EP. 23 WISCONSIN - Jeffrey Dahmer, The Milwaukee Cannibal (PT. 1)
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He's the most terrifying serial killer you've never heard of. Haddon Clark has confessed to several murders, but investigators say he could have over 100 victims. At the center of the mayhem, a cellmate of Haddon's that was able to get key evidence into Haddon's murder spree across America,

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Warning. The following podcast is not suitable for all audiences. We go into great detail with every case that we cover and do our best to bring viewers even deeper into the stories by utilizing disturbing audio and sound effects. Trigger warnings from the stories we cover may include violence, rape, murder, and offenses against children. This podcast is not for everyone. You have been warned.

The two police officers look at the disheveled man in front of them. His name is Tracy Edwards. He's completely out of breath, with a handcuff dangling from one of his wrists, and he has a look of pure terror in his eyes.

The officers aren't very concerned at first, thinking that this is most likely a domestic dispute of some sort. And they tell Tracy, Okay, okay, calm down. Take us to where you came from, and we'll go check out the situation, get the keys, and we'll unlock these handcuffs. Tracy is reluctant, not wanting to go back to the place where he had just escaped from. But he agrees, and the officers follow him back to door 213 of the Oxford Apartments.

Moments later, the door opens. Standing in front of them is a handsome young man in his early 30s. The officers explain the situation at hand, wanting to get the handcuff keys and move on with their night. And the man assures them that everything is fine and that this was all a big misunderstanding. He seems completely harmless, charming even.

But as they're standing inside the dirty apartment, Tracy, with a handcuff still attached to his wrist, grabs a butcher knife that's lying nearby, shows it to the officers, and frantically proclaims, "Look! This is the knife he's been using on me!" The situation is starting to look more suspicious than the officers had initially thought. And as they're all standing there observing their environment, something catches one of the officers' eyes. It's a pile of Polaroid pictures. But these aren't just any Polaroid pictures.

As the officers shuffle through them, they see dozens of images of dead bodies. Among the pictures, there are several sets of severed and bloody hands, legs, calves, arms, torsos, chest cavities that have been pried open, bodies folded in unnatural positions, and many decapitated heads that once belonged to young men.

The officers immediately know that they had just come across one of America's most heinous serial killers, and that at that very moment, he was standing right in front of them. This is the twisted, dark story of Jeffrey Dahmer, and you're listening to Murder in America. ♪♪

Our story starts in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on the day when a baby boy named Jeffrey Dahmer is brought into the world. It was May 21st, 1960, and parents Lionel and Joyce Dahmer had just experienced the miracle of childbirth.

Jeffrey was the couple's very first child, and they were very excited to begin growing their family. Jeffrey's father, Lionel, wasn't around much during his infancy due to his intensely taxing job as a chemist, and his mother suffered from some mental health issues, but nonetheless, throughout his childhood, Jeffrey was your average happy kid. During his toddler years, Jeffrey loved to play and was very active. But at around four years old, Joyce and Lionel discovered that Jeffrey had a double hernia that required immediate surgery.

The two approved the surgery and put their son under the blade without really explaining to him what was going on, which most likely left four-year-old Jeffrey confused and scared.

A few years later, Lionel and Joyce had their second and final child, a boy named David Dahmer.

Everybody knows that adding a new sibling to the family is a big adjustment, but this new addition only seemed to exacerbate Jeffrey's personality changes, causing him to become even more shy and reserved. And while his parents were giving a lot of their attention to David, Jeffrey spent a lot of time by himself, during which he began to discover a strong interest in the bodies of dead animals.

and he was specifically interested in their bones. At first, this morbid interest wasn't concerning to his family.

Jeffrey's dad, being a chemist, thought that his son was just taking after him and his love for science. Lionel even bought Jeffrey a science kit and really fed into this new fascination. And since Lionel wasn't home that often, the two really bonded over this. Lionel and Jeffrey would do these little experiments, examining animals' bones, taking them apart, and even sometimes bleaching them.

But Jeffrey's fascination with dead animals only grew stronger over the years, and at one point, it wasn't just a bonding activity between he and his father anymore, but instead, an obsession.

Jeffrey would gather up rotting roadkill and completely tear the corpses of these animals apart. He would even take the animal's bloody heads and stick them on the ends of sticks. And Jeffrey didn't really have a preference towards which animal's corpses he would dismember. They could be wild or domestic. Dogs, cats, raccoons, squirrels, birds, you name it. Jeffrey was fascinated with them all.

And he even kept their body parts in jars around his house, almost as if they were his little trophies. And it's important to mention that he wasn't killing these animals. He was just interested in their dead bodies. You'll find throughout our story that Jeffrey wasn't really into the whole killing aspect of his crimes. He was more so interested in the body after death. I noticed that Jeff had picked up these bones and just let them drop back down into the bucket. They made a clanging noise.

and he seemed sort of entranced by that. He just said, as he dropped him down, it's like fiddlesticks, he says. Looking back on it now, Lionel says he can't help wondering if there was more to it than just child's play. I can no longer distinguish the ordinary from the forbidding, trivial events from ones loaded with foreboding.

When he was four and pointed to his belly button and asked what would happen if someone cut it out, was that merely an ordinary question from a child who had begun to explore his own body, or was it a sign of something morbid already growing in his mind? When we went fishing and he seemed captivated by the gutted fish, staring intently at the brightly colored fish,

on trails. Was that a child's natural curiosity or was it a harbinger of the horror that was later to be found in apartment 213? Lionel took us back to the neighborhood in Ohio where his son's strange rituals began. He rode around on his bike, took containers, garbage bags and so forth and collected road kills and brought them back and examined them.

It was something Lionel says he never knew about until the trial. One of the biggest things that I've been wondering is just how on earth, how it got established with entrails, you know, with insides of dogs or foxes as you made your way around the neighborhood. I think it started, maybe started out as just childhood curiosity. Just to see what it looked like inside? Right, right. And something went wrong.

Was there some pleasure in the cutting open of the animal? Yes, there was. No sexual pleasure, but just a... it's hard to describe. Sense of power? Sense of control? I suppose that's a good way of putting it, yeah.

Jeffrey's childhood, however, wasn't ideal. At one point after his arrest later on, he told investigators that there was extreme tension between his parents during his childhood. The two adults were constantly arguing and they didn't do it behind closed doors. It was very obvious to Jeffrey and David that their parents didn't have a healthy relationship.

Like we mentioned earlier, their father wasn't around much and their mother suffered severely from mental health issues. Joyce was a known hypochondriac who was on a plethora of prescription medications during Jeffrey's adolescence. And although she loved her children, she kept to herself a lot, neglecting her duties as a mother. And on top of all of this, Jeffrey's family moved around a lot during his childhood.

In one of the neighborhoods where Dahmer lived, Lionel claimed that Jeffrey was sexually assaulted by a young boy when he was just 8 years old. Jeffrey experienced a lot of trauma at a very young age, and sadly there wasn't a lot of stability in his life or a support system in place to help him cope with it. The two of you never really communicated all that much, did you, father and son?

Not on any deep, deep level, no. We talked about superficial things. Never really had a real deep heart-to-heart talk about what was going on inside our own minds. Why do you think that was? Because from about 15 years on up, a great deal of my thoughts were basically unshareable. It was unnerving, depressing, made me angry sometimes.

I'd leave the house, go out in the woods and sulk, brooding, wondering why they had to have such a rough relationship. Your dad says that somewhere around the age of six, he thought that you began to change, that you began to withdraw, that you became much more shy. Oh, yeah. That's the time I really, really remember noticing that things weren't quite right now.

So it wasn't so much innate shyness as it was wanting to withdraw from tension and arguments and problems in the house. That's how I saw it, yeah. I sort of lived in my own little fantasy world when things got too heated in the household. It was just my own little world where I had control. Even in school, teachers and classmates noticed that there was something off about Jeffrey Dahmer.

Several people that went to school with Jeffrey stated that when he was in middle school, he would bring flasks of liquor to class and would get drunk in the middle of the school day. And obviously, this one fact in itself shows that there was a very deep problem going on with Jeffrey at a very young age. And although he kind of kept to himself and didn't have a lot of friends, he was also that kid in class that would entertain his classmates by causing trouble. We all know those kids who would randomly yell things out or make a scene for no reason.

And Jeffrey was that kid. He was remembered as the class clown that wasn't afraid to sneak into people's yearbook photos or make people laugh by making a fool out of himself. Okay guys, I've got a question for you all. Seriously, think about this. Is there something in your life interfering with your happiness or something that's preventing you from achieving your goals?

I mean, definitely for me, the amount that I'm working on the podcast, my YouTube, all the different things that have happened, even the wedding and the funeral this week, it's driven me crazy. Yeah, this year has been a really rough year for me. I had both of my grandpas pass away and...

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This podcast is sponsored by Talkspace. You know when you're really stressed or not feeling so great about your life or about yourself? Talking to someone who understands can really help. But who is that person? How do you find them? Where do you even start? Talkspace. Talkspace makes it easy to get the support you need.

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Jeffrey had this facade on the outside, where to everyone else he seemed like a normal, funny, average kid. What was he like as a young boy? Wonderful. I thought he was wonderful. Jeffrey's mother, Joyce. He was fun. We did all the normal things that people do.

If I'd seen something that had been a clue of any kind, I'd like to think that I would have done something about it immediately. No, there wasn't anything unusual about Jeff. Jeff was raised with all the love and care and concern that any child could be raised with. And what happened to him? I don't know. I wish I knew. I'd give anything to know.

I asked the universe, "Why would this be allowed to happen?" I don't have an answer for that. You don't have any answers, do you? No. No, I don't. What do you see when you look at Jeff's face? I guess the parent, naive parent in me still says I see an innocent, shy child. A defenseless, vulnerable child who

I wish I could help now. But no one knew the real Jeffrey. He later stated that he started having really dark thoughts about death when he was just a young child, and that these thoughts were oftentimes sexual in nature, but he didn't really understand what they meant since he was so young. At the age of 14, when he reached puberty, he realized that he was gay. But Jeffrey's thoughts towards men weren't normal.

He wasn't just attracted to them. Instead, he was experiencing incredibly dark thoughts about capturing and raping them. I think it was around age 14 or 15, I started having obsessive thoughts of violence intermingled with sex. And it just got worse and worse.

Jeffrey kept these thoughts to himself and actually, he kept his sexuality closeted too and didn't tell anyone that he was attracted to men.

The Midwestern United States in the 1960s wasn't the most accepting of the whole gay community, and he definitely didn't tell anybody about the dark, violent sexual thoughts that he was having. Instead, he let these dark fantasies ruminate for years, and at age 16, Jeffrey decided that he wanted to turn these fantasies into reality. His first desired victim was a frequent runner in the area that Jeffrey often observed while the man was jogging on his daily route.

Day after day, Jeffrey would watch this man on his run, and he would fantasize about capturing the man and raping him. On the day he planned to carry out this assault, Jeffrey went to the location where the man ran every day, and he waited in an overgrown bush with a baseball bat in hand, ready to assault him. Jeffrey waited and waited, but for some reason, the man never showed.

This was all from Jeffrey's account years later, and no one knows to this day who this man is, or if he even knows that he escaped the evil hands of Jeffrey Dahmer that day. But if Jeffrey would have succeeded, that phantom running man would have been his very first victim. It's impossible to know why Jeffrey's obsessions progressed from roadkill to humans, but it didn't take long.

During our visit back to the old neighborhood, Lionel showed us where the stalking began. When Jeff was 14, he rode his bike over here from his home a couple miles away at this location, hid in the trees and the bushes with a sawed-off baseball bat waiting for a jogger to come by. And what was he going to do? Well, he was going to hit the jogger over the head with the baseball bat, make him unconscious, and lie with him, lie with a motionless body.

Do you remember at age 14 hiding in the bushes alongside that road thinking about attacking a jogger? Yes, I remember doing that. So that's the point at which it shifted from animals to people. Years 14 or 15 in that area. About two years later, when Jeffrey was 17 years old, his parents split up after years of turmoil within their home.

The two would later divorce and this really divided their family. Jeffrey's younger brother David decided to go live with his mother Joyce and Jeffrey stayed with his father Lionel. Like we mentioned earlier in our story, Lionel was never around.

And this continued even after the divorce, especially when he found another woman who he would later go on to marry. After Lionel met this woman named Sherry, Jeffrey basically lived all by himself with no supervision. And it was here where Jeffrey's dark fantasy started to grow even stronger.

Eventually, Jeffrey came up with an evil plan to kidnap and rape a local hitchhiker. In the 1970s, everyone used to hitchhike. This was how many serial killers would actually capture their victims in those days. It was just too easy and people were too trusting. So, when Jeffrey was just 18 years old, he decided to finally act out his deepest, darkest fantasy.

So he takes his car out and drives it down the highway, hoping to find someone that needs a ride. And as he's driving, he sees his first victim: 18-year-old Stephen Hicks. Jeffrey pulls over on the side of the road and lets Stephen into his car. He's friendly with Stephen, and the two really hit it off. So much so that Stephen agrees to go back to Jeffrey's house for some drinks.

And with Jeffrey's calm and innocent demeanor on top of his ability to charm, Stephen had no way of knowing that Jeffrey's intentions were to rape and kill him. When the two first got back to Jeffrey's, they had a really good time together. They spent hours drinking, getting to know one another, listening to music, and they even had consensual sex. Things were going really well between the two. But at one point, Stephen told Jeffrey that he had to leave.

He had already been there for a few hours and it was time to call it a night. But it was here where Jeffrey's demeanor started to change. He didn't want Stephen to leave. In fact, his fun had just begun.

So when Stephen wasn't looking, Jeffrey slowly picked up a 10 pound dumbbell. He walked over to Stephen and hit him in the back of the head. Jeffrey then got on top of him and strangled him to death with the bar of the dumbbell. Now that Stephen was dead, it was time for Jeffrey to act out his true sexual fantasy. He proceeded to take off all of Stephen's clothes.

and then he masturbated over his dead body. 18-year-old Jeffrey Dahmer had just killed his very first victim. It was now time for Jeffrey to dispose of Stephen Hicks' body. He started off by first sawing Stephen's body into several bloody pieces. He then headed out to his backyard, dug a shallow grave, and buried the chunks of mangled flesh in the dirt.

Keep in mind, this was Jeffrey's dad's house, but Lionel was never home, so Jeffrey was kind of free to do whatever he wanted, including murder and disposing bodies. A few weeks after the murder, Jeffrey was starting to get a little paranoid about the corpse rotting in his yard, so he decided to dig it back up and dismember it even further. Jeffrey took the decaying body parts out of the ground one by one. He then ripped all of the remaining skin off of the body and flushed it down the toilet.

Next, he took Stephen's bones and boiled them in acid. After boiling them down, he smashed whatever was left of the bones into tiny pieces and sprinkled what was left of the body around the property. The body was successfully broken down into pieces that were so small that no one would find Stephen Hicks' remains for over 10 years. The first killing was not planned. I was coming back from the shopping mall back in '78.

I had fantasies about picking up a hitchhiker and taking him back to the house and having complete control and dominance. I wish I'd just kept on going, but I didn't. I turned around, picked him up, and that's when the nightmare became a reality. What happened after you took him to the house? We talked, had some drinks. I knocked him out, and...

That was the first time. - After Jeffrey's first kill, he kind of laid low for a while, almost as if he was trying to get his life together. He even enrolled in college at Ohio State University, but due to his lack of effort and constant drinking, he ended up dropping out just three months into his first semester. College just wasn't for him, but his father Lionel wanted him to do something meaningful with his life, so he urged him to join the Army.

And later that year, Jeffrey would be stationed in Germany as a combat medic, but he didn't really thrive here either.

In fact, two men would later come forward with rape allegations against Dahmer, with one man claiming that he was raped by Jeffrey for a period of 17 months. On top of all of this, as we've seen throughout his life, Jeffrey's alcoholism really hindered his performance in the Army, and he ended up being honorably discharged in March of 1981. He didn't do well in college, and now he was out of the Army.

Jeffrey was ashamed of his failures and he didn't want to tell his father about his discharge. So instead, he came back to the States and moved to Miami. Jeffrey tried to make it on his own here. He even rented his own place and got a job at a local deli. Interestingly, a place known for its sliced meats. But like with all other attempts at success in his life, Jeffrey's alcoholism got in the way. He was eventually evicted from his place and then he camped out on the beach for a while.

Jeffrey only lived in Miami for about six months before moving back in with his dad in Ohio. Unfortunately, after only two weeks of living with his dad and new stepmother, Jeffrey was already arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct in Ohio.

And things were just not working out at Lionel's house. It was said that Sherry, his stepmother, did not like Jeffrey and that he had a hard time finding a job and that Lionel, his father, could not stop Jeffrey from drinking. Because of all of this, Lionel thought it would be best to send Jeffrey to his grandmother's house in West Allis, Wisconsin.

But no one had any idea that it would be here where Jeffrey's dark fantasies would re-emerge and really take a hold of his twisted mind.

Interestingly enough, Jeffrey and his grandma had a really good relationship, and she was one of the few people in his life that he felt like he could really count on. She took him in with open arms, and at first, everything was going well. He would spend time with her, help her with chores, and he actually ended up getting a job at a blood plasma center. He still drank excessively, but things were starting to look up.

That was until August 7th, 1982, when Jeffrey was arrested for exposing himself to a group of children at the Wisconsin State Fair Park. Jeffrey didn't spend any time in jail for this incident and was basically let go with a slap on the wrist. And it was here where we start to see Jeffrey's actions change. Shortly after his arrest, he lost his job at the Blood Plasma Center and basically mooched off his grandma for two years.

until January of 1985 when he got a job at the Ambrosia Chocolate Factory in Milwaukee. At this point in our story, Jeffrey is about 25 years old. Keep in mind, he hasn't killed anyone in almost nine years. And it makes you wonder, had Jeffrey taken control of his dark urges during those years? Was he working to better himself?

Was he trying to make his family proud for once? Whatever the case may be, nine years is a long hiatus. And that hiatus would soon come to an end after a chance interaction at a library. In the book, The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer, Brian Masters talks about an incident that reawakened Jeffrey's dark side. Allegedly, when Jeffrey was in the public library, a man passed him a note that expressed a desire to have sex with him.

Although nothing came of this interaction, it is said that this got Jeffrey excited, and he began reliving all the dark fantasies that once consumed him.

Soon after, he started frequenting local bathhouses and engaging in sex with a number of men. And these experiences really helped him discover his sexual preferences. But Jeffrey's preferences were far from normal. One interesting quality about Jeffrey Dahmer is that he didn't like people moving during sex. He wanted complete control over them in every aspect, and a free-moving human being was just too much for him.

Jeffrey later said in an interview, "I train myself to view people as objects of pleasure instead of people."

Jeffrey wasn't a fan of his partners moving during sex, he started putting sleeping pills in their drinks so he could rape them while they were unconscious. Again, he was obsessed with the concept of having complete control over someone and drugging them was a way to gain that control. The bathhouse where this was happening started to get a lot of complaints from customers. And after around 12 incidences of this happening, the bathhouse kicked Jeffrey out for good.

But that didn't stop him. With Jeffrey's good looks and charm, he simply moved to local hotel rooms, where he could drug and rape men there. Around this time, Jeffrey claims that he read about the death of an 18-year-old boy in the newspaper.

Shortly after this, in August of 1986, Jeffrey saw two young boys hanging out by a river and he started masturbating in front of them.

He was arrested for this crime and at first he admitted to it, but then later recanted and said that he was just peeing by the river and that the two young boys were mistaken in what they saw. And regardless of his past record, which included a previous incident where Jeffrey had exposed himself to children, the judge decided to change his charge from indecent exposure to disorderly conduct.

Once again, Jeffrey was able to avoid jail time and was sentenced to a year of probation. In November of 1987, Jeffrey was ready for his next rape victim. He rented a room at the Ambassador Hotel and roamed around the local bars trying to find someone that would go back with him. After he spent some time prowling, Jeffrey found 25-year-old Steven Tuomi. Jeffrey went on to tell authorities that he didn't remember much from that night.

But he made it a point to emphasize that he did not plan on murdering Stephen. He just wanted to rape him. But the next morning when Jeffrey woke up in the hotel bed, he looked over at Stephen and noticed a big depression in his chest. It was completely crushed in. He had black and blue bruises all over his body.

and there was a stream of blood coming out the sides of his mouth. Based on the injuries that Jeffrey noticed on his own hands, he then realized that he had murdered his second victim, even though he had absolutely no recollection of the event. When I moved to Milwaukee in '81, I started reading pornography, going to the bookstores. Eventually that led to frequenting the gay bars, and then I

One time I brought this young man back to the hotel room, the Ambassador Hotel. I was just planning on drugging him and spending the night with him. I had no intention of hurting him. When I woke up in the morning, he had a broken rib here.

Was heavily bruised Apparently I had beaten him to death with my fists and you have no memory I had no memory of it, but that's what started the whole spree all over again I had put some sleeping pills in his drink to render him unconscious and Was just gonna spend the night with him when I woke up in the morning my forearms were bruised and

And his chest was bruised and blood was coming out of his mouth. He was hanging over the side of the bed. And I have no memory of beating him to death, but I must have. And that's when it all started again. And once it started again, you found it impossible to stop? Right. That's when the obsession went into full swing. Jeffrey then went to the store and bought a big suitcase so that he could remove Stephen's body from the hotel without anyone noticing.

After shoving the battered corpse inside of the bag, he brought the suitcase back to his grandmother's house, where he kept it for about a week. One day, when his grandmother wasn't around, Jeffrey finally found the time to remove Stephen's corpse from the suitcase, and he proceeded to savagely dismember Stephen's arms, legs, and head from his torso.

After this, Jeffrey removed all of the bones from the body, set them aside and cut the remaining flesh into tiny pieces before throwing the muscle and skin into some trash bags. Next, he pulverized the bones by wrapping them in a sheet and smashing them repeatedly with a sledgehammer. - Jeffrey threw away all of the bags full of flesh and bones.

But in a disturbing twist, he decided to keep Stephen's head. For two weeks, Jeffrey kept the head wrapped in a blanket at his grandma's house. Body parts definitely start to smell after two weeks. And I'm sure that Jeffrey knew he had to do something with the rotting head before his grandma noticed. So he decided to boil Stephen's head in bleach. His goal was to boil off all of the remaining flesh so that he could use the skull to masturbate.

But once he was finished boiling it, the skull was super brittle and didn't work in the way he wanted it to. So he decided to simply pulverize the head and discard it. Because Jeffrey disposed of Stephen's body this way, his remains have never been located.

But years later, Jeffrey would admit that Steven was his second victim. As soon as Jeffrey got his second taste of death, he was immediately ready to find another victim. For the next few months, he would hang out around gay bars, trying to charm someone, in hopes that he could get them to go home with him. And on the particular night that we are about to describe to you, outside of Club 219, he was successful.

While Jeffrey was on the prowl, he spotted a 14-year-old indigenous boy named James. James was actually a prostitute in the area, and Jeffrey knew he would be an easy target. So he approached James and offered him $50 to come back to his place to take some nude photos. James was already looking for some money that night, so he agreed, and the two went back to Jeffrey's grandmother's house.

All while his grandmother is sleeping in the same home, Jeffrey and James hang out, share some drinks, and have sex. And of course, Jeffrey then performs his signature move and slips some pills into the 14-year-old's drink.

And before James can even come to and realize what's happening, Jeffrey strangles him to death. And once James is dead, he proceeds to rape his corpse. James' body would lie in the cellar of Jeffrey's grandma's house for a whole entire week.

until Jeffrey decided to dismember and dispose of it in the same way he did his previous victim, bagging up the flesh, pulverizing the bones, and boiling the head. James Doxedor was Jeffrey Dahmer's third victim.

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Shortly after killing James, Jeffrey Dahmer was ready to strike again, and on March 22nd, 1988, he would locate his next victim, 22-year-old Richard Guerrero, who was hanging out that night outside of a local gay bar called The Phoenix. After Jeffrey approached Richard and struck up a conversation, the two hit it off, and Richard agreed to once again go back to Jeffrey's grandmother's house.

And again, Jeffrey slips some sleeping pills into his drink, and once he's unconscious, strangles him to death with a leather strap. But at this point, Jeffrey decides to change things up a bit. In his previous murders, Jeffrey would usually just ejaculate over the dead body, and then either store it or begin disposal procedures. But tonight, he actually performed oral sex on the corpse. This was the first time that Jeffrey actively participated in necrophilia, and after this, it became his new obsession.

That same day, in the same short time frame, Jeffrey completed the dismemberment of Richard's body in the cellar and once again, he kept his victim's skull in the home for several months after. Richard Guerrero was Jeffrey Dahmer's fourth murder victim. Just one month later, Jeffrey would lure his fifth victim into his grandma's house. But this time it was a man named Ronald Flowers.

Instead of having alcoholic drinks at this time, the two share a cup of coffee together. And of course, Ronald's hot cup was laced with sleeping pills. Just as the pills started to kick in, Jeffrey heard a noise from the top of the stairs. It was his grandma asking,

"Jeffrey, is that you?" Jeffrey replies back to his grandma, letting her know that yes, he was home. But he knew at that point that his plans for murder were ruined. He suspected that his grandma heard another man downstairs and knew that he couldn't kill him anymore. It was just too risky. So instead, Jeffrey waited until Ronald was unconscious and then he dropped him off at the County General Hospital.

It was at this point when Jeffrey's family began to grow more and more suspicious of him.

His grandmother was tired of Jeffrey bringing boys over late at night while she was sleeping, and she was also constantly finding empty bottles of alcohol around the house. It seems like Jeffrey's addictions had only gotten stronger, and his family was fed up and done with it.

Some sources say that at one point Jeffrey had even stolen a mannequin from a local store and would use it to sexually please himself at his grandmother's house. If you'll remember, Jeffrey didn't like his victims to move, so this mannequin serviced his dark fetishes when he didn't have an actual victim to help him do so. But Jeffrey's grandmother ended up finding the sex mannequin in his room and forced him to throw it out.

His grandma, around this time, also started noticing the heavy smell of decomposition wafting throughout her home. It was a constant rot, an omnipresent putrid stench, and flies began to appear in groups around certain parts of the home. The 87-year-old had absolutely no way of knowing that her beloved grandson had been killing and dismembering people for months, right under her nose, in her very own house.

At one point, she also noticed dark fluids oozing out of the trash bags that were left outside of the home. Trash bags which contained the sliced up flesh of Jeffrey's victims. His grandma went to Lionel about this, and when they questioned Jeffrey, he told them that it was animal meat, and for some reason, they believed him. I mean, that was Jeffrey's hobby when he was a little boy, and I'm sure it never even crossed their minds that this hobby had evolved to an interest in the bodies of humans.

Either way, Jeffrey's true colors were starting to show to nearly everyone around him, and his family had finally had enough. So in September of 1988, Jeffrey's grandma and father Lionel forced him to move out. Jeffrey searched for a new place and ended up moving into a one-bedroom apartment. Finally, Jeffrey had freedom. No one breathing down his neck telling him what to do, and no one that could interrupt his kill time.

The very next day, literally one day after Jeffrey moved into his new place, he went on the hunt for his fifth victim. He hops in his car and drives by a school where all of the kids were getting out of class at the time. And Jeffrey stops a 13-year-old boy and asks him if he will pose for some pictures. I'm sure the boy was apprehensive, but when Jeffrey offered him some cash, he agrees. Once they get back to his apartment, Jeffrey hands the boy a laced drink.

The adolescent drinks it and as soon as it starts to hit him, Jeffrey begins to inappropriately touch him. The boy is starting to feel uneasy and he tells Jeffrey that he has to leave before quickly exiting his apartment.

The boy makes it back to his house and his parents immediately take him to the hospital because it was obvious that he was overdosing on something. When the police questioned the young boy as to where he got the drugs, he gave them the exact directions to Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment. As Jeffrey was working at the chocolate factory that day, law enforcement came in and placed him under arrest.

In January of 1989, he was convicted of sexual assault and enticing a child for immoral purposes. But he posted bail, and his sentencing hearing wouldn't be for another four months. Four more months of Jeffrey on the streets, prowling for victims. And surprisingly, his grandma agreed to let him stay with her for the time being. So there he was, back at his old stomping grounds, waiting to be put in jail.

and he wanted to use this opportunity to find another victim. Two months before his sentencing, Jeffrey finds 24-year-old Anthony Sears outside of a local bar called Le Cage. Jeffrey has mentioned in interviews that he was very attracted to Anthony. He was a good-looking, aspiring model in the area, and he was exactly Jeffrey's type. It has been said that Jeffrey wasn't actually planning to murder anyone on this night.

but that Anthony started up a conversation with him, so he took the opportunity and asked him to come home with him. But Anthony wasn't out alone that night. He had actually had a group of friends with him. The friends were named Jeffrey Connor and Bob Keel, and they themselves dropped Anthony and Jeffrey off at his grandma's house that evening. Before Jeffrey Dahmer and Anthony got out of the car, Jeffrey Connor, Anthony's friend, turned around to look at Anthony and told him, "'Call me if you need a ride back home.'"

Anthony Sears would never be seen again. Shortly after they got inside of his grandmother's house, the two had sex. Jeffrey drugged Anthony, strangled him to death, and then raped his dead body. And since Jeffrey was so attracted to Anthony, he really wanted to take a part of his body as a trophy to save some sort of a gruesome memento. So, after dismembering Anthony's body, Jeffrey proceeds to mummify his head and penis, and he kept them in a box in his room.

After a few weeks, he boiled his head and even painted on it. He was obsessed with Anthony's head, and he wanted to use it in an altar that he would create later on. Jeffrey's family was understandably disappointed in him. At this point, he had multiple run-ins with the law. And now he was back living at his grandma's house before he was set to serve his prison time. And he was still causing trouble.

So one day, fed up with his son's behavior, Lionel heads over to his mother's house and starts snooping through Jeffrey's room. As he shuffles through the closet, he comes across a heavy box that's locked up tight, and he assumes that it's a box of porn.

Lionel was angry with Jeffrey at this point, and he thought that it was inappropriate that Jeffrey would keep a box of porn at his grandma's house. So he brings the box over to Jeffrey and demands that he open it. But Jeffrey didn't want to open the box because inside of it was the mummified head and penis of his most recent victim, Anthony Sears. Jeffrey was clearly nervous about his father's request and refused to open the box, but Lionel wouldn't let up.

Jeffrey, thinking quickly, brought the box up to his bedroom, removed Anthony's head and penis, and replaced them with some porn that he had kept hidden in the room. After doing so, he brought the box back to Lionel and showed him that there was indeed porn inside. And I can't help but think that as he opened that box to show his father its contents, that the smell of decay still lingered. The smell of rot. The smell of death.

But either way, Lionel didn't notice and he told Jeffrey to throw it away. Were there times when your dad may have been closer to discovering what was going on than even he knew? The box incident was about as close as it came, yeah. The so-called box incident happened in 1989 when Jeffrey had already killed at least five young men. It was about a one-foot square box, metal and wood box. My dad, one week, came to visit.

and happened to see it and wondering what was in it. He didn't know. Nobody knew. And I said, "Jeff, open it up. I just want to see what's in there." We got into

bit of an argument because I wouldn't open it up and I said Jeff open it up or I'm gonna just take it down into the basement and get a screwdriver or something and open it up that was think I've got to stop this from happening he got angry very visibly agitated I thought you know it's all going to come crashing down now not fathoming what could be in that box I said okay just

Open it up tomorrow then, and then let's get rid of it, whatever it is. What was in the box? The mummified head and genitals of a young man I met in one of the bars down in Milwaukee. But the box was never opened, not in my dad's presence. And so the lies continued. And so did the murders. I didn't have to be accountable to anybody.

Jeffrey's sentencing hearing was scheduled for May of 1989, and he ended up convincing a judge to let him serve his prison sentence on a work release.

meaning he would still get to go to work at the chocolate factory every day while at the same time serving his sentence. But before his prison sentence started, Jeffrey was trying to figure out what to do with Anthony Sears' head and genitals. He didn't want to get rid of it, but he also didn't want to leave it at his grandma's house. So instead, he kept it in his work locker at the chocolate factory. Anthony's head and penis sat in the locker for months without anyone noticing.

Jeffrey got to come into work from prison and admire the body parts of his victim, even while incarcerated. I kept the mummified body

What drives a man to this point? What causes him to lose all touch with reality, to snap, to want to turn a skull into a sex toy, to want to perform sexual intercourse on a dead corpse?

There are a lot of theories and a lot of explanations, but at the end of the day, it's darkness. There is a certain darkness that lives within us all, within every one of you listening at home. But sometimes that darkness manages to take a hold of a person's soul, and it seems like it never lets go. Maybe I felt I had no control as a child or young adult, and that got mixed in with my sexuality and...

I ended up doing what I did was my way of feeling in complete control, at least for that situation. Creating my own little world where I had the final say, where I could completely control a person, a person that I found physically attractive, and keep them with me as long as possible, even if it meant just keeping apart.

I had these obsessive desires and thoughts wanting to control them, to, I don't know how to put it, possess them permanently. And that's why you killed them. Right, right. Not because I was angry with them, not because I hated them, but because I wanted to keep them with me. And as my obsession grew, I was saving body parts such as skulls.

and skeletons. It's a process that doesn't happen overnight. When you depersonalize another person and view them as just an object, an object for pleasure instead of a living, breathing human being, it seems to make it easier to do things you shouldn't do. If you were out on the street now,

Would you still be committing the crimes? Probably. If this hadn't happened, there's no doubt I probably would be. I can't think of anything that would have stopped me.

Hey, everybody. Thank you for listening to another episode of Murder in America. We're so happy to have all of you guys here. Part two of the Jeffrey Dahmer story will be posted next Saturday. Sorry on the delay. We had to go to a wedding and sadly a funeral this weekend. So we've been really busy trying to get this out. But I'm so glad you guys are out there listening. Courtney's actually at the wedding already today as a bridesmaid. But hey,

If you want to follow us on Instagram, follow Murder in America. We're the same on Twitter. And if you want to become a patron, we have bonus episodes available on our Patreon. If you go to patreon.com and search Murder in America, you'll find us on there. But anyways, everybody, Jeffrey Dahmer, his house is still there. The house where those remains were scattered at the very beginning of this story. And I've always wondered, to the person who lives there to this day, do you ever wonder...

The dead don't talk, or do they? We'll see you on the next one, everybody, and thanks for listening.

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