Free Dead Men Walking (True Crime) by Bill Wallace Page A

human meat. In a cupboard in the bedroom there was a cooking pot containing decomposed hands and a penis. On the shelf above that there were two skulls. Male genitalia were preserved in formaldehyde and there was a variety of chemicals in containers – ethyl alcohol, chloroform and more formaldehyde.
    In a filing cabinet they found three skulls as well as photographs that seemed to have been taken as victims died. There were also gruesome photographs of corpses. In one, a man’s bloody head lay horrifically in a sink, while another depicted a victim cut neatly open from neck to groin. Others showed men in erotic and bondage poses. A kettle contained two more skulls and a blue plastic barrel hid three human torsos. There was a blood-stained electric saw – they had stumbled on a slaughterhouse.
    Jeffrey Dahmer confessed to killing seventeen men, cooperating freely and seemingly glad to have a chance to get it all off his chest. He was yet another in a series of serial killers like John Wayne Gacy and Dean Corll, but the difference was that he did not just kill them; he also ate them. He was a cannibal and would most certainly have eaten Tracy Edwards’ heart, as he had promised. The only foodstuffs in the apartment, apart from human meat, was a packet of crisps and a jar of mustard.
    Jeffrey Dahmer was born in Milwaukee in 1960, his family later moving to Akron, Ohio. The young Dahmer was a happy, normal little boy until at the age of six he underwent surgery for a double hernia. His father, Lionel, maintains that he was never the same little happy-go-lucky child again. He grew more introverted and strangely emotionless. It emerged at his trial that he took an unhealthy interest in dissecting animals, stripping the flesh off them and on one occasion putting a dead dog’s head on the end of a stake. As he grew older, he became more tense and was inordinately shy. Soon, completely unmotivated, he started drinking.
    He killed for the first time at the age of eighteen, his victim another eighteen-year-old, Steven Hicks, who had been hitch-hiking when Dahmer picked him up. He brought Hicks back to his house and killed him by smashing his skull with a weight because ‘he didn’t want him to leave.’ He then masturbated over the body before burying it in the woods behind his house.
    He did not kill for another nine years, enrolling in the army in the meantime and getting a posting to Germany. His drinking let him down, however, as it often did and he was discharged for drunkenness. Back in Milwaukee, he moved in with his grand-mother for a while, working at the Ambrosia Chocolate Company. He began to frequent the city’s gay bars but as ever usually spent the evenings drinking alone. When he did actually get into a conversation with anyone, his drinking companion more often than not ended the evening in a drugged coma. He was experimenting with the chemicals that would later enable to do what he wanted to his victims in the privacy of his own apartment. One of his drinking companions wound up in hospital and the proprietor of the bar in which he had collapsed barred Dahmer.
    He was also beginning to get into trouble with the police. He was picked up for a number of minor offences – drunkenness, disorderly conduct and so on. His father wrote later that his son had become ‘a liar, an alcoholic, a thief, an exhibitionist, a molester of children. I could not imagine how he had become such a ruined soul…there was something missing in Jeff…We call it a “conscience”… that had either died or had never been alive in the first place.’
    Then, on 8 September 1986, two twelve-year-old boys reported him to the police. He had exposed himself and masturbated in front of them. When he was picked up he claimed merely to have been urinating. He got a year’s probation.
    He stayed out of trouble during that year, but just a few days after the end of his probation, he murdered again. He picked up twenty-four-year-old Stephen