In the early hours of May 27, 1991, a fourteen-year-old boy was found on a street on Milwaukee's near west side, naked, bleeding and too drugged to speak for himself. Young women from the neighborhood called the police. When officers arrived, a tall, fair-haired man of thirty-one told them the boy was his adult lover, that they had been drinking, and that he would take him home. The officers walked them back to apartment 213 at 924 North 25th Street, saw some photographs, concluded the relationship was consensual, and left. Within about half an hour, according to the later court record, the boy was dead. His name was Konerak Sinthasomphone. The man was Jeffrey Dahmer, and Konerak was the thirteenth person he had killed.
Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer was born in Milwaukee on May 21, 1960, the first child of Lionel Dahmer, who had married Joyce the year before and went on to earn a doctorate in chemistry. Lionel took a job as a research chemist with PPG Industries, and the family moved several times before settling, in 1968, in Bath Township, a semi-rural community in Summit County, Ohio, near Akron. A younger brother, David, was born along the way.
Biographers describe a lively small child who changed after a painful recovery from surgery for a double hernia at about the age of four. He grew withdrawn. He became curious about the bones of dead animals and how to clean and keep them, and as a teenager he kept insects and small skulls in jars of preservative. He began drinking at about fourteen, the same age at which, he later told investigators, his thoughts first turned toward killing. A probation report written years later recorded his father's statement that a neighbor boy had sexually abused him at the age of eight; the claim was never tested, and accounts of it differ.
At Revere High School he played clarinet as a freshman and was remembered by classmates as a loner and a drinker. He once slipped uninvited into the yearbook photograph of the honor society, and an editor erased him from the picture. At home the marriage was coming apart. His parents quarreled for years and divorced in 1978. That summer Joyce left Ohio for Wisconsin with David, and Lionel was living elsewhere, so that in the weeks after graduation Jeffrey was alone in the house on Bath Road.
On June 18, 1978, he picked up a hitchhiker. Steven Hicks, eighteen, had just graduated from Coventry High School and was trying to get to a rock concert at Chippewa Lake Park. Friends and family knew him as warm and generous. His mother, Martha, said he had a smile that could keep him out of trouble most of the time, and his father, Richard, remembered a boy who once shot his first rabbit on a hunting trip and "was as proud as he could be, and then he bawled his eyes out." Dahmer took him back to the house. He later told investigators that when Hicks wanted to leave, he struck him with a barbell, strangled him, and dismembered the body.
Not long afterward an Ohio officer stopped Dahmer on suspicion of drunken driving while, by his later account, he was carrying bags of remains to a dump. The officer shone a light on the plastic bags and let him go. Later he dug up what remained and scattered the bone fragments around the property. Steven's parents hired a private detective and offered a $2,500 reward, and for thirteen years they heard nothing. Investigators who searched the grounds in 1991 recovered teeth and bone fragments. Coventry High School later created a scholarship in Steven's name. Martha Hicks died in 2008 and Richard in 2010.
In the fall of 1978 Dahmer enrolled at Ohio State University and left after a single quarter, drinking through most of it. His father, who had remarried, pressed him to enlist. He joined the Army at the end of December 1978, trained as a medical specialist at Fort Sam Houston in Texas, and in July 1979 was sent to Baumholder in West Germany as a combat medic. Superiors rated him average or slightly above average in his first year. Then the drinking took over, and in March 1981 he was discharged early because, the Army concluded, alcohol had made him unfit to serve. The discharge was honorable. German police later looked at whether he could be tied to unsolved killings in the area; he denied it, and no link was found. In 2017 two men who had served with him said he had drugged and raped them while they were stationed together. One said the abuse went on for seventeen months. Neither claim was ever tested in court.
He did not go straight home. He spent several months in Miami working at a sandwich shop, then drifted back to Ohio and lived for about six months with his father and stepmother, Shari. She later told a Cleveland newspaper that he "couldn't embrace; he couldn't touch." In October 1981 he was arrested at a hotel in Bath for disorderly conduct. His father then sent him to live with his grandmother.
Catherine Dahmer lived in West Allis, a working-class suburb on Milwaukee's west side. Jeffrey moved into her house in early 1982, and the drinking and the arrests went on. In August 1982 he was arrested at the Wisconsin State Fair; one account calls it drunk and disorderly conduct, another indecent exposure. He found steady work on the night shift at the Ambrosia Chocolate Company in Milwaukee, where some coworkers remembered him using racial slurs. In September 1986 two boys said he had exposed himself and masturbated in front of them by the Kinnickinnic River. He was given a year's probation. His corrections file listed "sexual behavior, emotional behavior, alcohol, financial" among his problems, and he told a corrections officer that suicide was "just a matter of time."
He was by then spending his nights in the city's gay bars and, in the summer of 1987, at a bathhouse, where he paid for a six-month membership and rented private rooms. Four or five men he took there later complained that they had felt sick after drinks he gave them. After a visitor from Madison collapsed, the manager revoked his membership. A former Lutheran minister who knew him from Club 219, a gay bar, recalled that Dahmer talked about why he should not be gay and said there was something wrong with it.
Steven Tuomi, twenty-eight, came from Ontonagon, in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and worked as a short-order cook in Milwaukee. A classmate remembered him as quiet and gifted at anything artistic. On September 15, 1987, he met Dahmer at Club 219, and Dahmer believed he killed him that night in a room at the Ambassador Hotel. When Tuomi's father, Walter, went to the police, he was told there was no sign of foul play. No remains were ever found, which is why Tuomi is the one Milwaukee victim Dahmer was never charged with killing.
The next two victims died at Catherine Dahmer's house. Jamie Doxtator was fourteen and nearly six feet tall, the oldest of four children, part Stockbridge and part Oneida, a boy who liked pool and bicycles. He was last seen on January 16, 1988. Years later his mother, Debbie Vega, then living in Tampa, spoke of the forgiveness others urged on her: "I will never feel that way about Dahmer." Richard Guerrero, twenty-five, from a Mexican American family, sometimes babysat his sister's two-year-old daughter. He went missing in March 1988. His father, who worked at a golf course, spent much of his savings on a private investigator who turned out to be a fraud. His sister Janie Hagen believed the police did not take the case seriously because of who he was. "He would have at least called my mom," she said.
Others got away. In February 1988 a man named Bobby Duane Simpson drank coffee Dahmer made at the West Allis house, passed out, and woke in the basement with Dahmer standing over him. That spring Ronald Flowers met Dahmer at a bar, went home with him, drank a cup of coffee, and woke in a hospital. He complained that he had been drugged and robbed of $240. The complaint went nowhere because tests did not show enough of a drug, and a West Allis detective, Don Yockey, later testified that Dahmer had "seemed normal" and that he had believed his story.
The house itself was giving him away. For about a year his grandmother noticed a harsh chemical smell from the basement and the garage. The family found bones in the trash and a vat of chemicals with residue in it. Lionel examined what was there and could not tell whether it was human or animal, and his son told him he had been using acid to strip dead animals he had found. The family suspected he was bringing men home and wanted him out. "We could not sacrifice her life for his," his stepmother said later. In September 1988 he moved to an apartment at 808 North 24th Street in Milwaukee.
On September 26, 1988, within days of the move, Dahmer approached a thirteen-year-old Laotian boy, Somsack Sinthasomphone, and offered him $50 to pose for photographs. At the apartment he drugged the boy and fondled him. Somsack got away, the police were called, and Dahmer was arrested at work the next day and charged with second-degree sexual assault and enticing a child for immoral purposes. (A 1991 Associated Press report dated the assault to 1989; the sources that give the full sequence place it in September 1988.) He was freed on bail and pleaded guilty on January 30, 1989.
While he waited to be sentenced, on March 25, 1989, he killed Anthony Sears at the West Allis house. Sears, who was twenty-four by the most recent account, managed a Baker's Square restaurant and had just been promoted. He wanted to be a model and was saving money to leave Milwaukee. "He never showed up, so I figured he just went out to celebrate with his friends," his mother, Marilyn, said. Nobody reported him missing for about four weeks.
Lionel Dahmer wrote to the judge, William Gardner, urging that his son be kept locked up and given treatment. Gardner instead imposed one year in a work-release program at the Milwaukee Community Correctional Center and five years of probation. In December 1989 Dahmer wrote to the judge asking to be let out early. "What I did was deplorable," he wrote. "The world has enough misery in it without adding more to it." He was released in March 1990, about two months ahead of schedule, after serving ten months.
In May 1990 Dahmer moved into apartment 213 of the Oxford Apartments at 924 North 25th Street, a few blocks from the Marquette University campus. The rooms were small and kept tidy, with black drapes, a black bedspread, black lights, lava lamps and two griffin statues. A small freezer stood in the kitchen. In the next fourteen months, twelve more men and boys died there.
He found them in gay bars, at shopping malls, at bus stops and on the street, and offered money to pose for photographs or to watch videos with him, or simply a drink and a place to go. He drugged the drinks. Most of the victims were Black. Some were reported missing late, or not at all.
Ricky Beeks, thirty-three, who often used the name Raymond Smith, had recently been released from prison and was living with his half-sister. He had a ten-year-old daughter in Rockford, Illinois. He was last seen on May 29, 1990. Eddie Smith, twenty-eight, known as "the Sheikh" for the turban-style wraps he wore, wanted to be a professional model; he was reported missing in June 1990. In March 1991 his sister Carolyn received a telephone call telling her that her brother was dead. Ernest Miller had graduated from Milwaukee's High School of the Arts, sang in church as a boy, and was about to start at an arts college in Chicago in the hope of dancing professionally. He had come back to Milwaukee to visit relatives and was last seen on September 2, 1990. "He was a talented dancer," his aunt Vivian said. David Thomas, twenty-three, the father of a two-year-old daughter, Courtia, was described by her mother, Chandra Beanland, as fun-loving and a hustler who was sometimes gone for weeks. It was Beanland who reported him missing. He was last seen on September 24.
Curtis Straughter, eighteen, lived with his grandmother. He had joined Gay Youth Milwaukee at fifteen, had recently lost a job as a nursing assistant, and planned to finish his equivalency diploma and go to modeling school. Friends knew him as Demetra or Curta. He was last seen in early 1991. Errol Lindsey, nineteen, was the youngest of six children. An eighth-grade art teacher had kept one of his watercolors, and as a young man he made plaster figures. On April 7, 1991, he left home to get a key cut and met Dahmer on the way. "Errol wasn't the type to talk to just anybody," his mother, Mildred, said. He left behind an unborn daughter. Anthony Hughes, thirty-one, had been deaf since a bout of pneumonia in childhood and communicated by lip reading, sign language and written notes. He lived in Madison and had come home to Milwaukee to see family when he met Dahmer at a gay bar; he was last seen on May 24, 1991. His mother, Shirley, taught a Bible class.
Three days later came Konerak Sinthasomphone, the younger brother of the boy Dahmer had assaulted in 1988. His family had fled Laos in 1980 to escape communist repression and settled on Milwaukee's north side; his father, Somthone, had been a farmer, and Konerak was one of nine children. He was a freshman at Pulaski High School and played soccer at Mitchell Park. He left home on the afternoon of Sunday, May 26, and did not come back. Members of Milwaukee's Laotian community later wondered aloud whether Dahmer had sought him out because of the earlier conviction. Police Chief Philip Arreola said there was no immediate sign of that, and the question was never answered.
In the early hours of May 27, Sandra Smith saw the boy, naked and dazed, near 25th and State Streets and asked Nicole Childress to call the police. The dispatcher logged the call as a man badly beaten. Officers John Balcerzak and Joseph Gabrish answered, and a trainee, Richard Porubcan, and a fourth officer, Pete Mozejewski, arrived as backup. Dahmer came up while Childress was on the phone. He told the officers that the boy was nineteen, that he had been drinking, and that they lived together. Inside the apartment the officers saw the boy's clothing and almost nude photographs of him, found no sign of a struggle, and left the boy there. They did not run Dahmer's name, which would have shown he was on probation for sexually assaulting a child, in fact Konerak's own brother. Dahmer later said that the body of another victim had been lying in the bedroom during the visit.
According to news accounts of the dispatch tapes, the officers joked over the radio about having reunited the lovers, and one said he would need to be deloused. Balcerzak later called it "a type of transmission that is commonplace, that type of jocularity." Glenda Cleveland, whose daughter had been at the scene, called the police more than once afterward to ask whether the person with Dahmer was a child in danger, and was assured that everything was fine. "God as my witness, I just didn't dump a little boy in the hands of a murderer," Gabrish told the Milwaukee Journal later. "There just wasn't anything there."
The killing went on, faster now. Matt Turner, twenty, from Flint, Michigan, had run away from home a year earlier and was living at a halfway house in Chicago, where he sometimes went by the name Donald Montrell and hoped to model. "He was basically a good kid," said a program director who knew him. He met Dahmer at a Chicago bus station after the Gay Pride parade on June 30, 1991. Jeremiah Weinberger, twenty-three, a native of Puerto Rico, worked in customer service at a Chicago video store, loved art, and was particular about how he looked. On July 6 he left Carol's Speakeasy, a Chicago bar, with Dahmer, and rode a Greyhound bus about ninety miles to Milwaukee with him. He stayed two days. Flyers with his face went up around Chicago. "My son was hypnotized by a cobra," his father, David, said. "Unfortunately, he bit."
Oliver Lacy, twenty-three, was the youngest of three sons, from Oak Park, Illinois, where he had run track at River Forest High School. He was engaged and had a two-year-old son, Emmanuel, and he wore the cross that had belonged to his father, whose death a few months earlier had preceded his move to Milwaukee. His mother, Catherine, described him as outspoken. He went missing on July 12 and would be the first of the victims identified after the arrest. Joseph Bradehoft, twenty-five, had moved into a Milwaukee apartment rented by his brother Donald to look for work; his wife and three children, aged two to seven, were in Minnesota. He loved sports and fishing. On July 16 he left for a job interview and met Dahmer at a bus stop near Marquette. "We lost the baby of the family," Donald said.
On July 15, 1991, the day before Bradehoft disappeared, Ambrosia fired Dahmer for poor performance.
On the afternoon of July 22, 1991, Tracy Edwards, thirty-two, a father of six, met Dahmer at the Grand Avenue Mall downtown. He had plans to meet friends that evening, and Dahmer invited him to wait at his apartment, a few blocks away. Edwards later said he noticed a foul smell and bottles of acid that Dahmer said were for work. "He seemed so normal," he said, until "he turned from Mr. Right to Mr. It." He spent about five hours there. At about 11:30 that night, with a handcuff locked on one wrist and, he said, a large knife in view, he punched Dahmer, ran out and flagged down a police car about a block away.
The officers, Robert Rauth and Rolf Mueller, saw that the handcuff was not police issue and that their keys would not open it, and they went back to the apartment with him. Dahmer offered to get the key. One officer, checking the bedroom for the knife Edwards had described, found Polaroid photographs of dismembered bodies. In the refrigerator was a human head. Dahmer fought, and the officers wrestled him to the floor and tied him. Through the night, remains were carried out the back door of the building. Neighbors had noticed a smell. "We thought it was his deep freeze," one told a television crew. Relatives of missing men gathered outside with photographs. Michael Lindsey came looking for his brother Errol.
Detective Patrick Kennedy first saw Dahmer lying bound and bleeding after the struggle, "whining, almost like a little baby," as he later put it. In the interrogation room Dahmer cried, raged and paced. Kennedy decided to be gentle with him. About three hours in, Dahmer began to talk. "Pat, when I tell you what I'm going to tell you, you probably will hate me," he said. Over the next six weeks, often for sixteen hours a day, Kennedy took his account of seventeen killings, going back to Steven Hicks in 1978. Kennedy came away describing Dahmer as a pathetic soul who was, in many ways, much like anyone else. He took early retirement, went back to school, taught, and later wrote about the case. He died in April 2013 at fifty-nine.
Tracy Edwards testified at the trial in 1992. His own life did not recover. In 2011, homeless in Milwaukee, he was charged after a man drowned in the Milwaukee River during a confrontation on a footbridge; he pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of aiding a felon and was sentenced in January 2012 to eighteen months in prison and two years of extended supervision. A friend said in 2022 that he had not been seen since 2015.
In September 1991 Chief Arreola fired Balcerzak and Gabrish, and the city's Board of Fire and Police Commissioners upheld the firings after the officers pleaded guilty to one rule violation. In 1994 Milwaukee County Reserve Judge Robert J. Parins found the discharges unreasonable, because the evidence showed only a negligent failure to investigate. The board's efforts to overturn him failed, and it replaced the firings with sixty-day suspensions. Both officers returned to work, and news reports put their back pay at about $55,000 each. A federal suit they later brought, claiming that the discipline was racially motivated, was dismissed, and the Seventh Circuit affirmed the dismissal in December 1998. Balcerzak went on to serve as president of the Milwaukee Police Association from 2005 to 2009 and retired from the department in 2017.
The Sinthasomphone family sued. In 1993 a federal judge dismissed the central claim that the officers had violated Konerak's civil rights, reasoning that they could not be expected to have recognized the threat Dahmer posed, and the family later settled with the city for $850,000.
The case left marks on Milwaukee beyond the courtroom. Most of the men Dahmer killed were Black, Asian or Latino, and many were gay, and several of their families said the police had not taken their missing-person reports seriously. Jeff Fleming, who covered the case as a television reporter, called it "an awakening that there were people who were missing and not followed up on," and said the department's handling of missing-person reports changed afterward.
He was charged in Milwaukee with fifteen counts of first-degree intentional homicide. He first pleaded not guilty, then changed his plea: on January 13, 1992, he pleaded guilty but insane, so the trial that opened before Judge Laurence C. Gram Jr. on January 30 was only about whether he had been legally sane. He sat behind an eight-foot wall of bulletproof glass. His father and stepmother attended throughout. To win, the defense had to show that he suffered from a mental disease and that, because of it, he either could not understand that what he did was wrong or could not make himself obey the law.
Gerald Boyle, the defense lawyer, told the jurors in his opening that his client was "not an evil man" but "a sick man." The defense experts tried to show it. Dr. Judith Becker diagnosed necrophilia and called it a mental disease that drove his conduct. Dr. Fred Berlin told the jury that if Dahmer's behavior was not mental illness, he did not know what was. Dr. Carl Wahlstrom, a forensic psychiatrist, found features of schizotypal and borderline personality disorders and called Dahmer's plan to build a kind of shrine from his victims' skulls, in the hope of gaining special powers, a delusion.
The prosecution answered with Dr. Frederick Fosdal, who testified that Dahmer had told him he had choices and made the wrong ones, and with Dr. Park Dietz, a forensic psychiatrist. Dietz agreed that Dahmer was an alcoholic but described the killings as planned and deliberate. Dahmer drank to get past his inhibitions, Dietz said, used condoms out of fear of AIDS, installed fake security cameras, and disposed of evidence with care, all signs of control. He killed, in Dietz's view, because he wanted his victims to stay, and he would not have killed a man who stayed of his own will. Dr. George Palermo, a court-appointed psychiatrist, diagnosed antisocial personality disorder and called Dahmer a sick man but not a psychotic one, and legally sane. Overall the experts split four to three; the two experts the court appointed sided with the prosecution, only one expert described him as psychotic, and all agreed he knew that what he was doing was wrong.
Boyle's closing called him "a steamrolling killing machine" and "the most desolately lonely human being imaginable." The district attorney, E. Michael McCann, told the jurors: "Please, please don't let this murderous killer fool you." Twelve jurors, seven men and five women, were chosen by lot from the fourteen who had heard the case. Only one was Black.
On Saturday, February 15, 1992, the jury found him sane on every count, by ten votes to two each time, the minimum Wisconsin law required. Because ten jurors found he had no mental disease, they never reached the question of self-control. (UPI reported nearly five hours of deliberation; Biography.com gives about ten.) "I want to thank God, thank Mr. McCann, thank the jury, for bringing in justice for us," said Shirley Hughes. "I knew I had an uphill struggle," Boyle said. "I did and I failed."
The families spoke on Monday, February 17. Most addressed him calmly, one at a time. "Jeffrey Dahmer has erased a million future memories for me of my brother," said J.W. Smith, Eddie's brother, who also read a statement from their mother: "Eddie inherited all the blessings that a family structure had to offer. The greatest of those blessings was love." Ernest Miller's uncle, Stanley Miller, asked him: "Did you ever think this was someone's son?" Inez Thomas told him he had taken away a two-year-old child's father. Dorothy Straughter told him he had taken her son. Shirley Hughes read a poem a friend had written in her son's voice. Rita Isbell, Errol Lindsey's sister, came forward shouting, called him Satan, screamed that she hated him and lunged toward him before deputies led her away. She said afterward that she had wanted him to see what out of control looked like.
Then Dahmer spoke for the first time. "I take all the blame for what I did," he said. He had wanted to find out "just what it was that caused me to be so bad and evil." He said he had never wanted freedom and had wanted death for himself, that he had hated no one, that he now believed he had been sick, and that he had "tried and failed, and created a holocaust." He asked for no consideration and said that any money that ever came to him should go to the families. Judge Gram sentenced him to fifteen consecutive life terms. Wisconsin had no death penalty. Boyle said there would be no appeal.
Summit County had indicted him for the murder of Steven Hicks. Lionel Dahmer hired a Philadelphia lawyer, Robert Mozenter, to represent him there. On Friday, May 1, 1992, in Akron, with a fresh haircut and a new suit and with Hicks's family in the courtroom, Dahmer pleaded guilty to aggravated murder and was given a sixteenth life sentence. He sat quietly while Martha Hicks addressed him. In 1992 she also sued Dahmer and his parents for $50 million, arguing that they should have known he was dangerous. The suit was decided against the Dahmers, but how much, if anything, the Hicks family ever collected is unclear.
Dahmer arrived at Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin, in February 1992. For about a year he was kept in protective custody and shackled whenever he left his cell. Then, at his own request, he was moved to a unit for prisoners with emotional problems, where he could attend classes, eat with other inmates and work. He made macabre jokes about his crimes, according to accounts of his time there. He also worked through a Bible correspondence course that his father sent him, and in May 1994 Roy Ratcliff, a Church of Christ minister, baptized him in a prison whirlpool bath. The two met weekly afterward. In July 1994 another inmate tried to cut his throat with a homemade blade during a chapel service; the blade broke, he was only scratched, and after a short time in isolation he went back to the general population. Lionel Dahmer visited him every month and spoke with him by telephone every week. "I'll always stick by him," he said in 1994.
On the morning of November 28, 1994, Dahmer and Jesse Anderson, who had murdered his wife and came from Cedarburg, were escorted at 7:50 to a cleaning detail in a bathroom of the prison gymnasium, where they worked with a third inmate, Christopher Scarver, already serving a life sentence for murder. The three were left without direct supervision for about twenty minutes. When guards returned, Dahmer was lying in a pool of blood, still breathing, his skull crushed. A bloody broom handle lay nearby. He died at 9:11 a.m. on the way to Divine Savior Hospital. He was thirty-four. Anderson died of his injuries days later. "I think Dahmer had a death wish and did not have the gumption to do it himself," Boyle said. Scarver later claimed God had told him to do it, and in an interview in 2015 he asked whether staff had left them alone on purpose. That suggestion has never been proven. Scarver was given further life sentences and moved to a federal prison.
Families of victims won judgments against Dahmer's estate, and in 1996, when they won a court order to auction his belongings to collect on them, a Milwaukee real estate developer, Joseph Zilber, raised $407,225 through a group called the Milwaukee Civic Pride Fund to buy the items instead. They were destroyed in June 1996 so that, in Zilber's words, "these tools of death be permanently destroyed." The Oxford Apartments were torn down. The city later sold the lot to a developer for $500 on condition that it be kept as green space, and it remains an empty, grassy lot near 25th and Kilbourn. The family house in Bath Township, where Steven Hicks died, was put up for sale in 2012.
Lionel Dahmer published a book about his son, A Father's Story, in 1994, hoping other parents would recognize warning signs. He died in hospice care in Medina County, Ohio, on December 5, 2023, aged eighty-seven. Recordings of his prison visits with his son were released in 2023 as a Fox Nation series, My Son Jeffrey: The Dahmer Family Tapes.
On September 21, 2022, Netflix released Ryan Murphy's ten-part drama about the case, with Evan Peters as Dahmer and Niecy Nash as Glenda Cleveland. Within weeks it had become one of the most-watched series in the service's history, drawing more than 196 million hours of viewing in its first week. Some of the victims' relatives objected. "I was never contacted about the show," said Rita Isbell, whose courtroom outburst the series recreated. "I feel like Netflix should've asked if we mind or how we felt about making it." Errol Lindsey's cousin Eric Perry wrote that the family was angry and that the show was "retraumatizing over and over again, and for what?" Shirley Hughes, then eighty-five, told The Guardian, "I don't see how they can do that," and said the series' account of her son's death was wrong.
May 21, 1960: Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer is born in Milwaukee.
1968: The family settles in Bath Township, Ohio.
1978: His parents divorce; he finishes at Revere High School.
June 18, 1978: Steven Hicks is killed at the house in Bath.
Fall 1978: One quarter at Ohio State University.
December 1978 to March 1981: Army service, including Baumholder, West Germany; discharged for drinking.
1981: Months in Miami; October arrest in Bath for disorderly conduct.
Early 1982: Moves in with his grandmother in West Allis.
September 1986: Exposure incident; one year of probation.
September 15, 1987: Steven Tuomi is killed.
January to March 1988: Jamie Doxtator and Richard Guerrero are killed.
September 26, 1988: Sexual assault of Somsack Sinthasomphone; arrested the next day.
January 30, 1989: Pleads guilty in the assault case.
March 25, 1989: Anthony Sears is killed.
1989: Sentenced to a year in work-release and five years of probation.
March 1990: Released early.
May 1990: Moves into apartment 213 at 924 North 25th Street.
May 1990 to May 1991: Ricky Beeks, Eddie Smith, Ernest Miller, David Thomas, Curtis Straughter, Errol Lindsey and Anthony Hughes are killed.
May 27, 1991: Police return Konerak Sinthasomphone to the apartment; he is killed.
June 30 to July 16, 1991: Matt Turner, Jeremiah Weinberger, Oliver Lacy and Joseph Bradehoft go missing; all are killed.
July 15, 1991: Fired from Ambrosia.
July 22, 1991: Tracy Edwards escapes; Dahmer is arrested.
September 1991: Officers Balcerzak and Gabrish are fired.
January 13, 1992: Pleads guilty but insane to fifteen counts.
February 15, 1992: Jury finds him sane on all counts.
February 17, 1992: Sentenced to fifteen consecutive life terms.
May 1, 1992: Pleads guilty in Akron to the murder of Steven Hicks; sixteenth life term.
1994: Judge Parins rules the officers' firings unreasonable; they are reinstated.
May 1994: Baptized in prison.
July 1994: Survives an attack in the prison chapel.
November 28, 1994: Beaten to death by Christopher Scarver at Columbia Correctional Institution.
June 1996: His belongings are bought by a civic group and destroyed.
December 1998: Seventh Circuit rejects the officers' federal suit.
September 21, 2022: Netflix drama released; victims' relatives object.
December 5, 2023: Lionel Dahmer dies.