Jeffrey Dahmer: life and crimes of the terrible - Butcher of Milwaukee

A serial killer who lured homosexuals to kill and rape them mercilessly

Jeffrey Dahmeralso known as "the Milwaukee Butcher", was one of the serial killers who marked the criminal history of the United States.

Along with other notorious criminals such as Ed Gein, Charles Manson, Dennis Rader, Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gacy, among others, he forms what we could call "the pantheon of monsters".

Jeffrey Dahmer's childhood and adolescence

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 vital and outgoing, someone who loved animals and liked to play. After three changes of residence, he became a withdrawn and extremely shy person. Although he was given a dog that he loved dearly, this did not stop his progressive isolation from the world. To prevent it from going any further, his father encouraged him to socialize with 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 gradually began to fall apart. It was not uncommon to see them arguing. Even as a teenager, when these kinds of events happened, Jeff would leave home and get lost in the woods. He continued to have a great passion for animals, but was more interested in what they were like on the inside. He became fond of picking up dead animals he found roadkill; he would put them in a garbage bag and then take them to the backyard of his farm, where he would dissect and debone them.

An unhealthy penchant for violent sex

In the midst of his developing sexuality, Jeffrey Dahmer engaged in such practices, establishing an association between violence and sex that marked his behavior and his subsequent actions.. He was attracted to men, fantasized about sleeping with them and then murdering them. These kinds of obsessive thoughts were, in the end, the only thing that caused him sexual arousal. Dahmer was tormented by his recurring fantasies of sex and death, so, in an attempt to forget them, he began to drink. Similarly, he turned to drink to escape his parents' constant fighting.

In high school, he was a polite student with his teachers and fun with his classmates. He became known as the class clown. He got good grades when he put his mind to it and did his homework if the subject interested him. However, in his later years, he became increasingly disengaged from his studies and lost interest in fostering social relationships, so key during such an unstable time as adolescence. He found the perfect substitute in his sexual fantasies, which he indulged in more and more, until he reached a point where he was no longer satisfied just thinking about them, but needed to act on them.

Murders and crimes

It was just after finishing his high school studies when Jeffrey started committing heinous crimes.

First murder, to an unprotected hitchhiker

When he graduated from high school, his parents divorced soon after: Lionel Dahmer rented a room in a nearby motel and the mother went to Wisconsin with her youngest son, David, leaving Jeff home alone. That summer of 1978, he committed his first murder. He was driving home from a few beers at a bar and picked 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 huff, Dahmer hit him over the head with a dumbbell and then strangled him with it. In a panic, he took the body down to the basement. In the morning, he bought a hunting knife, cut open its belly and masturbated over the viscera. After that, he tore the body apart, stuffed it into garbage bags and loaded them into his car. On his way to a nearby garbage dump, he was intercepted by a police patrol car. As luck would have it, they did not inspect the contents of the bags and only fined him for speeding. Terrified, he returned home and stuffed the bags into a large drainpipe in the basement. When he returned two years later, he took the bones and crushed them with a large sledgehammer. He then scattered the remains in the brush surrounding the house. The bracelets and watch worn by the victim were thrown into the river.

After this first murder, he was floundering because of his addiction to alcohol: he tried to go to university but dropped out after failing all his subjects; he joined the army; he joined the army and went to college. He enlisted in the army, from which he was also expelled prematurely. 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 in the library, he was approached by a young man who left him a note offering him sexual favors in the lavatory. 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 wrong, she stole a mannequin from a store, which she used to masturbate. But this did not quench his unquenchable thirst.

Second murder: deadly encounter in a hotel

After no attempts to curb his urges, one night in 1986, in a gay bar, he met Steven Toumi, with whom he went to a hotel to have sex. Once in the room, Dahmer poured four sleeping pills in his drink to knock him unconscious.. Although he always said he did not 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 composure, he went to buy a large suitcase with wheels, returned to the hotel and put the body in it. He took a cab to the basement of his grandmother's house, where he could dismember it at will. The process was almost identical to the one he carried out with his first victim, although this time, he deboned the corpse and kept the skull as a souvenir.

Descent into hell... more and more brutal crimes

From that point on, Jeffrey Dahmer finally gave in to his impulses.He went back to frequenting the clubs in search of men to conquer and dismember 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 him. Once the decomposition process accelerated and the foul odor was evident, he dismembered him.

With his fourth victim (Richard Guerrero), he followed the same procedure. In the meantime, he left his grandmother's house and rented an apartment on his own, which accelerated the bloodbath. This spiral almost ended at the beginning of 1989, when a thirteen-year-old boy he tried to seduce escaped from his apartment and alerted the police. For that event, he served ten months for sexual assault, but his terrible secret was not discovered. Three weeks after his release from prison, he returned to Milwaukee, where he began an orgy of bloodshed that would last a full year, 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 a compelling need to have sex with people whose will was overridden. To achieve this, while some of his victims were still alive, he would perform cranial trepanations with a drill 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 finished them off. In a last attempt to control them, he began to eat the bodies, as he confessed to feeling that they became a permanent part of him. This also gave him sexual pleasure. Gradually the remains of corpses piled up in his apartment but, despite the foul odors permeating the building, the neighbors were not alerted.

The discovery of the 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 half-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 pleaded guilty but pleaded insanity. The state of Wisconsin does not apply the death penalty, so if he was found mentally sane, he would spend the rest of his life in prison; otherwise, he would spend the rest of his life in an institution for the mentally ill.

The judicial process

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

After deliberation by a jury of non-experts, it was concluded that, to be diagnosed as mentally ill, Jeffrey Dahmer had to behave as such at all times, including when he was killing, which is precisely when he was considered to be in his right mind. He was eventually 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 Columbia (Wisconsin) prison, where he returned to the church to atone for his sins. He found an explanation for what had happened, and that was 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 relate his experience, in some of which his father was present.

In November 1994, he met his end violently, when another inmate also serving time for murder accosted him in the prison gym and beat him to death with a weight bar. For some, it was the death someone like Dahmer deserved, but for many others, it meant the disenfranchisement of citizens to have him purge for what he had done until the end of his days.