Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer was born on May 21, 1960, in Milwaukee, the elder son of Lionel Dahmer, a research chemist, and Joyce Dahmer. The family moved to Bath Township, Ohio, when he was a child. He was a withdrawn boy who collected roadkill, stripped the carcasses and kept the bones in jars behind the house, and who was drinking heavily by his mid-teens. His parents' marriage ended in acrimony in 1978 and he was left alone in the family home.
In June 1978, weeks after finishing high school, he picked up an eighteen-year-old hitchhiker named Steven Hicks, took him home for beer, and killed him with a dumbbell when Hicks tried to leave. He dismembered the body, dissolved the flesh and scattered the crushed bone in the woods behind the house. Nothing came of it for thirteen years. He lasted one term at Ohio State University before drink ended it, enlisted in the Army in 1979 and trained as a medic, served at Baumholder in West Germany, and was discharged early in 1981 for alcohol abuse. By 1982 he was living with his grandmother in West Allis and working, eventually, as a mixer at the Ambrosia Chocolate Company.
He killed again in November 1987, picking up Steven Tuomi at a Milwaukee bar and waking in a hotel room with the body. James Doxtator, Richard Guerrero and Anthony Sears followed over the next eighteen months, killed at his grandmother's house and dismembered there. In 1988 he was arrested for drugging and molesting a thirteen-year-old boy, and in May 1989 was sentenced to a year in a house of correction under work release, with five years' probation. His father and his probation officer both regarded him as a man struggling with drink.
In May 1990 he moved into Apartment 213 at the Oxford Apartments, 924 North 25th Street. Twelve more men and boys died there in fourteen months. He met them in bars, bathhouses and on the street, offered money to pose for photographs, drugged them with sedatives and strangled them. He photographed the bodies in stages, dismembered them in the bathroom, kept skulls, hands and genitals, and ate parts of some of the men. In his last months he drilled into the skulls of living victims and injected acid, trying to produce someone who would stay.
On May 27, 1991, fourteen-year-old Konerak Sinthasomphone, drugged and bleeding, got out of the flat and into the street, where neighbours found him and called police. Dahmer told the officers the boy was his adult lover and had drunk too much. The officers dismissed the women who were trying to intervene, walked Sinthasomphone back into the apartment, and left. Dahmer killed him that night. The handling of the call became a scandal in Milwaukee and cost the two officers their jobs, though they were later reinstated on appeal.
On the night of July 22, 1991, Tracy Edwards got out of the apartment with a handcuff still on one wrist and flagged down a patrol car. The officers who went back with him found Polaroids of dismembered bodies, then three severed heads in the refrigerator and freezer, skulls in a filing cabinet, a barrel of acid, and human remains through the flat. Dahmer confessed over the following weeks to seventeen killings stretching back to Steven Hicks in 1978.
He pleaded guilty but insane. The trial in Milwaukee ran from January 1992, and on February 15 the jury found him sane and guilty on fifteen counts of murder. He received fifteen consecutive life terms, a total of 957 years, and later a sixteenth in Ohio for the Hicks killing. Wisconsin had no death penalty. On November 28, 1994, at the Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, another inmate, Christopher Scarver, beat him to death with a metal bar during a work detail. Scarver killed a second prisoner, Jesse Anderson, in the same attack.