WARNING: This podcast contains graphic and disturbing content including detailed descriptions of sexual violence, dismemberment, and cannibalism. Listener discretion is strongly advised.
On a terrifying night in July 1991, Milwaukee police officers stumbled upon a scene of unimaginable horror in apartment 213 of the Oxford Apartments, revealing one of America’s most heinous serial killers: Jeffrey Dahmer. In this episode of “Murder in America,” presented by The Sleepless Vault, we delve into the twisted mind and gruesome crimes of the “Milwaukee Monster.”
This episode meticulously uncovers Dahmer’s chilling descent into depravity, tracing his early, disturbing fascination with dead animals and bones, influenced by his chemist father. We explore his traumatic childhood, marked by his parents’ tumultuous marriage and their ultimate divorce, leaving a young Jeffrey largely unsupervised and isolated.
Follow his dark progression from fantasizing about kidnapping and raping a jogger, to his first murder of hitchhiker Steven Hicks in 1978 – a crime followed by dismemberment, acid dissolution, and bone pulverization. We examine Dahmer’s subsequent failures in college and the military, fueled by escalating alcoholism and hidden sexual violence.
The narrative culminates in the shocking discovery of his apartment, filled with dismembered body parts, severed heads, and grotesque Polaroid photos of his victims. His seemingly normal facade crumbled, revealing a cannibalistic necrophiliac whose reign of terror left a trail of unspeakable horror and countless unanswered questions about why no one saw the signs earlier.
#JeffreyDahmer #MilwaukeeMonster #SerialKiller #TrueCrime #Cannibalism #Necrophilia #Dismemberment #MurderInAmerica #SleeplessVault #DisturbingCrimes #PsychologicalHorror #TrueStory #Milwaukee
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 help me help me officers please help me this freak this crazy guy he’s trying to hurt me he put these handcuffs on me I’ve been trying to escape his apartment for hours shit man he’s trying to kill me you gotta help me 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 2 13 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 4 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 at such a young age he didn’t really understand what was going on with his life and his body and the surgery really changed his personality instead of the active playful child he once was after the operation Jeffrey was suddenly a lot quieter and more withdrawn 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 animal’s 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 animals 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 into the bucket and made a a clanging noise and he seemed uh sort of entranced by that he just said as he dropped him down it’s just 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 4 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 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 2 13 Lionel took us back to the neighborhood in Ohio where his son’s strange rituals began so he rode around on his bike took uh containers garbage uh 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 on trails you know with the sides of dogs or foxes as you made your way around the neighborhood on I think it started started maybe started out as just a childhood curiosity just to see what it looked like inside right and uh something something went wrong was was there some pleasure in in the cutting open of the animal yes there was no no sexual pleasure but just a um 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 an not on any deep deep level no we talked about superficial things never really had a a real deep heart to heart talk about what was going on inside our own minds why do you think that was uh because from about 15 years on up a great deal of my thoughts were uh basically unshareable it was unnerving depressing uh made me angry sometimes uh I’d leave the house go out in the woods and uh sulk brooding you know wondering why they had to uh have such a rough relationship your dad says that somewhere around the age of 6 he thought that you began to change that you began to withdraw that you became much more shy oh yeah that’s that’s the time I really really remember uh noticing that things weren’t quite right so it wasn’t so much in a Chinese as it was wanting to withdraw from tension and arguments and problems in the house that’s how I saw it yeah just uh I I uh sort of uh lived in my own little fantasy world when things got too heated in the household it was just uh 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 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 just some unfortunate events and it’s been really tough but we pushed through it and I was still able to work and produce these podcast but at times I felt like I really did need some help well if you’ve ever been in a position like ours let me introduce you guys to a service that I’ve come to love better help that’s better H E L P better help it’s an absolutely amazing and easy online service that will assess your personal mental health needs and match you with your very own licensed professional therapist after you sign up for better help you can start communicating with a licensed professional therapist in under 48 hours and just to point out guys better help is not a crisis line it’s not self help it’s professional counseling done securely online in the age of the coronavirus you don’t even need to leave your home to receive quality mental health care you can literally do it from your couch your 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can switch therapists at any time I’ve benefited immensely from therapy over the years not only when I was recovering from addiction but also just in my day to day life it helps to get your feelings out it helps to talk to someone and it helps to have someone listen and give you advice that understands where you’re coming from as the largest online therapy provider in the world Better Help can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise our listeners get 10% off their first month at Better help dot com slash Mia that’s better H E L p dot com slash Mia anyways thanks for listening you guys now let’s get back to the gruesome and gory details 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 as a young as a young boy wonderful that it was wonderful Jeffrey’s mother Joyce he was fun he we did all the normal things that people do if I’d seen something that had been a a clue of any kind I I’d I’d like to think that I would have done something about it immediately no there were there wasn’t anything unusual about Jeff Jeff was raised with all the love and care and concern uh 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 um I guess the parent naive parent in me still says I see a 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 often times 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 fifteen started have having obsessive uh thoughts of of uh violence intermingled with sex and it just got worse and worse I didn’t know how to tell anyone about it so I didn’t I just kept it all inside 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 till 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 hidden in the trees and the bushes with a sawed off baseball bat waiting for a jogger to come by and what was he gonna 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 from animals to people uh years 14 or 15 in that area yeah 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 Steven Hicks Jeffrey pulls over on the side of the road and lets Steven into his car he’s friendly with Steven and the two really hit it off so much so that Steven 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 Steven 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 Steven 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 Steven to leave in fact his fun had just begun so when Steven wasn’t looking Jeffrey slowly picked up a 10 pound dumbbell he walked over to Steven 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 Steven was dead it was time for Jeffrey to act out his true sexual fantasy he proceeded to take off all of Steven’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 Steven Hicks’s body he started off by first sawing Steven’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 Steven’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 Steven Hicks’s remains for over 10 years the first killing was not planned I was coming back from the shopping mall back in 78 I had had uh fantasies about picking up a hitchhiker and uh taking him back to the house and uh having complete control and dominance I wish I just keep on kept on going but I didn’t turned around picked him up and uh that’s when that’s when it the nightmare became a reality what happened after you took him to the house um we talked had some drinks uh I knocked him out and that was that was the first time after Jeffrey’s first kill 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’s 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 trained 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 incidents 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 and after reading this he became obsessed with the thought of digging it up and having a fresh dead body in his possession completely under his control he even went to the grave and tried to dig up his coffin but he was unsuccessful because the dirt was already too hard 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 Steven he just wanted to rape him but the next morning when Jeffrey woke up in the hotel bed he looked over at Steven 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 uh I started reading pornography going to the bookstores um eventually that LED to uh 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 had no intention of hurting him when I woke up in the morning he uh had a broken rib here I was heavily bruised apparently I had uh beaten him to death with my fists and you have no memory I have 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 um I was just gonna spend the night with him when I woke up in the morning uh my forearms were bruised and his chest was was bruised and blood was coming out of his mouth he was hanging over the side of the bed and uh I have no memory of beating him to death but I must have and that’s when it when it all started again and once it started again you found it impossible to stop right that that’s when the the obsession went into full swing Jeffrey then went to the store and bought a big suitcase so that he could remove Steven’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 Steven’s corpse from the suitcase and he proceeded to savagely dismember Steven’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 Steven’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 Steven’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 Steven’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 2 1 9 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 slip 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’s 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 Doxidore was Jeffrey Dahmer’s third victim real quickly everybody I just wanna give a shout out to our wonderful patrons that are out there on the murder in America patron we are gonna be uploading a lot of different true crime content on there in the near future we already have a bunch of bonus episodes that you guys can go listen to so if you love the show please consider becoming a patron just type in murder in America on patron to find that page and if you like what we’re doing if you like the show you love the podcast please take a screenshot of your screen right now and upload it to Twitter to Instagram to Facebook to any social media and tag us every bit of promotion helps so if you really are enjoying our show help us out it’s free and just give us a shout out on some of your social media it helps so much thank you to everybody that has already done that for us and uh yeah we got some exciting episodes coming up soon glad you guys are enjoying this and let’s get back to the show 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 pill 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 Ronald had overdosed on the pills administered by Jeffrey but thankfully he lived when he woke up he tried to tell law enforcement about what happened to him but no one believed him since there were drugs involved and the victim was gay they didn’t find it too pressing to look deeper into what happened 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 question 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 the 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 Conner 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 Conner 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 momento 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 you know the so called box incident happened in 1989 when Jeffrey had already killed at least five young men it was a about a one foot square box a metal and wood box my dad one week came to visit and happened to see it and uh wondering what was in it he didn’t know nobody knew and I said Jeff open it up I just wanna see what’s in there we got into uh a bit of an argument because I wouldn’t open it up and I said Jeff open it up or or I’m gonna just take it down into the basement and get a screwdriver or something and open it up I was thinking I’ve got to stop this from happening he got angry very visibly agitated I thought you know it’s all gonna come crashing down now not uh 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 it about the mummified head and and uh genitals of uh a young man I met in one of the bars down in Milwaukee but the box was never opened uh not my dad’s presence and so the uh the lies continued and so did the murders I didn’t have to be accountable to anybody I felt that I could keep it in my own secret little world keep everything under control um and would never have to deal with the consequences and so things just progressed from bad to worse 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’s 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 uh the mummified uh head and skull of one of the victims in a a carrying case in my locker at work were you almost flaunting it yes but that’s how strong the compulsion was that’s how bizarre the the desire was I wanted to keep something of of the person with me 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 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 of feeling in 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 uh keep them with me as long as possible even if it meant just keeping apart I had uh these obsessive uh desires and and uh thoughts wanting to control them to uh I don’t know how to put it uh 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 uh as my obsession grew uh I was saving body parts such as uh skulls and uh skeletons it’s a process it doesn’t happen overnight uh when you uh depersonalize another person and view them as just an object uh an object for pleasure instead of a a living breathing human being uh it it seems to make it easier to uh 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 anything that would have stopped 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 2 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 if you wanna follow us on Instagram follow murder in America we’re the same on Twitter and if you wanna become a patron we have bonus episodes available on our patron it’s if you go to if you go to patron.com and site and Jesus I can’t talk 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 Toxic Avenger fans tickets are on sale now go to Toxic avenger.comslashpodcast and get tickets for you and dozens of your friends to see your favorite radioactive janitor exclusively in theaters go to Toxic avenger.comslashpodcast to get your movie tickets now and show the fuck up on August 29th