Dahmer, Jeffrey - Serial Killer
Jeffrey Dahmer was born on May 21, 1960 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His family moved to Bath, Ohio when he was eight years old where he stayed for most of his youth.
His father said that Jeffrey was very shy from a young age and was molested by a neighbor. It was later revealed at his trial that he had collected dead animals and performed sexual acts with them. He became an alcoholic during his teenage years, when he realized that he was also a homosexual. His parents divorced while he was a teenager, further adding to his mental stress.
Dahmer committed his first murder when he was only eighteen years old. He invited a young man, Steven Hicks, to his home and decided to kill him because he "didn't want him to leave." After high school, he tried studying at a college but had to drop out due to poor academic performance.
On the suggestion of his father, Dahmer decided to join the military. He became a medic, but he was arrested in 1988 after he was caught molesting a thirteen-year-old boy. He was sent to a work release camp and forced to register as a sex offender as a result of his actions, but he did not stop there.
Most of Dahmer's victims were young black men, who he raped before and after killing. After his capture, police were horrified to find decaying bodies, severed heads, and an altar constructed of human skulls in his apartment. Further interrogation revealed that Dahmer had committed cannibalism along with kidnapping, sexual assault, murder, and necrophilia.
A scandal was caused when people learned that police had returned one of Dahmer's victims to him after an escape attempt. In 1991, a naked and bleeding Laotian teenager named Konerak Sinthasomphone fled Dahmer's apartment and was found by police. Although the boy was only fourteen years old, Dahmer was able to convince the police that he was nineteen and his homosexual lover. The police allowed Dahmer to take the child back to his apartment, where he was dismembered.
After the revelation of this scandal to the public, the Milwaukee Police Department relieved the two police officers of their duty. The officers had reportedly never checked the boy's ID or noticed the drilled holes in the boy's head. In spite of this, the officers were reinstated after an appeal from their union representative.
Later that year, on July 22, 1991, another victim managed to escape from Dahmer's apartment. The man was Tracy Edwards and he flagged down a police car immediately. After leading the officers back to Dahmer's apartment, where they found the remains of eleven different victims. Dahmer was arrested after a brief struggle and put on trial.
On February 17, 1992, Dahmer was found guilty of fifteen counts of murder and sentenced to fifteen consecutive life sentences since Wisconsin does not have the death penalty. He was sent to the Columbia Correctional Institute in Portage, Wisconsin to serve time, but was killed on November 28, 1994 by Christopher Scarver, a fellow inmate. The man beat Dahmer and a second inmate to death with a lead pipe while they were cleaning a prison restroom.
Jeffrey Dahmer's story is a disturbing one of perversion and cruelty. His ghost still haunts the city of the Milwaukee, which demolished the building that Dahmer stayed in to help move on. Dahmer's case is one of the most bizarre recorded in history.