The Milwaukee Cannibal Case Study

The Milwaukee Cannibal On the night of July 22, 1991, two Milwaukee police officers came across a young African-American man named Tracy Edwards. Edwards was stumbling outside near an apartment building with a handcuff on his wrist. When the officers questioned Edwards, he rambled on about a “weird dude” who had drugged and tied him up. The officers decided to investigate the “weird dude.” Edwards along with the two police officers arrived at Jeffrey Dahmer’s apartment asking for the key for the handcuff. Dahmer was unruffled by the police and the escapee, and went to retrieve the key. As Dahmer headed to the bedroom, Edwards told the police that was where the knife was that Dahmer and threatened him with earlier. An officer went into the
bedroom to locate the knife but saw something much worse. There were Polaroid pictures of mutilated bodies and body parts in a fridge. The officer looking at the pictures shouted to his partner to restrain Dahmer. Dahmer fought back intensely but his attempts to escape failed. He knew that it was over. After searching the apartment, officers found three heads in the freezer along with another one in the fridge. Upon further examination, preserved skulls, pictures of dismember bodies, and jars of his victims’ genitalia were found throughout the apartment. Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer was born to Lionel and Joyce Dahmer on May 21st, 1960. Dahmer was a pleasant little boy, filled with life and love. When asked about his son’s younger life and when he noticed a change in his son’s personality, Lionel told a story of a time when he was cleaning the underneath of their house because a civet had killed some small animals. Lionel pulled the small animal bones from under the house and he noticed that Dahmer loved the sounds the bones made being moved around. Dahmer would play and dig in the bones. “I can no longer view it simply as a childish episode, a passing fascination. This same sense of something dark and shadowy, of a malicious force growing in my son, now colors almost every memory,” Dahmer’s father revealed. Lionel noticed his little boy was becoming more and more closed off and tense. During high school, Dahmer had average grades and was involved in some extracurricular activities, such as, the school newspaper and the tennis team.
Dahmer was a loner and soon became an alcoholic. His parents had said that nothing seemed to matter to him. After graduating high school, Dahmer attended Ohio State University. But after a semester, he flunked out because of his excessive drinking. Once Lionel had heard about his son’s failure, he gave Dahmer an ultimatum. Dahmer had to join the army or get a job; he chose to join the army. Dahmer joined the army in 1979; but like his college experience, his alcoholism got him discharged early from the army. When he arrived back home, he temporarily moved in with his grandmother until he could find a job and an apartment of his own. Dahmer was arrested a few times because of drunkenness and disorderly conduct; he was put on probation for a
year.
When Dahmer was arrested after the two police officers found all the incriminating evidence in his apartment, he confessed his thirteen-year killing binge to Detective Patrick Kennedy. He told the detective that he had dreamed about killing men and then having sex with their bodies since he was fourteen years old. He confessed that his first kill was Steven Hicks, a hitchhiker, occured just a few months after he graduated high school. They had gotten a little drunk and had sex at Dahmer’s parents’ house. Once they were finished, Hicks wanted to leave but Dahmer did not like the thought of him leaving. Dahmer killed Hicks with a blow to the head with a barbell. To get rid of the body, he dismembered Hicks and placed the pieces into garbage bags and then buried them into the woods behind the house.
Detective Kennedy asked Dahmer about his second victim, but Dahmer only knew that he had picked Steven Toumi up in a gay bar and then headed to a hotel and proceeded to become very intoxicated. Dahmer stated that he didn’t know how he killed him but he stuffed him into a suitcase and took it to his grandmother’s basement where he had sex with the body and then threw the body into the garbage after dismembering it.
Sometime in May of 1990, Dahmer rented an apartment located at 924 North 25th Street, Apartment 213 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
During the fifteen months that he had lived at this apartment, Dahmer killed twelve men. He went into a killing craze between the months of May to July of 1991. Dahmer was killing about one man per week. Police later discovered that the men that had been killed lived “high-risk’ lifestyles and most of them were criminals that had committed very serious crimes. Dahmer would lure his soon to be victims in with his charming aura. Once the men were in the apartment, he would drug their drinks. After the men were drugged, Dahmer would strangle the men; sometimes with his bare hands or a leather strap. Dahmer wanted complete control of his victims. This was all about his pleasure. A few times, Dahmer had tried to zombie-fy some of the men. He would drill a hole in their skull and then inject muriatic acid into the brain. Most victims would die instantly but one lived in a zombie like state for a few days before dying. Dahmer also sometimes like to eat the flesh of his victims. He thought that they would come back to life inside of him if he ate them.
After capturing Jeffrey Dahmer, his trial began. The courtroom had maximum security and there had to be a barrier built that was made from bullet proof glass and metal. Dahmer tried to plea insanity but the jurors did not believe that an insane man could have done the things he did. Dahmer knew exactly what he was
doing. He had written an apology letter that was thirteen pages long and read it to the courtroom. He was sentenced to fifteen consecutive life terms; 957 years in prison.
Once in prison, Dahmer was separated from the other inmates for his safety. But being the smooth talker that he was, he convinced that authorities to let him have more interaction with the other prisoners. Dahmer was allowed to do a janitorial job with two other inmates. One was Jesse Anderson; a man who had killed his wife and blamed it on a black man, and the other was Christopher Scarver; a murderous schizophrenic black man that thought he was the son of God. About twenty minutes after the guards left the three inmates alone, they returned to see that Dahmer had been beaten to death. He had a fatal blow to the head. Anderson was also severely injured. Scarver was the main suspect and the weapon was thought to be a boom handle. Jeffrey Dahmer died on November 28th, 1994 at the Columbia Correctional Institute in Portage, Wisconsin.