Cannibals (14 page)

While Ottis Toole was waiting for his trial on an arson murder in 1983, he confessed to the murder of six-year-old Adam Walsh. Ottis was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and was therefore not given a death sentence. Ottis Toole died of cirrhosis of the liver in the autumn of 1996.

Toole had a very bad start to life, just like his partner in crime. As a young child he would dress as a girl and even into his adult years he still preferred to dressed as a woman and solicited sex as a prostitute. He openly admitted that he did not enjoy having sex with women and always considered himself as a homosexual. His background was one of poverty, alcoholism and undernourishment and he never found his place in society. He had suffered both frontal and limbic brain damage which resulted in him having numerous seizures. He had a tendency to black out which resulted in confusion about the details of his crimes. His awareness of reality was hazed due to years of drug and alcohol abuse and his excuse for his actions was:

If I was in my right mind at the time, it wouldn’t have never happened. I was on dope, strung out, just wild and crazy, you know?

A cannibalistic serial killer who tried it, liked it, and did it again and again

It will be hard for the residents of Milwaukee to forget the name of Jeffrey Dahmer due to the sheer horror of his killings and the gruesome discoveries found in his house.

Jeffrey Dahmer was born on May 21, 1960 in an Evangelical hospital in Milwaukee. Unlike most of the killers we have discussed so far Jeffrey had a decent upbringing and was loved and well-cared for by his parents. His father was a student at the local university studying chemistry and spent many hours working away in his laboratory. His mother worked as a teletype machine operator.

At the age of four Jeffrey had to undergo an operation for a hernia and for some reason this had a catastrophic effect on his developing personality. He became more and more withdrawn and would sit for long periods of time staring into space, with his face somehow motionless. In April 1967 the family moved to Ohio and it seemed to have a good effect on the young Jeffrey. He adjusted well to the change and formed a close relationship with another boy named Lee. At school he was considered to be intelligent, but rather than pay attention he would disrupt the rest of the class with his clowning around.

In 1968 Jeffrey was sexually molested by another boy in the neighbourhood and, although the incident was not reported, this may have played quite a big part in the boy’s developing fetishes. Time and time again in his young life Jeffrey would show signs that something was seriously wrong. His father remembers a time when he swept some animal bones out from beneath the house, and he noticed how delighted his son was by the sound they made. The small child dug his hands deep into the pile of bones, but his father just put it down to a passing fascination at the time.

By the age of ten Jeffrey was starting to experiment with dead animals. He decapitated rodents, bleached chicken bones with acid, nailed a dog’s carcass to a tree and mounted its severed head on the end of a stake. As Jeffrey reached puberty his shyness and isolation were to return and he pushed away what few friends he had. At a time in his life when he should have been enjoying the company of other boys of his age, Jeffrey Dahmer simply withdrew into himself and became very secretive.

At the age of eighteen, Jeffrey had to experience the bitter divorce of his parents and he lived with his mother in Bath Township, Ohio, that is until she ran off with the younger brother of Jeffrey’s father. Feeling totally deserted and alone Jeffrey resorted to alcohol to try and take away the pain. When he was sober Jeffrey was a quiet, gentle person, but with alcohol as his prop he changed completely and a violent rage would build up inside waiting to erupt.

After graduating from high school and dropping out of university, Jeffrey decided to join the Army which he seemed to enjoy until his constant drinking became a problem and he was discharged. It was now obvious that Jeffrey had a real problem with alcohol addiction, but still he would not seek help. His father had almost given up on him by now and Jeffrey moved in with his grandmother and he managed to get himself a job, at least until he got arrested for drunkenness and disorderly conduct.

On June 18, 1978, Jeffrey went to see his father to ask him if he could borrow his car so that he could go to the cinema. His father agreed, but instead of going to the cinema as planned he just drove around the countryside. He spotted a young, bare-chested hitchhiker who was thumbing for a lift, and Jeffrey offered him a ride into town. The hitchhiker was 19-year-old Steven Hicks and Jeffrey’s wrath began when he took the man back to his grandmother’s house. It was here that he beat the poor man with a barbell then strangled him to death. Next he stripped the corpse down to the bone, then pulverized them with a sledgehammer and threw them into the bushland behind his grandmother’s house. The remainder of the body he buried in a shallow grave underneath the house.

After this vicious murder Jeffrey Dahmer did not strike again for another nine years, but he eventually went on to kill 16 more young men. During the nine-year period Jeffrey was arrested on many minor offences, including assault of a young boy, indecent exposure, disorderly conduct and drunken behaviour. He eventually managed to get a job working at a chocolate factory in Milwaukee, and although a little confused by his homosexuality, Jeffrey found much pleasure in the gay bars in and around that vicinity.

On September 15, 1987, Jeffrey picked up Stephen Tuomi, aged 24, at a gay club called Club 219. After talking for a while they decided to go to the adjoining hotel for sex. Jeffrey recalled that due to the amount of alcohol he had drunk that evening he does not have any recollection of the events, but remembers waking the next morning to find Tuomi dead with blood coming out of his mouth. Jeffrey panicked and rushed out to the nearest store to buy a large trunk, which is where he placed the dismembered carcass of Tuomi. Then he took the trunk back to his grandmother’s house and put it into the basement where he could continue to further mutilate the body. When he had finished he placed the remains in a plastic bag and threw it out into the rubbish. The remains of Steven Tuomi were never discovered.

The murder of his second victim seemed to open the floodgates to Jeffrey’s homicidal tendencies and it gradually spiralled out of control until he was claiming around one victim a week by 1991. His killing spree over the next three years is as follows:

January 1988, Jeffrey picked up James Doxtator, who was only 14 years old, in West Allis and enticed him back to his grandmother’s house. He first drugged his victim and then strangled him. Then he removed the flesh from the body with acid and, as before, the bones were pulverized.

March 1988 he picked up Richard Guerrero, aged 23, and once again lured him back to his grandmother’s house. After having oral sex with the man, Jeffrey spiked his drink with sleeping pills and then strangled him. He dismembered the corpse and then put the remains into the rubbish.

The following day the victim was 26-year-old Anthony Sears and again he was invited back to Jeffrey’s grandmother’s house. He was strangled, the body dismembered and this time he kept the head and genitals as trophies. Lastly he painted the skull grey and disposed of the other remains in the rubbish.

The more he killed, the more he got the taste for flesh, and Jeffrey started to put muscles and various other body parts in the freezer so that he could eat them later. Meanwhile, his grandmother, who was completely unaware of the grotesque things that were happening in her basement, she was fully aware of the noise and drunkenness of Jeffrey and his male friends. Finally the odd hours and the stench of her grandson’s experiments was too much for his grandmother and she asked him to leave.

Jeffrey took an apartment on North 24th Street in Milwaukee and the very next day he got himself into trouble. He offered a 13-year-old Laotian boy named Sinthasomphone, $50 to come to his apartment and pose for some photographs. Jeffrey drugged the boy and then fondled him, but the boy escaped unharmed. When the boy returned home his parents realized that there was something wrong with him and after being checked out at the local hospital, discovered that he had been drugged. The boy was able to give a full description of Jeffrey and the address where he had been taken, and they arrested Dahmer on charges of indecent assault and enticing a child for immoral purposes.

While Dahmer was waiting for his sentencing he once again went to live with his grandmother.

In 1989 Jeffrey went for a drink at a gay bar called ‘La Cage’ and was approached by a man named Anthony Sears towards the end of the evening. Anthony’s friend, Jeffrey Connor, offered to drive the couple to Jeffrey’s grandmother’s house. He dropped them off in West Allis and Anthony Sears was never seen again, but his skull, scalp and penis were found in Jeffrey Dahmer’s apartment when he was arrested over two years later.

At his trial for the assault on the young Sinthasomphone, Jeffrey plays the part of a true psychopath and manages to convince the judge that he is a reformed character and is determined to turn his life around. Dahmer was put on probation for five years and was ordered to spend a year in the House of Correction under ‘work release’ which meant that he could go to work during the day but had to return to the jail at night. After only ten months, and despite requests from Jeffrey’s father that he remain inside until he receives treatment, he is released back into an unsuspecting society.

On his release Jeffrey went to stay with his grandmother for a short while but on May 14, 1990, he moves to an apartment on North 25th Street. It was then that his killing spree began in earnest. Over a period of 15 months, 13 men lost their lives.

June 1990: Raymond Smith
June 1990: Edward Smith
July 1990: Ricky Lee Beeks
Sep 1990: Ernest Miller
Sep 1990: David Thomas
Feb 1991: Curtis Straughter
April 1991: Errol Lindsey
May 1991: Anthony Hughes
May 1991: Konerak Sinthasomphone (the younger brother of the boy assaulted in September 1988)
June 1991: Matt Turner
July 1991: Jeremiah Weinberger
July 1991: Oliver Lacey
July 1991: Joseph Bradehoft

Dahmer’s normal practice was to pick up young homosexual or bisexual men at a bar and then either offer them money to pose for photographs or just to invite them back to his apartment for a drink. His unsuspecting victims would then fall into a drugged sleep after a couple of spiked drinks and would then be either strangled or stabbed to death, before being dismembered with a hacksaw. He frequently had sex with the corpse and often masturbated over it later on. The remainder of the body would be boiled down using chemicals and acids and then disposed of down the drain. He used a Polaroid camera to capture the entire experience so that he could remember every one. He was apparently fascinated by the colour of the viscera and would become sexually aroused by the heat of the freshly-mutilated body. Certain parts would be retained as trophies, usually the head and genitalia. The genitals would be preserved in formaldehyde, while the heads were boiled to remove all the flesh. Once the skull was clean he would paint it with grey paint to make it look like plastic.

It is very common for a necrophiliac to also be a cannibal, and that was the case with Jeffrey Dahmer. He believed that if he ate the flesh of his victims they would come alive again within his own body. He tried various seasonings and meat tenderizers to make the flesh more palatable, and he later told his doctors that eating human flesh gave him an erection. He said he had also tried human blood, but he could not get the taste for it.

Three police officers were called to a rundown suburb of Milwaukee on May 27, 1991. Two black teenage girls had come a cross a young Asian boy who was running around without any clothes on and rambling in an incoherent way. The two cousins, Sandra Smith and Nicole Childress, who were both 18, were convinced that the young boy was scared of the tall white man who had followed him out into the street and was trying to convince him to follow him back inside. However, when the police arrived on the scene they paid far more attention to the tall white man than the two young black girls, and they believed the man’s story when he told them that the boy was his 19-year-old lover and they had simply had an argument.

Unwittingly the police actually escorted the Asian boy back into Dahmer’s apartment, despite the protests of the two teenage girls. It was to prove a very costly mistake for the police as this proved to the black Milwaukee community that the police force was inherently racist.

The Asian boy in question was 14-year-old Konerak Sinthasomphone, and as soon as the officers left he was strangled by Dahmer. Next he abused his lifeless body and then proceeded to dismember it. Had the police bothered to check to see whether the white man had a record, they would have discovered that Jeffrey Dahmer was already a convicted child molester. Instead they chose to believe the word of a 31-year-old man over that of two teenagers and that cost the young Asian lad his life – and indeed four other young males before he was finally caught.

Tracey Edwards accepted the offer by Jeffrey to go back to his apartment and watch some pornographic videos. Tracey was a homosexual who enjoyed that sort of thing and couldn’t see anything wrong with his new friend’s offer. However, once inside Jeffrey’s apartment, Tracey realized that he was about to become a player in some sort of homosexual perversion. Tracey was given a ‘cocktail’ which made him drowsy, and then Jeffrey made sexual advances towards him. As Jeffrey tried to slip handcuffs on his victim, Tracey started to struggle which made Dahmer go for a knife. With that Tracey made a grab for the door handle of apartment number 213. He knew he had to escape the mad man who only moments before had threatened him with death. Dahmer tried to drag him back inside the apartment, but a fight broke out and Jeffrey was hit on the side of his head causing him to drop to the floor. Tracey managed to escape and ran into the street where he managed to flag down a patrolling police car.