A suspicious proposition, a terrifying threat, and a daring escape. Everything
fell apart for Jeffrey Dahmer on the night he was finally caught.
Jeffrey Dahmer is a well-known name to anyone familiar with the deadliest serial killers.
Before he was handed down a life sentence for the murders of 17 victims in 1992,
Dahmer spent years hunting and killing young men, mostly in the Milwaukee area.
From the late '70s until the early '90s, he was a ruthless killer who kidnapped,
lured, drugged, and tortured victims that he invited back to his apartment.
Dahmer committed his first murder in 1978 just after graduating from high school. On a drive
to get rid of the body, he was pulled over by the police in Ohio to perform a sobriety test,
all while having the body of his first victim in the car.
Thankfully, in 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer's butchery came to an end. The notorious
killer approached three men in a Milwaukee bar on July 22, 1991, offering each one $100,
drinks, and a movie to come home with him to pose naked for photographs. One man,
32-year-old Tracey Edwards, took Dahmer up on the offer.
Arriving at Dahmer's apartment, Edwards became suspicious, not least of which was because of
the horrid smell. Before he could get away, though, Dahmer pulled a knife on the young man
and handcuffed him. He then forced Edwards to watch "The Exorcist III." Edwards later
told authorities that Dahmer put his head on his chest while they watched the movie and,
while listening to his heartbeat, told Edwards that he would eat the
young man's heart out. Edwards reported that Dahmer made him look in his refrigerator,
where he saw a human head. From his filing cabinet, Dahmer retrieved a hand.
"I was dead set on, on,
going with this compulsion. It was the only thing that gave me any…"
"...any satisfaction."
Before Dahmer could make his fatal strike, though, Edwards saw an opportunity. At some point in
the evening, Dahmer was distracted, and Edwards punched him and escaped out the front door, still
in handcuffs. Edwards flagged down two police officers in the street at 11:30 p.m. on the day of
his ordeal. He said that a man had tried to kill him, and led the officers to Dahmer's apartment.
Dahmer greeted those officers, and allowed them to come into his home. On the lookout for material
evidence, one of the officers searched Dahmer's bedside table for the key to Edward's handcuffs.
Instead of a key, however, the officer found more than 70 Polaroid photos of dismembered bodies.
The officers restrained Dahmer and conducted a full check of the apartment. In the end,
they found not only the head in Dahmer's refrigerator, but a human heart in a plastic bag,
and a set of male genitals. In Dahmer's bedroom, they found five human skulls and
the tools that Dahmer had used for his torture and dismemberment. One of Dahmer's drawers contained
a full human skeleton. Police also found a 57-gallon vat full of acid, three torsos,
and other assorted body parts. Dahmer willingly confessed to his crimes, telling detectives,
"I created this horror and it only makes sense I do everything to put an end to it."
Some of his victims could have lived if Dahmer were caught earlier. In addition
to the horrific nature of his murders, the way he got away with the crimes is
still hotly debated. It's believed that Dahmer intentionally chose Black and Asian men because
he believed that the police would spend less time investigating non-white victims.
The Milwaukee police department was also heavily criticized for its handling of events that could
have saved the life of one of Dahmer's victims. In a show of the department's negligence, just
months before Tracy Edwards escaped, a young boy had also found a way out of Dahmer's apartment.
Two young women tried to make a report to the police about a naked boy running down the
street. Unfortunately, when the cops found him, they returned him to Dahmer's apartment. Police
wrote off the incident as a domestic disturbance. The boy was 14-year-old Konerak Sinthasomphone,
who was later killed by Dahmer and discovered as one of the many corpses in the apartment.
Before that, Dahmer had spent 10 months in prison for the assault of Sinthasomphone's
brother. He was sentenced to eight years for that crime but wrote a letter asking
for leniency and it was granted. After murdering 14-year-old Konerak, Dahmer
would kill four more men before Edwards' escape finally led police to his apartment in 1991.