Free Dead Men Walking (True Crime) by Bill Wallace

lawyers pleaded diminished responsibility and wanted the charges reduced to manslaughter, he was found guilty by a vote of ten against two. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.
    In prison, Nilsen claims to have composed more than eighty symphonic suites, painted and written poetry. He has also written an unpublished autobiography, History of a Drowning Boy .
     

     
    Jeffrey Dahmer
     
    It started innocuously enough, two police officers, Robert Rauth and Rolf Mueller, of the Milwaukee Police Department knocking on the door of Room 213, in a building called the Oxford Apartments. They had, a short while before, encountered a young black man who had come running towards them with a pair of handcuffs dangling from one wrist. Deliriously happy to have found them, he started ranting hysterically about a madman who had tried to kill him. Tracy Edwards gave them an address and they were now knocking on the door of that address.
    The door swung open to reveal a tall, good-looking young white man with sandy hair. He calmly let them into the apartment, leading Rauth and Mueller to believe at first that there must have been some kind of mistake. But there was something about the place that made them uneasy. The smell. The smell of something rotting, like fish that had been left out too long.
    The man gave his name as Jeffrey Dahmer and when they told him that Tracy Edwards was claiming that he had threatened him, he apologised. He had recently lost his job, he said, and was upset. He had also been drinking and things had just got a little out of hand.
    The officers asked him for the key to the handcuffs but Dahmer suddenly became visibly nervous. He seemed to be playing for time, perhaps weighing up his options as he stalled them. Politely, but firmly, they insisted that he get the key. Suddenly, Dahmer became hysterical, screaming at them and looking as if he might get violent. The officers grabbed hold of him to subdue him and there was a struggle. He was no match for their training, however, and within seconds he was on the floor being cuffed and having his rights read to him. When they called in to run a check run on him, they quickly received the response that Jeffrey Dahmer had a conviction for sexual assault.
    Now very interested in what had happened earlier, one of the officers asked Edwards to tell them what had happened. He explained that he had met Dahmer in a shopping mall about four hours ago and had come back to his apartment with him. As they sat on the sofa drinking beer and rum and coke, Edwards told them he began to feel drowsy. Dahmer tried to put his arms around him and he woke up and said he was going. He had already felt uneasy when he had seen male pin-ups on the apartment walls. He was more into women, he told the officers. Before he could get up, Dahmer had quickly put a handcuff on one of his wrists but he managed to fight off his attempt to put it around the other. He stopped struggling when Dahmer produced a large butcher’s knife and held it against his chest. Seated like that, he spent the next hour watching the film The Exorcist. Seeming to get bored with the video, Dahmer calmly told Edwards that he was going to cut his heart out and eat it. But first he was going to strip him and take some pictures. As he stood up to get his camera, Edwards seized his chance, swinging a punch at Dahmer and kicking him. Dahmer was knocked off-balance and Edwards ran for the door. As Dahmer ran after him, offering to unlock the cuffs, Edwards did not hesitate. He flung open the door and threw himself down the stairs as fast as his feet could carry him.
    While one officer remained with Dahmer, the other decided to have a look around the apartment. Going into the kitchen, he opened the refrigerator door and froze in horror. ‘There’s a fucking head in the refrigerator!’ he screamed.
    He was wrong. There were actually three heads, neatly wrapped in clear plastic bags. There were also plastic food bags containing