A Closer Look at Jeffrey Dahmer

Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer was born on May 21, 1960 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His family moved to Bath, Ohio when he was eight years old. As a child he was extremely shy and suffered from very low self-esteem.

When Dahmer was a young boy, he had very disturbing behavior that he acted on.He impaled the heads of animals that he had killed on stakes in his backyard. He collected dead animals and had necrophilia desires. According to his stepmother, Shari Dahmer, when he was a young boy, he would use acid to scrape the meat off of dead animals. His parents both found his behavior to be very abnormal, but blamed it on his mental issues.

Dahmer committed his first brutal murder in 1978 in Bath Township which is located in Ohio. He had befriended a young man who was hitchhiking to come to his house. The young man accepted and went with Dahmer. Upon arriving at the home, Dahmer killed his victim with a barbell. He then proceeded to smash every bone in the dead man's body with a hammer, claiming that wanted him to stay. It would be another nine years before he got the urge to kill again. His second victim was a young man that he picked up in a gay bar in 1987.

Dahmer was killing one victim a week by July, 1991. He had fantasies for a compliant sexual partner as well as necrophilia. All of his victims were males and the majority of them were minorities, usually of African American descent. It may appear to some people that he chose minorites as he was racist; this is not the case, it was strictly because of the area that he lived in.

Dahmer often frequented gay bars in hopes of luring a young man back to his home. He offered young homosexual and bisexual men money to pose for photos or invited them to watch videos and drink beer at his place. He would spike the drinks with drugs that would throw the victims into a deep sleep before he strangled or stabbed them to death, having anal sex with the dead body, and then dismembering them with a hacksaw. He would put parts of the dismembered body into containers that were filled with acid in order to get rid of the evidence.

There heads and genitalia were kept as trophies; biceps and other muscles were frozen for future consumption. Dahmer said that human flesh “tasted like beef.” He conducted lobotomies on some of his victims. Thankfully, most of them died instantly when he poured acid into a drilled hole in the skull of his victim. According to Dahmer, many victims would live and function in a zombie state for several days after that. Often times, he would repeat this process so that he could abuse the victim over and over at his will.

One particular late night led to the arrest of this disturbed individual. Two police officers were driving through Dahmer's neighborhood on July 22, 1991, when they noticed a dazed black male with a single handcuff on his wrist. The man proceeded to tell them about watching a video with a weird man and being drugged, handcuffed, and threatened with a knife. The man was cognitive enough to fight back and escaped from the apartment. The cops took the man back to the apartment to investigate further.

Dahmer answered the door and explained to the officers that he had simply got drunk and lost his temper, due to losing his job at a chocolate factory. He proceeded to walk into his bedroom to get the key for the handcuff and one of the officers followed him. The site was horrific and the smell was even worse. The officer reported that he spotted Polaroid pictures of cut-up bodies and skulls in a refrigerator. He then went into the kitchen and saw the refrigerator was completely covered with pictures of mutilated men.

Dahmer was immediately taken into custody and one of the police officers remember him threatening to "cut out your heart and eat it." More body parts were to be found that evening; three more heads and human mean were stored in the freezer. The hands from several victims and a penis were found in a stockpot that was stored in a closet. On the bedroom shelf, he had two boiled skulls that had been painted Grey and male genitalia was found preserved in formaldehyde. There were literally hundreds of photos of the victimes before, during the murders, and after death.

In his closet, the police found an altar of candles and human skills. Dahmer planned to create a shrine using skulls, human trophies and a statue of a griffin he owned to honor evil. He told police that this shrine would give him “special powers and energies to help him socially and financially.”

Jeffrey Dahmer admitted openly that he commited these crimes, he made no excuses and blamed no one else but himself. He was charged with fifteen counts of murder and entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. The court rejected his plea and sentened Dahmer to fifteen consecutive life sentences, a minimum of 936 years total. This happened on February 17, 1992.

Just two years after his conviction, Dahmer was murdered in Portage, Wisconsin by another inmate at the Columbia Correctional Institute. He was murdered on November 28, 1994. I would have to say, "What goes around comes around." and in this man's case, I believe that he got what he deserved.

On November 28, 1994, Dahmer was murdered in a Portage, Wisconsin by another inmate at the Columbia Correctional Institute.