On July 22nd, 1991, 32-year-old Tracy Edwards fled an apartment building on 25th Street in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with handcuffs dangling from his wrist.
He managed to flag down a passing police car and he told the officers some “freak” named Jeffrey Dahmer had lured him to apartment 213.
When the officers walked with Edwards back to the apartment, they uncovered a crime scene that triggered nightmares for the rest of their lives.
In the new book “Grilling Dahmer: The Interrogation of ‘The Milwaukee Cannibal'”, authors Patrick Kennedy and Robyn Maharaj take the reader on a horrifying tour into the mind of evil as Kennedy patiently and meticulously listened to unspeakable horrors so that a monster would be taken off the streets forever.
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When Tracy Edwards first met Jeffrey Dahmer in a shopping mall he said that Dahmer seemed like a regular guy. After they talked for a while, Dahmer said he was a professional photographer and would Edwards be interested in posing for nude pictures in exchange for $100.
Edwards – a father of six – agreed to go back to Dahmer’s apartment for a beer.
Edwards noticed a terrible smell in the apartment as soon as he walked through the door but Dahmer just explained the plumbing in the building was off and the management was dealing with a “broken sewer pipe”.
The pair then drank together for a while and in the background on the TV, Dahmer was playing his favorite film – The Exorcist III.
There were many objects around the room that would have been a warning signal for Edwards if he’d have known exactly whose company he was keeping – ropes, restraints, hammers and saws were scattered around the living room.
Then Dahmer distracted Edwards by asking him to look at the fish tank. When Edwards turned to look, Dahmer pulled out a knife and forced a pair of handcuffs onto him.
Dahmer then appeared to slip into a demonic trance-like state, he was rocking back and forth manically and chanting to himself. At that moment, the serial killer is entering the phase where they reveal their true sad*stic self.
Many surviving victims have testified how they distinctly remember the exact moment this switch in the serial killer’s persona took place – the mask of superficial charm slips and they have on many occasions said there was a distinct change in the eyes and within a flash, the killer’s true violent intentions emerge to the surface.
Dahmer and Edwards got into a scuffle as both the serial killer and the intended victim tried to overpower each other. Edwards later testified that Dahmer screamed at him that he was going to eat his heart.
Edwards also revealed in court that he knew at that point he was going to die and he told himself you might as well die fighting.
Edwards managed to convince Dahmer to let him go to the bathroom, once he saw the opportunity – he escaped into the hallway and out the building.
He then summoned the Milwaukee police officers who were passing by – they tried to get the handcuffs off Edwards using their own key but this didn’t work. So instead, they agreed to walk with Edwards back to Dahmer’s apartment to try and find a key.
Once inside the apartment, Milwaukee police officers Robert Rauth and Rolf Mueller asked Dahmer where the key for the handcuffs was.
Officer Mueller went into the bedroom and he noticed a large knife under the bed. He also noticed in the beside dresser table there was a set of polaroid pictures with backgrounds that matched the interior of the apartment he was stood in.
When he took a better look, he realized these polaroids were of victims who were decapitated, dismembered, and posed in disturbing positions. In total, there were 74 polaroids as part of this twisted collection.
Dahmer freaked out as soon as he saw Mueller holding his twisted photo collection and he tried to escape the apartment but he was restrained on the floor by the officers. He told them, “For what I did I should be dead.”
The officers called for backup and whilst a second squad car was on the way, Mueller went to find out where the terrible odor in the apartment was coming from.
He looked in the fridge and there he saw the severed head of a victim staring right back at him.
Eventually, the officers uncovered at least 11 corpses. There was a pan on the stove that contained human brains. Hands and feet had been boiled in another pan. Three human heads were found in the fridge.
There were glass jars that contained male genitals preserved in what appeared to be a saline solution. And the bottom drawer of one cabinet also contained a whole human skeleton and plastic bags contained many severed limbs.
Every officer who attended the crime scene had to undergo specialist counseling to recover properly from the horrors of what they saw.
Whilst crime scene technicians worked through the night to piece together exactly what had taken place at apartment 213, Dahmer was interviewed at the Milwaukee police station.
His interview lasted six hours between 1.30 am and 7.30 am.
He confessed everything and even said, “I think in some way I wanted it to end even if it meant my own destruction.”
Dahmer admitted to killing 16 men in Milwaukee and Ohio. Six of the men he had killed at the apartment were in the past few weeks. He said he decapitated them, dismembered them, defleshed them and had thrown whatever was left in the trash.
He also said some of the bodies were placed in acid to liquefy them and he shared that it takes on average about an hour to boil a human head on a stove.
Detective Patrick Kennedy was the first detective who interviewed Dahmer. Kennedy thought the whole confession was fake – he was like, he’s making it all up. This cannot be real.
Yet whilst he was interviewing the suspect, his colleagues were assembling gruesome bags of evidence back at the apartment which supported everything he was saying. One crime scene technician later said, “It was more like dismantling someone’s museum than an actual crime scene.”
Over the next two weeks, Dahmer worked side by side with the detectives as they went through the polaroids taken of the victims and also photographs of missing persons to help identify every victim that had died at his hands.
When these horrifying crimes were made public, the media coverage was intense.
According to a former neighbor of Dahmer’s, there were people willing to pay $50 each to sit on a couch that the serial killer had given her and was also willing to pay extra just to hold a glass the serial killer had once drunk water from.
So what happened to the apartment of horrors? Following his arrest, the entire apartment building where Dahmer carried out his gruesome crimes was demolished after several tenants vacated the premises and, unsurprisingly, nobody really wanted to live there anymore.
