10 Disturbing Details Surrounding Jeffrey Dahmer, The Milwaukee Cannibal

6 /10 Troubles With The Law

This series of crimes (that had already cost two new victims, fourteen-year-old James Doxtator and twenty-three-year-old Richard Guerrero, their lives) stopped for a brief moment in 1988: a child that he attempted to drug and rape escaped him and went to the police.

Dahmer was arrested for sexual assault and enticement of a child for immoral purposes and condemned to three and five years of prison for each of the charges.

Due to legal allowances, however, he was free in ten months, ready to kill again.

5 /10 Dahmer's Zombies?

Part of his motivation to attack others seems to have been his fantasies of gaining absolute control over a man he found attractive, as he didn’t attempt to kill some of his victims; still, instead, these died as part of failed “zombification” attempts.

In these attempts, Dahmer crudely injected hydrochloric acid or boiling water directly into their skulls in an attempt to damage it just enough to make his victims obedient, mindless, and unresistant.

This was also, partly, his motivation in preserving their skeletons (especially their skulls), their skin, and photos of the dead and alive: “…if I couldn’t keep them there with me whole, I at least could keep their skeletons,” he would later state.

4 /10 The Shrine

In the spirit of these disgusting attempts at making objects out of people, Dahmer had conceived a plan that he didn’t have the time to carry out: a shrine to his murders.

Later explaining that having his victim’s bodies around made him feel “thoroughly evil,” he had in mind to make an altar to some demonic power in which he would place a statue of a griffin that he had, alongside the skulls and bones of his victims, all adorned with incense.

The purpose of this: to receive “special powers and energies to help (him) socially and financially.”

3 /10 Almost Caught

Before finally getting caught, there was, however, one occasion in which a little bit of police work could have gotten him in jail sooner, saving the lives of four later victims.

In May of 1991, he attempted to turn young Konerak Sinthasomphone, a Lao fourteen-year-old boy (and whose brother he had tried to rape several years earlier), into a zombie.

When the boy managed to escape the apartment and was found in the street speaking in Lao by three concerned women who called the police, the officers who attended their call responded that they should “butt out” and “shut the hell up.”

Without the slightest regard for police work, they immediately believed Dahmer’s cynical claims that the boy was, in fact, his 19-year-old lover and that he was just drunk after the two had quarreled. The police listed the incident as a “domestic dispute.”

2 /10 Preying On The Weak

This situation is revealing of a feature of the Dahmer case; one that has caused great anger in the public since it became known: that the incompetence of police to catch him sooner was because he took advantage of their racial and sexual biases against homosexuals and ethnic minorities (the exclusive victims of Dahmer’s crimes), knowing all too well that his word as a white, straight-looking man would be believed over theirs. He was, unfortunately, right.

1 /10 The Final Failure

It all came to an end, however, after no less than his second victim got away. Thirty-two-year-old Tracy Edwards was enticed to follow Dahmer to his apartment under the promise of receiving $100 for “keeping him company.”

There, he attempted to cuff Edwards as he had done with other victims. Edwards, seeing Dahmer drawing a knife from somewhere, started to negotiate and managed to avoid being murdered (though Dahmer did listen to his heartbeat and informed him that he intended to “eat his heart”) until he had the chance to punch Dahmer in the face and run out the front door.

It was all finished for Dahmer: the police came banging his door later that night to find, inside his apartment, a world of horrors.