Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer is an American serial killer!
Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer (May 21, 1960 – November 28, 1994) was an American serial killer who killed 17 boys and men between 1978 and 1991. All but one of the crimes were committed in Milwaukee from 1987 to 1991. Dahmer’s crimes were distinguished by extreme cruelty, he raped and ate the corpses of the victims. The court found Dahmer sane and sentenced him to 957 years in prison. In 1994, Dahmer was killed by a cellmate.
Childhood of Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer
Jeffrey Dahmer was born on May 21, 1960 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to Lionel and Joyce Dahmer. His parents married in August 1959, by the time Jeffrey was born, his father was finishing his studies at the university. The family later moved to Iowa, where Lionel received his PhD in chemistry from the University of Iowa in 1966. Then the second son David was born, and Lionel got a job in Akron (Ohio), in the suburbs of which the Damers settled.
At the age of six, Jeffrey underwent surgery to repair a bilateral inguinal hernia, after the operation he became more withdrawn and vulnerable. Lionel Dahmer later told a prison officer that Jeffrey was sexually abused by a neighbor at the age of eight, but Dahmer denied this. As a child, Jeffrey moved several times with his family, he did not have permanent friends. Quarrels often occurred between parents, Joyce was once forced to go to a psychiatric clinic.
When Dahmer was in high school, his parents divorced. Starting at the age of thirteen, Dahmer began to realize his homosexuality, and soon he had his first experience of homosexual caresses with a friend. At school, Dahmer was reclusive, often drank and was considered a local jester, although he played tennis, wrote for the school newspaper, and was a clarinetist in the orchestra.
While at school, Dahmer developed a craving for dead animals. He collected corpses or body parts and stored them at home in bottles of formaldehyde, which he took from his father, and set up an animal cemetery in the backyard. At the same time, he often imagined himself participating in scenes of same-sex sex, necrophilia and the dismemberment of Corpses.
First murder and military service
Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer (May 21, 1960 – November 28, 1994) was an American serial killer who killed 17 boys and men between 1978 and 1991. All but one of the crimes were committed in Milwaukee from 1987 to 1991. Dahmer’s crimes were distinguished by extreme cruelty, he raped and ate the corpses of the victims. The court found Dahmer sane and sentenced him to 957 years in prison. In 1994, Dahmer was killed by a cellmate.
In the same 1978, Lionel married a second time, his wife’s name was Shari. Dahmer entered the Ohio State University, but was expelled in the first semester for drunkenness and academic failure. In the spring of 1979, Dahmer signed a contract for three years of military service. He completed a one and a half month training course for a nurse in San Antonio and was sent to the American base in Baumholder (Germany). In 1981, he was fired early for drunkenness.
For a short time, Dahmer lived in Miami, Florida, then returned to Ohio. There, Dahmer found the decomposed body of Hicks, smashed the bones with a sledgehammer and threw them into a ravine. At his father’s insistence, Dahmer moved to live with his grandmother in Wisconsin. In subsequent years, he was arrested twice for indecent behavior (the second time for masturbation in the presence of two boys) and changed several jobs. In 1985, he took a full-time job at a chocolate factory.
Serial killings
On September 15, 1987, Dahmer killed his second victim, 24-year-old Stephen Twomey, in a hotel room at the Ambassador Hotel. Dahmer did not remember how the murder happened. He met Tuomi in a gay bar, they drank heavily, then rented a hotel room. In the morning, Dahmer found Tuomi’s corpse in bed next to him. He placed the body in a suitcase and took it by taxi to his grandmother’s house, where, after sexual manipulation, he put it in the basement. A week later, Dahmer dismembered the corpse and threw the remains in the trash.
Dahmer developed a tactic for finding victims. He met them in bars (often it was the Milwaukee 219 club) and offered to pose naked. When the victims came to his house, Dahmer drugged them, had sex, and then strangled them. Over time, Dahmer developed necrosadistic tendencies: he had sex with mutilated corpses and made fetishes from body parts. As a rule, representatives of sexual minorities became its victims. Dahmer wanted his lovers to be obedient to him like zombies. To this end, he experimented on them – he performed a primitive lobotomy, drilling holes in the skull with an electric drill and acid.
In the first months of 1988, Dahmer killed two more people at his grandmother’s house. September 25, 1988 Dahmer moves into an apartment on North 24th Street in Milwaukee. The next day, he brought a thirteen-year-old Laotian boy named Anukon Sintasomphon to his place, took photographs and, after caresses, gave him alcohol and a dose of sleeping pills. Despite the large dose, Sinthasomphon was able to escape and tell his parents about what had happened. In the morning, Dahmer was charged with sexual harassment. He was released on bail while awaiting trial.
The police opened the files and found that Dahmer had already been prosecuted twice for indecent behavior. Dahmer was examined by three psychiatrists who concluded that he was suffering from alcoholism and lacked the motivation to recover. At trial, Dahmer admitted that he had taken the photographs, but denied any sexual intercourse or intentional use of sleeping pills, and also stated that the boy seemed older than his age.
Prosecutor Gail Shelton demanded five years in prison, but the court sentenced Dahmer to only a year in a correctional facility (Dahmer could go to work, but spent nights in a cell) and five years of probation. Ten months later he was sent home. In February 1989, while under investigation, Dahmer killed black homosexual Anthony Sears.
On May 14, 1990, Dahmer settled in apartment number 213 at 924 North 24th Street. Before the end of the year, he killed four people, and in the first months of 1991, three more.
On May 27, 1991, fourteen-year-old Laotian Konerak Sintasomfon (by coincidence, brother of Anukon Sinthasomfon), whom Dahmer brought home the day before, was able to get out of the apartment. A naked and bloody drugged boy was discovered by two young black women who called the police.When the police arrived at the scene, Dahmer convinced them that there was a quarrel between two lovers and police intervention was not required. The police escorted Dahmer and Sinthasomphon back to the apartment and left.
At the same time, they felt an unpleasant smell emanating, as it later turned out, from the decomposing body of Tony Hughes, who was killed on May 24, but did not attach any importance to this. On the same day, Sinthasomphon was killed and dismembered. After Dahmer’s arrest, police officers John Balserzak and Joseph Gabrish, who returned Konerak to Dahmer, were fired from service, but later reinstated. In 2005, Balserzak was elected president of the Milwaukee Police Association.
Dahmer committed the last murders with a frequency of about once a week: June 30, July 5, 15 and 19. His last, seventeenth, victim was twenty-five-year-old Joseph Breidhoft. On July 15, Dahmer was fired from the chocolate factory for absenteeism.
Arrest and trial
July 22, 1991 Dahmer invited Tracy Edwards to his place. When Dahmer tried to handcuff him, Edwards broke free and ran outside with the handcuffs dangling from his left hand. He attracted the attention of two policemen who decided to go up to Dahmer. In the apartment, the police found photographs of dismembered corpses and fragments of human bodies.
In the toilet, Dahmer kept a pot with hands and a penis, two skulls, containers with alcohol, chloroform and formalin, jars with male genital organs. Skulls and hands were found in the sideboard, in the bedside table, in boxes. A human skeleton, scalp and genitals were found in the closet. In a 260-liter barrel of acid, Dahmer held three human torsos.
In total, Dahmer confessed to seventeen murders, including that of Hicks in 1978. On July 25, 1991, Dahmer was charged with four premeditated murders and bail was set at $1 million. On August 6, eight more murder charges were added and bail was raised to $5 million. Finally, on August 22, the number of charges rose to fifteen. There was not enough evidence to charge him with yet another murder in Milwaukee, and Hicks’ murder trial was to take place later in Ohio at the scene of the crime.
The process began on January 22, 1992. During the court hearings, increased security measures were taken: the use of metal detectors, sniffer dogs to search for explosives, Dahmer himself was behind bulletproof glass. Dahmer’s lawyer was Gerald Boyle, who defended Dahmer in the case of harassment against Anukon Sinthasomphon. Of the 100 seats in the courtroom, 23 were reserved for journalists, 34 for family members of Dahmer’s victims and 43 for spectators.
The defense tactic was that Dahmer committed all the murders for which he is accused, but was mentally ill and therefore could not be held responsible for them. During the trial, Boyle detailed the murders and sexual perversions, seeking to convince the jury that they could not have been committed by a healthy person. Both the prosecution and defense psychiatrists agreed that Dahmer suffered from necrophilia, but disagreed on whether necrophilia could be grounds for exoneration.
Prosecutor McCann during the process proved that Dahmer was aware of the illegality of his actions, could control his actions both in everyday life and when committing murders, and the murders themselves were pre-planned. On February 15, 1992, after a five-hour deliberation, the jury found Dahmer sane and guilty on all fifteen counts and sentenced him to 957 (nine hundred and fifty-seven) years in prison (there is no death penalty in Wisconsin). In his last speech, Dahmer said that he deeply repents and asks for death, not indulgence.
Dahmer’s trial became the most expensive trial in Milwaukee history and attracted the widest media attention; This was the first time a serial killer trial was televised. Much attention was paid to social aspects. Thus, the incident with Konerak Sintasomfon was considered by many as a manifestation of racist and homophobic sentiments in the police: the police preferred to believe the white Dahmer in a suspicious situation,and not two black women and a Laotian, and did not intervene in what they thought was a quarrel between two homosexuals. In addition, most of Dahmer’s victims were colored (among them eleven blacks) and homo- or bisexual, and the police did not make any efforts to investigate them for a long time.
The trial was also an example of refuting the defense’s argument about the insanity of a serial killer: it was shown that the cruelty or savagery of the crimes alone was not enough to declare the accused of serial murders or sexual crimes insane. Some commentators have said that the Dahmer trial marked the end of insanity waivers: firstly, the jury’s verdict set the bar too high, and secondly, many media outlets presented the insanity argument as a hole in the law that allows maniacs to avoid prison.
Conclusion and death
In 1993, the building where Dahmer’s apartment was located was demolished. In 1993, Dahmer, in a television interview with his father, expressed regret for causing mental anguish to the relatives of the victims. The following year, Lionel Dahmer released the biographical book A Father’s Story. In May 1994, Dahmer was being treated for suicidal thoughts. On July 3, 1994, during a prison church service, Jeffrey Dahmer was attacked by a Cuban prisoner. He tried to cut his throat with a razor blade fixed in the handle of a toothbrush. Dahmer received only superficial wounds.
On November 28, 1994, Dahmer was beaten to death by prisoner Christopher Scarver, who was serving time for robbery and murder. Dahmer, Scarver, and fellow inmate Jess Anderson were cleaning the showers. The prisoners were left unattended for 20 minutes, during which time Scarver inflicted fatal injuries on Dahmer and Andersen. Dahmer, who had a fractured skull, died on the way to the hospital, Andersen died two days later in the hospital. The murder weapon was, according to various sources, a metal bar or a mop handle, it was also believed that Scarver beat Dahmer’s head against the wall.
When Scarver returned to the cell and the guard asked him why it wasn’t working, Scarver replied, “God told me to do it. You’ll hear about it on the six o’clock news. Jess Anderson and Jeffrey Dahmer are dead.” Previously, Scarver tried to feign insanity and said he heard the voice of God. Racism is often cited as a possible motive for the murder: Scarver, an African American, showed hatred of whites, most of Dahmer’s victims were African Americans, and Anderson tried to blame the murder of his wife, for which he was serving time, on two blacks.
Dahmer’s body was kept in a refrigerator for about a year, in September 1995, was cremated. Dahmer’s father did not give permission for the use of his son’s brain for scientific purposes. The ashes left after Dahmer’s cremation were divided into two equal parts – one half went to Dahmer’s own mother, the other half was received by the father and stepmother.
At the request of the relatives of eleven victims of Dahmer, his property was distributed among them. In 1996, Thomas Jacobson, the lawyer representing the victims, announced plans to hold an auction for the sale of Dahmer’s belongings, including a refrigerator and murder weapons. Estimated revenue was to be one million dollars. This news caused outrage in the city. The Milwaukee Civic Pride Initiative Group was formed and raised $407,225 to buy pre-auction items and destroy them. After most of the families represented by Jacobson agreed to the deal, the items were ransomed and burned.
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