Jeffrey Dahmer

The backstory

The 1989 conviction and probation

In 1989 Dahmer was convicted in Milwaukee of second-degree sexual assault and of enticing a child for immoral purposes; the victim was a 13-year-old boy, according to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.² On May 24, 1989, he was sentenced to one year in the Milwaukee House of Correction, with work release, and five years of probation, with conditions that he get alcohol treatment and have no contact with anyone under 18.² A state probation agent supervised him from March 1990 until his arrest; she met with him about twice a month, and home visits were waived under a waiver her supervisor approved, the court wrote.²

The May 1991 police encounter

In the early morning of May 27, 1991, a woman named Sandra Smith encountered Konerak Sinthasomphone, who was 14 years old, and asked Nicole Childress to call the police, according to the federal district court’s account.¹ Milwaukee police officers John Balcerzak and Joseph Gabrish responded; the boy did not answer their questions, Dahmer gave a false name for him, and the ambulance crew “was sent away by the police,” the court wrote.¹ The officers took both to Dahmer’s apartment, and, “thinking they had verified that Sinthasomphone belonged with Dahmer,” left the boy there.¹ “Dahmer killed Sinthasomphone some 30 minutes later,” the court wrote.¹ Dahmer later failed to report that police contact to his probation agent, one of the two violations on which his probation was revoked after his arrest.²

The arrest

At about 11:30 p.m. on July 22, 1991, Milwaukee police on patrol found a partially clothed man near an apartment building who said he had been threatened with a knife, the FBI has recounted.⁵ Officers went to Dahmer’s apartment, arrested him and found “numerous body parts belonging to multiple victims”; the remains of 11 victims were found there.⁵ The FBI provided laboratory and identification services to Milwaukee authorities, including DNA and tool mark analysis.⁵ Soon after his arrest, Dahmer confessed to more than a dozen murders, and in an affidavit he admitted killing 11 men.⁵¹⁷ Milwaukee County prosecutors filed homicide charges in stages; by Aug. 6, 1991, he faced 12 counts, and bail was set at $5 million cash.¹⁸

The murders of conviction in Milwaukee

Dahmer admitted drugging, strangling and dismembering the young men and boys he was charged with killing, UPI reported at the end of the trial.¹⁰ He pleaded guilty but insane to the murders of 15 people. A list of the victims published after the verdict gave each one’s age, home city and when he was last seen or reported missing; those are not dates of death.¹²

Jamie Doxtator, 14, of Milwaukee, was last seen in January 1988.¹²

Richard Guerrero, 25, of Milwaukee, disappeared in 1988.¹²

Anthony Sears, 26, of Milwaukee, was last seen March 25, 1989.¹²

Ricky Beeks, 33, of Rockford, Illinois, was last seen in May 1990.¹²

Edward W. Smith, 28, of Milwaukee, was reported missing in June 1990.¹²

Ernest Miller, of Chicago, was last seen Sept. 2, 1990.¹² He had been living in Chicago, where he hoped to study dance, and was visiting family in Milwaukee when he disappeared, the Chicago Tribune reported.¹⁸

David C. Thomas, 23, of Milwaukee, was reported missing Sept. 24, 1990.¹²

Curtis Straughter, 18, of Milwaukee, was last seen Feb. 18, 1991.¹²

Errol Lindsey, 19, of Milwaukee, was last seen April 7, 1991.¹²

Anthony Hughes, 31, of Madison, was reported missing May 24, 1991.¹²

Konerak Sinthasomphone, 14, of Milwaukee, was killed on May 27, 1991, about 30 minutes after police left him at Dahmer’s apartment.¹ By Dahmer’s account, he had met the boy at a downtown shopping mall and invited him to the apartment to pose for pictures, the Chicago Tribune reported.¹⁸

Matt Turner, 20, of Chicago, met Dahmer in Chicago on June 30, 1991.¹² Dahmer’s unauthorized trip to Chicago that day was the second violation on which his probation was revoked.²

Jeremiah Benjamin Weinberger, 23, of Chicago, was killed by Dahmer “on or about July 6, 1991,” according to the Seventh Circuit.²¹²

Oliver Lacy, 23, of Milwaukee, was last seen July 12, 1991.¹²

Joseph Bradehoft, 25, of Milwaukee, met Dahmer on July 19, 1991, three days before the arrest.¹²

The plea and the sanity trial

On Jan. 13, 1992, Dahmer changed his plea to guilty but insane, and Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Laurence C. Gram Jr. accepted it.⁷ His lawyer, Gerald Boyle, told the court, “I want to emphasize that the decision to plead guilty is Mr. Dahmer’s.”⁷ Under Wisconsin’s procedure, a defendant who pleads insanity is first convicted and then tried separately on sanity; Dahmer’s plea took the trial directly to that second phase.⁷ If he was found sane, each count carried a mandatory life sentence; if insane, he would be committed to a mental institution.⁷ The burden of proving insanity was on the defense.¹¹

Testimony lasted 12 days and included three young men who said they had escaped from Dahmer, police detectives, and the officers from the May 1991 encounter.¹⁰⁶ Seven psychiatrists and psychologists testified.¹³

The defense experts. Dr. Fred Berlin of Johns Hopkins University testified that Dahmer had necrophilia, which he called “a broken mind,” and that Dahmer had been “fighting very hard not to give into these urges,” though he could control himself when a situation required it.⁸ Dr. Judith Becker testified, “He has a mental disease. That is what drives his behavior.”²³ Dr. Carl Wahlstrom, a Chicago psychiatrist, testified that after his fifth killing Dahmer developed beliefs about building a “temple” or “power center” from remains, and that he “tried very hard to avoid getting caught.”⁹²³

The prosecution and court-appointed experts. Dr. Frederick Fosdal, called by the prosecution, testified that Dahmer had told him, “I had choices to make. I made the wrong choices.”²³ Dr. Park Dietz, also for the prosecution, testified that while Dahmer was an alcoholic, the killings were planned and deliberate.²³ Dr. George Palermo, appointed by the court, testified that Dahmer had an antisocial personality disorder but did not meet the legal definition of insanity.²³ UPI reported that the experts split 4–3 on his sanity, that the two court-appointed experts sided with the prosecution, that only one described him as psychotic, and that all agreed he knew his actions were wrong.¹⁰

Five of the seven experts agreed, on direct or under cross-examination, that he had a mental disease. McCann argued that necrophilia was a personality disorder, not a mental illness, and Judge Gram rejected that argument each time it was raised.¹³ McCann’s fallback argument was that Dahmer could have chosen not to kill even if he had a mental disease.¹³

The verdict and sentence

On Feb. 15, 1992, after nearly five hours of deliberation, the jury of seven men and five women found Dahmer sane on each of the 15 counts by a 10–2 vote; Wisconsin required only 10 jurors to agree.¹⁰ One juror said, “His whole conduct showed he was a con artist.”¹¹ Another, one of the two in the minority, said the jury agreed there was a problem but disagreed whether it was a disorder or a disease.¹³

On Feb. 17, Judge Gram sentenced him to 15 consecutive life terms after relatives of the victims addressed the court.¹⁴¹⁵ A federal court later described the sentence as “life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.”¹ Dahmer told the court, “I take all the blame for what I did,” and, “I know society will never be able to forgive me.”¹⁵ His lawyer said no appeal was planned.¹⁴³¹ Wisconsin had no death penalty.¹¹

The Ohio case

Steven Mark Hicks, 18, of Coventry Township, Ohio, was killed on June 18, 1978, at the Dahmer family home in Bath Township, Summit County, according to an Associated Press account; Dahmer had graduated from high school shortly before.²⁴ Hicks had been hitchhiking.²⁴ After Dahmer’s 1991 confession, he told investigators where to find the remains, and he was indicted in Summit County.²⁴ In May 1992 he pleaded guilty in Akron to the murder and received another life term; he sat quietly while Hicks’s mother called him a monster, the St. Petersburg Times reported.¹⁶

Personal backstory

Early life

Dahmer was born in Milwaukee in 1960, according to his father’s memoir as summarized in a review.²⁹ The family moved to Bath Township, Ohio, when he was 8, and he graduated from Revere High School.²⁴ In the memoir, his father wrote that his son seemed like any other child until he began to withdraw, and that his own absorption in his work as a chemist kept him from seeing that his son’s drinking had begun in high school.²⁹ The father linked that withdrawal to a hernia operation in childhood, according to another review.³⁰ These are the father’s account, not findings of a court.

College and the Army

He left college after one semester, his father wrote.²⁹ He enlisted in the Army in 1979 and served as a medic with the 68th Armored Regiment in Baumholder, West Germany, from July 1979 to March 1981, according to Associated Press reporting cited by Military Times.²⁵ He was separated in 1981 under a chapter of Army regulations covering alcohol and drug abuse; his stepmother told the AP that his drinking led to the discharge.²⁵ Asked about him in 1991, she said, “Something happened to him in prison that he would never talk about.”¹⁷

Milwaukee

He later lived for a time at his grandmother’s home in West Allis, a Milwaukee suburb, the Chicago Tribune reported in 1991.¹⁸ The sources reviewed do not document his work history in Milwaukee.

Mental health, as testified

No court found Dahmer legally insane. At trial, defense experts testified that he had necrophilia, and Berlin called his condition “a broken mind”; the court-appointed psychiatrist testified to an antisocial personality disorder; and a prosecution expert testified that he was an alcoholic.⁸²³ Ten of the 12 jurors found that he did not have a mental disease.¹³ Dahmer told examiners that race played no role in his choice of victims, most of whom were young Black men, UPI reported.¹⁰

The families

After the verdict, the sister of Edward W. Smith said it “brought back the faith I’d lost in the justice system.”¹¹ The mother of Anthony Hughes said, “I want to thank God, thank Mr. McCann, thank the jury, for bringing in justice for us.”¹⁰ A relative of Ernest Miller said, “I’ve been praying every night that he would not be found insane.”¹⁰ In 2022, the sister of Errol Lindsey said that watching her sentencing-day statement recreated by Netflix “brought back all the emotions I was feeling back then.”²⁶

In custody and death

He served his sentences at the Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin.¹⁰²¹ On the morning of Nov. 28, 1994, Dahmer and another inmate, Jesse Anderson, were escorted to a work detail at about 7:50 a.m.; Dahmer was found about 20 minutes later in a bathroom in the prison’s recreation area with severe head wounds and died at 9:11 a.m., UPI reported.²¹ Neither man was under direct guard supervision at the time, and Anderson was critically injured in the same attack.²¹ Wisconsin’s corrections secretary called it “a terrible tragedy.”²¹ He was 34.²¹ A federal appeals court later described Christopher Scarver, a “triple murderer,” as “the inmate who murdered Jeffrey Dahmer.”⁴ His lawyer said he trusted Dahmer “has found a peace he could never find in life.”²¹