'Stone Phillips: 15 Years of Dateline'

CRIMINAL MINDS

Bernhard Goetz, 1996

Bernhard Goetz: Society is better off without certain people.  The people, whether they're--whether one believes that they should be killed or--locked up, or used in forced labor, is just a matter of one's political point of view.

He is blunt and controversial. He is hailed by some as a hero, vilified by others as a vigilante.

His name is Bernhard Goetz, the so-called subway gunman of New York City, the man who shot four black youths in a subway car because he believed they were about to mug him. 

Stone Phillips: You describe this as a mugging, but no one pulled a knife on you.  No one raised a fist against you.
Bernard Goetz: That is correct, but by words and by deeds they gave me every indication that they were about to use force on me.

Stone Phillips: Are you surprised that you were as competent with that weapon as you were?
Bernard Goetz: That did surprise me at the time. But when I was a young boy, I used to play cowboys and Indians a lot with cap guns.
Stone Phillips: So cowboys and Indians was a--was a warmup for this?
Bernard Goetz: Oh definitely. It's--it's a way of teaching a person how to shoot a gun.  To shoot a gun proficiently, including speed shooting, is much less of a skill than typing.
Stone Phillips: Yeah, but we're talking about a real gun, real bullets, and real people.
Bernard Goetz: Easier than typing.

After shooting and paralyzing one of his victims, Goetz didn't think twice about taking aim again.

Bernard Goetz: He was moving around, and I just tried to shoot him a second time.
Stone Phillips: He was trying to get away from you.
Bernard Goetz: Well, I didn't know that.

Stone Phillips: Were you more afraid because they were black?
Bernard Goetz: Possibly, yes.
Stone Phillips: Are you a racist?
Bernard Goetz: I don't believe so.

Stone Phillips: Have you ever used ‘the N word’?
Bernard Goetz: It's something that's in bad taste, but yes I have.

Stone Phillips: "Their mothers should have had abortions."
Bernard Goetz: I said that to one reporter. I think that would have been a better solution, just like one practices population control with animals.

Stone Phillips: Is that what you were doing on the subway that day when you opened fire, getting rid of what you considered to be undesirable elements?
Bernard Goetz: Well, no. The fact that I may, well almost got rid of some undesirable elements I think, you know, it was something I wasn't looking for.

Stone Phillips: Do you think what you did was a public service?
Bernard Goetz: What I did I'm not ashamed of at all.  And perhaps that's a good way of looking at it, as a public service.

Jeffrey Dahmer, 1994

Jeffrey Dahmer: He was hanging over the side of the bed. And I have no memory of beating him to death, but I must have.

Chilling words from a serial killer in what turned out to be Jeffrey Dahmer's first, and only, network television interview. 

When I met Dahmer and his father in this maximum security prison, he vividly described -- in the most matter-of-fact way -- the gruesome impluses that drove him to kill and cannibalize 17 young men.  He told me it began with a bizarre childhood fascination with dead animals and a teenage compulsion to dissect them.

Stone Phillips:  Was there some pleasure in--in the cutting open of the animal?
Jeffrey Dahmer: Yes.  There was.  No--no sexual pleasure, but just--
Stone Phillips: Sense of power, sense of control?
Jeffrey Dahmer: I suppose that's a good way of putting it, yeah. I suppose it could have turned into a normal hobby like taxidermy, but it didn't. It veered off into this.

Stone Phillips: Was it the killing that excited you or is it what happened after the killing?
Jeffrey Dahmer: No, the--the killing was just a means to an end. That--that was the least satisfactory part.  I didn't enjoy doing that. 
I had this recurring fantasy of meeting a hitchhiker on the road and of taking him hostage and doing what I wanted … Lust played a big part of it. Controlling lust.

Stone Phillips: Why the cannibalism?
Jeffrey Dahmer: That was--that was another step.  It--it made me feel like they were a permanent part of me … Besides the just mere curiosity of what it would be like it gave me a sexual satisfaction to do that.

Stone Phillips: Is it still there … Does it ever go away?
Jeffrey Dahmer: In part.  No, it never--it never completely goes away. I wish I--there was some way to completely get rid of--of the compulsive thoughts, the feelings.  It's not nearly so bad now that there's--there's no avenues to actually act on it.  But no, it never seems to go completely away.
Stone Phillips: So the thoughts still come to you?
Jeffrey Dahmer: Sometimes, yeah.

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