Jeffrey Dahmer biography

Necrophilia is generally associated with issues of exercising control over victims. Dahmer developed these rituals as he progressed, experimenting with chemical means of disposal, and he also consumed the flesh of his victims. He attempted crude lobotomies, drilling into victim's skulls while they were still alive, injecting them with Muriatic acid to see whether he could extend his control to the living. Most of these victims died instantly,

but he claimed that one victim had survived for a number of days in a zombie-like state, with limited motor function.

He was careful to select victims on the fringes of society, who were often itinerant or borderline criminal, making their disappearances less noticeable, and his likelihood of capture that much less. There have been claims that he was racially motivated, as most of his victims were African-American. However, it is equally likely that his victims were simply part of the demographic among residents of the poor neighborhood in which Dahmer lived, and not carefully selected.

Close Call

This racial motive did, however, figure largely in the case of his 13th victim, a 14-year-old Laotian boy who was, coincidentally, the younger brother of the boy he had been convicted of molesting three years earlier.

On May 26, 1991, Dahmer's African-American neighbor, Sandra Smith, called the police to report that a young Asian boy was running naked in the street. When the police arrived, the boy was incoherent, and they accepted the word of Dahmer, a white man in a largely poor African-American community, that the boy was his 19-year-old lover who had had too much to drink, over the protestations of Smith and her daughter, who could clearly see that the boy was terrified of Dahmer. Smith's subsequent enquiries, through the local authorities, were also not taken seriously.

The police escorted Dahmer and the boy home and, clearly not wishing to become embroiled in a homosexual domestic disturbance, took a cursory look around before leaving. Once the police left the scene, Dahmer strangled the boy and proceeded with his usual rituals. Had they conducted even a basic search, police officers would have found the body of Dahmer's 12th victim decomposing in the bedroom, and enough photographic evidence to immediately arrest the serial killer.

Arrest and Imprisonment

Dahmer's luck finally ran out on July 22, 1991, when two Milwaukee police officers picked up Tracy Edwards, a young African-American man who was wandering the streets with a handcuff dangling from his wrist. They decided to investigate the man's claims that a "weird dude" had drugged and restrained him, and arrived at Dahmer's apartment, where he calmly offered to get the keys for the handcuffs.

Edwards claimed that the knife Dahmer had threatened him with was in the bedroom and, when the officer went in to corroborate the story, he noticed photographs of dismembered bodies lying around, which included one of a head in the fridge. He shouted to his colleague to restrain Dahmer, who fought back fiercely, but was nevertheless subdued.