by Ray Black
Dahmer let the young boy go, but when he arrived back home his parents realised that there was something amiss with their child and took him straight away to hospital. The doctors confirmed that their son had been drugged and the police were given the details of what had occurred. They arrested Dahmer while he was working at his job at a chocolate factory. He was arrested for sexual exploitation of a minor and also second-degree sexual assault. He pleased guilty to the charges, although he did claim that he thought the boy was much older than thirteen.
While Dahmer was waiting for his case to come to trial he met a black homosexual named Anthony Sears, at a gay bar. As usual he enticed him back to his apartment and carried out all his normal fetishes.
Dahmer went to court on May 23, 1989. The assistant District Attorney, Gale Shelton suggested to the judge that he should have a prison sentence of at least five years, but three psychologists had previously examined him and suggested it would be more beneficial for him to be hospitalized to receive intense psychological treatment.
A magnificent performance by Dahmer stating that it was all a nightmare and admitting that he did need help, convinced the judge and he put Jeff on probation for five years. He was ordered to spend one year in a house of correction which allowed him to go to work during the day but had to return to the jail at night time. After having served ten months the judge granted Dahmer an early release, despite the fact that he had received a pleading letter from Dahmer’s father that he should not be released until he had finished his treatment.
On May 14, 1990, Dahmer moved into his own apartment in Milwaukee, and this was when his killing spree really started.
MAY 27, 1991
In the early hours of the morning of May 27, three police officers were called out to a rundown area of Milwaukee by a couple of black teenage girls. They reported to the policemen that they had come across a young Asian boy who was running about the streets completely naked and rambling incoherently. The two girls were Sandra Smith and her cousin Nicole Childress. They said that although they were unable to get the boy to explain exactly what had happened to him, they were both convinced that he was genuinely terrified. They told of a tall white man who had followed the boy out onto the street and that he was trying very hard to convince the lad to come back into his apartment.
For some reason, when the police arrived at the scene they seemed to pay more attention to the story the white man gave them than the evidence of the two black girls. The man told the police officers that the nineteen-year-old boy was his lover, and the boy was upset simply because they had had a lover’s tiff. He had run out on the streets because he was crying and upset by the argument. The police did not seem to doubt his story and accompanied the young Asian lad back to the man’s apartment, leaving them to sort out their differences. The two girls protested strongly, totally convinced that the situation was far more serious than the white man had led the police to believe.
It was a costly mistake for the police for when the whole matter became public six weeks later, it proved to Milwaukee’s black community that the city’s white establishment, the police in particular, were racist.
A KILLER IS LEFT TO KILL AGAIN
The tall white man was Jeffrey Dahmer – a depraved and psychopathic killer, a cannibal and a necrophile – the teenager was Konerak Sinthasomphone. Although Dahmer had said that his ‘lover’ was eighteen, Konerak was in fact only fourteen years old. He was the thirteenth of Dahmer’s seventeen victims, the majority of whom were either black, Asian or Hispanic.
As soon as Dahmer got Konerak back inside his apartment he strangled him, and then abused his body and proceeded to dismember it. As was his normal modus operandi, he retained some parts of the body to eat and others as bizarre trophies. Had the police bothered to investigate the case a little further when they were called out that night, they would have discovered that the tall white man was in fact a convicted child molester who was currently on probation.
Because of their mistake, Konerak and four other young males were all to die before Dahmer was finally apprehended.
Whether Dahmer was in fact rascist or not is unsure, but he probably chose mainly black victims because he lived in a mainly black area of Milwaukee, or perhaps he had a certain sexual fetish.
THE GRUESOME DISCOVERY
Two police officers were driving around the streets of Milwaukee on July 22, 1991. At around midnight the two officers noticed a short, wiry black man stumbling along with a handcuff dangling from one of his wrists. The man was thirty-two-year-old Tracy Edwards. The police pulled alongside the man and asked him what he was doing. He started to pour out a fantastic story about a strange man inviting back to his house and then after a couple of drinks had become very sleepy. This ‘weirdo’ then put on the handcuffs, threatened Tracy with a knife as they watched a film on video. Although Edwards was still feeling very woozy he managed to punch his assailant, and escaped from the apartment still wearing the handcuffs.
The police were curious, although they felt that it had all the trademarks of some sort of homosexual encounter. They asked the man to lead them back to the apartment as they felt they ought to check out the man he had mentioned.
When they arrived at apartment 213 on North 25th Street, the door was opened by a nice-looking, tall blond man. The man was Jeffrey Dahmer. He appeared very calm and rational and tried to wriggle his way out of the situation by saying that he had just lost his job at the chocolate factory, and that he had lost his temper after becoming drunk. He offered to get the officers the key to the handcuffs from his bedroom. Edwards immediately told the policemen that the knife he had been attacked with was also in the bedroom, and one of the policemen decided to accompany Dahmer into the room. The first thing the policeman noticed were numerous Polaroid photos of dismembered human bodies and of skulls in the refrigerator. Shocked by what he saw it took the officer several minutes to compose himself and call to his colleague to put handcuffs on Dahmer and place him under arrest. However, the calm, rational man suddenly turned on them and fought hard to try and prevent them from handcuffing him.
Having subdued Dahmer the officer, feeling increasingly worried about what he had seen in the bedroom, walked into the kitchen area and noticed that the refrigerator was the same as the one in the pictures. He pulled open the refrigerator door, and even though he was an experienced officer who had seen many gory cases, he screamed out loud at what he saw. On the shelf, staring back at him, lay a human head. Tracy Edwards stared at the head in horror, realising that Dahmer’s threats to ‘cut out your heart and eat it’ would probably have come true had he not managed to escape.
While Dahmer was taken down to the police station for questioning, a thorough search was made of apartment number 213 in Oxford Apartments. What the search revealed was just one horror after another . . .
Apart from the freshly severed head they had found in the refrigerator, there were three more human heads in the freezer compartment, wrapped neatly in plastic bags which were tied up with plastic twist-ties. They also discovered several pairs of hands in the freezer and a quantity of unidentifiable human meat. Neatly concealed in the back of a cupboard was a severed penis in a stockpot, and in the bedroom cupboard were two skulls that had been boiled to remove the flesh and then painted grey. Also in the same cupboard the police discovered containers of ethyl alcohol, chloroform, formaldehyde and a number of glass jars containing preserved male genitalia.
The stench of death and decomposing flesh was hanging in the air and neighbours that had congregated outside the front door admitted that there were several clues which should have alerted them to the fact that they were living next to a psychopath.
Among the polaroid photographs taken by Dahmer at varying stages of his victims’ deaths, was one that showed a man’s head, with the flesh still on it, lying in a sink. Another one showed a man who had been cut open from the neck right down to his groin, the cut being so clear that it actually showed the pelvic bone.
With the help of pathologists and forensic scientists and the gentle but persistent questioning of Dahmer, the Milwaukee police gradually uncovered the horrifying fact that this mild-mannered man who worked in a chocolate factory had in fact killed sixteen people.
THE TRIAL AND RETRIBUTION
Jeffrey Dahmer admitted a plea of guilty but insane on July 13, 1992. The security surrounding his trial was quite unique as he needed to be protected from the wrath of his victims’ families. They employed sniffer dogs to sweep the courtroom for explosives and everyone who entered the room had to be searched thoroughly with a metal detector. Finally an eight-foot-high barrier was constructed out of bullet-proof glass and steel, designed to isolate Dahmer from the people in the gallery.
The jury deliberated for five hours before reaching a verdict that he was guilty but sane and he was sentenced to serve fifteen life sentences – totalling 957 years in prison.
Dahmer was sent to Columbia Correctional Institute in Wisconsin to serve out his sentence. He adjusted well to prison life, although initially he did not join his fellow inmates for fear of an attempt on his life. As it was he was attacked on July 3, 1994, by a Cuban he had never seen before, while he was attending a service at the prison chapel. In fact, Dahmer was a model prisoner and soon convinced the prison authorities to allow him more contact with the other inmates. He was allowed to eat with his fellow prisoners and was also allocated some janitorial work in the main prison. To do this work he was paired up with two very dangerous men – Jessie Anderson, a white man who had murdered his wife, and a black man named Christopher Scarver, a schizophrenic who thought he was the son of God and who had committed first-degree murder. So you can imagine how Scarver saw Jeff Dahmer, someone who had victimized so many black men; it was a lethal concoction.
On the morning of November 28, 1994, the three men had been left on their own to get on with their work. The guards returned only twenty minutes later to find Dahmer’s head crushed and Anderson’s fatally wounded body lying close by. Jeffrey Dahmer was pronounced dead at 9.11 a.m.
WHY DID IT HAPPEN?
Apart from his parents’ doomed marriage and eventual divorce, Dahmer had been brought up in a fairly normal and happy environment, so his sick mind cannot be attributed to childhood abuse, bad parenting, or indeed any injury to the head. So what did turn Jeffrey Dahmer into a serial killer, a necrophilliac, a cannibal and a psychopath? Although many people have tried to come up with various theories, no-one can ever really be sure.
The factor that makes Dahmer different from the normal serial killer is that they normally stop once their victim is dead. Dahmer, on the other hand, seemed to get his kicks after his victims had died . . . satisfying his extraordinary sexual cravings on something over which he had total control.
At the request of his mother, Jeffrey’s brain was preserved in formaldehyde so that it could be used in future studies in an effort to get some insight into why he behaved the way he did. His father, on the other hand, took the matter to court in an attempt to honour his son’s request for cremation. On December 12, 1995, more than a year after his death, Columbia County Circuit Judge Daniel George took the side of Jeff’s father and ordered that the brain be destroyed.
Six months later Circuit Judge Daniel George ordered the city of Milwaukee to release Jeffrey Dahmer’s personal belongings to a lawyer named Robert Steurer. Steurer was representing the families of some of his victims and he planned to auction the ‘tools of the trade’ – hammers, drill bits, hatchets, saws and his world-famous refrigerator – to settle claims filed against the city by the victim’s families.
On May 29, 1996, the matter was settled when the city of Milwaukee raised more than $400,000 to buy Dahmer’s gruesome collection. Terrified that someone might actually buy the items and erect a Jeffrey Dahmer museum, on June 28, 1996, the items were finally incinerated. This marked the end of Jeff’s necrophilic legacy and hopefully laid to rest his grisly ghosts.
Vampire Killer Of Sacramento
Richard Trenton Chase enjoyed harming, mutilating and killing small animals. He had an obsession with blood and was also an incessant fire starter. His case is still used today by the FBI as a perfect example for getting inside the mind of a disorganized killer.
Richard Trenton Case was born on May 23, 1950, and even as a small child loved to torment animals and start fires. He was obviously a very disturbed person right from the very beginning. He had a sister who was four years younger than him, and grew up in an unhappy, strict and extremely angry household, where he was frequently beaten.
By the time he became an adult, Richard was showing signs of mental instability and hypochondria, which became further exaggerated by his dependency on drugs. He had an intense fear that his body was going to disintegrate and thought that the only way of preventing this was by drinking blood. His fear became so pronounced that on one occasion he rushed into the emergency room of his local hospital claiming that his pulmonary artery had been stolen, that his bones were protruding out of his neck and that his stomach was backwards. To feed his obsession he would kill small animals, put their blood into a blender and drink it. On another occasion he was admitted to hospital suffering from a severe case of blood poisoning which he had bought on himself by drinking the blood of a rabbit that he had killed.
Eventually he was committed to a mental institution as a schizophrenic who was suffering from somatic delusions. He was put on medication which appeared to have very little effect, indicating that maybe it was his early drug abuse that had turned him into a psychotic. He escaped briefly in 1976, returning to his mother’s house. He was returned to the hospital but ended up at a place called Beverley Manor, which was a facility for mental patients, and it was here that he earned the nickname ‘Dracula’. He often spoke about killing animals and drinking their blood, and one day the doctors discovered two dead birds and blood all around Chase’s mouth.
By 1978 the doctors at Beverley Manor felt that the medication they had been administering was finally starting to take effect, and he was released back into the community convinced that his paranoid schizophrenia was now under control. Unfortunately, once he was released, he did not take his medication regularly and so all his old problems returned. Voices in his head told him that his blood was turning to power and that his mother was being paid by the Nazis to poison him. These voices also told him how to treat his illness and that was to drink more blood.
Chase moved into an apartment and began to catch and torture cats, dogs and rabbits so that he could drink their blood. He even resorted to stealing neighbourhood pets, and on one occasion even called a family whose dog had gone missing to tell them exactly what he had done. It was around this time that he bought guns and started to experiment with them.
Although he was still on the medication provided by the hospital, he was allowed to live quite freely unsupervised. His mother, now believing he was free from his psychotic problems, weaned Richard off his medication. This was despite the fact that one day Richard paid his mother a visit, and when she opened the door to her horror she found her son holding a dead cat. He threw the cat to the ground, ripped its lifeless body apart, and then proceeded to smear the blood all over his face and neck. His mother failed to do anything about it and didn’t even report it to the authorities.
That same year, on August 3, police discovered Chase’s car stuck in some sand near Pyramid Lake in Nevada. There was a pile of clothes on the front seat along with a couple of rifles. There were blood smears on the inside of the car along with a plastic bucket containing a liver. Suspicious that there had been a murder, the police searched the area and eventually spotted Chase through their binoculars. He was running around totally naked with his body covered in blood. When he saw the police he tried to run away, but they caught up with him and he said that the blood had just seeped out of him. The liver in the bucket was one that had been removed from a cow.
A KILLER OF HUMANS
Richard Chase was inspir
ed by reports on ‘The Hillside Strangler’ which was the name the media gave to a series of rape, torture, abduction and murder crimes that had taken place not far from where Chase lived. Chase decided to move onto bigger and better things.
Chase started to kill humans on December 29, 1977, when he shot fifty-one-year-old Ambrose Griffin in the back from his moving car. Other attempted shootings were reported in the area, but these attacks were merely a warm-up of what was to come.
On January 11, 1978, one of Chase’s neighbours, Dawn Larson, had a strange encounter with him. She had previously seen him take three animals into his apartment and was a little curious as to why she had never seen them again. Possibly he had kept them hidden away because it was against the rules to keep animals in the apartment building. On this occasion Chase asked her for a cigarette but, even though she gave him one, he prevented her from walking away until she had given him the remainder of the packet.
About two weeks later a lady named Jeanne Layton saw an unkempt young man with fairly long hair walking towards her. She watched as he tried to open patio door, but on finding it locked tried to open one of the windows. When he discovered that this was also locked he went and knocked on her front door. She decided to confront him and opened the door only to find that the man showed no emotion whatsoever as he looked her up and down. Saying nothing, he turned away, first pausing to light a cigarette, and then walked off through her back garden.
A little further down the street Barbara and Robert Edwards were bringing their groceries into the house when they heard a noise coming from inside. They heard a window slam at the back of the house and to their surprise were confronted by a dishevelled looking man coming round the corner. Mr Edwards tried to stop him, but the man ran away down the street. Edwards gave chase but lost sight of him after the intruder had jumped a neighbour’s fence.