How They Caught Jeffrey Dahmer E-Book

Dylan Frost

• Herausgeber: epubli
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 184

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Jeffrey Dahmer is one of the most infamous and notorious serial killers in history. Dahmer had academic potential, but was a prolific killer who was into necrophilia and cannibalism. How was this awful man finally captured? How They Caught Jeffrey Dahmer offers a detailed account of the fateful night when it all went wrong for Jeffrey Dahmer...

Leseprobe

How They CaughtJeffrey Dahmer

Dylan Frost© Copyright 2025 Dylan Frost

-

ContentsWho was Jeffrey Dahmer?How They Caught Jeffrey Dahmer Part 1How They Caught Jeffrey Dahmer Part 2How They Caught Jeffrey Dahmer Part 3What Happened to Jeffrey Dahmer Afterwards? Photo CreditWHO WAS JEFFREY DAHMER?Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1960. He was an outcast from an early age although he was always quite intelligent. Dahmer could never seem to find any direction in his life though and eventually succumbed to the dark demons which resided within him. Dahmer always seemed to have a morbid fascination with the science of death and decomposition from an early age. This would escalate into necrophilia and even cannibalism. Dahmer became a heavy drinker at an unusually young age and would take alcohol to school with him to secretly drink. His heavy drinking made regular employment a constant struggle for Dahmer and greatly affected his chances of a good education. Jeffrey Dahmer was smart enough to have good academic potential but he was never able to take advantage of this. Dahmer was gay and become increasingly overcome with fantasies where he could dominate a male lover. Dahmer's ultimate fantasy was to exert his power over someone who couldn't move or was dead. Tragically, he would make these fantasies a grim reality in his life. Dahmer murdered someone for the first time in 1978 when he was just eighteen. Circumstances had left Dahmer living alone for a time as his mother had moved out and his father was in a motel. Dahmer picked up a young hitchhiker and took him home for a drink. When the hitchhiker was distracted, Dahmer hit him twice with a dumbbell and then throttled him with the weight. He dissected the body and buried it. Later he dug up the remains and used acid to dispose of the flesh. He crushed the bones with a hammer so they would easy to dispose of. Dahmer was more precise and careful when it came to disposing of bodies than your average serial killer. He had an aptitude for science - something which obviously helped in his grisly stock-in-trade. As his grasp on reality (never very firm to begin with) started to frazzle and evaporate though, Dahmer would become less studious at removing traces of his crimes. He seemed to develop a particular fascination with the skulls of his victims and would keep them as if they were trophies he had won. Dahmer's father paid for him to go university but he dropped out after a few months and ended up joining the armed forces. He served as a combat medic in 2nd Battalion, 68th Armored Regiment, 8th Infantry Division, and spent some time in what was then West Germany. Two soldiers later claimed that Dahmer had drugged and raped them during his service. After his discharge from the army, Dahmer worked in a food outlet for a time in Florida and then ended up living with his grandmother in West Allis, Wisconsin. It was hoped that his grandmother might be a good influence on Dahmer but it was in these years that his dark demons took hold again and set him on course to become one of the most infamous serial killers in American criminal history.Dahmer was arrested for indecent exposure around this time and also began to investigate the gay scene in the area. He became aware that it was relatively easy to pick up young men and as he was living with just his grandmother he had a relative sort of privacy at home. Dahmer frequented local bathhouses and would drug other patrons so that he could sexually abuse them. Late in 1987, Dahmer killed again. He rented a room in a hotel and awoke to find a dead man he had spent the night with. Dahmer claimed to have no memory of the murder. He transported the body out of the hotel in suitcases and went back to his grandmother's house where he dissected the body and pounded the bones up. Dahmer kept the skull for a time and then disposed of this too. Dahmer became a persistent killer from this point. There would be seventeen official victims in all. Dahmer's known victims were Steven Hicks, James Doxtator, Richard Guerrero, Anthony Sears, Raymond Smith, Edward Smith, Ernist Miller, David Thomas, Curtis Straughter, Errol Lindsey, Tony Hughes, Konerak Sinthasomphone, Matt Turner, Jeremiah Weinberger, Oliver Lacy and Joseph Bradehaft. Dahmer eventually moved into his own apartment and although this made bringing men back and killing them easier it also made disposing of the evidence harder. It was a more constrictive environment. Dahmer was by now completely lost in his own world of murder and depravity. He would pose the bodies of victims and take photographs. Skulls were kept in closets like a trophy case and he would mummify body parts to keep. Dahmer would boil flesh down to fat and bleach bones and skulls so they could be preserved. He spray painted one skull to make a macabre work of art. After drugging one victim, Dahmer drilled a hole in his skull and poured hydrochloric acid into it. His youngest victim was fourteen years old. There was no line that Dahmer didn't cross. He was not just a serial killer but a necrophile and a cannibal. By July 1991, the thirty-one year-old Dahmer was living at Oxford Apartments - located at 924 N. 25th St in Milwaukee. His apartment number was 213. A former neighbour of Dahmer said he always looked a bit dirty and in need of a shower. The manager of Dahmer's apartment building described Jeffrey Dahmer as a loner but not someone who caused any problems. He said Dahmer always paid his rent on time. Residents of Oxford Apartments said that Dahmer stood out like a sore thumb because he was practically the only white person who lived there. No one could have guessed the horror, depravity and terror which abounded behind the door of apartment 213. Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment was so eventually so full with victims and body parts that he put one body in the bath and had to shower over it. The apartment contained a plastic drum of acid where three human torsos were dissolving. Body parts were wrapped and stored in the fridge and bloodstains were visible on his mattress and some of the wall. The police later found two bags in Jeffrey Dahmer's fridge that contained human hearts. Dahmer had lost his job at a local chocolate factory and was fearful that he might be kicked out of his apartment in the end. If this happened he would be in big trouble because he still had copious amounts of forensic evidence in his apartment that he appeared to have little chance of disposing of in the immediate future. As of July 1991, the police were yet to deduce that a cannibal serial killer was active in Milwaukee. Milwaukee was perhaps best known for being where the sitcom Happy Days is set but it was now about to be connected to one of the most famous and disturbing killers in history. Dahmer, who was now completely dominated by his sick desires, was now trying to murder a new person on a weekly basis - which was prolific even by the grim standards of serial killers. On the night of July 22, 1991, Dahmer persuaded a thirty-one year-old man named Tracy Edwards to come back to his apartment to pose for photographs. This was the ruse that Dahmer would use to lure victims. He would offer money to men to pose for photographs in his apartment and then murder them. Though he didn't know it at the time, Dahmer's luck was about to finally run out. He'd had a few close shaves before with victims escaping or not being sedated properly but none of these incidents threatened his status as a secret serial killer or threatened to expose him. This time though would be very different...HOW THEY CAUGHT JEFFREY DAHMER PART 1Jeffrey Dahmer said his necrophiliac desires began when he was fourteen. A necrophiliac is a person who is sexually excited by or attracted to dead bodies. When he was growing-up, Jeffrey Dahmer once stole a mannequin from a store and kept it in his bedroom for a couple of weeks. Sadly, this mannequin only served to make him wish he had a real inert body to lie down with. Dahmer said he threw the stolen mannequin away because his grandmother found it and thought it was a weird thing to have. How did Dahmer steal the mannequin from a store? Dahmer said he hid and got himself locked in and when everyone went home and they closed up he put a sleeping bag over it and took a taxi home. Dahmer said he kept the mannequin for about two weeks. He said he pretended it was a real person and cuddled it in bed. Dahmer also said that when he was eighteen he tried to steal a corpse from a graveyard but his plan was foiled because the ground was too hard to dig up. Dahmer had read in the obituary section of the newspaper that a local teenage boy had died. Dahmer said that when he tried to dig up the body in the graveyard he was attacked by a dog. Dahmer's friends said he was obsessed with graveyards. If we flash forward to 1991 we see that Dahmer's obsession with necrophillia has reached its terrible and perhaps inevitable end. Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment was so eventually so full with victims and body parts that he put one body in the bath and had to shower over it. According to some sources Dahmer had TWO bodies in the shower in the end. Neighbours of Jeffrey Dahmer did complain about the smell coming from his apartment several times. He apparently told them once that his freezer broke and some food went bad. The way Dahmer got the victims back to his apartment was to offer them money for a photoshoot or sex. They evidently didn't detect any danger from him and so took the chance to make some extra cash. Dahmer was bespectacled and mild in temperament and speech so he wasn't someone who raised obvious alarm bells or seemed dangerous. Dahmer would usually offer his victims $75 to come back to his apartment for a photography session. His victims were always broke so took the bait. Dahmer would sometimes get his victims handcuffed by telling them he wanted to take a bondage photograph. Once the victim was handcuffed it was game over because they now had little means to defend themselves. Handcuffs and sleeping pills were a vital part of Dahmer's serial killer 'kit'. Both were vital to ensure a victim could not resist and fight back. When Dahmer moved into his own apartment this made bringing men back and killing them much easier but it also made disposing of the evidence much harder. It was a more constrictive environment with no immediate access to quiet outdoor spaces. Nonetheless, despite these drawbacks, Dahmer was soon completely lost in his own world of murder and depravity. The apartment of Jeffrey Dahmer contained a big blue plastic drum of acid where three human torsos were dissolving. It was truly a house (or apartment in this case) of horrors. Jefffrey Dahmer lived in a rough part of Milwaukee that had plenty of crime and a notoriously smelly sewer problem. This is the only explanation for why the noises and smells from his apartment didn't trigger more curiosity in his neighbours. Dahmer often used a handsaw to cut up his victims. Dahmer owned a large hunting knife with a rubber grip. He would often use this knife as part of the process of dissecting a body. Dahmer was always naked when he dismembered his victims. Dahmer said he did this not for kinky reasons but because he wanted to avoid getting blood or cleaning chemicals on his clothes. Jeffrey Dahmer tried to disguise the smell in his apartment by venting it with a fan. One imagines that Dahmer was always fighting a losing battle trying to mask the foul odours coming from his apartment. Dahmer was initially more precise and careful when it came to disposing of bodies than your average serial killer. He had an aptitude for science - something which obviously helped in his grisly stock-in-trade. As his grasp on reality (never very firm to begin with) started to frazzle and evaporate, Dahmer would become less studious at removing traces of his crimes. What didn't help was his obsession with keeping flesh in the fridge and collection bones as trophies. When you add in the fact he kept killing people then you can see how Dahmer eventually ended up in a situation where he was trapped in an apartment with considerable forensic murder evidence but no swift and easy way of removing it. Dahmer took many photographs of his victims after he murdered them. Dahmer's polaroids would show victims in various states of dismemberment. Dahmer seemed to like to chronicle his dissection. The polaroids Damer took of his victims included ones he took during actual acts of necrophilia. He had a bolt lock on the outside of his bedroom door. This was obviously designed to lock people in. Dahmer said he would usually target victims who were alone. If he saw someone with a group of friends he knew it would be too risky - unless he could isolate them. the last person that Dahmer took home - Tracy Edwards - was with two friends when Dahmer encountered him. However as we shall see, Dahmer was cunning in the way he isolated the intended victim and got rid of the other men. We tend to think that necrophile serial killers only get a few days of sexual gratification out of the bodies because of decomposition. This wasn't really the case with Dahmer though because he continued to get sexual gratification out of the bones, heads, and even the photographs. Dahmer said that he always tried to keep his apartment tidy because this made him seem more normal and less suspicious. The police found that Jeffrey Dahmer had extensive security at his apartment. He had a complex series of locks and an alarm system. This was not just to prevent people from escaping but also to prevent uninvited guests or thieves from entering. Dahmer knew only too well that if anyone took a good look inside his apartment his secret life as a serial killer would be quickly exposed. After he killed a victim, Dahmer would usually not dissect them for a couple of days. He did this because he wanted the corpse to enjoy while it was still 'fresh'. Dahmer used a black nylon strap to strangle some of his victims. Dahmer's method of selecting victims was risky and he'd had more than one close shave in the past where he could easily have been unmasked as a serial killer. The most famous of these close shaves involved a victim named Konerak Sinthasomphone. Dahmer had previously sexually assaulted the brother of his murder victim Konerak Sinthasomphone. This was just a strange coincidence. Dahmer didn't know these victims were related. Dahmer poured acid into the head of Konerak Sinthasomphone but Sinthasomphone escaped and wandered the streets in a daze. Tragically, some policemen who found Sinthasomphone then took him back to Dahmer's apartment after Dahmer told them Sinthasomphone was his intoxicated boyfriend. Dahmer’s neighbour Sandra Smith had alerted the police to Konerak Sinthasomphone wandering the street in a daze. The police officers in this incident were highly lackadaisical because they didn't even bother to do a background check on Dahmer or take a proper look in his apartment. They just handed the victim back to him and left. The police got a lot of criticism for this blunder when Dahmer was later captured. They had basically handed Konerak Sinthasomphone back to a serial killer to be murdered. John A. Balcerzak and Joseph P. Gabrish were the bungling police officers who handed the dazed and confused victim Konerak Sinthasomphone back to Jeffrey Dahmer and certain death. They were dismissed from the police after an investigation but then appealed and got reinstated. John A. Balcerzak and Joseph P. Gabrishwere were caught on radio making homophobic comments and joking about how they had reunited 'lovers' after the incident. Dahmer was so crazy that he thought if he injected acid or boiling water into a victim's brain they would become a complaint slave for him. Dahmer performed his 'zombification' experiments on four of the victims.  John A. Balcerzak and Joseph P. Gabrish didn't even bother to ask for identification to establish how old Konerak Sinthasomphone really was. They also failed to take much of a look inside Dahmer's apartment. The two police officers just seemed to want to wash their hands of this affair and leave the scene as quickly as possible. Dahmer told John A. Balcerzak and Joseph P. Gabrish that Konerak Sinthasomphone's name was John Hmong. This was a slight variation on the name of a doctor that Dahmer procured his sleeping pills from. John A. Balcerzak and Joseph P. Gabrish both later defended their actions in various interviews. They said that Dahmer seemed perfectly calm and normal to them and they had no idea that Konerak Sinthasomphone was so young. Dahmer told the police officers that Sinthasomphone was nineteen. John A. Balcerzak and Joseph P. Gabrish said they had little information to go on that night and genuinely believed that this was just a case of someone having too much to drink. John A. Balcerzak remained a police officer until his retirement in 2017. Balcerzak later served as president of the Milwaukee Police Association (the police union) from 2005 to 2009. Balcerzak made a joke on the police radio about needing to be 'deloused' after the tragic incident where Konerak Sinthasomphone was handed back to Dahmer. Dahmer was not the first (and sadly wouldn't be the last) serial killer who benefited from a police reluctance to get involved in disputes and crimes which related to the gay community.By July of 1991, Dahmer was beginning to sense that he might be nearing the end as far as his present circumstances were concerned. He was running out of money and the human remains in his apartment had got to a point where it was going to take a long time to remove them. Even if he did somehow manage this he was only going to kill again anyway and the whole grisly cycle would go back to square one. Serial killers tend not to take much notice of obvious problems like this. The main problem they face is that because they can't stop killing people they run the risk of ending up like Dahmer in that apartment. It was no problem for roaming killers like Ted Bundy - who was perfectly happy to murder people anywhere - but Jeffrey Dahmer (aside from the hotel incident - which was a drunken accident rather than premeditated) only killed at his home. Mudering in an outside location was out of the question because he needed ownership of the body to get full satisfaction. It was obviously a lot easier for Dahmer to dispose of victims when he lived with his father and then his grandmother because he had easy quick access to woodland and relative privacy. Dahmer dissected three men at his grandmother's house. She obviously had no idea what her grandson was doing in the basement. When he moved to an apartment and started killing people it obviously became a lot more complicated to dispose of remains - hence the nightmarish situation he ended up in. Dahmer, like most serial killers, had come to regard his macabre and disturbing situation as the norm. He was lost in a bizarre world of his own. There were some instances of Dahmer sedating someone but not killing them. It is quite rare for serial killers to let a potential victim go like this. It is generally assumed that Dahmer did not kill these people because he deemed those specific situations too risky. Dahmer said he only murdered people he was attracted to so it could be the case that he let people go if he decided he wasn't attracted to them in the end. Dahmer's murders escalated in the end to the point where they almost piled up on one another. One could argue that he began as an organised serial killer but as his descent into madness and depravity went on he became a disorganised serial killer. Jeffrey Dahmer said that he never really understood why he did the awful things he did. He said it was like some dark compulsion he couldn't control.Dahmer's apartment was, all things considered, rather ordinary and surprisingly tidy. He had cream walls, a rug, paintings on the wall. The horrors were hidden away in fridges, boxes, pans, drawers  and out of the way places - though bloodstains on his mattress and bedroom wall betrayed the insanity of this man and the awful things he had done. Dahmer's shopping bills were mostly taken up by cleaning fluids and chemicals. There wasn't much in the way of actual food in the apartment. Dahmer seemed to be subsisting on potato chips and beer. He never was one for cooking at home. When he was employed at the chocolate factory Dahmer would eat in a diner when he finished work. The woman who had the apartment above Jeffrey Dahmer DID complain about the smell and got moved. Those in charge of the building presumed it must be a sewage problem. Dahmer's neighbours complained more than once about strange noises and smells coming from Dahmer's apartment. No action was taken though over these complaints and no one ever took a good look inside Dahmer's apartment. Naturally, if there are complaints about someone in an apartment block the last think you assume is that they might be a serial killer. Dahmer had some creative excuses for the smells that came from his apartment. When he was questioned by the building supervisor about strange smells Dahmer told him that the smell came from changing the water in his fish tank. A former resident of Oxford Apartments where Dahmer lived said the whole building stank at the best of times so this probably mitigated some of the dreadful odours coming from Dahmer's apartment. When he was captured, Dahmer told the police he was very surprised that the residents in his building hadn't deduced anything because his apartment was really starting to stink. In his police confession, Jeffrey Dahmer said that he was dissolving bodies in a vat of acid because he had run out of money and feared he would be thrown out of his apartment. He wanted to destroy all evidence of his crimes before this happened. Dahmer said that when he killed someone he got himself into a mindset where the victim was not a person but an object designed purely for his own pleasure. Dahmer claimed that he gave his victims sleeping pills before strangulation because he didn't want them to suffer. He wanted their death to be quick and unexpected. Dahmer wanted the victims to be oblivious to their predicament.