It would be more than a year before they would learn that Smith was a victim of Dahmer. The details - he had been strangled and dismembered, his bones stripped with acid before being displayed around Dahmer’s second-story apartment as art – would haunt them.
For the rest of the world, Smith would be remembered for little more than the tattoo on his chest, Cash D, and for being the first one of Dahmer’s victims to result in cannibalism.
Dahmer later recounted eating Smith’s heart, which he said “tasted spongy.”
Hunger escalates
Four days later, on May 24, Dahmer was again on the prowl, this time at The Phoenix, another Milwaukee gay bar, one of the most well-established gay clubs in town.
Here, he encountered 27-year-old Eddie Smith, who he lured back to his apartment.
Dahmer later spoke of how sorry he was for killing Smith, in part because his methods of preservation failed miserably – Smith’s skull exploded as Dahmer attempted to dry it in the oven – and he was unable to save any mementoes from the crime.
“Edward Warren Smith tried to be Jeffrey Dahmer’s friend,” said J.W. Smith, brother of victim Eddie Smith.
In 1999, another brother, Ernest, was stabbed to death in his apartment, sending the family back in time to the horrors of losing their first brother to Dahmer.
“It’s like living a nightmare all over again,” Carolyn Smith told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. “I hadn’t really gotten over Eddie’s death.”
Real-life skeletons in the closet
On September 3, 1990, Dahmer met Ernest Miller outside a gay bookstore on North 27th Street.
He invited the 22-year-old Miller back to his place to watch some porn, and the man agreed.
Unlike his other victims, after removing the flesh from Miller’s bones, he kept the man’s full-size skeleton in his closet. One of his biceps had been removed and stored in Dahmer’s freezer.
Other portions of Miller were consumed.
“His thigh muscle was so tough, I could hardly chew it,” Dahmer later told police.
He used meat tenderizer to make Miller’s remaining biceps more palatable.
“It was big and I wanted to try it,” Dahmer said. “It tasted like beef or filet mignon.”
Miller’s horrified family later struggled to remain composed in court.
“Jeffrey Dahmer, you have become a hero for a few, but you have become a nightmare for so many more,” said Ernest Miller’s uncle, Stanley Miller, when the family was allowed to address the killer at his sentencing hearing.
Ill-fated shopping trip
David Thomas was 23 when he encountered Jeffrey Dahmer at a Milwaukee shopping center.
It was Sept. 24, 1990, less than three weeks after Dahmer had killed Ernest Miller and stripped the flesh from his bones.
By now, Dahmer was likely getting cocky. He’d been seen with one of his victims by that young man’s friend, and neighbors had to notice the smell of human flesh being eaten by acid from his apartment.
Still, the candy factory worker with the pale skin and hair had not been linked to any of the disappearances of young men in Milwaukee, despite his background as a molester, and he apparently felt free to continue hunting his prey.
Thomas had a girlfriend and two young children, and didn’t fit the profile of the other victims.
In fact, after Dahmer drugged the young man, he realized he wasn’t really his “type.”
Because of that, after he killed him – for fear that Thomas might give him away – he saved no souvenirs, aside from photos he took while dismembering him. The photos were later used by Thomas’ sister to identify him.
At his sentencing, Inez Thomas, the victim’s mother, told Dahmer, “That was my baby boy you took away from me.”
Perhaps Dahmer was unsettled by having to kill Thomas, for having made an impulsive, poor choice, because it wasn’t until the next year that his selected a new victim.
Gay advocate’s voice silenced
Curtis Straughter was 19 and a member of Gay Youth Milwaukee, a social group for young people who are part of the LGBT community.
He liked to go by the name Demetra, and dreamed of being a model.
Those dreams would be silenced when he encountered Jeffrey Dahmer one day while waiting for a bus near Milwaukee’s Marquette University, a private Catholic school that counts late comedian Chris Farley among its graduates.
But the model in him couldn’t refuse when Dahmer offered Straughter $50 to pose for photographs.
A few hours later, he would be dead, strangled with one of Dahmer’s leather belts.
A brush with necrophilia
Errol Linsey, a choirboy, was 19 years old on April 7, 1991, when he encountered Jeffrey Dahmer outside a gay bookstore, the same one where Dahmer had picked up earlier victim Ernest Miller.
Dahmer offered the young man money to pose naked for photographs, and Linsey agreed.
This time, however, Dahmer had tired of having nothing more than skulls and bones to keep him company.
What he really wanted was a sex slave who would never leave him, and Errol Linsey was his first attempt at making that dream a reality.
“I took the drill while he was asleep,” Dahmer said in his confession, which revealed that Dahmer drilled a small hole in the top of Linsey’s skull, then used a syringe to inject muriatic acid into his brain.
In the midst of the experiment, Linsey woke up, so Dahmer drugged him again, then strangled him with one of his ties.
He later had oral sex with the corpse, then dismembered it, keeping Linsey’s skull as a trophy.
An unlikely victim
Intrigued by the idea of having a sex slave, Dahmer decided he wanted to try again, and on May 24, 1991, he choose deaf mute Anthony Hughes, a 31-year-old man he knew from his visits to local gay bars.
According to Dahmer, he invited Hughes over to pose for photographs, and attempted to turn him into a submissive, again using the drill and a syringe of acid.
Hughes, who was a happy, social guy despite his handicaps, never woke up.
After about three days, Dahmer immersed his dismembered body in acid and saved his skull.
Hughes’ mother later disputed Dahmer’s claim in court, accusing him of lying about how he had lured the man to his apartment.
“He had four hundred dollars in his pocket that night. He didn’t need his fifty dollars,” said Mrs. Hughes.
She was likely right.
In a bid to seem less culpable, Dahmer attempted to make most of his victims – the majority of which were young, black men – appear to be prostitutes. He was likely hoping that the courtroom, including the jury, would be less concerned about their lives and deaths if they were sex workers.
Police make a deadly mistake
The family of Konerak Sinthasomphone moved to the United States from Laos in 1980 through the Catholic diocese of Milwaukee, which was assisting with the relocation of Laotian and Cambodian refugees who had escaped communism in their country.
There were four boys, and it appeared that the family would have a better life, until 1988, when one of their sons, then 13, was molested by candy maker Jeffrey Dahmer.
Dahmer was tried and convicted, and police told the Sinthasomphone family that Dahmer would be sentenced to a long prison term, so the family didn’t attend his court hearings, and didn’t know when Dahmer instead received a year in prison with work release and five years’ probation.
The short sentence allowed Dahmer to continue to drug and kill, although he would have been caught much earlier if police had reacted differently on May 29, 1991, when a second son, Konerak Sinthasomphone, was found wandering the streets of Milwaukee, naked, drugged and bleeding.
The two women who found him, Sandra Smith and Nicole Childress, called 911, and officers John Balcerzak and Joseph Gabrish were sent on the call.
They discovered Sinthasomphone - who had managed to escape from Dahmer’s apartment from hell when the man had left for more b
eer - drugged, naked and bleeding from his rectum following a rape.
A returning Dahmer spotted the escapee and told police that the young man was his lover – he produced Polaroids of a half-dressed Konerak to prove it – even as Smith and Childress protested, telling officers they recognized the boy from the neighborhood.
Falling for Dahmer’s story, the officers gave Konerak a towel and took him back to Dahmer’s apartment. Despite an acrid smell which would turn out to be the decaying corpse of a previous victim, police left the injured boy there.
Later that night, Dahmer killed him, dismembered his body and saved his skull as a memento of the kill.
For the family, their dreams of coming to the United States for a better life shattered, it was horrifying to learn that their lives had twice been impacted by Jeffrey Dahmer.
“We don’t have energy to do anything,” said Anouke Sinthasomphone, a 27-year-old brother of the dead boy, at the time of Dahmer’s arrest. “We can’t sleep. We can’t eat.”
The police officers were later suspended for failing to file a report or check Dahmer’s record, but were reinstated when a judge called the suspension too harsh, and “shocking to one’s sense of fairness.” Both officers were also given $55,000 in back pay following the decision.
And again, the Sinthasomphone family was left to wonder why they had come to America after all.
“They are very confused by the whole thing,” said the family’s attorney after the officers were back on the job. “They know that their child is dead, and could have been saved.”
Apartment of death
After his close call with police Dahmer grew more confident, and killed about one person a week in his attempt to create a zombie-like sex partner who would submit to his every whim.
On June 30, 1991, 20-year-old Matt Turner – a Chicago pizza restaurant worker who loved to lip synch, using the name Donald Montrell – had the unfortunate luck of running into Jeffrey Dahmer at a Gay Pride parade.
Turner, according to those who knew him, was gregarious and friendly, qualities which served him well at his job at the pizza place.
“He was noticeable because he was really outgoing,” said Turner’s boss, Patti Schuldenfrei, owner of Chicago Style Pizza & Eatery. “He liked to go around to tables and schmooze. I had customers say to me, ‘That guy is great. He’s so enthusiastic. He’s so upbeat.’”
Dahmer likely asked Turner to pose for photographs – according to a friend, Turner loved to have his picture taken – and the two rode back to Milwaukee on Greyhound bus.
Turner never made it back to Chicago.
Instead, he ended up becoming one of Dahmer’s failed sex slave experiments.
If at first you don’t succeed…
About a week later, Dahmer was ready to try again.
This time, he ran into 23-year-old Jeremiah Weinberger, a customer services rep with an easygoing personality that made him popular both at work and at play.
Weinberger was hanging out at Carol’s Speakeasy, a Chicago gay bar, when Dahmer asked him back to his Milwaukee apartment.
Weinberger was intrigued, but uncertain, so he asked a friend what he thought about Dahmer before the two left the bar for the Greyhound bus station.
“He seems alright,” said the friend, who according to one report later committed suicide over the guilt of sending his friend to his death.
A former roommate remembered Weinberger fondly.
“He never was in a bad mood,” said Tim Gideon, who was working at Carol’s the night Weinberger met Dahmer. “I never saw him get mad about anything.”
That night, he talked to the two while they sat at the bar, but neither mentioned going to Milwaukee while he was in earshot.
“He wasn’t the type of person who would just fly off on a whirlwind vacation,” he said. “We never dreamed we’d find him like this.”
Unlike many of Dahmer’s victims, Weinberger was alive for a few days, acting as Dahmer’s boyfriend, and it looked like he might actually survive his ordeal.
Unfortunately for him, however, after a while he tired of Dahmer, and asked to leave.
Dahmer asked him to stay for one more drink.
“He was exceptionally affectionate. He was nice to be with,” said Dahmer.
After he fell asleep, drugged, Dahmer injected boiling water into his skull, a new method of making a zombie.
“If they had their own thought processes they might remember that they had to leave, or lived somewhere else,” Dahmer said.
Weinberger woke up, disoriented from the drugs and the brain damage, and Dahmer fed him a new drink.
He would end up dismembered, his torso submerged in a large blue vat in the corner of Dahmer’s bedroom.
His family became stoic in the face of such a nightmarish discovery.
“We’re dealing with it as a family will deal with it,” said Weinberger’s father, David, owner of Chicago’s Caffe Pergolesi, after learning of Dahmer’s arrest and that his son’s remains were in the Milwaukee man’s apartment. “We have a missing person in the family.”
Was probation officer to blame?
Weinberger’s father later sued the state of Wisconsin and Dahmer’s probation officer, Donna Chester, for failing to visit Dahmer’s apartment – where she would have seen Dahmer’s macabre collection of skulls and bones, and could have prevented numerous deaths including Jeremiah Weinbergers’.
It turns out Dahmer was a model probationer, despite what Chester later said was a deep depression accompanied by regular threats of suicide.
“There were no signs, apparently, no overt signs, no clues, no hints, of a nature that would cause this agent to do anything other than what she did,” Joe Scislowizc, a spokesman for the state Department of Corrections later said. “He gave no sign he was involved in any kind of activity of this kind.”
At least not until he was arrested.
“Up to this point in time I had no legitimate or lawful grounds under departmental policies and rules to take Dahmer into custody or to revoke his probation,” said Chester. “I never had any grounds to take any disciplinary action against Dahmer or to suspect that home visits would have been of material benefit in his supervision.”
Chester had requested that she be allowed to skip home visits with Dahmer, and her request was approved by a supervisor.
Weinberger’s lawsuit was ultimately dismissed.
Another tasty victim
Oliver Lacy, 24, had moved to Milwaukee from Illinois with his girlfriend and infant son.
The elite high school athlete – one of the top five runners in the state, he had earned a track scholarship to Texas A&M University, although he had to turn it down because of his grades – was planning on marrying the girl, and would have, most likely, had he not encountered Jeffrey Dahmer at Milwaukee’s Grand Avenue Mall.
It was July 12, 1991, and the athletic Lacy caught Dahmer’s eye.
He invited Lacy back to his apartment to pose for photographs, and Lacy – likely interested in earning any extra money he could to support his child – agreed.
He was later killed, raped and dismembered, his head stuffed into a box in the refrigerator, his heart saved “for later” in the freezer. His biceps was seasoned with salt, pepper and A1 sauce so it, like the previous biceps Dahmer had consumed, again “tasted like filet mignon.”
Lacy’s mother knew almost immediately after seeing the news of Dahmer’s arrest that her son was one of his unfortunate victims.
“I felt like something hit me real hard,” said Catherine Lacy, who confirmed her son’s identity by viewing a photograph of his head. “I don’t know how this person lured my son. He wasn’t the type of person who would let someone come up to him like that.”
Dahmer called in sick to work the next day so he would have more time with Lacy’s body.
He ended up being suspended, and was fired four days later.
His response was to find another victim to help ease his anxiety over losin
g the job that paid his rent. He had no way of knowing that it would be his last.
Dahmer’s final victim
Dahmer’s final victim was 25-year-old Joseph Bradehoft, a married dad of three who was in Milwaukee to visit his brother and try to find work to support his family.
He had just gotten a six-pack of beer when he met Dahmer at a bus stop. It was July 19, 1991.
Dahmer hadn’t been sleeping, and was a wreck over the loss of his job. He had purchased a large quantity or muriatic acid in hopes of ridding his apartment of all evidence of his murders, since he was already late with his rent and feared that would soon be evicted.
He likely needed a distraction, and Bradehoft would be it.
Dahmer invited the man back to his place, and Bradehoft accepted.
One drugged drink later, and he ended up becoming a head in Dahmer’s freezer, a torso in the acid vat.
“I carried it too far, that’s for sure,” Dahmer said.
Tracy Edwards ends Dahmer’s fantasy
On the night of his arrest, Dahmer lured Tracy Edwards into his home by promising him money and beer for posing naked for photographs.
Instead, Edwards found himself confronted with a knife pointed at his groin, in a room filled with photographs of dead bodies and severed limbs.
“He put his head on my chest, was listening to my heart, and said he was going to eat my heart,” Edwards later testified in court.
The two spent time in Dahmer’s bedroom watching the movie “Exorcist III,” and Dahmer told Edwards how much he hated being alone and worried about other people not liking him.
As he listened, Edwards’ mind raced thinking of ways to escape his horrifying predicament.
And as Dahmer talked, Edwards realized he was distracted, so he hit him, leaving Dahmer dazed enough that Edwards was able to escape the apartment of horrors.
True Crime Stories Volume 4: 12 Shocking True Crime Murder Cases (True Crime Anthology) Page 20