I was Jeffrey Dahmer’s attorney and I saw a blood-soaked apartment – his terrifying reason for killing victims shocked me to the core

As Wendy Patrickus took in the blood-soaked mattress, the splattered walls, and the sickening smell of rotting flesh, she felt sick in her stomach.

It was a baptism of fire for the young attorney whose first major case was defending serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.

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She sat in interviews for over 32 hours, listening to the gory details of his horrific crimes, developing a relationship with the killer and feeling “like Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs.”

But the visit to the Milwaukee home where he murdered many of his 17 victims proved too much.

“The mattress was still there, soaked in blood,” she recalls in the new Netflix documentary, Conversations With a Killer: The Unheard Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes.

“The smell inside was a combination of death, dampness, and blood. It was awful. I made it to the emergency exit and the gagging turned to vomiting.”

First released for the three-part documentary out Friday, Wendy’s interviews with the serial killer offer a chilling glimpse into the mind of a monster.

Dahmer, who targeted athletic men and boys as young as 14, describes how he drugged and raped his victims before strangling and dismembering them and keeping body parts as “souvenirs.”

Driven by an overwhelming need for companionship, he admits that every murder was to keep the victim from leaving him.

In a hauntingly calm voice, he heard Wendy say, “I was looking for a live companion, someone to spend the night with and have complete control over whatever I want.

“I felt like it was a waste that I couldn’t keep her any longer without having to kill her, but I couldn’t think of any other way to get her to stay and control her. I had no choice.”

Attorney Gerald Boyle tells the program that Dahmer’s loneliness spurred his evil crimes.

“I’ve never met anyone on this earth who was as lonely as Jeffrey Dahmer,” he says. “He’s never been on a date or been to a party. He didn’t have any friends, so he didn’t talk to anyone.

“He was a shell of a man.”

In the harrowing tapes, Dahmer discusses his sick desire to keep victims alive in a “zombie state” by drilling holes in their skulls and injecting acid.

First kill at 18

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Dahmer, who realized he was gay at the age of 13, grew up friendless with quarreling parents.

Father Lionel moved out when he was 18, and mother Joyce took younger brother David to Wisconsin and left him alone at the family home in Ohio.

Feeling “depressed, lonely, bored and confused,” he met his first victim, 19-year-old Steven Hicks, shortly thereafter.

“No one was home, I saw this guy hitchhiking and thought it would be nice to have someone to talk to and someone to have sex with,” he said.

After inviting him inside for a beer, Dahmer hit him with a barbell before strangling him.

“I don’t know why I hit him other than wanting to stay with him,” he said.

“It shocked me that I got to this point. But there was a sense of excitement or control mixed with fear.”

Dahmer hid the body in a room under the house and dragged it out to have sex before finally dismembering it and scattering it in the fields around the house.

He told Wendy he felt guilty that Hicks’ family waited 13 years to find out what happened to their son, but he “didn’t have the guts” to admit it.

Drug rape in bathrooms

By now, Dahmer was drinking heavily, and after three months of service in the army, his father sent him to live with his grandmother in Milwaukee.

He told Wendy he tried to suppress his homosexuality and even stole a mannequin as a substitute for a submissive lover, but found it “disappointing.”

He began frequenting gay bars and drugging potential sexual partners with sleeping pills.

“I could keep her there longer. I was able to lie around without feeling the pressure to do whatever they wanted to do,” he told Wendy. “I was able to enjoy them however I wanted.”

i wanted more It triggered something. It gave me sick pleasure. The compulsion was stronger than anything else. It was a single-minded driving force. My wishes were bestial

Jeffrey Dahmer

Nine years after his first murder, Dahmer picked Steven Tuomi up and spent the night with him at Ambassadors Hotel – but woke up to find he had murdered the 25-year-old in a drunken blackout.

Claiming he was “horrified” to have killed again, he cleaned the room and took the body back to his grandmother in a suitcase before discarding it in the garbage.

But the chilling tape reveals the November 1987 murder sparked a killing spree.

“I wanted more. It triggered something. It gave me sick pleasure,” he said. “The compulsion was stronger than anything else. It was a single-minded driving force. My wishes were bestial.”

Rampage

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Two months later he murdered James Doxtater, 14, at his grandmother’s house, followed by Rochard Guerrero, 22 – quietly having breakfast with her while bodies lay in his room.

Incredibly, during this time he was convicted of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old whom he lured to his home with the promise of $50 for photos.

While awaiting conviction for the crime, he drugged and strangled 24-year-old Tony Sears after a one-night stand.

Obsessed with his victim’s appearance, he decided to keep body parts for the first time.

“[It felt] unfulfilled. It felt like a waste,” he says. “Tony had a good looking face, so I cut off the head, put it in a big white drum, filled it with acetone and that preserved the head.”

He also kept Sears’ genitals in a Tupperware box in his locker at the chocolate factory where he worked.

Registered as a sex offender, Dahmer served a 10-month sentence before moving into Milwaukee’s Oxford Apartments in May 1990 and speeding up the killings, killing up to two a month.

He began collecting his “favorite” body parts and bought an industrial vat to dissolve bones in acid before flushing them down the toilet.

Believing that “if I took these souls, they would stay alive,” he also began eating hearts, livers, and thighs, telling Wendy he chose “the meatiest parts with the least amount of fat.” .

“It looked like supermarket meat. I froze it for a couple of weeks,” he said.

zombie slaves

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But the thrills wore off and, as Dahmer explained on the tape, he decided to find a way to keep his victims alive “in a zombie state” — practicing his first crude lobotomy by piercing the deaf-mute’s skull Tony Hughes was boring.

“I wanted to see if there was a way I could keep him with me without actually killing him,” he said.

“I didn’t want to keep killing people and have nothing but the skull.”

Meanwhile, as the bodies piled up, neighbors complained about foul odors coming from the apartment.

“He was showering with two people (corpses) on the bottom of the tub,” says Wendy.

“I asked him why he didn’t get rid of the bodies before he found another one. He said: “I couldn’t help it. I needed the excitement of it’.”

death threats

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Dahmer was eventually caught after victim Tracy Edwards fled the home and stopped a passing police car in July 1991.

Police found 11 skulls, two skeletons, severed hands and penises, and three torsos that dissolved in the acid solution.

Drawers full of Polaroids of his victims before, after and during the dismemberment were found.

Dahmer confessed to 17 murders in grisly detail, and Wendy admits it was often hard to hear.

“There were times I felt like a mother to him, there were times I felt like he was my brother, there were times I felt like a therapist,” she says.

Throughout a lengthy trial, Wendy was constantly at Dahmer’s side and became the focus of anger for the victims’ grieving families, scaring her to leave her home.

“I’ve received death threats from multiple sources,” she says. “I was out one night and a family member of one of the victims came after me with a pool cue. I became a couch potato at that point.”

Dahmer was sentenced to 16 consecutive life terms at Columbia Correctional Institution in Wisconsin in 1992.

Two years later, on November 28, 1994, Dahmer was bludgeoned to death by convicted murderer Christopher Scarver.

While few mourned his death, Wendy says she formed a good relationship with the serial killer.

“I was very upset,” she says. “You can’t help but grow close to someone after spending so many days, weeks and months with them.

“There were still things I wanted to talk to him about.”