Jeffrey Dahmer , also known as “the Milwaukee Butcher”, was one of the serial killers who marked the criminal history of the United States.

Together with other criminals as notorious as Ed Gein, Charles Manson, Dennis Rader, Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gacy, among others, it forms what we could call “the pantheon of monsters”.

Childhood and Adolescence by Jeffrey Dahmer

Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer was born on May 21, 1960 in Milwaukee, where he was raised in a middle-class family . As a child, he was characterized by being very lively and outgoing, someone who loved animals and liked to play. After three changes of address, he became extremely shy and withdrawn. Although he was given a dog that he loved madly, this did not stop his process of progressive isolation from the world. To prevent him from going any further, his father encouraged him to relate to other children, almost forcing him to do so, as he feared that little Jeffrey might develop an inferiority complex.

Around the age of ten, his parents’ marriage slowly began to fall apart. It was not uncommon to see them arguing. As a teenager, when this kind of event happened, J eff would leave home and get lost in the woods . He still had a great passion for animals, but he was more interested in what they were like inside. He began to take a liking to collecting dead animals he found on the road; he would put them in a garbage bag and then take them to the backyard of his farm, where he would dissect and bone them.

An unhealthy penchant for violent sex

At the height of his sexuality, Jeffrey Dahmer was engaged in this type of practice, establishing an association between violence and sex that marked his conduct and later actions . He was attracted to men, fantasized that he slept with them and then killed them. These kinds of obsessive thoughts were, in the end, the only thing that caused her sexual excitement. Dahmer was tormented by his recurring fantasies of sex and death, so, in an attempt to forget them, he began to drink. Similarly, he took refuge in drinking to escape the constant fights of his parents.

In high school, was an educated student with teachers and fun with his peers , so he earned the reputation of a class clown. He got good grades when he wanted to and did his homework if he was interested in the subject. However, in recent years, he gradually disengaged from his studies and lost interest in fostering social relationships, which were so key during such an unstable time as adolescence. He found the perfect substitute in his sexual fantasies, in which he gloated more and more, until it reached a point where he was no longer satisfied just thinking about them, but needed to carry them out.

Murders and Crimes

It was right after he finished high school that Jeffrey started committing heinous crimes.

First murder, an unprotected hitchhiker

When he graduated from high school, his parents soon divorced: Lionel Dahmer rented a room at a nearby motel and the mother went to Wisconsin with her youngest son, David, leaving Jeff alone at home. That summer of 1978, he committed the first murder. He was driving home after drinking a few beers in a bar and picking up a young hitchhiker named Steven Hicks.

Dahmer invited him to his house to drink beer and smoke marijuana. When Hicks said he had to leave, in a fit, D ahmer hit him on the head with a dumbbell and then strangled him with it . Panicked, he lowered the body into the basement. In the morning, he bought a hunting knife, cut open his belly and masturbated over the viscera. After that, he chopped up the body, put it in garbage bags and loaded them into his car. On his way to a nearby dump, he was intercepted by a police car. As luck would have it, they did not inspect the contents of the bags and only gave him a speeding ticket. Terrified, he returned home and stuffed the bags into a large drainage pipe in the basement. When he came back two years later, he took the bones and smashed them with a big sledgehammer. He then scattered the remains in the undergrowth around the house. The bracelets and watch that the victim was wearing were thrown into the river.

After this first murder, he was stumbling around because of his alcohol addiction: he tried to go to university but dropped out after failing all his subjects ; he joined the army, from where he was also expelled early. In an attempt to straighten himself out, he went to live with his grandmother in a town near Milwaukee. He became a man of faith, gave up drinking and seemed to put an end to his sexual urges… Until one afternoon, while he was in the library, a young man approached him and left a note offering sexual favors in the bathroom. It seems that this moment was decisive in awakening her voracious appetite for wanting to subject other men to her will. Knowing that this was not right, she stole the mannequin from a store, which she used to masturbate. But this did not quench her insatiable thirst.

Second murder: deadly encounter in a hotel

After no attempt to stop her urges, one night in 1986, in a gay bar, she met Steven Toumi, with whom she went to a hotel to have sex. Once in his room, Dahmer poured four sleeping pills into his drink to make him unconscious . Although he always said he didn’t remember what happened, when Jeff woke up, he found Toumi’s body with his head out of bed, his arms full of bruises and several broken ribs.

Faced with that scene, and without losing his cool, he went to buy a big suitcase with wheels, returned to the hotel and put the body in it. He went by taxi to his grandmother’s basement, where he could chop him up at will. The process was almost identical to the one he carried out with his first victim, although this time, he boned the body and kept the skull as a souvenir .

Descent into hell… more and more brutal crimes

From that moment on, Jeffrey Dahmer finally gave in to his impulses : he would go back to the clubs in search of men to conquer and quarter them. After drugging and strangling James Doxtator (January 1988), he hid the body of his victim for a week and committed acts of necrophilia with it. Once the decomposition process accelerated and the bad smell was evident, he dismembered him.

With his fourth victim (Richard Guerrero), he acted according to the same procedure. In the meantime, left his grandmother’s house and rented a flat on his own, which accelerated the bloodbath . This spiral almost ended at the beginning of 1989, when a thirteen-year-old boy whom she tried to seduce escaped from her apartment and alerted the police. For that, he served ten months for sexual assault, but his terrible secret remained undiscovered. Three weeks after his release from prison, he returned to Milwaukee, where he began a year-long blood orgy well into 1990. Despite his record, no one investigated him for the disappearances of young people that were occurring in the city, up to a total of thirteen.

Jeffrey Dahmer felt an urgent need to have sex with people whose will was overruled . To achieve this, while some of his victims were still alive, he would drill into their heads and then inject a mild acid into their brains in order to create a kind of zombie that he could control. When his experiments failed, Jeff would finish them off. In a final attempt to control them, he began eating the bodies, as he confessed to feeling that they became a permanent part of him. This, too, gave him sexual pleasure. Little by little, the remains of the bodies began to pile up in his apartment, but despite the bad odors that permeated the building, the neighbors were not alerted.

The discovery of horror

It was not until July 1991 that he was arrested. Thirty-one year old Tracy Edwards managed to get out of Dahmer’s apartment half drugged and naked, but managed to stop a passing patrol car. When they searched the apartment, they discovered more than eighty Polaroids showing bodies at different times of dismemberment, a head in the refrigerator and human remains in the freezer; in addition to a two hundred liter drum full of acid that the cannibal used to dispose of the human remains.

Jeffrey Dahmer pled guilty but pleaded insanity . The state of Wisconsin does not apply the death penalty, so if he was declared mentally healthy, he would spend the rest of his life in prison; otherwise, he would be in a mental institution.

The judicial process

The defense argued that Dahmer suffered from necrophilia (a condition also suffered by another well-known murderer, Carl Tanzler), which exempted him from being legally responsible for his actions and, therefore, he should be confined to a psychiatric facility. When it was the prosecution’s turn, their argument was that the accused had had sex with the victims while they were still alive, albeit unconscious (always using a condom, for more signs); in addition, he maintained control over his impulses, since he committed the crimes only where he felt safe enough.

After deliberation by a jury of non-experts, it was concluded that, in order to be diagnosed as mentally ill, Jeffrey Dahmer had to behave as such all the time, including when he was killing, which is precisely when he was considered to be on his senses. He was finally found guilty of fifteen murders and sentenced to fifteen life sentences, a total of 937 years in prison .

Life in prison and death

He was sent to the prison in Columbia, Wisconsin, where he returned to the church to atone for his sins. He found an explanation for what had happened, and that is that the Devil himself had possessed him . During his short stay, he was visited by the sister of one of the dead youths and gave several interviews to the media to tell about his experience, in some of which his father was present.

In November 1994, he met his end violently when another prisoner who was also serving a murder sentence accosted him in the prison gymnasium and beat him to death with a barbell. For some, it was the death that someone like Dahmer deserved, but for many others, it was the deprivation of the right of citizens to have him purge for what he had done until the end of his days.