After beer number one, the teenage Jeffery
Dahmer, already a budding alcoholic, sits in his hideaway fantasizing about a male
jogger he often sees running down the street. For some strange reason, his attraction to
this fully-grown man is somehow connected to the thrill he gets from dissecting roadkill.
Young Dahmer has no idea how his obsession with collecting bones and cutting apart dead
animals will be intertwined with his lust. He opens another beer, and then another, and so
on until he’s drunk. He peers through the window of his hut. There’s a blue sky above. A Blue Jay
perches on the branch of a tree and lets out its unmistakable screech. He scrunches a beer can and
opens another. “Nature”, he thinks while looking at the bird. “I must be a freak of nature.”
He’s aware that something could be wrong with him. He wants to kill. He knows it’s not
right, but it’s a feeling he can’t push back. He gets his baseball bat and waits behind a bush
for the jogger to run down that same route again. Young Jeff doesn’t know what he’ll do,
not really. Maybe he’ll knock him out, he thinks, and then keep the body. It just
so happened the man didn’t jog that day. These were the warped thoughts of a boy that
would become known as the Milwaukee Monster, a deserving epithet if ever there was one.
Dahmer’s atrocious crimes not only shocked a nation, but his actions have perplexed medical
science. He may have been a monster, but Dahmer was also soft-spoken, intelligent, and as strange
as it sounds, he came across as a likable guy. That’s perhaps one reason why it took so long
to arrest him. He almost operated in full view of the cops. He was hardly a mastermind
when it came to concealing his crimes. In fact, it’s as if sometimes he wanted
to be caught, and yet, it took so long. We might ask how the killer was caught, but in
Dahmer’s case, another question needs to be asked: How didn’t anyone realize he was
a distressed and messed-up kid? He came from a broken family, a family that was
likely a little more broken than documentary films have made out. His mother, it seems,
was what you might call the overbearing type of matriarch. She was moody, often depressed,
argumentative, and she wanted constant attention. This kind of behavior often does not
bode well for children in a family. She was a wreck, and by the time Dahmer was old
enough to go to school she was spending most of her days in bed. The household wasn’t much
fun at all for young Dahmer, especially since his father was away so much of the time. When
he was back, the parents argued all the time. This is something that affected Dahmer deeply,
more so after his mother tried, and failed, to take her own life. By the time she was pregnant
with another child, she wasn’t much better. So, this could have been the genesis
of a killer in the making, but then, a lot of kids grow up in chaotic households
and they end up just fine. Many serial killers experience extreme physical violence from their
parents when they are young, but with Dahmer, it was more being put on the sidelines as his
mother fell apart that seemed to bother him. He didn’t like being abandoned, and that may
explain his utter depravity in later life. After he was arrested he always said his
parents’ blustery relationship didn’t make him the way he was, but it would be hard to
deny it shaped his very peculiar personality. His father was an analytical chemist, and
unbeknownst to him, it was teaching his son some things about science which would lead
to some of the grizzliest crimes the USA, or the world for that matter, has seen
in modern times. He taught his son how to bleach and preserve bones, something Dahmer
evidently took on board even at such a young age. Sometimes the two of them would look around the
garden and under the house for dead animals. When they found one, the father would show
his son how you could bleach the skin and connective tissue from an animal.
Young Dahmer was obsessed with this, but not in a way his father thought. Jeff loved
the end product: a pile of shiny bones. These he and his father used to call, “fiddlesticks.”
Later in life, a forensic psychiatrist named Carl Wahlstrom asked Dahmer if he ever tortured
animals as a child. Hurting defenseless animals is often said to be something serial
killers in the making do. It’s about control, about living out sadistic fantasies.
Dahmer told Wahlstrom a story. He said, when he was in grade school the
teacher asked the class to bring something in. The next day, Dahmer brought in
a tadpole. At the end of the day, the teacher gave that tadpole to another kid
in the class. Dahmer was absolutely infuriated, so much so, he went around to that kid’s house.
There he saw the tadpole in an aquarium. He poured gasoline in it and set it on fire.
After telling that story, Dahmer turned to the psychiatrist and said, “If you want to call
that torturing animals, I tortured animals.” His parents moved around. When they were together,
they argued all the time. The kid got hardly any attention, less so after his brother was born.
It gave him plenty of time to think, to go out exploring the nearby woodlands. He’d find dead
animals and dissect them in his backyard shed. One time he even impaled a dog’s head on a
stick and stuck it in the forest near his house. We won’t get into everything here, but as his
father later admitted, there were signs that weren’t seen. Dahmer was quiet, sometimes moody.
He had a shed full of animal parts. He spent much of his free time looking for roadkill. But his
parents, as consumed as they were with their own disagreements, failed to see those signs.
This was a kid who likely could have been fixed, but instead, his problems were being ignored.
In 1978, just a few weeks after he graduated high school, he took his first life. He was living
alone at this point in his parents’ old house. He picked up a hitchhiker named Steven Hicks,
just a young man himself at 18. The two went back to Dahmer’s place to drink some beers.
Dahmer later said that he found his new friend attractive, but when the conversation turned
to attractive girls and how to meet them, he became aware that there’d be no love for
him. For a few years, he’d known he was gay. When they were both drunk, and the other guy
said he wanted to leave, Dahmer went over to a set of weights. He picked up a large dumbbell,
walked over to the guy who was sitting in a chair with his back to him, and he whacked him
over the head. He subsequently strangled him, stripped him, used his body for sexual
gratification, and like the dead animals he’d been so obsessed with, he dissected him.
Dahmer buried the body, but a few weeks later, he dug it up. He then methodically stripped the
bones of their flesh and dissolved what he could in acid. The solution that was leftover he flushed
down the toilet. As for the bones that were left, he crushed them with a sledgehammer and
threw the fragments around a nearby forest. After the murder, he tried his hand at higher
education, but his persistent drinking wasn’t exactly conducive to attaining good grades.
He soon dropped out and joined the United States Army just prior to his 19th birthday.
We won’t go into everything that happened in the army, but it’s reported that he drugged and
molested soldiers while stationed in Germany. This is something that became known much later.
His drinking habits never really diminished, and by the time he was just shy of
22, he was discharged from the army. At this point in time, his father and step-mother
had seen how alcohol was destroying his life. That’s the main reason why they sent him to live
with his grandmother in West Allis, Wisconsin. She had always had a calming effect on Dahmer and
they hoped she’d guide him out of the darkness. This worked to some extent, but after being
fired from a job he started drinking a lot again and acting out his fantasies. This started
by exposing himself to women and children, something he was arrested for. At age 22, he paid
$50 after being charged with indecent exposure. Soon after, he landed a job as a mixer at
the Milwaukee Ambrosia Chocolate Factory, but his mind was far from settled. It was at this
time he started thinking about control again, how he might enact his lurid fantasies on
someone who could not say no. At first, he stole a mannequin and used that, but his grandmother
was somewhat disturbed by the fact he had one of those things stuffed into his wardrobe.
She made him throw it out, so Dahmer, even more frustrated, was now looking
for a human doll to play with. It was around that time he started frequenting the
local gay bars and discos, although his favorite places for finding men were bathhouses. He met
men and at times he had some good times with them, but he was never content because of the fact
they also had some control. If that’s confusing, this is what he said after his arrest:
“I trained myself to view people as objects of pleasure instead of as people.”
His solution was to ply people with alcohol. Remember he could drink a lot, so they would
usually be the first to reach the point of passing out. He also dropped sleeping pills
into their drinks when they weren’t looking. It’s thought he did this at least 12 times after
meeting people in bathhouses. He would wait until they were out, and then have his way with them.
These were not the murders, but the crimes were heinous in themselves. What’s strange is
that Dahmer was never arrested, likely because no one pressed charges. He was, though,
banned from the bathhouses. When he was 26, yet again he was charged with indecent exposure.
He got a one-year probationary sentence for that. Had anyone been able to join a few dots,
Dahmer’s actions certainly would have portrayed a man on the edge, a dangerous man.
But as things went, those dots were spread far and wide and the only person that regularly
saw him was his grandmother. Nonetheless, Dahmer knew that to satisfy himself he had to take
a different course than exposing himself in public and drugging men he’d met in saunas.
That’s when he got the idea to go back to his old ways: How to keep the dead, to
conceal the dead, to do what he wanted to the dead. He began his killing spree.
He said the first murder of this new era was an accident. That happened in 1987
when Dahmer was 27. He said he woke up in a hotel and the guy was dead beside him in
the bed with blood coming from his mouth. Dahmer left the hotel, got his hands on a large
suitcase, and then transported the body back to his grandma’s house. There he dismembered it
and got rid of most of it. He kept the head, which he boiled so he could keep the
skull for his own sexual gratification. He killed again, in much the same
fashion. Drugging, strangling, and then dismembering the bodies – often keeping
the skulls. When he was done with those skulls, he’d pulverize them with a hammer
and disperse the fragments someplace. Did his grandmother know
something strange was going on? She actually asked him to leave, not being too
fond of him always bringing men back to his room. She even complained about the foul smells in the
house, a consequence of human decay, but she never once thought her grandson was a killer.
He didn’t stop. He couldn’t stop. He killed more and as his addiction
got worse, he took more risks. He later said he found his 5th victim
so attractive he kept the head intact and preserved it. He kept some of the other
body parts, too. He flayed the corpse in his grandmother’s bathtub, got rid of the parts he
didn’t want, and stored the rest in his room. In 1989, two days after his 29th birthday,
he was given five years' probation and one year in the House of Correction for
a sexual assault. He spent some time behind bars but was allowed out to work, too.
Almost exactly a year after his sentencing, he returned to his grandmother’s
house to pick up his things, the most valuable to him being the human remains.
At his new apartment, he started again. He picked up male prostitutes. He drugged people he’d met
in bars. When they were unconscious, he strangled them. Sometimes he’d pose with the dead bodies.
Sometimes he’d sleep with them. Often, he’d take photos with them. One time he talked to a severed
head while dismembering other parts of the body. All the time this was going on, he told
his probation officer how horrible he felt. That he was lonely and depressed. That he often
thought about taking his own life. He even alluded to his depraved sexuality, but strangely, nothing
ever came of it. To most people, he seemed like a nice enough guy with a few problems on his mind.
Believe it or not, residents of the apartment complex where he lived had told their landlord
they were tired of listening to all the noises coming from that one flat. They said they often
heard loud crashes, like heavy objects falling. They said the guy in there even used a chainsaw
in the middle of the night. They also couldn’t stand the terrible smells issuing from that
apartment, what smelled like dead animals. And no one put two and two together. It was
as if Dahmer was invisible, untouchable. Then in 1991 something straight out of the
darkest kind of horror story happened. Dahmer had lured a teenager to his apartment.
This time, he not only subdued the guy with drinks and pills, but when the victim was almost
out he drilled a hole in his skull and injected hydrochloric acid into the hole. It was Dahmer’s
belief that by putting the acid into the so-called “executive suit”, the part of the brain called the
frontal cortex, he could turn him into a living zombie. He could have someone forever, but that
person wouldn’t rot like all his other victims. He left the young man alone on the couch in his
zombified state, drank some more beers, and then went to a bar. When he returned home he hoped
his “zombie” would still be there. He wasn’t. Dahmer looked for him and then saw three women
standing over him as he crouched in the street, looking awfully worse for wear. Dahmer tried to
convince the women he was the youth’s friend, but they knew something was wrong. They
told Dahmer they’d called the cops. The police turned up quite quickly, but after
hearing Dahmer tell them he was the boyfriend of the youth they believed him, even when the
women told them Dahmer had tried to kidnap the kid and it was evident he was bleeding from a
certain orifice. A cop said to one of the women, “shut the hell up.” They wrote
it down as a domestic dispute. As you’ll see, this interaction in the street
would later cause problems for the police. This is yet another time Dahmer should
have been caught. Given his background, this was one hell of a big clue.
The cops walked Dahmer and the allegedly drunk boy back up to his apartment, where
one of the police noticed a really foul odor. Little did he know that it was the decomposing
body of a previous victim. When the cops were gone, Dahmer injected more hydrochloric acid into
the head of the youth. This time it killed him. He killed again, and he took his trophies again.
With another man, he tried injecting water into the brain. That didn’t create a zombie, either.
There were more murders, and more of Dahmer doing despicable things with body parts. At this time,
bits of people were piling up in that apartment. Police still hadn’t linked any of the missing
people to Dahmer. Then he met 32-year-old Tracy Edwards. This changed everything.
He lured Edwards to his apartment, too, but after struggling to get one handcuff on him
Edwards became suspicious. He noticed not only an oil drum, but a disgusting smell pervading the
place. Dahmer also had a tape of the Exorcist part III playing. Suffice to say, things didn’t look
good. He knew he had to talk his way out of this. Dahmer then grabbed a knife. He told Edwards he
wanted to take photos with him. He put his head against Edward’s chest, said something about
his heartbeat, and then in a calm tone said he was going to rip that heart out and eat it.
Time passed, however, mostly because Edwards was able to keep a conversation going. When he had
his chance, he punched Dahmer in the face and made a run for it. Out in the street, naked, almost
hysterical, he jumped in front of a police car. Shouting at the cops, he said a crazed man
had threatened to kill him. He showed them the handcuffs still attached to one of his hands.
He told them he’d been captive for five hours. This time the cops took it seriously.
They had no idea, they couldn’t have any idea, of what they were about to find.
First, was a knife. Then, one of them opened a drawer and pulled out some photographs. He almost
fell back in shock. They were pictures of bodies, some dismembered, lying in certain poses. The cop
went over to his partner and said, “These are for real.” They then wrestled Dahmer onto the floor,
whereupon Dahmer managed to squeeze out the words, “For what I did I should be dead.” Once in
restraints, he showed them why. He opened the fridge door. Inside was a human head.
Personnel from the Milwaukee County medical examiner's office were soon on the scene working
with the Milwaukee police department to photograph the apartment. They found a bunch of tools that
could be used for dismembering bodies. They also found seven skulls, some of them painted.
Elsewhere there were four human heads, three partially skeletonized bodies, a human
heart, and what was described as “large muscle filets packaged in plastic bags.” They found
little food, and so it looked to them that Dahmer had been eating the bodies. The so-called fillets
were all frozen just like little packages of pork. So, there were the body parts. There were the
drugs he used to sedate people. There were the photos and there were the tools Dahmer had used.
Forensic pathologists were soon able to say what the cause of death was with some victims,
and they were able to make identifications. They discovered the skulls into which Dahmer had
drilled, understanding what kind of injury that had caused. At this point, no one knew
much about Dahmer, but when questioned, he told police he’d tried to create “zombie
sex-slaves” by lobotomizing his victims. He didn’t deny what he’d done, and
instead gave information that helped police identify his victims. Out of
the 11 bodies found in his apartment, four could be identified with fingerprints.
Other victims’ IDs were at the apartment. The rest could be identified through dental records.
Later, activists said that the reason the police work had been shoddy was because of the fact
the victims had been gay. The majority of the victims had also been African-American. On
top of that, some people said because most of the victims had been poor, it was a case
of the “less-dead” going missing – meaning police don’t work as hard when the victims are
the folks who live on the margins of society. But it was the 14-year old who police had helped
Dahmer take back to his apartment that really got the public angry. That’s why there were headlines
like this, “ANGER BUILDING OVER ROLE OF POLICE IN DAHMER CASE.” The boy was Laotian, two of
the women who’d tried to help him were black, which led people to say the white police officers
had not paid enough attention to them out of some harbored racism. They believed Dahmer instead,
who as you know, killed the kid shortly after. The cop later defended himself, saying,
“There was just nothing that stood out, or we would have seen it. I've been doing this
for a while, and usually, if something stands out, you'll spot it. There just wasn't anything there.”
On February 15, 1992, Dahmer was sentenced to 15 consecutive life terms in prison.
Another life sentence was later added on. In total, he’d killed 17 people.
At the end of 1994, while serving time in prison, Dahmer was attacked by a man in the bathroom
of the gym. He was bludgeoned with a metal bar to the point of death, and he did die shortly
after in the hospital. The guy that killed him, also in for murder, later said Dahmer didn’t
make a single noise throughout the assault. When Dahmer’s mother was approached by the
media she said, “Now is everybody happy? Now that he's bludgeoned to death, is that good
enough for everyone?” For a lot of Americans, it was a fitting ending to a terrible story.
Now you need to watch, “H. H. Holmes - The Most Horrific Serial Killer in US
History?” Or, have a look at...
