Crime
Milwaukee Police Department
ByRemy Millisky
The following article includes graphic descriptions of sexual assault and cannibalism.
Jeffrey Dahmer was one depraved individual, and his name has gone down in American history among the worst of the worst killers and cannibals, per Biography. He had a pretty normal childhood growing up in Wisconsin, but by the time he was in his teenage years in the 1970s, he began to develop a desire to kidnap, torture, and kill men.
According to Crime Museum, Dahmer was left alone in his family's house at age 18 following his parent's divorce. He was a heavy drinker and a loner, and left to his own devices, he killed a man for the first time in 1978, hitting a hitchhiker in the head with a heavy dumbbell. He went on to develop his habit of killing and committed unspeakable atrocities. It took police years to catch Jeffrey Dahmer, but when they finally did, they discovered the abominations he had been keeping inside his refrigerator.
The awful smell in his apartment
kemal gonen/Shutterstock
Jeffrey Dahmer was known to target exclusively men and young boys, and he almost always chose gay men, per Biography. After his first murder, he went on to kill 16 other people. Usually, Dahmer would lure men back to his apartment so that he could drug them or ply them with alcohol until they were submissive to him.
By 1989, Dahmer had killed four men and was in the U.S. court system under sexual exploitation, sexual assault, and child molestation charges. He was allowed on day release from prison and continued to murder men. Dahmer's experimentation with his victims grew increasingly violent from 1989 to 1991 — he began to give his victims lobotomies and sometimes poured acid into the holes he'd created, making the victim almost like a zombie.
According to Oxygen, even before Dahmer was investigated by police, his neighbors knew something was amiss. There was an awful rotting smell permeating the building, which Dahmer blamed on his faulty freezer, saying he had been gifted some meat by his grandmother but forgot to plug in the freezer to keep the meat from spoiling.
If you or anyone you know has been a victim of sexual assault, help is available. Visit the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network website or contact RAINN's National Helpline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).
The four human heads in his apartment
Lost Mountain Studio/Shutterstock
Crime Museum reports that in 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer's horrific crimes finally saw the light of day. As police investigated his apartment, they found horror after horror. There were four human heads in his house, with one inside the refrigerator. There was also a human heart in the freezer.Oxygen reports that there was a box of baking soda along with a recently decapitated human head of a Black man inside the fridge, but police reported that there was no blood.
In an interview, a veteran homicide detective recounted that he was so deeply unnerved by the remains that he nearly fled from the room. Per TruTV, the policeman who discovered the head shouted an expletive, and the police later noted that the box of baking soda did literally nothing to conceal the horrible stench emanating from the fridge.
Police found three more heads in the freezer wrapped in plastic. Then, they looked in a nearby closet, where they found genitals and decomposing human hands inside a large cooking pot.
Missed opportunities to catch Dahmer
Andrey_Popov/Shutterstock
According to United Press International, police investigated Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment during a time when he had a human body laying in his bedroom. But they dismissed the stench since Dahmer was nicely dressed and instead chalked it up to bathroom odors. Dahmer's neighbors continued to complain about the rotting smell, and Dahmer contacted a carpet cleaner at least twice in the early 1990s to get rid of stained carpets.
Dahmer seemed to be regularly cooking and eating his victims' bodies, per The New York Times. If police had properly responded to his victims, they might have found other atrocities in his kitchen sooner — but unfortunately, they botched basically every encounter with Dahmer, letting him go free numerous times.In one instance, Dahmer had been sexually abusing a 14-year-old boy, who managed to break free from Dahmer and tell police his harrowing experience. Even though he was found naked and completely terrified of Dahmer, police hand-delivered him back to Dahmer's apartment anyway.
He preserved his victims' remains
TrueTacticalGear/Shutterstock
The day they returned the child to the sex offender, there was evidence of bodies in Jeffrey Dahmer's refrigerator, reports The New York Times. Dahmer said in interviews that if police had examined his home that day, they would have easily found it. There were also heads, skulls, and preserved genitals inside an acid-filled drum. Dahmer later killed the 14-year-old child, plus four other victims, before police finally arrested him.
According to TruTV, Dahmer did all sorts of things with his victims' bodies. He usually photographed them and sexually abused their remains. Dahmer reportedly loved when the bodies were fresh enough to still give off heat. Most of the body parts were relegated to the large acid vat, where it would become a sludge that Dahmer could dispose of easily. But for other bodily remains, Dahmer would preserve them with formaldehyde or boil the flesh off to preserve the bones.
Disposing of the fridge in secret
Maksim Safaniuk/Shutterstock
Jeffrey Dahmer ate some of his victims, according to a 1993 interview with Inside Edition. He claimed that he kept his victims' body parts out of love and cannibalized them to be closer with them. One victim even testified that when he was with Dahmer, Dahmer casually mentioned how he was going to eat the man's heart. Dahmer reportedly enjoyed eating his victims' hearts and arm muscles most of all.
In total, Jeffrey Dahmer killed 17 men, according to Biography. He was arrested in 1991, but he died in 1994 after a prison inmate murdered him (viaAP News). Then, in 1996, lots of Dahmer's belongings were destroyed in the years after his death, including his silverware and the fridge where the victim's head was discovered.His belongings were driven out of the state and destroyed at a waste management site in secret so that the grisly reminders of his crimes could never be recovered.
Recommended
