If you had met Jeffrey Dahmer on the street the only thing you might have noticed about him was just how average he was. Born in the American heartland city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in May 1960, Dahmer was about as typically American as you can get.
With a population of about 700,000 Milwaukee is known for its hard-working, largely Germanic population, the fact that it produces about 20 per cent of all the beer in America and is the home of Harley Davidson motorcycles. Dahmer’s family was just as typical as their city. His father, Lionel, was a chemist whose work, and PhD research, kept him away from his family more than he would have liked, but he tried to make up for it by spending as much ‘quality time’ with them as his schedule allowed. Joyce, Jeffrey’s mother, was a slightly neurotic homemaker obsessed with her health. Like most kids, little Jeff had a dog and picked up injured birds hoping his dad could mend their broken wing. When he got a baby brother, David, in 1966, the family seemed complete. In Dahmer’s own words, ‘When I was a kid I was just like everybody else.’ Well, not quite.
One summer day, when Jeff was four years old, his father was sweeping the debris from under the porch. Mixed among the leaves and twigs were a large number of bird carcasses. Jeff seemed almost morbidly fascinated by the tiny bones, playing with them and running his fingers through them. At the time, Lionel laughed it off as a ‘childish episode’ but later remembered it as ‘colouring almost every memory’ of Jeff.
In the year Jeff ’s brother David was born, 1966, Lionel’s new job as a research chemist forced a family move from Milwaukee to Akron, Ohio. In retrospect, Lionel believed that the trauma of a new brother, the move and his first year at school might have affected Jeff more than normal. In his book about his son, Lionel later wrote: ‘A strange fear had begun to creep into his personality, a dread of others and a general lack of self confidence. The little boy who had once seemed so happy was now deeply shy, distant, nearly uncommunicative.’ His parents were concerned but with a new baby, a new job, a new house and a new city to deal with their attention was divided. Besides, kids all go through phases. With Jeff, however, the phase did not seem to pass. In his book, his father remembered, ‘His posture and the general way in which he carried himself changed radically between his tenth and fifteenth years. He grew increasingly shy during this time and when approached by other people, he would become very tense. More and more he remained at home, alone in his room or staring at television. His face was often blank and disengaged.’
In fact, Jeffrey was withdrawing into his own little world of nightmares brought on, at least in part, by his parents’ dissolving relationship and the dawning awareness that he was gay, something his family’s Christian fundamentalism would never understand. Unable to cope with the problems, Jeff simply withdrew. Still, he did his best to get along in high school. He worked on the school newspaper and joined the 4H Club (a youth organisation dedicated to agricultural and livestock raising, generally found in rural, faming communities), but his classmates always saw him as a loner and more than one of them noticed that Jeff was developing a drink problem, sometimes smuggling beer into school and more than once coming back from his lunch break a little drunk.
As Jeff ’s eighteenth birthday and his high school graduation approached, his parents’ marriage collapsed in an acrimonious divorce. Almost simultaneously they left home, intending to sell the house later. Joyce took eleven-year-old David with her. Communication between her and Lionel had broken down to such an extent that each of them assumed the other was taking care of Jeff. As a result, one day Jeff came home from school to find himself deserted by his parents, without money, in a house with no food and a broken refrigerator. The confusion was eventually straightened out, but its effect on Jeffrey Dahmer was permanent. For the rest of his life he would be terrified of abandonment.
Only days after graduation in June 1978, Jeff picked up a casual acquaintance, eighteen-year-old Steve Hicks, who was hitchhiking to his girlfriend’s house. Jeff offered to buy Steve a few beers at a local bar and, being in no particular hurry, Steve agreed. After a few beers they drove to Jeff ’s grandmother’s house where, terrified of being alone once Steve left, Jeff beat his friend to death and stuffed the body into the void beneath the house. A week later, he returned late at night and dismembered the body, shoving the pieces into plastic bin bags and heaving the bags into the boot of his car. He then headed off to a nearby wood to bury the evidence. By this time, Jeff had had more than a few beers and his erratic driving was noticed by a passing policeman who pulled him over. When the officer asked the boy what the awful smell was, Jeff told him it was trash that he was taking to the local dump. The cop told him to watch his drinking and waved him on.
Later, Jeffrey Dahmer realised that the murder of Steve Hicks had irrevocably changed his life. During one psychiatric evaluation, he said: ‘That night in Ohio, that one impulsive night. Nothing’s been normal since. It taints your whole life. After it happened I thought I’d just try to live as normally as possible and bury it, but things like that don’t stay buried.’
Worried that his son was becoming an aimless drifter, Lionel Dahmer, and his new wife Shari, tried to convince Jeff to cut down his drinking and get some direction into his life. Something. Anything. Finally, Jeff agreed to enrol in Ohio State University, but he spent most of his time in the local college bars and by the end of the first semester he had flunked out. Now completely frustrated, Lionel insisted that Jeff either get a responsible job or join the army. Jeff chose the army.
For a while after his induction in January 1979, Jeff ’s condition seemed to improve. He made it through basic training, became an army medic and was stationed at a US base in Germany. But his problems, especially the drinking, inevitably caught up with him. In early 1981 he was discharged on grounds of alcoholism. He moved back to Ohio, dug up Steve Hicks’s bones, pounded them to dust with a hammer and scattered them across the woodland. Months later, in October, he was arrested on charges of drunk and disorderly conduct. No longer able to cope with his son, Lionel insisted that Jeff move to West Allis, Wisconsin – a suburb of Milwaukee – where his grandmother had a spare apartment he could rent. Maybe the move and the expense of living on his own would force him to become responsible.
The Jeffrey Dahmer who returned to the city of his birth looked like almost any other young man from the American Midwest. He stood just under 6 feet tall, weighed about 190 pounds, had dirty-blond hair and wore glasses. He had good manners, was well spoken and not at all bad looking. Although he found it almost impossible to make friends, people seemed to like Jeff Dahmer and he had no problem getting a job on the production line at the Ambrosia Chocolate Company. If he had a few drinks after work, who cared? Everybody in Milwaukee drank beer. Even when he dropped his trousers in a bar and was cautioned by the police, people just laughed it off. It was, however, a little different in September 1986 when he was caught masturbating in front of two young boys and was sentenced to a year’s probation for indecent exposure. Still, as he had always done, Lionel stood by his drunken son, paid his lawyer’s bill and, not for the first time, begged him to get help for his drinking. Jeffrey ignored the advice.
In September 1987, Jeff was drinking in a Milwaukee gay bar and fell into conversation with Steve Tuomi. After they rented a hotel room, Jeff proceeded to murder Tuomi and pass out: when he woke up there was blood on his mouth. Dahmer hurriedly bought a large suitcase, stuffed Tuomi’s body into it, hauled his macabre luggage back to his grandmother’s basement and had sex with the body before throwing it in the garbage. Jeff seemed to be amazed that he had killed for a second time. ‘I just couldn’t believe it happened again after all those years . . . I don’t know what was going through my mind. I [have] tried to dredge it up, but I have no memory whatsoever.’ Somehow, with the death of Steve Tuomi, a dam broke inside Jeffrey Dahmer’s head. Whatever he had been trying to hold in check was about to drown out his entire existence.
The urge to kill and desecrate the body of another human being came again four months later. In January 1988 Dahmer picked up and murdered fourteen-year-old Jamie Doxtator who often loitered outside gay bars desperately trying to find someone to love him. Less than three months later, he did the same thing to Richard Guerrero. Events that had once seemed, to Dahmer at least, like terrible aberrations were now becoming a monstrous habit.
Although she was completely unaware of her grandson’s unspeakable urges, Jeffrey’s landlady-grandmother was exhausted by his loud, drunken lifestyle. In late summer 1988 she asked him to move and in late September he took an apartment in Milwaukee proper. As if released from the only remaining tether on his unbridled inhibitions, the next day Jeff found himself in serious trouble with the law.
On 26 September, Dahmer approached a thirteen-year-old Laotian boy and offered him $50 to pose for nude photographs. The boy was willing but Dahmer still felt it necessary to drug him so that he could have sex with him. Later, when the woozy boy staggered home, his parents realised something was terribly wrong. The hospital confirmed that he had been drugged, the police were called in and Dahmer was arrested while at work at Ambrosia Chocolate. Charged with exploitation of a minor and second-degree sexual assault, he was bound over for trial in January, but released on his own recognisance.
Anxious about the outcome of his trial, Dahmer decided to relieve the tension by picking up Anthony Sears. Amazingly, Dahmer even let one of Sears’s friends drive them back to his house before he murdered the man.
Before Dahmer’s case came up in May, he was ordered to undergo examination by three psychologists. Unanimously, they agreed that he was manipulative and evasive and should be hospitalised for intensive treatment. Dahmer’s lawyer, Gerald Boyle, again hired by Jeff ’s father, argued that because it was Dahmer’s first offence, he should not be imprisoned. Innocently, he told the court, ‘We don’t have a multiple offender here. I believe that he was caught before it got to that point.’ In a statement to the court, Dahmer buttressed his attorney’s argument. ‘What I have done is very serious. I’ve never been in this position before. This is a nightmare . . . I do want help. I want to turn my life around.’ The judge bought Dahmer’s plea and put him on five years’ probation with the first year to be spent under a ‘work-release’ programme whereby Dahmer could go to work every day but had to return to jail at the end of his shift. Ten months later, Jeff ’s behaviour seemed so exemplary that the judge offered him early release. At no time during his detention had he been ordered to seek professional counselling. Even a letter from Lionel Dahmer, urging the judge not to allow his son to go free until he was forced to get help, did no good. If no one else understood that Jeffrey Dahmer had real problems, his father did. He said he was afraid that his son ‘would never be more than he seemed to be – a liar, an alcoholic, a thief, an exhibitionist, a molester of children. I could not imagine how he had become such a ruined soul. There was something missing in Jeff . . . We call it a conscience.’
Although he went back to stay with his grandmother temporarily, by May 1990 Dahmer had taken apartment number 213 at the Oxford Apartments located at 924 North 25th Street in Milwaukee. Knowing full well that he was living on the edge, in addition to the security system on the building’s main doors, he installed a separate alarm system and security locks on his own apartment. They would be absolutely necessary for what he had in mind.
Now in a constant emotional frenzy, Dahmer increased both the frequency and ferocity of his attacks. In June he murdered Edward Smith; a month later it was Ricky Beeks. September was a bumper month that garnered him two playmates; the first was Ernest Miller and the second David Thomas. By now, Dahmer had honed his modus operandi to a fine edge. His targets were always young men with unsettled lives, and he often chose victims who, like himself, had drink problems or were frequently in trouble with the law. Many of them were members of racial minorities. He knew that the police never paid much attention when such people simply dropped out of sight.
The pattern of Dahmer’s approach was as predictable as his victims’ profile. He would pick a likely candidate at a gay bar or bookshop and fall into conversation with them. Being nice looking and articulate, he had no trouble getting them to agree to go back to his apartment; the ploy was either to watch ‘porno’ movies or pose for photographs. Once inside his lair, he would offer them a drink laced with prescription sleeping pills. When they were no longer capable of offering any resistance, he would strangle them with his belt or his bare hands, or simply slit their throat with a sharp knife. Then he would strip off their clothes, photograph them and have sex with the corpse. Now well into the swing of things, Dahmer would begin to mutilate the body, cutting it open, revelling in the heat emanating from the internal organs and photographing the entire process. Finally, he would dissect his prey, laying the best parts aside. Prime cuts, like biceps, hearts and thighs were wrapped in plastic and put in the fridge or frozen for later consumption. The sexual organs were cut off and preserved in jars of formaldehyde while the skulls were boiled clean and coated with granite-effect spray paint. Sometimes, he liked to pull out his growing collection of skulls and masturbate in front of them. The remainder of the carcass was dumped into a 55-gallon plastic container filled with acid that would reduce muscle and bone to a greasy sludge that could be flushed down the toilet. There were, of course, variations on the theme. Ernest Miller’s entire skeleton was boiled clean and bleached, awaiting later reassembly. Later, one victim would be flayed, his skin tanned like a piece of leather.
One of the few cannibals ever to give an explanation for his predilection, Dahmer would later insist that he believed that by eating his victims he was able to make them a part of him and that, in a way, they would always be with him. In the most perverse way imaginable, Dahmer was ensuring that his one-off lovers would never abandon him and that he would always remain in control of the relationship. If possible, Dahmer’s need for control and terror of rejection drove him to acts more bizarre than cannibalism. Even Dahmer found what he did so awful that he hesitated to talk about it. ‘I didn’t want to keep killing people and having nothing left except the skull . . . This is going to sound bad, but . . . should I say it? . . . I took the drill while he was asleep . . .’ What Dahmer hesitated to describe was his attempt to make zombie love-slaves. He hoped that by drilling a 
-inch hole in the head of his drugged victim and injecting muratic acid into their brain, he could, quite literally, turn them into zombies that would wait patiently while he was out and be ready to love him when he came home. It did not work. Most of the victims died almost instantly although a few hung on for several days as their brain was slowly eaten away. But still, Jeff kept trying.
In February 1991 he met and killed Curtis Straughter. The next month it was Errol Lindsey and the month after that Tony Hughes. Hughes’ case was particularly tragic in that he was a deaf-mute and more than grateful to anyone who would spend a little time with him. Had he been alive, he would probably not have been so grateful when Dahmer left his body lying on the floor for three days before cleaning up the mess. Even Dahmer realised that his urge to kill was accelerating its pace. ‘After the fear and terror of what I had done had left, which took about a month, I started it all over again. From then on it was just a craving, a hunger. I don’t know how to describe it, a compulsion. And I just kept doing it, doing it, doing it.’ And by the time he killed Tony Hughes he was ‘doing it’ almost once a week. At that rate, something was bound to go wrong.
On 27 May, the very evening he dissected Tony Hughes’ body, laying aside the good bits and dropping the rest into the vat of acid, Dahmer went out hunting again. Later that evening he met a fourteen-year-old oriental boy named Konerak Sinthasomphone. Using the photo ploy Dahmer lured him back to his apartment, drugged him, raped him and drilled a hole in his head. Somehow, while Jeff was busying himself getting the muratic acid ready, Konerak stumbled out of the apartment, down the stairs and into the street. Minutes later, around 2.00am, he was spotted by two eighteen-year-old black girls as he wandered around naked, babbling incoherently, blood running all over his head and down his legs. One of the girls ran to help him while the other called 911 emergency. Even before the police cruiser arrived Dahmer was out in the street looking for Konerak. The girls managed to keep Dahmer and his victim apart until the police pulled up, and then tried frantically to explain to the cops what had happened. Dahmer interrupted, insisting that the boy was a lot older than he looked and was, in fact, his nineteen-year-old lover. The police never bothered to call in a request for background information on Dahmer – which would have revealed that he was on parole for molesting a child, who was, as it happened, Konerak Sinthasomphone’s older brother. Neither did they seem to notice the blood covering the boy’s head and legs. All they saw was an articulate, 31-year-old white male and two teenage black girls. Who were they going to believe? Joking that the whole thing was just a ‘homosexual lovers’ spat’ they led Sinthasomphone back to Dahmer’s door and handed him over. Minutes later Konerak was dead, his flesh was in the fridge, his skull waiting to join the rest of the collection.
When the story came out, the officers who had led Konerak to his death were summarily fired but took their case to court, won, were reinstated with full pay and later named Officers of the Year by the Milwaukee Police Union for their ‘righteous’ struggle to clear their good names.
Now in the last stages of his insanity, Dahmer finally decided what to do with all the skulls he had been collecting. Increasingly divorced from reality, he convinced himself that if he built a shrine to the devil he could conjure up the Evil One himself and convince him to fork over ‘special powers and energies to help me socially and financially’. The shrine was to take the form of a long, black table with six skulls arrayed down each side and a complete skeleton at each end. He already had almost enough skulls and Ernest Miller’s skeleton was just waiting to be wired together, so why not? Later, Dahmer would look back on this episode with mixed feelings about the devil. ‘Am I just an extremely evil person or is it some kind of satanic influence, or what? . . . I have to question whether or not there is an evil force in the world and whether or not I have been influenced by it . . . I have no idea. Is it possible to be influenced by spirit beings? I know it sounds like an easy copout . . . but from all that the Bible says, there are forces that have a[n] influence on people’s behaviour. The Bible calls him Satan. I suppose it’s possible because it sure seems like some of the thoughts aren’t my own, they just come blasting into my head . . . They do not leave.’
Whether or not the devil made him do it, Dahmer was doing it as fast as he possibly could. Only two weeks after nearly being caught trying to kill Konerak Sinthasomphone he was off to the Chicago Gay Pride Parade. There he met Matt Turner, and together they travelled back to Milwaukee by Greyhound coach. A few weeks later, on 5 July, Jeff was back in Chicago where he picked up Jeremiah Weinberger. Again, they went back to Milwaukee but there must have been something very special about this one – Jeff lived with him for four days before killing him. Maybe something Jerry found in the fridge made him want to get away and Jeff just couldn’t bear to be deserted again.
A week later he picked up Oliver Lacey and only four days after Lacey it was Joseph Bradehoft’s turn. Joe lay on Dahmer’s bed for two days before the ghoul decided to dismember him. But even the best fun eventually comes to an end, and for Jeffrey Dahmer the end came on 22 July when he picked up Tracey Edwards. Tracey was thirty-two years old, as big as Dahmer, black and a far more formidable opponent than Jeff was accustomed to.
The two officers in the passing police car realised that something on North 25th Street was definitely wrong when they spotted the naked black man running down the street – a pair of handcuffs dangling from one wrist – frantically trying to wave them down. When they stopped he explained that he had just escaped from some ‘weird dude’ who had tried to drug him, handcuff him and threaten him with a knife. He had managed to punch the ‘freak’ and escape. Did they have a key to the ’cuffs? Finally, someone listened. The officers asked Edwards to show them where the suspect lived. Together the two uniformed officers and the naked black man went up to Dahmer’s apartment.
A nice-looking white man opened the door and apologetically let them in, explaining he had been depressed over losing his job at Ambrosia Chocolate, had had a little too much to drink and got a little crazy. He was sorry and would get the key to the handcuffs. While one of the policeman stayed with Tracey Edwards, the other escorted Dahmer to his bedroom to get the key. When Dahmer opened a dresser drawer the cop noticed the pile of Polaroid photos of bodies – and parts of bodies. He also noticed that the refrigerator in the photos looked like the one in Dahmer’s kitchen. Hadn’t the naked black guy said something about seeing something ‘nasty’ in the fridge when he went to get a beer? Leaving Dahmer in the custody of his partner, the cop wandered into the kitchen and looked into the refrigerator. The thing on the shelf looked back at him. ‘There’s a goddamned head in here!’ he shrieked. The head belonged to Oliver Lacey and next to it, in a plastic bag labelled ‘to eat later’, was his heart.
With that, Dahmer completely lost his wits. Fighting like a wildcat he was cuffed, hustled out to the cruiser and taken to the police station. Minutes later a throng of detectives and forensic experts were combing through Dahmer’s apartment. It was like nothing any of them had ever seen, or would ever want to see again. In addition to Oliver Lacey’s head and heart in the cooler compartment, there was a bag of human meat. The freezer contained the heads of Jerry Weinberger, Matt Turner and Joe Bradehoft. A chest freezer held the torsos of Matt Turner and Jerry Weinberger. In the kitchen closet was a soup kettle containing two hands and Anthony Sears’ genitalia. A metal filing cabinet in Dahmer’s bedroom contained the skulls of Konerak Sinthasomphone, Raymond Smith, Curtis Straughter and Anthony Sears, Errol Lindsey’s skin, Ernest Miller’s skeleton and 74 Polaroid photos of partially dismembered bodies. In all, portions of thirteen of Dahmer’s seventeen victims were recovered from the slaughterhouse. There was also the 55-gallon drum filled with human sludge, the muratic acid, a hypodermic needle, an electric drill and a -inch drill bit to be used in the creation of sex-zombies and a circular saw for dismembering corpses.
While lab technicians and forensic experts ploughed through the gruesome souvenirs of Dahmer’s life, the boy himself was spilling his guts to the police. His confession, which ran to just over 160 pages, contained some of the weirdest personal insights in history:
It’s hard for me to believe that a human being could have done what I’ve done, but I know that I did it.
If I knew the true, real reasons why all this started, I wouldn’t probably have done any of it.
If I’d been thinking rationally I would have stopped. I wasn’t thinking rationally because it just increased and increased. I was very careful for years and years, you know. Very careful about making sure that nothing incriminating remained, but these last few months, they just went nuts.
If I hadn’t been caught or lost my job, I’d still be doing it. I’m quite sure of that. I went on doing it and doing it and doing it . . . How arrogant and stupid of me to think that I could do something like this . . . as if nothing ever happened.
I should have gone to college and gone into real estate and got myself an aquarium, that’s what I should have done.
Appearing for Dahmer’s defence was Gerald Boyle who had defended him on the child molestation charges three years earlier. Against Boyle’s advice, Dahmer changed his plea from innocent by reason of insanity to guilty but insane. Now Boyle had to convince the jury just how crazy his client really was, even if it was obvious that he had murdered seventeen men and boys.
The security around the Dahmer case was like nothing ever seen in America. Everyone who went into the courthouse was ‘patted down’ for weapons and scanned electronically. The courtroom was constantly swept for bombs, both electronically and by sniffer dogs, and an 8-foot high bullet-proof glass screen protected the defendant from the hordes of people who wanted him dead. Prospective jurors were warned, ‘You are going to hear about things that you probably didn’t know existed in the real world.’ And the entire, grisly affair was to be broadcast on nationwide television.
It was the prosecution’s intention to persuade the jury that although what he did was the act of a madman, Jeffrey Dahmer was completely sane. Ultimately, as is the case in most such trials, it would be the psychiatrists’ job to convince the jury of the accused’s state of mind at the time of his crimes. There were a wide variety of professional opinions on why Dahmer did what he did; Dr James Fox, Dean of the College of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University in Boston said, ‘If he felt at all uncomfortable about his own sexual orientation, it is very easy to see it projected on to these victims and punishing them, indirectly, to punish himself.’ It was all great theatre, but the jury did not buy any of it. After three weeks of testimony it only took the jury five hours to find Jeffrey Dahmer both sane and guilty on all counts.
Although nothing was going to ameliorate his sentence, after being found guilty Dahmer read a four-page apology to the families of his victims. ‘I know how much harm I have caused . . . Thank God there will be no more harm that I can do . . . I ask for no consideration.’ He got none. He was sentenced to fifteen consecutive life terms without hope of parole. Had he lived so long, Jeff would have been up for release in 957 years.
After his sentencing, Dahmer commented, ‘I couldn’t find any meaning in my life when I was out there. I’m sure as hell not going to find it in [prison]. This is the grand finale of a life poorly spent and the end result is just overwhelmingly depressing . . . it’s just a sick, pathetic, wretched, miserable life story, that’s all it is.’ Later, he commented to his lawyer, ‘. . . if I was killed in prison, that would be a blessing right now’. It was one wish that Dahmer would have granted. On 28 November 1994, while on a toilet cleaning detail with two other inmates, Jeffrey Dahmer, aged thirty-four, along with fellow inmate Jesse Anderson, was murdered by the third man on their crew, a schizophrenic killer named Christopher Scarver, who believed himself to be a new messiah.
In 1996 the city of Milwaukee apportioned $400,000 to buy the entire contents of Dahmer’s apartment and have them incinerated to prevent anyone from buying them to create a Jeffrey Dahmer museum. All things considered, it was probably a wise move.