Cultish: Dahmer - A Cultish True Crime Story Pt. 2

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Is Protestantism Heresy? Pt. 3 - The Pope | Collision w/ Jeff Durbin

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I didn't feel accountable to anybody. I didn't feel that I had to face what I had done ever.

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And so there comes a point where a person has to be accountable for what he's done.

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Can't go around making excuses, blaming other people or other things.

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So I alone am the one who is responsible for what's happened. And I've since come to believe that the

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Lord Jesus Christ is the true creator of the heavens and the earth. It just didn't just happen.

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And I have accepted him as my Lord and Savior. And I believe that I, as well as everyone else, will be accountable to him.

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All right. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to Cultish. My name is Jeremiah Roberts, one of the co -hosts here flying solo today.

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I am joined once again by my good friend Robin from A Couch Divided, Dr. Mindhunter.

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Dr. Mindhunter. Good to have you back. Thank you, sir. We're also joined by the one and only, the great one,

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Nick Thomas. Oh, the great one. The great one. I like that. So me and The Rock have something in common. We're the great one. The great one. Yes.

01:13

The Brahma bull. The great one. Yep. Yeah. Nick Thomas, you know what? You know, Toby calls me Uncle Nick. You can call me

01:18

Uncle Nick if you want, except you're older than me, Jerry. So. Yeah. Oh, man. I know. And Toby doesn't actually vocalize

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Uncle Nick yet. Well, he's told that to me. Oh, has he? Okay. You didn't share that my son spoke those two complex words with me.

01:33

That was so nice. I am. I'm doing my best to try and age well. At least I'm trying to age well as much as I can.

01:39

I'm about six weeks out from becoming a married man. That's right. Which I'm super excited for. You're wearing an All Valley Karate tournament shirt.

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I know. I know. Cobra Kai. Which speaks to the era that we grew up in. You are. Yes. And you are aging quite well.

01:54

You're going to look very handsome. Oh, yeah. And your wedding attire. Hey, you gotta have, you gotta be, you know, sometimes style a little bit.

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You know, this is a $5 t -shirt from the clearance section at Kohl's. I see. I love it.

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Was it? Plus, when you actually, when you order something from Amazon, here's a life hack. If you have to refund something from Amazon. Go to Kohl's.

02:11

If you go to Kohl's and you do a refund there, they give you a $5 gift card that's valid for like 24 hours.

02:17

Oh, I didn't know that. You can get five bucks off anything. Oh, that's so cool. If you go to the clearance section, this was a dollar, I think it was $6.

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So I actually got this t -shirt for $1. That's the kind of frugal shopping us, I enjoy hearing about.

02:30

Yeah. And just because I've been exercising and trying to, you know, look good for the wedding. A little buff for your Friday. I've been, it's actually fitting better.

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This shirt was very difficult to wear a couple of weeks ago. And I've been trying to trim up all this real fun stuff, but.

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Good find. Yeah. Yeah. Well, real quickly, just tell everyone again about your podcast and what it's about.

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And maybe, and also why you think it's relevant to the discussion that we're having. My name is

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Dr. Robin Hall. I have my doctorate in clinical psychology. I am a co -host.

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Glory. What did you, what do you call me normally? Glorify? The glorious Dr. Robin. The glorious Dr. Robin Hall.

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I am one co -host of the A Couch Divided podcast. And yeah.

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So my area of expertise is in psychological, is in psychology, psychopathology specifically.

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And so that's why we are joining forces again with Jerry here.

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Sure. I had Koltish to talk about Jeffrey Dahmer. And I'm Nick Thomas. I begin every episode with that.

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I am the other part and the co -host of A Couch Divided podcast, where secular psychology meets a biblical worldview.

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You'll hear that at the beginning of every episode. My degree is in behavioral health counseling, and I'm pursuing more education too as well.

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Yeah. Nick's going to be joining the doctor ranks here eventually. Yeah. Pretty soon here. So that's exciting.

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I have an affinity towards new thetic counseling, even though I'm kind of diving into creating a covenantal style of approach and what the human psyche is in relationship to God and his covenant people.

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I think we've got a lot of books and texts in our future, which is exciting.

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I mean, we're really trying to bridge a gap between, well, the chasm that exists essentially between secular psychology and the church.

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This is an area that the church, the real church, has failed in terribly for a long, long time, and we need to do better.

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So that's what we're speaking to. I think what's also interesting why we're all combined together here is that this is something that really is sort of a hybrid of everything that we all kind of cover separately and even kind of cover together.

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We're talking about the mental health aspect, the psychological aspect, what was inside Dahmer that made him take, make the decisions to do what he did, what was going psych sociologically on in the 1990s?

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How do we consume our media? I'm going to talk about that in just a moment. There's a lot of other variables in play and also just to like the nature of evil, the real nature of true crime.

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What's the appeal? What's the aesthetic of finding out about people like Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, all these other people that are just enamored by it.

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You think about the Netflix show, Mindhunters. Ironically, we gave the name Mindhunter. I mean, that whole story, that whole

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Netflix series was based off of a true story of this one portion of the FBI where they were trying to analyze the crimes of real people who are serial killers and psychopaths to try and see if they could find a predictable behavior pattern to stop future crimes.

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And this is something, too, when we still look at the nature of neurology and what makes people take and what makes people do what they do,

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I think in many ways that's still in its infancy. There's still so little that we know.

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And we're only beginning to really truly understand that. So I think it's taking all those things into account.

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So the clip we played at the very beginning was a clip from MSNBC clip.

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And this is Dahmer with his father from MSNBC after he's talking all these years later about his crimes.

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He mentions a couple of interesting things. He mentions that he accepted Jesus Christ as his

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Lord and Savior. We're going to have that conversation. But then he talks about worldview.

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He talks about him taking to account, really, evolution, his view of that and understanding why he did the things that he did.

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So you have that variable in play, but also responsibility, at least from his point.

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We don't know his heart, but he did say, this is my responsibility and mine and mine alone.

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So that is, on some level, a fruit of repentance. So I'm definitely enamored to jump into the second part of this conversation.

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Yeah, it's going to be a good one. which also makes

07:24

Cultish a possibility for you to enjoy every single week here on YouTube. Go to Apologyistudios .com.

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You can become an all access member and you will also get a lot of great additional content, which will also help support the studio, which will allow

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Cultish to be a possibility as well on a weekly basis. So we thank you all for watching us. And now back to the episode.

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You also wanted to go over his arrest. And then yeah, yeah, let's talk about that.

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Because we're talking, this is sort of moving forward, man. Now we're rewinding back a little bit. We're not going to go into every single crime.

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We're kind of giving some details that kind of getting the idea of what made him tick. And again, part of how he operated, you get to a point where you think you get away with stuff so much, you almost kind of let down your guard.

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Yes, you get sloppy. So maybe we could just, let's just jump forward to the when he got caught. Sure. From all accounts, there was a man who was running, crying for help, who had one handcuff attached to him, to one of his wrists, who also had escaped his apartment.

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Nothing had happened to him. He was, you know, nothing happened to him, like his previous victims. They didn't really, from all their understandings, probably one of the gay bars that Dahmer had frequented.

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And so the police that he encountered, again, talking about the don't ask, don't tell nature of the early 1990s.

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They didn't have a key that matched, that could unlock his specific handcuffs.

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So they were actually led to go back to the apartment this time, just to see, not because they want to investigate.

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They just want to see if they could get the key just to unlock this guy and kind of not deal with it anymore.

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So even the story of how that came about was very interesting. And of course, they go in there and Dahmer's acting very cool, very nonchalant.

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And lo and behold, that's where he got caught. What else do we know about that?

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So he escalated, his killing spree escalated in terms of frequency.

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In that last little bit right before he was caught. So we talked about during the first episode that between his first and second murders, there was a nine year span.

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Okay, so he starts really getting quick with this in February of 91.

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10th victim, okay, and then April of 91 is 19 year old victim,

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Errol Lindsay. And we're actually going to hear a clip from his sister during Jeffrey Dahmer's trial.

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He had a hole drilled in his head, had hydrochloric acid poured inside an attempt to zombify him.

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So we've got February, April of 91. Then we have May of 91. And we've got 31 year old

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Anthony Hughes is dead. This is when the younger brother of the previous sexual assault victim, right?

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Escapes, but then gets released back to Dahmer's custody by the police.

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We go listen to the first episode and you'll understand that a little bit more. So we've got again,

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February, April, May, June. His victim in June of 1991 was 20 year old

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Matthew Turner. And then between July 7th and July 19th of 91, he has three more victims.

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So you can see this is just an absolutely unbelievable progression, right?

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Like he's going, they're spaced out every couple of months here in 88, 89.

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And then we get to July and he is in a frenzy. He kills three people between July 7th and July 19th.

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We've given enough warning disclaimers here. And I'll just give one again for the sake of what I'm going to say.

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But again, if you've made it this far, you're here. But one of the things that is very, even if you watch the documentaries, again,

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I would not recommend watching the Netflix television show. I think it really unfortunately pushes the line.

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But like one of the things when you look at the progression of sin, we quoted that passage in James, how sin continues to give birth to death, right?

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It's a matter of fact that he was aroused by these crimes.

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And so what was happening is that as he was killing someone and disposing of the body, he couldn't even fully dispose of it before he had to go on and seduce the next person and claim his next victim.

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That's one of the reasons why the smell started coming from his apartment.

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So what you see is that this compulsive behavior is escalating as escalating, which is just it's just mean people can kind of get in the industries, the psychology behind it.

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But again, just from a very, very basic level standpoint, this is just the nature of sin. It starts off small and it escalates.

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Yeah. And he's feeding the beast, right? So in the same way, like when you think it's OK to keep pet sin, right?

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My brain, my mind immediately goes back to pornography. When you are tempting sin almost in that way.

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The wages of sin is death, right? I mean, I think we could quote like every single verse in Romans, you know, it's he is indulging himself.

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He's indulging himself in this. Wow. Yeah. That's terrifying.

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Yeah. Terrifying. And it's very easy to look at someone like Donovan, this extreme example to say, oh, that's horrific.

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But how many of us like want to look at that but not look introspectively at ourselves?

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Right. Like the fact that I wanted to throw a bottle at the car that cut me off in traffic or I'm, you know, like in my mind, spewing hate at somebody.

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Like that. God is very clear that we commit murder first. Where? In our heart.

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So this is it's interesting for us to look at somebody like Dahmer because like that evil becomes so manifest.

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Right. And so right before he is arrested, literally within weeks, three weeks of his arrest, he kills three people.

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And out of respect for them, I'm going to say their names. So our sign keeps falling over, Jerry, our coaster.

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No. Jeremiah Weinberger was 20. Oliver Lacy was 24.

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And Joseph Bradahof was 25. So his arrest,

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Jerry already kind of went over it a little bit. And they do display like they accurately portray how this went down in the

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Netflix series, even though we are not encouraging people to watch it. No. Um, so this individual, the one that escaped and lived, his name is

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Tracy Edwards. He was 32. And like Jerry said, he was handcuffed by Dahmer and manages to escape his apartment and run down the streets.

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He flags down a couple of officers. The officers don't have a handcuff key that matches the handcuff.

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So Tracy brings them back to the apartment. I can I just like stop there for one second?

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Uh, no. I would have been like, all right, y 'all, number 13. And I'm not going anywhere near that place ever again.

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This guy has the gut. Seriously. Think about that kind of the courage that that takes. Yeah. To accompany the officers back when you have just escaped what you believe he was trying to kill you.

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Yeah. Okay. Uh, no, thank you. Right. I would not. Yeah. And you actually there are several awesome true crime cases where like the victims do escape.

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And the first thing they do is bring the police right back to the apartment, to the place where they were tortured, where they escaped from.

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And I have nothing but respect. Yeah. And this is the case in a lot of cases. I think if you're going to say,

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I'll let you jump in. But one of the things, too, when you look at crimes in general, is that a lot of times a killer, whether it's a serial killer, a sociopath or whatever.

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They always try and spot out victims who will not fight back. Yeah. Like this is the gazelle that's loose from the pack.

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So the packs together, you're going to be in trouble. You can watch plenty of nature shows to see that. So in this case, you know,

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Dahmer was specifically targeting, you know, and this is a time, too, where the gay community was extremely a minority community.

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Not only that, but minority black gay men is who he was primarily targeting. Which was even more a minority within the minority.

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So even then, like there was even like a talk around that time amongst the gay bars that there were men that were vanishing and disappearing.

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Right. But it was shut. But even back then, it was like we didn't have we didn't text each other. We'd have a phone call.

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How you could communicate or get a hold of somebody. I mean, unless you went to a pay phone. Right. It's very different. I mean, we all have ways we could communicate to anyone across the world.

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Right. It was a very different world. But in this case, this is somebody who had courage, who fought back.

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Right. Or in this case, didn't fight. We fought back by utilizing the civil magistrates to be gods and actors of justice.

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And what's also interesting is that you got to think from the standpoint of Dahmer. He lets these officers in.

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But you think about how much. He's gotten away with. He's gotten away with that. But also just how compulsive he was.

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I mean, how warped he must have been. He probably let those officers in with everything.

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I'm not even going to go into the details of what was in his room. Just you can look. You can look in his apartment.

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You can listen to other true crime podcast documentaries and find that out. But he let them in, like, assuming he could get away with this.

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Yeah, I think because he had gotten away with it so often. And I think that was probably primarily operating psychologically speaking.

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But I also think there was a part of him that didn't care like he.

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He didn't believe he would be caught. Mm hmm. But if he did get caught. And I think another thing.

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And yeah, exactly. And I think that's just how detached that he was. Right. He was so consumed in this and his lust for it again.

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He, you know, not really killing them, but in order to get what he wanted, which was that comatose zombie like pliable, malleable state.

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See, I find that very interesting that he had that reaction after he got caught, too, as well, because the first time that he got arrested over the sexual assault case.

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Yeah. Back in I think it was 88. Yeah. With that boy.

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Yeah. They describe him as very irritated, uncooperative and angry. And in this case, all emotion foregone kind of thing.

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And I don't know if that was a radical progression into dissociation or if it was just,

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OK, I had a good ride. There is no reason to kick against the goats on this one. I don't know. I haven't actually heard parts of an interview that ask about that.

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But this is something that we see in other serial killers. We see like Bundy is a classic example of this.

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We see like a progression and like an escalation and then a frenzy.

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And you've got that right here. This is like to kill three people in three weeks. He had never done anything like that before.

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Yeah. Right. Up until this point, even though 91 was definitely a much more active year for him.

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Right. Yeah. He had never killed three people in that short time. Yeah. Right. So eventually they they find out right away.

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We played in part one, the newscast. And you can even see like sometimes when you look at somebody like their face tells a thousand words and that police chief who's described trying to describe to the news, what are you saying?

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He's doing it as professionally as he can. But you could tell, man, he just saw he's rattled.

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He's rattled. And it's probably he he saw something. I don't know if that man's still alive. This is the 1990s.

20:14

This is 30 somewhat years ago. But, you know, this is also indicative of the fact that you've worked with first responders and the need for like mental health treatment amongst firemen, policemen, because they're the first on the scene detectives who see things and then they have to go home.

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Like these people, like these police officers, these detectives who went and saw what was in Dahmer's refrigerator and what was the bowl full of acid gallon barrel in his bedroom.

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Right. Everyone from the hazmat unit to all these people like these are people who are probably family men who are just doing their job they went to school for.

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And now they're seeing that what they can't be unseen. And now they just have to go home and say hi to the kids, say hi to the wife.

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So I'm going to say, like, honestly, in the early 90s, like these aren't even men that would have been trained in school to deal with anything like this.

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Crime scene cleanup is not what it it was not then what it is today. Right. And I guarantee you the officers on duty that made the initial discoveries here had zero training to try and prepare them for this.

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Nowadays, because 30 whatever years later, we've got all these examples of serial killers and really depraved ones that have done awful things.

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We approach situations like this differently. There is absolutely no way on God's green earth that we would walk by an apartment that so clearly stank of wretched death and ignore it.

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That's me. So our olfactory system, our sensory input for sense of smell, it's the only sensory input that's directly linked to our amygdala.

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And the amygdala is a part of the brain that is responsible for processing and storing emotional memory.

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And that's why when you smell apple pie, you don't just remember that grandma made it.

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Suddenly, you're back in her kitchen. You can watch her pour the flour and the butter into the bowl and roll it out.

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Our olfaction, our olfactory sense is always our most potent trauma cue. Vietnam era veterans couldn't go.

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A lot of the guys that I've worked with in the past couldn't go to strip malls because if there was any kind of Asian cooking, that smell immediately triggered it.

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OEF, OIF guys burning trash, smelling dust. I mean, especially here in Arizona, for those of you guys that don't live here, which is plenty, when you drive like the outer freeways in our city, around our city, some of the train is very similar to Iraq and Afghanistan.

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And just the smell of the dust can be triggering. It's fascinating to see what sets people off.

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And I mean, I'll say in the most compassionate way possible. But I mean, I remember one time

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I was in Houston and I was doing some evangelism on the street with a few people from this one church in Houston.

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And I got in this gospel conversation with somebody who was a veteran and we were chatting back and forth.

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And it sticks with me to this day. And there's a moment where there's a

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Humvee that drove by. But we're talking about civilian, like fluorescent, like H3, like fluorescent green.

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The thing is like a total vanity thing. You know, if somebody has money to burn, how to buy this or whatever, probably still have the new car smell, everything like that.

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Soon as that drove by, you could say like he froze, like, and you could tell that he's like this fight or flight.

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And I just looked at him like, are you okay, man? Yeah. And then he told me, I was like, dude, and I was just there.

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It was like he understood, like I understood, even though I haven't served. It was like he knew that I knew that what he was going through.

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And they actually set like a groundwork for him to listen to that, which was like an amazing thing.

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So to go to say that there's a level of like ravitas in this situation from all people involved.

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We're talking about trauma from the people who are the families of Dahmer's victims. So the victims themselves, obviously, right?

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The murdered victims, every person that loved them, every person they loved, all of the paperwork people, case like the first responders.

24:37

Think about people that had to perform autopsies. What about the like a

24:43

Milwaukee medical examiner in that season? They found three torsos in that gallon, in that 50 -gallon, 56 -gallon jug.

24:53

I think your point is really, really important. There are so many more individuals touched by something like this than just Jeffrey and the individuals that he killed.

25:07

Of course, those being the most important. But yeah, there's that. Well, there is a three -part

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Netflix series called The Dahmer Tapes, which again, it's graphic, but it's a good alternative to the show, which

25:21

I would not recommend. Right. But it goes into interviewing the actual people. And we're talking about people who are affected by it.

25:28

I believe it was the defense attorney for Dahmer that was assigned just because the American system,

25:33

Miranda writes, you have the right to an attorney. If you're not able to afford one will be assigned to you. She just happened to be that person.

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And so she approached Dahmer. And if you look up the confession tapes, all the audio, this is her doing that.

25:48

So she had to approach Dahmer with this very nonjudgmental, to get the information out of him.

25:54

So there's a lot of layers to it. But all these years later, she's the first person ever to hear in intricate detail what he did.

26:05

And I believe, if I'm not mistaken, she was trying to see if they could get him to plea insanity. I don't know if she was the one that was encouraging.

26:14

Yeah, that was the case. He was found sane. Right. And what was ironic about her or his defense attorney is that she exclaimed that that was the first job that she had.

26:26

Oh, really? Yeah. Coming right out of all that stuff. And so imagine that your first case is

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Jeffrey Dahmer. And she nailed it as far as getting all the information, building trust, having that nonjudgmental attitude.

26:38

And what she means by that is that it didn't pay. Unconditional positive regard. Yeah, right. I was like, yeah.

26:43

Carl Rogers, you do not get what you want by coming in and making yourself an enemy of the person you're interrogating.

26:50

Yeah. It's not that she didn't think in her mind, like, wow. Wow. I'm sitting across from her. But she even said that she winced in a couple of moments that she had to get a grip on herself because of what he was saying.

27:00

And I don't know what she was feeling. She wanted to shut her back or maybe come and cold clock the guy. I'm not sure.

27:06

But I mean, whatever emotions of those things, I know that I feel that maybe that's just testosterone.

27:13

Like, I would just beat you up kind of thing. But yeah, that nonjudgmental attitude allowed for all the information to release in such a way where she can record it down.

27:22

Well, this is also like one of those complexities, too. There's a couple of trials in the 1990s you could think of.

27:29

But in her case, again, this is the first time she's ever signed to a case. She's doing her job.

27:34

She's doing what she was trained to do and what she states in the Dahmer tapes. And it's somewhere trending on Netflix.

27:40

But that she was sort of getting death threats. Yeah. Yes. Because of the fact that she was doing it. And she's trying to explain, like, you realize there's...

27:46

Very to kill a mockingbird. Yeah. Except Dahmer, of course, is guilty. Like, you realize that, like,

27:52

I am actually doing a service. I'm actually trying to unearth. I'm not just trying to defend him.

27:57

I'm trying to earth what actually happens so we can have data to work with. I mean, this is another one of those cases, those murders that was unprecedented.

28:05

Mass murders that was unprecedented where no one had any point of reference. Right. So I would assume like her mindset was like,

28:13

I need to extract as much data as possible because this is going to be on the record for like years after me to hopefully study and understand this, to hope that something like this never happens again.

28:22

And she wants to get as much information as possible for victims and victims' families. She went through a wide range of her relationship with Jeff Dahmer, getting all this information.

28:34

She said at one time, I could describe him as a brother. I could describe him as a friend. I can describe him as a son.

28:40

I can describe him as this because of the nature of, you know, just talking to him and having him be so open.

28:48

It wasn't a hard job as far as recording all of that, as far as the difficulty getting out that much.

28:54

But because of that, he ended up saying things that he didn't say to the police either, or even in his confession.

29:00

So he got, she got a lot more out of that. And I can only imagine what it was like to unfilter that when you go home.

29:05

Right. Yeah. Difficult, extremely difficult. I worked with a, this reminds me of where I worked with a first responder whose very, very first ever 911 call as an

29:20

EMT was his father's fatal heart attack. And when you're working with people who are rurally stationed, you know, in a big city like Phoenix and all of its surrounding suburbs, the chances that you would get called to some, a house to an incident of somebody that you know is so slim.

29:40

I mean, I can't, I don't even know what the statistics are. There are statistics to represent it. But in a rural community, like a place like Flagstaff or Sedona or Show Low or Pinetop, you know, everyone.

29:54

So the calls you're getting, the emergent critical calls you're getting are not for people that you can disconnect from.

30:01

They're for family and friends. So that adds another layer. And I love that when we were prepping for this episode,

30:09

Jerry, you wanted to spend so much time focusing on like how billow -ous the effects of this are.

30:18

Yeah. You know, it touches so many people forever. I mean, there is no way that the mother and sister of Errol Lindsay were ever the same again, ever.

30:32

That doesn't mean, I mean, we have the offer of ultimate healing in Christ, but we are not unscathed by suffering just like he wasn't, right?

30:41

So yeah, when you think about the ultimate impact of something like this and how we're supposed to respond as Christians in the most compassionate and empathetic way possible, not, you know.

30:55

Well, yeah. And then also when you talk about the ripple effect is that, and we'll jump into the trial in just a second, but you even had people who are in the apartment, not just the lady next door, but a bunch of people who had sort of all sleep together at the very bottom of the apartment, like they all have this weird trauma bond just because they didn't really know how to relate except to relate to each other to say, yes,

31:19

I feel you. Like I feel, we feel all of us feel finally validated that this happened. That something was wrong here.

31:24

Yeah. And that it was addressed right. But also like think about what the psychological repercussion would be to be that close to a serial killer like this.

31:36

Every single moment that you spent in your apartment, you would re -examine, was he watching me?

31:42

Would I have been next? Plus most of his neighbors were black, which ended up being his primary, like objective target.

31:50

So I, you know, the fear, the post -traumatic stress that would have been involved in that, just by your proximity.

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32:44

It's interesting when you look at the 1990s, I mean, there, there's always have been like racial tensions in American history.

32:51

It's, it's very important and partial just to like who we are as a nation. And we, we talked about this too, like during the 1960s, you had a lot of racial tensions, especially with you know,

33:02

Martin Luther King and everything that was going on there. And it was accumulated with the Manson murders in the 1990s.

33:07

When you think about two particular examples, you had the O .J. Simpson trial and you think about how, when you first like you think about what first comes to mind.

33:15

Like I remember as a kid seeing O .J. in a Bronco going there.

33:22

I totally remember seeing the footage of him in the Bronco. Yeah. The like helicopter footage.

33:28

Yeah. Yeah. I'm also, you know, I was homeschooled. So I remember just constantly I would be doing my homework and I was really enamored by the

33:34

O .J. I, I would like be doing my homework and it always kind of beyond, uh, even if it was like a split screen, you know, like whatever

33:41

TV show is going on. I was always just want to stay still, like somewhat in tune. Yeah. And again, I'm 13 years old.

33:47

Yeah. And when they read the verdict, like my heart was like pounding, like what's actually going to happen. And I just saw how the reaction of him being acquitted.

33:58

Yeah. I didn't understand as a young boy, the emotional reaction specifically like outside the courtroom specifically like black men who are hugging each other were crying.

34:07

And I, I didn't understand it. No. I believe I have some level of understanding. Now, I mean, especially given when you look at what was also going on in 1991, uh, was

34:17

Rodney King. Right. Now talking about social media again, the modern generation is viewing this to the realm of Netflix.

34:23

We have tick tock, we're express where everyone's trying to express this story through like Instagram reels, tick tocks, um, you know, anybody who's an influencer, they're trying to do something with some sort of thumbnail to get their thoughts in it.

34:37

Like back then we didn't have that. We had a couple of basic news stations. Right. And your local news.

34:44

And then the national news. So, but you look at something as, as everyone knew that the Rodney King riots was racially, was a very, very emotional, racially motivated.

34:53

And even if you look at the LA riots after, after the police were acquitted, when you look at what happened with Dahmer, like what's he known for the fact that he just, he killed

35:02

Nate people. It's not, there's not really any emphasis that I ever, ever recollect that this was an issue actually similar to like the

35:13

OJ Simpson trial or Rodney King in that sense. Because yeah, you, the, you, you never got the sense that it was racially motivated for him.

35:22

Right. But I don't think, I honestly don't think that it was. I think he was attracted to young black men.

35:29

I really think that, but because of the cultural climate, I could see how it would have been interpreted that way.

35:37

And maybe, cause this happens a lot when you got serial killers that are killing women, you assume they hate women.

35:43

You have a serial killer that's killing black men, which is highly unusual anyway, right? To have that as your

35:49

MO. Um, I can, I can see why that leap would be made quickly.

35:56

Oh, well you must hate black people, but that it wasn't about that. It was actually much, much worse. What it was about. He had a sexual disorder.

36:03

He liked the male body and, um. He liked corpses. Yeah. And he liked to be dominant and, and, uh, to, you know, uh, necrophilia.

36:11

And so he had those disorders. Um, I believe he qualifies for those disorders as well. And I think this is also one of those moments too, when you look at a, like a very premiere episode, uh, ground zero

36:21

Jonestown, where we're going through Q42, the Jonestown tape. So many times drink the

36:26

Kool -Aid gets thrown around as a pejorative. Yeah. And that whole aesthetic, like I, anybody who sends that,

36:32

I just delete comments. I honestly don't like it. Yeah. Um, because it really just strips people who were victims of Jim Jones of their humanity.

36:39

Yeah. And when you actually look at the majority of the people who died in Jonestown, they're mostly African -American.

36:45

Yeah. They were manipulated. Yeah. By someone who advocated for social justice, they were murdered.

36:50

And in the same way, you know, in like his legacy, Dahmer's legacy, it's like, oh, this is somebody who, uh, like eight people.

36:59

Yeah. There's even now, like there's videos and TikToks of people who are making jokes about cannibalism. Right. It's like, no, this is actually, sometimes these stories, they, they, they, sometimes they do strip away the humanity and that's one of the things

37:12

I really want to make emphasis on is that like these people were image bearers of God. And he also had like the families that were.

37:20

Imagine for one second that you had to live the rest of your life knowing that your brother's heart was eaten by a serial killer.

37:29

But not only this, you think about, um, just this, this, the severance trauma of somebody going from, you know, think of all the people who go missing every single year, you think about the epidemic of human trafficking.

37:40

I know. And, uh, you know, all of a sudden to have this period of maybe like a decade where, uh, you don't know what happened to your nephew or your cousin.

37:52

And all of a sudden that clip we play at the beginning makes national news.

37:57

Next thing, you know, right. Yep. The two detectives come knocking at your door and I'll talk about trauma to talk about the trauma of the, uh, detectives.

38:05

Right. You know, having to inform, you know, you're going to have to go to door after door because it, again, it's a small community having to tell all these people, uh, the collateral fallout of that.

38:16

Um, yeah. Did any of you guys have any other thoughts on that? Cause I want to kind of jump into the trial as well too. No, I think, you know,

38:21

I think it's just important that when we are interested in stories like this, that we honor the victims, which include all of these people, right.

38:35

Detectives, family members, the actual people that were hurt and killed. Um, and we get to do that as Christians because we understand intrinsically their value and that their image bears, right.

38:47

I mean, ultimately without a Christian worldview, why are you upset about any of this anyway? Like what's wrong with evolved broccoli eating other evolved broccoli?

38:55

There isn't. So apart from God, you can't even make sense of this suffering, right?

39:01

So Christ is what's, what gives us the platform, the foundation to even argue that it's wrong, right?

39:09

We, from the very beginning, we have wanted to determine for ourselves what is good and what is evil. That alone belongs to the

39:15

Lord, right? So be careful that you don't just consume stories like this only because of that.

39:24

Like, you know, we are interested in the morbid. We are interested in what is unique and unusual.

39:31

As a Christian, you need to recognize all of the players involved and their value.

39:36

And I like how you guys bring up too, as well, that this affects all facets of reality too, as well.

39:42

Not just the, not just the victims or the victim's family, but you know, the workers, the policemen, the neighbors around them, society at large, thinking about their own mortality and everything like that.

39:52

And I think of, you know, the psalm of David in Psalm 124, that it says, had it not been

39:59

Yahweh who was on our side, let Israel now say, had it not been Yahweh who was on our side, when men rose up against us, they would have swallowed us alive.

40:12

And when I think about that, is that, you know, overall, even the effects of evil, when they come to haunt us, the body of Christ is not destroyed.

40:23

Here we are still talking about that. And I do think he's talking about a covenant relationship. And I always think that, you know, his covenant people are never destroyed, even though we're affected by all kinds of evil, affected by all kinds of trauma, whatever, had it not been for Yahweh.

40:38

Right. He promises that. He promises his protection over us. And that's the number one thing that I think about when

40:45

I came from, you know, out of my addiction, out of my traumas, out of my sufferings, had it not been for Yahweh.

40:52

And I think about that. And that's the covenantal mind I would like to, for every

40:58

Christian that is seeing all of this around them in any kind of heinous act or crime or whatever, including

41:04

Jeffrey Dahmer, had it not been for Yahweh, the body of Christ still stands firm. And so I would implore anybody to repent and believe in Christ, to come over to that, to have that peace and make sense of everything around you.

41:18

Right. So the trial. So the trial is really interesting. Yeah. Let me just make one point, if I recall, and I'll let you guys kind of jump in.

41:28

So his defense, if I'm not mistaken, they wanted him to plead insanity, the insanity plea, but based off of Dahmer's confession, he was not given that.

41:40

So he actually went to prison instead of going to a mental institution slash asylum.

41:46

That's my understanding, correct? Yeah. So he was definitely also evaluated by multiple people.

41:53

So it wasn't just based on his confession. Right. He was evaluated to determine sanity, right, by multiple professionals.

42:03

I actually just pulled up an article that's like a, it's kind of a cheapo summary article by Oxygen.

42:12

Yeah. But the, so he tried to enter in, he tried to enter a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity.

42:20

So that's a real thing here in Arizona. Guilty except insane, not guilty by reason of insanity.

42:27

In Arizona, we actually don't use that terminology because in our statutes, we uphold that the person is guilty, like guilty except insane.

42:40

So this is a whole area of psychology and psychiatry and evaluation.

42:47

People go and get competency training and learn how to establish competency. So it has to do with rule 11 here in Arizona.

42:56

Every year, every couple of years, they do a huge training on it. So the law says that in order to stand trial, you must be deemed competent, right?

43:06

Competent being the opposite of insane, right? Not sane at the time that you committed the crime.

43:13

What that means is two things. You are found competent to stand trial, sane, essentially.

43:21

If you can, one, understand the nature of the charges being brought against you so that you, like you understand that you're being charged with first degree murder, capital murder, whatever you're being charged with.

43:35

And that you have the capacity to assist your defense in your own counsel. So these people that were brought in to examine

43:44

Dahmer would have used this as kind of a foundation.

43:52

Was he out of his mind at the time that he committed these crimes? He was deranged, but he knew where he was.

44:00

He knew what he was doing. He knew what he was doing was wrong, which is all established in the confession.

44:07

Not guilty by reason of insanity is for individuals that were in fluid psychosis when they committed their act.

44:15

Individuals that believed they were the Archangel Michael and that if they didn't burn down this school,

44:21

Satan himself would be loosed on the world, right? That person was not sane at the time they lit the fire.

44:29

But if he had only, for example, committed the one murder that took place in the hotel where he had passed out, do you think that might have been a better case, say that was the only time that took place?

44:41

Because he was unconscious. He said he drank and he passed out. I don't think that that would have stood up in a court. I think he could have said,

44:48

I don't have any memory of this. And I think a jury would have said, well, your knuckles were black and covered in crusted blood and the blood was of this individual.

44:59

He might have not been charged with first degree murder as far as intent goes because of the intoxication, but definitely wouldn't have been charged with murder.

45:06

You have to be able to prove that you were insane during the commission of an act. If he wasn't, was he deranged and awful?

45:15

Absolutely. But he was in his right mind, meaning he did not think he wasn't hearing things.

45:21

He wasn't seeing things. He didn't have a dog commanding him to do X, Y, and Z like we see in Son of Sam or any of that.

45:28

He was fully aware and conscious of what he was doing. He was deliberate and intentional.

45:34

He was calculating. He planned it. That first murder might not have been planned per se because he didn't plan necessarily to pick up that hitchhiker that day in Stephen Hicks.

45:46

But look at all of the forethought involved in disposing of their bodies. A disorganized person, somebody that isn't connected to reality doesn't do that.

45:55

They aren't sane when they commit the crime and they're not sane enough to clean it up to try and cover it up.

46:01

So yeah, he was definitely deemed competent to stand trial and any judge worth their salt would have immediately returned.

46:08

No. Yeah. The defense team wasn't surprised about that. No, no, no, no. And I think that's kind of your job as the defense team is like if the only thing that we've got here, because no, everyone knew he was guilty.

46:18

He was caught with the body, like by a guy he was about to murder.

46:25

Jeffrey was not getting away. There was no not guilty. And he knew that too as well. Exactly. So what do you do?

46:30

Well, there's clearly something wrong with you, Dahmer. You like to eat people. There's something wrong with you.

46:36

You must be insane in a way, right? But not in this way. According to the law, insane during the commission of a crime means you couldn't reasonably be expected to act morally.

46:50

That's not true here. He knew what he was doing. Yeah. And then what's also interesting, too, and I guess we'll go ahead and play a clip in just a moment.

46:59

So when you think about even now, you think about all the different court shows. You have like just court TV. You have

47:05

Judge Judy, like all these court drama shows that are kind of like some of it is kind of everyone knows are on TV.

47:12

So they're kind of putting on a show a little bit. I mean, it's whether it's whether it's Judge Judy, Judge Joe Brown, knowledge of their other shows.

47:19

When you look at a lot of times in the early 90s, that was one of the first times that I can remember where they started really putting cameras in courtrooms.

47:26

And so you think about the trial, the OJ trial. Yeah, that was that was an example where all of a sudden like trial in that way.

47:33

Yeah, that was like one of the first ever reality show. So you had like I remember, too, as even a kid, like all these different players was a

47:39

Kato Kaelin. Yes, OJ's roommate. But there's these like infamous moments. So they had there's a moment where a camera zoomed down on something that OJ was writing.

47:50

And then Judge Ito said that was a violation of that. So they actually terminated the recording like for that day.

47:56

Yeah. And so he's got so like that's a huge deal because that right to privacy between you and your attorney is like.

48:03

Yeah. And then you also got to see people just real raw emotions on play where a lot of times you would have where cameras weren't allowed.

48:13

You'd have somebody who was like sketching, sketching. Yeah. So a lot of times in the news, you would see kind of like the camera panning on a sketch drawing of something.

48:20

But a lot of times you got to see people's emotions. So so another example, when OJ was acquitted, not guilty by the jury, you could hear, you know,

48:30

Nicole's family and Nicole's family. And it was what was the dad's name? It was a Ron Goldman.

48:35

Yes, yes. Yeah. And so you could hear them just like crying out for like injustice, you know, and this is like multiple months.

48:44

And so there's all these like various emotions. So you saw the same thing around the same time. Well, this is a couple of years later, the

48:49

OJ trial was, but you saw the same thing happen to where this is a real and like raw moment.

48:57

So again, I want to make sure that there's gravitas to this, that this is a very emotional conversation.

49:04

This is a moment towards when he is about to get sentencing. Yeah. And this is a moment where they gave the family, the victim's family is a moment to say their peace to Jeffrey, to Jeffrey.

49:16

So like I said, we've given plain warning disclaimers. There are some very expressive words used in this clip.

49:23

So again, please listen to this with caution. And we are going to go and break down this clip.

49:32

What's the person's name again? This is the sister of, um, arrow,

49:37

Lindsay. I can't remember her first name, but she's the sister of one of Jeffrey's victims. Okay.

49:43

Oh, this sister of arrow, Lindsay, Jim, whatever your name is. I'm mad.

49:48

This is how you act when you are out of control. I don't want to ever see my mother have to go through this again.

49:56

Never Jeffrey. So, yeah, as you can see that a very intense clip, uh, if you haven't seen the video, what's taking place in that is, you know, again, she used a lot of expressive language.

50:23

Again, we chose not to censor that out just because it's showing the real emotional gravitas of her in that moment.

50:29

What you don't, if you're listening to this, what you see is that she's initially at the podium where the, the, the victims, uh, families of the victims are allowed to stand and see their piece.

50:40

She loses control. She starts to walk over towards Jeffrey and you see several of the police officers go and try and hold her back.

50:48

Um, what is it? Yeah. What is interesting though, if you just look at body language, Dahmer's completely cool, calm, collected.

50:58

Well, and he's refusing to look at her, which is why she's getting so angry and why she moves toward him.

51:03

You can hear her say, look at me, Jeffrey. Like you can hear that. And, and he is again, choosing to check out in that moment rather than face what he's done.

51:17

Which is, I mean, I can't imagine a more infuriating experience, but absolutely what this type of psychopath would do in the moment.

51:27

Nick, what are your thoughts on this clip? Like when you see this, you've kind of read up on that. I mean, how, how do you pick apart what's happening here?

51:33

Yeah, sure. Obviously. I mean, very emotional. Um, I think that the language that she uses fits the situation and wouldn't, um,

51:40

I'd probably express the same way kind of thing like that. Um, also just, it's just reality check, you know, um,

51:48

God, you know, we live in an explicit world and God saved me out of an explicit world.

51:54

Um, I, when I tell my testimony, um, you know, depending on who I'm talking to,

52:00

I can go into detail only because we need to know this. So this clip, uh, when

52:05

I listened to it, it is something that we need to hear, to gain the reality of what is going on, the emotional reaction and the harm that we can do to our neighbor because of situations like this.

52:15

And then to look at Jeffrey Dahmer, again, stoic, right? No emotion, checking out, dissociation.

52:21

It lets it's even more anger because you know, you're not paying attention to me. That's part of justice too, as well to say your peace and the pursuit of that.

52:30

And we want that to be, I mean, we want that to be sharp. We wanted to see some kind of remorse on his face, you know, and then how completely

52:39

I'm getting like preachy here, but like how completely offensive could it be to the victims where you even are trying to, to plead insanity, um, uh, in the first place, you know, a lot of the victims don't see that as justice.

52:54

And so when you look at God's law, this is why, you know, like an eye for an eye in the, in the case law sense really, really is a part of our design to pursue because that is the nature of justice.

53:07

Now we don't have to talk about the, uh, the kind of, uh, the, you know, the law and whether or not first degree, second degree, uh, you know, insane or not insane needs to be talked about or anything like that.

53:19

But it does show us, um, in our hearts, the pursuit of justice. And I think that, um, that we saw that in, in her emotional reaction, as far as the angsts that we see.

53:30

Again, it goes back to Romans one, the wrath of God is revealed unto all mankind. And so we know that there's injustice taking place when you don't look me in the eye and you did this to my sister, you know, like you owe me something at least that you owe me.

53:44

And then, um, and then again, you know, it's just shows our angst on that. So when I hear that, uh, that my mind, my mind immediately goes to, you know, wanting justice.

53:55

And it's, it's a very stark contrast between the clip we played at the very beginning where he's also saying he adhered to an evolutionary worldview where it would make sense where if that's what he was adhering to at least at the time where maybe at that time he didn't have any remorse or he just, he didn't want to be controlled.

54:13

It may be thousand of the situation he could control, even though he had already been arrested, he can sort of be stoic, not react to how she's reacting, uh, the whole time.

54:22

Or wait for him to re -victimize again. Yeah. Yeah. There's, um, there's a moment,

54:29

I can't remember what movie it was. It was a movie with, uh, Michael Keaton and, um, and this other famous, it was

54:38

Andy Garcia. And I never saw the movie. I heard it was actually pretty lame, but it's called Desperate Measures.

54:44

And basically there's a detective, there's this guy, Michael Keaton's this guy who's on it, who has a death sentence or he's incarcerated.

54:53

He's like a serial killer, but he finds out, uh, Andy Garcia's character, he's a detective and he finds out that his son is, uh, like has this terminal disease.

55:02

And I guess Michael Keaton's character's blood count is, uh, whatever his blood type is what he needs to like to fix whatever disease that he has.

55:10

Um, and so Michael Keaton's character says to Andy Garcia, he goes, you know, I basically,

55:15

I get the opportunity to kill your son and all I have to do is nothing. So there's almost like a level, even like in inmates, they still want to still terrorize their people, even though, like, even though like they know that you've already done these crimes, like you're living rent free in a lot of people's heads and like people still get a rise out of that.

55:36

Oh, they're so famous. Yeah. He's so famous. So Jeffrey is dead. He was murdered by another inmate,

55:42

I think in 94. So he's not around to hear or see any of this happening, but could you imagine if he was alive and the

55:52

Netflix series premiered? I mean, a lot of the victims' families have come out and talked in staunch opposition to the show because the focus, of course, is

56:03

Dahmer, not the victims. And that's always the problem. It's a huge problem.

56:09

Even as Christians, how do we avoid the focusing on the monster, right?

56:14

And not focusing on the human beings who had dignity and value that he killed.

56:20

Correct. Patterns of behavior in humans is when they see something, they want to reenact it too as well.

56:25

So you create a lot of copycats or can create a lot of copycats, you know, like a copycat serial killer or anything like that.

56:32

So, I mean, even now, as the waters calmed, it's 2022 and you bring this up again.

56:39

Right, I know. Right. Now, how many people are thinking about that? I kind of agree with the victims on this part that I probably wouldn't pursue it.

56:49

The information is out there. Everybody knows who Jeffrey Dahmer is. We've abominated it. We've explained it.

56:55

I probably, we just need to put it to rest. Yeah, we do. I think ultimately to answer the question we've been speaking to throughout the two episodes is as Christians, we absolutely have a responsibility to engage the culture.

57:07

This is happening in the culture. So how do we speak to it? Well, we speak to it the same way we speak to anything with the gospel, with the truth of scripture.

57:16

And I hope, I hope desperately that Jeffrey truly repented.

57:23

I really hope that. I have no way of knowing, but I hope that's true. Just like I hope it's true for everyone.

57:29

I hope everyone who is wicked and dead in their sins and trespasses will repent.

57:35

Right. And believe on Christ. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of layers to that when you talk about not only how the trauma is like multifaceted amongst the first responders.

57:48

You have the victims, the victims' families. Then you have Dahmer, but even like the relationship with his parents and those who are close to them, like even the trauma that his grandma went through, just thinking,

57:59

Hey, this is my grandson that I was just trying to do my best to take care of him. And you're always realizing that your son was actually killing people in your basement.

58:08

And now the media people are trying to talk to you. And some days she was going to, yeah.

58:14

She was, his grandma was like, you know, he had breakfast with his grandma before she went to church and there was a body upstairs or in the basement.

58:23

I can only imagine what she was thinking, you know, what was going on when I was at church and then the, you know, in the house and all of a sudden it shakes your faith a little bit too as well.

58:29

It shakes your heart. Remember, you know, if it had not been for Yahweh, who was on her side, I mean, if she didn't have to, you know, come back to that and then plus a sense of betrayal too as well, because he seemed to have great love for his grandma.

58:41

Lots of betrayal and a sense of responsibility. Yeah. Like I didn't notice, I should have noticed. What could

58:47

I have done? Or if I did notice. The survivor's guilt is very real. What did I ignore? What did

58:52

I miss? And things like that, especially with the mannequin involved, because she is the one that found it and called her dad.

58:59

So just real quickly. So when you think of just jumping back to that court tape that we played, how, how would we, how would we articulate the gospel to someone like that?

59:12

I mean, to the sister who's like rushing him, you know, there's so many emotions going through this.

59:18

She wants justice, arguably and understandably. Um, and he's.

59:24

Yeah. I mean, I think in that, you don't, in that moment, you let her catch her breath. You let her catch her breath.

59:30

But then you say, absolutely. Everything that you are feeling right now, everything you're feeling right now speaks to what you know is true, which is that your brother had eternal value.

59:44

That as a human being, he was, his value was limitless. And what you're watching in the face of his killer is zero acknowledgement of that.

59:56

He deserves justice. God says eye for an eye. Yeah. Right. We're allowed to abominate. That's where I, that's where I would go.

01:00:02

That's how I would speak to her. Like there's the reason that you're angry right now, because you loved your brother because he's gone.

01:00:09

It's actually because of all of this. Now, I know, I don't know initially her belief in God or anything like that.

01:00:16

You know, the nature of repentance and belief is going to come upon everybody, regardless of a tragedy has happened to you or not or anything like that.

01:00:23

But obviously you mourn with those who mourn. And you don't mourn if you do believe in God, like one has no hope.

01:00:30

So of course we got to let her breathe. Right, let her breathe. And maybe this is for a long time, not all at once, kind of thing like that.

01:00:39

The best gospel presentation inside of tragedy is to know that you're with that person and they're with you.

01:00:46

And you speak words of love and encouragement into them. And sometimes that just means staying silent. And then, and then you, and then you kind of, you know, recapitulate, you know, the gospel as it's neat.

01:00:58

Again, if it had not been for Yahweh, you mourn with those who mourn. You don't mourn like you don't have any hope kind of thing.

01:01:06

And she said something at the beginning. She didn't want to utter Jeffrey's name at first. She said, whatever, you know,

01:01:11

Satan, you know, you called him Satan. You know, I, and I would, um, you know, I like,

01:01:17

I like taking people's words for what they are, regardless of intent, because you can always tell a story through those things.

01:01:24

And that is evil. What he did was the breath of Satan.

01:01:30

You know what I mean? If scripture is theanostos, then sin is whatever, whatever is the

01:01:36

Greek term for the breath of Satan. And bringing it back there and showing that even though, even though people get away with their crimes and there is injustice and things like that, that one day, one day someone will have to face the

01:01:52

Lord of glory. Right. And no one got away with anything. No one got away.

01:01:58

No one got away with anything. This should reflect up on yourself before you judge somebody as well.

01:02:04

And then even in your right judgment, let that be known. It's always been said that it's better for a guilty man to go free than the throw an innocent man in jail.

01:02:14

Right. That is because no one gets away with anything and justice must be pursued. So there you go.

01:02:20

How much fun, Jerry. Dark topic, but such a good conversation. No, definitely.

01:02:26

And I just, um, there's a lot, they're not going to go a whole bunch into what was going on with him at his prison.

01:02:33

But when you do talk about eye for an eye, what is, what was the name of his first victim again? Stephen Hicks.

01:02:39

Stephen Hicks. Yeah. So Stephen Hicks. So there's a level of like eye for an eye or like say what goes around comes around from all from Jeffrey Dahmer's own confession when he murdered

01:02:49

Stephen Hicks, very compulsive and his first murder he ever did. He used a weight.

01:02:55

Yeah. A dumbbell. A dumbbell with a blunt hit to the head to initially kill him.

01:03:02

And it was actually, he was assigned, I believe on cleanup duty or whatever you call it in the gym area of the prison.

01:03:12

And for all intents and purposes, there was somebody else who was also a convicted serial killer.

01:03:18

He used a gym dumbbell against Jeffrey. And beat him to death.

01:03:24

So ironically, the same way he committed his first murder, he was on the receiving end of that.

01:03:29

You live by the sword, you die by the sword. Exactly. And you don't like, there's just, there is, whether we see it or not, guys, there is always perfect justice and don't look for it in the world because it won't necessarily come from there.

01:03:45

We love when it does come from there, but the ultimate justice we're seeking anyway is when we stand before God.

01:03:53

Yeah. And ultimately God is a perfect judge. Right. And we aren't. At the end of the day, we do know,

01:03:59

I do rest in the fact that Dahmer did get perfect justice. I can rest in that.

01:04:05

So what's really interesting as well, too, as we wrap up here is that, and then again, this was articulated at the very end of the

01:04:14

Netflix series. And you can, you can probably find this, these details just by looking up clips to kind of find out the story behind it.

01:04:20

But after Dahmer had died, one was also interesting too, is that the investigation, they did a full investigation because it was such a national news story.

01:04:30

They didn't want to make any further controversy. So they did a full investigation. Upon them looking into what happened with him dying in prison, they was pretty, they said there was a notification that he didn't resist at all.

01:04:43

Like he, he actually like wanted to die. He wanted to get the death penalty. So it just, and another thing too, is he actually chose not to be in the confinement area, but to just to be in the general public, the general population.

01:04:56

I don't know how much that was like, well, maybe if I just get out there, I don't have to spend the rest of my life. Maybe I can get what I deserve.

01:05:02

Yeah. And that just shows to go that eventually it doesn't matter who you are, what you've done eventually, no matter how hardened you are, eventually that guilt will start coming around.

01:05:12

You can only suppress it for so long before it comes back at you. Um, I agree with that wholeheartedly to either one degree or another to the max or to the slightest, um, that your sins will find you or that you reap what you do.

01:05:24

So, you know, whether the, I hope we find that out in this life and not the next. And what

01:05:29

I mean by that is, is a point to where it breaks your heart and leads to a godly repentance. That's why when

01:05:35

I watch, uh, Jeffrey's confession of faith that I, you know, I, I, I, I have doubts myself, you know what

01:05:41

I mean? And I'm sure everybody else does, but you know, godly sorrow leads to repentance and God knows his heart, um, on everything.

01:05:49

Um, but I, you know, I do think about that and, uh, you know, how to handle that situation as Christians, uh, when we look upon something like that and how to answer the world.

01:05:57

As Christians, we should hope that everyone is saved. Yeah. Yep. And also just, uh, the last thing I'll just say as we, as we wrap up,

01:06:03

I kind of like the on this is, uh, when, after Dahmer had died, there was a discussion that, um,

01:06:12

I don't know if it was like some of the universities and, uh, one of their departments studying neurology, they wanted to be able to, uh, study

01:06:22

Jeffrey Dahmer's brain. Um, and they're in hopes again, that they might be able to find something to say, okay, what made him tick and do the things that, uh, he did, uh, believe it was

01:06:34

Dahmer's father who said, no, uh, you need to dispose of it, uh, to which they did. And, uh, from my understanding, the show kind of depicted the, uh, kind of like that.

01:06:44

We'll like, we'll never really know. Mm -hmm. And I think that, I think that's one of the real flaws when it comes, like, even why we're doing this episode is that the truth to the nature of evil is not behind studying, you know, the, the, somebody's brain after they've died.

01:07:01

The physiological structures of his brain. So it's like, okay, we, we have, what if we had some remaining body parts of like Hitler?

01:07:08

Is that going to really get us into the mindset of why he did the things that he did? Like, no, I think when it comes down to it, we have to look at really what the

01:07:19

Bible says about us. The heart is deceitful above all things. I actually... They're desperately wicked. I actually want to now quote from the movie

01:07:26

Seven in here. As William Somerset said this, if we catch John Doe and he turns out to be the devil,

01:07:32

I mean, if he's Satan himself, that might live up to our expectations, but he's not the devil.

01:07:39

He's just a man. Yeah. And that shows you that, well, we're all in that category.

01:07:45

Yeah. That's, I think as Christians, that's really important. You know, there is, there is good that can come from performing posthumous analysis of somebody's body.

01:07:56

If they really thought that something happened to Dahmer that messed with his, like there was a brain trauma that could have caused his deviance.

01:08:05

Okay. I don't think so. We didn't have this like concussive injury that occurred to him.

01:08:13

And then he started killing and eating people. He had these fantasies from the time he was very, very, very, very, very little.

01:08:21

I mean, they started with wanting to lay next to somebody who was completely still, and it just escalates.

01:08:27

Yeah. So, yeah, I don't like, it's not that we would say, no, you should never perform an autopsy.

01:08:33

Absolutely you should. But we don't need to look there to understand Jeffrey Dahmer.

01:08:39

We can understand Jeffrey Dahmer because we understand sin nature and depravity. Yeah. And ultimately, we can find the true nature of evil by looking at the cross.

01:08:49

That's right. And looking at Christ who's crucified on Calvary. Right. Innocent. Crucified. Innocent.

01:08:54

Right. Yeah. The only man that didn't deserve to die. Right. And from there you have perfect.

01:08:59

We talked about how the trauma was multifaceted upon. Multigenerational. Multigenerational, multifaceted amongst all the parties, victims, families, you name it.

01:09:09

We expressed that in both of the episodes. But now what we want to just finally articulate as we rev up here is that the gospel is relevant to this conversation.

01:09:18

This is the only way we can give an accounting for it. And also the gospel allows us to give, allows justice.

01:09:25

Yeah. For all parties. That's right. Justice for all parties. Yeah. Again, I've mentioned this word.

01:09:31

I can get misty eyed by talking about that too as well because the nature of election and then the fact that my depravity prohibited me, impeded me to even come to Jesus Christ myself, that I could have faced that judgment, but God's divine mercy on my heart opened my eyes to the kingdom of God, causing my heart to be anew.

01:09:56

When I think about that eternal judgment, I don't want anybody to face that. Right.

01:10:01

And so I hope people hear this. Yes, we've talked about something interesting, but if you've listened to the first episode and the second episode, we've not, we didn't shoehorn.

01:10:11

We talked about Christ throughout this whole thing. Please, you're no better or worse than anybody else.

01:10:17

Repent and believe the gospel. And if it had not been for Yahweh, we would all be consumed. Right.

01:10:22

Come to the cross for true healing. All right. Well, that is a wrap on our second ever crossover with A Couch Divided.

01:10:31

Real quickly, where's the home address? Where can people find you all? We're on Facebook and Instagram.

01:10:36

Our website's currently under construction because we're doing some cool stuff with it. But you can email us at a couchdividedpod at Gmail.

01:10:46

Yeah, couchdividedpodcast at gmail .com. You can find us on Instagram, couchdividedpod, same name,

01:10:51

Facebook, email us. We have tons of people always emailing us topics and engaging.

01:10:56

We love talking to you guys. Forgive us if we haven't gone back to you yet, but we will. Okay. All right.

01:11:02

Well, thank you all for listening in to our second true crime series.

01:11:07

Yeah. And ironically, we did the first one. Yeah. So this is our second true crime and we hope to do more in the future.

01:11:13

So if you all enjoyed this episode, we'd love to hear your feedback. Yes. And as always, a program like this cannot continue without your support.

01:11:19

So if you want to support the cultist ministry, you can go to thecultistshow .com. There is a donate tab and we'd ask that you prayerfully consider either donating one time or monthly.

01:11:28

All right. All that being said, we'll talk to you all next time on cultists, where we enter into the kingdom of the cults.