Christopher Scarver has been convicted of three murders: one in 1992, and two more on no contest pleas in 1995. He is serving three life sentences.
The first killing took place in Milwaukee on June 1, 1990, when Scarver walked into the office of a state job-training program that had dropped him, held up the two men inside and shot one of them, Steven J. Lohman, in the head. A Milwaukee jury rejected his insanity defense in 1992 and he was sentenced to life. On November 28, 1994, while serving that sentence at Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin, he beat two fellow inmates to death with a steel bar while the three were cleaning a gym area without a guard present. One was Jeffrey Dahmer, convicted in 1992 of murdering 15 young men and boys in Wisconsin. The other was Jesse Anderson, serving life for murdering his wife. Scarver told a guard that God had told him to do it.
Scarver has been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Psychiatrists, prosecutors, his own lawyers and a federal appeals court have all described the voices he hears and his belief, stated many times, that he was chosen by God. His accounts of why he killed have changed over three decades, and they are reported below as his claims, not as findings.
Scarver was born in Milwaukee in 1969, the second of five children, and grew up in the city. He went to James Madison High School and dropped out in the 11th grade, The New York Times reported in 1994, drawing on court records and the testimony at his 1992 trial.
After leaving school he enrolled in a one-year carpentry trainee program run by the Wisconsin Conservation Corps, a state job-training and conservation program. He later told investigators and a court-appointed psychiatrist, William Crowley, that a supervisor had promised him full-time work once he finished the program. The supervisor was dismissed and the job never came. Scarver blamed the program's site manager for what had happened to him.
According to his own account to Crowley, after he lost his place in the program he began drinking three 40-ounce bottles of beer a day and smoking at least four marijuana cigarettes a day. "He began to brood about it," Crowley testified. "He felt that there were racial overtones involved." Scarver said his mother made him move out of her home, and that his girlfriend was pregnant. He then began to plan revenge on the program.
He also began to hear voices. "A month after being fired, I started hearing voices," he told a court-appointed psychiatrist, the Associated Press reported in 1994, quoting records from his first case. He described them as the voices of a family, a man, a woman, a little girl and a boy. They told him, he said, that he was the son of God and "the chosen one." He reasoned that he was like Christ because his name was Chris, his mother's name was Mary and he worked as a carpenter.
Steven J. Lohman was 27 and worked for the Wisconsin Conservation Corps. Contemporary reports describe him as a crew chief and as a worker at the program's training office. He had no part in the decisions Scarver resented; Scarver later said he had expected to find only the site manager in the office that day. The reports say little more about his life, his family or his home town.
On June 1, 1990, Scarver walked into the training program office with a .25-caliber semiautomatic pistol. He had expected to find the site manager alone. Lohman was there too. Scarver ordered Lohman to lie face down on the floor and demanded money from the manager.
The manager showed him that he had only 15 dollars in his wallet. Scarver shot Lohman in the head. "Now, do you think I'm kidding?" he said, according to the court record summarized by The New York Times. "I need more money." He shot Lohman again and forced the manager to write him a check for 3,000 dollars, then shot Lohman once more. The manager broke free and ran into the street; Scarver fired one shot at him and fled with the check, the cash and the manager's credit card. Accounts differ on the total number of shots that struck Lohman: the Associated Press said three, The New York Times said four.
Prosecutors later argued that the repeated shots were meant to frighten the manager into handing over more. Scarver gave different explanations at different times. "The reason I did it is because the voices told me that he had done me wrong; that I will receive no harm and that I will still be the Son of God," he told a court-appointed interviewer. In another interview before trial, he said he had been angry that day and wanted his job back. "I don't know why I shot him," he said. "I was never in trouble with the law, never in a fight with anyone. I was nervous and jumpy. I feared loss of control."
A couple of hours after the shooting, police found Scarver sitting on the stoop of his girlfriend's apartment building in Milwaukee. In his pockets were the check, the credit card and the pistol. A police officer later testified that Scarver told the arresting officers he had planned to turn himself in because he knew he had done wrong.
Scarver pleaded not guilty by reason of mental disease, and psychiatrists disagreed about whether he was competent to stand trial. During psychiatric evaluation he told Crowley that he expected to spend the rest of his life in prison. Asked whether he thought that a just fate, he answered: "Nothing white people do to blacks is just." He also said he did not want to go to a mental hospital, because the doctors there would turn him into a "vegetable," and that the voices had told him to go to prison instead.
He was in jail awaiting trial when Dahmer was arrested in Milwaukee in 1991, and Dahmer's trial went first. When Scarver's case came to trial later in 1992, the two cases briefly crossed in the courtroom. The defense objected to a prosecution psychiatrist mentioning that he had testified at Dahmer's trial, and Scarver's lawyer, Steven Kohn, said that emotions in the community were high. The prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney Douglas J. Simpson, told the judge that the two cases had nothing to do with each other.
Jurors heard testimony that Scarver said he was the son of God and heard voices. Jim Stingl, who covered the trial for The Milwaukee Journal, later recalled testimony that Scarver believed he was a million years old. The jury rejected the insanity plea and convicted him in the killing of Steven Lohman, and he was sentenced to life in prison in 1992. The Associated Press reported in 1994 that he would not have been eligible for parole until 2042.
"It was not a surprise that someone with his background of mental health problems would wind up in trouble in prison," Kohn said after the 1994 killings. "Prison is not the place for a person with that background."
Scarver was sent to Columbia Correctional Institution, a maximum-security prison in Portage, about 40 miles north of Madison. There, according to The Milwaukee Journal as cited by The New York Times, he was known as a mentally ill inmate who took antipsychotic medication. The Seventh Circuit later recorded that he twice attempted suicide at Columbia, once by setting himself on fire.
Scarver said in 2015 that he and Dahmer arrived at Columbia at about the same time in 1992, and that he kept his distance from him. In July 1994 another inmate tried to cut Dahmer's throat during a chapel service; the makeshift blade broke and Dahmer was left with a scratch. The Wisconsin Corrections Secretary, Michael Sullivan, later said that attack was an isolated act unconnected to what followed.
Jesse Michael Anderson was born on May 3, 1957, and grew up in Alton, Illinois. He graduated in business administration from Elmhurst College near Chicago in 1984, married Barbara Lynch, who had grown up in a large family in the Chicago suburbs, and moved with her to Cedarburg, north of Milwaukee, where they raised three young children. He worked as a salesman for a Milwaukee heating oil company, was a member of the Lions Club and active in their parish, and ran unsuccessfully for the Ozaukee County board in April 1992.
On April 21, 1992, after a movie and dinner at Northridge Mall in northwest Milwaukee, Barbara Anderson, 33, was stabbed repeatedly in the face and head in the parking lot. She died two days later. Jesse Anderson, who had stab wounds of his own, told police that two young Black men had attacked them. Within a week police arrested him; a witness later tied him to the purchase of the Los Angeles Clippers cap he said had come from one of the attackers, the New York Post recounted in 2015. A jury convicted him on August 13, 1992, and he was sentenced to life with no possibility of parole before 2052. He denied the crime to the end. In August 1994 a judge threw out his attempt to win a new trial on the testimony of two men he said had found the real killers; one of them admitted lying.
His false account had caused real harm in Milwaukee, where Black leaders criticized local media for repeating it. In prison, according to the historian Ben Schultz's study of the case, Anderson was disciplined in April 1994 for defacing a fellow inmate's portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. and trying to blame another prisoner. Barbara Anderson's family later started a charity in her name, BELA Charities, to support victims of domestic violence.
On the morning of Monday, November 28, 1994, Scarver, Dahmer and Anderson were assigned together to a janitorial detail, cleaning toilets and locker rooms in the recreation area next to the prison gym. All three were serving life for murder. According to The New York Times, they were apparently left unattended by guards for up to 20 minutes.
The fullest early account of what Scarver did comes from the criminal complaint released by Columbia County on December 15, 1994, which drew on an interview Scarver himself requested on December 9. According to the complaint, he removed a steel bar about 20 inches long from the padded foot brace of a sit-up machine in the gym and hid it in his pants leg. He went into the staff locker room bathroom Dahmer was cleaning and struck him on the head as Dahmer faced him. He then hid the bar under his jacket, went to the inmate locker room where Anderson was working and struck him the same way. Neither man cried out, Scarver said. He told investigators he put the bar back on the exercise machine and walked back to his cell unseen.
He told investigators that he had not planned the attacks or discussed them with anyone, and that "the spirit" had come upon him "right there." He said he was "simply submitting to the will of God" and was "simply a tool used by the spirit."
When a guard asked Scarver why he had stopped work early, he answered, according to the complaint: "God told me to do it. You will hear about it on the 6 o'clock news. Jesse Anderson and Jeffrey Dahmer are dead." He was found in his cell, calmly smoking a cigarette, shortly after the two men were discovered.
Dahmer was found on the floor by the toilets with severe head injuries; The New York Times reported that he was hurt between about 7:50 and 8:10 a.m. He died on the way to Divine Savior Hospital in Portage and was pronounced dead at 9:11 a.m., United Press International reported. The coroner gave the cause as multiple skull fractures and brain trauma. He was 34. Anderson, 37, was critically injured and was taken to the University of Wisconsin Hospital in Madison, where he died on Wednesday, November 30, 1994.
In the first days the weapon was unclear. A bloody broom handle was found at the scene, and Sullivan said he did not know whether it had been used. The complaint and Scarver's later accounts identify the steel bar from the exercise equipment, and that is the weapon in the charges.
Scarver was held in solitary confinement. Sullivan told NBC's "Today" show on November 29 that investigators were still looking for a motive but did not believe race had played a part, and that they knew of no link between Scarver and any of Dahmer's victims. The Associated Press noted that Scarver is Black, that 11 of Dahmer's victims were Black, and that Anderson, who was white, had blamed his wife's murder on two Black men who did not exist.
The Columbia County district attorney, Mark Bennett, said there was no rush to charge Scarver because he was already in custody. Within days the press had dug out his psychiatric history. The Milwaukee Sentinel and The New York Times described the voices and his belief that he was the son of God, and the Los Angeles Times reported that the suspect had a long history of mental problems.
Scarver made his first court appearance in Portage on December 15, 1994. He entered the courtroom softly singing the words "let love be the light" and "this old world is cold," the Chicago Tribune reported. Circuit Judge Richard Rehm set bond at 500,000 dollars on two counts of first-degree intentional homicide and ordered a review of his mental competency.
"There is no evidence of criminal involvement by anyone other than Mr. Scarver," Bennett told a news conference afterward. He said he did not expect further charges and had found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing by guards, but he would not say where the guards had been during the attacks and referred that question to corrections officials. A week earlier, Milwaukee's WISN television had broadcast an interview with an unidentified prison guard who said that one guard was missing, another was "jamming to music" and talking on the phone, and a third, a recreation aide, was in a back office.
The bar had come from a machine. In July 1994 Governor Tommy Thompson had ordered all free weights removed from Wisconsin prisons by October 1 because they could be used as weapons, but the order did not cover exercise machines.
At a special hearing in Portage on May 15, 1995, Scarver withdrew his pleas of not guilty and pleaded no contest to the two counts of first-degree intentional homicide. A no contest plea does not admit guilt but allows the court to convict, and it did. He was sentenced to two more life terms in prison, on top of the life sentence he was already serving.
Later reporting, including a 2015 Associated Press account carried by the Chicago Tribune, says he changed his plea in exchange for a transfer to a federal prison. The Wisconsin authorities had their own reasons to want him moved: the Seventh Circuit later wrote that the state did not think it had a prison secure enough to protect inmates and staff from him. Neither the date of sentencing nor the terms of any parole eligibility set for the 1995 sentences appears in the published reports.
Sullivan had appointed a five-member panel to investigate the killings, including prison policy on supervising work details. Gerald Boyle, the Milwaukee lawyer who had defended Dahmer, served on the inquiry. In June 1995 Boyle and Kohn went to the federal prison in Springfield, Missouri, to interview Scarver.
The panel's report, released on June 20, 1995, found that Scarver had acted alone. It also found that two officers had failed to properly watch the inmates on the work detail: one had left his post, and another had been on the telephone for about 20 minutes. Sullivan suspended the officer who had been on the phone for six months without pay and the one who had left his post for three months. A third officer, who had allowed the 15-minute outside call, was suspended for one day, and a supervisor who had been on the other end of a short call was suspended for three days, The Spokesman-Review reported.
Boyle said years later that the inquiry left him convinced the guards had not deliberately left Scarver alone with the two men so that he could kill them. He also recalled that Scarver had told him he had "a hit list of five guys who he did not feel were worthy of the word murderer because of who and how they killed." Kohn recalled that Scarver said in that interview that Dahmer and Anderson had murdered for unacceptable reasons, and that it was humiliating to be on the same work detail as them.
After a psychiatric evaluation at the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Scarver was moved to the federal prison at Florence, Colorado, the most secure prison in the federal system. He spent five years there. By the account later accepted by the Seventh Circuit, he was well behaved at Florence: he was given audiotapes to help quiet the voices, worked, and mixed daily with other prisoners in the recreation yard without incident.
Around 2000, at the request of a Wisconsin official, he was brought back to the state and placed in the newly opened Wisconsin Secure Program Facility at Boscobel, known as Supermax. Inmates there began on Level One, locked alone in windowless cells for all but four hours a week, under lights that never went off. The cells had no air conditioning, and in summer the heat index sometimes passed 100 degrees. Prisoners on Level One could have no radio, clock or watch.
For Scarver, the court later found, these conditions were harmful. The heat interacted with his antipsychotic medication and caused him severe distress, and when that happened he stopped taking it and his symptoms grew worse. Without tapes or any other sound, he could not quiet the voices. In three years at Supermax he twice tried to kill himself with overdoses. He repeatedly banged his head against the wall, telling a psychologist he wanted to break it open so the voices could escape, and he cut his head and his wrists with a razor. He never rose above Level One.
In 2001 Judge Barbara Crabb of the federal district court in Madison, hearing a class action by Supermax prisoners, Jones 'El v. Berge, found that conditions there were so severe that they made mentally ill prisoners' symptoms worse, and in June 2002 she issued an order governing where mentally ill prisoners could be held. Scarver was one of the named plaintiffs. In 2003 Wisconsin moved him to a state prison in Colorado. Scarver, now represented by the Foley and Lardner law firm, asked the court to enforce the 2002 order, but on August 14, 2003, Crabb found that the transfer complied with it, denied his motion as moot and told him that if he believed he was being held unconstitutionally in Colorado he was free to file a new lawsuit. In Colorado, the Seventh Circuit noted, he was allowed to mix with other inmates, and staff did not regard him as a management problem.
Scarver also sued the Supermax officials personally for damages, arguing that the conditions they had held him in were cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment. Judge Crabb dismissed some defendants and found that a jury could reasonably conclude the others had violated his rights by holding him in conditions that greatly aggravated his mental illness. She nevertheless granted summary judgment to them on the ground of qualified immunity, because settled law at the time had not clearly made their conduct unlawful.
The Seventh Circuit affirmed on January 18, 2006, in Scarver v. Litscher, 434 F.3d 972, in an opinion by Judge Richard Posner joined by Judges William Bauer and Michael Kanne. The court decided the case on the merits instead of on immunity. It accepted that the conditions had aggravated his illness and caused him severe suffering, but held that there was no evidence the officials knew the heat, the constant light and the lack of sound were making his illness worse. Without that knowledge they could not be found deliberately indifferent, which is what an Eighth Amendment claim requires. The court added that officials who must protect inmates and staff from a man who has killed two prisoners need considerable latitude, while noting that the heat and the denial of audiotapes had little to do with security.
This was a civil rights suit about prison conditions. Reports of his case mention no federal habeas corpus petition challenging any of his convictions and no Wisconsin appellate decision in either criminal case.
Scarver's explanations for the killings have changed over the years. All of what follows is his own account, or other people's reading of his motives, and none of it was tested at a trial, because he pleaded no contest.
In 1994 he told investigators that God had directed him and that he was a tool of the spirit. In June 1995, by Kohn's account, he said the two men had killed for unacceptable reasons.
In April 2015, in an interview with Jamie Schram of the New York Post, a tabloid, Scarver, then 45, gave a different and more detailed account. He said Dahmer taunted other prisoners and staff by shaping prison food into the form of severed limbs, adding ketchup as blood. "He crossed the line with some people, prisoners, prison staff," he said. "Some people who are in prison are repentant, but he was not one of them." He said he had kept a newspaper article about Dahmer's crimes in his pocket. On the morning of the detail, he said, while he was filling a mop bucket someone poked him in the back; he turned and saw Dahmer and Anderson laughing and could not tell which had done it. He said he followed Dahmer to the staff locker room, took a metal bar from the weight room, showed him the article and asked whether he had really done those things, and then struck him when Dahmer looked for the door. He said he then found Anderson and did the same.
In a follow-up the Post published on May 4, 2015, Scarver said he had killed Anderson because Anderson had defaced an inmate's painting of Martin Luther King Jr. and had tried to blame his wife's murder on Black men.
Scarver has since rejected that coverage. Newsweek reported in 2022 that he had written on his blog that the Post's reporting was "riddled with lies and foolishness."
Others who knew the case doubted the 2015 story. Boyle, Dahmer's lawyer, said Dahmer "would never have done that stuff," and told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that nothing of the kind had come up when the 1995 panel spoke to prison officials. Kohn said nothing in the public record supported it, and that Scarver had said nothing about taunting in his 1995 interview. Roy Ratcliff, the Madison minister who baptized Dahmer in prison in 1994, told the Post that guards had told him Dahmer joked with them; he later told Stingl that he had never seen any of it himself and was repeating what guards had said.
Jeffrey Endicott, who had been the warden at Columbia in 1994, told the Post in 2015 that Dahmer had been disciplined for a crude joke involving food, and said he would ask the Department of Corrections to look again at Scarver's new claims. He also said he did not believe staff had been complicit and that the original investigation had found Scarver acted alone.
Scarver told the Post in 2015 that he had been evaluated by 10 to 20 prison doctors and still did not understand his illness, and that he had concluded from his own reading that bread and refined sugar triggered his psychotic episodes. He said he spent his days writing poems for his website. The Post and, in 2022, NBC's TODAY reported that he had self-published poetry, including a 2015 collection sold on Amazon whose author's note said he wrote songs, short stories, poetry and prison protocols and wanted to help others earn an education and a second chance in prison.
The most recent detailed report of his location is from April 2015, when the New York Post and the Chicago Tribune said he was held at Centennial Correctional Facility, a Colorado state prison in Cañon City. Stingl wrote at the same time that he was in a federal prison in Colorado. Neither placement has since been confirmed in an official public record.
On October 16, 2026, the online inmate locator of the federal Bureau of Prisons still listed Christopher J. Scarver, aged 57, under the register number he was given in 1995, with no release date and his location shown only as "in transit." No release, parole or death has been reported. As of that date he remains in custody, serving his three Wisconsin life sentences.
Dahmer's death drew mixed reactions from the families of the men and boys he had killed. Some said they were glad; others said he had escaped the punishment of a long life in prison. "The hurt is worse now, because he's not suffering like we are," said Catherine Lacy, whose son Oliver Lacy was one of his victims, as reported by The Independent. Dahmer's stepmother said he and his family had expected that he would be killed, and his mother said that if he had had a choice, "he'd have let this happen to him," the Associated Press reported. His mother, Joyce Flint, also asked reporters whether everyone was now happy that he had been beaten to death.
The deaths led to the suspension of four corrections officers in 1995 for the lapses on the work detail. No broader change in Wisconsin's rules for supervising inmate work crews was reported. Dahmer's and Anderson's deaths also became part of the long discussion of race in Milwaukee in the early 1990s, which Schultz's study of the Anderson case traces through the press coverage of both men.
Scarver's own transfers through federal and state prisons later became part of the federal litigation over Wisconsin's Supermax, in which Judge Crabb's rulings limited the placement of seriously mentally ill prisoners there.
Proven by final convictions: the murder of Steven Lohman (jury verdict, 1992) and the murders of Jeffrey Dahmer and Jesse Anderson (no contest pleas, 1995).
Motive. Scarver's reasons are his own claims and have shifted: voices and divine instruction (1990 and 1994), a "hit list" of men he thought unworthy of the name murderer (1995, as recalled by Boyle), Dahmer's taunting and Anderson's racism (2015, New York Post), followed by his own rejection of the Post's reporting. Officials in 1994 said they had no evidence the attack was racially motivated. The Seventh Circuit wrote in 2006 that race may have played a role, but that was a remark in a civil case, not a finding at a criminal trial.
Claims that guards were complicit. Scarver told the New York Post in 2015 that staff "had something to do with what took place," but refused to say more. Rumors of an arranged killing circulated from 1994, including the anonymous guard interview broadcast by WISN. The Columbia County district attorney found no evidence of criminal involvement by anyone else, the 1995 state panel found that he acted alone, and both Boyle and the former warden said they did not believe staff were complicit. The panel did find that two officers were not doing their jobs; that is a finding of neglect, not of a plot. Anonymous online claims by self-described former inmates have also circulated, unverified.
Dahmer's alleged taunting. Reported only from Scarver, from guards as relayed by a minister, and from the former warden, all in 2015; Dahmer's lawyer disputed it.
Details that vary between sources: the number of shots that struck Lohman (three or four); the weapon in the first reports (a broom handle was found; the bar was named in the charges); the machine the bar came from (a sit-up machine's foot brace, a Nautilus-style machine, or "the weight room"); whether the 1995 inquiry was a panel named by the Corrections Secretary or a governor's commission; and where Scarver was held in 2015.
1969: Christopher J. Scarver is born in Milwaukee, the second of five children.
Before 1990: drops out of James Madison High School in the 11th grade; enrolls as a carpentry trainee with the Wisconsin Conservation Corps.
Before June 1990: is not hired when the program ends; drinks heavily and says he hears voices.
June 1, 1990: shoots Steven J. Lohman, 27, dead during a robbery at the program's Milwaukee office; the site manager escapes. Scarver is arrested a few hours later.
1991: Jeffrey Dahmer is arrested in Milwaukee while Scarver awaits trial.
April 21, 1992: Jesse Anderson murders his wife, Barbara Anderson, in Milwaukee; he is convicted on August 13, 1992.
1992: a Milwaukee jury rejects Scarver's insanity plea; he is convicted and sentenced to life. He is sent to Columbia Correctional Institution, Portage.
July 1994: another inmate tries to cut Dahmer's throat in the prison chapel; Governor Thompson orders free weights removed from prisons.
November 28, 1994: Scarver beats Dahmer and Anderson with a steel bar on a cleaning detail; Dahmer dies that morning.
November 30, 1994: Anderson dies in hospital in Madison.
December 9, 1994: Scarver confesses in an interview he requested.
December 15, 1994: charged with two counts of first-degree intentional homicide; bond set at 500,000 dollars and a competency review ordered.
May 15, 1995: pleads no contest to both counts in Portage; sentenced to two more life terms.
1995: transferred to federal custody, first at Springfield, Missouri, then at Florence, Colorado.
June 20, 1995: state panel finds he acted alone; four corrections staff are suspended.
About 2000: returned to Wisconsin's Supermax at Boscobel.
2001 to 2002: Judge Crabb rules on conditions for mentally ill prisoners at Supermax in Jones 'El v. Berge.
2003: moved to a Colorado state prison; on August 14, 2003, the federal court finds the transfer complied with its order.
January 18, 2006: the Seventh Circuit affirms judgment against him in Scarver v. Litscher.
April and May 2015: interviews with the New York Post; reported held at Centennial Correctional Facility, Cañon City, Colorado. He later disowns the coverage.
October 16, 2026: federal inmate locator still lists his record with no release date; no report of release or death found.