Lacy...
Less than two weeks later, Jeff met a muscular black male, Oliver Lacy (DOB 06/23/1968, 5'7”, approximately 165 pounds, short hair, white shirt and blue jeans) who was living on North 24th Place. They met between West State Street and West Kilbourn Avenue in Milwaukee as Lacy was en-route to his cousin's residence. Oliver had recently moved to Milwaukee to be with his girlfriend and child. Jeff invited Oliver to his apartment to pose for photos and Lacy went with Jeff. Once in his apartment, they removed their shirts and did body rubs on each other. Once finished, Jeff gave Lacy a drink laced with sleeping pills. Once asleep, Jeff had anal sex with him and then dismembered Lacy. He saved his head in the bottom of his refrigerator inside a box and his heart in the freezer to eat later. He placed a few other parts of Lacy's body in the freezer and kept the skeleton. Jeff ate the right biceps of Lacy by softening with meat tenderizer and then cooking in shortening in a skillet and thought that it tasted like beef. [Identified by fingerprints from severed hands found in Jeff's apartment and from victim's identification also found in the apartment. Mother was notified of death on July 24, 1991, at 10:00 am. Police report number 91-53901, date 07/22/1991, 2350 hours. Homicide Number M2472.]
After murdering Lacy, Jeff called Ambrosia on July 7, 1991, to request off work which was allowed but Jeff was fired the next day for attendance issues, being late to work, and for sleeping on the job. Jeff knew about a week before he was fired that he was going to be terminated and he later stated that he felt that that was the reason his murders began increasing in frequency.
Bradehoft...
Just a few days later, on a hot, rainy July 19, 1991, a white male, Joseph Arthur Bradehoft (DOB 01/24/1966) living in an apartment on East Kane Place, was standing at a bus stop on Wisconsin Avenue close to Marquette University. He was in Milwaukee and was seeking a job to help support him and his children as he was going through a divorce during that time. Jeff was getting off of the bus and saw Joseph with a six pack of beer and began a conversation with him asking if he would come to his apartment and pose nude for money and then watch videos. Joseph agreed and followed Jeff to his apartment a couple of blocks away. After the two had oral sex, Jeff gave him a drink of coffee and run with sleeping pills. Joseph passed out. Jeff then strangled the victim and kept the body, sleeping with it for a couple of days (perhaps stressed from being fired from Ambrosia) until the maggots (it was hot during this time and Jeff's air conditioner was not working very well) on the victim's head forced Jeff to dismember Joseph. Jeff placed his head in the freezer and his body in the 57 gallon drum where he had placed two other of his victims. [Reported missing to the Greenville (Illinois) Police Department. Last contacted by his ex-wife who spoke to him on the phone. Identification from the victim's fingerprints taken from his hands. Police report number 91-51767, date 07/29/1991. Homicide Number M2475.]
Unknown...
Jeff approached two Hispanic males at the Grand Avenue Mall on 07/21/1991 asking them to come to his apartment for $100 to be photographed. Jeff stopped at a liquor store and purchased beer before taking a cab to go to his apartment, but before they arrived, the two males jumped out of the cab and left quickly.
[Jeff knew he was about to lose his apartment since he lost his job and could no pay the rent and was making preparation to dispose of all bodies and body parts before he was evicted so no one discovered his crimes. His plan, after leaving his apartment, was to go to the Salvation Army to live for a month until he could, once again, find employment and get back on his feet financially.]
Edwards...
When Jeff approached his last victim, Tracy Edwards, it was not his first time to meet him. A week before, Jeff saw Tracy at a bus stop at North 24th Street and West Wisconsin Avenue, about three blocks from Jeff's apartment. Edwards had asked Jeff for a cigarette and they had polite conversation before Tracy boarded the bus.
The second timer they crossed paths was on a cloudy Monday on July 22, 1991. Jeff had just completed his beer and pizza dinner around 5:30 pm at the Grand Avenue Mall when, as he was leaving, he saw Edwards in the company of two friends at the 3rd Street entrance to the mall. Jeff and Tracy spoke and Jeff offered Edwards $50.00 to pose nude for him and watch videos. Edwards agreed and Jeff, Tracy, and his friends walked to a liquor store close to Marquette University and Jeff went inside and purchased a six pack of beer, a bottle of rum and a cola drink. When Jeff came out of the liquor store, only Edwards remained. Leaving the liquor store, the two walked to the bus station where they took a taxi to North 24th Street and West Wisconsin Avenue. Jeff wanted to get out of the taxi at that location so no one would know where he lived. From there, they walked to his apartment.
Once inside his apartment, Jeff poured a drink of rum and cola but without sleeping pills as Jeff still had not refilled his prescription. While they were discussing frequenting the gay bars in Chicago and watching the Exorcist II, Jeff changed the conversation to taking some photos – bondage photos. Jeff placed one cuff on Edwards while they were sitting on his bed. According to Jeff, he blacked out, possibly due to alcohol, and the next thing he heard was a knock at his door. Answering the knock, Jeff opened his apartment door and observed Edwards standing outside with two police officers with him. The victim still had the handcuff on his wrist. Edwards had fled Jeff's apartment to find the police and told them that Jeff had threatened him with a knife and was going to cut his heart out. The police entered his apartment and seeing the photos Jeff had made of some of his victims, handcuffed Jeff but not without a struggle as Jeff resisted the officers.
Jeff was transported to the police department to begin questioning. During Jeff's initial interview with officers he had numerous cigarettes, four to five cups of coffee, two glasses of water, two cans of soda. Confession began at approximately 1:30 am and ended about 7:15 am. When officers asked if her was hungry, he stated he was not and probably would not be hungry for some time.
WHO WAS JEFF?
“I haven't cried for a long time.”
Jeff Dahmer
Opportunistic. By his own admission, he was an opportunist. While he had some general preferences regarding age, and sexual preference (He liked homosexuals and, while some have proposed that he killed homosexuals because he hated who he was, Jeff is quoted as having said that the reason he killed homosexuals is because he wanted to be with them and he kept their skulls of the good looking ones because he did not want to lose them). His selection of a victim was whoever was there at the moment and if they were going to be easy to lure to his apartment. Jeff's preference was males, mid to late teens to mid 20s, average height, slender, and smooth skin. He would search out victims that were alone and then wait until closing time to approach them by offering money for photos, to watch videos, and for sex.
When Jeff would go out looking for his victims he was always drunk or drinking even drinking as he was dismembering and cutting the bodies. He did not claim to be an alcoholic but drank because he was committing such horrendous crimes and wanted to try to forget the carnage he was committing.
He had a plan on how to get his victims and that plan seemed to work well for him: offer money for photos and sex, then give them a drink laced with sleeping pills that he received from his doctor and then kill them if they wanted to leave. It was physically pleasurable for him to be with living people but if they wanted to leave, it was better to have them dead and with him than alive and gone. To Jeff, the skulls represented the very essence of his victims and by keeping the skull, he was essentially keeping the victim.
Jeff had a system, a way he did things and, even though he was fully aware what he was doing was wrong and felt horrified that he was able to commit these heinous acts, that did not stop him. In fact, Jeff would later admit that the death and dismemberment added to the sexual excitement. He knew it was wrong because he went to great lengths to cover up his crimes and drank excessively because he was trying to forget what he was doing.
Whenever Jeff would dismember a victim, he
stripped nude so none of the blood would get on his clothing. Usually, Jeff placed his victims near a drain or in a bathtub and stripped his victim naked. He then took a knife and cut the victim down the middle, starting at the top of the sternum cutting downward. Once completed. He would then remove the internal organs. The organs were cut up into small pieces and placed into plastic bags. Once the organ processing was complete, he then began cutting the flesh off and started with the arms and move to the chest. He would work his way downward, ending at the feet. According to Jeff, the skin of a human was easily removed from the body, similar to removing the skin from a chicken. He related that the only difficulty came when he was trying to remove the skin around the joints of his victims. To do so, he had to use a kitchen paring knife. When removing the skin from the heads of his victims, Jeff would make an incision along the bottom of the neck and cut upwards until he reached the crown of the head. Once this was done, he could pull on the flaps of skin and it would pull off the skull with little effort with the exception of the area around the eyes, nose, and mouth. The entire skin of the skull would come off in one complete piece like a Halloween mask. He would cut up the tissue into fist-sized pieces and place the pieces into plastic bags, usually three were required as he did not want too much in one bag. Each bag would weigh approximately 25 pounds each. Once a bag was filled to his satisfaction, he would then place that bag into another then another bag, triple bagging each one. If he did not intend to keep any of the bones of the victim, he would wrap the skeleton in a sheet and then smashed the bones into small pieces and place them into a plastic bag. Typically, it took five plastic bags to hold one victim.
Jeff would get the brains out of the skulls by drilling several holes in different places in the skull and then he would boil the skull and, during the boiling process, he would use a large basting type syringe and inject Soilex into the holes. This turned the brain into a sludge and could be removed by taking off the remaining vertebrae after boiling and then scoop out the brains. Once the brains were gone, he would boil the skull once more until any remaining skin or hair were boiled off.
Jeff would frequently cut off the skin on the bottoms of his victim's feet because the thick skin interfered with the muriatic acid liquefying the muscles and bones in the feet.
[NOTE: Jeff bought the muriatic acid and Soilex from Ace Hardware at South 43rd Street and West Oklahoma Avenue and would often return the knife he bought at the knife store in the mall on several occasions to have it resharpened – they sharpened knives for free. Jeff bought the two paring knives at Lechtner's Kitchen Mart in the Grand Avenue Mall.]
When eating some of the body parts of his victims, he would often use steak sauce, meat tenderizer, and salt and pepper and only ate parts of the people he really liked. Jeff had two hearts and a bicep muscle in his freezer upon his arrest and, had he not been arrested, had planned to eat them. By eating some of the parts of some of his victims, Jeff felt that they would forever be a part of him.
Jeff was different from almost all other serial killers. A lot of serial killers enjoy the kill and enjoy rendering the pain and suffering to their victims. Jeff did not want his victims to suffer or feel pain and, in fact, used the sleeping pills to put his victims to sleep so they would not experience any pain. To Jeff it wasn't about the pain but about loneliness and not wanting people to leave him. He just simply did not want people to keep running out of his life. Did this stem from his disdain and embarrassment from his parent's divorce? Perhaps, as he is quoted as saying that it was during that time that he developed issues with being left alone.
Lonely, perhaps, but Jeff had other issues in his life. Jeff said he had no direction in his life. He would often denigrate himself and had a very low self opinion and often felt empty inside.
Despite how he felt and any reasons or rationale for what he was doing, Jeff did not want to be doing what he was doing and, in fact, tried to stop but without success. Each time he would try to ignore his desires to kill, these desires would overtake him like some kind of addiction. On one occasion, as you have read, he turned to religion and was regularly attending church with his grandmother, for whom he had a great deal of love and respect. Try as he might, the desires of sex and murder kept forcing their way to the forefront. On another occasion, Jeff sought psychiatric care with social services and, after two or three visits, was given a prescription which Jeff thought he did not need and never had it filled.
On several occasions, Jeff expressed his wish that he wished he had never started his murderous activities. Unfortunately, being able to control those desires was not something over which Jeff had control. In fact, when asked if he was to be released from prison did he believe he would go back to killing and the sad answer was that, yes, he felt he would and that prison was the best place for him and that he would even welcome the death penalty.
Jeff did not kill every time he had sex. There were many one-night-stands where there was sex but he did not murder anyone. When he would go to the adult bookstores, he would sometimes meet individuals in then back, have sex, and then go to a bath house and no one was killed.
Jeff was, himself, a sad state of affairs. Who would have ever imagined that one day, that happy child at age four would grow up and become 177252?
Jeff felt an immense amount of guilt for what he was doing and did and felt evil and corrupted in his body and his soul.
He watched the Exorcist II two or three times a week and did so for almost six months and felt that, in the movie, Satan was very angry for having been condemned and he was able to relate to Satan on a personal level.
Jeff was a man who wanted to be like everyone else and, once upon a time as a young child, he was. He said so and so did those who knew him. Somewhere, however, along the way, something changed.
Evidence Page One
Taken from Jeff’s Apartment
Evidence Page Two
Taken from Jeff’s Apartment
Evidence Page Three
Taken from Jeff’s Apartment
Evidence Page Four
Taken from Jeff's Apartment
Evidence Page Five
Taken from Jeff's Apartment
Evidence Page Six
Taken from Jeff's Apartment
Homicide Report Oliver Lacy
Front
Homicide Report Oliver Lacy
Back
Homicide Report Oliver Lacy
Page Two
Homicide Report Oliver Lacy
Page Three
Homicide Report Oliver Lacy
Page Four
Arrest Report
Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer
Arrest Report
Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer
Page Two
Order to Detain
Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer
Confession
Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer
Confession
Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer
Confession
Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer
Confession
Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer
Confession
Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer
Mug Shot
Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer
With Glasses
Mug Shot
Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer
Without Glasses
TRIAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL
“I have remorse but I'm not even sure, myself, whether it is as profound as it should be.”
Jeff Dahmer
Unfortunately, reading the psychological assessments on Jeff are almost as diverse as the number of people rendering them. Some psychological experts say he was insane, others say he is not. Some say he had a mental disease while others say he did not. Who are we to believe and why are the opinions so varying?
Was Jeff insane? Well, the court ruled he was not, but the ever apparent argument in serial killing cases remains, “How can one do what he did and not be insane?” Again, it depends on who you read and who you believe.
The argum
ents in court varied along defense and prosecution lines as is expected. The defense making a case for insanity and mental defect and the prosecution pleading that Jeff acted in full knowledge of what he was doing.
The prosecution, defense, and the court each had its own psychiatric experts.
Jeff pled guilty to all charges against him, but he plead guilty by reason of insanity. Since his guilty plea negated the need to have a trial to determine guilt, the only reason to have a trail was to determine Jeff's sanity or, perhaps, insanity.
The Dahmer Book Page 7