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Jeffrey Dahmer: Life and Crimes of the Terrible

Jeffrey Dahmer: Life and Crimes of the Terrible "Milwaukee Butcher"

March 29, 2024

Jeffrey Dahmer , also known as "the butcher of Milwaukee", was one of the serial killers that marked the criminal history of the United States.

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

Childhood and adolescence of 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 as very vital and extroverted, someone who loved animals and liked to play. After three changes of address, he became a withdrawn and extremely shy person. Although they gave him a dog that he loved with madness, it did not stop his process of progressive isolation of the world. To prevent him from going further, his father encouraged him to interact with other children, almost forcing him to do so, as he feared that little Jeffrey might develop a certain inferiority complex.


By age ten, the marriage of his parents began to fall apart little by little. It was not strange to see them arguing. Already in adolescence, when these kinds of events happened, J eff was leaving home and getting lost in the forest . I continued to feel great passion for animals, but I was more interested in how they were inside. He began to take a fancy to pick up dead animals he found run over on the road; he put them in a garbage bag and then took them to the backyard of his farm, where he dissected and deboned them.

An insane passion for violent sex

In the middle of the development of his sexuality, Jeffrey Dahmer was engaged in this type of practice, establishing an association between violence and sex that marked his behavior and his subsequent actions . He felt attracted to men, fantasized that he slept with them and then murdered them. This type of obsessive thoughts were, in the end, the only thing that caused sexual arousal. Dahmer was tormented by his recurrent fantasies of sex and death, so that, in an attempt to forget them, he began to drink. Similarly, he took refuge in the drink to escape the constant fights of his parents.


In high school, he was an educated student with teachers and fun with his classmates , so he earned the reputation as a class clown. He got good grades when he proposed and did his homework if the subject interested him. However, in recent years, he has been disengaging from his studies and has lost interest in fostering social relations, which are so important during a time as unstable as adolescence. He found the perfect substitute in his sexual fantasies, in which he gloated more and more, until he reached a point where he no longer satisfied merely thinking about them, but needed to carry them out.

Murders and crimes

It was right after finishing high school when Jeffrey started committing atrocious crimes.

First murder, an unprotected hitchhiker

When he graduated from high school, his parents divorced shortly: 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 returned home in his car after having 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 go, in a fit, D Ahmer hit him on the head with a dumbbell and then strangled him with it . In panic, he lowered the body to the basement. In the morning, he bought a hunting knife, opened his belly and masturbated on the viscera. After that, he tore up the body, put it in garbage bags and loaded them in his car. On the way to a nearby dump, he was intercepted by a police patrol. As luck would have it, they did not inspect the contents of the bags and only fines for speeding. Terrified, he returned home and stuffed the bags into a large drain pipe in the basement. When he returned two years later, he picked up the bones and crushed them with a large mallet. Then he scattered the remains through the brush that surrounded the house. The wristbands and watch worn by the victim were thrown into the river.

After this first murder, he was stumbling because of his addiction to alcohol: He tried to go to university but abandoned after suspending all his subjects ; He enlisted in the army, from which he was also expelled ahead of time.In an attempt to straighten up, she went to live with her grandmother in a town near Milwaukee. He became a man of faith, he stopped drinking and it seemed that he put an end to his sexual impulses ... Until one afternoon, when he was in the library, a young man approached him and left him a note in which he offered sexual favors in the sink. Apparently, that moment was decisive to arouse his voracious appetite for wanting to subject other men to his will. Since he knew that was not right, he stole a shop mannequin, which he used to masturbate. But this did not quench his insatiable thirst.

Second murder: deadly encounter in a hotel

After null attempts to curb his drives, one night in 1986, in a gay bar, he met Steven Toumi, with whom he went to a hotel to have sex. Already in the room, Dahmer threw four sleeping pills in the drink to make 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.

Before that scene, and without losing calm, went to buy a large suitcase with wheels, returned to the hotel and put the body in it. He took a taxi to the basement of his grandmother's house, where he could dismember it to his liking. The process was almost identical to the one he did with his first victim, although this time, deboned the corpse and kept the skull as a souvenir .

Descent into hell ... more and more brutal crimes

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

With his fourth victim (Richard Guerrero), he acted following the same procedure. Meanwhile, He left his grandmother's house and rented a flat alone, which accelerated the blood bath . This spiral almost ended in early 1989, when a thirteen-year-old boy whom he tried to seduce escaped from his apartment and alerted the police. For that fact, he served ten months in prison for sexual assault, but his terrible secret was not discovered. Three weeks after leaving prison, he returned to Milwaukee, where he began an orgy of blood that would last a year, well into 1990. Despite his background, nobody investigated him about the disappearances of young people that were happening in the city, up to a total of thirteen.

Jeffrey Dahmer I felt an urgent need to have sex with people whose will was nullified . To achieve this, being some of his victims still alive, he practiced cranial trepanations with a drill and then injected them with a mild acid in the brain with the intention of creating a kind of zombies to be able to control. Faced with the failure of his experiments, Jeff finished them off. In a last attempt to control them, he began to eat the bodies, as he confessed that they were becoming a permanent part of him. That also gave her sexual pleasure. Little by little the remains of corpses were piling up in their apartment but, despite the bad smells that permeated the building, the neighbors did not alert themselves.

The discovery of horror

It was not until July 1991 when he was arrested. Tracy Edwards, thirty-one years old, managed to leave half-drugged and naked from Dahmer's apartment, but managed to stop a patrol passing by. When they searched the apartment, they discovered over eighty polaroids that showed bodies at different times of dismemberment, a head in the refrigerator and human remains in the freezer; in addition to a canister of two hundred liters of capacity full of acid that the cannibal used to undo the human remains.

Jeffrey Dahmer pleaded guilty but claimed insanity . The state of Wisconsin does not apply the death penalty, so that, if declared mentally healthy, he would spend the rest of his life in prison; otherwise, I would do it in an institution for the mentally ill.

The judicial process

The defense argued that Dahmer suffered from necrophilia (A condition that also suffered another known murderer, Carl Tanzler), which exempted him from being legally responsible for their actions and, therefore, should be confined in a psychiatric hospital. When it was the turn of the prosecution, his argument was that the defendant had sex with the victims while they were alive, although unconscious (always using condoms, for more); besides, he maintained control over his impulses, since he committed the crimes only where he felt safe enough.

After the deliberation of a jury made up of non-expert people, it was concluded that, to be diagnosed as mentally ill, Jeffrey Dahmer had to behave as such all the time, including when he killed, which is precisely when he was considered to be in his right mind. 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 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 found his end violently, when another prisoner who also served a sentence for murder boarded him in the prison gym and beat him with a barbell until he killed him. For some, it was the death that someone like Dahmer deserved, but for many others, it meant the deprivation of citizens' right to have him purged for what he had done until the end of his days.


JEFFREY DAHMER - THE MILWAUKEE CANNIBAL | Serial Killer Files #35 (March 2024).


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