Jeffery Dahmer was born in Milwaukee in 1960; when he was six years old, his family moved to Ohio. There is not a great body of detailed evidence on what happened to create Jeffrey Dahmer, but it is known that, as a child, he was subjected to his mother and father’s blistering arguments. There were also reports that a male neighbor had sexually molested him. Whatever the confluence of forces, by the age of ten, Jeffrey was clearly showing the signs of a future killer—he delighted in violating the bodies of dead animals, such as mounting the head of a dog on a stake, decapitating rats and mice, and bleaching chicken bones.
In June 1978, when he was eighteen years old, he killed his first human being. His mother and father, who had separated by this time, had gone off somewhere on separate journeys and had left him alone in the house. He had a car, and he picked up a hitchhiker named Steven Hicks and took him home in hopes of having sex with him. But when Hicks wanted to leave, Dahmer prevented it by smashing him in the skull with a barbell, and then cutting him up and burying the parts.
For a while after this there were apparently no more murders; it was a time when Dahmer enrolled in college, unsuccessfully, and then signed up for a six-year stint in the army. He was discharged after two years for alcoholism.
In 1982, Dahmer moved in with his grandmother in West Allis, Wisconsin. In August of that year, he was arrested for exposing himself at a state fair. In September 1986, he was charged again with public exposure after two boys accused him of masturbating in public. This time he was sentenced to a year in prison, and he served ten months. On September 25, 1988, he was arrested for fondling a thirteen-year-old Laotian boy in Milwaukee, for which he served ten months of a one-year sentence in a work-release camp. He was required to register as a sex offender. He convinced the judge that he needed therapy, and he was released on good behavior with five-year probation. Shortly thereafter, he began a string of murders that would end with his 1991 arrest.
Dahmer’s first kill in this string of murders occurred on September 15, 1987. Steven Tuomis disappeared, and people found out he had been murdered by Dahmer only when Dahmer confessed to his crimes in 1991. He killed three more men, and he was also experimenting with his victims, particularly with their body parts. The odor proved too much for his grandmother, who threw him out of her house on September 25, 1988. Dahmer took an apartment on Milwaukee’s North Twenty-fifth Street, and there at least eight killings took place. Dahmer’s MO was particularly horrible: He wanted to create “zombies” that would be at his beck and call, and to do this, he drilled holes in his victims’ skulls and poured caustic solutions into the holes to make them unconscious. The method didn’t work, though it did succeed in killing the victim every time.
In the early morning hours of May 30, 1991, fourteen-year-old Konerak Sinthasomphone (the younger brother of the boy Dahmer had molested in 1988) was discovered on the street, wandering nude and under the heavy influence of drugs. Dahmer convinced police that they had an argument while drinking, and that Sinthasomphone was his nineteen-year-old boyfriend. Against the teenager’s protests—which the police likely didn’t understand, as Sinthasomphone didn’t speak English—police turned him over to Dahmer. Later that night, Dahmer killed and dismembered Sinthasomphone, keeping his skull as a souvenir.
By the summer of 1991, Dahmer was murdering approximately one person each week. He killed Matt Turner on June 30, Jeremiah Weinberger on July 5, Oliver Lacy on July 12, and finally Joseph Brandehoft on July 18. On July 22, 1991, Dahmer lured another man, Tracy Edwards, into his home.
According to the would-be victim, Dahmer struggled with Edwards to handcuff him. Edwards escaped and flagged down a police car, with the handcuffs still hanging from one hand. Edwards led police back to Dahmer’s apartment, where Dahmer at first acted friendly to the officers, only to turn on them when he realized that they suspected something was wrong. As one officer subdued Dahmer, the other searched the house and uncovered multiple photographs of murdered victims and human remains, including three severed heads and penises. All told, the police found the remains of eleven people, with parts divided between acid vats and the refrigerator. And it was not that Dahmer wasn’t religious: In his bedroom they found an altar festooned with candles and skulls of his victims, as well as photos of people he had killed.
The Trial
On January 30, 1992, Jeffrey Dahmer faced fifteen counts of murder in a Wisconsin court. The murder cases were already so notorious and Dahmer so clearly guilty that the authorities never bothered to charge him with the attempted murder of Edwards. His trial began in January 1992. With evidence overwhelmingly against him, Dahmer pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. The court found Dahmer sane and guilty and sentenced him to fifteen consecutive life terms, totaling 957 years in prison. At his sentencing hearing, Dahmer expressed remorse for his actions, also saying that he wished for his own death.
Dahmer served his time at the Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin, where he ultimately declared himself a born-again Christian. This conversion occurred after viewing Evangelical material sent to him by his father. A local preacher, Roy Ratcliff, met with Dahmer and agreed to baptize him.
On November 28, 1994, Dahmer and another inmate named Jesse Anderson were beaten to death by fellow inmate Christopher Scarver with a bar from a weight machine while on work detail in the prison gym—ironically, just how Dahmer had killed his first victim. Dahmer died from severe head trauma in the ambulance en route to the hospital. Before his death, Dahmer had already survived one attempt on his life: After attending a church service in the prison chapel, an inmate tried to slash Dahmer’s throat with a razor blade. Dahmer escaped the incident with superficial wounds.
