Detective’s chilling account of Dahmer

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This article was published 24/11/2017 (2882 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When Robyn Maharaj, a writer who calls East Kildonan home, first met retired detective Patrick Kennedy in 2012, she was researching a feature article on Jeffery Dahmer, the infamous serial killer.

Little did she know their encounter would lead Maharaj to share Kennedy’s story with the world.

In July 1991, Kennedy, then a Milwaukee homicide detective, was called to the scene of a multiple murder. He was involved in the subsequent arrest and interrogation of Jeffery Dahmer. A serial killer, Dahmer confessed to Kennedy to having killed 17 men in a predatory, sexual manner that shocked the world. Maharaj met Kennedy in Austin, Texas, when she was researching an article for crimemagazine.com

“Kennedy told me he had all this information he had from Jeff that he wanted to get off his chest,” Maharaj said. “That turned into a huge stack of notes.”

In April 2013, Maharaj travelled to Madison, Wis., to spend some time with Kennedy and work on what, at the time, they considered the start of a manuscript.

“I kind of got a sense of who he was, and the aftermath of living in the city after this crime happened.”

Maharaj gave Kennedy some notes on his manuscript, and then travelled back to Winnipeg. Five days later, Kennedy died in his home of a heart attack.

“It really knocked me out,” Maharaj said. She continued working on the manuscript, and finished her article on Dahmer. When it was published, she sent it to Kennedy’s widow, Patricia.
“She said, ‘If there’s anything you could or want to do with it, go ahead,’” Maharaj said.

With her experience in grant and freelance writing, and some experience editing, Maharaj set out to make something of Kennedy’s story.

“Kennedy’s story is interesting,” she said. “Nobody who had written about Dahmer had that kind of access.”

The result is Dahmer Detective, published in 2016 by Poison Berry Press. While Maharaj said sales on Amazon have been steady, they’ve seen a jump following the release of the film My Friend Dahmer earlier this year.

Maharaj argues that Kennedy was able to get such a detailed, forthcoming confession from Dahmer because of the way Kennedy dealt with suspects.

“He was a young detective when this case came across his desk,” Maharaj said. “He saw those horrible things in that apartment, a decapitated head in the fridge and all that, but he was able to be professional and respectful.

“‘Tell me your story,’ he said. If he’d been a brusque cop, mishandling him, Dahmer would have just shut down.”

Maharaj believes that stories like Dahmer’s appeal to readers because there is more to their stories than the grisly details.

“True crime is so much more than crime stories,” Maharaj, a fan of the genre herself, explained. “There are so many things that go on in a true crime story. It’s a bit of history. Sometimes it’s biography or geography, to learn about a place. Did the place contribute to the crimes?”

Dahmer Detective: The interrogation and investigation that shocked the world is available from Poison Berry Press online and in bookstores.

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