Jeffrey Dahmer: Life And Crimes Of The Terrible “Milwaukee Butcher”
Jeffrey Dahmer also known as “the Butcher of Milwaukee,” was one of the serial killers who marked the criminal history of the United States.
Together with other infamous criminals such as Ed Gein, Charles Manson, Dennis Rader, Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy, among others, he forms what we could call “the pantheon of monsters.”
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 outgoing, 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 After three changes of address, he became a withdrawn and extremely shy person.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 dearly, this did not stop his process of progressive isolation from the world. To prevent him from going further, his father encouraged him to interact with other children, almost forcing him to do so, since he feared that little Jeffrey might develop an inferiority complex.
Around the age of ten, his parents’ marriage slowly began to fall apart. It wasn’t strange to see them arguing. Already in adolescence, when these types of events happened, J eff left home and got lost in the forest He continued to have a great passion for animals, but he was more interested in what they were like on the inside. He began to get into picking up dead animals that he found run over on the road; He would put them in a garbage bag and then take them to the backyard of his farm, where he would dissect and bone them.
An unhealthy penchant for violent sex
At the height of his sexual development, Jeffrey Dahmer was dedicated to this type of practice, establishing an association between violence and sex that marked their behavior and subsequent actions He was attracted to men, fantasized that he slept with them and then murdered them. These types 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 drinking. Likewise, he took refuge in drink to escape the constant fights of his parents.
In high school, He was a polite student with his teachers and fun with his classmates , for which he gained fame as a class clown. He got good grades when he wanted to and did his homework if the subject interested him. However, in recent years, he became disengaged from his studies and lost interest in fostering social relationships, so key during a time as unstable as adolescence. He found the perfect substitute in his sexual fantasies, in which he reveled more and more, until there came a point where he was no longer satisfied with just thinking about them, but he needed to carry them out.
It was just after finishing high school that Jeffrey began committing heinous crimes.
First murder, of an unprotected hitchhiker
When he graduated from high school, his parents divorced shortly after: Lionel Dahmer rented a room in a nearby motel and his mother left for Wisconsin with her youngest son, David, leaving Jeff alone at home. That summer of 1978, he committed the first murder. He was returning 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 rush, d ahmer hit him on the head with a dumbbell and then strangled him with it Panicked, she took the body down to the basement. In the morning, she bought a hunting knife, cut open his belly and masturbated over the viscera. After that, she dismembered the body, put it in garbage bags, and loaded them into her car. On his way to a nearby garbage dump, he was intercepted by a police patrol. 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 drain pipe in the basement. When he returned two years later, he took the bones and crushed them with a large mallet. He then scattered the remains in the brush surrounding the house. The bracelets and watch that the victim was wearing were thrown into the river.
After this first murder, he was stumbling around due to his alcohol addiction: He tried to go to university but dropped out after failing all his subjects ; He enlisted in the army, from which he too was expelled early. In an attempt to straighten 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 impulses… Until one afternoon, while in the library, a young man approached him and left him a note in which he offered sexual favors in the library. sink. Apparently, that moment was decisive in awakening his voracious appetite for wanting to subject other men to his will. Since he knew that this was not correct, he stole a mannequin from a store, which he used to masturbate. But this did not quench his insatiable thirst.
After no attempts to stop her impulses, one night in 1986, in a gay bar, she met Steven Toumi, with whom she went to a hotel to have sex. Already in the room, Dahmer put four sleeping pills in his drink to render him unconscious Although he always claimed not to remember what happened, when Jeff woke up, he found Toumi’s corpse with her head out of the bed, her arms full of bruises and several broken ribs.
Faced with that scene, and without losing his calm, he went to buy a large suitcase with wheels, returned to the hotel and put the body in it. He went by taxi to the basement of his grandmother’s house, where he could dismember him to his heart’s content. The process was almost identical to the one he carried out with his first victim, although this time, He boned the corpse and kept the skull as a souvenir
Descent into hell… more and more brutal crimes
From that moment on, Jeffrey Dahmer finally gave in to his impulses : I would return to frequenting clubs in search of men to conquer and dismember them. After drugging and strangling James Doxtator (January 1988), she hid her victim’s body for a week and committed acts of necrophilia on him. Once the decomposition process accelerated and the bad smell was evident, she dismembered it.
With his fourth victim (Richard Guerrero), he acted following the same procedure. Meanwhile, He left his grandmother’s house and rented an apartment alone, which accelerated the bloodbath This spiral almost ended in early 1989, when a thirteen-year-old boy he tried to seduce escaped from his apartment and alerted the police. For that fact, he served ten months of sentence 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 whole year, well into 1990. Despite his background, 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 an urgent need to have sex with people whose will was nullified To achieve this, while some of his victims were still alive, he performed cranial trepanations with a drill and then injected a mild acid into their brains with the aim of creating a type of zombies whom 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. That also gave him sexual pleasure. Little by little the remains of corpses were piling up in his apartment but, despite the bad odors that permeated the building, the neighbors were not alerted.
It was not until July 1991 when he was arrested. Thirty-one-year-old Tracy Edwards managed to leave Dahmer’s apartment half-drugged and naked, but he managed to stop a patrol car that was passing by. When they searched the apartment, they discovered more than eighty polaroids that showed bodies in different moments 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 break up human remains.
Jeffrey Dahmer pleaded guilty but pleaded insanity The state of Wisconsin does not apply the death penalty, so if he was declared mentally healthy, he would spend the rest of his life in prison; Otherwise, he would do it in a mental institution.
The judicial process
The defense maintained that Dahmer suffered from necrophilia (a condition that another well-known murderer, Carl Tanzler, also suffered from), which exempted him from being legally responsible for his actions and, therefore, he had to be confined in a psychiatric hospital. When it was the prosecution’s turn, his argument was that the accused had had sex with the victims while they were alive, although unconscious (always using a condom, to be exact); In addition, he maintained control over his impulses, since he committed crimes only where he felt safe enough.
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 killed, which is precisely when he was considered to be sane. He was eventually found guilty of fifteen murders and sentenced to fifteen life sentences, a total of 937 years in prison
Prison life and death
He was sent to prison in Columbia, Wisconsin, where he returned to the church to atone for his sins. He found an explanation for what had happened, and it was that the Devil himself had possessed him During his short stay, he was visited by the sister of one of the dead young men and gave several interviews to the media to recount his experience, some of which his father was present.
In November 1994 he met his end violently, when another prisoner who was also serving a sentence for murder accosted him in the prison gym and beat him with a weight bar until he died. For some, it was the death that someone like Dahmer deserved, but for many others, it meant the deprivation of the citizens’ right to have him purged for what he had done until the end of his days.
