Jeffrey Dahmer: the Milwaukee killings and the police call that went wrong

• Born21 May 1960, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
• Died28 November 1994, killed by a fellow inmate at Columbia Correctional Institution, Portage, Wisconsin
• Killings17 boys and men by his own account: one in Ohio in 1978, the rest in Wisconsin, 1987–1991
• Arrested22 July 1991, Milwaukee
• Convictions15 murders in Milwaukee County (February 1992) and one in Ohio (May 1992)
• Sentence16 consecutive life terms

Jeffrey Dahmer told Milwaukee police in 1991 that he had killed 17 boys and young men: one in Ohio in 1978, when he was 18, and the rest in Wisconsin between 1987 and 1991, most of them in Milwaukee. He was arrested in July 1991 after a man escaped from his Milwaukee apartment and flagged down a patrol car. In February 1992 a jury found him legally sane, and he was sentenced to 15 consecutive life terms in Wisconsin; a 16th followed in Ohio. In November 1994 he was beaten to death by a fellow inmate.

The case is remembered almost as much for what happened two months before his arrest, when three Milwaukee police officers returned a dazed, naked 14-year-old boy to his apartment, and Dahmer killed the boy after they left.

This account rests on contemporary reports by United Press International, the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and the New York Times, and on reference entries in Encyclopaedia Britannica and Biography.com, listed at the end. Where they disagree, it says so. In line with this site’s rules, the people Dahmer killed, their families, the man who escaped from his apartment, the neighbours who called the police, the officers involved and the inmate who killed him are not named.

An Ohio boyhood

Dahmer was born in Milwaukee on 21 May 1960. The family moved to Ohio when he was a small child and settled in Bath Township, a semi-rural area where, neighbours and schoolmates later told the Associated Press, he was a solitary boy who collected animal bones and was drinking heavily while still at school.

His parents’ marriage ended in a bitter divorce in 1978, the year he finished high school. That June, by his own account to police, he picked up an 18-year-old hitchhiker, brought him back to the family house and killed him, then disposed of the remains. He described the killing to detectives 13 years later, after his arrest in Milwaukee.

He lasted one term at Ohio State University, enlisted in the Army at the end of December 1978 and was posted to Germany, where his drinking continued; the Army discharged him early in 1981. After returning to Ohio he was sent to live with his grandmother in West Allis, a Milwaukee suburb. Arrests for drunkenness and indecent behaviour followed over the next few years, and he found work at a Milwaukee chocolate factory.

Milwaukee, 1987–1991

He told police that he killed again in 1987, nine years after the first death, and that more killings followed while he was living at his grandmother’s house. He then moved into a one-bedroom apartment of his own in Milwaukee.

In 1989 he was convicted of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old boy he had lured to pose for photographs. He was given time in a work-release programme, which let him keep his factory job, and five years’ probation, and he served about ten months. He told police he killed another man in March 1989, and that the killings resumed after his release.

As he described it to detectives, he met young men in bars and other public places, offered them money, drink or sex to come back to his apartment, drugged them and strangled them. He admitted to dismembering the bodies, to sexual acts with some of them after death and to eating parts of some, and he kept skulls and other remains. Most of the men were poor and Black, and many were gay; Dahmer was white. He told the psychiatrists who examined him, UPI reported, that race played no part in his choice of victims.

The call of 27 May 1991

On 27 May 1991 neighbours called the police about a naked, dazed young man in the street near Dahmer’s building. He was a 14-year-old Laotian boy. According to the criminal complaint, as UPI summarised it, Dahmer had lured him to the apartment to pose for photographs, drugged him and gone out to buy beer, and came back to find him outside with police on the scene.

Dahmer told the three officers who responded that the boy was his drunk adult lover and that he would take care of him. The officers took the boy back into the apartment and left. Dahmer later told police he killed him shortly afterwards. According to UPI, a woman who phoned the police after the incident to insist that the boy was a child was told by one of the officers that it was all taken care of. The Los Angeles Times reported in 1994 that the officers had joked over the radio about needing to be ‘deloused’ at the station.

Dahmer killed four more men in the next two months.

The escape and the arrest

On 22 July 1991 a man fled from Dahmer’s apartment with a handcuff on one wrist and stopped two police officers. He led them back to the apartment, where they saw Polaroid photographs of dismembered bodies, and Dahmer was arrested. The search that followed found the remains of 11 people, among them skulls and heads, some of them in a refrigerator and freezer.

In interviews with detectives he described 17 killings going back to 1978. Milwaukee County prosecutors charged him with 15 murders. The 1978 killing was a matter for Ohio, and one killing in 1987 was never charged in Wisconsin; according to the Washington Post, no body had been found.

A trial about sanity

In January 1992 Dahmer pleaded guilty to the 15 murders but kept the insanity claim, so the only question left for the jury was whether he had been legally sane when he killed. Had he been found insane, he would have gone to a state mental hospital rather than prison. Under Wisconsin law, ten of the twelve jurors had to agree.

The trial in Milwaukee County Circuit Court, before Judge Laurence C. Gram Jr., heard 12 days of testimony, much of it from psychiatrists and psychologists who disagreed about his state of mind; UPI counted the experts as splitting four to three. On 15 February 1992 the jury found him sane on all 15 counts, by ten votes to two on each. Only one of the twelve jurors was Black.

On 17 February he was sentenced to 15 consecutive life terms; Wisconsin has no death penalty. In May 1992 an Ohio court added a 16th life term for the 1978 killing. The Los Angeles Times later calculated that, with all the terms combined, he would not have been eligible for parole for 936 years.

The officers

Milwaukee’s police chief, Philip Arreola, suspended the three officers who had answered the May call and on 6 September 1991 fired two of them; the third, the least experienced, kept his job on a year’s probation. Arreola said they had failed to take witnesses’ names and failed to take an obviously incapacitated child into custody, and that he and the whole department must “accept responsibility” for the response. The case set off a wider argument in Milwaukee over whether police took less care when the missing and the endangered were Black, Asian or gay.

According to UPI, the city’s Fire and Police Commission upheld the firings in November 1992, listing 16 errors the officers made in the 16 minutes they spent on the call and faulting them for dismissing the women who had called, who could have told them the boy’s age. In April 1994 a reserve judge from Green Bay ordered both men reinstated with back pay; the Associated Press reported that he called the dismissals too harsh.

Death in prison

Dahmer served his sentence at the Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin. He was allowed to mix with other prisoners, and in 1994 he survived an attack in the prison chapel with only a scratch.

On the morning of 28 November 1994 he was sent with two other inmates to clean the area around the prison gymnasium. About twenty minutes after they were escorted to work, with no guard directly supervising them, he was found with severe head injuries, and he died about an hour later. He was 34. A second inmate on the same work detail was also badly beaten, and a third, already serving a sentence for murder, was held in the attack. E. Michael McCann, the Milwaukee County district attorney who had prosecuted Dahmer, was quoted by the Los Angeles Times as saying: “That’s not justice. This is murder.”

Where the accounts differ

• The 1989 conviction: the Associated Press’s 1991 profile says he was convicted in 1989 of assaulting a 13-year-old; Biography.com dates the assault itself to September 1989 while also placing his sentencing in May 1989, which cannot both be right.
• The killings at his grandmother’s house: the Associated Press says he described killing three times while he lived there; Biography.com says the first of those men died in a hotel room and the body was taken to the house afterwards.
• What Dahmer told the officers in May 1991: that the boy was his 19-year-old lover, according to the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times and Biography.com; 20 years old, in the police commission findings reported by UPI; an “adult lover”, in UPI’s 1991 account.
• Who called the police that night: two women in the Los Angeles Times; three young women in UPI’s report of the commission findings; a single neighbour in Biography.com.
• When the officers were suspended: 26 July 1991, according to the Associated Press; UPI reported that Arreola announced the suspensions on 1 August.
• How many men he killed after the boy: four, according to the Washington Post, the Associated Press and Biography.com; UPI’s November 1992 report says one.
• How long the jury deliberated: nearly five hours, according to UPI, which says deliberations began on the Saturday morning; about ten hours “beginning Friday afternoon”, according to the Washington Post, and about ten in Biography.com.
• The attack in the prison chapel: an inmate with a sharpened toothbrush “several months” earlier, according to UPI; a razor blade fixed to a plastic handle on 3 July 1994, according to the Los Angeles Times.
• The weapon that killed him: UPI and the Los Angeles Times reported a bloody broom handle found at the scene, which officials would not confirm as the weapon; Biography.com says it was a metal bar from the prison weight room.
• Where he died: on the way to Divine Savior Hospital in Portage, according to UPI; at the hospital, according to the Los Angeles Times; Biography.com says only that he was pronounced dead about an hour after he was found.

The portrait

The portrait above is a detail of the coloring page drawn for Bloody America, which gives one killer to each state. The full page sets him in a wood of heavy trees, with a map of the United States and the word “Wisconsin” in one corner and, in the other, a hooded reaper with a scythe beside the number 4. A handsaw with a coil of rope, a tied sack and two bound blades frame a nameplate that reads “Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer, ‘The Milwaukee Cannibal’, 1978–1991”, with a judge’s gavel, a pair of handcuffs and a banner reading “Murdered in prison” beneath it. For other case files, see Ed Gein, Richard Ramirez and Aileen Wuornos.

If you find an error in this account, write to hello@truecrimeart.com and it will be corrected.

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Questions people ask

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Sources

Every date and name on this page was checked against at least two of the following. Where they disagree, the disagreement is stated in the text rather than resolved silently.

1. Murder in Milwaukee: Experts Struggle to Explain Dahmer’s CompulsionAssociated Press (Los Angeles Times), 11 August 1991
2. Two cops fired for returning naked boy to DahmerUnited Press International, 6 September 1991
3. 2 Officers Fired for Leaving Boy With DahmerAssociated Press (Los Angeles Times), 7 September 1991
4. Jury finds Dahmer saneUnited Press International, 15 February 1992
5. Dahmer Found Sane in Grisly Murders of 15The Washington Post (Los Angeles Times), 16 February 1992
6. Commission upholds firing of Dahmer copsUnited Press International, 27 November 1992
7. Dahmer cops to get jobs backUnited Press International, 27 April 1994
8. Victory for Two in Dahmer CaseAssociated Press (The New York Times), 28 April 1994
9. Dahmer killed in prisonUnited Press International, 28 November 1994
10. Dahmer Slain in Prison Attack; Inmate HeldLos Angeles Times, 29 November 1994
11. Jeffrey DahmerEncyclopaedia Britannica, 29 August 2026
12. Jeffrey DahmerBiography.com, 15 September 2023

The facts on this page come from public records and the published sources above. If you find an error, write to hello@truecrimeart.com and it will be corrected.

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