Modern day cannibals

                                                          

Going for long periods of time without eating causes you to go into a starvation mode, a condition where your body breaks down stored body fat — and eventually other body tissues—for energy. The number of days you can survive without food varies from person to person. A 2009 review in Archiv Fur Kriminologie reports that humans can generally survive with no food or drink for 8 to 21 days and may be able to survive without food, if they have water, for up to two months. Bobby Sands, an Irish terrorist went on a hunger strike for 66 days before he died of starvation

Starvation can cause malnutrition, fatigue, nausea and dizziness and eventually blindness before death ensues. The Weight-Control Information Network reports that eating fewer than 800 calories a day increases your risk for developing gallstones. While you’ll shed body fat when you're in starvation mode, you’ll also lose valuable lean muscle tissue. Fasting can also cause decreases in your body’s metabolism, which is a side effect of starvation. Women should eat at least 1,200 calories daily and men should eat a minimum of 1,500 calories a day. Children can eat less a day and still service.   However, women who only eat at least 1,200 calories daily and men who only eat a minimum of 1,500 calories a day will likely lose weight. To maintain current body weights, women often require 1,600 to 2,400 calories daily, while many adult men need 2,000 to 3,000 calories a day

How many calories would you get from consuming one whole human body? More than 125,000, according to a new study on human cannibalism that will either make you queasy or have you reaching for some fava beans and a nice glass of Chianti. Human thighs come in at a beefy 13,350 calories, while the calves are about 4,490 calories. The upper arms are around 7,450 calories and the forearms about 1,660 calories. Within the chest cavity beats a heart that is about 650 calories. There are also the lungs, which come in around 1,600 calories, and below them the liver sits at around 2,570 calories. The kidneys total about 380 calories together.

There have been a quite a number instances of people eating humans brings during the last century. In some instances, it was forgivable and in other instances, it was unforgivable. I will explain both kinds of instances.

Instances of modern day cannibalism

During the Second World War and during the 872-day Siege of Leningrad, Russia, the failure of the German Army Group North to capture Leningrad in the Eastern Front of the war, resulted in the city being encircled by the German forces and the siege of the city lasting from September 8, 1941 to January 27, 1944. It became one of the longest and most destructive sieges in history thereby causing considerable devastation to the city of Leningrad (now called Saint Petersburg).

After heavy German bombing in August, September, and October, all main food warehouses were destroyed and burned in massive fires. Huge amounts of stored food reserves, such as grain, flour and sugar, as well as other stored food, were completely destroyed.  Rations that still existed were subsequently reduced for manual workers to 600 grams of bread daily; state employees, 400 grams; and children and dependents (other civilians), 300 grams per day. Without having to explain how much a gram weighs, it is suffice for me to say that these unfortunate people were eating starvation rations.

The 872 days of the siege caused extreme famine in the Leningrad region through disruption of utilities, water, energy and food supplies. The siege  resulted in the deaths cause by the bombings and starvation and as many as 1,500,000soldiers and civilians during the evacuation of 1,400,000;  mainly women and children, died during the evacuation due to starvation.  

Civilians remaining in the city suffered from extreme starvation, especially in the winter of 1941–42. From November 1941 to February 1942 the only food available to the citizens was 125 grams of bread per day, of which 50–60% consisted of sawdust and other inedible admixtures. For about two weeks at the beginning of January 1942, even this food was available only for workers and military personnel. Civilians got nothing to eat except their pets, rats and birds if they could catch them. Deaths peaked in January–February 1942 at 100,000 per month, mostly from starvation. People often died on the streets, and citizens soon became accustomed to the sight of death.

NKVD files reported the first use of human meat as food on December 13, 1941. The report outlined thirteen cases of cannibalism which ranged from a mother smothering her eighteen-month-old baby to feed her three older children to a plumber killing his wife to feed his sons and nieces.

By December 1942, the NKVD arrested 2,105 cannibals dividing them into two legal categories: corpse-eating and live person-eating The latter were usually shot while the former were sent to prison. The Soviet Criminal Code had no provision for cannibalism so all convictions and punishments were carried out under Code Article 59–3—special category banditry.    

Instances of person-eating in Leningrad were significantly lower than that of corpse-eating; of the 300 people arrested in April 1942 for cannibalism. Only 44 were murderer in which 64% of the cannibals were female and 36% were males. 44% were unemployed, 90% were illiterate, 15% were inhabitants who had permanent homes in the city and only 2% had any criminal records. More cases of cannibalism occurred in the outlying districts than the city itself. Cannibals were often unsupported women with dependent children and no previous convictions, which allowed for a certain level of clemency in legal their proceedings. Given the scope of mass starvation, cannibalism was relatively rare.

Quite frankly, I find it hard to fault someone who is starving to death and has no hope of rescue and eats a corpse of a human being who he or she didn’t first kill. Here is a case where that occurred.

A pilot survived for 31 days in the Arctic after a November 1972 plane crash. Marten Hartwell, the sole survivor of the crash was eventually rescued. Hartwell was piloting a medevac plane in the Northwest Territories from Cambridge Bay to Yellowknife carrying a nurse and two patients when it crashed near Hottah Lake, south of Great Bear Lake, about 300 kilometres north of Yellowknife. Two of the three passengers died of injuries sustained in the crash.

Hartwell and 14-year-old David Kootook survived, enduring temperatures close to -40 while waiting to be rescued. Hartwell suffered both broken ankles and said the boy helped keep him alive by building a fire and shelter. Hartwell resorted to eating flesh from one of the dead passengers, but said Kootook abstained. He ate bark instead in his attempt to stay alive. The boy died about a week before help arrived 31 days later.

The question that must have been in everyone’s minds; could the pilot have waited for the rescue instead of eating the flesh of one of his passengers? Keep in mind that he had no idea as to when or even if a rescue plane would arrive. Further, if he didn’t eat some of the flesh of one of his passengers, he may have died like the boy did before the pilot was rescued. Soon after, Pope Paul VI said that he didn’t blame the pilot for what he had done since his act was done out of necessity.

Armin Meiwes of Rotenburg, Germany prowled Internet chat rooms and bulletin boards in his off hours looking for people to eat. Meiwes, who'd been fantasizing about cannibalism since childhood, is said to have exchanged messages with at least 200 like-minded souls, most of whom he met through Web sites catering to cannibal fetishists like himself Eventually his correspondents struck home in several instances.

A few who went to his house for play dates but they weren't ready to do more than talk about being eaten,  However  in March 2001 he hooked up with a fellow who was willing to put his money where Meiwes's mouth was. Bernd Juergen Brandes, like Meiwes was a 40-ish computer geek, traveled to Rotenburg and permitted his host to slice off and cook his penis, which the two then attempted to eat. (Apparently it came out a bit tough.) Later, after Brandes had knocked back several further glasses of liquor, cough syrup, and sleeping pills, Meiwes stabbed him to death in a bathtub, stored most of the body in his large freezer, and eventually ate about 20 kilograms of Brandes’ body.  

Meiwes captured what he had done to his victim on video. Police got wind of it only after they received a call about a year and a half later from an alarmed Austrian student who'd just seen another of Meiwes's ads seeking dinner partners. At trial which was Germany's first cannibalism case, Meiwes's lawyer argued that the victim had been asking for it, a defense that the court seems to have bought at least partially, since the killer was convicted of manslaughter rather than murder and sentenced to thirty and a half years. Many have condemned the sentence as too mild, but defenders say, “Hey! you’re talking about consenting adults.” Brandes may have consented to have his penis eaten but I hardly think he consented to being murdered.

While the trial court concluded that both men were "deeply psychologically disturbed," a psychiatrist testified that Meiwes was schizoid but not mentally ill, and the defendant did not plead insanity. If he had, it is unlikely that he would have ever been released from an insane asylum.

This form of sexual behaviour is indeed baffling. ‘Vorarephilia’ from the Latin means the ‘love of devouring’ which usually shows itself in the dominant desire to eat, as in extreme cases like serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. The submissive inverse of this is the desire to be eaten, which is truly among the rarest of fetishes.            

Stephen, as he was called in a scientific paper, was 45 years old, “socially anxious but pleasant and cooperative,” clean, cogent, casually dressed, and not psychotic. His problem was that he had an intense desire according to him to be “consumed by a large, dominant woman and then defecated by her.” There is no known treatment to change such abnormal desires into normal ones, however, treatment to help such people adjust to some form of normalcy, rather than change or suppress their sexual interests.

Jeffrey Dahmer was an American serial killer and sex offender, who committed the rape, murder, and dismemberment of seventeen men and boys between the years 1978 and 1991. Many of his later murders involved necrophilia, ( a sexual attraction or sexual act involving corpses)  ^‘cannibalism, and the permanent preservation of body parts—typically all or part of the skeletal structure, including his victim’s skulls.  

In one instance, he is known to have impaled a dog's head upon a stake behind his house. Dahmer's fascination with dead animals might have begun when, at the age of four, he saw his father removing animal bones from beneath the family home. According to his father, his son was "oddly thrilled" by the sound the bones made, and instantly developed a fixation for playing with and collecting animal bones.

 Dahmer as a teenager occasionally accompanied by one or more of his few friends—would collect animal carcasses from the roadside. He would then  dismember those animals either in his home or in an expanse of woodland behind the family home. According to one friend, Dahmer would dismember these animals and store the parts in jars in the family's wooden toolshed.  

When he reached puberty, Dahmer discovered that he was homosexual. He did not divulge his sexual orientation to his parents, although in his early teens, he did engage in a brief relationship with another youth, although the pair never participated in sodomy.

He began to fantasize sexually, issues of dominance and control over subservient partners which were prevalent in his thoughts. These thoughts gradually became intertwined with dissection. On one occasion, when he was approximately 16 years old, Dahmer conceived a rape fantasy of rendering a particular male jogger he found attractive unconscious and then make sexual use of his unconscious body. To render the man unconscious, Dahmer concealed himself in bushes on the route he had noted the jogger took a baseball bat in hand, and lay in wait for the jogger. On this particular day, the jogger did not pass him and, although Dahmer never attempted to implement this plan again, he later stated this was his first attempt to attack another individual.

On June 18,^[34] Dahmer picked up an 18-year-old hitchhiker named Steven Mark Hicks. Dahmer lured the youth to his house on the pretext of the two young men drinking alcohol together. Hicks, who had been hitchhiking to a rock concert in Lockwood Corners, agreed to accompany Dahmer to his house. According to Dahmer, after several hours' drinking and listening to music, Hicks wanted to leave and Dahmer didn't want him to leave. In response, Dahmer bludgeoned Hicks with a 10 lb. as his victim sat upon a chair. When Hicks fell unconscious, Dahmer strangled him to death with the bar of the dumbbell pressed against Hick’s throat. He then stripped the clothes from Hicks' body.  The following day, Dahmer dissected Hicks' body in his crawl space.  He later buried the remains in a shallow grave in his backyard.   Several weeks later, he unearthed the remains and pared the flesh from the bones. He dissolved the flesh in acid before flushing the solution down the toilet. Then he crushed the bones with a sledgehammer and scattered them in the woodland behind the family home. This was the first of 17 murders committed by him.

Six weeks after the murder of Hicks, Dahmer's father and his fiancée returned to his home where they discovered Jeffrey living alone at their house.

Shortly after Dahmer found employment, an incident occurred in which he was propositioned by another man while seated and reading in the West Allis Public Library. The stranger threw Dahmer a note offering to perform fellatio upon him. However, Dahmer did not respond to this particular proposal.  

I am not a psychiatrist or a psychologist however I studied abnormal psychology for a year at the University of Toronto during my attendance in the five-year criminology program and I spent a year counselling mentally ill prisoners so I have some idea as to what makes a mentally ill person’s mind tick.  

I believe that Dahmer didn’t accept the offer because the man who made the overture would have been the predominate participant and Dahmer would have then become the subservient participant and that went against his preference in the sex act since he was always the dominant participant in his sexual trysts. During his sexual encounters, he became frustrated when his male sexual partners' were moving during the sexual act—which is evidence of his inclination to play the dominant role during his sexual trysts.

Beginning in June 1986, he began to administer sleeping pills and liquor laced with the sedatives to his partners and then he would sodomize their unconscious bodies. That being the way he preferred to have sex , there was no way that his partners would be the dominant partners.

Dahmer read a report in a newspaper regarding the upcoming funeral of an 18-year-old male; he conceived the idea of stealing the freshly-interred corpse and taking it home. That is pushing necrophilia to the extreme.  According to Dahmer’s own words, he attempted to dig the coffin from the ground, but found the soil too hard, so he abandoned the plan. He never went that particular route again.

In November 1987, Dahmer—at the time he was residing with his grandmother in West Allis—saw a 25-year-old man from Ontonagon, Michigan whose name was Steven Tuomi at a bar and persuaded him to return to the Ambassador Hotel, where Dahmer had rented a room for the evening. According to Dahmer, he had no intention of murdering Tuomi, but simply intended to drug and rape him as he lay unconscious. The following morning, however, he awoke to find Tuomi lying beneath him on the bed, which the young man’s chest "crushed in" and blood seeping from his mouth, with bruises on Dahmer's own fists and one forearm. Dahmer stated to the police much later that he had absolutely no memory of having killed Tuomi. I find that hard to believe. In my opinion, it is probable that Tuomi woke up and resisted Dahmer’s advances and was subsequently beaten to death. 

To dispose of Tuomi's body, he purchased a large suitcase in which he transported the body to his grandmother's residence. There, one week later, he severed the head, arms, and legs from the torso, then filleted the bones from the body before cutting the flesh into pieces small enough to handle. He then placed the flesh inside plastic garbage bags. He wrapped the bones inside a sheet and pounded them into splinters with a sledgehammer. The entire dismemberment process took Dahmer approximately two hours to complete, and all of Tuomi's remains—excluding the severed head—were disposed of in the trash.

If you are wondering why he didn’t cook and eat Tuomi’s flesh since he was a cannibal, consider the fact that if he had done this, his grandmother may have become suspicious and pressed him for facts that Dahmer couldn’t provide convincingly.

For two weeks following Tuomi's murder, Dahmer retained the victim's head wrapped in a blanket. After two weeks, Dahmer boiled the head in a mixture of Soilex (an alkali-based industrial detergent) and bleach in an effort to retain the skull without the flesh, which he then used as stimulus for masturbation. Eventually, the skull was rendered too brittle by this bleaching process, and was also pulverized and disposed of.

Following the murder of Tuomi, Dahmer began to actively seek victims, most of whom he encountered in or close to gay bars, and whom he would typically lure to his grandmother's home, where they would be drugged before or shortly after engaging in sexual activity with him. Once he had rendered the victim unconscious with sleeping pills, he would kill them by strangulation.

Two months after the murder of Steven Tuomi, Dahmer encountered a 14-year-old Native American male prostitute named James Doxtator; Dahmer lured the youth to his residence at West Allis with an offer of $50 to pose for nude pictures. The pair engaged in sexual activity before Dahmer drugged Doxtator and strangled him on the floor of the cellar.^[82] Dahmer left the body in the cellar for one week before dismembering it in much the same manner as he had with Tuomi. He placed all of Doxtator's remains (excluding the skull) in the trash. He boiled the skull, and initially retained it before pulverizing it

On March 24, 1988, Dahmer met a 22-year-old bisexual man named Richard Guerrero outside a gay bar called The Phoenix. Dahmer lured Guerrero to his grandmother's residence, although the incentive on this occasion was $50 to simply spend the remainder of the night with him; he then drugged Guerrero with sleeping pills and strangled him with a leather strap, with Dahmer then performing oral sex upon the corpse. Guerrero's body was dismembered within 24 hours of his murder, with the remains again disposed of in the trash and the skull again retained before being pulverized several months later.

On April 23, Dahmer lured another young man to his grandmother’s house; however, after giving the victim a drugged coffee, both he and the victim heard Dahmer's grandmother call, "Is that you, Jeff? Although Dahmer replied in a manner that led his grandmother to believe he was alone, his grandmother did observe that Dahmer was not alone. Because of this, Dahmer opted not to kill this particular victim, instead waiting until he had become unconscious before taking him to the County General Hospital.

In September 1988, Dahmer's grandmother asked him to move out of her house because of his habit of bringing young men to her house late at night and the foul smells emanating from both the basement and the garage.

Dahmer rented a one-bedroom apartment on North Twenty-fifth Street and moved into his new residence on September 25, 1988. The following day, Dahmer was arrested for drugging and sexually fondling a 13-year-old boy whom he had lured to his home on the pretext of posing nude for photographs.  In January 1989, Dahmer was convicted of second-degree sexual assault and of enticing a child for immoral purposes. Sentencing for the assault was suspended until May 1989.

On March 20, Dahmer commenced a ten-day Easter absence from work, during which he moved back into his grandmother's home.

Two months after his conviction and two months prior to his sentencing for the sexual assault, Dahmer murdered his fifth victim. He was a mixed-race 24-year-old aspiring model named Anthony Sears, whom Dahmer met at a gay bar on March 25, 1989.

Dahmer lured Sears to his grandmother's home, where the pair engaged in oral sex before Dahmer drugged and strangled his victim. The following morning, Dahmer placed the corpse in his grandmother's bathtub where he decapitated the body before flaying the corpse. He then stripped the flesh from the body and pulverized the bones, which were again disposed of in the trash. Where was the grandmother all this time? He preserved Sears' head and genitalia in acetone and stored them in his work locker. When he moved to a new address the following year, he took the remains there.

On May 23, 1989, Dahmer was then sentenced to five years' probation and one year in the House of Correction, (work camp) with work release permitted in order that he be able to keep his job.  He was also required to register as a sex offender. Two months before his scheduled release from the work camp, Dahmer was paroled. His five years' probation imposed in 1989 began at this point.

On release, Dahmer temporarily moved back to his grandmother's home in West Allis. IN May 1990, He moved into the Oxford Apartments, located on North 25th Street in Milwaukee. Although the hotel was located in a high crime area, it was close to his workplace, was furnished and, at $300 a month inclusive of all bills excluding electricity, thereby living in Apartment 213 was economical. When he moved into the apartment, he took Anthony Sears' skull, scalp, and painted genitals with him.

 Dahmer had killed his sixth victim, Raymond Smith who was a 32-year-old male prostitute whom Dahmer lured to Apartment 213 with the promise of $50 for sex. At Dahmer's apartment, he gave Smith a drink laced with seven sleeping pills and later manually strangled him. The following day, Dahmer purchased a Polaroid camera with which he took several pictures of Smith's body in suggestive positions before dismembering him in the bathroom. He boiled the legs, arms, and pelvis in a steel kettle with Soilex, which enabled him to then rinse the bones in his sink.  He then dissolved the remainder of Smith's skeleton—excluding the skull—in a container he filled with acid. He spray-painted Smith's skull and placed it alongside the skull of Anthony Sears.

Approximately one week after the murder of Raymond Smith, on or about May 27, Dahmer lured another young man to his apartment. On this occasion, however, Dahmer himself accidentally consumed the drink laden with sedatives intended for consumption by his guest. When he awoke the following day, he discovered that his intended victim had stolen several items of his clothing, $300, and his watch. Now that is definitely poetic justice. Dahmer never reported this incident to the police because if he had,  the police may have visited the scene of the crime in his apartment and while snooping, looked into his fridge. “Oh oh. What do we have here?”

In June 1990, Dahmer lured a 27-year-old acquaintance named Edward Smith to his apartment. He drugged and strangled Smith. On this occasion, rather than immediately acidifying the skeleton or repeating previous processes of bleaching (which had rendered previous victims' skulls brittle), Dahmer placed the skeleton of Smith in his freezer for several months in the hope it would not retain moisture. Freezing the skeleton did not remove moisture, and the skeleton would be acidified several months later. The skull was destroyed unintentionally when Dahmer placed it in the oven to dry—a process which caused the skull to exploded.

Less than three months after the murder of Smith, Dahmer met a 22-year-old man named Ernest Miller on the corner of North 27th Street. Miller agreed to accompany Dahmer to his apartment for $50 and further agreed to allow him to listen to his heart and stomach. When Dahmer attempted to perform oral sex upon Miller, Smith said, "That'll cost you extra.” I don’t know if Dahmer performed oral sex on his new victim. In any case;  Dahmer gave his intended victim a drink laced with two sleeping pills. On this occasion, however, he had had only two sleeping pills to give his victim so he killed Miller by slashing his carotid artery with the same knife he used to dissect his victims' bodies. Miller bled to death within minutes.

Dahmer then posed the nude body for various suggestive Polaroid photographs before placing the body in his bathtub for dismemberment. Dahmer repeatedly kissed and talked to the severed head while he dismembered the remainder of the body. He wrapped Miller's heart, biceps, and portions of flesh from the legs in plastic bags and placed them in the fridge for later cannibalistic consumption. Dahmer boiled the remaining flesh and organs into a "jelly-like substance" using Soilex, which again enabled him to rinse the flesh off the skeleton, which he intended to retain. To preserve the skeleton, he placed the bones in a light bleach solution for 24 hours before allowing them to dry upon a cloth for one week; the severed head was initially placed in the fridge before also being stripped of flesh, then painted and coated with enamel.

Three weeks after the murder of Ernest Miller, on September 24, Dahmer met David Thomas, a 22-year-old father of one child at the Grand Avenue Mall and persuaded him to return to his apartment for a few drinks, with additional money on offer if he would pose for photographs. In his statement to police after his arrest, Dahmer stated that after giving Thomas a drink laden with sedatives, he did not feel attracted to him, but was afraid to allow him to awake in case he would be angry over having been drugged. Therefore, he strangled him and dismembered the body—intentionally retaining no body parts whatsoever. Nonetheless, he did photograph the dismemberment process and retained those photographs which later came back in court as evidence against him

Following the murder of David Thomas, Dahmer did not kill for almost five months, although on a minimum of five occasions between October 1990 and February 1991, he unsuccessfully attempted to lure men to his apartment. He is also known to have regularly complained of feelings of both anxiety and depression to his probation officer throughout 1990; with frequent references to his sexuality, his solitary lifestyle, and financial difficulties. On several occasions, he is also known to have referred to harboring suicidal thoughts.

In February 1991, Dahmer observed a 17-year-old named Curtis Straughter standing at a bus stop near Marquette University. According to Dahmer, he lured Straughter into his apartment with an offer of money for posing for nude photos, with the added incentive of sexual intercourse. Dahmer drugged and strangled Straughter with a leather strap, then dismembered him, with Dahmer retaining the youth's skull, hands, and genitals and photographing each stage of the dismemberment process.

Less than two months later, on April 7, Dahmer saw a 19-year-old named Errol Lindsey walking on the street to get a key cut. Lindsey was a heterosexual. Dahmer lured Lindsey to his apartment, where he drugged him, drilled a hole in his skull and poured muriatic acid into it. That acid is used in household cleaning. According to Dahmer, Lindsey awoke after this experiment (which Dahmer had hoped of inducing -his victim into a permanent, non-resistant, submissive state), saying: "I have a headache. What time is it?"  Dahmer realized that he wasn’t going to get a zombie-like sexual partner so again he drugged Lindsey and then he strangled him. He decapitated Lindsey and retained his skull. He then flayed Lindsey's body, placing the skin in a solution of cold water and salt for several weeks in the hope of permanently retaining it. Reluctantly, Dahmer disposed of Lindsey's skin when he noted it had become too frayed and brittle.

By 1991, fellow residents of the Oxford Apartments had complained of the smells emanating from Apartment 213, in addition to the sounds of falling objects and the occasional sound of a chainsaw. The manager of the Oxford Apartments, Sopa Princewill, did contact Dahmer in response to these complaints on several occasions, to which Dahmer initially excused the odors from his apartment as being caused by his freezer breaking, causing the contents to become "spoiled". On another occasion, he informed the manager that the reason for the resurgence of the odor was that several of his tropical fish had recently died.

On the afternoon of May 26, 1991, Dahmer saw a 14-year-old named Konerak Sinthasomphone on Wisconsin Avenue and then he approached the youth with an offer of money to accompany him to his apartment to pose for Polaroid pictures. According to Dahmer, Sinthasomphone—the younger brother of the boy whom he had molested in 1988—was initially reluctant to the proposal, before changing his mind and accompanying Dahmer to his apartment, where the youth posed for two pictures in his underwear before Dahmer drugged him into unconsciousness and performed oral sex on him. 

 On this occasion, Dahmer drilled a single hole into Sinthasomphone's skull, through which he injected muriatic acid into the frontal lobe. Before Sinthasomphone fell unconscious, Dahmer led the boy into his bedroom, where the nude body of 31-year-old Tony Hughes, whom Dahmer had killed three days earlier was laying naked on the floor. According to Dahmer, he "believed that Sinthasomphone actually saw this body," yet did not react to seeing the bloated corpse—likely because of the effects of the sleeping pills he had ingested and the muriatic acid Dahmer had injected into his skull.

Sinthasomphone soon became unconscious, whereupon Dahmer drank several beers while lying alongside Sinthasomphone before leaving his apartment to drink at a bar, then he purchase more alcohol.  I should point out that Dahmer had this overpowering desire to sleep beside a human being be his victim alive or dead. I suspect that was because he was actually a very lonely man.

In the early morning hours of May 27, Dahmer returned to his apartment  and saw the Sinthasomphone sitting naked outside on the corner of 25th and State streets, talking in Laotian, with three hysterical young women standing near him. Dahmer approached the trio and explained to the women that Sinthasomphone (whom he referred to by an alias) was his lover, and attempted to lead him to his apartment by the arm. The three women dissuaded Dahmer, explaining they had phoned 911.

Upon the arrival of two police officers named John Balcerzak and Joseph Gabrish, Dahmer's demeanor relaxed. He then informed the officers that Sinthasomphone was his 19-year-old boyfriend and that he had drank too much following a quarrel, and that he frequently behaved in this manner when intoxicated.

The three women were exasperated and when one of the trio attempted to indicate to one of the officers that Sinthasomphone was bleeding from his buttocks and that he had seemingly struggled against Dahmer's attempts to walk him to his apartment, officer Balcerzak harshly informed her to "butt out,"  "shut the hell up" and to not interfere, adding that the incident was merely a "domestic matter.

Against the protests of the three women, the officers simply covered Sinthasomphone with a towel and walked him to Dahmer's apartment where, in an effort to verify his claim that he and Sinthasomphone were lovers, Dahmer showed the officers the two semi-nude Polaroid pictures he had taken of the youth the previous evening.

The officers later reported having noted a strange scent reminiscent of excrement inside the apartment (this odor emanated from the decomposing body of Hughes). To investigate this, one officer simply peeked his head around the bedroom but really didn't take a good look. The officers then left, with a departing remark that Dahmer should "take good care" of Sinthasomphone.” That remark is like wishing a parachutist good luck when he doesn’t know that two of the straps are cut. Had they conducted a background check upon Dahmer, it would have revealed that he was a convicted child molester under probation, a condition that he was not to bring children to his home. The two officers failed in their duty as police officers. If he had done their job properly, the 14-year-old boy wouldn’t have been murdered shortly thereafter by Dahmer. 

Upon the departure of the two police officers from his apartment, Dahmer again injected muriatic acid into Sinthasomphone's brain and on this second occasion, the injection proved fatal.

The following day, May 28, Dahmer took a day's leave from work to devote himself to the dismemberment of the bodies of Sinthasomphone and Hughes, whose decomposing body had been lying in his bedroom as police brought Sinthasomphone back to his apartment. He retained both victims' skulls.

On June 30, Dahmer traveled to Chicago, where he saw a 20-year-old named Matt Turner at a bus station. Turner accepted Dahmer's offer to travel to Milwaukee for a professional photo shoot. At Dahmer's apartment, Dahmer drugged, strangled and dismembered Turner, and placed his head and internal organs in separate plastic bags in the freezer. Turner was not reported missing. Five days later, on July 5, Dahmer lured 23-year-old Jeremiah Weinberger from a Chicago bar to his apartment on the promise of spending the weekend with him. He drugged Weinberger and twice injected boiling water into his skull, sending him into a coma from which he died two days later.  

On July 15, Dahmer encountered 24-year-old^[ Oliver Lacy at the corner of 27th and Kilbourn streets. Lacy agreed to Dahmer's ruse of posing nude for photographs and accompanied him to his apartment, where the pair engaged in tentative sexual activity before Dahmer drugged Lacy.

On this particular occasion, Dahmer intended to prolong the time he spent with Lacy while his victim was alive. After unsuccessfully attempting to render Lacy unconscious with chloroform, he phoned his workplace to request a day's absence which was granted, although the next day, he was suspended. A

After strangling Lacy, Dahmer had sex with the corpse before dismembering him. He placed Lacy's head and heart in the refrigerator and his skeleton in the freezer.

Four days later, on July 19, Dahmer received word that he was fired. Upon receipt of this news; Dahmer lured 25-year-old Joseph Bradehoft to his apartment. Bradehoft was strangled and left lying on Dahmer's bed, covered with a sheet, for two days. On July 21, Dahmer removed these sheets to find the head covered with maggots, whereupon he decapitated the body, cleaned the head, and placed it in the refrigerator.  He later acidified Bradehoft's torso, along with those of two other victims killed during the previous month. Lacy was the last of Dahmer’s victims. His attempt to kill his next one was his downfall.

On July 22, 1991, Dahmer approached three men with an offer of $100 to accompany him to his apartment to pose for nude photographs, drink beer, and simply keep him company. One of the trio; 32-year-old Tracy Edwards, agreed to accompany him to his apartment. Upon entering Dahmer's apartment, Edwards noted a foul odor and several boxes of muriatic acid on the floor, which Dahmer claimed to use for cleaning bricks. After some minor conversation, Edwards responded to Dahmer's request to turn his head and view his tropical fish, whereupon Dahmer placed a handcuff upon his wrist. When Edwards asked, "What's happening?" Dahmer unsuccessfully attempted to cuff his wrists together, then told Edwards to accompany him to the bedroom to pose for nude pictures. While inside the bedroom, Edwards noted nude male posters on the wall and that a videotape of The Exorcist III was playing; he also noted a blue 57-gallon drum in the corner, from which a strong odor emanated. As instructed, he lay down on the bed.

Dahmer then brandished a knife and informed Edwards he intended to take nude pictures of him. In an attempt to appease Dahmer, Edwards unbuttoned his shirt, saying he would allow him to do so if he would remove the handcuffs and put the knife away. In response to this promise, Dahmer simply turned his attention towards the TV; Edwards observed Dahmer rocking back and forth and chanting before turning his attention back to him: he placed his head on Edwards' chest, listened to his heartbeat and, with the knife pressed against his intended victim, informed Edwards he intended to eat his heart. In continuous attempts to prevent Dahmer from attacking him, Edwards repeated that he was Dahmer's friend and that he was not going to run away. (Edwards had decided he was going to either jump from a window or run through the unlocked front door upon the next available opportunity. When Edwards next stated he needed to use the bathroom, he asked if they could sit with a beer in the living room, where there was air conditioning, to which Dahmer consented, and the pair walked to the living room when Edwards left the bathroom. 

Inside the living room, Edwards waited until he observed Dahmer have a momentary lapse of concentration before requesting to use the bathroom again. When Edwards rose from the couch, he noted Dahmer was not holding the handcuffs, whereupon Edwards punched him in the face, knocking Dahmer off balance, and ran out the front door.

When he reached the street, it was 11:30 in the evening on July 22. Edwards flagged down two Milwaukee police officers at the corner of North 25th Street. The officers noted Edwards had a handcuff attached to his wrist, whereupon Edwards explained to the officers that a "freak" had placed the handcuffs upon him and asked if the police could remove them. When the officers' own handcuff keys failed to fit the brand of handcuffs, Edwards agreed to accompany the officers to the apartment where, Edwards stated, he had spent the previous five hours before escaping. When the officers and Edwards arrived at Apartment 213, Dahmer invited the trio inside and acknowledged he had indeed placed the handcuffs upon Edwards, although he offered no explanation as to why he had done so. At this point, Edwards divulged to the officers that Dahmer had also brandished a large knife upon him and that this had happened in the bedroom. Dahmer made no comment to this revelation; indicating to one of the officers, Rolf Mueller that the key to the handcuffs was in his bedside dresser in the bedroom. As Mueller entered the bedroom, Dahmer attempted to pass Mueller to himself retrieve the key, whereupon the second officer present, Robert Rauth, informed him to "back off.”

In the bedroom, Mueller noted there was indeed a large knife beneath the bed; he also saw an open drawer which, upon closer inspection, contained scores of Polaroid pictures—many of which were of human bodies in various stages of dismemberment. Mueller noted the decor indicated they had been taken in the very apartment in which they were standing. He walked into the living room to show them to his partner, uttering the words, "These are for real." When Dahmer saw that Mueller was holding several of his Polaroids pictures, he fought with the officers in an effort to resist arrest. The officers quickly overpowered him, cuffed his hands behind his back, and called a second squad car for backup. At this point, Mueller opened the refrigerator to reveal the freshly severed head of a black male on the bottom shelf. As Dahmer lay pinned on the floor beneath Rauth, he turned his head towards the officers and muttered the words: "For what I did I should be dead.”

A more detailed search of the apartment, conducted by the Criminal Investigation Bureau, revealed a total of four severed heads in Dahmer's kitchen. A total of seven skulls—some painted, some bleached—were found in Dahmer's bedroom and inside a closet. In addition, investigators discovered collected blood drippings upon a tray at the bottom of Dahmer's refrigerator, plus two human hearts and a portion of arm muscle, each wrapped inside plastic bags upon the shelves. In Dahmer's freezer, investigators discovered an entire torso, plus a bag of human organs and flesh stuck to the ice at the bottom. Elsewhere in Apartment 213, investigators discovered two entire skeletons, a pair of severed hands, two severed and preserved penises, a mummified scalp and, in the 57-gallon drum, three further dismembered torsos dissolving in the acid solution. A total of 74 Polaroid pictures detailing the dismemberment of Dahmer's victims were found. In reference to the recovery of body parts and artifacts at 924 North 25th Street, the chief medical examiner later stated: "It was more like dismantling someone's museum than an actual crime scene.

Beginning in the early hours of July 23, 1991, Dahmer was questioned by Detective Patrick Kennedy as to the murders he had committed and the evidence found at his apartment. Over the following two weeks, Kennedy and, later, Detective Patrick Murphy would conduct numerous interviews with Dahmer which, when combined, would total over 60 hours. Dahmer waived his right to have a lawyer present throughout his interrogations, adding he wished to confess all as he had "created this horror and it only makes sense I do everything to put an end to it. He readily admitted to having murdered 16 young men in Wisconsin since 1987, with one further victim—Steven Hicks—killed in Ohio back in 1978.

He stated that most of the victims had been rendered unconscious prior to their murder, although some had died as a result of having acid or boiling water injected into their brain. (As he had no memory of the murder of Tuomi, he was unsure whether he was unconscious when beaten to death, although he did concede it was possible that his viewing the exposed chest of Steven Tuomi while in a drunken stupor may have led him to unsuccessfully attempt to tear Tuomi's heart from his chest. Almost all the murders Dahmer committed after moving into the Oxford Apartments had involved a ritual of posing the victims' bodies in suggestive positions—typically with the chest thrust outwards—prior to dismemberment. He readily admitted to performing necrophilia with several of his victims' bodies, including performing sexual acts with their  viscera (guts)  as he dismembered their bodies in his bathtub. Having noted that much of the blood pooled inside his victims' chest after death, Dahmer would first remove the internal organs, then suspend the torso so the blood would drain into his bathtub, before dicing any organs he did not wish to retain and paring the flesh from the body. The bones he wished to dispose of would be pulverized or acidified, with Soilex and bleach solutions used to aid in the preservation of the skeletons and skulls he wished to keep. In addition, he confessed to having consumed the hearts, livers, biceps, and portions of thighs of several victims killed within the previous year.

Describing the increase in his rate of killing in the two months prior to his arrest, he stated he had been "completely swept along" with his compulsion to kill, adding: "It was an incessant and never-ending desire to be with someone at whatever cost. Someone good looking, really nice looking. It just filled my thoughts all day long." When asked as to why he had preserved a total of seven skulls and the entire skeletons of two victims, Dahmer stated he had been in the process of constructing a private altar of victims' skulls which he had intended to adorn upon the black table located in his living room and upon which he had photographed the bodies of many of his victims. This display of skulls was to be adorned at each side with the complete skeletons of Ernest Miller and Oliver Lacy. The four severed heads found in his kitchen were to be removed of all flesh and used in this altar, as was the skull of at least one future victim. Incense sticks were to be placed at each end of the black table, above which Dahmer intended to place a large blue lamp with extending blue globe lights. The entire construction was to be placed before a window covered with a black, opaque shower curtain, in front of which Dahmer intended to sit in a black leather chair. When asked in a November 18, 1991 interview who the altar was dedicated to, Dahmer replied, “It was a place where I could feel at home." He further described his intended altar as a place for meditation, from where he believed he could draw a sense of power, adding: "If this [his arrest] had happened six months later, that's what they would have found.”

On July 25, 1991, Dahmer was charged with four counts of murder. By August 22, he would be charged with a further 11 murders committed in the state of Wisconsin. Dahmer was not charged with the attempted murder of Tracy Edwards nor with the murder of Steven Tuomi. He was not charged with Tuomi's murder because the Milwaukee County District Attorney only brought charges where murder could be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Dahmer had no memory of actually committing this particular murder, and which no physical evidence of the crime actually existed.

The trial of Jeffrey Dahmer began on January 30, 1992. He was tried in Milwaukee for the 15 counts of murder before Judge Laurence Gram. Since he pleaded guilty on January 13 to the charges brought against him, Dahmer had waived his rights to an initial trial to establish guilt (as defined in Wisconsin law).  The issue debated by opposing counsels at Dahmer's trial was to determine whether he suffered from either a mental or a personality disorder: the prosecution claiming that any disorders did not deprive Dahmer of the ability to appreciate the criminality of his conduct or to deprive him of the ability to resist his impulses; the defense arguing that Dahmer suffered from a mental disease and was driven by obsessions and impulses he was unable to control.

I won’t even try to explain why this cannibalistic ghoul did all those horrible things to his victims. I am not even convinced that anyone can explain why he did all those horrible things to human beings

Defense experts argued that Dahmer was insane due to his necrophilic drive—his compulsion to have sexual encounters with corpses. Defense expert Dr. Fred Berlin testified that Dahmer was unable to conform his conduct at the time that he committed the crimes because he was suffering from paraphilia or, more specifically, necrophilia. Dr. Judith Becker, a professor of Psychiatry and Psychology, was the second expert witness for the defense; Becker also diagnosed Dahmer with necrophilia. The final defense expert to testify, forensic psychiatrist Dr. Carl Wahlstrom, diagnosed Dahmer with borderline personality disorder, schizotypal personality disorder, necrophilia, alcohol dependence, and a psychotic disorder.

The prosecution rejected the defense's argument that Dahmer was insane. Forensic psychiatrist Dr. Phillip Resnick testified that Dahmer did not suffer from primary necrophilia because he preferred live sexual partners as evidenced by his efforts to create unresistant, submissive sexual partners devoid of rational thought and to whose needs he did not have to cater. Another prosecution expert to testify, Dr. Fred Fosdel, testified to his belief that Dahmer was without mental disease or defect at the time he committed the murders. He described Dahmer as a calculating and cunning individual, able to differentiate between right and wrong, with the ability to control his actions. Although Fosdel did state his belief that Dahmer suffered from paraphilia, his conclusion was that Dahmer was not a sadist.

The final witness to appear for the prosecution was forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz. He began his testimony on February 12. Dietz testified that he did not believe Dahmer to be suffering from any mental disease or defect at the time that he committed the crimes, stating: "Dahmer went to great lengths to be alone with his victim and to have no witnesses." He explained that there was ample evidence that Dahmer prepared in advance for each murder, therefore, his crimes were not impulsive. He also felt that Dahmer's habit of becoming intoxicated prior to committing each of the murders was significant, stating: "If he had a compulsion to kill, he would not have to drink alcohol. He had to drink alcohol to overcome his inhibition, to do the crime which he would rather not do." Dietz diagnosed Dahmer with substance use disorder, paraphilia, and schizotypal personality disorder.

Two court-appointed mental health professionals—testifying independently of either prosecution or defense—were forensic psychiatrist George Palermo and clinical psychologist Samuel Friedman. Palermo stated that the murders were the result of a "pent-up aggression within himself [Dahmer]. He killed those men because he wanted to kill the source of his homosexual attraction to them. In killing them, he killed what he hated in himself." Palermo concluded that Dahmer was a sexual sadist with antisocial personality disorder, but at the same time, he was legally sane. Friedman testified that it was a longing for companionship that caused Dahmer to kill. He stated, "Mr. Dahmer is not psychotic." He spoke kindly of Dahmer, describing him as "Amiable, pleasant to be with, courteous, with a sense of humor, conventionally handsome, and charming in manner. He was, and still is, a bright young man." He diagnosed Dahmer with a personality disorder not otherwise specified  featuring  borderline, obsessive-compulsive, and sadistic traits.

The trial lasted two weeks.^[113]On February 14, both counsels delivered their closing arguments to the jury. Each counsel was allowed to speak for two hours. Defense attorney Gerald Boyle argued first. Repeatedly harking to the testimony of the mental health professionals—almost all of whom had agreed Dahmer was suffering from a mental disease—Boyle argued that Dahmer's compulsive killings had been a result of "a sickness.  Boyle portrayed Dahmer as a desperately lonely and profoundly sick individual "so out of control he could not conform to normal conduct any more.

 Following the defense counsel's 75-minute closing argument, Michael McCann delivered his closing argument for the prosecution, describing Dahmer as a sane man, in full control of his actions, who simply strove to avoid detection. McCann argued that the act of murder was committed in hostility, anger, resentment, frustration, or hatred, and that the 15 victims for whose murder he was tried "died merely to afford Dahmer a period of sexual pleasure." McCann further argued that by pleading guilty but insane to the charges, Dahmer was seeking to escape responsibility for his crimes.

On February 15, the court reconvened to hear the verdict. Dahmer was ruled to be sane and not suffering from a mental disorder at the time of each of the 15 murders for which he was tried, although in each count, two of the 12 jurors signified their dissent. On the first two counts,

Before the sentence was pronounced, a few victims were permitted to speak to Dahmer with their impact statements. One mother was so incensed, she was screaming and jumping up and down and had to be escorted out of the courtroom.

Dahmer was sentenced to natural life imprisonment with the remaining 13 counts each carrying a mandatory sentence of natural life imprisonment plus 70 years. The death penalty was not an option for Judge Gram to consider at the penalty phase as the State of Wisconsin had abolished capital punishment in 1853.

Upon hearing of Jeffrey's sentencing, his father Lionel and stepmother Shari, requested to be allowed a 10-minute private meeting with their son before he was transferred to the Columbia Correctional  Institution in Portage to begin his sentence. This request was granted and the trio exchanged hugs and well-wishes before Dahmer was escorted away to begin serving his sentence.

Three months after his conviction for 15 murders in Milwaukee, Dahmer was extradited to Ohio to be tried for the murder of his first victim, Steven Hicks. In a court hearing lasting just 45 minutes, Dahmer again pleaded guilty to the charges and was sentenced to a 16th term of life imprisonment on May 1, 1992

Upon sentencing, Dahmer was transferred to the Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin.  For the first year of his incarceration, Dahmer was placed in solitary confinement due to concerns for his physical safety should he come into contact with his fellow inmates. With Dahmer's consent, after one year in solitary confinement, he was transferred to a less secure unit, where he was assigned a two-hour daily work detail cleaning the toilet block.

In July 1994, a fellow inmate, Osvaldo Durruthy, attempted to slash Dahmer's throat with a razor embedded in a toothbrush as Dahmer returned to his cell from Roy Ratcliff's weekly church service conducted in the prison chapel. Dahmer received superficial wounds and was not seriously hurt in this incident.

On the morning of November 28, 1994, Dahmer left his cell to conduct his assigned work detail. Accompanying him were two fellow inmates: Jesse Anderson and Christopher Scarver. The trio was left unsupervised in the showers of the prison gym for approximately 20 minutes. At approximately 8:10  in the morning, Dahmer was discovered lying on the floor of the bathrooms of the gym suffering from extreme head and facial wounds. He had been severely bludgeoned about the head and face with a 20-inch (51 cm) metal bar. His head had also been repeatedly struck against the wall in the assault.  Although Dahmer was still alive and was rushed to a nearby hospital, he was pronounced dead one hour later. Anderson had also been beaten with the same instrument, and died two days later from his wounds. Scarver, who was serving a life sentence for a murder committed in 1990, informed authorities he had first attacked Dahmer with the metal bar as he (Dahmer) was cleaning a staff locker room, before attacking Anderson as he (Anderson) was cleaning an inmate locker room. According to Scarver, Dahmer did not yell or make any noise as he was attacked. Immediately after attacking both men, Scarver returned to his cell.

The response of the families of Dahmer's victims was mixed, although it appears most were pleased with his death. 

Scarver was sentenced to two additional terms of life imprisonment for the murders of Dahmer and Anderson. Although Scarver had confessed in 1994 to having concealed the weapon used to kill Dahmer and Anderson in his clothing on the morning of the murders, in 2015, he publicly stated the murders of Dahmer and Anderson had resulted from a confrontation in which one of the two men had poked him (Scarver) in the back as the three had begun their assigned work detail.

Scarver alleges that immediately before murdering Dahmer, he had cornered him, presented a newspaper article detailing Dahmer's crimes, and demanded that Dahmer answer whether the account was true.  Scarver further alleged he had been revolted by Dahmer's crimes and that Dahmer had been openly unrepentant for his crimes because Dahmer taunted prison employees and fellow inmates by shaping his prison food into imitations of severed limbs, complete with ketchup to simulate blood spattering. That would certainly infuriate anyone who saw what Dahmer was doing with his food especially considering that Dahmer had been a cannibal prior to his final arrest.

Dahmer was so disliked by fellow inmates that he required a personal escort of at least one guard whenever he was out of his cell to prevent inmates from attacking him. If that is true, then I find it hard to believe what Scarver later said. Scarver said that prison staff, knowing of his hatred for Dahmer, they had deliberately left the two men unsupervised so that he could kill Dahmer. But if that is so, then why did he also kill Anderson?  

Dahmer had stated in his Will he wished for no services to be conducted and that he wished to be cremated. In September 1995, Dahmer's body was cremated, and his ashes were divided between his mother and father.

I hope you have found this article informative. Some day in the future, I will write another article about other modern day cannibals.