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...