Making Zombies

It was thirteen years after his first killing – sixteen dead bodies later – that Jeffrey Dahmer was finally arrested in Milwaukee as a mass murderer. By that time aged 31, he’d been earlier charged with a sexual assault against a young boy, bailed and put on probation after attending prison part-time. He’d been identified to police as responsible for another sex attack in his apartment; and he’d even got away with claiming that an incoherent and terrified young man found running away from him naked in the street was his drunk lover. Police on this occasion had actually visited the apartment, but apparently hadn’t noticed the smell of decaying flesh. Nor had they visited his bedroom, in which a dead body had been laid out, ready for butchering. All they’d seen was the plausible Dahmer, who showed them photographs and apologised – and then, a few minutes after they’d left, strangled the helpless young man they’d left with him.

It wasn’t, in fact, until July 22nd 1991 when, in eerily similar circumstances, police stopped a young black man found running hysterically down the street with a handcuff hanging from his wrist, that they finally discovered the man responsible for a rash of recent missing-person cases. For Tracy Edwards told them that some crazy white man in an apartment not far away had been holding a knife to him, threatening to cut out his heart and eat it. He took them to the apartment-building in question and told them the number; Jeffrey Dahmer calmly answered the door. And then, finally, standing in the doorway, the police smelt the smell of death.

Inside the apartment were five dried and lacquered human skulls and a barrel containing three male torsos; an electric saw stained with blood, and a drum containing acid which Dahmer had used to dissolve his victims’ bodies and to inject – with a turkey baster through holes drilled into their heads – into their living brains. In the freezer was a human head and a box containing human hands and genitals. The meat neatly wrapped in the refrigerator, Dahmer later allowed, was also human – waiting to be eaten the way he preferred it, with mustard.

Jeffrey Dahmer photographed at his trial

The son of middle-class parents, Dahmer was born in 1960 and grew up in a small town in Ohio. He first killed at 18 when he invited a hitch-hiker he’d picked up to his parents’ house and strangled him after beating him unconscious. Nine years later, after a stint in the army, he began again where he’d left off. He picked up a man in a Milwaukee gay bar and invited him to a hotel room where he strangled him. Then he took the body back to his basement apartment in his grandmother’s house, dismembered it and left it out, wrapped up in plastic bags, for the garbagemen.

One killing in 1986; two in 1988; one in 1989; four in 1990, eight in 1991 – once Dahmer had his own apartment, the number of his killings began gradually to escalate. But the pattern was more or less exactly the same. He would pick up boys or young men for sex, then drug them and torture them before killing them and dismembering their bodies. Some he would try to turn into zombies while they were still alive, by injecting acid into their brains. But their fate remained the same. . .

At his trial, an attempt was made by Dahmer’s defence to claim he was guilty, but insane: a plea possible in Wisconsin. But the jury decided that he was sane when he committed the murders, and he was sentenced to fifteen life sentences, or a total of 936 years. In prison, he was offered special protection, but he refused: he wanted, he said, to be part of the general prison population. He was beaten to death by a black prisoner, another lifer, in November 1994.