Jeffrey Dahmer

What the record shows

Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer, known as the Milwaukee Cannibal, murdered 17 men and boys in Ohio and Wisconsin between 1978 and 1991 and was convicted of 16 of the killings. After he pleaded guilty but insane to 15 Wisconsin murders, a Milwaukee County jury found him sane on every count in February 1992 and he received 15 consecutive life terms; in May 1992 he pleaded guilty in Ohio to a 16th murder and received another life term. He was beaten to death by a fellow inmate at Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin, on November 28, 1994.

According to the Wikipedia article, the first killing took place on June 18, 1978, three weeks after Dahmer's high school graduation, when he picked up an 18-year-old hitchhiker, Steven Hicks, and killed him at his family's home in Bath Township, Ohio. The second murder, of Steven Tuomi in a Milwaukee hotel room, came nine years later in 1987. Three further victims were killed at his grandmother's house in West Allis and twelve at the Oxford Apartments on North 25th Street in Milwaukee, where he moved in 1990. He met his victims, aged 14 to 32, at bars, malls and bus stops, offered them money to pose for photographs, and drugged and strangled them. In January 1989 he had pleaded guilty to second-degree sexual assault of a 13-year-old boy and served a work-release term followed by probation.

On May 27, 1991, Milwaukee police officers found 14-year-old Konerak Sinthasomphone, the older brother of the 1989 case's victim, naked and disoriented outside Dahmer's building. Dahmer told them the boy was his adult boyfriend, and the officers returned him to the apartment, where he was killed that day. Wikipedia, citing the federal district court's opinion in Estate of Sinthasomphone v. City of Milwaukee, notes that the family's civil claims against the city and officers were dismissed.

The killings ended on July 22, 1991, when Tracy Edwards, who had been handcuffed in the apartment, escaped and flagged down two patrol officers. They searched the apartment, found evidence of the murders and arrested Dahmer, who confessed to 17 killings over more than 60 hours of interviews, according to Wikipedia. He was charged with four counts of first-degree murder on July 25, 1991, and eleven more by August 22. UPI reported that Summit County prosecutors charged him in September 1991 with aggravated murder in the Hicks case.

Dahmer pleaded guilty but insane to the 15 Wisconsin counts on January 13, 1992, so the trial that began January 30 before Judge Laurence C. Gram Jr. concerned only his sanity. On February 15, 1992, the jury found him sane on each count, with two of twelve jurors dissenting. On February 17 Gram imposed mandatory life plus ten years on the first two counts and consecutive life terms on the other thirteen; Wisconsin has no death penalty. UPI and the Deseret News quoted Dahmer telling the court, "I hope that God can forgive me." On May 1, 1992, in Summit County Common Pleas Court in Akron, he pleaded guilty to the aggravated murder of Steven Hicks and was sentenced to life without parole, consecutive to the Wisconsin terms, UPI reported.

Dahmer was held at Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, where UPI reported in July 1992 that he was in administrative confinement with a daily cleaning detail. On November 28, 1994, while cleaning a bathroom on a work detail, he was beaten by inmate Christopher Scarver, 25, and died on the way to hospital, UPI reported; inmate Jesse Anderson, attacked at the same time, died two days later. Scarver received two additional life terms in May 1995. In June 1995 a Wisconsin Department of Corrections panel found that Scarver had acted alone after a lapse in supervision, and four staff members were suspended, the Spokesman-Review reported.

The Oxford Apartments were demolished in November 1992, and a civic group bought and destroyed Dahmer's possessions. His remains were cremated in 1995. Dahmer was born in Milwaukee on May 21, 1960, and grew up in Bath Township, Ohio. He briefly attended Ohio State University, served in the Army in West Germany, and later lived with his grandmother in West Allis before renting the Milwaukee apartment.