Jeffrey Dahmer, RIP

Jeffrey Dahmer is also known as the Milwaukee Cannibal. Born 5/21/1960, he is said to have murdered and dismembered 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991. Join me in the fun! Dahmer, if alive today, is now 60.

I’ve reviewed the deaths and will get to them later. I don’t think they really happened. But for now, I want to review the writing in Wikipedia. It is gruesome! Even if no one was ever cannibalized, the person(s) who wrote the narrative of Jeffrey’s life are living on the dark side.

Serial killers, if we are to believe news and detective TV and movies, are all about. However, they are waning – there were said to be 198 active in 1987, versus only fifty today, that according to World Atlas. However, according to the American Bar Association Journal, in 2019 there were only two active. Reasons cited for the decline include use of DNA evidence, a legitimate funtion of the PCR machine. It’s much harder to get away with stuff.

Other theories are that interventions that help troubled children might reform potential killers … that easy access to pornography is providing an outlet that satiates serial killers’ sexual impulses, and that would-be serial killers are turning instead to mass shootings. But “experts” discount that last item, saying the motivation for serial killing is quite different than that for mass killings. I discount the pornography aspect, as easy access is and always has been a fact of life. I have little use for “experts” in this area. 

I have another suggestion … CIA has backed away from fake serial killings and is now almost exclusively devoted to fake mass shootings, like the recent one in Boulder, Colorado, fake all the way.

I will briefly review Jeffrey’s life. Born an “energetic and happy child,” he was later regarded as quiet and timid in grade school. (So was I.) One teacher detected early signs of abandonment in the boy – his mother was ill. Then she had another child.

From an early age, Dahmer manifested an interest in dead animals. He initially collected large insects, such as dragonflies and butterflies, in jars. Later he collected animal carcasses, occasionally accompanied by one or more friends; he dismembered these animals either at home or in nearby woodland. According to one friend, Dahmer dismembered these animals and stored the parts in jars in the family’s toolshed, explaining that he was curious as to how animals “fitted together”.^[19] His fascination with dead animals may have begun when, at the age of four, he saw his father removing animal bones from beneath the family home. According to Lionel, Dahmer was “oddly thrilled” by the sound the bones made, and became preoccupied with animal bones. He occasionally searched beneath and around the family home for additional bones, and explored the bodies of live animals to discover where their bones were located.^[11] In one instance, Dahmer decapitated the carcass of a dog before nailing the body to a tree and impaling the skull^[20] on a stake beside a wooden cross in the woodland behind his house.^[21][22]

That is known as professional “backstory.” The writers were given the task of creating a cannibal/serial killer, and so had to concoct childhood stories that foreshadowed what was scripted to follow.

Two years later, during a chicken dinner, Dahmer asked Lionel what would happen if the chicken bones were placed in bleach.^[26] Lionel, pleased by Dahmer’s curiosity, demonstrated how to safely bleach and preserve animal bones. Dahmer incorporated these preserving techniques into his bone collecting.^[27]

Lionel is his father, and would remain loyal to him throughout his life. Again, this paragraph is foreshadowing, as the narrative will show Jefferey dismembering and bodies and bleaching skulls and other bones.

As a freshman in high school, Dahmer was seen as an outcast. By age 14 he had begun drinking heavily and during daylight hours. He was seen, however, as polite and intelligent. He got only average grades, we are told, as if that is something to worry about. He was a tennis player and played in the high school band, but only briefly. His photo to the left looks to me like a perfectly normal young man. He is age 17 at that time.

In 1978, when Jeffrey was 18, his parents divorced. Prior to that they had moved to Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. (Aside … I once visited a family friend in that town, and asked him where the falls were so we could visit. “I don’t know why they named the town that,” he replied. Apparently, there are no falls.) Anyway, Jeffrey was left behind in the family home in Bath, Ohio, and so the fun begins.

Jeffrey is said to have picked up a hitchhiker in Bath and lured him to the house. After several hours of drinking and talking, young Mark Steven Hicks wanted to leave, so Jeffrey bludgeoned him with a 10 lb. dumbbell. Then he strangled him. He then masturbated over the corpse. (I did not write this stuff – spooks did.) Later he would bury the body in the back yard, and then dig it up and pare the flesh off, then dissolving the flesh in acid (see a link to a prior foreshadowing).

Jeffrey would cool it for a few years, attending Ohio State, but it did not last. Then, at Lionel’s urging, he joined the army. Stationed in West Germany, he served as a combat medic. Two soldiers claim that he raped them. There is no disposition to those claims in Wikipedia. Were they investigated? It does not say.

Owing to Dahmer’s alcohol abuse, his performance deteriorated and, in March 1981, he was deemed unsuitable for military service and was later discharged from the Army.^[68] He received an honorable discharge, as his superiors did not believe that any problems Dahmer had in the Army would be applicable to civilian life.^[69]

Who writes this stuff? That’s a hard paragraph to swallow. Heavy and abusive drinking is exactly the kind of problem that would be applicable to civilian life. (Does anyone ever get a dishonorable discharge? If anyone was worthy of one, it was Jeffrey.) No matter, he was given a plane ticket to anywhere in the country, and chose Miami Beach. He ended up sleeping on the beach, using most of his money for booze, we are told. He moved back to Ohio to move in with his father. I must say, the Army was kind and generous with this young and irresponsible drunk.

He brought his drinking problem with him to Bath, and eventually he was sent off to live with his grandmother in West Allis, Wisconsin, part of the Milwaukee metropolis. It is there that he resumed his career as a cannibal and murderer. He got a job as a phlebotomist – no doubt intentional irony by the writers. Phlebotomists are the people who draw blood samples from us. That lasted ten months, and thereafter followed two years of unemployment, and mooching off grandma.

In January 1985, Dahmer was hired as a mixer at the Milwaukee Ambrosia Chocolate Factory, where he worked from 1 p.m [my note: This should probably be 11 p.m.] to 7 a.m. six nights per week, with Saturday evenings off. Shortly after Dahmer found this employment, an incident occurred in which he was propositioned by another man while sitting reading in the West Allis Public Library. The stranger threw Dahmer a note offering to perform fellatio upon him. Although Dahmer did not respond to this proposition,^[80] the incident stirred in his mind the fantasies of control and dominance he had developed as a teenager, and he began to familiarize himself with Milwaukee’s gay bars, gay bathhouses and bookstores. He is also known to have stolen a male mannequin from a store,^[81] which he briefly used for sexual stimulation, until his grandmother discovered the item stowed in a closet and demanded that he discard it.^[82]

I should advise the reader that Jeffrey, after arrest, was a cooperative prisoner and made full confessions. I assume we are to believe that the paragraph above is a result of his confessing nature.

Shortly after his membership of the bathhouses was revoked,^[85] Dahmer read a report in a newspaper regarding the upcoming funeral of an 18-year-old male. He conceived the idea of stealing the freshly interred corpse and taking it home.^[86] According to Dahmer, he attempted to dig up the coffin from the ground, but found the soil too hard and abandoned the plan.^[87]

Later he was caught masturbating in front of two 12-year-old boys as he stood close to the Kinnnickinnic River. He was sentenced to probation and counseling.

What follows in the narrative are the brutal and gruesome murders of sixteen boys and young men. I am of the opinion that while Jeffrey might have masturbated on the Kinnickinnic, the writers of this narrative did so over the script as they wrote it. Jeffrey enjoys sex with corpses, including oral, and often enough drugs them before strangulation. He dismembers the bodies, disposes of most, but saves trophies. He photographs the nude bodies of his victims. The writers have the killings far apart at first, and then occurring more and more frequently. That’s what professional “profilers” say that serial killers do. I, along with Malcolm Gladwell, have little regard for profilers, who usually get things very wrong. In detective fiction they are considered astute and insightful. In real life, they are a joke. (Harry Bosch’s ex-wife, Eleanor Wish, was an FBI profiler. She was deadly accurate, of course.)

Here is a brief sample of the narrative constructed by the writers of the Dahmer tale:

In February 1991, Dahmer observed a 17-year-old named Curtis Straughter standing at a bus stop near Marquette University. According to Dahmer, he lured Straughter into his apartment with an offer of money for posing for nude photos,^[128] with the added incentive of sexual intercourse. Dahmer drugged and strangled Straughter with a leather strap, then dismembered him, with Dahmer retaining the youth’s skull, hands, and genitals and photographing each stage of the dismemberment process.

Less than two months later, on April 7, Dahmer encountered a 19-year-old named Errol Lindsey^[129][130] walking to get a key cut. Lindsey was heterosexual. Dahmer lured Lindsey to his apartment, where he drugged him, drilled a hole in his skull and poured hydrochloric acid into it. According to Dahmer, Lindsey awoke after this experiment (which Dahmer had conceived in the hope of inducing a permanent, unresistant, submissive state), saying: “I have a headache. What time is it?”^[131][132] In response to this, Dahmer again drugged Lindsey, then strangled him. He decapitated Lindsey and retained his skull; he then flayed Lindsey’s body, placing the skin in a solution of cold water and salt for several weeks in the hope of permanently retaining it. Reluctantly, he disposed of Lindsey’s skin when he noted it had become too frayed and brittle.^[133]

I am more and more convinced that these fables of monsters living among us are constructed to create distrust, spread fear of one another, and enter our dark regions with Jungian archetypes. We are not to imagine that life is rather quite a peaceful affair, with maybe 93% of our experiences happy, or at least innocent ones. Of course we all experience that other 7%, which is deaths of family members, deaths of friends, and exposure to some real creeps. There are indeed murders, rapes and robberies, but we are only likely to encounter such horrors once or twice, if that. We are rarely in danger. 

I know they are out there. I experienced one myself. But the overall objective, it appears, with fables like the Dahmer killings, is to suggest to us that these people lurk all around us, and that we are never safe. Therefore, we need police protection, and further, police need to be able to break into houses and strong-arm suspects without evidence to achieve that protection. I have watched parts ofi the detective series Bosch and DCI Banks, and this is a recurring theme. Bosch is set in LA, while DCI Banks is in Britain. Serial killers are the norm, and both Bosch and Banks have to break rules to bring bad guys to justice. I sometimes think that the purpose of the shows, to imply that police need to be given a long leash and be easily forgiven when they stray. Harry Bosch, in particular, has little regard for rules, but dammit, gets results! 

Bosch is also used as a vehicle to reinforce the mythology of the past few decades, of Ruby Ridge, Waco, Oklahoma City, the Wonderland and Tate murders, and the OJ Trial, all portrayed as real. It is reinforcement propaganda.

On to the victims. As with John Wayne Gacy, I have searched for them via Find-A-Grave (FAG), the Social Security Death Index (SSDI), and TruePeopleSearch (TPS). I was given the precise date of their deaths by Wikipedia, which helped in the search. FAG supplied a few birthdays, making the search a little more reliable. Overall, I think it safe to say that none of these boys and men were killed, but I do suspect that two of the 17 really died of some unknown cause, and were included in the list to add some credibility.

• Steven Mark Hicks, 18, 6/22/89-6/18/78, listed in FAG, gravestone shown with him sandwiched between his parents. This is one of the two that I suspect was a real death repurposed as a Dahmer killing. Hicks is not in SSDI nor did I find him in TPS.
• Steven Walter Tuomi, 25, 12/19/62-11/20/87 is listed in FAG, but there is no gravestone. It says he was buried in Ontonagan, MI. There is no photo of a grave marker. He is not listed in SSDI, nor did TPS locate anyone by that name.
• James Edward Doxator, 14, 3/1/73-1/16/1988, is listed in FAG, and a grave marker is shown. He is not in SSDI. Interestingly, a James E. Doxator is shown to be living in Green Bay, age 56. Doxator would be 46 if still alive, so there is not a true age match. But the unusual name and Wisconsin location are intriguing, to say the least. Under TPS, I put this one down as a “maybe.” Remember that the spooks were in charge of all information, including dates of birth and death. Maybe a reach on my part, however. 
• Richard Guerrero, 22, DOD 3/24/1988, is not in either FAG or SSDI. He would be age 54+- if still alive. There is a Richard Guerrero living now in Milwaukee, age 56.
• Anthony Lee Sears, 24, 1/28/65-3/25/89 is listed in FAG with no gravestone shown. He is not in SSDI. He would be 56 if still alive, and TPS shows an Anthony Lee Sears living in Milwaukee, age 56.
• Raymond Lamont Smith (aka Ricky Beeks), 32, DOD 5/20/90, is in FAG, no gravestone shown. He is not in SSDI and TPS returned nothing on that name.
• Edward Warren Smith, 27, DOD 6/14/90, is not in FAG nor in SSDI. TPS returns a “maybe,” as there is an Edward Warren Smith living in Eastanollee, GA, age 58. Smith would be 57,+-, if alive. TPS says the Smith in Eastanollee used to live in Milwaukee.
• Ernest Marquez Miller, 22, DOD 9/2/1990, returns flat “No’s” across the board. No sign of him in FAG, SSDI, or TPS.
• David Courtney Thomas, 22, 1967-9/24/90, is in FAG with no gravestone shown, and is not in SSDI. He would be 52+- if alive, and TPS shows a David C. Thomas living in Milwaukee, age 53.
• Curtis Durrell Straughter, 17, 4/6/73-2/18/91, is in FAG, no gravestone. He is not in SSDI. He would be 46+- if alive, and TPS shows a Curtis D. Straughter living in Milwaukee, age 47.
• Errol Lindsay, 19,DOD 4/7/91, is not in FAG or SSDI. He would be 48+- if alive, and TPS shows an Errol S. Lindsey living in Milwaukee, age 49.
• Tony Anthony Hughes, 31, DOD 5/24/91, is not in either FAG or SSDI. He would be 60+- if alive. TPS shows a Tony Anthony Hughes living in Milwaukee, age 61.
• Konerak Sinthasomphone, 14, 12/1/1976-5/27/1991, is listed in FAG with no gravestone shown. He is not in SSDI, but then, I don’t think he would be as a Laotian national. FAG does not turn up anyone his age (he’d be 43), but, intriguingly, there is a Sinthasomphone living in Milwaukee, a female, age 54. The name is so unusual that I listed it under TPS with a “No match,” but didn’t want to let it go.
• Matt Cleveland Turner, 20, DOD 6/30/91, is not in FAG nor in SSDI. TPS shows a Matt C. Turner living in Milwaukee, age 47. Turner would be 49,+-, if alive. Usually I only get one year’s difference in age due to the spillover of part of 2021 into the mix (I use 2020 to calculate age if alive), so there is a discrepancy here, but it is close enough that I listed Turner under TPA as a “Yes.”
• Jerremiah B. Weinberger, 23, DOD 7/5/91, does not turn up in FAG, SSDI, or TPS.
• Oliver Joseph Lacy, 24, 6/23/68-7/15/91, does not turn up in FAG, but is in SSDI with correct dates. There are no TPS results on him. From this I gather a possible real death that was reassigned to Dahmer. Keep in mind, however, that spooks have access to SSDI and can forge records there. The question then is why this one and Bradehoft who follows, and no others? Why not put them all in?
• Joseph Arthur Bradehoft, 25, 1/24/66-7/19/91, does not turn up in FAG. As with Lacy above, he is in SSDI with correct dates, indicating a possible re-purposed death attribute to Dahmer. If alive, he would be 54. There is a Joseph A. Bradehoft living in St. Paul, age 55. That’s a strong “maybe.”

There it is. I think the most reliable results come from SSDI, where only two of 17 names show up, and TruePeopleSearch, where 11 of the 17 might in deed still be alive. Find-A-Grave seems compromised, that is, if there is no grave marker, why list someone?

Interestingly, in Find-a-Grave, I often encountered the following:

Note the orange arrows I have inserted. These are sweet messages left within the last three weeks. It was not just Thomas, but quite a few other Dahmer victims that had no gravestone, only an image, and very recent messages. I am suspicious that these are inserted on a regular basis to reinforce the idea that Thomas was a real person, that is his real name, and he had relatives and friends who miss him, 30 years after his death.

Keep in mind that the photo, said to be Thomas, is a real person. Also keep in mind that Find-A-Grave is not a strictly reliable source. If often misses people, as does SSDI. But I find it strange that a face can make it into the database without a grave. If their purpose is to find graves, that should not happen. Indeed, in this case, his burial place is unknown, but in others where no grave is shown, a specific cemetery is listed. However, who is going to check?

Conclusions

Jeffrey Dahmer was an image. Real photos of real people were used to simulate his existence. His entire story, beginning to end, was fabricated. In the fabrication are real people used, i,e., lifetime actors? Is/was there a Lionel and Joyce Dahmer? A general search of all databases on Ancestry.com shows no Lionel Dahmer, anywhere. Joyce and Lionel divorced, so she would be under another name, and I did not search. His younger brother, David Dahmer, is said to have changed his name and is in the wind.

Wisconsin has no death penalty, making it difficult to dispose of a fictitious person. Consequently, we get the following account of Jeffrey’s death:

On the morning of November 28, 1994, Dahmer left his cell to conduct his assigned work detail. Accompanying him were two fellow inmates: Jesse Anderson and Christopher Scarver. The trio were left unsupervised in the showers of the prison gym for approximately 20 minutes. At approximately 8:10 a.m.^[245] Dahmer was discovered on the floor of the bathrooms of the gym suffering from extreme head wounds;^[246][247] he had been severely bludgeoned about the head and face with a 20-inch (51-centimeter) metal bar.^[245] His head had also been repeatedly struck against the wall in the assault.^[248] Although Dahmer was still alive and was rushed to a nearby hospital, he was pronounced dead one hour later. Anderson had also been beaten with the same instrument, and died two days later from his wounds.^[241][249]

In another part of the Wikipedia essay, it is said that Dahmer, whenever out of his cell, was escorted by a guard, as he was targeted. Some might think that suspicious, that prison security could be so lax. I don’t. It also leaves open the possibility that Jeffrey was set up and guards and prison officials looked the other way. But I offer a third possibility, that Dahmer, not a real person, had to be disposed of in some fashion, and absent a death penalty, it had to be via murder. Ancestry.com shows no listing of a Christopher Scarver, anywhere.

My conclusion: Since Dahmer was a fictitious person who lived a factitious life, his death might as well be fictitious too.

---

PS: Almost forgot – Jeffrey comes very close, like Mark David Chapman John Hinckley Jr., to belonging to the Jack Nicholson group of brats, or clones. The eyes and ears say no, but otherwise close. He has Jack’s eyebrows, sinister eyes, nose and lips. The facial shape agrees. 

PPS: I visited geni.com in my search for Lionel Dahmer and his former wife, and indeed they turn up there. It’s a dead end after them, and only makes me wonder about the validity of genealogy sources in general. Ancestry is the one I use because we subscribe and it offers a wide range of databases. No Lionel there. But I will not pledge my loyalty to it. It could be a confidence game, the whole lot of genealogy databases.