While the series on serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer continues to be a hit on Netflix, one of the men who knew him intimately during his last years confided in The Sun.
Last confessions. The name of Jeffrey Dahmer came out of the shadows recently following the broadcast, on Netflix, of a series retracing his life. Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. And the streaming platform continued to ride on the success of fiction inspired by real events with the broadcast of a documentary series just after, the Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes. But we must not forget that behind the character who has fascinated for some time is a cannibal killer responsible for the deaths of 17 young men between 1978 and 1991. A man who, after being sentenced, obviously found faith and decided to officially convert. This is where comes in Roy Ratcliff, American pastor who confided in the Sun about his relationship with the cannibal from Milwaukee.
When he was contacted by another pastor asking if he was okay with baptize a prisoner, Roy Ratcliff didn’t expect to hear Jeffrey Dahmer’s name when asked who it was. But that didn’t stop him from agreeing. As he explains to Sunhe was not very aware of the case around the serial killer and only began to inquire about it when his wife told him “that he needed to learn more about Dahmer”. The pastor adds, “When I first met him I didn’t know all the sordid details and I think it was better that way, so that I wouldn’t arrive full of prejudice“. He also remembers this first meeting very well: “Jeff walked into the room, closed the door, then shook my hand and sat across from me. I was impressed with his courtesy and cooperation. He was considerate, which surprised me. Since he had killed several people, I had expected to see a more brutal person.
Pastor saddened by the death of Jeffrey Dahmer
When Roy Ratcliff agreed to baptize him, Jeffrey Dahmer said he was relieved that the pastor did not refuse on the pretext that he had been “too evil”. But the clergyman was not refused to help a man seeking to repent, even if he confessed to having eaten the biceps of one of his victims… During their meetings and their conversations, Roy Ratcliff came to consider Jeffrey Dahmer a friendwith whom he would remain so “until you’re old and need a cane to get around.” A strange relationship during which the pastor, under the pretext that Dahmer had found his god, perhaps a little too quickly put aside the many victims of the killer and the empathy he could have felt towards their families. He indeed explains that when Dahmer was killed by a fellow prisoner, “I felt sad because I had lost a friend“.