Jeffrey Dahmer, a convicted serial killer and sex offender, killed 17 males between 1978 and 1991. He was killed in 1994 by a fellow prisoner.
Who was Jeffrey Dahmer?
Jeffrey Dahmer 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 searched for men, mostly African Americans, in gay bars, malls and bus stops., lured them home with promises of money or sex, and gave them drug-soaked alcohol before strangling them to death. He would then engage in sexual acts with the corpses before dismembering and disposing of them, often keeping their skulls or genitals as souvenirs. He often took pictures of his victims himself at various stages of the murder process, so that he could remember each act later and relive the experience.
Dahmer was captured in 1991 and sentenced to 16 life sentences. He was killed by fellow inmate Christopher Scarver in 1994.
Childhood and family
Dahmer was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on May 21, 1960, to Lionel and Joyce Dahmer. He was described as an energetic and happy child until the age of 4, when surgery to correct a double hernia appears to have produced a change in the boy. Greatly subjugated, he retreated more and more after the birth of his younger brother and family’s frequent moves. By his teens, he was disengaged, tense, and largely friendless.
Dahmer says his compulsions towards necrophilia and murder started around age 14, but it appears that his parents’ breakup marriage and their bitter divorce a few years later may have been the catalyst for transforming these thoughts. in shares.
By the time of his first murder, Dahmer’s alcohol consumption had gotten out of control. He left Ohio State University after a quarter term and his father had recently remarried insisting that he join the military. Dahmer enlisted in late December 1978 and was sent to Germany shortly thereafter.
His drinking problem persisted and, in early 1981, the army fired him. Although German authorities would later investigate possible links between Dahmer and the murders that took place in the area during that time, he is not believed to have taken other victims while serving in the military.
After his discharge, Dahmer returned home to Ohio. An arrest later that year for disorderly conduct prompted his father to send Dahmer to live with his grandmother in Wisconsin, but his drinking problem continued and he was arrested the following summer for indecent exposure. He was arrested again in 1986 when two boys accused him of masturbating in front of them. He received a one-year probationary sentence.
Jeffrey Dahmer’s Victims
Dahmer killed 17 men between 1978 and 1991. He was careful to select victims on the fringes of society, who were often itinerant or borderline criminals, making their disappearances less obvious and reducing the likelihood of his capture. He lured them to his house with promises of money or sex, then strangled them to death. He engaged in sexual acts with their bodies and kept body parts and photos as souvenirs.
First four victims
Dahmer’s first murder occurred soon after he graduated from high school, in June 1978, when he took a hitchhiker named Steven Hicks and took him home to his parents’ home. Dahmer proceeded to get the young man drunk; when Hicks tried to leave, Dahmer killed him by hitting him in the head and choking him with a barbell.
Dahmer dismembered the body of his first victim, packed the body parts in plastic bags and buried them behind his parents’ house. He later exhumed the remains, crushed the bones with a club and scattered them over a wooded ravine.
It was until September 1987 that Dahmer took his second victim, Steven Tuomi. They entered a hotel room and drank, and Dahmer eventually woke up to find Tuomi dead, with no recollection of the previous night’s activity. He bought a large suitcase to carry Tuomi’s body of grandmother’s basement, where he dismembered and masturbated on the corpse before disposing of his remains.
Only after Dahmer killed two more victims at her grandmother’s home, did she get tired of her grandson’s late night and drunkenness – although she had no knowledge of her other activities & # x2014; and she forced him to leave the premises in 1988.
Charges for sexual assault
That September 1989 Dahmer had an extremely fortunate escape: meeting a 13-year-old Laotian boy resulted in allegations of sexual exploitation and second-degree sexual assault for Dahmer. He pleaded guilty, claiming that the boy had appeared much older.
Waiting to be convicted of his sexual assault case, Dahmer put his basement grandmother back for gruesome use: In March 1989, he lured, 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 model of contrition, eloquently arguing, in his defense, about how he saw the error of his ways and that his arrest marked a turning point in his life. His defense attorney argued that he needed treatment, not incarceration, and the judge agreed, delivering a one-year prison sentence for “one-day release” allowing Dahmer to work during the day and return to prison at night – as well as a five-year probationary sentence.
Years later, in an interview with CNN , Lionel Dahmer said he wrote a letter to the court that issued the sentence, asking for psychological help in front of his son’s words. However, Dahmer was granted an early release from the judge after serving only 10 months of his sentence. He lived briefly with his grandmother after her release, during which time she doesn’t seem to have added her body count, before returning to his apartment.
Last 13 victims
Over the next two years, Dahmer’s casualty count accelerated, bringing his total from four to 17. He developed rituals as he progressed, experimenting with chemical means of disposal and often consuming the flesh of his victims. Dahmer also attempted crude lobotomies, piercing the victims’ skulls while they were still alive and injecting them with muriatic acid.
On May 27, 1991, Dahmer’s neighbor Sandra Smith called the police to report that an Asian boy was running naked in the street. When the police arrived, the boy was inconsistent and they accepted Dahmer’s word & # x2014; a white man in a largely poor African American community – that the boy was her 19-year-old lover. In fact, the boy was 14 and a brother of the Laotian teenager Dahmer had molested three years earlier.
The police escorted Dahmer and the boy home. Clearly not wishing to be embroiled in homosexual domestic disturbance, they just looked around before leaving.
Once the police left the scene, Dahmer killed the boy and proceeded with his usual rituals. Had they also conducted a basic search, the police officers would have found the body of Dahmer’s 12th victim, Tony Hughes.
Before finally being arrested, Dahmer killed four other men.
The crime scene of Jeffrey Dahmer’s arrest: refrigerator and polaroid
Dahmer’s killing spree ended when he was arrested on July 22, 1991. Body parts found in Dahmer’s refrigerator and Polaroid photographs of his victims were inextricably associated with his infamous killing spree.
Two Milwaukee police officers were brought to Dahmer when they took Tracy Edwards, a 32-year-old African American who wandered the streets with handcuffs hanging from his wrist. They decided to investigate the man’s claims that a “weird dude” had drugged and detained him. They arrived at Dahmer’s apartment, where he calmly offered to get the keys to the handcuffs.
Edwards claimed that the knife Dahmer had threatened him with was in the bedroom. When the officer entered to confirm the story, he noticed Polaroid photographs 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 genitals, and a vast gallery of grisly Polaroid photographs of its victims.
In 1996, after Dahmer’s death, a group of businessmen from Milwaukee raised more than $ 400,000 to purchase the items he used for his victims – including blades, saws, handcuffs and a refrigerator to store body parts. They promptly destroyed them in an attempt to remove the city from the horrors of Dahmer’action and the resulting media circus surrounding his trial.
Trial and imprisonment
Dahmer’s trial began in January 1992. As most of Dahmer’s victims were African American, there were considerable racial tensions, so strict security precautions were taken, including an eight-meter barrier of bulletproof glass separating him. from the gallery. The inclusion of a single African American on the jury caused further unrest, but was ultimately contained and short-lived. Lionel Dahmer and his second wife attended the trial the whole time.
Dahmer initially pleaded not guilty to all charges, despite confessing to the killings during police interrogation. Eventually he changed his plea to guilty by virtue of insanity. His defense then offered the gruesome details of his behavior, as proof that only a mad person could commit such terrible deeds.
The jury chose to believe the prosecution’s claim that Dahmer was fully aware that his actions were evil and chose to commit them anyway. On February 15, 1992, they returned after about 10 hours’ resolution to find him guilty, but sane, in all respects. He was sentenced to 15 consecutive life sentences, with a 16th term in May.
Dahmer reportedly adapted well to life in prison, although he was initially separated from the general population. Eventually he convinced the authorities to allow him to integrate more fully with the other inmates. He found the religion in the form of books and photos sent by his father, and was granted permission by the Columbia Correctional Institution to be baptized by a local pastor.
How Jeffrey Dahmer died
Jeffrey Dahmer was killed on November 28, 1994 by his prison partner Christopher Scarver.
In accordance with his inclusion in the regular job details, Dahmer was assigned to work with two other convicted killers, Scarver and Jesse Anderson. After being left alone to complete their duties, the guards returned to find that Scarver had brutally beaten both men with a metal bar from the prison weight room. Dahmer was pronounced dead after about an hour. Anderson succumbed to his injuries days later.
In 2015, Christopher Scarver spoke to the New York Post about his reasons for killing Dahmer. Scarver claimed that he was disturbed not only by Dahmer’s crimes, but out of habit Dahmer had developed the modeling of limbs severed from prison food to antagonize other inmates.
After being provoked by Dahmer and Anderson during their job details, Scarver said he confronted Dahmer for his crimes before beating the two men to death. He also claimed that the prison guards allowed the killings to happen by leaving them alone.
Jeffrey Dahmer’ s House
In August 2012, nearly two decades after his death, it was reported that Dahmer’s childhood home in Bath, Ohio, where he committed his first murder in 1978 and buried his victim’s remains – # x2014; was on the market. The owner, musician Chris Butler, said the property would be a great home, provided the buyer could “get over the horror factor.”
In March 2016, Butler rented the house for $ 8,000 for the week of the Republican National Convention. As of July 2017, the house was no longer listed on the market, according to Zillow.com.
Jeffrey Dahmer movies and books
Famous books on Dahmer include:
- The Story of Jeffrey Dahmer: An American Nightmare , by Donald A. Davis. It was published a few months after Dahmer’s arrest in November 1991.
- The Jeffrey Dahmer Shrine , by Brian Masters, released in 1993.
Major movies about Dahmer’s life and killing spree include:
- Dahmer , a 2002 biopic starring Jeremy Renner
- The files Jeffrey Dahmer , a 2012 documentary about the summer of Dahmer’s 1991 arrest.
- My Friend Dahmer , a 2017 film about Dahmer’s pre-killing alcoholic adolescence in teens based on the 2012 graphic novel of the same name by Derf Backderf.
