How Was Jeffrey Dahmer Caught?

A partially clothed man with a handcuff dangling from his wrist stumbled down a street northeast of downtown Milwaukee on July 22, 1991. It was 11:30 p.m. and an odd site for the area. Milwaukee police who happened to be nearby stopped him. The man, identified later as Tracy Edwards, told them he had been threatened with a knife inside a nearby apartment building and got away.

Edwards took him to the apartment, rented by Jeffery Dahmer. Police found a nightmare: numerous body parts belonging to multiple people. The remains of 11 people were eventually uncovered and Dahmer was arrested, ending his reign as the “Milwaukee Cannibal.”

Dahmer confessed to murdering more than a dozen people, including the torture and mutilation of his victims and the abuse of their corpses.

One of his neighbors told WISN 12 News that the night Edwards escaped, he heard Edwards tell police: “He had met [Dahmer] at the Grand Avenue tonight, and the guy offered him some beers. So they came back to his house and so they got to drinking beer and the white guy somehow handcuffed the Black guy, and then he brought out a real big butcher knife. And somehow the Black guy got out, ran down the street, got the cops and then came back.”

It was Dahmer’s modus operandi, luring vulnerable young men he met at bars to his apartment, knocking them out with alcohol and drugs, and murdering them. He then engaged in necrophilia and cannibalism. 

Agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and personnel from the Milwaukee County medical examiner's office searched the apartment and found various body parts from many different victims.

They uncovered seven skulls, three of which were painted. Four intact human heads and a partly dissected skeleton were found inside a portable freezer, and in a separate freezer, a heart and human muscle. They also found three partially skeletonized bodies in a 55-gallon drum. 

Dahmer stored chloroform and ether bottles in the hall closet that police said he used to sedate and kill his victims. Near the bottles, Dahmer kept two cleaned skulls displayed.

Police also found tape, a hammer, handsaw and an electrical drill in a bedroom, as well as other evidence, including muriatic acid, degreasing solvents and photographs of victims, both alive and dead.

What police didn’t find also became a massive piece of evidence: no food in the kitchen except a can of Crisco grease, which supported later allegations of cannibalism. 

Investigators used Dahmer’s apartment to not only establish how he killed, but what he did to his victims before and after he murdered them. Dahmer, investigators said, experimented on his victims and lobotomized them. In one case, he drilled multiple holes into the victim's heads to inject acid into his brain. 

Dahmer, then 31, was charged with 15 counts of murders and initially pleaded not guilty in September 1991. When officers found the body of Steven Hicks buried in the woods behind Dahmer’s Ohio house, they gave him an additional charge. Then, in 1992, Dahmer changed his plea to guilty but insane to the 15 murders. 

This shifted the burden of proof prosecutors needed; instead of convincing a jury that Dahmer was guilty, they had to prove that Dahmer was a sane, conniving killer. And, instead of a 12-person unanimous jury verdict, the state needed just 10 jurors to agree on Dahmer’s mental state. 

The trial began at a time when the 24-hour news cycle was relatively new. Onlookers and media packed out the courtroom and lined the streets. There was an 8-foot bulletproof glass barrier that divided spectators from the courtroom itself.

Gerald Boyle, Dahmer’s attorney, said Dahmer was "not an evil man, [he] was a sick man." Dahmer had, he said, admitted to cannibalism and having sex with corpses, but he blamed it on Dahmer suffering from necrophilia, a psychological disorder in which a person has a desire to have sex with dead bodies.

On the other hand, prosecutor E. Michael McCann argued Dahmer could have controlled his behavior. 

Prosecutorial witness Dr. Park Elliott Dietz said that though Dahmer was an alcoholic, his killings had been well-planned and deliberate. In addition, he pointed out Dahmer's condom use due to fears of contracting AIDS. All this, they argued, pointed to control and thought. 

Dr. Frederick Fosdal, a prosecution psychiatrist, concurred that Dahmer suffered from necrophilia, but added that “this type of disorder in and by itself … in my interpretation does not usually cause the degree of impairment" to make a person unable to obey the law.

After five hours of deliberation, jurors found Dahmer guilty of 15 counts of murder and decided he was sane and not suffering from a mental disorder. His initial punishment was 15 life sentences without any chance of parole, but a 16th life sentence was later added after he pleaded guilty to the 1978 murder of Hicks.

Dahmer said in court, “I knew I was sick or evil or both. Now I believe I was sick. The doctors have told me about my sickness, and now I have some peace. I know how much harm I have caused … Thank God there will be no more harm that I can do.”

Two years into his sentence, Dahmer was killed at age 34 by inmate Christopher Scarver, who also fatally beat another man on their work detail. Scarver claimed God told him to kill Dahmer and the other man. Already serving a life term for murder, Scarver was sentenced to additional life terms and transferred to a federal prison.