Jeffrey Dahmer
On September 18, Fox Nation will launch a new documentary series about serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer called My Son Jeffrey: The Dahmer Family Tapes. Unreleased audio recordings of Dahmer, including calls he made to his father Lionel while incarcerated, are featured in the four-part series. In one tape, Dahmer reportedly stated, “I was so wrapped up in what I was doing,” indicating that he fully intended to continue killing if he hadn’t been apprehended, according to Court TV. I thought I would carry on doing it for the rest of my days.
Jeffrey Dahmer: Who Was He?
Between 1978 and 1991, American serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer murdered seventeen men and boys. Over the course of more than 13 years, Dahmer stalked his victims—mostly Black men—at gay bars, shopping centers, and bus stations. He then offered them booze laced with drugs, enticed them home with promises of money or sex, and strangled them to death. After that, he would perform sexual actions on the dead and then dismember and dispose of them, sometimes saving body parts as mementos. In order to remember each deed afterward and relive the sensation, he regularly snapped pictures of jeffrey dahmer’s victims at different points during the murder process. After being apprehended in 1991, Dahmer was given sixteen life sentences. Christopher Scarver, a fellow prisoner, killed him in 1994.
Fast Facts
FULL NAME: Dahmer Jeffrey
BIRTH DATE: May 21, 1960
DEAD: November 28, 1994
DATE OF BIRTH: Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Sign of the Astrologer: Gemini
6 feet, 0 inches in height.
Early Life and Family
Lionel and Joyce Dahmer welcomed Jeffrey Dahmer into the world on May 21, 1960, in Milwaukee. Up until the age of four, he was regarded as an active and content child. However, a terrible and agonizing recovery from surgery to repair a double hernia seems to have changed the boy. He was notably reserved and withdrew after the birth of his younger brother and the family’s many movements. The family had relocated to Ohio by the time Dahmer reached school age.
Dahmer became fascinated with animal bones at an early age and researched the best ways to clean and preserve them. According to Brian Masters’ book The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer, as a child he collected huge insects and small animal skulls preserved in jars of formaldehyde.
By his early teens, he was generally friendless, tense, and disinterested. Dahmer states that his obsessions with necrophilia and murder started when he was about 14 years old, but it seems as though the dissolution of his parents’ marriage and their contentious divorce a few years later served as the impetus for him to act on these ideas. Masters claims that Dahmer began to doubt the stability of his family and existence as a result of his parents’ frequent disagreements and the ongoing stress in the home.
Dahmer began drinking at the age of 14, and by the time he committed his first murder at the age of 18, he was abusing alcohol. After just one quarter of a term, he left Ohio State University because his freshly remarried father was pressing him to enlist in the Army. Following his enlistment in late December 1978, Dahmer was dispatched to Germany.
Due to his ongoing drinking, the Army let him go in early 1981. It is thought that Dahmer did not take any victims while serving in the Armed Forces, despite the fact that German police would subsequently look into potential connections between Dahmr and murders that occurred in the vicinity during that period.
Dahmer went back to his Ohio home after being released from prison. His father sent Dahmer to live with his grandmother Catherine Dahmer in Wisconsin when he was arrested for disorderly conduct later that year. However, Dahmer’s alcoholism persisted, and he was arrested for indecent exposure the following summer. In 1986, two boys accused him of masturbating in front of them, which led to his detention once more. He was given a probationary period of one year.
First Four Casualties
Between 1978 and 1991, Dahmer killed seventeen men. He was cautious in his choice of victims, many of whom were outcasts or on the verge of becoming criminals, so as to obscure their disappearances and lessen the possibility that he would be apprehended. He used promises of money or sex to entice them to his house, when he strangled them to death. He performed sexual acts on them using their bodies, keeping pictures and body pieces as mementos. His most well-known monikers, Milwaukee Monster and Milwaukee Cannibal, are a fitting tribute to his horrific deeds.
Shortly after graduating from Revere High School in June 1978, Dahmer picked up 18-year-old Steven Hicks, a hitchhiker, and brought him home to his parents’ house. This was the first murder Dahmer committed. After getting the young guy intoxicated, Dahmer killed him by hitting him in the head and strangling him with a barbell. When Hicks attempted to leave, Dahmer remarked, “I didn’t want him to leave.” Hicks’ body was dismembered by Dahmer, who then buried the pieces behind his parents’ house after packing them in plastic bags. Later, he dug up the remains, used a sledgehammer to smash the bones, and threw them into a ravine that was covered in woods.
Dahmer didn’t take advantage of Steven Tuomi as his second victim until September 1987. After checking into a hotel room and having some alcohol, Dahmer finally woke up to discover Tuomi dead and had no memory of what had happened the night before. Afterwards, Dahmer told authorities that he “could not believe this had happened” and that he planned to drug Tuomi but not kill him. Dahmer purchased a huge suitcase to carry Tuomi’s body to his grandmother’s basement, where he murdered and then disposed of the body. He kept Tuomi’s wrapped head under a blanket for several weeks following the killing.
Dahmer killed two more victims at his grandmother’s house until she forcibly evicted him in 1988. He subsequently claimed that after killing Tuomi, his “obsession [with killing] went into full swing” and he “didn’t even try to stop it after that.” Masters claimed that although she was unaware of his transgressions, she was sick of his drinking, his propensity to invite young guys to her home, and the unpleasant odors that periodically emanated from her basement.
Charges for Sexual Assault and Penalty
About a year after moving into his new flat, in September 1989, Dahmer invited a 13-year-old Laotian boy to his residence on the pretense that he wanted to snap pictures of him in his underwear. Dahmer was then charged with second-degree sexual assault and sexual exploitation. The youngster had seemed much older, he said as he entered a guilty plea.
Dahmer once more used his grandmother’s basement for grisly purposes while he awaited sentence in his sexual assault case. An aspiring model named Anthony Sears was lured, drugged, strangled, sodomized, photographed, dissected, and disposed of by him in March 1989. According to Masters, Dahmer mummified Sears’ head and genitalia because he thought Sears was exceptionally attractive and later declared that he did not want to “lose him.” As a result, Sears became the first victim from whom Dahmer retained preserved body parts for an extended length of time.
Dahmer was the epitome of remorse during his May 1989 child molestation trial. He persuasively argued in his own defense that he had realized his mistakes and that his arrest had been a turning point in his life. Dahmer’s defense team persuaded the judge that he required therapy rather than imprisonment, and in exchange, the judge sentenced him to one year in jail on “day release,” which allows him to work during the day and return to the prison at night, as well as five years of probation.
Years later, during a CNN interview, Lionel Dahmer claimed to have written a letter to the court that handed down the sentence, asking for psychological assistance prior to his son’s release. Nevertheless, the judge gave Dahmer an early release, even though he had barely completed ten months of his sentence. After his release, he stayed temporarily with his grandmother—during which he doesn’t seem to have contributed to his body count—before returning to his own apartment.
Past 13 Victims
Dahmer would murder 12 more individuals in the ensuing two years, increasing his total number of victims to 17. Raymond Smith, a prostitute, was Dahmer’s first victim during this period. Dahmer enticed Smith to his apartment for sex, gave her a drink laced with sleeping pills, and then strangled her. Before dismembering him, Dahmer snapped pictures of his body in seductive poses. When Dahmer attempted to dry Edward Smith’s skull in the oven, he unintentionally ruined it, causing it to explode. Masters claims that he later admitted to police that he felt “rotten” about Smith’s murder since he was unable to preserve anything from his body, which made it seem like a complete waste.
As he carried out more murders, Dahmer created rituals, experimented with chemical disposal techniques, and frequently consumed the flesh of his victims. Dahmer also tried performing rudimentary lobotomies: while his eleventh victim Errol Lindsey was still alive, he had a muriatic acid injection and a drill made into his head. During the treatment, Lindsey woke up and asked, “I have a headache; what time is it?,” defying Dahmer’s anticipation that she would become permanently obedient.Dahmer then choked him.
Sandra Smith, Dahmer’s neighbor, said that an Asian youngster was running in the street naked on May 27, 1991, and she phoned the police. The youngster was disoriented when the police arrived, so they took Dahmer’s—a white man living in a predominantly impoverished Black neighborhood—word for it that the boy was his 19-year-old lover. Unbeknownst to Dahmer, the 14-year-old child was actually the younger brother of the Laotian adolescent he had sexually assaulted three years prior.
Dahmer and the boy were taken home by the police. Obviously not wanting to become entangled in a homosexual home dispute, they merely glanced around before departing. Masters claims that Dahmer was told to “take care” of the youngster by the officer, who “peeked his head around in the bedroom but didn’t really take a good look,” before the officer departed. After they had left the area, Dahmer killed the youngster by injecting hydrochloric acid into his head. Tony Hughes, Dahmer’s twelfth victim, was buried, and his remains would have been discovered if the police had even performed a minimal search.
Before Dahmer was apprehended, he murdered four more men. Oliver Lacy, 24, was one of his final victims. Before dismembering the body, Dahmer had sex with Oliver Lacy’s body. He preserved Lacy’s skeleton in a freezer and his head and heart in his refrigerator.
The Arrest of Dahmer
On July 22, 1991, Dahmer was apprehended, putting a stop to his murderous rampage. Polaroid photos of Dahmer’s victims and body parts discovered in his refrigerator came to be intimately linked to his infamous killing spree.
When two Milwaukee police officers arrested Tracy Edwards, a 32-year-old Black man who was walking the streets with shackles hanging around his wrist, they were brought to Dahmer. They made the decision to look into the man’s allegations that he was drugged and restrained by a “weird dude.” When they got to Dahmer’s place, he graciously offered to grab the handcuff keys.
The knife Dahmer had threatened Edwards with, according to Edwards, was in the bedroom. Upon entering to verify the account, the officer saw Polaroid pictures of mutilated corpses scattered throughout. Masters claims that once Dahmer was brought down by the police, he whispered, “For what I did, I should be dead.”
Further investigations turned up a head in the fridge, three more in the freezer, and a long list of other horrifying finds, such as preserved skulls, jars filled with genitalia, and a gallery full of gory Polaroid pictures of his victims. Subsequently, Dahmer said he intended to construct a personal altar out of the skulls of his victims, complete with globe lights and incense sticks. According to Masters, he hoped the altar to be “A place where I could feel at home.”
Trial and Detention
January 1992 saw the start of Dahmer’s trial. Racial tensions were high because most of Dahmer’s victims were Black, thus stringent security measures were implemented, such as erecting an eight-foot bulletproof glass barrier to keep him away from the gallery. Even though the controversy caused by having only one Black member of the jury was eventually circumscribed and brief, it did not go away. Throughout the entire trial, Lionel Dahmer and his second wife were present.
Dahmer admitted to the deaths during a police interview, but he first entered a not guilty plea to all of the counts. Ultimately, he shifted his plea to guilty by reason of insanity. The graphic details of his actions were then presented by his defense as evidence that only the deranged could carry out such horrible deeds.
The prosecution’s claim that Dahmer knew full well that his actions were wrong but yet decided to carry them out was accepted by the jury. After almost ten hours of deliberation, they returned on February 15, 1992, and found him guilty on all counts but sane. He received sentences of 15 consecutive life terms in jail, plus an additional 16 years added in May.
Dahmer was initially segregated from the general public, but he seemed to have adapted well to prison life at the south-central Wisconsin Columbia Correctional Institution. Eventually, he persuaded the authorities to let him become more fully integrated with the other prisoners. His father sent him books and pictures that introduced him to Christianity, and the Columbia Correctional Institution gave him permission to be baptized by a local preacher.
Demise
On November 28, 1994, Christopher Scarver, a fellow prisoner, killed Dahmer.
As per his assignment to regular work tasks, Dahmer was put to work with two other convicted killers, namely Scarver and Jesse Anderson. When the guards came back after allowing them to do their work alone, they discovered that Scarver had severely beaten both men using a metal bar from the prison weight room. After almost an hour, Dahmer was declared dead. Days after his injuries, Anderson passed away.
Scarver, who was thought to be psychotic, allegedly told a prison guard immediately after the killings that “God told me to do it.” In 2015, Scarver discussed his motivations for killing Dahmer in an interview with the New York Post. In addition to Dahmer’s misdeeds, Scarver claimed to be troubled by his habit of fashioning severed limbs from prison food in order to agitate other prisoners.
Scarver claimed that after Dahmer and Anderson made fun of them while they were on duty, he confronted Dahmer about his transgressions and beat the two men to death. Additionally, he asserted that the murders were made possible by the jail guards’ silence. Oliver Lacy’s mother, Catherine Lacy, stated that she was left feeling unsatisfied by her son’s death: “The hurt is worse now, because he’s not suffering like we are.”
House of Jeffrey Dahmer
A group of Milwaukee businessmen raised more than $400,000 in 1996 after Dahmer’s death to buy the tools he used for his atrocities, such as handcuffs, blades, saws, and a refrigerator to keep body parts. In an attempt to disassociate the city from the atrocities of Dahmer’s deeds and the subsequent circus of media coverage surrounding his trial, they swiftly burned them.
It was revealed in August 2012, over twenty years after Dahmer passed away, that the childhood house in Bath, Ohio, where he carried out his first murder in 1978 and interred the remains of his victim, was up for sale. The mansion was taken off the market and is presumably still owned by singer Chris Butler as of 2022. Butler said that the property would make a fine home, as long as the buyer could “get past the horror factor.”
Pop Culture Illustrations
The Jeffrey Dahmer Story: An American Nightmare (1991) by Donald A. Davis and The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer (1993) by Brian Masters are two of the well-known books that have been written about Dahmer. In the 2002 film Dahmer, Jeremy Renner played Dahmer, while Bruce Davison played Dahmer’s father, Lionel. Based on a graphic novel by artist John “Derf” Backderf, who had been acquainted with Dahmer in high school, Ross Lynch starred in the film My Friend Dahmer (2017).
Real-life interviews with those connected to Dahmer’s cases were mixed with dramatized portrayals of Dahmer’s life in the 2012 documentary The Jeffery Dahmer Files, starring Andrew Swant. There have also been a number of additional documentaries made about Dahmer. Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story is a ten-part anthology series that Netflix aired in September of 2022. The show, which featured Evan Peters as Michael Dahmer and was co-created by Ryan Murphy of American Horror Story, focused on instances in which Dahmer was on the verge of being caught before being taken into custody, especially on how police ineptitude allowed him to continue his murderous rampage.
On September 18, 2023, Fox Nation will launch a four-part documentary series titled My Son Jeffrey: The Dahmer Family Tapes for streaming. It contains previously unreleased audio recordings of Dahmer, including calls he made while incarcerated to his father, Lionel. In one tape, Dahmer reportedly stated, “I was so wrapped up in what I was doing,” indicating that he fully intended to continue killing if he hadn’t been apprehended, according to Court TV. In other recordings, Lionel inquired about Dahmer’s experience with prayer to God, to which Dahmer stated that he had not, citing his discomfort with the practice.
