Jeffrey Dahmer

Jeffrey Dahmer

Mr. Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer was born on May 21, 1960 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (wikipedia.org). Eight years later, his family moved to Bath, Ohio. He was a very shy young boy who often collected dead animals and showed signs of necrophilia at an early age. No one could have predicted that Jeffrey Dahmer would commit 17 murders during his lifetime which, in trial, were proven to have been driven by necrophilia and his own homosexuality.

Most of Mr. Dahmer's victims were young, homosexual black men whom Dahmer subjected to sexual assaults (wikipedia.org). Jeffrey Dahmer had one goal in mind; finding a completely compliant sexual partner, essentially making his motivation for killing necrophilia. Dahmer was a closet alcoholic and also suffered from low self-esteem. He is one of the most notorious serial killers in American true crime history.

On July 24, 1991, the news broke. Thirty-one year old Jeffrey Dahmer had been taken into custody in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Shortly before, police had been alerted by a terrified man, Tracy Edwards, still in handcuffs, who just escaped from a nearby apartment where he had been lured in by a man offering him a beer (Lane 126). Had the man not escaped, he would have been slaughtered by a butcher knife.

Unfortunately for police, they had another opportunity to catch Dahmer in the act, but they failed miserably. In May of 1991, a Laotian teenager, Konerak Sinthasomphone, had escaped from Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment, naked, dazed and bleeding, but still alive. Sinthasomphone spoke no English, and Dahmer was able to convince police officers that the 15 year-old boy was his 19 year-old homosexual lover. After police released Sinthasomphone back into the clutches of Mr. Dahmer, Dahmer dismembered the boy and kept his skull as a memento. Coincidentally, this was the older brother of a boy Dahmer molested in 1988, a crime for which he served one year in a low-security work-release camp (wikipedia.org).

In 1991, police had yet to link the murder of 12 black men, as well as five others, to a serial killer possibly operating in the Milwaukee area. The break in the case finally came later that year. Two officers spotted a 32 year-old Tracy Edwards stumbling along with a single handcuff of his wrist. Naturally, the officers pulled alongside Edwards and began questioning him.