English: The American Cannibal:

Every once in a while, society catches a monster, a truly evil person. One who has broken all the taboos of civilization and was caught due to pure chance, this article is that monster, that people know exists, and wishes not to meet their horrible dream.

Konerak was only 14 and he was running for his life. This was his only chance to escape from the horrible smelling apartment where the creepy blond guy had slipped him some kind of powerful drug. It seemed that luck was with him that he started to come around just as the blond man had left the apartment.

It took all the strength he had to get up and get to the door. He was so disoriented and panicked that it made no difference that he was naked. This was his only chance to survive. He was working strictly on instinct. Just get out of there and run away. It was just before 2 A.M. and Sandra Smith called 911 to report the boy running around "butt naked." She didn't know who he was, but she knew he was injured and terrified. The paramedics got there first and put a blanket around the naked, dazed boy. Two police officers arrived soon after and tried to understand what was going on with this young man of Asian descent.

Sandra Smith, eighteen years old and her cousin Nicole Childress, also eighteen, were standing near the boy when the Milwaukee city police arrived. The tall blond man was also standing near the boy. The conversation became heated between the girls, the blond man and the police. The tall blond man told the police the Konerak was his nineteen-year-old lover who had been drinking too much. Konerak who was drugged and incoherent wasn't able to contradict the smooth-talking blond man.

Jeffrey L. Dahmer gave the police a picture ID. The two young women tried to intervene. They had seen the terrified boy trying to resist the blond man before the police arrived. They were angry and upset. The police were ignoring them and listening to the white man instead.

Just to be on the safe side, the two officers went with the boy and the tall blond man to his apartment. The apartment smelled bad, but it was very neat. Konerak's clothing was folded and placed on the sofa. There were a couple of photographs of Konerak in black bikini briefs. Konerak sat quietly on the sofa unable to talk intelligently. It's not even clear that he understood the calm explanation the blond man was giving the police. The blond man was apologizing that his lover had caused a disturbance and promised it wouldn't happen again. The police believed the blond man. They had no reason not to -- he was well-spoken, intelligent and very calm. The Asian was apparently drunk and incoherent. The officers, not wanting to get in the middle of a domestic argument between homosexual lovers, left the apartment with Konerak still sitting quietly on the sofa. In that neighborhood, the officers felt that there were more pressing things for them to do.

1. The Body in the Bedroom

What they missed in the apartment bedroom was the body of Tony Hughes, whose decomposing corpse had lain for three days on the bed. What they missed was the blond man immediately strangling the Asian boy and having sex with his corpse. What they missed were the photos that the blond man took of the dead boy, the subsequent dismemberment of his body, and the cleaning up of his skull to be kept as a trophy. What they missed was the opportunity to take the name of Jeffrey Dahmer off the ID that the man gave them and run a background check which would have told them than the calm, well-spoken man was a convicted child molester who was still on probation. This story didn't stop there. The two girls who the police ignored went back home to Sandra Smith's mother, Glenda Cleveland, a 36-year-old woman who lived next to the Oxford Apartments which Jeffrey Dahmer called home. Later, Cleveland called up the officers to find out what happened to the Asian boy. She asked how old the child was. "It wasn't a child. It was an adult," the officer said. When she continued to ask questions, he told her: "Ma'am, I can't make it any more clear. It's all taken care of. He's with his boyfriend and in his boyfriend's apartment...It's as positive as I can be...I can't do anything about somebody's sexual preferences in life." A couple of days later, Cleveland called the officers back after she read a newspaper article about the disappearance of a Laotian boy named Konerak Sinthasomphone who looked like the boy that had seen trying to escape from Jeff Dahmer. They never sent anybody to talk with her. Cleveland even tried contacting the Milwaukee office of the FBI, but nothing came of it. That is, until a couple of months later on Monday, July 22, 1991 when all hell broke loose.

2. Exposed

A couple of months later on July 22, 1991, two Milwaukee police officers were driving around in the very high crime area around Marquette University. The heat was oppressive and the humidity almost unbearable. The smell of the neighborhood was all the more pungent in the heat: the garbage on the streets, the urine and feces left by the homeless, the rancid stink of cooked grease.

Around midnight, as the two officers sat in their car, they saw a short, wiry black man with a handcuff dangling from his wrist. Assuming that this man had escaped from another policeman, they asked him what he was doing. The man started to pour out a tale about this "weird dude" who put the cuffs on him in his apartment. The man was thirty-two year old Tracy Edwards. His

story smacked of some homosexual encounter that normally the police would avoid, but the two policemen thought they ought to check out this man that had cuffed Edwards who lived at the Oxford Apartments at 924 North 25th Street. The door to Apartment 213 was opened by a nice looking thirty-one-year-old blond man. He was very calm and rationale. He offered to get the key to the handcuffs in the bedroom. Edwards remembered that the knife that Dahmer had threatened him with was also in the bedroom.Once of the officers decided to go into the bedroom himself and take a look. He noticed photographs lying around that shocked him: dismembered human bodies, skulls in the refrigerator. When he collected his wits, he yelled to his partner to cuff Dahmer and arrest him.

3. The Head in the Fridge

The placid, rational blond man suddenly turned on them and fought as the other cop tried to cuff him. While the one officer subdued Dahmer, the other one went to the refrigerator and opened it. He shrieked loudly at the face that stared out at him and slammed the door. "There's a fucking head in the refrigerator!" A closer examination of the apartment revealed an intimate juxt-a-position of the tidy and the unspeakable. While the small one-bedroom flat was neat and clean, especially for a bachelor, and his pet fish well cared for, the smell of decomposition was overwhelming. The box of baking soda in the refrigerator hardly absorbed the odors of a decomposing severed head. The freezer had three more heads, stored neatly in plastic bags and tied with plastic twisties. Then there was a door that led to the bedroom, bedroom closet and bath which had been outfitted with a dead-bolt lock. Anne E. Schwartz, the reporter who was first on the scene describes what she saw in her book The Man Who Could Not Kill Enough: "...in the back of the closet was a metal stockpot that contained decomposed hands and a penis. On the shelf above the kettle were 2 skulls. Also in the closet were containers of ethyl alcohol, chloroform, and formaldehyde, along with some glass jars holding male genitalia preserved in formaldehyde...Polaroid photos taken by Dahmer at various stages of his victims' deaths. One showed a man's head, with the flesh still intact, lying in a sink. Another displayed a victim cut open from the neck to the groin, like a deer gutted after the kill, the cuts so clean I could see the pelvic bone clearly." Some of the photos were his victims before he murdered them in various erotic and bondage poses. The police, the county medical examiner, the media, families of missing young men, Jeff Dahmer's family, the entire city of Milwaukee and the whole world tried to understand what had really happened in Apartment 213. Eventually the story began to tumble out.

4. First Blood

The first person to plumb the depths of Jeffrey Dahmer's depravity was Detective Patrick Kennedy. A huge bear of a man with dramatic handlebar mustache, he engaged Dahmer's confidence and was the person to whom he confessed the details of his thirteen-year killing spree. While Dahmer had fantasies about killing men and having sex with their corpses as early as age fourteen, he didn't do anything about it until just after he graduated high school in June of 1978. He picked up a hitchhiker named Steven Hicks when he was living with his parents in the upscale community of Bath, Ohio. They had sex and drank beer, but then Hicks wanted to leave. Dahmer couldn't stand the idea of Hicks leaving, so he struck him in the head with a barbell and killed him. Then he needed to get rid of the body so he cut it up, packaged it up in plastic garbage bags and buried the bags in the woods behind his house. That fall, he attended Ohio State University for a semester but flunked out. At the end of 1978, he left to join the Army and was stationed in Germany. Apparently he didn't kill anyone when he was in the Army which was corroborated by an exhaustive investigation by the German police. After a couple of years, the Army discharged him for alcoholism and he went to live in Florida before returning to Ohio. Once back home, he dug up Hick's body, pounded the decomposing corpse with a sledgehammer and scattered the remains in the woods.

5. Lust, Booze & Murder

A few months after his arrest in October of 1981 for drunken and disorderly conduct, his father thought it best that Jeffrey go live with his grandmother in West Allis, Wisconsin. Things were calm for a few months until he dropped his trousers in the company of a group of people. He had apparently had a bit to drink. He kept things under control for another four years until he was again arrested in September of 1986 for masturbating in front of two boys. He was put on probation for a year. He killed his second victim Steven Toumi a hotel room in September of 1987. The two of them had been drinking heavily in one of the popular gay bars. Dahmer didn't know how he killed him, but when he awoke, Toumi was dead and blood was on his mouth. He bought a large suitcase and stuffed the body inside. After he took Toumi's corpse to his grandmother's basement, he had sex with it, masturbated on it, dismembered it and threw it in the garbage. Several months later, he selected his third victim, a fourteen-year-old Native American boy named Jamie Doxtator who hung around outside the gay bars, looking for relationships. Dahmer's methods became established by that time. Normally, he would meet and select his prey at gay bars or bathhouses. He would lure his victims by offering them money for posing for photographs or simply to enjoy some beer and videos. Then he would drug them, strangle them, masturbate on the body or have sex with the corpse, dismember the body and dispose of it. Sometimes he would keep the skull or other body parts as souvenirs.

6. More Murders And More Arrests

He practiced this ritual on Richard Guerrero, a handsome young man of Mexican origin in late March of 1988. Dahmer said he met him a gay bar in Milwaukee, but the young man's family disputed that their son was anything but heterosexual. By the summer of that year, Dahmer had killed four men. While Dahmer's grandmother was completely ignorant of the awful things that were happening in her basement, she was fully aware of the noise and drunkenness of Jeff and his male friends. Something had to be done. So, on September 25, 1988, Jeffrey moved into an apartment on North 24th Street in Milwaukee. The very next day, he got into serious trouble. He offered a thirteen-year-old Laotian boy $50 to pose for some pictures. He drugged the boy and fondled him, but did not get violent or have intercourse with him. By incredible coincidence, the boy's name was Sinthasomphone, the older brother of the boy that Dahmer would kill in May of 1991. The boy's parents realized there was something wrong with their child and took him to the hospital where it was confirmed that he had been drugged. The police picked up Dahmer at his job at the mixer of Ambrosia Chocolate. He was arrested for sexual exploitation of a child and second-degree sexual assault. On January 30, 1989, he pleaded guilty, although he claimed that he thought that the boy was much older than he was.

While Dahmer awaited sentencing and was living again at his grandmother's house, he met a black homosexual named Anthony Sears at a gay bar. Like the others, he offered the twenty-four-year-old aspiring black model some money to pose for photos. When they reached Dahmer's grandmother's house, Sears was drugged and strangled. Dahmer had sex with his corpse and then dismembered it. Anne Schwartz describes what happened next: "...he kept the head and boiled it to remove the skin, later painting it gray, so that in case of discovery, the skull would look like a plastic model used by medical students. Dahmer saved the trophy for two years, until it was recovered from Apartment 213 on July 23, 1991. Later he explained that he masturbated in front of the skulls for gratification."

7. A True Psychopath

On May 23, 1989, Dahmer's lawyer Gerald Boyle and Assistant D.A. Gale Shelton presented their arguments to Judge William Gardner. Shelton wanted a prison sentence of at least five years. "In my judgment it is absolutely crystal clear that the prognosis for treatment of Mr. Dahmer within the community is extremely bleak... His perception that what he did wrong here was choosing too young a victim, -- and that that's all he did wrong, -- is a part of the problem... He appeared to be cooperative and receptive, but anything that goes below the surface indicates that the deep-seated anger and deep-seated psychological problems that he is unwilling or incapable of dealing with." Three psychologists examined him and concurred that Dahmer was manipulative, resistant and evasive. Hospitalization and intensive treatment was recommended. Boyle, the defense attorney argued that Dahmer was sick and needed treatment, not prison. He praised the fact that he had held a job. "We don't have a multiple offender here. I believe that he was caught before it got to the point where it would have gotten worse, which means that it is a blessing in disguise." Dahmer himself spoke in his own defense, blaming his behavior on alcoholism. He was articulate and convincing, for someone who had secretly murdered several men by that time. "What I have done is very serious. I've never been in this position before. Nothing this awful. This is a nightmare come true for me. If anything would shock me out of my past behavior patterns, it's this.

"The one thing I have in my mind that is stable and that gives me some source of pride is my job. I've come very close to losing it because of my actions, which I take full responsibility for... All I can do is beg you, please spare my job. Please give me a chance to show that I can, that I can tread the straight and narrow and not get involved in any situation like this ever again... This enticing a child was the climax of my idiocy... I do want help. I do want to turn my life around."

A marvelous performance by a true psychopath! The judge fell for it, stayed his sentence, and put Dahmer on probation for five years. He was ordered to spend one year in the House of Correction under "work release," which allowed him to go to work during the day and return to the jail at night.

8. The Killing Binge

After ten months, the judge granted him early release despite a letter from Dahmer's father urging him not to release him until he received treatment. He went to stay with his grandmother in early March of 1990, but his stay there was conditional upon him finding his own place to live. On May 14, 1990, Dahmer moved to 924 North 25th Street, Apartment 213 and the killing began in earnest. During the following fifteen months, Dahmer went on a killing binge that cost twelve men their lives. The pace of Dahmer's murders accelerated to a frenzy in May-July of 1991 when he was killing almost at a rate of one man a week. All but three were black; one was white, one was Laotian and one was Hispanic. Most, but not all, were homosexual or bisexual. The youngest was Konerak, age fourteen, and the oldest was thirty-one. Many of the victims lived what police call "high-risk" lifestyles. Most of the men had arrest records, often for very serious crimes, like arson, sexual assault, rape, battery, etc.

9. The Deadly Ritual

His ritual for luring, murdering and disposing of his victims was usually the same. He invited the men to his apartment to watch sexually-explicit videos or to pose for photos.  He crushed up his prescribed sedatives and served them in a drink. Once drugged, Dahmer strangled them with his bare hands or with a leather strap. He frequently had sex with the corpse and later masturbated on it. Before any clean up began, Dahmer reached for his Polaroid to capture the entire experience so that he could remember each and every murder. Then he cut open their torsos. He was fascinated by the color of the viscera and sexually aroused by the heat that the freshly-killed body would give off. Finally, he would dismember the man, photographing each stage of the process for future viewing pleasure. He disposed of most of the bodies, experimenting with various chemicals and acids that would reduce the flesh and bone to a black, evil-smelling sludge, which could be poured down a drain or toilet. Some parts of the bodies he chose to keep as trophies, frequently the genitals and head. The genitals were preserved in formaldehyde. The heads were boiled until the flesh came off. Once the skull was bare, he painted it with gray paint to look like plastic.

10. The Need Of Control

Not unusual with necrophiliacs is cannibalism. Dahmer claimed that he ate the flesh of his victims because he believed that the people would come alive again in him. He tried various seasonings and meat tenderizers to make the human flesh more tasty. Eating human flesh gave him an erection. His famous freezer contained strips of frozen human flesh. He had tried human blood too, but it did not appeal to his taste buds. Like Eddie Gein, he tried to perfect the art of preservation and taxidermy so that he could practice the state-of-the-art on his victims.Control was an all important issue for Dahmer. He could not tolerate rejection or abandonment. Even in his homosexual relationships, he did not want to please his sexual partner, he just wanted to have his own pleasures. Pleasure to Dahmer meant performing oral or anal sex on his partner, whether alive or dead. This absolute need for control led him down some pretty weird roads. One of them was a kind of lobotomy that he performed on several of his victims. Once they were drugged, he drilled a hole in their skulls and injected some muriatic acid into their brains. Needless to say, it caused death right away in a few victims, but one supposedly functioned minimally for a few days before dying. Not surprisingly, his need for control led him to dabble with Satanism. In fact, just having the bodies of his victims around him made him feel "thoroughly evil." "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. Although I am not sure if there is a God," Dahmer said," or if there is a devil, I know that as of lately I've been doing a lot of thinking about both." He had plans to create a shrine in his apartment, featuring all of his trophies, his statue of a griffin, and incense burned in the skulls of his victims, so that he could receive "special powers and energies to help him socially and financially."

11. Why?

Why does a Jeffrey Dahmer happen? How does a man become a serial killer, necrophiliac, cannibal and psychopath? Very few convincing answers are forthcoming, despite a spate of books that propose to the understand the problem. Many of the theories would have you believe that the answers can always be found in childhood abuse, bad parenting, head trauma, fetal alcoholism and drug addiction. Perhaps in some cases, these are contributing factors, but not for Jeffrey Dahmer.  His father, Lionel Dahmer, wrote a very sad and poignant book called A Father's Story which explores the very common phenomenon of a parents trying desperately to give their child a good upbringing and discovering to their horror that their child has built a high wall around himself from which their influence is progressively shut out. While fortunately, most parents do not have a Jeffrey Dahmer to raise, too many have seen their children succumb to drugs, alcohol, crime despite their very best and often frantic efforts to intervene. "It is a portrayal of parental dread... the terrible sense that your child has slipped beyond your grasp, that your little boy is spinning in the void, swirling in the maelstrom, lost, lost, lost." Lionel seems to be fairly straightforward in recognizing the negative influences in Jeff's life. No family is perfect. Jeff's mother had various physical ailments and appeared to be high strung, coming from a background in which her father's alcoholism deeply affected her life. Lionel, a chemist who went on to get his Ph.D., stayed at work more often than he should to avoid turmoil on the home front. Eventually, the marriage dissolved in divorce when Jeff was eighteen. However, none of this commonplace domestic discord accounts for serial murder, necrophilia, or Jeff's other bizarre behaviors.

12. A Happy Little Boy

Jeff Dahmer was born in Milwaukee on May 21, 1960, to Lionel and Joyce Dahmer. He was a child who was wanted and adored, in spite of the difficulties of Joyce's pregnancy. He was a normal, healthy child whose birth was the occasion of great joy. As a tot, he was a happy bubbly youngster who loved stuffed bunnies, wooden blocks, etc. He also had a dog named Frisky, his much loved childhood pet. Despite a greater number than usual of ear and throat infections, Jeff developed into a happy little boy. His father recalled the day that they released back into the wild a bird that the three of them had nursed back to health from an injury: "I cradled the bird in my cupped hand, lifted it into the air, then opened my hand and let it go. All of us felt a wonderful delight. Jeff's eyes were wide and gleaming. It may have been the single, happiest moment of his life." The family had moved to Iowa where Lionel was working on his Ph.D. at Iowa State University. When Jeff was four, his father swept out from under their house the remains of some small animals that had been killed by civets. As his father gathered the tiny animal bones, Jeff seemed "oddly thrilled by the sound they made. His small hands dug deep into the pile of bones. I can no longer view it simply as a childish episode, a passing fascination. This same sense of something dark and shadowy, of a malicious force growing in my son, now colors almost every memory."  At the age of six, he was found to be suffering from a double hernia and needed surgery to correct the problem. He never seemed to recover his ebullience and buoyancy. "He seemed smaller, somehow more vulnerable... he grew more inward, sitting quietly for long periods, hardly stirring, his face oddly motionless."

In 1966, Lionel had completed his graduate work in Iowa and got a job as a research chemist in Akron, Ohio. Joyce was pregnant with their second son David By that time Jeff was in the first grade and "a strange fear had begun to creep into his personality, a dread of others that was combined with a general lack of self-confidence. He was developing a reluctance to change, a need to feel the assurance of familiar places. The prospect of going to school frightened him. The little boy who'd once seemed so happy and self-assured had been replaced by a different person, now deeply shy, distant, nearly uncommunicative."

13. The Metamorphosis

Lionel suspected that the move from Iowa to Ohio was the causative factor and Jeff's behavior was a normal reaction to being uprooted from familiar settings and placed into entirely new ones. Lionel, too, had suffered from shyness, introversion and insecurity as a child and had learned to overcome these problems. He figured his son would learn to overcome them too. What he didn't realize was that Jeff's boyhood condition was far graver than his and that "Jeff had begun to suffer from a near isolation." In April of 1967, they bought a new house. Jeff seemed to adjust better to this move and developed a close friendship with a boy named Lee. He was also very fond of one of his teachers and took her a bowl of tadpoles he had caught. Later, Jeff found out that the teacher had given the tadpole to his friend Lee. Jeff sneaked into Lee's garage and killed all the tadpoles will motor oil. Things did not get better with time. "His posture, and the general way in which he carried himself, changed radically between his tenth and fifteenth years. The loose-limbed boy disappeared, and was replaced by a strangely rigid and inflexible figure.

He looked tense, his body very straight. 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 he gave the more or less permanent impression of someone who could do nothing but mope around, purposeless and disengaged. He had one friend, who drifted apart from him at age fifteen. Lionel found out at Jeff's trial that during this period, Jeff would ride around with plastic garbage bags and collect the remains of animals for his own private cemetery. "He would strip the flesh from the bodies of these putrescent road kills and even mount a dog's head on a stake." There has been the suggestion that Jeff tortured animals, but that is unlikely. He enjoyed a dog and cat as pets in his childhood and kept pet fish as an adult. His fascination was with dead creatures.

14. Isolated by His Sexual Fantasy

Jeff grew more passive and isolated. " His conversation narrowing to the practice of answering questions with barely audible one-word responses. He was drifting into a nightmare world of unimaginable fantasies. In coming years those fantasies would begin to overwhelm him. The dead in their stillness would become the primary objects of his growing sexual desire. His inability to speak about such strange and unsetting notions would sever his connections to the world outside himself." While other boys pursued careers, education, the creation of homes and families, Jeff was completely unmotivated. "He must have come to view himself as utterly outside the human community, outside all that was normal and acceptable, outside all that could be admitted to another human being." One would expect that a person harboring the fantasies of death and dismemberment that swirled around in Jeffrey Dahmer's head as a teenager would show some outer signs of mental illness. But Jeff just became more isolated and un - communicative. Far from rebelling, he never argued with his parents because nothing seemed to matter to him. In high school, Jeff had average grades and participated in a few activities: he played tennis and worked on the school newspaper.

However, his classmates considered him a loner and an alcoholic, who brought liquor into the classroom. He actually had a prom date, who he later invited to his parents' house for a seance. His classmates remember a stunt he pulled when he got himself included in the yearbook photo of the members of the National Honor Society. The yearbook staff caught the prank in time and blacked out Jeff's picture. As Jeff became more passive, the passions between Lionel and Joyce increased. It culminated in divorce when Jeff was almost eighteen. A custody battle began over David. Some months later, Lionel remarried. Whatever Lionel missed about Jeff's alcoholism, his new wife Shari did not. Lionel and Shari convinced him to try the idea of college. In the fall of 1978, they drove him to Ohio State University, but he stayed drunk the whole semester and flunked out. By this time, his drinking problem was well understood, but he would not seek help for it. Lionel read him the rules: either Jeff had to get a job or join the Army. When Jeff refused to get a job and stayed drunk most of the time, his father drove him down to the recruiting office to join the armed forces in January of 1979.

15. Drunk and Deadly

From that time until Jeff's final arrest in 1991, life was a rollercoaster for Lionel and his wife. Jeff would appear to be doing well and then it was clear that he wasn't. He seemed to enjoy the Army, but then he was discharged early for habitual drunkenness. He then moved in with his grandmother and got a job, but then he was arrested for drunkenness and disorderly conduct. The offenses got worse as his alcoholism and emotional problems intensified. Indecent exposure, then child molesting and finally, the most horrible discovery of all when the police arrested him for multiple murders. Each time, Lionel stood by him, paid for the lawyer, urged him to seek treatment and crossed his fingers that Jeff would improve. Each time, his hopes were dashed by some fresh and more serious difficulty. Lionel began to understand that his son was completely beyond his reach. As early as 1989 when Jeff was facing sentencing for child molestation, Lionel felt that the 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... For the first time, I no longer believed that my efforts and resources alone would be enough to save my son. There was something missing in Jeff.... We call it a "conscience"... that had either died or had never been alive in the first place."

Dr. James Fox, dean of the College of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University in Boston and recognized expert on serial killer claims that "There was nothing we could do to predict this [tragedy] ahead of time, no matter how bizarre the behavior. He also noted that while Jeffrey was devastated when his mother left him, it would be wrong to blame his parents for what he had become. "Ever since Sigmund Freud, we blame everything bad that kids do on their parents... The culprit is Dahmer. Not his father, not his family, not the police." Fox believes that Dahmer is an unusual serial killer. "He fits the stereotype of someone who really is out of control and being controlled by his fantasies. The difference is that most serial killers stop once the victim dies. Everything is leading up to that. They tie them up; they like to her them scream and beg for their lives. It makes the killer feel great, superior, powerful, dominant... In Dahmer's case, everything is post-mortem... all of his 'fun' began after the victims died... He led a rich fantasy life that focused on having complete control over people... That fantasy life, mixed with hatred, perhaps hatred of himself which is being projected into his victims. If he at all felt uncomfortable about his own sexual orientation, it is very easy to see it projected into these victims and punishing them indirectly to punish himself."

Serial murder, psychopathology, necrophilia, cannibalism -- none of these phenomena is unique to modern times. The answers to explain these phenomena go in and out of fashion. Today, genetics is gaining ground over behaviorism in explaining why people become criminals. In the case of Jeffrey Dahmer it may be the only explanation.

16. Trial Begins with Very Heavy Security

The security surrounding the trial of Jeff Dahmer was unique in Milwaukee's history: "The courtroom was swept for bombs by a dog trained to sniff for explosives, and everyone allowed into the courtroom was searched and checked with a metal detector... In the courtroom, an eight-foot-high barrier was constructed from bullet-resistant glass and steel, designed to isolate Dahmer from the gallery." Of the 100 seats that were available, 23 were for reporters, 34 for the families of Dahmer's victims and the remaining 43 for public spectators. The key players in this legal drama, besides Jeff Dahmer himself, were Judge Laurence C. Gram, Jr., District Attorney Michael McCann, and defense lawyer Gerald Boyle, who had defended Dahmer in the past. Lionel and Shari Dahmer attended every day.

17. The Insanity Defense

On July 13, 1992, Dahmer ignored his lawyer's advice and changed his plea to guilty, but that he was insane. According to Don Davis in The Milwaukee Murders, " the declaration turned the case on its head. Now, instead of having to prove his man did not commit the murders, defense attorney Gerald Boyle would unroll one of the goriest tapestries ever seen in an American courtroom. His task was to convince the jury that Dahmer was crazy, because only an insane person would do the things he did." Mike McCann, on the other hand, needed to prove that Dahmer was not legally insane -- that he knew what he was doing was wrong, but did it anyway. In others words, Dahmer was an evil psychopath who lured his victims and murdered them in cold blood. The pool of prospective jurors were warned "You're going to hear about things you probably didn't know existed in the real world. In this case," Boyle told them, " you're going to hear about sexual conduct before death, during death, and after death. Will you be so disgusted by that you won't be able to listen?" Together, Boyle and McCann discarded potential jurors who were prejudiced against homosexuals or who didn't have any use for psychiatrists. Anne Schwartz remembers the second day of jury selection before the prospective jurors were called into the room. Boyle held up a tabloid newspaper that read "Milwaukee Cannibal Killer Eats His Cellmate. "We all laughed," Schwartz recalled, "especially Jeffrey Dahmer... He was an attractive man when he laughed...I could see how so many were taken in by him." On January 29, 1992, the jury and two alternates were selected. Only one black person was selected, which caused a protest among the family members. The entire case had seriously polarized the community along racial lines from the moment the public heard Glenda Cleveland's story through the discovery that most of his victims were black. Now, it seemed as though this jury of six white men and seven white women was just another example of racial injustice.

18. Evil or Sick

Boyle's defense consisted of some forty-five witnesses that would attest to various aspects of Dahmer's bizarre behavior and to try to show that Dahmer's sexual and mental disorders preventing him from understanding the nature of his crime. Every hideous detail of what Dahmer allegedly did with his victims and every nightmarish thing that ever entered his head was fair game. The goal was to convince the jury that such alleged actions and such alleged thoughts did not happen with a man that was sane. Boyle threw the question out to the jury? "Was he evil or was he sick?" Had the jury at that point in time taken a vote, it's very possible that they would have agreed with Boyle. However, it was McCann's turn to present his case. Dahmer, he told them, was a "master manipulator and deceiver who knew exactly what he was doing every step of the way, able to turn his urges on and off as easily as flipping a light switch. Did he attack other soldiers while he was in the army? Other students while at Ohio State University? The deaths, he said were not the acts of a madman, but the result of meticulous planning."

Two detectives took turns reading the 160-page confession. It was a catalog of sexual perversion. Detective Dennis Murphy stated that Dahmer "felt a tremendous amount of guilt because of his actions. He felt thoroughly evil." Then he quoted from Dahmer's own confession: "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." He claimed that his fear of being caught was overwhelmed by his excitement of being completely in control. The battle of psychiatrists over whether Dahmer was legally responsible and able to control his actions seemed to confuse the jury.

Finally, in his summation, Boyle drew a chart for the jury that took the form of a wheel. The hub of the wheel was Jeff Dahmer and all of the spokes coming out from the wheel were the elements of his deviance. He read them off quickly: "Skulls in locker, cannibalism, sexual urges, drilling, making zombies, necrophilia, drinking alcohol all the time, trying to create a shrine, lobotomies, defleshing, calling taxidermists, going to grave yards, masturbating.....This is Jeffrey Dahmer, a runaway train on a track of madness..."  McCann rebutted, "He wasn't a runaway train, he was the engineer!" He was satisfying his extraordinary sexual cravings. "Ladies and gentlemen, he's fooled a lot of people. Please don't let this murderous killer fool you." The jury deliberated for five hours and decided that Jeff Dahmer did not deserve to spend the rest of his life in a hospital, but in a prison cell. On all fifteen counts, Dahmer was found guilty and sane. Anne Schwartz, who covered the Dahmer story for the Milwaukee Journal from its discovery through the trial, was "astonished at how normal this man looked and sounded...The day Jeffrey Dahmer was sentenced, I heard him read his statement to the court calmly and eloquently, and I wondered how easily I could have been conned.

19. The End of the Road

His apology, covering a thirteen-year bloodbath, ran fourty pewritten pages:

"'Your Honor:

"'It is now over. this has never been a case of trying to get free. I didn't ever want freedom. Frankly, I wanted death for myself. This was a case to tell the world that I did what I did, but not for reasons of hate. I hated no one. I knew I was sick or evil or both. Now I believe I was sick. The doctors have told me about my sickness, and now I have some peace.. I know how much harm I have caused... Thank God there will be no more harm that I can do. I believe that only the Lord Jesus Christ can save me from my sins... I ask for no consideration."

He was sentenced to fifteen consecutive life terms or a total of 957 years in prison. Dahmer adjusted very well to prison life at the Columbia Correctional Institute in Portage, Wisconsin. Initially, he was not part of the general population of the prison, which would have jeopardized his safety. As it was, he was attacked on July 3, 1994, while attending a chapel service by a Cuban who he had never seen before. Dahmer, the model prisoner, convinced the prison authorities to allow him more contact with other inmates. He was able to eat in communal areas and he was given some janitorial work to do with other teams of inmates. For some incredible reason, he was paired up with two highly dangerous men on a work detail: Jesse Anderson, a white man who had murdered his wife and blamed it on a black man, and Christopher Scarver, a black delusional schizophrenic who thought he was the son of God, who was in for first-degree murder. It's not difficult to imagine how Scarver viewed Jeff Dahmer, who had butchered so many black men, and Anderson. It was a disastrous combination.  On the morning of November 28, 1994, the guard left these three men alone to do their work. Twenty minutes later, the guards came back to find Dahmer's head crushed and Anderson's fatally injured body nearby. A bloody broom handle seemed to represent Scarver's statement on the subject. Jeffrey Dahmer was pronounced dead at 9:11 A.M.

20. And in his final statement before the court . . .

Your Honor, it is over now. This has never been a case of trying to get free. I didn't ever want freedom. Frankly, I wanted death for myself. This was a case to tell the world that I did what I did, not for reasons of hate -- I hated no one. I knew I was sick or evil or both. Now I believe that I was sick. The doctors have told told me about my sickness and now I have some peace. I know how much harm I have caused, and I tried to do the best that I could after the arrest to make ammends, but no matter what I did, I could not undo the terrible harm I have caused. My attempt to identify the remains was the best that I could do and that was hardly anything. I feel so bad for what I did to those poor families, and I understand their rightful hate. I know I will be in prison for the rest of my life. I know that I will have to turn to God to help me get through each day. I should have stayed with God. I tried and failed and created a holocaust. Thank God that there will be no more harm that I can do. I believe that only the Lord Jesus Christ can save me from my sins. I have instructed Mr. Boyle to end this matter. I do not want to contest the civil case. I have told Mr. Boyle to finalize them if he can. If there is ever any money, I want it to go to the victim's families. I have talked to Mr. Boyle about other things that might help me ease my conscience in some way of coming up with ideas on how to make some ammends with these families and I will work with him on that. I want to return to Ohio and quickly end that matter so I can put all this behind me and then come right back here and do my sentence. I decided to go through this trial for a number of reasons. One of the reasons was to let the world know that these were not hate crimes. I wanted the world of Milwaukee, who I deeply hurt, to know the truth of what I did. I didn't want unanswered questions. All of the questions have now been answered. I wanted to find out just what it was that caused me to be so bad and evil. But most of all, Mr. Boyle and I decided that maybe there was a way for us to tell the world that if there are people out there with these disorders maybe they can get some help before they end up being hurt or hurting someone. I think the trial did that.  I take all the blame for what I did. I hurt many people. The judge in my earlier case tried to help me and I refused his help and he got hurt by what I did. I hurt those policemen in that Konerack matter and I shall forever regret causing them to lose their jobs. I hope and pray that they can get their jobs back because I know that they did their best and I just plain fooled them. For that I am so sorry. I know I hurt my probation officer who was really trying to help me. I am so sorry for that and for everyone else that I have hurt.  I hurt my mother and father and stepmother. I love them all so very much. I hope they will find the same peace that I am looking for.  Mr. Boyle's associates Wendy and Ellen have been wonderful to me, helping me through this worst of all times. I want to publicly thank Mr. Boyle. He didn't have to take this case, but when I asked him to help me find answers and to help others if I could, he stayed with me and went way overboard in trying to help me.  Mr. Boyle and I agreed that it was never a matter of trying to get off, only a matter of which place I would be housed for the rest of my life. Not for my comfort, but for trying to study me in hopes of helping me in learning to help others who might have problems. I know I will be in prison. I pledge to talk to doctors who might be able to find some answers.

In closing, I just want to say that I hope God has forgiven me. I know that society will never be able to forgive me. I know the families of the victims will never be able to forgive me for what I have done. I promise I will pray ever wach day to ask for their forgivness when the hurt goes away, if ever. I have seen their tears and if I could give my life to bring their loved ones back I would do it. I am so very sorry.  Your Honor, I know that you are about to sentence me. I ask for no consideration. I want you to know that I have been treated prefectly by the deputies who have been in your court and the deputies that work the jail. The deputies have treated me very professionally and I want everyone to know that. They have not given me special treatment.  Here is a trust worthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the worst. But for that very reason, I was shown mercy so that in me, the worst of sinners, Christ Jesus might display his unlimited patience as an example for those who would believe in him and receive eternal life. Now to the King, Immortal, Invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever.  I know my time in prison will be terrible, but I deserve whatever I get because of what I have done.

Thank you, your Honor, and I am prepared for your sentence which I know will be the maximum. I ask for no consideration.

21. The Possessions of a Madman

The doors of apartment 213, both inner and outer, were heavily secured with multiple locks and an alarm system. On the walls in the bedroom and the hall were framed photographs and posters of male nudes taken in "artistic" poses and clearly intended to be attractive to a homosexual man. There were some empty beer cans and dirty dishes, and a number of pornographic videos lying around, mostly of the explicit kind commercially made in California. Among the titles which Dahmer possessed were, Cocktales, Chippendale's Tall Dark and Handsome, Rock Hard, Hard Men II, Hard Men III, Peep Show, and Tropical Heat Wave. Other non-sexual videos included two that would be referred to several times at the trial, Excorcist II and The Return of the Jedi. Somewhat incongruously, a lecture on evolution was also found on videotape, and an episode from The Bill Cosby Show. On the kitchen floor were four boxes of muriatic acid. The refrigerator contained, in addition to the man's head already noted [The first of the human remains discovered. The head was facing upward in a cardboard box on the bottom shelf.], some blood drippings on the bottom, and, in the freezer compartment, three plastic bags. Two of them each contained a heart, and the third some portion of muscle. Against another wall was a floor-standing freezer in which were found three more human heads and a plastic bag containing a human torso. Stuck to the bottom of this freezer was another plastic bag the contents of which appeared to include flesh and various human internal organs; Dahmer subsequently revealed that it had been there for several weeks because he had been unable to wrench it away from the ice.

The Medical Examiner decided that this entire freezer should be sealed and removed, with its load, for detailed examination later. 

In the hallway stood a closet in which were found, together with bedding, some chemicals formaldehyde, ether, chloroform, and two bleached skulls on a shelf. On the floor at the back of the closet was a large aluminium kettle containing two human hands, obviously from the same person because they matched, and human genitals including penis, testicles and the pubic hair region.

The bedroom was seen to have a single bed with a mattress stained with blood, as well as some blood on the walls and pillow-case. The large knife to which Tracy Edwards had alerted the police officers [Tracy Edwards escaped from Dahmer's apartment after spending several hours handcuffed to a chair. He approached a squad car on a nearby street and informed the officers of the incident, which led to his eventual arrest] was still lying beneath the bed, while on top was the a polaroid camera. Next to the bed was a metal filing-cabinet. When this was opened it revealed, in the top drawer, three human skulls lying on a black towel.

The police officers noted they had been painted green with black flecks, but the Medical Examiner reported that they were painted and glazed to 'a dark gray marble-like texture', and that the towel upon which they rested was a dark blue. The bottom drawer of this cabinet contained a complete human skeleton, and in front of it were two paper bags: one held the dried remains of a human scalp, and the other a second set of genitals, also dried and mummified. On the floor next to the chest of drawers was a box with a styrofoam lid, in which were two more skulls, and in the far corner was the 57-gallon blue plastic drum with a tight-fitting black lid, removed by a private contractor hired by the Fire Department's Hazardous Materials Unit. This was later discovered to contain three human torsos in various stages of dismemberment and decomposition. In the chest of drawers which [Police Officer] Rolf Mueller had found open when he first went into the bedroom were original photographs of a particularly repellent nature. When they were counted, it was found that there were seventy-four of them. The decor of Jeffrey Dahmer's life was labelled, catalogued and carted away with the most painstaking care. A photo album, a black ceramic coffee cup, an empty can of Budweiser beer, an empty bottle of Paramount rum, an empty paper lunch-bag lying on the occasional table by the couch in the living-room -- the fragile, dumb debris of ordinary life jostled with the curious and the sinister. A one-gallon jug of bleach was no longer as innocent as it might have been, and a bottle of 'Odorsorb' suggested long battles with unnaturally polluted air. Incense sticks had probably served a similar purpose. There were fifty envelopes from Woolworth's, a tube of acne lotion, a shaving kit, an Oral-B toothbrush, the lease form for the rental of apartment 213, a library card bearing the name of Jeff Dahmer, a pair of black men's nylon shorts.

The business card of Lionel Dahmer, Ph.D., was the first indication that the suspect had a family, while various identity cards littered on the kitchen floor, the bedroom floor, and in the drawers, poignantly gave names to some of the heads and limbs that had once been people. An identity card in the name of Oliver Lacy, a Wisconsin driver's license in the name of Tony Hughes, and an Illinois driver's license in the name of Joseph Bradehoft supplied the initial clues in the investigation, and since Oliver Lacy's I.D. bore a photograph and was the first positive ID, the entire homicide file would be listed under his name. It was Lacy's head which lay in the box in the refrigerator, his heart which was in the bag, his skeleton which was in the freezer.

A few items held significance which would not be revealed until much later. One large hypodermic needle appeared mysterious, and a contact lens cleaning kit quite innocuous, but they had both played a role in the wild distracted turmoil of Dahmer's life. So had two plastic gargoyle figurines recovered from the living-room, and chemical-resistant gloves next to gallons of muriatic acid and six boxes of Soilex cleaner. The purpose of the three-eighth inch drill and one-sixteenth inch drill bits was yet unclear, although the claw hammer and handsaw gave rise to no such doubts. And still, in crazy juxtaposition to the grim inventory were items suggestive of decency and goodness. A King James Version Bible, for example, audio cassettes on Creation Science and the Bible, and other tapes entitled The Genesis Flood and The Bible, Science, and the Age of the Earth. There were further audio tapes explaining Numerology and the Divine Triangle, and a learning kit, in tapes and books, in Latin. Finally, there were four books on the care of fish and aquariums, and a beautifully kept aquarium itself, clean and wholesome, full of living plants and daintily exotic fish.

22. The Crimes of A Madman

Late on the night of January 17, 1988, Jeff Dahmer met a young man named James Doxtator and murdered him at his grandmother's house in West Allis. Doxtator's mother reported him missing on January 18, 1988. Approximately two months later, on March 27, 1988, Jeff Dahmer encountered Richard Guerrero, aged twenty-three, and killed him at his grandmother's house. Pablo Guerrero reported his son missing to the Milwaukee Police Department on March 29th, and placed announcements in the local press, which included a recent photo. He received no response. One year later, at closing time on March 25, 1989, Jeff Dahmer met two men outside La Cage ( a local gay bar, which Jeff often frequented ); a white man by the name of Jeffrey Connor, and a twenty-four-year-old black man named Anthony Sears. It was Sears who made the approach. Conner drove them both to the corner of 56th Street and Lincoln, in West Allis, and from there Sears and Dahmer walked to Catherine Dahmer's house, where he eventually murdered him. His skull, scalp, and genitals were discovered in Dahmer's apartment at the time of his arrest, which would not take place more than two years.

On May 20, 1990, Dahmer met a thirty-three-year-old black man named Raymond Smith ( a.k.a. Ricky Beeks ) who accompanied him to his apartment where he was drugged and strangled. One of the painted skulls found in upon Dahmer's arrest was identified as Smith's.

On June 24, 1990, Dahmer met a twenty-seven-year-old black man, Edward Smith, at the Pheonix Bar. They went to Dahmer's apartment by taxi, and engaged in oral sex. Smith was later drugged and strangled. No remains of Edward Smith were ever found.

Outside a homosexual bookshop on North 27th Street in the early part of September, 1990, Dahmer fell into conversation with a twenty-three-year-old black man from Chicago: Ernest Miller. He agreed to accompany Dahmer to his apartment, where he too, was killed. His skull was painted and his entire skeleton kept for future use. Both were discovered on the day of Dahmer's arrest.

Three weeks later, Dahmer met David Thomas, a twenty-two-year-old black man, and murdered him at his apartment. The following day David Thomas was taken to pieces and photographed throughout the process. No remains were ever found. He was reported missing by his girlfriend on the 24th of September, and was identified by his sister from photographs Dahmer had taken during dismemberment.

At 4:00 p.m. on February 17, 1991, Dahmer met a seventeen-year-old black man, Curtis Straughter, and murdered him by strangulation with a leather strap. He was then dismembered. Dahmer kept his skull, hands, and genitals, all of which he had photographed. All these items were found in Jeff's apartment when he was arrested. Straughter had been reported missing by his grandmother, and his skull was identified from dental records.

On April 7, 1991, a black man, not long past his nineteenth birthday, Errol Lindsey, spoke to Jeff Dahmer at 27th Street near the homosexual bookstore, and went with him to his apartment. Lindsey was drugged and strangled. Dahmer flayed the body and kept the skin for some weeks. The skull was discovered at the time of his arrest, enabling identification through dental records.

Tony Hughes was one year older than Dahmer. He was black, and he was deaf and dumb. They met at the 219 Club on May 24, 1991, and communicated by writing, although Hughes could lip read. The mute was drugged, strangled, and left to lie on the bedroom floor for three days. His identity was established by one of the skulls and dental records.

Dahmer met Konerack Sinthasomphone, the fourteen-year-old son of Laotian immigrants, outside a shopping center known as the Grand Avenue Mall on May 27, 1991, and offered him money to return with him to his home. Konerack accepted, and posed for two photographs in his underwear, before being drugged and murdered.

A month went by before Dahmer killed again. On June 30, 1991, he went to the Gay Pride Parade in Chicago and met a twenty-year-old black man, Matt Turner, in the bus station afterwards. He invited Turner to come to Milwaukee. They traveled by Greyhound bus, then took a taxi to the apartment, where Dahmer strangled him. Turner's head was found in the freezer, his internal organs were stuck to the freezer floor, and his torso was inside the blue drum in the bedroom.

One week later, again in Chicago, Dahmer met Jeremiah Weinberger, a twenty-three-year-old Puerto Rican with Jewish blood, at Carols Gay Bar. They went by bus to Milwaukee, and then by taxi to the apartment. Weinberger was reported missing the following day, July 6th, but he was still alive and staying with Dahmer. It was not until the third day that Dahmer slew him. The improbable details of these two days together were not revealed until the trial. Weinberger's head was in the freezer, his torso in the big blue drum with Turner's.

On July 15, 1991, Dahmer met Oliver Lacy, under whose name the murder investigation was filed, on 27th Street. Lacy was black and twenty-four-year's old. Dahmer drugged and strangled him. He took various photographs of his victim before and after decapitation. His head and skeleton were found the freezer, his heart in the refrigerator.

It was four days later, on July 19, 1991, that Dahmer encountered a white man called Joseph Bradehoft, from Greenville, Illinois. Bradehoft was drugged and strangled. He was left on the bed, covered in a sheet, for two days. When Dahmer was arrested three days later, Bradehoft's head was sitting in the freezer, his torso was lying in the 57-gallon blue drum, along with Turner and Wienberger's.

23. A Selected Quote from Jeff Dahmer

I think in some way I wanted it to end, even if it meant my own destruction.

24.  Bibliography

There are several good books readily available on Jeff Dahmer in bookstores and libraries. The Crime Library particularly recommends Anne E. Schwartz's Man Who Could Not Kill Enough; The Secret Murders of Milwaukee's Jeffrey Dahmer. As a newspaper reporter who followed the story from its very beginning to its completion, she brings an intimacy and immediacy that other books do not have. Another book that is recommended, but not easy to find, is Lionel's Dahmer's A Father's Story, which gives an intimate account of what it is like trying to raise a boy with so many serious, hidden problems.

1. A&E Biography Video: Jeffrey Dahmer

2. Baumann, Edward, Step into My Parlor: The Chilling Story of Serial Killer Jeffrey Dahmer. 1991.

3. Dahmer, Lionel, A Father's Story. William Morrow and Company, 1994.

4. Davis, Don, Milwaukee Murders, Nightmare in Apartment 213: The True Story. St Martin's Paperbacks, 1995.

5. Martingale, Moira, Cannibal Killers. St. Martin's Paperbacks, 1993.

6. Tithecott, Richard and James Kincaid, Of Men & Monsters: Jeffrey Dahmer & the Construction of the Serial Killer.

- Bird