Jeffrey Dahmer was a merciless serial killer from Milwaukee who was convicted in 1991, causing outrage among local law enforcement and sparking public interest in serial murders.
Jeffrey Dahmer has passed away, but he will always be remembered as a serial killer who brutally murdered around 17 men. Numerous media have created various shows, movies, and documentaries about his crimes. The most trending show currently is a Netflix series, Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story.
Not only did Dahmer keep the corpses of the victims, but he also desecrated them, making him one of the most dangerous serial killers of his time.
When Did it All Begin?
It all started when Milwaukee police received a call on the morning of May 27, 1991. Two women witnessed a naked boy lying on the street in terrible condition.
That boy was bleeding and stumbling around.
As the police arrived, an attractive blond man stopped and assured them everything was OK. Unbeknownst to the police, he was the serial killer, Jeffrey Dahmer.
Dahmer calmly informed the police that the boy was 19 years old and his boyfriend. In reality, Konerak Sinthasomphone was only 14 years old.
The police believed him and silenced the women, considering it a personal domestic issue. They even joked about them being gay lovers, but they allowed a crime to occur.
Who could have imagined that the 14-year-old kid was Dahmer’s victim?
It was one of 17 killings committed by Dahmer between 1978 and 1991. Shortly after that, Dahmer was apprehended and charged with the murder of Sinthasomphone, as well as other men and boys.
It is a fact that all of Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims were primarily young, ranging in age from 14 to 31 years old, and his predatory behavior made it clear.
What Drew Jeffrey Dahmer to a Life of Crime?
Born on May 21, 1960, Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer belonged to a middle-class family residing in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
He was fixated on all things related to death from an early age. He also began collecting the remains of deceased animals as a hobby.
His father, Eerily, was concerned about his son’s fixation with dead animals and how he enjoyed rattling their bones.
Soon after attending high school, he moved to Bath Township with his family in Akron, Ohio, a tranquil suburb.
He attempted to integrate with the people but failed. He began feeling like an outsider and, as a result, became an alcoholic.
Dahmer was a heavy drinker in high school, often concealing beer and hard liquor under his army fatigue jacket.
Meanwhile, Dahmer also came to terms with his homosexuality. His sexuality intensified, and his sexual desires became increasingly bizarre.
Dahmer started fantasizing about assaulting boys and men, as well as the idea of completely dominating and manipulating others became his fascination.
All of these disturbing elements piqued his interest. Jeffrey Dahmer’s unusual behavior as a young man shaped him into the person he became.
The Start of an Even Worse Nightmare
Dahmer’s mental state became uncontrollable, and he struggled to manage it as his violent fantasies grew stronger.
Jeffrey Dahmer committed his first crime just a few weeks after graduating from high school. He also attended Ohio State University but was expelled due to his alcoholism.
Prior to his alcoholism worsening, he also served in the US Army as a combat medic for two years.
After being discharged and returning to Milwaukee, Dahmer was later found to have drugged and sexually assaulted two soldiers.
Over time, he became more violent, committing acts such as exposing himself to minors and drugging and assaulting men at gay bathhouses.
The death of Steven Tuomi by Jeffrey Dahmer marked the beginning of Dahmer’s true murderous spree. After Dahmer killed Steven Tuomi, a 25-year-old man, in September 1987, he turned to homicide.
Dahmer met Tuomi in a gay bar and convinced him to go to his hotel room. Dahmer later claimed that his intention was only to drug and assault him.
However, the next day, Dahmer woke up with bruises on his hand, and Tuomi’s bleeding body was under his bed.
Following this heinous murder, Dahmer began committing more severe crimes and actively sought out young boys and men at gay bars.
He would drug them, lure them to his grandmother’s house, and then brutally assault and kill them.
During this time, Dahmer killed at least three people. He was also charged with sexually assaulting a 13-year-old boy, leading to his incarceration in a detention camp for eight months.
“It was an incessant and never-ending desire to be with someone at whatever cost,” he confessed in an interview.
“Someone good looking, really nice looking. It just filled my thoughts all day long,” Dahmer said.
However, merely murdering his victims was not enough for him, so he began collecting macabre mementos from his victims as well.
This practice began when he strangled a 24-year-old model, Anthony Sears, to death and then violated his corpse. Dahmer preserved Spears’ head and genitals in jars filled with acetone.
Dahmer committed most of his 17 killings over the next two years, during which he would kill, torture, rape the victims, and keep trophies.
He descended into cannibalism, storing body parts in the refrigerator so he could consume them later.
Yet even this was not enough to satisfy Dahmer’s depraved desires. He even began drilling holes in the skulls of his victims while they were still alive and sedated.
He would then pour hydrochloric acid into his victim’s heads, hoping that this would render them in a lifelong, non-resistive, and subservient condition.
Following his death, Dahmer served as the basis for numerous television programs, movies, and documentaries, including the hit drama series “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” on Netflix, which premiered in 2022 with Evan Peters portraying Dahmer.
In a September 2022 interview with Netflix, Peters detailed why portraying a serial killer was the most challenging role he had undertaken.
‘Attempting to portray [this character] was going to be one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do in my life because I wanted it to be incredibly authentic, but I was very afraid about everything that Dahmer did.’ Peters remarked. “But in order to do that, I was going to have to go to really dark places and stay there for an extended period of time.”
One can only imagine how he could have actually made up his mind about portraying the most horrifying serial killer there was.
In the unsettling series ‘Dahmer,’ Jeffrey reveals the traumas of his childhood, how they impacted his mind, and his struggles with loneliness. As portrayed by Evan Peters, all he desired was for people to stay with him forever.
How Was Jeffrey Dahmer Caught? The Last Victim
On July 22, 1991, Dahmer promised three men $100 at a bar to accompany him to his apartment for nude photos in exchange for their company. Tracy Edwards, one of the three men, accepted the offer.
However, when Edwards entered Dahmer’s apartment, he smelled something foul and noticed numerous boxes of hydrochloric acid on the floor, which Dahmer claimed he used to clean bricks.
Dahmer handcuffed Edwards after asking him to tilt his head to look at his tropical fish during their conversation (he attempted to handcuff both of his wrists but failed.) Despite being confused and asking him, “What’s happening?” Edwards followed Dahmer to his bedroom to take the nude pictures.
A videotape of “The Exorcist III” was playing in the bedroom, and Edwards saw naked men’s pictures on the wall. A blue 57-gallon drum that emitted a foul stench was also in the corner of the room, which Edwards had previously noticed.
Dahmer then retrieved a knife from his pocket and instructed Edwards to remove his shirt. To calm him down, Edwards began unbuttoning his shirt, but Dahmer insisted that he first remove the handcuffs and put away the knife to let him do it himself.
Disregarding Edwards’ request while placing his head on Edwards’s chest to listen to his heartbeat, Dahmer declared that he wanted to devour Edwards’ heart. To keep Dahmer calm, Edwards assured him that he was his friend and had no intention of fleeing.
Edwards asked Dahmer if they could return to the living room, where there was air conditioning, and have a beer. Edwards planned to escape by jumping out a window or dashing through the unlocked front door.
After receiving Dahmer’s permission, they returned to the living room. Edwards then requested permission to use the restroom from Dahmer. Five hours later, as he rose from the couch, Edwards punched Dahmer in the face and exited through the front door, which was initially difficult to open.
On the corner of North 25th Street in Milwaukee that evening, Edwards flagged down Robert Rauth and Rolf Mueller. When the officers noticed Edwards’s handcuffs on his wrist, he told them that a “freak” had abducted him. Edwards agreed to accompany the officers back to Dahmer’s apartment when the officers’ handcuff keys failed to free Dahmer from his restraints.
When Edwards brought the officers to Dahmer’s apartment, Dahmer admitted to having placed the handcuffs on Edwards. Only then did Edwards also tell them that Dahmer had threatened him with a knife and expressed a desire to eat his heart.
Without responding to Edwards’s claims, Dahmer pointed the officers to a key on his bedside dresser. One of the officers, Mueller, discovered a knife underneath Dahmer’s bed in the bedroom, along with an open dresser containing Polaroid images of severed human bodies.
When Mueller showed the pictures to Rauth in the living room, Rauth said, “These are real.” Dahmer struggled with the officers to avoid being arrested when he saw Mueller holding the photos, but the officers eventually overpowered him and handcuffed him.
When Mueller opened Dahmer’s refrigerator after his apprehension, he found a decapitated skull on the bottom shelf. Dahmer reportedly said to Mueller, “For what I did, I should be killed.”
Dahmer was promptly arrested when police discovered gruesome photos and body parts at his residence.
Jeffrey Dahmer later confessed to 15 of the charges and was sentenced to 15 life sentences plus 70 years in prison.
On November 28, 1994, a fellow prisoner and convicted killer named Christopher Scarver bludgeoned Dahmer to death with a metal rod in the prison restroom.
According to Scarver, during the attack, Jeffrey Dahmer did not resist or make a sound but seemed willing to give up his life.
Where Is The Last Victim?
The final victim, Tracey Edwards, who was 32 years old when he first encountered Dahmer, testified in court and was a crucial witness in Dahmer’s conviction. Edwards stated in his testimony that Dahmer was “not the same person” he first met at the pub. “His facial features were unusual… He said, “It was like it wasn’t him anymore.
Edwards allegedly pushed a man to his death from a Milwaukee bridge on July 26, 2011, 20 years after the incident. At the time, he was 52 years old, homeless, and had been moving between shelters since 2002.
Following an altercation, Edwards said that he and another man threw a man into a river from a bridge in the center of Milwaukee and pleaded guilty to aiding a felon. Edwards was convicted of the offense in 2012 and received a sentence of 1.5 years in prison and two years of community service from the Milwaukee County Circuit Court.
Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story Review On Netflix
This week, Murphy’s latest Netflix series, Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, emerged without any prior notice or promotion.
There was no premiere. The stars of the show were not available for interviews, and no media representatives were given access to the preview.
You might be forgiven for not even knowing it existed unless you stumbled upon the flimsy trailer released online just five days before the show’s debut.
This usually indicates that a platform wants to bury a show.
It raises the question that although the series was made with good intentions, something went horribly wrong along the way, and Netflix decided it would be better to keep the situation under wraps.
Whether intentional or not, Dahmer is a show that leaves viewers profoundly unsettled.
Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan co-created the American limited biographical crime drama series Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, which made its Netflix debut on September 21, 2022.
The series tells the story of victims of the notorious serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, portrayed by Evan Peters.
The Plot
The biopic of Jeffrey Dahmer seems almost pathologically incapable of subtlety.
Dahmer murdered and occasionally consumed 17 victims over 13 years from the 1970s to the 1990s.
The initial episodes mainly depict every negative trait the true crime drama subgenre can exhibit.
Dahmer is fetishized here. Even the blood smears on the mattress attest to the squalor of his apartment.
He guts his first fish, dissecting it in a disturbingly gynecological manner to examine its internal organs.
He is shown to us shirtless and sweaty, and he m*sturbates frequently in front of the camera.
In one scene, Dahmer sensually fondles a store mannequin while the song ‘Please Don’t Go’ by KC and the Sunshine Band plays in the background.
However, the show improves as it progresses. The focus changes in the second half, and Jeffrey Dahmer fades into the background.
Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story Review – Netflix
According to an aggregator website, Rotten Tomatoes reported a 60% approval rating with an average score of 6/10.
Based on seven reviews, the weighted average review site Metacritic gave the series a score of 46 out of 100, categorizing it as mixed reviews from the audience.
Kayla Cobb from Decider mentioned that the program has excellent writing, acting, and direction, emphasizing failures rather than glorifying murders.
In his review of episode 6 (“Silenced”), Dan Fienberg of The Hollywood Reporter called it “arguably the best episode of the series, an unbearably sweet and tragic hour of TV that perhaps should have been the model for the entire show.”
Is The Victims’ Family Pleased With The Show’s Production?
Rita Isbell, the sister of Dahmer victim Errol Lindsey, made a statement during her brother’s 1992 trial that has since been widely broadcast.
Responding to the show, Isbell’s cousin Eric tweeted on September 22, 2022, ‘If you’re truly curious about the victims, my family, the Isbells, are upset about this show. It keeps triggering old trauma, but for what? We wake up every other day with calls and messages about another Dahmer show, which is inhuman.’
