''I'm Going To Eat Your Heart'' | The Life & Gruesome Crimes of Jeffrey Dahmer (& Other Details You May Not Know) | Serial Killer Series | Part Two

(Jeffrey Dahmer at his trial. Picture credit: britannica)

Please note, as mentioned in part one, I will be sharing some very disturbing details in this post so please be aware. 

Just a year after the horrific murder and dismemberment of 18 year old hitchhiker, Steven Hicks, Jeffrey had a short stint at university which was a disaster. He became very withdrawn and didn't get on with his fellow students. He drank continuously and stole from the other boys. There was an incident where his flatmates went on a night out but didn't invite him, he took revenge by throwing pizza and furniture all over the room, his flatmates were sick of him. His parents were at a loss at what to do with him so they surprisingly enlisted him in the U.S Army. He trained as a medical specialist. He soon found himself in Germany and when he spoke later of this period in his life he said he enjoyed it. He claimed that he enjoyed the routine of it all and it kept his disturbing fantasies under control. His role in the Army was to be short lived though as his drinking got in the way and he was relieved of his duties. 


A lot of people don't know about this part of Jeffrey's history, that he served in the U.S Army and although he claimed that his sick fantasies has calmed down during this period, some of his fellow soldiers would later claim that he was notorious was drugging and raping boys at the camps. One man claimed that he had been raped and tortured repeatedly by Jeffrey Dahmer over a period of 17 months. 

When Jeffrey was let go from the Army it seemed that his life had no direction. He was very intelligent but couldn't seem to do anything right when it came to going to University and maintaining an Army career. His addiction to alcohol putting the hems on both of these opportunities. 

When he left the Army and returned home, he was still plagued by memories of what he had done to Steven Hicks. He decided to go to the location where he had put some of the remains and found that they had rotted away to just bones. He smashed the bones up as much as he could and proceeded to scatter the fragments around the woods. 

By the late 1980s he found that his fantasies had once again taken full control. There were various previous attempts for Jeffrey Dahmer to have been caught, the time in 1978 when the police stopped his car and saw the bags in the back seat, a further inspection of these bags could have prevented the horrific murders that were to come. There was also an opportunity for something to have been done about his horrendous conduct in the Army but alas he'd gotten away with his actions again. 

In between the dates of his first killing in 1978 right up until the late 1980s. Jeffrey had spent some time in the Army but was then back on the streets in America and frequenting bath houses and gay bars. He was notorious for drugging and raping men at these establishments, months would go by where he would do this and would get banned from various places. He'd been caught, fined and received suspended sentences for exposing himself. His murder of Steven Hicks was unknown at the time or that he was a murderer but it was definitely known that Jeffrey Dahmer was a serial rapist.

His parents thought it would be a good idea for him to go and stay with his grandmother in Milwaukee. This didn't make a difference for Jeffrey in regards to the evilness that was continuing to grow within him. 

He was still trying to control his urge to kill by going to bath houses to drug and rape men and he even stole a mannequin which he took home and would masturbate over, pretending it was a real body. Jeffery was mostly living with his grandmother at the time and she didn't like the idea of the mannequin being in the house so he got rid of it and again focused of a real life scenario. 

Jeffrey later claimed, when discussing his crimes, that he did not enjoy anal sex, he found it uncomfortable plus he didn't like the feeling of not being in control. He always had to be in charge when it came to sex. He enjoyed penetrating other men but not having it done to him. He also said that he found it difficult to maintain an erection when his sexual partner was awake, he claimed that he could only get a full erection when the other person was passed out or deceased. He would drug his sexual partners or victims with sleeping pills and they would be passed out for up to 8 hours enabling him to do whatever he wanted. He claims that he would just masturbate, sometimes up to 3 times whilst the other person was passed out. 

Jeffrey also have a fixation with the movies 'Return of The Jedi' and 'The Exorcist III', apparently he would show some of the scenes of these movies to his victims before he murdered them 

In November of 1987 he went to a hotel with a 25 year old man by the name of Steven Tuomi who he met at a bus stop. Jeffrey already had the hotel room booked beforehand on the chance that he would meet someone to take back for a sexual encounter or in his case, drug and rape an unsuspecting victim. Jeffrey claimed that the pair had been drinking. He'd put the pills in Steven's drink and saw that he had passed out but Jeffrey carried on drinking and claimed to have woken up some time later to find that Steven was deceased. He noticed injuries on Steven's chest and there was some bruising on his own arms indicating there must have been some sort of struggle with Steven trying to defend himself. 

He said he never meant to murder Steven and went into a panic over what he had done. He said that he had flashbacks of what he had done to Steven Hicks. He left the hotel room to buy a suitcase and took Steven's body back to his grandmother's house where he kept Steven's body in his grandmother's cellar for 9 days. 

After 9 days he took Steven's body out of the cellar whilst his grandmother was out of the house and proceeded to cut the corpse open. In doing so, he was sexually aroused and proceeded to masturbate. After he was finished with Steven's body he dismembered his remains and put them into the trash. 

He later told a psychiatrist that the murder of Steven Tuomi was a turning point that he no longer wanted to fight against his urges. He said that he realised that going to a public hotel to rape his victims was too much of a risk as well as being too much trouble for him so he took the other risk of taking men back to his grandmother's house because he felt he could have more privacy there. 

His next victim James Doxtator, was just 15 years old who he met outside of a gay bar. Jeffrey took the young boy back to his grandmother's house whilst she was asleep. He promised the young boy $50 for some nude photographs and the boy agreed. Once at the house they both engaged in sexual contact and drank alcohol. At one point, James announced that he would have to leave to which Jeffrey began to panic and wanted to keep the boy at the house so he strangled him.  

After the boy was quite clearly deceased, Jeffery laid beside him for a period of time before performing anal penetration on the decedent. He kept the boy's body for a week and would take the corpse out at certain times when his grandmother was not around, he would lay next to the corpse and masturbate. After a week when the body was becoming too decomposed and the odour becoming too strong, he removed the skin from the body, dismembered him and put the remains in the trash. 

His fourth victim was 22 year old Richard Guerrero, same situation with taking Richard back to the house, drugging him and performing sexual acts before killing him. He used a different method of disposing of the remains by dismembering the corpse and dissolving the skin in acid. He kept Richard's skull for a period of a time before throwing it in the trash along with the rest of his remains. 

24 year old Anthony Sears was the last victim to be murdered at Jeffrey's grandmother's house, he was also Jeffrey's 5th known victim. Anthony was drugged, murdered and dismembered. Jeffery kept some of his remains and took them with him to his new apartment when he moved out of his grandmother's house. 

Jeffrey realised that he could no longer keep bringing men back to his grandmother's house, it was too much of a risk and too much hard work trying to disguise the smell and get rid of the remains. For once, he was only too happy to be by himself because having his own apartment meant that he could do what he wanted with the bodies for as long as he wanted without fear of getting caught. 

His notorious address at Oxford Apartments at North 25th Street in Milwaukee was the location for what was to be a unimaginable and sickening killing factory, controlled and operated by Jeffrey Dahmer. His evil and sickening rape and murders before had been too much to bare but the things that he did in that Apartment is too horrendous, too sick that no modern day horror movie could match it. During this time he managed to get a steady job working at a chocolate factory and would go to the bath houses and bars at weekends.

Once he was at that apartment he had free reign to do what he wanted and he let his disturbing and sickening fantasies run wild. More young men were to be drugged, dismembered and sexually assaulted before and after death. He bought a huge refrigerator to store dismembered body parts in. He put remains in acid so he could keep the bones and skulls. He painted the skulls and had them on display in his apartment. He kept full skeletons of some of his victims and froze their hearts and other remains so he could cook and eat them later. He also kept the genitals of some of his victims. 

(Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment: Picture credit: Murderpedia)

Jeffrey had also found a new habit of drilling holes into his victims skulls and injecting acid or boiling hot water to incapacitate them so they would be like zombies whilst he carried out his sickening sexual acts. 

The neighbours complained about the terrible smell that was coming from the trash cans outside of the block. The landlord did some investigating and realised the smell was also coming from Jeffrey's apartment. The landlord confronted Jeffrey and was told that it was due to Jeffrey's freezer breaking down. The landlord accepted this excuse because he believed Jeffrey to be a nice, quiet man who kept himself to himself and was no trouble. 

Jeffrey continued his horrendous routine and on one occasion a 14 year old boy by the name of Konerak Sinthasomphone who had been drugged and had his skull drilled appeared to be in a zombie like state so Jeffrey felt confident enough to leave the apartment to buy some more alcohol. He was surprised to see the boy sitting on the sidewalk naked, covered in blood and disorientated, when he returned. There was two women beside him trying to talk to him and help him. Jeffrey tried to convince the two women that the young man was his friend but they didn't believe him and the police were called. 

When the police arrived, they saw how disorientated the boy was and Jeffrey explained this away as the boy being drunk. Jeffrey told the officers that the boy had been 20 years old (not 14) and gave them a false name. He said that the boy was his friend and had been staying with him for few weeks and they'd been drinking, Amazingly, the police bought the story and sent the young man back up to Jeffrey's apartment.

Once Konerak was back in the apartment he was subjected to another injection of acid through the hole in his skull. Jeffrey murdered him, dismembered his body, disposed of the remains apart from the skull which he kept in his freezer. The two officers responsible for sending the naked, blood covered young boy back up to Jeffrey's apartment, were later dismissed from their roles. 

Finally the whole sickening nightmare was to come to an end when Jeffrey approached a group of three men with his usual routine of asking if anyone would like to pose for some pictures for some money. One of them agreed to go back to his apartment to shoot the pictures. 

On the 22nd of July 1991, Jeffrey and Tracy Edwards went back to his apartment to shoot the pictures (obviously, Jeffrey had other sickening plans in mind), they took some pictures and drank some alcohol. Tracy noticed the terrible smell and boxes of acid. At one point during a conversation, Tracy turned his head to look at Jeffrey's fish tank to find himself being handcuffed by Jeffrey. Tracy struggled with him and Jeffrey was unable to handcuff both wrists. Knowing he was in trouble and in fear for his life, Tracy tried his best to remain calm as not to get Jeffrey enraged. He agreed to go back into the livingroom with him to to take more photos. At one point Jeffrey laid his head on Tracy's chest to listen to his heartbeat, he then told Tracy that he wanted to eat his heart. Tracy who was quite obviously more terrified as this saga continued, managed to convince Jeffrey to have some more drinks with him. Jeffrey agreed and they both sat in the livingroom and continued to talk, all the while Tracy was thinking about how he was going to get out of his apartment. At one point Jeffrey appeared to become more relaxed and was no longer holding onto the handcuffs or the knife he had been threatening Tracy with. 

Tracy saw an opportunity and quick as a flash he got up from the sofa claiming that he needed to go to the bathroom and suddenly punched Jeffrey in the face and ran out of the apartment. he was able to flag down a police car and told them what happened. 

The police tried to remove the handcuffs from Tracy's wrist but were unable to do so and the three of them returned to Jeffrey's apartment. Once at the apartment they found Jeffrey who tried to fight the police officers, there was endless pictures of dismembered bodies found in Jeffrey's bedroom. He was arrested, Tracy was taken to safety and the apartment was sealed off to be searched. 

What investigators found was unbelievable. This is this list of evidence found:

- Photographs of dismembered bodies (74 in total) 
- Boxes of acid for the purpose of dissolving human flesh.
- Refrigerator with human blood and human remains inside.
- A bag of organs and flesh
- Two human skeletons
- Two human hands
- Seven human skulls 
- A human scalp
- A human torso
- Two preserved penises

Once arrested, Jeffrey claimed that he was relieved that the nightmare had come to an end because he wanted it be stopped. He claimed the purpose of keeping the skeletons was so that he could create a shrine for himself. He said that he ate some of his victims because he felt that by eating them that they would become a part of him and that would mean that they would never be able to leave him. His confession made for gruesome and horrific reading, it was 200 pages long. 

He pleaded guilty to all the murders and co-operated fully with investigators. He reportedly sat for hours determined to have each of the photographs found in his apartment fully identified. 

He was placed on trial for the purpose of determining whether he was sane or insane. If he was declared insane it would mean that he would spend the rest of his life in a secure psychiatric hospital. If declared sane, then he would simply go to prison. There was no death penalty in Wisconsin at that time. 

He was declared sane and was sentenced on the 15th of February 1992 to 15 terms of life imprisonment. He was later convicted of a 16th murder and another life sentence was added on. One of the murders he didn't receive a sentence due to lack of evidence. 

Not long into his sentence, things took another dramatic turn on the 28th of November 1994, when he and another inmate were found unconscious on the bathroom floor of the gymnasium in the prison. Both men had been severely beaten with a metal bar by a man named Christopher Scarver. Both men died of their injuries, Jeffrey died an hour after he was found and the other man, Jesse Anderson, died two days later in hospital. Jeffrey was 34 years old. 

The man who murdered Jeffrey was an African-American man which for some would seem like some small work of karma considering that most of Jeffrey's victims were African-American. 

Jeffrey's body was cremated but his brain was preserved for some time at his mother's request. Her thought was that the brain could be donated to medical science. A Judge ruled that the brain be destroyed and all of the ashes were split between Jeffrey's parents. 

In 1992, the Apartment where Jeffrey carried out his sickening crimes, was demolished.

(Some of Jeffrey Dahmer's Victims. Picture credit: Daily Mail)

The poor young men who lost their lives at the evil hands of Jeffrey Dahmer were not his only victims, there are numerous men out there who were drugged, raped and tortured by him but were able to escape. Every boy or man that he took back to his apartment was not murdered, some he lost the nerve with. others he was too drunk himself to do anything and on one occasion he'd taken a young man back to his home with plans to kill him but had passed out drunk, waking up the next morning to find that the man had gone and had taken some money from him. 

The story of Jeffrey Dahmer will forever haunt and horrify anyone who has researched the case or followed the headlines in the newspapers at the time. People are still fascinated by him, they don't condone what he did in the slightest but people want to know how can someone be so cold, so evil? How could someone take another human being and treat them like that and who could have sexual thoughts about having sex with corpses and acting upon it? It really is the stuff of nightmares and none of us, even the criminologists, psychologists and investigators who worked on the case and dealt with Jeffery personally will ever understand what he was and why he was driven to do the things he did. 

I think of the victims, the survivors and the families. During Jeffrey's trial, there was a moment when the friends and relatives of the victims were given a chance to speak and a lady stepped forward by the name of Rita Isbell (sister of Errol Lindsey). Jeffrey sat at his table surrounded by lawyers and cops as Rita called him 'Satan' and proceeded to walk towards his table shouting: 

''JEFFREY! I HATE YOU MOTHERF*****! I HATE YOU! DON'T F*** WITH ME JEFFREY I WILL KILL YOU GOD DAMN IT! LOOK AT ME MOTHERF*****! I WANT TO KILL YOU! 

I think anyone who has watched that piece of footage will agree, your heart just goes out to Rita and you can feel her pain. I've watched many trials and been to some court cases myself and there's always been a level of restraint. There is so much the people want to say and do, the urge to just jump over the table and grab Jeffrey is totally understandable. The fact he just sat there without a tear in his eye at any point of the trial and didn't even flinch when Rita (who I felt was incredibly brave and an amazing woman) confronted him just added to the anger. Even people who were not related to the victims, people like myself who have researched and written about this case know of the suffering these young men went through, the ordeals the survivors went through and the pain that the families went through and no doubt continue to go through today. It's a horrible case and Jeffrey Dahmer was pure evil, very manipulative and that's what makes him even more frightening. He just appeared to be a quiet, well spoken guy but behind the scenes was a complete monster. 

I just want to say as I close this post that I appreciate you taking the time to read my first subject in my Serial Killer Series, I know it must have been a harrowing read. I hope you will join me next Sunday for my next subject. 

I welcome any comments here or on my Socials


R.I.P to the known victims of Jeffrey Dahmer:
 
Steven Hicks.
Steven Tuomi.
James Doxtator.
Richard Guerrero.
Anthony Sears.
Raymond Smith.
Edward Smith.
Ernest Miller.
David Thomas.
Curtis Straughter.
Errol Lindsey.
Tony Hughes.
Konerak Sinthasomphone.
Matt Turner. 
Jeremiah Weinberger.
Oliver Lacy.
Joseph Bradechoft. 


The victims were aged between 14 -32. 



Further Reading & Sources: 




 Thank you for joining me for these first two posts in my serial killer series, I hope you will join me again next Sunday, Hope to see you on socials x

1 comment:

  1. This was insane!!! 😯😯🤯🤯🤯

    First thank you so much for the incredible shout out at the beginning of this insanely intense True Crime Story! I truly do love how you write and how you do your research "the old fashioned way", it's a breath of fresh air in today's podcasts, YouTube videos and whatever else comes out these days.

    Knowing the case a bit and living in the Chicago area (a 90 minute drive from Milwuakee) when it happened, the case was close to home in a lot of ways. But never really knowing all the details and facts really left a lot to the mind in terms of questions.

    But like you said you went down the rabbit hole in your research on this and it was a "very dark rabbit hole" in this case. Dahmer was a monster beyond compare, truly sick, truly disturbed, and after reading this I realize just how sickening he was.

    The crimes he committed are beyond the description of heinous and vile, and you've told his story in such a brilliant manner. This story was so horrifying that I don't want to say I loved the story as I feel that minimizes the true horrific nature and actions that Dahmer committed. But I do love the way you wrote it and presented it, this was amazing!

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