The Crimes of Jeffery Dahmer: A Mini-Essay

     In June of 1978, Jeffrey Dahmer, a troubled and introverted teenager with a history of alcohol abuse, performed his first murder when he killed Steven Hicks, an eighteen-year-old hitchhiker Dahmer had brought to his parents’ home in a semi-rural area of Bath, Ohio.[1] With his parents out of town, Dahmer engaged in sexual acts with Hicks and, when the young traveler decided to leave, the jilted Dahmer struck him upside the head with a barbell, strangled him to death, and used a bowie knife to dismember the body and bury the parts – wrapped in plastic bags – in the wooded area surrounding the house.[2] Over the proceeding thirteen years, Dahmer murdered an additional seventeen men, many of whom he had picked up outside of adult bookstores and gay bars and lured back to his Oxford Apartment Complex with the promise of paying them for nude photograph sessions.[3] Once the men arrived at his apartment, Dahmer drugged and killed them (some by drilling holes into their skulls and injecting muriatic acid into their brains), performed necrophilia on their bodies, dissected them, and ingested the portions of their corpses that he did not preserve as trophies.[4] In July of 1991, Dahmer’s attempts to make the thirty-two-year-old Tracy Edwards his next victim failed as, during the middle of the shoot, the handcuffed Edwards fled Dahmer’s apartment and alerted the police.[5] A police investigation later that day revealed a charnel house masked by the façade of an immaculately cleaned homestead: pictures of victims in erotic poses and differing states of dismemberment, human remains in varying degrees of decomposition concealed in the closet, heads and other body parts preserved in the refrigerator and freezer, and a barrel filled with mutilated limbs.[6] Although Dahmer was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and schizotypal personality disorder, he was labeled sane enough to stand trial and, in 1992, he was sentenced to a combined term of 957 years and incarcerated in the Columbia Correctional Institute in Portage, Wisconsin, where he was attacked and killed two years later by a fellow inmate while performing janitorial services.[7] 

Works Referenced

Ferllini, Roxana. Silent Witness: How Forensic Anthropology is Used to Solve the World’s Toughest Crimes. Buffalo, NY: Firefly Books, 2002.

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[1] Ferllini, 86-87.

[2] Ferllini, 86.

[3] Ferllini, 66-67.

[4] Ferllini, 66.

[5] Ferllini, 66.

[6] Ferllini, 67.

[7] Ferllini, 67.