“I really screwed up this time.”

“I should have gone to college and gone into real estate and got myself an aquarium. That’s what I should have done.”

“I think in some way I wanted it to end, even if it meant my own destruction.”

Of his first victim: “I, uh, didn’t know how else to keep him there other than to get the barbell and hit him, over the head, which I did, and then strangled him with the same barbell.”

Robert Ressler: “So you were aroused at just the physique?”
Dahmer: “The internal organs.”

“That’s why I started drilling. ‘Cause drugging was not working.”

“I made my fantasy life more powerful than my real one.”

“The maintaining of the skulls was a way to feel that I had saved at least something of their essence, that I wasn’t a total waste in killing them.”

“I would cook it, and look at the pictures and masturbate.”

“My consuming lust was to experience their bodies. I viewed them as objects, as strangers. It is hard for me to believe a human being could have done what I’ve done.”

“I was completely swept along with my own compulsion. I don’t know how else to put it. It didn’t satisfy me completely, so maybe I was thinking, ‘Maybe another one will. Maybe this one will.’ And the numbers started growing and growing and just got out of control, as you can see.”

“I carried it too far, that’s for sure.”