Once he flagged down police officers, he was still wearing the handcuffs Dahmer had attempted to subdue him with. The police handcuff key didn’t fit, so officers asked Edwards to accompany them to Dahmer’s apartment, as he had the key.
Surprises in store
It would be the start of a night that would leave a nation in horror, especially as photos began surfacing over news wires of police carrying a large blue barrel filled with acid-soaked decomposing body parts out of the Milwaukee apartment.
When the officers arrived with Edwards – who then told police that Dahmer had held a knife to him as well – Dahmer told them that the key to the handcuffs was in the drawer of his nightstand.
Officer Rolf Mueller was headed into the bedroom to fetch the key when Dahmer attempted to squeeze past him to get the key himself – and doubtlessly prevent him from discovering the horrible secrets the room contained - and was told by officer Robert Rauth to “back off.”
In the same drawer as the key, Mueller found a collection of Polaroid photographs that Dahmer had taken of his victims as he dismembered them.
A dazed Mueller, who realized the photographs were taken in Dahmer’s apartment, based on the décor in the background, walked back to the living room, telling his partner, “These are for real.”
The photos were gruesome and gory, and the look on both officers’ faces likely forced Dahmer to realize his collection was now police evidence.
He attempted to resist arrest, but was quickly overpowered by the two officers, who handcuffed him and called for backup.
Mueller then opened the refrigerator, where he found a freshly severed head.
“For what I did I should be dead,” Dahmer said from the floor of his living room.
Chapter 3: Dahmer’s house of horrors revealed
Over the course of the night, officials found four severed heads, seven skulls – some painted silver, others bleached – an arm muscle and two human hearts in the refrigerator, a human torso and various organs and bits of flesh inside the freezer, three dismembered torsos in a drum, dissolving in acid, two whole skeletons, a pair of severed hands, two preserved penises and a preserved scalp.
“That any civilized human being in a civilized society could do something this gruesome is inexplicable,” said Milwaukee Police Chief Philip Arreola.
“It was more like dismantling someone’s museum than an actual crime scene,” the chief medical examiner said.
At first, police didn’t know how many bodies were hidden in Dahmer’s apartment, or how many young men he had actually killed.
“There were virtually no bodies, in most cases, because he had destroyed them,” said stepmom Sheri Dahmer. “He had eaten parts, but he had cut them up and destroyed them. He had put them in trash bags. That’s why there was no hard line of bodies to trace.”
Instead, they were forced to wade through the morbid bits of evidence.
Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist called it “the most heinous crime committed in the history of Milwaukee.”
As for Dahmer, he was in many ways glad his murder spree was finally over.
“I am glad that the secrets are gone,” said Dahmer. “I think in some way I wanted it to end, even if it meant my own destruction.”
Father’s support never wavers
After learning of the circumstances surrounding Dahmer’s arrest, Lionel and Shari immediately went to the Milwaukee County Jail where Jeffrey was being held.
“It just seemed like his soul had dropped out of him. I hugged him. And he said to me, ‘I really messed up this time,’ which is an understatement. And I said, ‘Jeff, you really need help. The only way I can see is to have you judged insane so that you'd be put into a psychiatric hospital to really find out what's wrong.’ He hesitated at first, but later on, he really wanted to find out what was causing him to do these things,” Lionel said.
“I felt depression and shame,” Lionel added. “I wanted to help him in some way, and I kept reassuring him. It was sort of a feeling as if I were floating above myself, as if I were anesthetized with something that kept me from feeling anything deeply. It was complete numbness.”
Of course, it turned into a circus, the same circus the small town of Plainfield had endured when Eddie Gein was arrested.
“I sat with my mother and … and our home was invaded by national as well as international photographers set up across the street on neighbors’ porches,” Lionel recalled. “Ringing doorbells, tromping all over our yard and looking in, trying to see in our windows. It was horrible.”
Steven Hicks found
On June 30, 1991, a week after Dahmer was arrested, investigators in Ohio, alerted to Dahmer’s first murder, found numerous bone fragments, as well as blood and a bloody handprint in the crawlspace beneath the home where a younger Dahmer had killed his first victim.
Neighbors looked on in abject horror as police struggled to determine which bone bits were human, and which were animal.
“It just shows you how little we knew about them,” said James Klippel, who grew up next door and had no idea what had happened in the three-bedroom house formerly owned by the Dahmer family.
A cannibal or a madman?
Much of the media attention was focused on Dahmer’s consumption of parts of his victims, their hearts, their biceps.
“It made me feel like they were a part of me,” Dahmer later said, “and it gave me a sexual satisfaction for me to do that.”
The idea of it inflamed the community, although Dahmer’s father said that the dismemberment and the mementoes, those parts of the crimes were much more important to Dahmer himself.
“Actually, the eating part was more like, you know, how the Indians -- the ancient Indians used to eat parts of humans hoping that they would gather strength from that, you know. Jeff told me that that was a very, very small part. It was a part. But very much overblown by the media,” said Lionel.
Evaluating madness
Bail was set at $5 million for the man who had peeled the skin off his victims’ skulls, at one point attempting to save one of them, saying it resembled a mask at a party store.
Dahmer was immediately seen by a slew of psychologists who attempted to figure out what had gone wrong with the soft-spoken candy factory worker with the blond hair and slightly nasal Midwestern accent.
Most saw him with a degree of sympathy – the lonely boy who desperately wanted someone by his side – and they shared what they believed with Dahmer, giving him some idea of what had caused his world to crack open in madness.
“There is a picture of a lonely, alienated small boy who has a difficulty relating to anyone,” said psychologist Samuel H. Friedman, who later disputed Dahmer’s insanity plea at trial.
“I knew I was sick or evil or both. Now I believe I was sick. The doctors have told me about my sickness and now I have some peace. I know now how much harm I have caused. I tried to do the best I could after the arrest to make amends,” he said.
While he was in jail awaiting his trial, he read books his father sent him, and he began looking to God for answers.
“I now know I will be in prison the rest of my life. I know that I will have to turn to God to help me get through each day. I should have stayed with God. I tried and failed and created a holocaust,” he said. “Thank God there will be no more harm that I can do. I believe that only the Lord Jesus Christ can save me from my sins.”
Lionel Dahmer worried that his son would want to commit suicide given the bleakness of the situation, and was unable to come to terms with his son as the evil, deranged man the media portrayed.
“I can remember him as a youth, when he was innocent,” said Lionel. “The naïve parent in me still sees an innocent, shy child.”
Eventually, the victim list reached 17, over the span of more than a decade, and his parents began debating what they might have missed during Dahmer’s childhood that might have predicted his future crimes.
Lionel Dahmer, who was bullied as a child, had dre
ams of murder, and debated if he had perhaps passed a genetic propensity for killing on to his son.
Stone Phillips, who later called the interview one of the more unsettling of his career, especially after Dahmer took time out as he left to point out a box, saying it looked exactly like the one whose contents he had carefully hidden from his father - asked whether Dahmer thought family problems led to his lifestyle. Dahmer was quick to reject the idea.
“I think it’s wrong for people who commit crimes to shift the blame to their parents, to their upbringing,” Dahmer said. “I think that’s a copout. I take full responsibility. I just get angry with other people who try to blame my parents for what happened. I alone am the one who’s responsible for what happened.”
In fact, he credits his parents and their undying love for carrying Dahmer through the dark days of jail, of his trial and of what he believed would be a lifetime in prison.
“Without the support of my folks, I don’t think that I could have come through this,” said Dahmer, who said that the family conversations are deeper now.
“There’s a lot more communication between us,” he said.
Still, his fantasies of death and dismemberment lingered, a darkness in his brain that tortured him daily.
“It never completely goes away,” Dahmer said. “I wish it would go away. It will probably be with me for the rest of my life.”
Chapter 5: The trial of Jeffrey Dahmer
Lionel Dahmer wonders how he and his wife, Shari, managed to make it through the trial, much of which focused on whether Dahmer was sane or insane, especially as they learned he often had to shower with corpses he kept hidden in the tub, because they were piling up at his place so fast.
“We sat just motionless and sick to our stomach,” Lionel said. “To this day, I can't really see how I -- we both just sat there.”
Dahmer sat with his attorney, his back to his family.
Meanwhile, psychologists debated back and forth.
“Most people that have even severe mental illnesses are not dysfunctional in every aspect of their lives. Many work, get up in the morning, they dress, they shower, they watch TV, they read the newspaper. They may become psychotic only during periods of severe stress,” said Dr. Carl Wahlstrom, who testified at the Jeffrey Dahmer trial and later spoke to the Chicago Tribune. “I think Jeffrey Dahmer had both borderline personality and schizotypal personality disorder. Part of the characteristics of those disorders is that under severe stress someone can become psychotic, and that could be an internal or an external stress. His personality structure is extremely primitive. He has bizarre and delusional ideas.”
Others said Dahmer’s inability to interact well with others as a child suggested he might have had Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism.
In fact, Wahlstrom later said that if mental health professionals had noticed the extent of Dahmer’s problems, they could have helped him before he turned into a murderer.
“He was very ill from childhood on,” Wahlstrom later said. “There was a question in one of the cases I read. One probation officer had referred him to some treatment, and he had been treated by a psychologist. He wasn't really cooperating, he was just going through the motions. Had that psychologist said ‘Just showing up is not enough. I'm going to say that by not participating in treatment I think that you're violating the conditions of probation. I’m going to recommend that your probation be violated unless you start talking to me.’ That's Monday-morning quarterbacking a bit, but I think that had his problem been recognized in early childhood, it's possible that someone with such a profound self-esteem problem could have been helped, so it didn't get to where it did. He really didn't feel that he could talk to anybody about what was going on in his mind after a point, and he began to lead an increasingly private existence filled with fantasies and delusions.”
Others suggested it was borderline personality disorder, because despite being the aggressor in each of his crimes, Dahmer saw himself as a victim as well.
“What I’ve done has cut both ways. It’s hurt the victim, and it's hurt me,” “Dahmer said. “I don’t know what I was thinking when I did it. I know I was under the influence. It is hard for me to believe a human being could have done what I've done.”
Others said he killed in order to silence his own homosexuality, which was something he hated and refused to admit about himself.
But Dahmer, Wahlstrom said, was more likely unable to figure out a way to forge a relationship with another man, given his difficulty in making friendships as a child.
“He liked other men, and he was completely ineffectual and could not even conceptualize what a relationship would be with someone. And so he attempted, in whatever way he could, to form something,” Wahlstrom said.
Insanity plea hard card to play
But insanity was a different story, and many believed he was not insane at the time of his crimes.
“Jeffrey Dahmer knew exactly what he was doing. He took precautions. He knew the consequences of his actions. But he did not want to stop,” said forensic psychologist Dr. George Palermo. “Nobody can deny that Jeffrey Dahmer is a sick person. (But) he is not psychotic. He was legally sane at the time of the offenses.”
Too, he was able to deliberately deter police when they were at his apartment with Konerak Sinthasomphone, even though if one of them had opened his bedroom door, they would have discovered his macabre collection.
“He fooled everyone. He had bodies in his next room when the police were standing in his outer room,” Lionel said in the Stone Phillips interview. “There were so many people that he fooled. He just looked very innocuous, he looked like an average person who couldn’t possibly do the things that de did.”
A madman in disguise
Inexplicably, family members of the victims agreed.
“He wasn’t what I expected,” said Therese Smith, whose brother, Eddie Smith, was one of Dahmer’s victims.
“He didn’t seem evil or anything,” said Shirley Hughes, whose son, Anthony, had known Dahmer for years before becoming one of his victims. “Just to look at him, you wouldn’t think he could do the types of things they’ve said he’s done.”
“I know the families of the victims will never be able to forgive me for what I have done,” Dahmer said in court. “I promise I will pray each day to ask for their forgiveness when the hurt goes away, if ever. I have seen their tears, and if I could give my life right now to bring their loved ones back, I would do it. I am so very sorry.”
It took a jury just five hours to find Jeffrey Dahmer sane and reach a verdict in the case.
He was sentenced to life in prison.
Dahmer lamented his future.
“I couldn’t find any meaning for my life when I was out there, I’m sure as hell not going to find it in here,” Dahmer said. “This is the grand finale of a life poorly spent and the end result is just overwhelmingly depressing... it’s just a sick, pathetic, wretched, miserable life story, that’s all it is. How it can help anyone, I’ve no idea.”
At the hearing, family members were given a chance to speak, and one made national news for screaming “I hate you, Jeffrey” at the top of her lungs as she was held back by bailiffs.
Still, he was unable to speak directly to the families of his victims, and said nothing when they raged at him during his sentencing hearing.
“Any words that I could say to the victims’ families would just feel trite and empty,” he said. “I can’t find the right words.”
He did, however, mention his family as he took responsibility for what he had done.
“I know my time in prison will be terrible, but I deserve whatever I get because of what I've done. I've hurt my mother and father and stepmother. I love them all so very much. I hope that they will find the same peace I am looking for,” he said.
He later pled guilty to aggravated murder in Ohio, in the death of his first victim, Steven Hicks. He was again sentenced to life in prison without parole.
> Chapter 6: The aftermath
Over the years that Jeffrey Dahmer was imprisoned, Lionel Dahmer visited his son about once a month. They never talked about Dahmer’s crimes.
“There’s no point to going into in-depth talks about it,” said Dahmer. “We talk about family, how things used to be. It gives me a sense of comfort to talk about the few good times we had in the past.”
Dahmer was beaten to death at Wisconsin’s Columbia Correctional Institute by fellow inmate Christopher Scarver in 1994, in part because Dahmer spent his time in prison taunting other inmates with dioramas of his crimes fashioned from his prison dinners.
Scarver – who had been housed in prison with Dahmer since 1992 for killing his boss in 1990 – said Dahmer would create severed limbs from his food, then drizzle them with packets of ketchup, leaving them in places where they would be easily noticed.
“He crossed the line with some people — prisoners, prison staff,” Scarver told the New York Post in 2015.
“Some people who are in prison are repentant — but he was not one of them,” Scarver said.
An attorney later told Lionel Dahmer that he believed Scarver and Dahmer were deliberately left alone for the minutes required for Scarver to make his move.
“This attorney said he was confident that it was something that was allowed to happen, as he put it,” Lionel said. “And for the second time I sat at my desk, totally numb, paralyzed, to get - to get the news.”
A sandwich still causes nightmares
Eighteen years after Jeffrey Dahmer died, his former neighbor Pamela Bass recalls eating a sandwich Dahmer gave her one day, its contents unknown.
True Crime Stories Volume 4: 12 Shocking True Crime Murder Cases (True Crime Anthology) Page 21