Sandra Smith alarmed the police when she saw a young boy running around naked, and really terrified. She was 18 years old, and she was standing outside with her cousin when the police arrived. A tall blond man was also standing near the boy. The young boy was named Konerak, and because he was drugged he wasn't able to respond to any of the questions the police asked him. The tall blond man told the police that Konerak was his nineteen-year-old lover who had been drinking too much. The blond man, Jeffrey Dahmer, gave the police a picture ID. Sandra Smith and her cousin tried to interfere. They were angry and upset. They had seen how Dahmer tried to grab the boy before the police arrived, but no one listened to them. But the officers went with Dahmer to check out his apartment. It smelled bad, but it was very neat. There were a couple of photographs of Konerak. Konerak was still unable to talk. Dahmer apologized for the disturbances and the police left the apartment. What they didn't see in the apartment was the body of Tony Hughes. A corpse that had been there for three days. Konerak was killed, strangled, shortly after, and Dahmer had sex with his body. Then kept his skull as a trophy. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 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 Konerak, whom she also had seen in the area before. She also tried contacting the Milwaukee office of the FBI, but nothing ever happened. That is, until a couple of months later on Monday, July 22, 1991 when all hell broke loose. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 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. Around midnight the two officers 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. The policemen wanted 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. Dahmer was very calm and seemed nice. 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 place him under arrest. The blond man suddenly turned on them and fought as the other cop tried to cuff him. While the one officer overpowered 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!" The freezer had three more heads, stored neatly in plastic bags and tied with plastic twisters. 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. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 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 drank some beer together, 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. He needed to get rid of the body so he cut it up, covered it 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. A few months after his arrest in October of 1981 for drunken and disorderly conduct, his father thought it was best if Jeffrey went to 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 too much 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 a lot 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 over it, dismembered it and threw it in the garbage. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Several months later, he selected his third victim, a 14-year-old boy named Jamie Doxtator who hung around outside the gay bars, looking for relationships. Dahmer's methods became established by that time. Generally, 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 over 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. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 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. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 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 13-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 as the mixer at Ambrosia Chocolate. He was arrested for sexual exploitation of a child and second-degree sexual assault. On January 30, 1989, he pled 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 Anthony Sears at a gay bar. Like the others, he offered the 24-year-old aspiring 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. 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. 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. After 10 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 next 15 months, Dahmer went on a killing binge that cost 12 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, 14, 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. The listing below appears in Anne Schwartz's The Man Who Could Not Kill Enough: ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Edward Smith June, 1990 Ricky Lee Beeks July, 1990 Ernest Miller Sept., 1990 David Thomas Sept., 1990 Curtis Straughter Feb., 1991 Errol Lindsey April, 1991 Anthony Hughes May 24, 1991 Konerak Sinthasomphone May 27, 1991 Matt Turner June 30, 1991 Jeremiah Weinberger July 5, 1991 Oliver Lacey July 12, 1991 Joseph Bradehoft July 19, 1991 ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 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 over 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. Not unusual with necrophilia’s 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 tastier. Eating human flesh gave him an erection. His famous freezer contained strips of frozen flesh. He had tried human blood too, but it did not appeal to his taste buds. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Control was an all important issue for Dahmer. He could not tolerate rejection or abandonment. Even in his sexual relationships, he did not want to please his partner, he just wanted to have his own fantasies fulfilled. 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," Dahmer said, "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, 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." ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 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. 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. Eventually, the marriage dissolved in divorce when Jeff was eighteen. Jeffrey 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. 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" 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. 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, and nearly uncommunicative." 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. 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. 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. Jeff grew more passive and isolated. He was completely unmotivated. 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. Some months later, Lionel remarried. His new wife was named Shari. 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. 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. Until Jeff's final arrest in 1991, life was a rollercoaster for Lionel and his wife, but Jeff 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. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ As early as 1989 Jeff was facing sentencing for child molestation. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Dr. James 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. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ On July 13, 1992, Dahmer ignored his lawyer's advice and changed his plea to guilty. 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. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ On January 29, 1992, the jury and two alternates were selected. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 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. 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. He came along to other dangerous inmates. 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.