Jeffrey Dahmer

The victims

Jeffrey Dahmer killed seventeen men and boys between 1978 and 1991. The first was Steven Hicks, an 18-year-old who had recently finished at Coventry High School, just south of Akron, Ohio. In 1978 Hicks was trying to get a lift to meet friends for a rock concert when he accepted a ride from Dahmer; he was never seen alive again, and his disappearance stayed unsolved until 1991. Every other killing took place in the Milwaukee area, after a gap of almost a decade: Dahmer later said his second killing did not happen until 1987. Most of the victims were young men, many of them Black, and many were gay. Konerak Sinthasomphone, one of the last, was only 14. Relatives have long asked that the victims be remembered as sons, brothers, fathers and friends rather than as footnotes to their killer's story.

What happened

Dahmer grew up in Bath Township, an affluent community in Summit County, Ohio, where he attended Revere High School. After settling in Milwaukee, he typically met young men in bars or other public places, offered them money or a drink and took them to his home, in his final years a rented apartment on the city's west side. There he drugged and killed them. This page does not describe the further details, which were established in court and widely reported at the time.

A missed chance and the arrest

The case is remembered as much for the moment he could have been stopped as for the crimes themselves. In May 1991 Konerak Sinthasomphone got out of the apartment and was found dazed and unclothed in the street. Police were called to the scene. Dahmer convinced the responding officers that the boy was an adult companion who had been drinking, and the officers left him in Dahmer's care. He was killed soon afterwards, a failure that later cost the officers their jobs, at least for a time. Dahmer was finally arrested on 22 July 1991, after another intended victim escaped and alerted police, who returned with him to the apartment and found evidence that led to Dahmer's immediate detention. He went on to confess to seventeen killings.

Trials and death in prison

Milwaukee County prosecutors charged Dahmer with fifteen of those killings. He pleaded guilty but insane, so the trial turned on his mental state rather than on whether he had committed the acts. On Saturday 15 February 1992 a jury found him legally sane in each case. Two days later, on Monday 17 February, Milwaukee County Judge Laurence C. Gram Jr. sentenced him to fifteen consecutive life terms, structured, the judge said, so that he would never be free again. Wisconsin has no death penalty, so this was the most severe outcome available. During the sentencing hearing, victims' relatives spoke directly to the court, and one sister's outburst forced a short recess. In May 1992 Dahmer appeared in Akron, admitted killing Steven Hicks and received another life sentence; Ohio's death penalty law had not been in force in 1978. On 28 November 1994 he was beaten to death by a fellow prisoner, Christopher Scarver, while on a work detail at the Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin. Another inmate, Jesse Anderson, was also killed in that attack.

Accountability for the police

The two officers who left Konerak Sinthasomphone with Dahmer, John Balcerzak and Joseph Gabrish, were fired by the Milwaukee Police Department. They appealed, and in April 1994 reserve judge Robert Parins ordered the city to reinstate both men with back pay. For many Milwaukee residents, especially in Black, Asian and LGBTQ communities, the episode became an enduring example of warnings from marginalised people being brushed aside.

The Netflix series and the families

In September 2022 Netflix released Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, co-created by Ryan Murphy, which became one of the platform's most-watched series. Several families objected. Rita Isbell, whose brother Errol Lindsey was killed in 1991, wrote that she had never been contacted and that it was sad to see money being made from the tragedy. Murphy said his team had approached around twenty relatives and friends of victims over several years of writing and had received no replies. The series revived wider arguments about whether dramatising real killings honours victims or exploits them, and about whether families should have a say in how their losses are portrayed. A search for developments between late 2024 and late 2026 found no new legal proceedings connected to the case.

Why the case matters

The Dahmer case remains a reference point in American debates about policing, about whose calls for help are believed, and about the ethics of true-crime entertainment. Legally, it showed how narrow the insanity defence is in practice: even where the defendant's mental state was the only real question, a Wisconsin jury held him responsible. It also illustrated how state law shapes punishment, since neither Wisconsin nor, for a 1978 crime, Ohio could impose a death sentence. More than three decades on, families continue to ask that the public remember the seventeen people who died rather than the man who killed them.