Milwaukee to New York and San Francisco and were like trying to make it on the same level as that for queer folks, which I never knew that. Did you know that? No,

SPEAKER_00: 43:08

this is new to

SPEAKER_01: 43:09

me. Yeah. Thank you for unearthing this. I'm sure people who like live in the Midwest may be No, no more about this. But and I'll share another quote by Josie. She said, I have never lived in fear. All someone can do is beat me up. But believe me, if I see them again anywhere, I will walk up to them, tap them on the shoulder and say, remember me? And they'll remember me. I promise you that. What's really awesome is in 2023, they placed a historic marker and landmark in Milwaukee that tells the tale of the Black Knight uprising. And at the end of the marker, it says, Josie's courage was a call to action. When the servicemen returned later that night, they faced over 70 customers who heroically defended their safe space from invasion. In 2021, the Wisconsin LGBTQ project obtained official civic commemoration to ensure the uprising will never be forgotten. This is the first marker honoring a Black transgender person in Wisconsin. Wow. Badass. Yeah. So that's some of the positive history. Now I'm going to get into some of the more depressing shit because, of course, it's the 1970s. There are was not only like a big LGBTQ community in Wisconsin, but also the city's Black population had increased during this period of time due to what's called the Second Great Migration, which is a lot of Black folks leaving the South. And after World War II, Black folks from states like Mississippi and Arkansas migrated to Milwaukee for better job opportunities. And actually, in this time period, the city's Black population more than doubled, growing from 8,821 in 1940 to 21,000 in 722 in 1950. The city was very segregated and redlined and black families lived in the north side in like houses that were extremely dilapidated. And it was known as the inner core, while white residents, quote unquote, fled to the city's inner suburbs. There was a lot of racial exclusionary policies and redlining and predatory lending practices, kind of typical stuff that kept Black people out of other neighborhoods. And of course, the police targeted the Black community. They did this by targeting interracial heterosexual relationships, which I guess were illegal at this time, enforcing curfews and also quote-unquote vagrancy laws, which is like homelessness-related laws. And as the Black population grew, so did the white cries that something had to be done to quote-unquote fix the city, which they now believed was in moral decay. Of course, the media was also part of this, and they frequently blamed Black migration to Milwaukee as the reason for increased crime rate in the city. And the media also helped criminalize the city's residents, sort of sensationalizing that they were like living morally offensive lives, quote unquote. Actually, in the 1940s, the Milwaukee Journal frequently used phrases such as, quote unquote, slaves of lust and, quote, menace of sex perverts in editorials discussing the growing LGBTQ and other forms of, quote unquote, deviant sexuality. there was also a psych sexual psychopath law that was introduced in 1946 that would allow anyone who was a quote overt homosexual to be committed to an institution until they were cured of their quote unquote deviancy yikes yikes so it's like media police and then like legal frameworks that are already marginalizing this LGBTQ folks. And when you think about black LGBTQ folks, it's like the intersection of two already very marginalized groups. So the passage of these sexual psychopath laws were apparently designed to diffuse the threat of a growing minority presence in Milwaukee.

UNKNOWN: 47:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 47:44

And Wisconsin was among 12 states that passed such laws between 1937 and 1950. So, of course, by the 1960s, there's four and a half times more police in the Black North Side compared to the neighboring majority white district. And At this point, there's just been years of police violence against Black residents. And one such case was in 1958, where a Black man named Daniel Bell was murdered by a white police officer, Thomas Grady. He shot him in the back and then planted a knife on him. And after a 20-year cover-up, he confessed to this in 1979 and was convicted of reckless homicide and perjury. And of course, because of this, there's like A huge fear and distrust between the Black community of Milwaukee and the police, and they often didn't report crimes committed against them. Interestingly, by 1982, Wisconsin became the first state in the country to pass sexual orientation anti-discrimination legislation. And this was because there was a huge presence of queer activism in Milwaukee. And the only reason that happened was because of the advocacy towards it. There was a lot of LGBTQ organizations that were present at this point. So I want you all to just sort of like keep this context in mind as we go into Jeff, JD, and what he was up to in the 1980s in Milwaukee. I'm also thinking about the AIDS crisis. Yeah, I was thinking about that too.

SPEAKER_00: 49:23

Yeah, which I have just a little bit on, not a lot. So I very briefly kind of looked over, you know, the AIDS crisis in Wisconsin in particular, and just like many other places in Milwaukee, the racial disparity between folks who got treatment for HIV AIDS, there's an extreme gap there. In 1983, people of color accounted for 33% of new HIV diagnoses, access to sexual health services, and that kind of thing was less available. Sexual education and then follow-up treatment, not to mention that medical trauma is so intense in communities of color, especially Black communities here in the United States, that it makes a lot of sense that people would not be accessing their doctors.

SPEAKER_01: 50:12

And it was quite new at the time too. Some people were probably like unsure about whether it was serious enough to warrant going to doctors and things like that. Yeah. Lots of misinformation. This,

SPEAKER_00: 50:28

this statistic says that by 2019 that this percentage rose to 86%. Wow. So the disparities in care is still very present. actually. And the people who still continue not to get adequate care are people of color in a pretty intense way. I

SPEAKER_01: 50:48

was just going to say, like, just even going through this history, I feel like there's echoes of it happening again now. It's like this is decades ago, but there's still stuff like this happening to the same exact communities. Yeah. And with all of the change that has happened, there's still so much violence and disparity.

SPEAKER_00: 51:12

86% is so significant and that far outnumbers the percentage of people of color that actually are in Milwaukee. And I don't have the demographic breakdown. They use people of color in a really broad way. So I'm actually not sure what they mean by that. Well, they note that people of color in Milwaukee are also more likely to have low income status, limited access to healthcare. The areas that they're going to school are not well-funded. So education is under-resourced. There's higher percentage of people of color who are homeless in comparison to the white population. And we know that houselessness in and of itself is a risk for sexual violence. I don't think that I worked with so many when I did DV and sexual violence work, um, I don't think I worked with anybody who was experiencing homelessness who had not been sexually assaulted during that time. You know, we talk about HIV AIDS within the context of gay oppression, queer oppression, which is valid. And also there's all of these other factors that people don't ever really think about, like how people are assaulted at like really alarming rates. Yeah, just like

SPEAKER_01: 52:26

different people's identities and their experiences and what puts them more at risk. And I mean, when I was doing this research, also, I like clocked that it was around the same times as the HIV AIDS epidemic. And I was like, damn, the queer community in Milwaukee really be going through it because not only is there racism, The AIDS epidemic. But then there's also this fucker. Yeah,

SPEAKER_00: 52:55

they had to be concerned about AIDS, the police, and Jeffrey. The media, general society. But yeah, during this time, the crisis was initially labeled as the gay-related immune deficiency. Yeah, grid. Ugh. There were calls for quarantine. There was employment discrimination. People were getting fired because they didn't know how it was transmitted. And so the homophobia, very intense. Yeah. and the community building, community organizing. Wisconsin's response was actually one of the, they were kind of the earlier responders to HIV AIDS. They, the state formed a task force in 1983, which was a lot earlier than a lot of other places and implemented confidentiality protections for HIV testing. So they were trying to encourage people to get tested without fear, or at least the people who were pushing for this part, but you know, That's incomplete because they're also saying that the health care system was not really responsive to, again, quote unquote, marginalized groups with HIV AIDS, especially folks who were Black, Latino or openly gay. They faced barriers to basic services. Yeah, that's that. Just getting hit from all angles. Right. And so, you know, similarly, like people were struggling anyway. People who were living in the intersections of race, sexuality, and poverty were at heightened risk for really dying just by living during this time. That was also who Jeffrey really targeted. There has to be like some extreme ties to like his psyche and how he was like, look at how much they don't fucking care. Right. Yeah. That made him feel like he could really escalate because he does escalate in the 80s in particular. It feels very congruent with this same time.

SPEAKER_01: 55:00

Great segue. So as I said before, around 1985 was when JD started going to gay bars and gay bathhouses and just sort of like inserting himself into the LGBT community in Milwaukee. Yeah. in the north side, specifically in a predominantly gay neighborhood, a predominantly black neighborhood. And what he was doing when he went to these gay bathhouses was he was drugging people and sexually assaulting them. And it happened so many times that his membership to the bathhouse was revoked. And he said that the reason he did this was he found it frustrating that his partners would, quote, move It's

SPEAKER_00: 55:48

honestly terrifying because I'm like, I've always kind of thought about roofing as such a common, I mean, such a common practice that we're just like drilled into our heads to cover our drinks. And I definitely know multiple people who've been roofied and everybody that I know knows multiple people who've been roofied. It's such a common practice. And I always wondered what the tie between that and necrophilia was, because why are you feeling roofed? aroused by someone who is unable to respond to you yeah

SPEAKER_01: 56:20

yeah i was just i just was reading this book where there's a significant plot line of like young boys having a group chat where they talk about essaying girls a lot of whom through drugging and i'm just like this makes me so suspicious of like any man because i'm just like what kind of group chats you in that we don't know about you know what kind of conversations are being had and like i know there's this what i haven't watched adolescence yet but i know that there's like something called the manosphere on the internet and stuff which is like where incels get radicalized and It's very scary. It really scares me, honestly, because I

SPEAKER_00: 57:09

feel like they're

SPEAKER_01: 57:10

uplifting each other's violent tendencies and we don't know about it because it's happening in these private channels at a much larger degree than it was before because of technology. So it freaks me out.

SPEAKER_00: 57:23

I always think about this study, which maybe I've talked about on here before. I've definitely shared it with you before because I think about it all the time. I learned about it in undergrad. It never left my mind. They did a study with, I think, college-age men. I don't know what the racial demographic was, but I would assume that it was largely white men. But basically what they did was they put like an EKG on their brain, and they were asked to just look at a series of photos. And what they found was that overwhelmingly the men, when they looked at a tool or like a hammer or like a couch, like an object, there's a part of your brain that lights up and your prefrontal cortex is dark, right? Because you're not trying to figure out what's going on with the object. But they also found that when they looked at photos of women, especially women who were dressed in bikinis and whatnot, they Their prefrontal cortex goes dark and the same parts of their brain that are assessing for tools and objects is the same part of the brain that's lit up when they're looking at women. And they did not find that to be consistent when they were looking at photos of men. So there is literally a biological wiring that is happening to people we raise to be men that literally... dulls or removes their capacity to see women as human beings. And I think about it all the time.

SPEAKER_01: 59:02

And that is just frightening.

SPEAKER_00: 59:06

I think about it all the time. There's another study in my head that I think of when they surveyed white people with similar, except they were showing them photos and videos of people who were being hurt. They found that white people, the part of your brain that lights up when you feel pain yourself, It lights up when they look at other white people who are being harmed. But when they showed them videos or photos of people of color being harmed, the part of their brain goes dark. Wow. So, you know, combination white man. Yes. The suspicion is high. And I just don't know the level of work that you would have to do to rewire your brain to receive people differently. The work is... immense like you would have to be so fucking dedicated all day every day for most pretty much all of your life i think which is why

SPEAKER_01: 1:00:04

probably the quote-unquote best men that you meet are people that have a lot of sisters or are friends with a lot of women right because

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:15

they see them as people yeah

SPEAKER_01: 1:00:17

yeah Yeah, and they have probably rewired their brain through those experiences that they've had. Sad, disappointing. Very sad,

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:25

very scary. I don't know. I can never find those studies. I look for them every so often, but I remember they were seared in my brain.

SPEAKER_01: 1:00:37

Yeah, I mean, they're very specific, so I'm sure that they are real and somewhere. But wow, thanks for sharing that. yeah so he was essaying people that he met in bathhouses and he had his membership revoked after he did this and this is late 1985 and shortly after this he actually tried to dig up a body of an 18 year old corpse and take it home but then he gave up on this plan because I think he probably didn't think it through and lots of logistics there. So like Shaina said, behavior is starting to escalate. September 1986, he is again charged with disorderly conduct because he is masturbating in front of two boys. He told authorities that he was just urinating and And he was sentenced to one year probation and to undergo counseling, but I'm pretty sure that never happened. Again, many instances in which things could have happened and the reason why he was not reported to the police because he was SAing people is because of the horrific context in which... Black queer community is living in Wisconsin with no trust at all for the police. And I'm sure that they would have done absolutely nothing about it, even if they had. So this comes to September 1987, when he murders his second victim. His name was Stephen Tuomi, he was 24 years old, grew up in Ontonagon in the upper peninsula of Michigan, and he worked as a short order cook in a Milwaukee restaurant. Jeffrey's goal apparently was to drug him and sexually assault him. What he says is the next day he awoke to find his dead body covered in bruises next to him and that he died. blacked out and has no memory of the murder happening. I really don't know how true that is. He lies a lot. He's a manipulative person. But he ends up transporting the body to his grandmother's house and disposes of everything in the trash except for the head. I just noticed similarities to Gary Ridgway in how he was targeting sex workers because he knew that no one would care or notice that they were going missing and he would be able to get away with it for much longer in the, in that context and how JD did the same preying on queer communities of color and how the police were very indifferent to violence that was happening within these communities and victim blaming as well of like, if you're gay, you know, you should expect violence and, because that's the quote-unquote lifestyle you're signing up for. It was several years after he murdered Stephen Hicks that this second murder happened. And after that, I think he felt really confident in himself. And January 1987, Jamie Dockstader, 14 years old, was murdered. March 24th, 1988, Richard Guerrero, 25, was murdered. And March 25th, 1989, Anthony Sears, 26, was murdered. And these were all people that he murdered while he was living at his grandma's house. And I will go a little more into who these folks were later on.

SPEAKER_00: 1:04:26

He clearly is getting more bold and he's clearly escalating. And I think for a lot of cases like this, there's always a point at which there's an escalation because One, they feel like they can get away with it. But then also I think that there's like adrenaline chase that happens where they're like, I want more and I want more and I want more. Really gruesome and horrible come 1990. It was already gruesome and horrible, but you know. He's getting experimental now. He moved into apartment 213 at a place called the Oxford Apartments in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It's on the north side, which Akshay mentioned is a racially segregated area, a really under-resourced area, historically Black neighborhood. He moved there on purpose. He moved there on purpose. Absolutely. He moved there on purpose. And I think that he had a fetish for Black men in particular. Like that feels really clear. Later in his interviews, he was talking about how he only killed the pretty ones. And he said it with like, I don't know. I remember being struck by it because he said it with like a resentment feeling. Like there was all of this internalized anti-Blackness and internalized homophobia that was living inside of him that he resented himself for being attracted to Black men. And I think that we see this a lot with violence against transgender women. I think that a lot of the times people who kill them are people who are attracted to them and then they are angry. An extremely violent

SPEAKER_01: 1:05:57

projection, basically. It's like you hate yourself and you're taking it out on this person. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:06:04

I'm thinking about this quote by Alok Menon. They have this really beautiful way of framing that that kind of violence is occurring because you hate the beauty and the softness that you see in me. Wow. That you cannot locate within yourself and that you cannot love within yourself. And that feels really resonant. And this feels related. Anyways, So this place in the north side becomes like the primary sites for where all of the murders happen, the ones that he's most well known for. And this is also where the site of that first story we shared at the beginning or actually shared at the beginning where he gets caught. 12 of his 17 known targets over the span of roughly 14 months happen here. here. I'm going to just name who these people are. Akshi does have more details about who these people were and their stories that we'll share later on in the episode. But for now, I'm just naming who they were. So May 1990, Raymond Smith, 32 years old. June 1990, Edward Smith, 27. September 1990, Ernest Miller, 22. September 24th, 1990, David Thomas, 23. February 18th, 1991, Curtis Slaughter, 17 years old. April 7th, 1991, Errol Lindsay, 19. May 24th, 1991, Tony Hughes, 31. May 27th, 1991, Konarak Sinta Somphone, I hope I'm saying that right, who's 14 years old. And I'm going to go deeper into his story in just a moment. June 30th, 1991, Matt Turner, 20 years old. I think this is July 20th. 1991, Jeremiah Weinberger. July 12th, 1991, Oliver Lacey, 24. And July 19th, 1991, Joseph Bradahoft, 25 years old. I wanted to put a spotlight on Konarak's story. He's a 14-year-old boy. And I think that this is a story that we have more details on. And so if you've heard about Jeffrey, you're likely to have heard about this particular story. Konarak was a Laotian boy. who he was one of nine children. And I think his family was financially struggling at the time. And so Jeffrey lured him with the promise of paying him. He

SPEAKER_01: 1:08:37

did that with a lot of people. Yeah,

SPEAKER_00: 1:08:39

right. He said, I'm going to take your photo. I'll pay you. Yeah. And actually, he didn't know that he had done this to Konorak's older brother years prior. when he was like 12 or something like that, he got away, but he did, he did take photos of him and he did molest his brother. But in, in the show again, which I'm not sure if all the details were aligned perfectly, but in the show, they show him kind of talking to his family to say that he was going to go. And his brother is like clearly still traumatized from the whole thing, but because his brother got away and, And he did get money, I think. I think that he thought it was an opportunity to bring money back home to his family. Yeah, I don't think he saw him as a danger in that way. And it sounded like he was willing to risk a traumatic experience to bring money back to his family, which I think just speaks to how they were struggling at the time. But he's a child, really. Yeah, 14. So, yeah. JD, you know, has him at his house, drugs him. Essentially, he's like trying to lobotomize him. And Konarak ends up being able to run out naked. And he's bruised, he's disoriented, and he's bleeding. So the site was really alarming. There was nothing about this that looked okay. Yeah, and he's like a child as well. He's a child, yeah.

UNKNOWN: 1:10:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:10:19

So Glenda Cleveland, who I'll get to, is Jeffrey Dahmer's neighbor, who I also saw in a documentary quoted saying that he used to offer her sandwiches and she always thought he was kind of off. And now she thinks that the sandwiches absolutely had human meat in them. So she was like suspicious the entire time. And she had made many complaints to the police about him. which they never ever responded to. Nick Cleveland's daughter, Sandra Smith, and niece, Nicole Childress, ran into Konarak in this state outside of JD's apartment. And so after they told Glenda, they called the police to respond to the situation. The police that showed up on the scene, their names are John Balserzak and Joseph Gabrysch. They assume that this was JD's lover. He goes, oh, he's just a little drunk. He doesn't really speak English. He acts like this. He's fine. I just want to take him back to my house. And the two young women who are like, clearly like, do you see this? He's like, can barely walk. He's bleeding. He's a child are completely ignored. And they're not only ignored, the

SPEAKER_01: 1:11:42

police- This is so rage-inducing. The

SPEAKER_00: 1:11:45

police not only dismiss the situation, they walk him and Konarak back to his house. They said it was a lover's quarrel,

SPEAKER_01: 1:11:58

which- Which I'm guessing he has incriminating shit in his apartment. 100%.

SPEAKER_00: 1:12:06

100%. So I think they were dismissing it as domestic violence. Which, you know, the failure to respond to domestic violence is high as well.

SPEAKER_02: 1:12:18

Right.

SPEAKER_00: 1:12:19

They never checked his ID. They never ran his record, which they would have seen that he at least had other run-ins that were really... I

SPEAKER_01: 1:12:27

actually read that he was... convicted for molesting his brother and so they would have realized that if they ran his name

SPEAKER_00: 1:12:38

right

SPEAKER_01: 1:12:39

and i'm also just thinking about how i just said that this neighborhood has four and a half times the number of cops as any other neighborhood in Milwaukee.

SPEAKER_00: 1:12:49

Yeah, the juxtaposition between this and the over-policing and extreme brutality is really stark. Yeah. Yeah, and the way that I'm sure that they were probably criminalizing queer folks as well. Yeah, they took him back to the apartment. They ignored the very clear evidence that this boy was bleeding and there was a foul smell a foul smell that the neighbor had repeatedly. It's just

SPEAKER_02: 1:13:16

so many red flags.

SPEAKER_00: 1:13:17

I know. So many red flags. The neighbor, Glenda would literally call and say, they're screaming. There's a horrible smell that I cannot describe coming through the vents and coming outside of the door. And they never responded. And so when they brought him and this boy back, they had to have been able to smell that, the decomposing bodies. I

SPEAKER_01: 1:13:38

bet they didn't like, make reports that she had stated this probably not either yeah because then if they had those they would be like yeah we should maybe not leave this child here oh my god just

SPEAKER_00: 1:13:56

it's not even like incompetence it's like yeah blatant disregard for for life yeah

SPEAKER_01: 1:14:03

and

SPEAKER_00: 1:14:05

I would go out on a limb and say that police know what decomposing bodies. Of course they do. Yeah. More than the average person. After they do that, they apparently joked about it on the police radio, a lover's quarrel, made some homophobic jokes. And he, it said that he murdered Conor Rock within the next hour. Yeah. The officers

SPEAKER_01: 1:14:30

giving him also like, more sort of like oh it's so easy for me to get away with this

SPEAKER_00: 1:14:37

you know right the evidence is there and still nothing yeah yeah the officers were suspended but then they were later reinstated with back pay I have a little bit about them because I was like what the fuck yeah there's all of these police to respond to like the moral depravity of the city and like sexual deviancy uh-huh And this is the response. This doesn't count as sexual deviancy, though. I guess not. Or it's not their problem or business or I'm not really sure. Yeah. I

SPEAKER_01: 1:15:12

mean, he's a white man that's like charming and manipulative. And they're like, yeah, you're fine. You're safe.

SPEAKER_00: 1:15:20

I don't even think he's charming. Everybody knows he's weird.

SPEAKER_01: 1:15:22

That's fair.

SPEAKER_00: 1:15:23

They just don't find him threatening. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you already spoke about like the context of the police force at the time in the 1980s, early 1990s. There's like a tough on crime. Like there's a new set of tough on crime policies that were ushered in to, you know, respond, which of course, like, you know, the racialized profiling, no officer accountability. Yeah. and outright negligence to the things that actually mattered. Broader context during this time is, you know, organizers and activists, they were pushing to advocate against the increased aggressive tactics, the underreporting of officer wrongdoing, and the complete lack of transparency in the way that they were operating and doing their investigations. They were failing to take complaints seriously, especially from the Black community in Milwaukee. And Very clearly that ties to the way that they dismissed and dismissed and dismissed all of the red flags that were happening. There's no real way to know the rates because there was no real documentation. They didn't. They just didn't. A little bit about John Balzerak. He was reinstated in 1994. In 2005, he was elected president of the Milwaukee Police Association, the police union representing Milwaukee officers. He served in that role until 2009, and then he was in the Milwaukee Police Department until he retired in 2017. Chilling. Joseph, the other officer... Left the Milwaukee Police Department. He joined the Grafton Police Department in 93. He was promoted to captain. In 2019, he was named interim police chief after the last chief retired. And he was on the force until October 10th, 2019, which is 26 years of service. I am

SPEAKER_01: 1:17:24

flabbergasted.

SPEAKER_00: 1:17:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:17:27

zero consequences zero rewards rewards yeah yeah

SPEAKER_00: 1:17:33

uh-huh so that's that

SPEAKER_01: 1:17:36

speechless and flabbergasted yeah

SPEAKER_00: 1:17:39

yeah it's all very enraging it's all very enraging and it says a lot about like we're like oh my gosh violence and we're just living in violence all the time

SPEAKER_02: 1:17:48

right

SPEAKER_00: 1:17:50

having a lot of cherry picking about what violence we feel is permissible or normal. There's this quote from Glenda Cleveland. She said, we knew something was wrong. The smell, the screams, we called the cops. They did nothing. I'm going to give a little overview of the kinds of things he did to people, not to be gratuitous, but because I have some connections to make about Oh my gosh. European colonists have done for over a century to non-white bodies. For all of his victims, a lot of them, he said that he wanted to create them into zombies, quote unquote, through acid injections. He kept the remains as trophies. He typically lured victims with promises of money or companionship, like we said, and then he would drug them. He would lock them in the house. He would kill them and he would dismember them in the apartment. He preserved and kept their body parts in this freezer, including skulls and skin and organs. He also cannibalized some of the bodies and then he also painted some of their heads and put them on display in his apartment as decoration. He repeatedly stated that his desire was to keep them close forever. by consuming them and trying to preserve their parts. So the way that he's sexualizing death and control, I think, is very much a byproduct of older colonial violence. I want to reiterate that throughout this period, he went unnoticed. Nearly all of his victims were working class men and boys of color. Not unnoticed, his neighbor noticed. Right. Unnoticed by people who had the power. Yes. To intervene. Yeah,

SPEAKER_01: 1:19:52

exactly.

SPEAKER_00: 1:19:53

But you're right. He did not go unnoticed. I'm sure plenty of people- Unnoticed or

SPEAKER_01: 1:19:56

indifferent by the people in power, we don't know. But seems like the second one to me. Maybe both.

SPEAKER_00: 1:20:03

Yeah. Because I could see people in his community being like, couldn't possibly, couldn't fathom someone who was chill with me and is like this goofy guy. I perceive him to be so unthreatening that it threatens my own self-concept and sense of reality to consider that.

UNKNOWN: 1:20:20

Right.

SPEAKER_01: 1:20:20

Right. Yeah. Like his high school friend who was like, he would have never killed

SPEAKER_00: 1:20:24

me. Right. Yeah. Like, I don't think that's the point, but glad you feel safe. Yes. And, you know, like most of them were queer people. Some were houseless, some were involved in survival sex work, main targets in the end being predominantly gay Black men. And he gets to sustain this benign vibe. They called him well-mannered, they called him soft-spoken, they called him pleasant. So I'm going to go on a tangent now about cannibalism because I think this kind of blend of fetishization and brutality, all of which is based in extreme dehumanization and objectification of non-white bodies, is actually just really basic colonial history. So we're going to bring it to the top, actually. I first looked at the internet to be like, okay, what are examples of cannibalism? in European history. And there's actually quite a lot. The first thing that came up was on the practice of medical cannibalism. And I found all of this information about how from the Middle Ages to through the Renaissance and maybe a little beyond that, Europeans widely practiced cannibalizing mummies. Egyptian mummies were very prized, it said. Thousands were ground up and sold in apothecaries. They called it mamia. They thought it had healing properties. It feels like it shouldn't be real, but all of this feels like it shouldn't be real. So there was a misunderstanding of Arabic medical texts, they said, which described the use of bitumen, which is like they say it's a resinous substance. So I wonder if the resin that's used in mummification practices, that was the thing that they said had healing properties, but they're not translating correctly, you know, because...

SPEAKER_02: 1:22:31

Oh,

SPEAKER_00: 1:22:31

God. Yeah. Yeah, they confuse this with the actual mummy themselves, right?

SPEAKER_01: 1:22:41

It's kind of funny in a dark way. It just seems so absurd that they were even trying to look to do something like this in the first place. And they were like, you know what this probably says is that we should consume the mummy. It's like, that's...

SPEAKER_00: 1:23:01

You know, they were living rough out there in Europe for some time. They were probably looking rough and smelling rough and all of these things. And, you know, like the practices were just horrific. I was reading that in the Victorian era, rat's nest comes from literally like ladies wanted their giant hair and they put fucking lard in it so that it would stay up. And, you know, you weren't bathing regularly or washing your hair regularly and rats would literally make make a home out of. Yeah. Oh my God. People want to smell so bad. It must be fucking stinky. And everything, every, every bit of history over and over shows that like they show up and they're just like, they're stinky. They come with disease and they do it to like communities who have regular bathing practices. And you know what I mean? And so my water to clean their booties. Right. So I, I'm just like, Part of me always feels like the act of racism is actually just an act of envy, feeling like and seeing that people are living better, that they're actually looking beautiful because they're taking care of themselves, that maybe they're looking younger or maybe that they're living longer, you know, because they have different infrastructures. And instead of it being that, oh, maybe they have different practices than my people do and I could learn from that. it becomes, oh, they have these things. It must be magical. It must be something inherent over there. And I'm going to consume it. It's mine. Yeah. You know, that feels consistent. So yeah, they started fucking, apothecaries sold powdered mummy as medicine. They said it treated everything. They said headaches, the plague, a cure. And it was a practice for people from All social stratas, wealthy people, poor people, they were all looking for mummy powder because they thought it was going to fucking cure them. This is wild. They said internal bleeding healed. Internal bleeding healed. Oh my gosh. Absurd. It's just like a mass delusion. It is mass delusion. What if whiteness is just folia de but like forever? Forever.

SPEAKER_01: 1:25:23

on a massive scale yeah

SPEAKER_00: 1:25:30

because this is so wild it really connects to i'm thinking about the asylum whatever and you look at the list and you're just like political excitement menstrual derangement this is so wild bad whiskey like yes girl what are you talking about you know

SPEAKER_01: 1:25:47

so It makes me think that they're like tripping or like high off of something. They're fucking confused and violent. Yes.

SPEAKER_00: 1:25:58

For a long time.

SPEAKER_01: 1:25:59

Yes. For a very, very long time.

SPEAKER_00: 1:26:02

But, you know, we talked about the mid... Yeah. In the Lizzie one, the Elizabeth one, we talked about, you know, the Middle Ages. So gnarly. They didn't bond with their kids. They're being incestuous. Yeah. We learned that blue eyes is actually a byproduct of incest. They love these

SPEAKER_01: 1:26:22

like torture practices.

SPEAKER_00: 1:26:24

What's with the torture, man? Yeah. I went to a torture museum. Don't ask me why I did that. I was in Chicago. I was by myself. It kept popping up on my phone. I said, you know what? What the fuck else am I doing? I've never gone to one of these. It was horrifying. Wouldn't do it again. The vibes were very bad, but all, you know, 80, 90% of all of the featured items and mechanisms and practices, they were all from Europe. And the ones it's interesting because the most popular torture practices are a lot of them were actually stolen ideas from folklore they learned about in other countries. So what they just go to other countries and take the most brutal. Yeah. Uh-huh. And then they make it, they said it's mine now. Cultural appropriation of

SPEAKER_01: 1:27:27

torture. Not

SPEAKER_00: 1:27:28

cultural appropriation of torture. This is just so wild. I was like, I need to get out of here. And this is so wild, but also a lot of it looked like BDSM. And I was like,

SPEAKER_01: 1:27:37

Yes, that makes sense.

SPEAKER_00: 1:27:39

Like, whoa, what is the inheritance that is BDSM and how does it connect? Because it would make a lot of sense that you would have to trick your body into receiving pleasure from pain if pain was something that was inevitable and happening to you at really intense levels. Yeah. But that's neither here nor there. If someone has some analysis around that, would love to hear. Okay. Mummified remains were also used in art. Mummy Brown, a pigment made from ground mummies, was popular among some European artists. Yeah. The artifacts, they became prized collectibles for personal cabinets of curiosity, and they put them in museum displays. This... mummy obsession increased after Napoleon's 1798 Egyptian campaign, which apparently sparked what they call Egyptomania, a widespread obsession with all things Egyptian. I

SPEAKER_01: 1:28:42

have heard of this before. I recorded the first episode of my tarot podcast and I was going into the history of tarot and it was around the same time that Egyptomania was happening and they were like, connecting the two of like the cards might've come from Egypt because it was around the same time that people in Europe were flipping out about Egypt. That would track.

SPEAKER_00: 1:29:09

Yeah. Travelers, collectors, they brought mummies back to Europe. They're fucking grave robbing, bro. That's such cursed behavior. That's like cursed for generations

SPEAKER_01: 1:29:20

on boats and stuff. Like that's what, how they're bringing it back. Right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:29:26

Yeah. bought them from local markets or straight up just like robbed graves.

SPEAKER_01: 1:29:31

Yeah. I just don't understand how you can think that that's like not going to bring such bad energy. And that's also like just such a, such a disrespectful thing to do. Like, But it kind of connects back to if you view certain humans as an object, then you're not seeing them with the same respect.

SPEAKER_00: 1:29:51

Yeah. So the normalization of this practice actually expanded to this idea of medical cannibalism. They were down to eat anybody. They often sourced from the quote-unquote most vulnerable, people who were poor, people who were executed for crime. enslaved people and people who were otherwise deemed unworthy or other in society. They talked about how this practice reinforced and reflected the social hierarchies established by pre-European colonialism and slavery. During the subjugation of Ireland, also, colonizers exhumed Irish skulls to ground into powder. for sale across Europe. And I tried to find information about how this was practiced during slavery, which is reflected in their other stuff too, like they would collect hair clippings from lynchings. I mean, George Washington, his teeth are not wood. His teeth are the teeth of enslaved people.

SPEAKER_01: 1:30:59

Oh my

SPEAKER_00: 1:30:59

gosh. They make dentures out of their teeth. And so cannibal adjacent things happening all the time, those things are well documented. And so I'm just like, you know, Jeffrey is in good company because this is so consistent. I have some gross stuff about keeping bodies as trophies that I could not stop thinking about when I was reading about the things that he did to people. Colonial forces in Africa and elsewhere frequently beheaded local chiefs. They frequently beheaded resistance leaders and warriors. They would collect their skulls as trophies, and they would bring them back to Europe as symbols of victory and conquest. And sometimes those skulls would then be displayed in museums or kept in private collections. Wow. Parallels are striking. They're striking, no? I was like, ugh. This is just ancestral. He's getting in touch with his ancestors, you know. They keep talking about like body parts as ornamental objects. They also practice scalping indigenous people, which is, you know, interesting because I think that there is the lore that white people like to put out is that indigenous people were scalping each other and scalping them. But actually the practice of scalping was happening online. by the colonizers. It's always a projection, always. It's always. They institutionalized the practice of scalping indigenous people, British and Spanish colonizers would. They kept them as trophies and proof of their military superiority, or they would bring them back to claim rewards for bounty. Massachusetts issued a lot of scalp bounties in the 18th century. and practiced this continuously through the conquest of California. California actually is a site of one of the most devastating indigenous genocides in the country. I don't feel like people talk about it that way because California is held up as this liberal place. The erasure is really intense. And not to mention like missions and all that, like there's so much going on in California. They also had human zoos in early 19th and early 20th centuries. Europeans and Americans displayed colonized people in human zoos. Millions attended these, millions. And so, you know, I'm thinking about like, there's the people who do the egregious violence and then there are millions of people who have the appetite for it. And I feel like that's also really mirrored in the public spectacle people have created around JD and his violence, or they call them his crimes, but not like the way that he took human life and desecrated their bodies and stole people of their loved ones. You know what I mean? Like they're like his crimes. There's that. And then there's also trophy hunting and colonial game. So beyond, you know, beyond humans, colonizers, they also engage trophy hunting of animals as a symbol that they had conquered lands and people. Like they would bring, you know, taxidermy always rub me the wrong fuck away. I don't like it. It feels disrespectful. Oh, I hate it. And they, yeah, they would do this as a way to show that they like conquered a place. And they often, you know, displayed these in museums as well and collecting and they would collect like heirlooms and whatever. They would collect everything. And so including people's bodies, but also like the bodies of animals that they exotic quote unquote animals that they have killed that may have been sacred objects. to the people, especially. Yeah, it seemed like some sick joy that they were getting. And so I also was making the connection to the McDonald triad and mutilation of animals and curious about if that's actually rooted specifically in these behaviors. Right. You know what I mean? Yeah. So I found a couple articles. One is from... a book called Confronting Colonial Objects, Histories, Legacies, and Access to Culture. This article was written by Karsten Stahn. It's called Collecting Humanity, Commodification, Trophy Hunting, Biocolonialism. And it starts with a story. And this is very disturbing, but it feels relevant sometimes to not shirk details because I think that there is a tendency to minimize or choose to disappear the... Just like depravity of colonial violence and people are not recognizing that this is something that echoes through this day. And that actually, I don't know that there's a level of reparations that is possible for the harm that has happened. And even, you know, even the most basic reparations, there's always pushback.

UNKNOWN: 1:36:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:36:09

And so the story that they open with is a chest of Herero skulls was recently sent by troops from German Southwest Africa to the Pathological Institute in Berlin, where they will be subjected to scientific measurements. The skulls from which Herero women have removed the flesh with the aid of glass shards to make them suitable for shipment come from Hereros who have been hanged or who have fallen. This Cruel and Distance description of the collection of human remains by Germans in Southwest Africa forms part of the memoirs of an officer of the German Protective Force called the Schutztrupp, published in 1907. It's connected to a popular image, namely a colonial postcard, which shows officers from the notorious Swakomund camp loading the Herero skulls designated for German museums and universities. They say that the sober tone of the text and triumphant image depicting skulls piled up like brick stones illustrate the dehumanization of human remains and colonial violence and the degrading methods of collection and preservation creating an entire industry of trade of body parts.

SPEAKER_01: 1:37:22

Oh my

SPEAKER_00: 1:37:22

gosh. The mix of colonial ideology and racial science. See, science. They keep calling it science. Medical cannibalism, racial science. It's not. It's just depraved science. Yeah. At the peak of the colonial period prompted not only a stark increase in the removal of cultural objects, but also a new era in collection of human remains. Thousands of remains, in particular from allegedly quote-unquote extinct or quote-unquote primitive populations, were collected in colonies and transferred to scientific, anthropological, or military museums and laboratories. Human skulls turned into the quote-unquote holy grail of 19th century race theory. Human remains constituted biocapital. sought by public institutions, private collectors, and colonial administrations in order to remap the human space. The study of crania, facial angles, or jaws served to investigate human differences through biological criteria. This study And they put it in quotes also, colonial corporality was driven by global networks involving physicians, curators, traders, profiteers, colonial officials, military doctors, or missionaries in museums. It was supported by colonial expansion, Darwinist theories, desires for anthropological objectification, strife for national prestige, or for educational purposes. It provided an additional incentive for trophy taking and collection of human remains from burial sites, battlefields, prisons, or internment camps. Remains were commissioned, exchanged, traded as objects between institutions and individuals. And this person names this as the most violent emblem of colonial conquest. Later in the article, they talk about how many indigenous culture and indigenous cultures human remains are sacred. And treated as people rather than objects, even after their passing, connecting past and present. And collectors treated remains obviously as objects. Indigenous populations regarded as research material for anthropological classification or show objects. Many remains were collected without consent in violation of local laws, customs, and belief systems. Of course. Yeah. They also note that the collection of human remains started long before the peak of colonial expansion. That trophy taking has been an inherent part of warfare. And then also, as we noted earlier with the mummies, that was before these examples. Bones and body parts were collected under the umbrella of science to explain differences between nations or to classify human races by anatomical difference. That's where the practice of phrenology comes from.

SPEAKER_02: 1:40:13

In

SPEAKER_00: 1:40:14

particular, non-European human skulls became fetish objects. Military physicians, explorers, missionaries, anthropologists were mandated to obtain skulls. They were collected in military operations, detention camps, hospitals, or again, taken from burial sites. They also noted these practices were in contrast to standard quote-unquote civilized behavior and military codes of honor, like these are Things that they would simultaneously say is like actually like not a part of the code of honor. And yet they had like a quota for it still. Yeah. Right. They were like morally banned, but then also practiced all the time, you know, warfare, sometimes in alleged response to mutilations of bodies or head hunting by quote unquote non-civilized enemies. So they used, they said, this is where I think all of the rumors come from is that they were like, oh no, they did it first. No, they were cannibals. No, they were scalping. No, they were beheading our people. Yeah. And I just don't think that that's, yeah, I don't think that's consistent. Right. Said they continued by saying trophy hunting or mutilation were both a cause and consequence of colonial conflict. They're striking parallels between colonial context. Examples may be found under British, Belgian, French, Portuguese, and German colonial rule. silenced element of British colonial practice with such practices. When those practices became public, they were often condemned by home audiences. However, they formed a part of the rationalization of colonial violence. People were enraged to hear that maybe other communities were doing this to their people when actually the story was the opposite. And then they used that as a way to mobilize and get a lot of support from people back home to continue colonial conquest as if people deserved Like manufacturer consent. Exactly. And then they talk again about how they were used to crush resistance efforts or insurgencies in Asia and Africa. For example, during the uprising in 1857 in India, British commanders condemned rebel leaders to death by cannonade. The force of explosion mutilated bodies and made it impossible to perform funeral rites in the Hindu or Muslim traditions. Sometimes the skulls were preserved. So that feels really intentional too. I'm thinking a lot about Palestine and the intentional use of bombing. Not only are they decimating entire lines of families, but they're Mm-hmm. Yeah. After the Battle of Magdala in Northern Ethiopia, 1868, British troops cut hair from a corpse of the Emperor Tuodros II as a trophy. And then it later became part of the National Army Museum in London. The stories go on and on and on. One more thing on this note that I wanted to highlight, another article that I found is that we're talking about this from a military context, which is structural, which is like a tribute to governments and institutions. But what's missing in that is that militaries are made up of individual people who go home to their families. And so I found another article called colonialism in the decor. We can't keep sweeping the past under the leopard skin rug by Elliot Ross. And I Elliot says around 25,000 colonial officials returned to Britain during the mid-20th century alone as formal colonial rule came to an end. Many others who had lived and worked in British colonies outside of any government role came back too. They brought all kinds of stuff with them. Historians Chris Jeppesen and Sarah Longair discovered an assortment of wood carvings, paintings, drums, other musical instruments, furniture, a set of arrows used as a hat rack. In one home, a wash basin had been kept intact. Some items were proudly displayed. Others have been stored away from view in attics and cupboards. There were lion and leopard skins, many ivory ornaments, and elephant feet used as waste paper bins. Just casual in these people's houses. There was a machete shattered by a bullet taken from the body of a slain Land and Freedom Army fighter in Kenya. They were called Mau Mau. In the 1950s, some interviewees devoted Africa rooms in their homes or other ways of consciously using museum curation and display, such as labeling and glass cabinets. So this is just the beginning of this article. And I'm thinking a lot about cultural appropriation. I don't think that when we talk about cultural appropriation, people are often thinking about this violent underbelly. as a part of it. I think it offers a different way for metabolizing the impact of cultural appropriation when we see that actually it has roots here. So the article continues and then talks about how Jeppesen and Longhair interviewed more than 30 elderly former colonial officials in their homes across the UK and found that the world of their youth, often memorialized through domestic ornaments and furniture, was frequently fondly remembered as a time and place of family and friendship, of personal ambition and adventure, of love, of hope, pleasure, desire, and loss. Gosh. They said that they also spoke with several elderly people now living in England who had spent early years in colonized countries in Africa and brought souvenirs home. These conversations offered a way of understanding how the colonial period is perceived in domestic settings. German historian Britta Schilling defines public memory as being primed through interactions in the public space, media and institutions, whereas private memory is usually transmitted orally and often within families. It forms a unique archive of stories and anecdotes. on one hand, but also material relics on the other. Cherished notions of white European innocence and benevolence are sustained through a focus of simple curiosity. They then say, Oh, God. Yeah, Klaus van Weisman told me how his relative crossed the Congo Basin on behalf of Leopold II riding a tamed ox, writes Schilling. Hermann von Weisman, who eventually became governor of German East Africa, now Tanzania. However, may he also be remembered for his self-proclaimed acts of violence against natives. But that part, you know. people are not really holding on to. Other examples include Ewald and Nikolaus von Puttkamer showed shilling the researcher. Vast Mansion, their relative, Jesko von Puttkamer had put in the middle of a jungle during his reign as governor of Cameroon. The German government recalled him in 1907, accusing him of excessive spending and severity to natives during a period of heightened indigenous resistance to colonial rule. But his like, you know, grandchild or whatever has this affectionate moment where he's sharing this photo photograph of look at this beautiful mansion and they're all of them are like my you know my my whimsical little uncle

SPEAKER_01: 1:48:11

quirky

SPEAKER_00: 1:48:12

grandpa guy you know he may have cannibalized some people but you know it was a phase

SPEAKER_01: 1:48:21

oh my gosh

SPEAKER_00: 1:48:22

you know we all have that phase in college Is the vibe. Yeah, it is.

SPEAKER_02: 1:48:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:48:32

They also talk about how Germany is not alone in fixating on colonial leaders' eccentricities and hobbies at the expense of more troubling political histories. They talked about Winston Churchill's home, which is now a museum. And the writer says there was no mention that Churchill lived Churchill's role in causing the Bengal famine of 1943. The death toll is approximately 3 million. Visitors instead are encouraged to detail Churchill's great fondness for butterflies.

SPEAKER_01: 1:49:08

Feels like the kawaiification of Japan. 100% of it.

SPEAKER_00: 1:49:15

The kawaiification of Japan. Yeah, that's true. They're like so cute, but also... Not too long ago. Yeah. Conversations.

SPEAKER_01: 1:49:26

So cute. Don't remember all the other stuff. Recasting itself through the kawaii culture to evade historical accountability.

SPEAKER_00: 1:49:34

You know, a lot of accountability needs to be had. Yeah, troubles. Troubles in Japan. But yeah, it's very romanticized over there.

SPEAKER_02: 1:49:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:49:42

The writer then talks about how you can trace a thread from these personal memories to the public framing of colonists as just wide-eyed adventurers who just happen to possess enormous political power over non-European people. Cherished notions of white Europeans' innocence and benevolence are sustained through a focus on simple curiosity. Even the most basic historical facts manage to slip through the cracks in colonial families and the nations to which they belong. It's the way that A man's skull can be taken and displayed in a museum or used to hold novels in place on a shelf. So a lot of parallels. I felt very validated

SPEAKER_01: 1:50:17

with these findings. Yeah, a lot that you went down this rabbit hole because it's very insightful and telling.

SPEAKER_00: 1:50:25

I have one more thing. Sorry, I'm talking a lot. That's okay. But this time I asked ChachiBT... Because I was having these connections in my head. I said, make an argument about how Jeffrey Dahmer is just... How his cannibalism and his behaviors are a byproduct of the violence. Okay, let's hear it. And I tried to ask about epigenetics and stuff. Everybody taught... Any type of historical trauma... And the conversation around epigenetics is always about the people who have been traumatized, who people have colonized. Never through the lens of what do you inherit when you have legacies of conquest? People are not researching. Well, they're starting to research that, but, you know, sparse. But they did present these other concepts that feel good enough. But I can't take credit for finding these. I mean... These ideas in my brain, the connections made chat GPT. So, you know, I suppose they talked about two things. They talked about repetition compulsion, which is a psychodynamic theory, right? The drive to repeat a trauma over and over, especially if we're they're unresolved. Chatupiti took a metaphorical approach. They said, if Dahmer's ancestors lived by consuming the lives of other people through slavery, conquest, rape, and dispossession, then his cannibalism could be a grotesque re-ritualization of those acts, metaphorically. Yeah. But I think also literally. And literally, yeah. And then... And then Chachibiti says he didn't need to be taught colonialism. It lives in his cells, his dreams, his compulsions. The lineage of European conquest becomes a kind of haunted genetic architecture, one that reenacts itself not through speeches, but through flesh. And I was like, Chachibiti can never just answer a question straight. No, no, no, no. But also, I was like, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:52:21

Has to be poetic.

SPEAKER_00: 1:52:23

Well, it has information about me. So I think that it tries to talk to me like I want to talk to.

SPEAKER_02: 1:52:29

Yeah,

SPEAKER_00: 1:52:30

I do think that it lives in his body, his dreams, his compulsions, you know, haunted genetic architecture. Yeah, yeah. So they also talk about the colonial unconscious, which refers to like a deep seated internal memory of Intergenerational trauma, collective memory, combo, colonial unconscious. It's this thing that we share, this unspoken legacy of colonialism that persists in all of our psyches. throughout society. The legacies include patterns of domination, violence, dehumanization, racial hierarchy, traumas that are not only historical, but also psychological and cultural, shaping behaviors and social structures across generations. And so the connection that was being made here is the idea that people who are socialized and shaped by colonial histories may unconsciously repeat patterns of violence or dehumanization inherited from their colonial past and could be seen as a form of repetition compulsion on interpersonal and collective levels. For descendants of colonizers, the repetition compulsion may manifest as the reenactment of Right. Totally. Yeah. that people literally cannot and will not believe certain things happened and that their family members were a part of it.

SPEAKER_02: 1:54:20

And

SPEAKER_00: 1:54:21

yet there's this embodied knowing otherwise and like a weird like penchant for collecting quote unquote exotic things that they don't understand, you know, why they're doing that. Now, you know, I'm thinking about nonprofit ladies who like have too much African garb in a different way.

SPEAKER_01: 1:54:39

True, true, true. Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_00: 1:54:41

Because what the fuck is going on there? Rachel Dolezal too?

SPEAKER_01: 1:54:45

What's going on? Never forget about her.

SPEAKER_00: 1:54:47

Never forget Rachel Dolezal. She's out here still. She's...

SPEAKER_02: 1:54:52

Yeah, I wonder what she's up to.

SPEAKER_00: 1:54:53

Last I heard, she was fired for being on OnlyFans from a school. Yeah, they fired her for being on OnlyFans, not for cosplaying black person. Wow. Again. And I'm just like, if someone is on OnlyFans and they're teaching... isn't that just a sign that you need to pay them more? Yes. Out of everything that Rachel has done, they're asking the wrong questions. But anyway, always asking the wrong questions. Yeah. So the reenactment of trauma within relationships and communities, that's the connection. And when you

SPEAKER_01: 1:55:25

contextualized looks like personality.

SPEAKER_00: 1:55:28

Exactly. Wow. Yes.

SPEAKER_01: 1:55:31

Yes. Yeah, yeah. That's a Rashma Menekum quote. Because they're saying that he has like personality disorders and stuff, but.

SPEAKER_00: 1:55:40

That's that. That was a lot. A

SPEAKER_01: 1:55:44

doozy.

SPEAKER_00: 1:55:45

That's what I got lost in. That's why I was behind, because I got lost in this. That's fair. That's fair. But hopefully it kept your attention the whole time. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:55:57

I mean, I feel like it's very, very relevant and very insightful. to the story so thanks for taking us on that journey yeah for sure as you were talking i like one of the last things that i did for research was watch the testimony of tracy edwards who's the person i talked about right in the beginning and i haven't formed full connections with it but maybe you can help me out as i get into it so Now we're back to July 22nd, 1991. Tracy Edwards is a 32-year-old Black man. He had seen Jeffrey Dahmer a couple times before then, had spoken to him, had said hello. He was at Grand Avenue Mall in Milwaukee on this day with a couple of friends drinking beer. He said that J.D. approached them and started talking to them. J.D. told them that he was... in the city from chicago and was taking care of his sick grandma but he said he was like a professional photographer and then was trying to like ask them like are any of you guys interested in making money taking nude pictures basically modeling for nude pictures. And then he told them like, Oh, I'm going to buy all of us like beer, rum and Coke. So like, let's go to the liquor store together. And they go to the liquor store. And while they're there, Tracy Edwards actually runs into his brother and is talking to his brother while JD is with his other friends. Something happens where like, it ends up being that his two friends leave to go to change and then they said that they'll come come back with some girls and tracy edwards goes with jd to his apartment but jd ended up giving his friends a fake address which he finds out later when he reconnects with his friends so they go to his apartment taking back routes which jd said would be better the better way to do it he said that he seemed normal at first as they were walking there he was talking to him about the military because tracy had told him that his dad was in the military and had a military family he said that he walked into the apartment there was a foul odor and he asked him about it and he said a sewer pipe broke so he said okay He also did see acid, which he told him he cleaned bricks with. But I guess like at this point he was like he was just seeming like a really nice guy. So I like really didn't. think that there was anything that he was going to do. So then he offered him a beer and also offered him a mixture of rum and Coke. It's weird because throughout this whole testimony, whoever it is, I think it's the prosecutor, he's stating, you're not a homosexual though, right? And you didn't know he was asking you to go back there for homosexual stuff, right? You didn't know he was going to take you back there to try to kill you, but no, about the homosexual stuff. He takes a couple sips from the rum and Coke at this point. And then I guess JD has a fish tank in his apartment and he says something about a fish tank. Tracy turns to look at the fish tank. And then next thing he knows, one of his hands is handcuffed and Jeffrey is holding a knife. It's actually a military knife that looks kind of like a machete and he has it like on his rib. He tells him, if you don't do what I say, I'll kill you. And he, He said he seemed like a completely different person. Like it looked like he had a different face structure and a different body. And he looked like a different guy. And he repeats this over and over again. He was at his apartment for like four hours. And he said every 20 to 30 minutes is when sort of a switch happens. would happen so at this point they're in the living room and jd's like let's go to the bedroom so they go into the bedroom and he sees that there's a drum barrel there and then he sees that the bed is unmade and that there's a stain on the bed and he's trying to just continue to talk with him and sort of being friendly as a way to just de-escalate the situation and i guess the There was a TV in his bedroom. He thinks that when they first got to the apartment, Jeffrey went in there and turned it on and The Exorcist 3 was playing on VCR. They were just watching it together for a little while. J.D. said, I mean, Tracy Edwards said that J.D. one minute was nice and then said he didn't want people to leave or abandon him. and then was quiet and would be watching the movie and was also asking Tracy to watch the movie with him. This is where it gets weird. And this is what I was like thinking about when you were talking. I haven't seen The Exorcist 3, so I don't know what they're talking about, but there's a part in the movie where a preacher gets possessed by the devil, I guess. He wanted to mimic that part of the movie and he's rocking back and forth and chanting, right?

SPEAKER_00: 2:01:18

From a spiritual perspective, I do think that something dark and sinister happens and opens inside of you when you disconnect from your humanity in such an extreme way. Like I think.

SPEAKER_01: 2:01:31

Totally. I

SPEAKER_00: 2:01:32

think that's true. Yeah. Yeah. When you're thinking about like how in healing work we're talking about, let's reconnect with our ancestors.

UNKNOWN: 2:01:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 2:01:42

What kind of ancestors are you getting in contact with when you're doing this shit, you know? The chanting? Very creepy.

SPEAKER_01: 2:01:48

Yeah. And he said that he kept doing that. So then at one point, JD asks him to lay down face down on the floor and starts to get a bit more aggressive at this point. He said that he was trying to listen to his heart and told him that he was going to eat his heart. Okay. And at this point had the machete pointed to his groin area. Tracy Edwards is really, I feel like he's really trying to figure out how to survive the situation. He's multiple times asked to go to the bathroom and he does take him to the bathroom. Towards the end, he asked to go to the bathroom again. And then he says, can we go back to the living room? Because the front room has an AC. And so... I guess they go back to the living room. Tracy Edwards actually unbuttoned his shirt to keep JD more at ease. And then he said that he was going out of himself. So I'm like interpreting that as like he was dissociating and that he was again rocking and chanting. And at this point, like he kind of just even let him go. And that's when he got up and he ran towards the door is like when he was kind of in this like kind of dazed out state. Tracy Edwards gets up, hits him, runs out the door, makes it outside, sees Milwaukee PD and says like, this crazy guy was trying to hurt me. The police then go to the apartment. He goes with them. This is when they find what I said in the beginning. They found photos of dismembered bodies, found a dismembered head in the refrigerator. They found seven skulls and four decapitated heads stuffed into the refrigerator. A 57-gallon barrel containing a headless torso and other body parts that was decomposing with corrosive chemicals at the time. He was also bleaching bones like he had done with his dad when he was younger. And then for some reason, the first thing that he said to the cops was, if you ever see Al Smeshko, I want you to thank him for everything he did for me when I was in high school, which is the teacher that they interviewed on that podcast the teacher was the one that found him outside with the six pack of beer and then took him to the guidance counselor okay yeah yeah so he never really seems fully there no

SPEAKER_00: 2:04:17

i mean the amount of drinking he's been doing since he was 13 on top of like the extreme acts of violence have to be yeah psychologically damaging in an extreme way. Like I can imagine he just is not there.

SPEAKER_01: 2:04:32

Yeah. I'm sure he's quite fractured in terms of his, his parts and his soul as well, which kind of makes sense with the like, Oh, he seemed like a different person. It was interesting that he was like, it looked like he had a different face, um,

SPEAKER_00: 2:04:48

That is interesting. But we do hear that with DID, that people's literal body chemistry shifts. So that's interesting. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 2:04:56

It's surprising to me that that was not one of the things that he was diagnosed with. But anyways, I'll get into that in a moment. So like right after he was arrested, he did confess. to 17 murders and also admitted to the authorities that he ate his victim's organs and also engaged in necrophilia. On September 10th, 1991, a couple months later, he pled not guilty by reason of insanity for 15 charges to murder. Unfortunately, one of the bodies was never found, so they didn't charge him. for one of the murders, even though he admitted to it. And since Stephen Hicks was killed in Ohio, he had to go to Ohio for another trial for murder. The person's body that was never found was Stephen Tuomi, the second victim. I was just curious about the not guilty by reason of insanity charge. And so I just sort of looked into it. It's still a thing. It's called NGRI or not guilty by reason of insanity. But it basically asserts that the defendant was, quote, legally insane at the time that the offense was committed and so did not understand the wrongfulness of the actions. In a court, what this means is that someone lacks insight into their mental illness at the time that they committed the crime. So they could have insight during the trial that they didn't have during the moment that they committed the crime. wins a trial so is declared not guilty by reason of insanity it's not that they're free they are committed to a mental health facility and usually they get held on an involuntary indefinite psychiatric hold and oftentimes are incarcerated for the same amount of time or even longer than those who are incarcerated in prison for the same crime and because of how the current mental health infrastructure is not set up to house people in this way. What ends up happening is that there's like state jails that end up being the place that these people are put and folks have died in these facilities from neglect and abuse. And I found out that there are only So they get put in state psychiatric hospital beds. And in the US, there's only 35,000 state psychiatric beds in the whole country. Well, his

SPEAKER_00: 2:07:51

lawyer probably didn't find any other. Yes. I mean, do you ever think like, you know, someone's got to be the defense attorney and they're probably, this guy's probably like, you know, I, this is

SPEAKER_01: 2:08:05

all I got

SPEAKER_00: 2:08:05

for you, you know?

SPEAKER_01: 2:08:06

Well, what ended up happening is actually, On January 13th, they changed his plea to guilty but insane, which is now called guilty but mentally ill plea, which allows defendants to admit guilt while stating that they were mentally incompetent, quote unquote, at the time of the offense. In jurisdictions where this does exist, the process requires the defendant to provide expert testimony demonstrating that They were mentally incompetent during the time, which is why he was evaluated by so many different psychiatrists and stuff like this at this point. So this meant that they did not need to have a criminal trial and that the court proceedings would pretty much only be about Jeffrey's death. mental state. And they only needed 10 out of 12 jurors to agree on his mental state for a verdict to stand. So his trial began on January 30, 1992. Huge crowds outside of the courthouse. This is the early 90s. So when the 24-hour news cycles had just started. So news outlets were always looking for news to cover. And a serial killer trial was a great opportunity. for them to report on. You can actually watch his entire trial online. It's on court TV or on YouTube. I watched parts of it, but not all of it. But apparently people were waiting in line to get seats or get as close to the courtroom as possible and that there was a bulletproof glass wall between the audience and where he was seated, where the defendants and the witness and the judge were. During the trial, many people in the community were really upset with how the police had served or not served the people of color and gay people who were his victims, especially what happened with Conorac Synthesifone. And these tensions were reflected in the courtroom. The Room was also swept for explosives before the crowd filed in. And there were seats that were reserved for victims' family members, as well as Dahmer's father and stepmother. So in his attorney's opening statement, he states that his client was, quote, not an evil man, but he was a sick man. And I'm just going to talk a little bit about go on a small tangent about that. So the definition of psychopathy, according to psychology today, is the absence of empathy, blunting of other affective states, callousness, detachment, and enable them to be highly manipulative. They can appear, quote unquote, normal or even charming, underneath which they lack a conscience. Psychopath and sociopath are often used interchangeably, but a sociopath, I guess, refers to someone with antisocial tendencies that are thought to be rooted in social and environmental factors, whereas psychopathic traits are thought to be more genetic or innate. That said, both genetic and non-genetic causes likely play a role in shaping any person who has these kind of traits. Antisocial personality disorder does overlap with psychopathy, but it's not the same condition. A person can meet the criteria for antisocial personality disorder without showing the core traits associated with psychopathy. Psychopaths are thought to comprise just a fraction of people with antisocial personality disorder, which is like 1% of the general population. Psychopathy and sociopathy are also not like diagnostic. terms. They're more like sociological terms. So, I mean, with that definition, I feel like he definitely fits that. I found this article. Who is it written by? Mariam Malik and Dr. Hafiz Javed Ur-Rahman. And it was called A Killer's Politeness, A Discourse Analysis of Jeffrey Dahmer's Interview. And it basically does like a content analysis of the interview that he gave to inside edition in 1993 and it basically talks about how he acts calm and is polite and presents himself as this like composed rational and non-violent person which sharply contrasts with the wild and gory aspects of this crime. They also talk about how this sort of discordancy which he creates using strategic language gives him the ability to shape public's perception and shift public focus from his monstrous deeds to his humane characteristics that seem relatable by using subtlety and politeness strategies. He's trying to portray himself as more relatable so that he can get audience sympathy. There's this theory that Brown and Levinson created called politeness theory. And they go into how he uses different strategies from this politeness theory to basically manipulate interviewers and audiences to see him as more human. And him saying like, oh, I knew what I was doing was wrong is part of that as well. And it's like he's Describing his actions as simply wrong is like a euphemism, right? Because it's like wrong is not the same as, you know, sexually assaulting, drugging, raping, cannibalizing, mutilating. He

SPEAKER_00: 2:14:19

doesn't have remorse. He doesn't know what it means. He's saying that he knows it's like socially looked down upon to be wrong. But he doesn't feel bad. He doesn't feel bad. So that makes a lot of sense. He's using language that he can connect with, which is.

SPEAKER_01: 2:14:51

And he also like frames that like, oh, after I was arrested, I told the police where all the bodies were and I helped to give closure to the families as though like he did that, but he wasn't the one that caused the trauma and pain. And loss to begin with. Right. It's like very easy for him to just engage in this control and manipulation. And him being like a white man, interviewers just like eat it up and people just eat it up and are able to like have a cognitive dissonance between what they're seeing in front of them, which is like this person talking in like a monotone, calm, polite way and his like horrific, horrific deeds. Control and manipulation, charm, social skills, and a high IQ are literally all characteristics of serial killers. Dr. Elizabeth Yardley, who's the director of the Center of Applied Criminology at Birmingham City University, identifies being skilled manipulators as one of the very common characteristics of serial killers. in order to present themselves in a false light and I mean his whole trial was about he was trying to argue that he was like mentally incompetent or didn't know what he was doing at the time of the murders or he's like mentally ill right and so this just contributes to that same narrative that he's trying to push that like poor me there's something wrong with me and not like I killed 17 people.

SPEAKER_00: 2:17:07

is implied by people who perpetrate violence and people who inherit conquest. There are some studies that suggest there's a blunting of affect. There's more difficulty with guilt or empathy, or there's a kind of distorted intimacy in children of perpetrators of large-scale violence. They found this with... They did some studies with descendants of Nazis specifically. And so... There's some suggestion that the moral dissociation that would be required for this kind of domination might rewire your stress responses in a weird way. Yeah, I could see that. Which would maybe reinforce cruelty or dissociation, disembodiment, or the impulse to control. Totally. They did find that. So that all paired together feels like...

SPEAKER_01: 2:18:02

yeah and the way that he doesn't have emotional responses to anything and just yeah no affect always yeah flat affect always is very very disturbing and I think we don't get to see we like we don't ever get to see the side that like Tracy Edwards saw where that shift happened but back to the trial what his attorney was trying to argue was was that he said he had sex with corpses he committed cannibalism he performed lobotomies but he also suffered from necrophilia which is also not like a diagnosis technically

SPEAKER_00: 2:18:44

suffered from necrophilia suffered i don't think he was the one suffering

SPEAKER_01: 2:18:51

no definitely

SPEAKER_00: 2:18:52

from necrophilia

SPEAKER_01: 2:18:53

yeah Necrophilia is also not a diagnosis. It's technically paraphilia, not otherwise specified in the DSM-IV, which is used to describe sexual arousal to object situations or non-consenting individuals which are outside the range of usual sexual interest. But notably, fellatio and transgenderism used to be qualified under this category as well. Yeah,

SPEAKER_00: 2:19:19

the systems,

SPEAKER_01: 2:19:21

they're homophobic.

UNKNOWN: 2:19:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 2:19:23

Systems are very homophobic, very transphobic, very misogynistic. He said this during the trial, that he had an obsession with the Emperor and the return of the Jedi, and he got yellow eye contacts. I don't know why this was relevant to the trial, but he did say that as a way to argue that he was a sick man. The prosecutor outlined ways in which Dahmer had demonstrated control of his behavior, like selecting his victims cautiously, killing them in a carefully controlled environment, And people in the court heard a lot of gruesome details about his actions and how he lured people to his apartment with promises of sex and money in exchange for photos and drug their drinks and then killed them, mutilated them and sometimes documented these processes. A large part of the trial was testimony from psychologists and psychiatrists about his mental state, and he had various diagnoses proposed as a result of interviews with him. And also, retroactively, psychologists and psychiatrists after the trial have proposed certain diagnoses, including borderline personality disorder, substance use disorder, alcoholism, psychotic disorder, schizotypal personality disorder, and antisocial personality disorder, and necrophilia. One of the doctors said he did not meet the legal definition for insanity because he knew what he was doing when he was doing it. Dr. Park Elliott Diaz notably said that though Dahmer was an alcoholic, his killings had been well planned and deliberate. In addition, he pointed out that Dahmer used condoms due to fear of contracting AIDS. So he really planned things out, you know? In Boyle's closing statement, he said of his client, he was so impaired as he went along this killing spree that he could not stop. He was a runaway train on a track of madness. McCann said he's fooled a lot of people. Please, please don't let him fool you. And the verdict was that 10 out of 12 jurors found him not mentally ill, said that his crimes were organized, premeditated, chose his victims carefully. He was thoughtful when it came to storing body parts in the refrigerator as he planned to eat them later. He targeted men who did not have a car since he knew that missing persons could be traced through their automobiles. Someone who is insane does not have the ability to plan ahead and have forethought and organization to commit such atrocities. And he was then sentenced to 15 consecutive life sentences and then later tried for murder in Ohio and was found guilty and received another life sentence there. I'll... go into this a little bit later, but there was also victim statements that I watched all of them that were part of the trial where family members of the victims came and spoke to Jeffrey. It was honestly really emotional. All of them were Black and people of color. A lot of them looked him directly in the eye while they were making their statements. A lot of them cried during it. There was one person that just cried started yelling and screaming at him and they like pulled her out of the courtroom and he literally just had no reaction to and he was just they showed they would show his face every now and then he's just sitting there like no reaction just blank faced looking down very very disturbing but i am glad that the family members had a chance to say say their peace to him it's like a small small very small consolation that they were able to have So yeah, that's the end of the trial. Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 2:23:09

It's been a long time. We'll be splitting it into two. For sure. We'll come back. We'll share about more. Okay. And then the victims, their stories.

SPEAKER_01: 2:23:20

Yeah. Yeah. I'll share about like the community's response.

SPEAKER_00: 2:23:23

Cool. And then I was gonna talk about Glenda. Wow. Thanks for staying up so late.

SPEAKER_01: 2:23:27

Yeah, it's all good.

SPEAKER_00: 2:23:28

Yeah. We're going to be back with part two.

SPEAKER_01: 2:23:31

Very, very soon. See you then. See you in part two. Hear you then. Hear you in part two, or you'll hear us. Yeah, we

SPEAKER_00: 2:23:39

won't hear you. Okay. Bye. Bye.

SPEAKER_01: 2:23:47

thanks for listening if you liked what you heard please leave us a review on apple podcasts and tell your friends you can follow us on instagram at unpacking the eerie or visit our website at unpacking the eerie.com

SPEAKER_00: 2:24:02

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SPEAKER_01: 2:24:54

Thank you

SPEAKER_00: 2:25:04

so much. We really appreciate you.

SPEAKER_01: 2:25:06

Yeah, thank you so much. See you on the next one.