Serial Killer - Jeffrey Dahmer

Convicted serial killer and sex offender Jeffrey Dahmer murdered 17 men between 1978 and 1991. He was killed by a fellow prison inmate in 1994.
Who Was Jeffrey Dahmer?
Jeffrey Dahmer (May 21, 1960 to November 28, 1994) was an American serial killer who took the lives of 17 males between 1978 and 1991. Over the course of more than 13 years, Dahmer sought out men, largely African American, at gay bars, malls and bus stops, lured them home with promises of sex or money, and gave them alcohol laced with drugs before strangling them to death. He would then engage in sex acts with the corpses before dismembering them and disposing of them, often keeping their skulls or genitals as souvenirs. He frequently took photographs of his victims at different phases of the murder process, so that he could recollect each act afterward and relive the experience. Dahmer was seized in 1991 and sentenced to 16 life terms. He was killed by fellow prison inmate Christopher Scarver in 1994.

The Crime Scene: Jeffrey Dahmer's Fridge and Polaroids
Dahmer's killing spree ended when he was arrested on July 22, 1991. That day, two Milwaukee police officers picked up Tracy Edwards, a 32-year-old African American man who was wandering the streets with a handcuff dangling from his wrist. They decided to look into the man's claims that a "weird dude" had drugged and controlled him. They arrived at Dahmer's apartment, where he calmly offered to get the keys for the handcuffs.

Edwards claimed that the knife Dahmer had threatened him was in the sack. When the officer went into corroborate the story, he detected Polaroid photos of dismembered bodies lying around. Dahmer was subdued by the officers. Subsequent searches revealed a head in the refrigerator, three more in the freezer and a catalog of other horrors, including preserved skulls, jars containing genitalia and an extensive gallery of macabre Polaroid photographs of his victims.

Dahmer's refrigerator and Polaroid photographs became associated with his notorious killing spree. In 1996, after Dahmer's death, a group of Milwaukee businessmen raised more than $400,000 to buy the things he used for his victims -- such as blades, saws, handcuffs and a fridge to store body parts. They promptly destroyed them in an effort to distance the city from the horrors of Dahmer's actions and the ensuing media circus surrounding his trial.

Childhood and Family
Notorious serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on May 21, 1960, to Lionel and Joyce Dahmer. He had been described as an energetic and happy child until age 4, when surgery to correct a double hernia seemed to effect a change in the boy. Noticeably subdued, he became increasingly withdrawn following the arrival of his younger brother and the family's frequent moves. By his early teens, he was disengaged, tense and largely friendless.

Dahmer claims that his compulsions toward necrophilia and murder began around age 14, but it seems that the breakdown of his parents' marriage and their acrimonious divorce a few years later might have been the catalyst for turning these thoughts into actions.

Jeffrey Dahmer's 17 victims
Dahmer's first murder happened just after graduating high school, in June 1978, when he picked up a hitchhiker named Steven Hicks and took him home to his parents' house. Dahmer proceeded to get the young man drunk; when Hicks tried to leave, Dahmer killed him by striking him in the head and strangling him with a barbell. He dismembered the corpse of his first victim, packed the body parts in plastic bags and buried them behind his parents' home. He later exhumed the remains, crushed the bones with a sledgehammer and scattered them across a wooded ravine.

By the time of his first killing, Dahmer's alcohol intake had spun out of control. He dropped out of Ohio State University after a quarter term, and his recently remarried father insisted that he join the Army. Dahmer enlisted in late December 1978, and has been posted to Germany shortly afterwards. His drinking problem persisted, and in early 1981, the Army discharged him. Although German governments would later explore possible connections between Dahmer and murders which happened in the region during that time, it's not considered that he took any more victims while serving in the Armed Forces.
After his release, Dahmer returned home to Ohio.

It was not until September 1987 that Dahmer took his next victim, Steven Tuomi. They checked into a hotel room and drank, and Dahmer finally awakened to find Tuomi dead, with no memory of their previous night's activities. He bought a big suitcase to transfer Tuomi's body to his grandma's basement, where he dismembered and masturbated on the corpse before disposing of the remains.

Only after Dahmer murdered another two victims in his grandma's house did she tire of her grandson's late nights and drunkenness -- although she had no understanding of his other actions -- and she forced him to move from the assumptions in 1988.

That September 1989, Dahmer had a very lucky escape: An experience with a 13-year-old Laotian boy led to charges of sexual abuse and second-degree sexual assault for Dahmer. He pleaded guilty, claiming that the boy had seemed much older. While awaiting sentencing for his sexual assault case, Dahmer again placed his grandma's cellar to gruesome usage: In March 1989, he enticed, drugged, strangled, sodomized, photographed, dismembered and disposed of Anthony Sears, an aspiring model.

In his trial for child molestation in May 1989, Dahmer was the version of contrition, arguing eloquently, in his own defense, about how he'd seen the error of his ways, and that his arrest marked a turning point in his life. His defense counsel argued he needed treatment, not incarceration, and the judge agreed, handing down a yearlong prison sentence on "day release" -- permitting Dahmer to work at his job during the day and come back to the prison at night -- and a last-minute probationary sentence.

Years later, in an interview with CNN, Lionel Dahmer said he composed a letter to the court that issued the sentence, asking psychological help before his son's parole. But, Jeffrey Dahmer was granted an early release from the judge, after serving just 10 months of his sentence. He lived with his grandma following his release, during which time he doesn't seem to have added to his body count, before going back into his own flat.

Over the following two decades, Dahmer's victim count accelerated, bringing his total from four to 17. He developed rituals as he improved, experimenting with chemical way of disposal and frequently consuming the flesh of his victims. Dahmer also tried crude lobotomies, drilling into victims' skulls while they were still living and injecting them with muriatic acid. He was careful to pick victims on the fringes of society, who were often itinerant or borderline criminal, making their disappearances less noticeable and diminishing the odds of his capture.

On May 27, 1991, Dahmer's neighbor Sandra Smith called the police to report an Asian boy was running naked in the road. After the police arrived, the boy was incoherent, and they accepted the word of Dahmer -- a white guy in a mostly poor African-American community -- the boy was his 19-year-old lover.

The police escorted Dahmer and the boy house and, obviously not wanting to become embroiled in a gay domestic disruption, took just a cursory look around before leaving. When the police left the scene, Dahmer murdered the boy and proceeded with his usual rituals. Had they ran even a simple search, police officers could have discovered the body of Dahmer's 12th victim, Tony Hughes. Before he was eventually arrested, on July 22, 1991, he killed four guys.

Trial and Imprisonment
Jeffrey Dahmer's trial started in January 1992. Given that the vast majority of Dahmer's victims were African American, there were significant racial tensions and so strict security precautions were taken, such as an eight-foot barrier of bulletproof glass that separated him from the gallery. The addition of just one African American on the jury triggered further unrest, but was finally contained and short lived. Lionel Dahmer and his second wife attended the trial during.

His defense then offered the grisly details of his behaviour, as evidence that only somebody mad could commit such terrible acts.

The jury chose to believe that the prosecution's assertion that Dahmer was fully aware that his actions were evil and decided to commit them anyway. On February 15, 1992, they returned after about 10 hours' deliberation to find him guilty, but fair, on all counts.

Dahmer allegedly adjusted well to prison life, although he was originally kept apart from the general populace. He eventually persuaded police to allow him to integrate more fully with other offenders. He found faith in the kind of books and photographs sent to him by his dad, and he had been granted permission by the Columbia Correctional Institution to be baptized by a local pastor.

On November 28, 1994, in line with his inclusion in routine work information, Dahmer was assigned to work with two other convicted murderers, Jesse Anderson and Christopher Scarver. After they were left alone to finish their jobs, guards returned to discover that Scarver had brutally beaten both guys with a metal bar from the prison weight room. Dahmer was declared dead after about 1 hour. Anderson succumbed to his injuries times afterwards.

In 2015, Christopher Scarver talked to the New York Post about his motives for killing Dahmer. Scarver alleged he was upset not only by Dahmer's crimes, but with a custom Dahmer had developed of fashioning severed limbs from prison food to antagonize other offenders. He also maintained that prison guards allowed the murders to take place by leaving them alone.

Its owner, musician Chris Butler, said that the land would make a excellent home, so long as the purchaser could "get past the terror element."

As of July 2017, the home was no longer available on the market.