Serial Killer's Soul (2 page)

Jeffrey Dahmer was born on May 21, 1960, to Lionel and Joyce (Flint) Dahmer. He started out like any normal kid, doing normal kid things. Somewhere around the age of five though, he ventured off the “normal kid” path and began to show an interest in bones and dead animals.

Around the age of ten, Jeff’s dad gave him a chemistry set. Lionel Dahmer was an analytical chemist and possibly had aspirations that maybe Jeff wanted to become a scientist, too. Dead animals and bones could be a sign of an aspiring archaeologist or a penchant for biology. However, Jeff used the chemistry
set to explore his interest in dead things further and not in anything resembling a “scientific” interest. The interest was more morbid fascination than science.

The set had various chemicals, things like formaldehyde and various acids. Jeff learned like an apt pupil how to use the formaldehyde to preserve animal remains and the acid to remove the skin from the bone. Jeff’s morbid interest didn’t apparently include actually torturing animals or even killing them, a typical trait of many serial killers; instead, he liked to mutilate the ones that were already dead ones.

One day he found a dead dog by the side of the road. He took the animal home, sawed off its head, and mounted the head on a stake in the woods near his house. He then gutted and skinned the carcass and nailed it to a tree in the shape of a cross.

Jeff’s unusual interest in death wasn’t his only difference from kids his age. He had a lonely childhood with few friends. In school, one could say he had a difficult time connecting with other students. He was the quiet, awkward kid who often found himself the target of anyone touting bully potential. At the same time in life, his parents were going through a nasty divorce and were often absent or absorbed in their own issues.

As the years went on, Jeff became angrier, sadder, and lonelier. He was a kid with bad ideas and parents too caught up in their own life traumas to help him through those dark times.

After his parents’ divorce, everything in his life began a steep, downhill spiral. Jeff was eighteen when the divorce was final. His parents endlessly fought a proverbial tug-of-war surrounding custody of his younger brother. Jeff paid the price by being frequently ignored as he wasn’t directly involved in the battle and, as a legal adult, wasn’t a prize for his parents to quarrel over.

It was in June 1978, shortly after Jeff’s high school graduation, when something snapped and he killed his first victim, seventeen-year-old Steven Hicks. Later, Jeff said it was an experiment … an experiment to see if he could really kill someone.

The biggest mistake of Steven Hicks’ entire life was hitchhiking that night. Jeff saw him and opted to pick him up. Jeff must have already had his plan
set in his head and Stephen was the unwitting target. Jeff talked Stephen into going back to his house. Agreeing, they went back to Jeff’s empty home to drink some beer and hang out. After awhile, things took a drastic turn for the worse. Later, Jeff told everyone that he didn’t want Stephen to leave and merely wanted to keep him around. What he did, however, was knock Steven unconscious with a barbell, rape him, and then use the same barbell to crush Stephen’s windpipe, killing him.

Jeff dragged Stephen’s lifeless body behind his house and buried him in a crawl space. A few years later, for whatever reason, he returned, cut up the body, and scattered the remains around a wooded lot near the house.

After high school, Jeff attended Ohio State University. His scholarly stint was short lived; after only a semester, he dropped out because he drank too much and never attended class. His dad, likely disappointed and frustrated, forced him to join the Army. In 1981, the Army decided they didn’t want Jeff either, again because of his alcoholism. He was discharged and Jeff moved to Miami Beach, Florida, where he kept drinking.

Later that year he moved back to Ohio to live with his dad and stepmother, but his drinking problem continued. By the fall of 1981, Jeff officially started his criminal record when police arrested him and charged him with drunk and disorderly conduct.

His dad kicked him out.

In 1982, Jeff moved into the basement of his grandmother’s house in West Allis, Wisconsin. While there, Jeff’s drinking problem escalated and his behavior became even stranger. In 1982, police arrested him again, this time for indecent exposure. He was arrested a third time in September of 1986 on a second charge of indecent exposure for masturbating in front of two boys.

On September 15, 1987, almost eight years after murdering Stephen Hicks, Jeff met Steven Tuomi. The two hooked up at a gay bar in Milwaukee and ended the evening at a hotel. Jeff was drunk; too drunk to even remember murdering Steven. When Jeff sobered up and realized what had transpired, he left and bought a large suitcase. He returned to the hotel and stuffed Tuomi’s body inside the suitcase. He went to his grandmother’s house, suitcase in tow. In his
grandmother’s basement, Jeff took Tuomi out of the suitcase and had sex with the corpse. Eventually, he chopped Tuomi’s body up and boiled the flesh from the bones. He packed the remains in trash bags and hauled them to the garbage.

No one ever found a single fragment of Tuomi’s body.

Jeff killed again a month later, in October 1987. James Doxtator was a fourteen-year-old American Indian boy. Dahmer also met him outside a gay bar and convinced him to come back to his grandmother’s house to pose for naked pictures. Jeff said he would give him fifty bucks and it was easy money. Jeff did take the photos but decided that wasn’t the end of the bargain. He drugged James, strangled him to death, and took
more
photos.

Richard Guerrero, a twenty-five-year-old Hispanic man, was reported missing in March of 1988. What the world had yet to realize was that Guerrero was Jeff’s next victim. Jeff, likely inspired by his previous success, did the same things to Richard that he had to Tuomi: killed him, had sex with the body, chopped it up, and threw out the remains. This time, however, he kept Richard’s head and genitals as trophies.

Jeff’s grandmother, oblivious to what was occurring in her own basement, had enough of her grandson’s odd behavior. She had tolerated strange noises, awful smells, his drinking, and the young men he kept inviting back to her house. She kicked him out in the summer of 1988.

Jeff found an apartment in Milwaukee and was apparently enthralled with his newfound privacy. After living in the new apartment for only one day, Jeff met a thirteen-year-old Laotian boy named Somsack Sinthasomphone. Jeff lured the boy back to his apartment, where he drugged and sexually assaulted him. This boy, however, managed what the others had not; he escaped. Jeff was soon arrested, serving ten months in jail, receiving five years’ probation, and registering as a sex offender.

He moved back into his grandmother’s basement.

While living at his grandmother’s home for the second time, Jeff met and killed twenty-four-year-old African American Anthony Sears in 1989.

Dahmer’s murder toll was up to four with one failed attempt.

In May 1990, Jeff’s grandmother finally kicked him out for good. She later swore she never knew about the men and boys he killed while he lived in her home. Jeff moved into an apartment in downtown Milwaukee–Apartment 213, at 924 North 25th Street. This apartment later became infamous after the truth of Dahmer’s killing spree emerged.

Now that Jeff had an apartment to himself and the return of his privacy, he was free to do whatever he wanted. The apartment was in a poor, mostly black neighborhood. Jeff later confided that the area was ideal for killing because people there didn’t like to get cops involved and cops, likewise, didn’t seem to care as much if people who lived there went missing. He said that even if people saw something or thought something was out of ordinary, they often didn’t call the cops. Drug dealing and prostitution were everyday facts and no one liked to put their nose in anyone else’s business, fearing they’d mess up their own. Jeff felt a freedom he reveled in. He could do whatever he wanted.

His murderous nature in full swing, he killed as he pleased. He started to keep more trophy body parts from his victims: heads, skulls, genitals, hands, organs, torsos, skeletons, even entire bodies. He used acid to remove parts he didn’t want to keep. His acid of choice turned the parts into a black, jelly-like sludge. The sludge was then poured down a sink or flushed down the toilet.

In June of 1990, Jeff met twenty-eight-year-old African American Edward Smith. As was his normal
modus operandi
, Jeff lured Smith back to his apartment, drugged him, and then killed him. Jeff cut off Smith’s head, boiled off the flesh, and painted the skull gray to make it look like a replica of a medical student’s model.

The next month he convinced twenty-seven-year-old Ricky Beeks to come to his place. Jeff also drugged him, killed him, and performed necrophiliac acts on the corpse. He chopped up the body, keeping random trophy parts.

Jeff seemed to target men in their twenties. He picked them up at bars or at the mall and brought them back to his apartment. Neighbors complained about the sounds and the smells. Jeff lied to get the neighbors to leave him alone, and his compulsion continued.

In May of 1991, police
almost
caught Jeff shortly after he murdered Hughes. Jeff later said he got sloppy and lazy. He met a fourteen-year-old Laotian boy, Konerak Sinthasomphone, who just so happened to be the brother of Somsack Sinthasomphone, the young boy Jeff sexually assaulted a few years earlier.

He brought the boy back to his place where he drugged him, raped him, and took pictures. He decided to try a “zombie experiment” on the boy and actually drilled a hole in Konerak’s head and poured acid into the hole. His motive, apparently, was a desire to have a zombie sex slave, one who would never want to leave him.

The teen, like his brother before him, escaped. He ran out into the street, drugged, naked, a hole drilled into his skull, and bleeding from the rectum. Jeff chased him. Two African-American women spotted the dazed boy stumbling on the street and it was too much. They called the police. Jeff arrived and demanded that the women stay out of it, but the women stood their ground and refused to return the boy to him.

When the police showed up, Jeff lied, saying the boy was nineteen, and that they were lovers. He said his lover was drunk, and they had gotten into a fight. Amazingly, the police believed him.

The cops didn’t do a background check on Jeff and, ignoring the protests of the women, escorted Dahmer and the boy back to Jeff’s apartment. The police came up to the apartment but didn’t notice anything unusual except for a “bad smell.” They accepted Jeff’s explanation and left, not wanting to get involved with a homosexual dispute. Jeff wasn’t taking any more chances. He quickly killed Konerak, dismembering the boy’s body and saving his head.

The odor the officers reported smelling later turned out to be Tony Hughes’s corpse, rotting in Jeff’s bedroom.

The killing continued, escalating in frequency.

On July 22, 1991, a thirty-one-year-old African-American man named Tracy Edwards was to be Jeff’s eighteenth victim, but Tracy escaped. Two officers saw him running toward them, waving them down with a handcuff around his wrist. He told them that he had fought with Dahmer when Dahmer had threatened him with a knife. Edwards and the officers returned to Jeff’s place and, after a short struggle, arrested Jeff.

When police searched Jeff’s apartment, they found the remains of eleven bodies. Body parts were scattered throughout the apartment in various stages of decomposition. Among the scattered remains, they found four severed heads, five skulls along with five complete skeletons and various remains of six other bodies. A fifty-seven-gallon vat filled with acid held three torsos. Police found drills, electric saws, a claw hammer, a hypodermic syringe, and, surprisingly, a King James Bible.

Reportedly, there was no food in Jeff’s apartment, only condiments. Instead of food, the freezer held lungs, intestines, a kidney, a liver, and Oliver Lacy’s heart.

Jeffrey Dahmer’s killing spree had finally ended.

The now thirty-one-year-old man had committed grisly, unthinkable crimes. He was a man with a story no one had ever seen or heard before; a story, it seems, that came straight out of a horror movie.

Milwaukee is my second hometown and even though I was locked away during most of Jeff’s rampage, it is still frightening to think that I could have easily been one of his victims. How simple would it have been for me to think I was playing him when, in fact, I was the one being played.