Serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer murdered 17 victims in and around Milwaukee, Wisconsin between 1978 and 1991, then collected and cannibalized their remains.
Curt Borgwardt/Sygma/Getty ImagesJeffrey Dahmer’s murders came to an end after his capture by police in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on July 22, 1991.
On the morning of May 27, 1991, Milwaukee police responded to an alarming call. Two women had encountered a naked boy on the street who was disoriented and bleeding. But as the police arrived at the scene, a handsome blond man approached and assured them all was well. But that man was the notorious serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.
Dahmer calmly told the police officers that the boy was 19 years old and his lover. In reality, Konerak Sinthasomphone was just 14. And he was about to become Dahmer’s latest victim.
Not long after, the 31-year-old Dahmer was finally arrested and charged with murdering Sinthasomphone, one of 17 men and boys he murdered between 1978 and 1991. Tragically, Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims were often young, ranging in age from 14 to 31.
His modus operandi was to lure the men to his apartment in Milwaukee, drug them with laced drinks, and strangle them. Then, he would dismember their bodies and either consume their flesh or store them throughout his apartment — a tactic meant to exert complete control over his victims.
This is the disturbing story of Jeffrey Dahmer, history’s most notorious cannibalistic serial killer — and how he finally got caught red-handed.
- Jeffrey Dahmer: A Little Boy Fascinated With Death
- Jeffrey Dahmer’s Murders Begin With The Killing Of Steven Hicks
- An “Incessant And Never-Ending Desire” For Murder
- Inside Jeffrey Dahmer’s Milwaukee House Of Horrors
- The Escape Of Tracy Edwards, Dahmer’s Last Would-Be Victim, Leads To His Capture
- The Trial Of A Monster: Dahmer Faces Justice
- When The Tables Turned: The Murder Of Jeffrey Dahmer
- Dahmer’s Grisly Legacy Of One Of America’s Worst Serial Killers In Movies And TV To This Day
Jeffrey Dahmer: A Little Boy Fascinated With Death
Wikimedia CommonsJeffrey Dahmer’s high school yearbook photo.
Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer was born on May 21, 1960, to a middle-class family in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. At a young age, he became fascinated with all things related to death and began collecting the carcasses of dead animals.
Eerily, Dahmer’s father Lionel noted how his son was “oddly thrilled” by the sounds of clanking animal bones.
By the time Dahmer was in high school, his family had moved to Bath Township, a sleepy suburb of Akron, Ohio. There, Dahmer was an outcast who quickly became an alcoholic. He drank heavily at school, often hiding beer and hard liquor in his army fatigue jacket.
To fit in, Dahmer would often pull practical jokes, like pretending to have seizures. He would do this so frequently that pulling off a good practical joke became known around the school as “doing a Dahmer.”
During this time, Jeffrey Dahmer also realized that he was gay. As his sexuality blossomed, so too did his increasingly abnormal sexual fantasies. Dahmer began fantasizing about raping men and became aroused by the idea of completely dominating and controlling another person.
As Dahmer’s violent fantasies grew stronger, his control weakened. Just weeks after he graduated high school, Dahmer committed his first murder.
Jeffrey Dahmer’s Murders Begin With The Killing Of Steven Hicks
Public DomainEighteen-year-old Steven Mark Hicks, Jeffrey Dahmer’s first known victim.
Jeffrey Dahmer’s parents divorced the same year he graduated high school. Dahmer’s brother and his father decided to move into a nearby motel, and Dahmer and his mother continued living at the Dahmer family home. Whenever Dahmer’s mother was out of town, he had full control of the house.
On one such occasion, Dahmer took advantage of his newfound freedom. He picked up 18-year-old hitchhiker Steven Mark Hicks, who was on his way to a rock concert in nearby Lockwood Corners. Dahmer convinced Hicks to join him at his house for some drinks before he went to the show.
After hours of drinking and listening to music, Hicks attempted to leave, a move that enraged Dahmer. In response, Jeffrey Dahmer bludgeoned Hicks from behind with a 10-pound dumbbell and strangled him to death. He then stripped Hicks naked and masturbated on his lifeless corpse.
Then, Dahmer brought Hicks down to the crawl space of his house and began dissecting the body. Afterward, Dahmer removed the bones, smashed them to powder, and dissolved the flesh with acid.
Jeffrey Dahmer’s murders had begun. But on the surface, Dahmer seemed to be a normal young man who was struggling to figure his life out.
Public DomainThe first mugshot of Jeffrey Dahmer, taken in Bath, Ohio.
He briefly attended Ohio State University but dropped out after one term due to his drinking. He also served as a combat medic in the U.S. Army for two years before his alcoholism became a problem.
After being honorably discharged, he returned to his grandmother’s house in West Allis, a suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It would later come to light that Dahmer had drugged and raped two other soldiers.
As a civilian, Jeffrey Dahmer’s violence continued. He committed numerous sex crimes, including masturbating in front of children and drugging and raping men at gay bathhouses. In September 1987, Dahmer escalated back to murder when he killed 25-year-old Steven Tuomi.
Dahmer met Tuomi at a bar and convinced the young man to go back to his hotel room with him. Dahmer later claimed that he had just intended to drug and rape the man, but awoke the next morning to find his hand bruised and Tuomi’s bloodied corpse underneath his bed.
An “Incessant And Never-Ending Desire” For Murder
Jeffrey Dahmer’s murder of Steven Tuomi was the catalyst that sparked Dahmer’s true killing spree. After that heinous crime, he began actively seeking out young men at gay bars and luring them back to his grandmother’s house. There, he would drug, rape, and kill them.
YouTubeSteven Tuomi, one of Jeffrey Dahmer’s 17 victims.
Dahmer killed at least three victims during this time. He was also arrested for the molestation of a 13-year-old boy. Due to that charge, Dahmer would serve eight months in a work camp.
Still, the idea of killing consumed him. “It was an incessant and never-ending desire to be with someone at whatever cost,” he later said. “Someone good looking, really nice looking. It just filled my thoughts all day long.”
But murder alone wasn’t enough. Jeffrey Dahmer also began to collect grotesque trophies from his victims. This practice began with the murder of a 24-year-old aspiring model named Anthony Sears.
Public DomainBefore Jeffrey Dahmer was captured in 1991, the “Milwaukee Cannibal” brutally murdered at least 17 boys and young men in Ohio and Wisconsin.
Sears struck up a conversation with the seemingly innocent Dahmer at a gay bar. After going home with Dahmer, Sears was drugged, raped, and eventually strangled. Dahmer would then preserve Spears’ head and genitals in jars filled with acetone. When he moved into his own place downtown, Dahmer brought the dismembered pieces of Sears with him.
Over the next two years, Dahmer committed the bulk of his 17 murders. He would lure young men back to his home, often offering them money to pose nude for him before killing them.
Inside Jeffrey Dahmer’s Milwaukee House Of Horrors
Milwaukee Police Department The living room inside Jeffrey Dahmer’s Apartment 213.
As Jeffrey Dahmer’s murders continued, his depravity deepened, this time within the privacy of his one-bedroom apartment in Milwaukee.
After being kicked out by his grandma due to his drinking and habit of bringing strange young men back to her home, Dahmer rented Apartment 213 at 924 North 25th Street. Within a week of moving in, Dahmer would commit yet another crime, this time drugging and strangling Raymond Smith, a 32-year-old sex worker.
With a new level of privacy to carry out his depraved desires, Dahmer quickly escalated his crimes.
After taking photos of the corpses and dissolving their flesh and bones, Dahmer would regularly keep the skulls of his victims as trophies. He also began experimenting with various techniques to preserve these grisly mementos. He once even accidentally exploded the head of one of his victims, Edward Smith, when he tried to dry it out in the oven.
Around the same time, Dahmer began to dabble in cannibalism. He kept body parts in the refrigerator so that he could feast on them later.
Curt Borgwardt/Sygma/Sygma via Getty ImagesJeffrey Dahmer murdered 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991. He also raped some of his victims and cannibalized their bodies.
But even that wasn’t enough to satisfy Dahmer’s sickening urges. He also began drilling holes into the heads of his victims while they were drugged and still alive. He would then pour hydrochloric acid onto his victim’s brain, a technique that he hoped would put the person in a permanent, unresistant, and submissive state.
He attempted this procedure with numerous victims, including Konerak Sinthasomphone. That’s why, along with being drugged, the boy was unable to communicate with the police and ask for help.
Dahmer’s most violent fantasies had slithered from nightmares to reality. But he hid it well. His parole officer didn’t suspect a thing. And Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims often didn’t realize what was happening until it was too late.
The Escape Of Tracy Edwards, Dahmer’s Last Would-Be Victim, Leads To His Capture
CBS/KLEWTVJeffrey Dahmer’s last attempted victim, Tracy Edwards, in 1991.
On July 22, 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer went after 32-year-old Tracy Edwards. Like he did with many of his victims, Dahmer offered Edwards money to pose for nude photos in his apartment. But to the shock of Edwards, Dahmer handcuffed him and threatened him with a knife, telling him to undress.
Dahmer then taunted Edwards, telling him that he was going to eat his heart. Dahmer placed his ear against Edwards’ chest and rocked back and forth.
Terrified, Edwards attempted to appease Dahmer, telling him that he was his friend and that he would watch TV with him. While Dahmer was distracted, Edwards punched him in the face and ran out the door — escaping the fate of becoming another one of Jeffrey Dahmer’s murder victims.
Edwards flagged down a police car and led the officers to Dahmer’s apartment. There, a policeman discovered photos of dismembered corpses — which were clearly taken in the same exact apartment that they were now standing in. “These are for real,” said the officer who uncovered the photos, as he handed them to his partner.
Public DomainA 57-gallon drum of acid found in Jeffrey Dahmer’s room. He often used this drum to disintegrate his victims.
Though Dahmer attempted to resist arrest, he was quickly detained.
Upon closer inspection of the apartment, the police found four severed heads in the kitchen and a total of seven skulls, many of them painted. In the fridge, they found numerous body parts, including two human hearts.
In the bedroom, they found a 57-gallon drum — and quickly noticed an overpowering odor emanating from it. When they looked inside, they found three dismembered human torsos dissolving in an acid solution.
The apartment was filled with so many human body parts that were stored and arranged with such care that the medical examiner later said, “It was more like dismantling someone’s museum than an actual crime scene.”
The Trial Of A Monster: Dahmer Faces Justice
Curt Borgwardt/Sygma/Sygma via Getty ImagesJeffrey Dahmer’s murder trial shocked and horrified the nation.
After Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested, it didn’t take long for him to admit to all 17 of his murders. But despite his unspeakable crimes, Dahmer was found to be sane during his trial, which began on January 30, 1992.
Because he pled guilty to all of the murder charges, his trial was not about his guilt, but whether he was sane during the murders. After two weeks of horrific testimony regarding his crimes, a jury took only five hours to find him sane, and therefore culpable for the crimes. In the end, Dahmer received 15 life sentences plus 70 years.
Some disagreed with the declaration of sanity — including at least one other serial killer. When John Wayne Gacy was asked what he thought of Dahmer, he said, “I don’t know the man personally, but I’ll tell ya this, that’s a good example as to why insanity doesn’t belong in the courtroom. Because if Jeffrey Dahmer doesn’t meet the requirements for insanity, then I’d hate like hell to run into the guy that does.”
At his sentencing, Dahmer stated “I take all the blame for what I did…Your honor, it is over now. This has never been a case of trying to get free. I never wanted freedom.”
He would spend the next three years imprisoned at Wisconsin’s Columbia Correctional Institution, with only a brief trip to Ohio in May 1992 to face the trial for the murder of his first victim, Steven Hicks. In a court hearing lasting only 45 minutes, Dahmer pled guilty and was sentenced to another life term.
For the remainder of his life, he would be interviewed by the media multiple times as journalists, doctors, and pundits tried to figure out who Dahmer was deep down. Unsurprisingly, he quickly became infamous as one of the worst serial killers in modern history.
When The Tables Turned: The Murder Of Jeffrey Dahmer
Steve Kagan/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty ImagesThe Milwaukee Sentinel reports on Dahmer’s death. November 28, 1994.
During his time in prison, Dahmer had constant thoughts of suicide — but he would never get the chance to take his own life. On November 28, 1994, a fellow inmate and convicted murderer named Christopher Scarver beat Dahmer to death with a metal bar in the prison bathroom before attacking another fellow inmate, Jesse Anderson.
Scarver, who was serving a sentence for murder, attacked Dahmer while they performed unsupervised work in the prison showers. Prison guards found the trio and rushed Dahmer, who was still alive but suffering from severe head wounds, to the hospital. He died only an hour later. Anderson, who had been attacked with the same metal bar, died two days later.
According to Scarver, Jeffrey Dahmer neither fought back nor made a sound during the attack, but instead appeared to accept his fate.
This was not the first attack on Dahmer. A few months prior, inmate Osvaldo Durruthy attempted to slash Dahmer’s throat with a toothbrush razor but only left superficial wounds.
“If he’d have had a choice, he’d have let this happen to him,” Dahmer’s mother told the Milwaukee Sentinel soon afterward. “I always asked if he was safe, and he’d say, ‘It doesn’t matter, Mom. I don’t care if something happens to me.'”
“Now is everybody happy?” Joyce Dahmer asked. “Now that he’s bludgeoned to death, is that good enough for everyone?”
As per his request, Dahmer was cremated and his ashes were dispersed between his parents.
Dahmer’s Grisly Legacy Of One Of America’s Worst Serial Killers In Movies And TV To This Day
Google Maps The lot where Dahmer’s apartment once stood. It was torn down in November 1992.
The revelation of Jeffrey Dahmer’s gruesome murders changed the city of Milwaukee forever.
The city’s underground LGBT community was particularly enraged that a monster like Dahmer could operate for so long undetected, especially when news of Dahmer’s frequent run-ins with law enforcement were publicized.
Additionally, racial tensions in the city had been brewing long before Dahmer arrived on the scene, but news of his crimes, the bulk of which targeted men of color, only served to stoke the flames even more.
To ease the tensions, the city decided to destroy the apartment where the bulk of the violent crimes were committed. In November 1992, the building was demolished, and plans to create a memorial were discussed, although they have yet to materialize.
Dahmer’s estate was awarded to several of the victims’ families and proceeds from books, films, and television specials about the crimes were often donated.
Now, more than 30 years after Jeffrey Dahmer’s death, the world still has a macabre interest in his crimes. Books about Dahmer’s upbringing, crimes, and death like My Friend Dahmer, A Father’s Story, and Inside the Mind of Jeffrey Dahmer: The Cannibal Killer are still being frequently published.
In film and television, Dahmer’s story has been featured in Netflix’s 2022 series, Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story and Marc Meyers’ 2017 film My Friend Dahmer. Plays like Joshua Hitchens’ 2013 Jeffrey Dahmer: Guilty but Insane have also been produced.
However, these frequent releases have not come without criticism. As more content is published about Dahmer’s crimes, friends and family of the victims are beginning to feel exploited for the wider public’s macabre pleasure.
“It couldn’t be more wrong, more ill timed, and it’s a media grab,” Eric Wynn, a former drag queen at Club 219, a gay club that Dahmer frequented, told the New York Times about Netflix’s 2022 series.
“It brought back all the emotions I was feeling back then,” Rita Isbell, whose brother Errol Lindsey was murdered by Dahmer, told the Times. “I was never contacted about the show. I feel like Netflix should’ve asked if we mind or how we felt about making it. They didn’t ask me anything. They just did it.”
Despite his death and the three decades that have passed since then, Dahmer has undoubtedly left behind a legacy that continues to impact his victims’ loved ones today. His actions have left a noticeable wound on the city of Milwaukee — one that has continuously been opened up by society’s insatiable appetite for more about the Milwaukee Monster.
How Many Victims Did Jeffrey Dahmer Have?
Jeffrey Dahmer killed 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991, the bulk of whom were murdered at Dahmer’s Milwaukee apartment — Apartment 213 at 924 North 25th Street.
How Did Jeffrey Dahmer Get Caught?
Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested following the escape of one of his victims, Tracy Edwards, from his apartment. Edwards, accompanied by two police officers he had flagged down, searched through Dahmer’s apartment and discovered body parts, weapons, and polaroids of his former victims in various states of dismemberment.
Was Jeffrey Dahmer A Cannibal?
Yes, Jeffrey Dahmer did consume the flesh of a few of his victims. Upon his arrest, law enforcement officers found human body parts all around his apartment. He later admitted to consuming his victims in order to be closer to them.
How Brutal Were Jeffrey Dahmer’s Crimes?
Dahmer is known as one of the worst serial killers in American history. His modus operandi was to lure victims to his apartment, provide them with laced-drinks, and strangle them to death. When his victims died, he would dismember the bodies and save some of their body parts for future consumption or use.
What Was Found In Dahmer’s Milwaukee Apartment?
Law enforcement officers discovered human body parts in nearly every room of his apartment. In the kitchen, the authorities found four severed heads and two hearts in the fridge. In his bedroom, Dahmer stacked seven skulls in his closet. In other parts of the apartment, officers discovered a 57-gallon drum filled with human torsos dissolving in acid, preserved genitals, and two skeletons.
How Did Dahmer Die?
Jeffrey Dahmer passed away on November 28, 1994, after being beat with a metal pipe by fellow inmate, Christopher Scarver.
Why Did Dahmer Cannibalize His Victims?
According to Dahmer, he consumed the flesh of his victims in order to be close to them. By cannibalizing his victims, Dahmer believed that they would always be part of him.
Where Did Dahmer Commit His Crimes?
The majority of Dahmer’s crimes were committed in his apartment in Milwaukee. However, three of his crimes were committed when he lived with his grandmother in West Allis, Wisconsin.
Did Jeffrey Dahmer’s Grandmother Know About His Crimes?
Because Dahmer lived with his grandmother when he was committing the murders, his grandmother was suspicious of his behavior and even complained about foul smells coming from the home’s garage and basement. However, she never witnessed any of Dahmer’s murders and later asked him to move out due to his drinking problems.
Is Jeffrey Dahmer’s Apartment Still Standing Today?
Jeffrey Dahmer’s apartment at 924 North 25th Street was demolished in November 1992. Today, the site is an empty lot. The city of Milwaukee has discussed the possibility of building a memorial or park in honor of the victims.
After learning about Jeffrey Dahmer’s murders, read up on history’s most infamous serial killers and learn how they were finally caught. Then, check out serial killer quotes that will chill you to the bone.
