Jeffrey Dahmer

Biography On: Jeffrey Dahmer

Section I: Introduction:

Jeffrey Dahmer was one of the most well known serial killers ever. Dahmer was no ordinary serial killer. He was a killer, necropheliac, and a cannibal. The purpose of this report is to learn more about this serial killer.

Section II: Overview

* "Jeffrey Dahmer was born May 21, 1960, at Evangelical Hospital in Milwaukee, Wisconsin" (Blakey).

* "Jeffrey Dahmer was found beaten by fellow inmates on the morning of November 28, 1994, as was pronounced dead at 9:11 a.m." (Blakey).

* Jeffrey Dahmer given life imprisonment on 15 counts of murder committed in Wisconsin and one committed in Ohio, for which he was tried separately. "He was sentenced to fifteen consecutive life terms for a total of 957 years in prison." (Schwartz p. 44)

Section III: Early Age

Jeffrey Dahmer was a very shy and isolated at an early age. Dahmer had fantasies about killing men and having sex with their corpses. Despite these early tendencies during his childhood, Dahmer didn't fulfill these fantasies until after he graduated from high school in June 1978 (Schwartz p 33). Dahmer picked up a hitchhiker by the name of Steven Hicks, and eventually Hicks became Dahmer's first victim. Dahmer enrolled at Ohio State University, only to flunk out within one semester. Next, Dahmer joined the army at the end of 1978, but was discharged for alcoholism and went to live in Florida.

After returning to Ohio, Dahmer was then arrested in October of 1981 for drunken and disorderly conduct, so his father sent him to live with his grandmother in West Allis, Wisconsin. Dahmer had a couple of sexual legal incidents, then kept cool for

about four years. In 1987, Dahmer killed his second victim, Steven Toumi and went on a killing spree soon after (Schwartz).

* "Most of Dahmer's victims were homosexual, African-American men.

* Dahmer was actively killing from June 1978 to July 22, 1991" (Pringle).

Section III: Childhood

Dahmer was born on May 21, 1960, to Lionel and Joyce Dahmer. There were problems during Joyce's pregnancy with Jeffrey, but Jeffrey grew up as a normal, healthy child that showed no signs of mental problems. At age six, he suffered from a double hernia and needed surgery to correct the problem. After the surgery, Jeffrey seemed to be emotionally scarred by it. It seemed as if he had been exposed by this surgery and couldn't recover from it. When Dahmer entered the first grade, Lionel noticed Dahmer had become very shy and showed a general lack of self-confidence. Jeffrey became distant, in comparison to his outgoing self earlier in his life. At age 15, Dahmer would ride around with plastic bags collecting animal remains for his own personal cemetery. He would strip the flesh from the bodies of dead animals that

he had found. Dahmer had a fascination with stripping the flesh off dead animals. Dahmer had pets of his own, but had no means of hurting them. Dahmer soon became more isolated which soon brought him to fulfill his fantasies of having sex with dead people and creatures.

Section IV: Dahmer's Crimes

Dahmer seemed like a very disorganized killer. He seemed much like a particular killer. Dahmer wasn't very smart. He was below average intelligence, low or average birth status, was socially immature, and he seldom dated (Pringle). Dahmer hung out at gay bars and picked up homosexuals, particularly African-Americans. At the crime scenes, he left his victims dismembered. Dahmer would lead the victims back to his house, drug them, sexually assault the victims, and then dismember them. Dahmer would use acid to take away the skin from the skulls of the victims and then keep these skulls as trophies for his fantasies. Dahmer would also dismember the bodies of the victims and keep them in his apartment for safekeeping. When the police discovered Dahmer's apartment, they found, not only skulls kept as trophies, but also an entire industrial size bin full of human bodies. They also found a human head in the refrigerator of his apartment. When the police arrived at the scene of the

crime they smelled a very foul smell, which would be later learned to be the stench of the dead bodies that had been decaying in his apartment. Dahmer had built a shrine to himself to remind him of all the victims that he had killed.

Jeffery Dahmer was a local killer because all the murders that he committed were in Milwaukee, and just one fell in the state of Ohio. "It is rumored that Dahmer used a chainsaw to dismember his victims, but more valid arguments claim that he used a knife in his bathtub" (Pringle).

Section V: Caught and Dead

A couple of months after Dahmer had killed his last victim, the fourteen year-old boy, Konerak, two Milwaukee police officers were patrolling a very high crime scene near Marquette University and they would be blown away at their findings. At about

midnight, the two officers sat in their squad car and observed an African-American male with handcuffs on one of his wrists. The two police officers, thinking that this man had more than likely escaped from another police officer, approached the man

for questioning. The man questioned, Tracy Edwards, told of a "weird" man who had put cuffs on him and acted in a very bizarre manner. The two police officers hesitated, wanting to stay away from this homosexual affair, but proceeded to check

out the situation (Pringle).. Edwards led the officers to the Oxford apartments where a very calm and rational Dahmer would answer the door. The officers