Monster. That’s the one word that perfectly sums up Jeffrey Dahmer. Now, I know we’re not supposed to judge another human being and all of that, but e get some kind things wey some people go do, e go shock you like…
Jeffrey Dahmer’s exploits were more than that, because the more you read about them, the more your eyebrows will climb to the top of your head until they will all but trade places with your hair. Oh, you think I’m exaggerating? Leggo then.
Who is Jeffrey Dahmer?
Born Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer, he was an American serial killer and sex offender who came to be known as the Milwaukee Cannibal or the Milwaukee Monster, and as you can see, I am not the only one who thinks he is a monster. Between 1978 and 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer murdered and dismembered seventeen men and boys.
And if he’d only killed them, it would have been… well, not fine, since that alone in itself is an abhorrent act, but Jeffrey Dahmer also did… other things to the corpses of his victims. And his sobriquets should already give you a clue as to what these things were.
Early life
Jeffrey Dahmer was born on the 21st of May, 1960, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Lionel Herbert Dahmer, a chemistry student and later research chemist, and Joyce Annette, a teletype machine instructor. He was the first of two sons.
Sources remain divided on his childhood development; some report that he was deprived of attention in his infancy, and others suggest that Jeffrey Dahmer was generally dotted on as a kid by both parents. However, all agree that his mother was tense, greedy for pity and attention, and argumentative with her husband and neighbours.
During Jeffrey Dahmer’s childhood, his father’s university education meant he was away from home most of the time. Even when he was home, his wife, a depressed hypochondriac, demanded constant attention and was always in bed; she was reported to have attempted suicide on one occasion. As a result, neither parent spent much time with their son, who later reflected that, from a young age, he felt “unsure of the family’s solidity”.
Jeffrey Dahmer manifested an interest in dead animals from a young age, an appeal that may have begun at the age of four when he saw his father exhuming animal bones from beneath the family home. According to Lionel, Dahmer was “weirdly thrilled” by the sounds of the bones and became preoccupied with them, calling them his fiddlesticks. He was said to occasionally search beneath and around the house for more bones and even took to exploring the bodies of live animals to discover where their bones were.
Two years later, during a chicken dinner, he asked his father what would happen if the chicken bones were immersed in bleach. Pleased by what he believed to be a scientific curiosity, Lionel taught his son how to safely bleach and preserve animal bones.
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If only he hadn’t.
Jeffrey Dahmer discovered that he was gay when he reached puberty, although he didn’t tell his parents. He had a brief relationship with another teenage boy in his early teens, although they never had intercourse. As seen in his later admissions, it was around this time that Jeffrey Dahmer started fantasizing about dominating and controlling a totally submissive male partner, and his masturbatory fantasies evolved to focus on the chest and torso, and gradually became intertwined with dissection.
When he was 16, Jeffrey Dahmer fantasized about rendering a particular male jogger he found attractive unconscious and then using the body sexually. He even went as far as concealing himself in bushes with a baseball bat to lie in wait for this man, but he did not pass by that day. Dahmer would later admit that this was his first attempt to attack an individual and render him submissive.
A look at his murder career
First murder
Jeffrey Dahmer committed his first murder three weeks after his graduation in 1978, on June 18, when he picked up a 19-year-old hitchhiker named Steven Mark Hicks. He lured Hicks, who had been hitchhiking to a rock concert in Ohio, to his house under the pretext of a few beers, and the youth agreed, since Dahmer had the house to himself.
According to Jeffrey Dahmer, he was attracted to Hicks standing bare-chested on the roadside. However, he immediately knew this was offside when the latter started talking about girls. When Hicks wanted to leave, Dahmer didn’t want him to and bludgeoned him twice from behind with a 10-pound (4.5 kg) dumbbell. He strangled Hicks to death with the dumbbell’s bar, stripped him nude, and explored his chest with his hands.
Then he proceeded to masturbate as he stood above the corpse.
Wait, wait, hold on to your shock; we ain’t done yet. The following day, Jeffrey Dahmer dissected Hick’s body in his basement and buried the remains in a shallow grave in the backyard. Several weeks later, he exhumed the remains and pared the flesh from the bones; he dissolved the flesh in acid and flushed the solution down the toilet, then crushed the bones with a sledgehammer and scattered them in the woods behind his house.
Okay, now you can go ballistic with your shock.
In August, two months after his first murder, Jeffrey Dahmer enrolled at Ohio State University, hoping to major in business, but he dropped out after three months due to persistent alcohol abuse, with an overall GPA of 0.45/4.0. He later enlisted in the United States Army in January 1979 at his father’s urging, but he was eventually deemed unsuitable for military service and discharged honourably; the honourable discharge was because his superiors didn’t believe that his issues in the army would affect civilian life.
In 1985, however, an incident occurred in which a man threw Dahmer a note and offered to perform fellatio upon him while he was reading at the West Allis Public Library. Although he didn’t respond to this offer, the incident rekindled Jeffrey Dahmer’s teenage fantasies of dominance and control, and he started scouting out Milwaukee’s gay bars and gay bathhouses.
Jeffrey Dahmer described these places as “relaxing”, although during his sexual encounters, he apparently became frustrated with his partners’ “moving” during the act. “I trained myself to view people as objects of pleasure”, he said after his arrest, and for this reason, he started administering sleeping pills to his partners in June 1986, giving them liquor laced with sedatives. After about twelve such instances, the management of the bathhouses revoked Dahmer’s membership, and he began using hotel rooms to continue this practice.
Shortly after the cancellation of his bathhouse memberships, Jeffrey Dahmer read a report in a newspaper about the upcoming funeral of an 18-year-old man. He conceived the idea of stealing the freshly interred corpse and taking it home, but when he attempted to dig up the coffin from the ground, the soil was too hard, and he abandoned the plan.
Subsequent murders
On the 20th of November, 1987, Jeffrey Dahmer, while still living with his grandmother in West Allis, met 25-year-old Steven Tuomi at a bar and persuaded him to return with him to the Ambassador Hotel in Milwaukee, where Dahmer had rented a room for the evening. Dahmer would later claim he had no intention of murdering Tuomi, rather than simply drug him and lie beside him as he explored his body.
However, when he woke the following morning, Jeffrey Dahmer found Tuomi lying beneath him on the bed, his chest crushed in with bruises and blood seeping from the corner of his mouth. Dahmer’s fist and one forearm were also extensively bruised, although he stated he had no memory of committing the murder, and later informed investigators that he “could not believe this had happened.”
This, however, didn’t mean he intended to report it; Jeffrey Dahmer bought a large suitcase and used it to transport the body to his grandmother’s residence. There, a week later, he cut off the arms, legs, and head from the torso, then filleted the bones from the body before dicing the flesh into smaller pieces, which he placed inside plastic garbage bags. He wrapped the bones inside a sheet, crushed them into splinters with a sledgehammer, and then disposed of all the remains, apart from the severed head, in the trash.
The entire dismemberment process took Jeffrey Dahmer roughly two hours to complete. Talk about a natural butcher.
Dahmer retained Tuomi’s head wrapped in a blanket for two weeks after the murder, after which he boiled it in a mixture of bleach and Soilex (an alkali-based industrial detergent) to try and retain the skull, which he then used as a stimulus for masturbation. However, the bleaching process rendered the skull too brittle, so he finally pulverized and disposed of it.
Look, from this point onwards, maybe you should just recycle one of the GIFs above to help you process your shock, because this was only the beginning of Jeffrey Dahmer’s reign of terror. He started actively seeking victims in and around gar bars, then he would lure them home and drug them before or after engaging in sexual activity with them. Once they were unconscious, he killed them by strangulation and dismembered them.
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List of Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims
1978
Steven Hicks, June 18, 18yo
1987
Steven Walter Tuomi, November 20, 25yo
1988
James Edward Doxtator, January 16, 14yo: was lured by Jeffrey Dahmer under the pretense of earning $50 for nude pictures. Dahmer strangled him and kept his body in the basement for a week before dismembering him and discarding the remains in the trash.
Richard Guerrero, March 24, 22yo: was drugged and strangled in Jeffrey Dahmer’s bedroom, his corpse dismembered and dissolved in acid, and his bones disposed of in the trash. He bleached and kept the skull for several months before disposing of it.
1989
Anthony Lee Sears, March 25, 24yo: was the last victim to be drugged and strangled at Jeffrey Dahmer’s grandmother’s house, and the first victim whose body parts were permanently retained. His preserved skull and genitals were found in a filing cabinet at after Dahmer’s arrest in 1991.
1990
Raymond Lamont Smith, May 20, 32yo: Smith was a male sex worker that Jeffrey Dahmer met at a tavern, and was the first victim to be killed at Dahmer’s new apartment. Dahmer gave him a drink spiked with sleeping pills, and then strangled him on his kitchen floor. His skull was spray-painted and kept.
Edward Warren Smith, June 14, 27yo: he was a known acquaintance of Dahmer’s and was last seen in his company at a party. Jeffrey Dahmer acidified Smith’s skeleton, although his skull was unintentionally destroyed when it was placed in an oven in an effort to remove moisture. No remains were ever found.
Ernest Marquez Miller, September 2, 22yo: a dance student whom Jeffrey Dahmer encountered outside a bookstore, and was attracted to for his physique. His carotid artery was severed before he was dismembered in the bathtub, and his entire skeleton was stored in the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet. His heart, biceps and portions of his legs were kept in the freezer for later consumption.
I mean, why eat chicken or beef? Those are for weaklings.
David Courtney Thomas, September 14, 22yo: Dahmer decided he wasn’t his type, but strangled him nonetheless and took Polaroid photos of the dismemberment process. No remains were ever found.
1991
Curtis Durrell Straughter, February 18, 17yo: strangled and dismembered him in the bathtub. His skull, hands, and genitals were retained.
Errol Lindsey, April 7, 19yo: the first victim on which Jeffrey Dahmer practised what he later described as his “drilling technique”, in which he drilled holes into his victim’s skull and injected hydrochloric acid into the brain. Okay, this one deserves its own…
According to Dahmer, Lindsey later woke, but was rendered unconscious again with a sedated drink and then strangled to death, after which Dahmer flayed the body and retained the skin for weeks. His skull was found following Dahmer’s arrest.
Anthony Hughes, May 24, 31yo: was lured to Dahmer’s apartment with the promise of posing for nude photos; as he was deaf, he and Dahmer communicated with handwritten notes. Jeffrey Dahmer strangled and dismembered him, photographing the process. His skull was retained and identified from dental records.
Konerak Sinthasomphone, May 27, 14yo; had hydrochloric acid injected into his brain, but when he left the youth unattended to buy beer, he returned to find him naked and disoriented in the street with three young women trying to assist him. When the police arrived, Jeffrey Dahmer managed to convince them that he and the boy were lovers, and that the latter was simply inebriated.
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After the police left, Dahmer injected hydrochloric acid into Sinthasomphone’s brain again, and this time it proved fatal. He retained his head in the freezer and dismembered the body.
Matt Cleveland Turner, June 30, 20yo: drugged, strangled and dismembered in the bathtub. His head and internal organs were kept in a freezer, and his torso was subsequently placed in a 57-gallon drum.
Jeremiah Benjamin Weinberger, July 5, 23yo: had his skull drilled and boiling water injected into the cavity. His decapitated body was kept in a bathtub for a week before dismemberment, and his torso placed in the 57-gallon drum.
Oliver Joseph Lacy, July 15, 24: a bodybuilding enthusiast who Jeffrey Dahmer lured with the promise of money for photos. He was drugged and strangled with a leather strap before being decapitated, and his head and heart were kept in the refrigerator. Dahmer retained his skeleton to adorn one side of the private shrine of skulls and skeletons that he was in the process of creating before his arrest.
Joseph Arthur Bradehoft, July 19, 25yo: a father of three from Minnesota and Jeffrey Dahmer’s last victim. He was left on Dahmer’s bed for two days before being decapitated, and his head was placed in the refrigerator and his torso in the 57-gallon drum.
Arrest of Jeffrey Dahmer
Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested on July 22, 1991, after he unsuccessfully tried to subdue 32-year-old Tracy Edwards in his apartment. Edwards was already on alert due to the apartment’s foul odour and the several boxes of hydrochloric acid on the floor, which Dahmer said were for cleaning bricks.
After Dahmer tried to cuff his wrists together and then pulled a knife on him, Edwards managed to punch him in the face and ran out the front door and flagged down two Milwaukee police officers, Rolf Mueller and Robert Rauth, both of whom accompanied him back to the apartment.
And na so kasala burst.
Jeffrey Dahmer initially tried to resist arrest, but after he was overpowered and cuffed and a freshly severed head was found on the bottom shelf of his refrigerator, he told them, “For what I did, I should be dead.”
In reference to the recovery of body parts and artifacts, the chief medical examiner later said that “It was more like dismantling someone’s museum than an actual crime scene.”
Throughout his interrogation, Jeffrey Dahmer waived his right to an attorney, stating that he wished to confess, as he had “created this horror and it only makes sense I do everything to put an end to it.” He readily admitted to engaging in necrophilia with several of his victim’s bodies while he dismembered them, and confessed to also consuming their hearts, livers, biceps and portions of thighs.
When asked why he had preserved seven skulls and the entire skeletons of two victims, Jeffrey Dahmer revealed that he had planned on constructing a private altar of his victims’ skulls. He intended to display it on the black table in his living room, upon which he had taken photographs of many of his victims’ bodies.
The altar would have been dedicated to himself, as a place where he could feel at home, meditate and where he believed he could draw a sense of power. According to him, if the arrest had happened six months later, that was what they would have found.
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Indictment and trial of Jeffrey Dahmer
Jeffrey Dahmer was charged with four counts of first-degree murder on July 25, 1991, and was charged with an additional eleven murders committed in Wisconsin by August 22. However, he was not charged with Edwards’ attempted murder, nor with Tuomi’s, because the latter could not be proven beyond reasonable doubt and there was no physical evidence of the crime. Jeffrey Dahmer pleaded guilty but insane to 15 counts of murder.
Dahmer was diagnosed with alcohol dependence, schizotypal personality disorder, necrophilia, borderline personality disorder, and a psychotic disorder. However, a doctor on behalf of the prosecution testified to his belief that Jeffrey Dahmer had no mental defects while committing the murders. He described Dahmer as a cunning and calculating individual who was able to differentiate between right and wrong and with the ability to control his actions, but whose lust overcame his morals.
Jeffrey Dahmer was finally sentenced to life imprisonment, plus an additional ten years on the first two counts, with the remaining thirteen counts carrying a compulsory sentence of life imprisonment plus seventy years. As Wisconsin had abolished capital punishment in 1853, the death penalty was not an option.
Three months after his conviction in Milwaukee, Dahmer was extradited to Ohio for the trial for the murder of Steven Hicks, his first victim; he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a 16th term of life imprisonment on May 1, 1992.
Jeffrey Dahmer’s death
On November 28, 1994, Jeffrey Dahmer left his cell in the Colombia Correctional Institute to conduct his assigned work detail, along with two inmates, Christopher Scarver and Jesse Anderson. The trio were left unsupervised in the prison gym’s showers for approximately 20 minutes, after which Dahmer was found on the floor with head wounds.
He had been severely bludgeoned around the face and head with a metal bar, and his head had also been repeatedly struck against the wall. And although he was still alive and was rushed to a nearby hospital, he was pronounced dead an hour later. Anderson had also been attacked with the same instrument and died two days later.
Scarver, who was in prison for homicide and was thought to be schizophrenic, informed the authorities that he had attacked Dahmer and Anderson because “God told him to do it”. And while he maintained that he had not planned the attack in advance, he later confessed that he had hidden the metal bar in his clothes shortly before he attacked them.
Jeffrey Dahmer’s body was cremated on September 1995, as per his wishes, and his ashes were divided between his parents. He was 34 years old.
Legacy of Jeffrey Dahmer
Jeffrey Dahmer has been the subject of television series, movies, documentaries, articles and novels as people sought to understand the motive behind his monstrous acts. Because that’s what they were, monstrous. Whether or not he was insane or suffered from every disorder in the world, the fact remains that he committed horrific crimes.
Some of the works based on him include:
- Anne Schwartz published the bookThe Man Who Could Not Kill Enough in 1992.
- The Law of Remains (1992) by experimental writer and director Reza Abdoh used the techniques of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty to illustrate the life and crimes of Dahmer.
- Dahmer: Mystery of a Serial Killer: A 50-minute documentary released in 1993 containing archive footage of Jeffrey Dahmer’s trial, including interviews with other individuals.
- Inside Edition reporter, Nancy Glass interviewed Dahmer in January 1993, and the 30-minute discourse was aired in February 1993.
- Dahmer, a biographical movie, was released in 2002, starring Jeremy Renner in the title role.
- Jeffrey Dahmer: Guilty but Insane, was a 2013 theatre play written and performed by Joshua Hitchens and directed by Ryan Walter.
- In 2014, Dean Haycock published a book titled Murderous Minds: Exploring the Criminal Psychopathic Brain: Neurological Imaging and the Manifestation of Evil.
- My Friend Dahmer, a movie based on the graphic novel by John Backderf, was released in 2017. Ross Lynch stars as Jeffrey Dahmer, and the film chronicles his high school years and the events leading up to his first murder.
- In 2022, a 10-part biographical crime drama titled Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story was commissioned by Netflix and released on September 21, 2022, starring Evan Peters as Jeffrey Dahmer.
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