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

Tuomi in a gay bar. They went to a hotel and went to bed together. Dahmer claimed to remember nothing, apart from waking up in the morning to find Tuomi dead. He had been strangled.
    He wondered how on earth he was going to get the body out of the hotel but quickly arrived at a solution. He slipped out and purchased a large suitcase into which he crammed the corpse. He took a taxi to his grandmother’s house where he lived in a basement flat. He dismembered the body, stuffed the various bits into plastic rubbish sacks and put them in the dustbin. As he relaxed afterwards, he pondered on how much he had enjoyed it, how exciting it had been. He realised at that moment that the only way he could satisfy his sexual urges was to kill. From then on, that was his life’s work.
    Between 16 January 1988 and 19 July 1991, he would kill fifteen young men, more often than not black. They would be invited back to his apartment, given a drugged drink and either strangled or stabbed to death. The body would then be dismembered and bagged for eating, the parts that he did not need being left out with the rubbish. He told police that by eating the flesh of his victims, he believed they would come alive again in him. He experimented with seasoning and meat tenderisers. Eating human meat gave him an erection, he said, and his fridge contained strips of human flesh.
    He further explained that before his victims died, he sometimes tried to perform a kind of lobotomy on them. After drugging them, he would drill a hole in their skulls and inject hydrochloric acid into their brains. He was trying to create a functioning zombie-like creature that he could exercise ultimate control over and control, after all, was really what it was all about. Needless to say, most died during this procedure, but he claimed that one survived for a few days.
    By March 1988, he had claimed his third and fourth victims, fourteen year-old Native American, Jamie Doxtator and twenty-five-year-old Richard Guerro.
    Soon the smells and the drinking became too much for his grandmother who threw him out. He moved to an apartment in Milwaukee, at 808 N. 24th Street and the day after he moved in, he picked up thirteen year-old Laotian boy called Sinthasomphone, who agreed to pose for photographs for fifty dollars. By grim coincidence, he was the older brother of a boy Dahmer would kill in 1991. But, he did not kill Sinthasomphone and, when the boy returned home, his parents realised he had been drugged. The cops picked Dahmer up on charges of sexual exploitation of a child and second-degree sexual assault. He pleaded guilty, claiming he thought the boy was older.
    His arrest did not put him off his stride, however. As he awaited sentencing, on 25 March 1989 he killed Anthony Sears, a handsome black male model. Dahmer boiled the skull to remove the skin and painted it grey. He still had it when he was arrested.
    In the style of the true psychopath, Dahmer put on a superb performance in court, charming and manipulative. The prosecution sought a prison sentence but he got off with five years’ probation. He was also ordered to spend a year in the House of Correction under ‘work release’, which meant he went to work during the day and returned to jail at night. In spite of a letter from Dahmer’s father, pleading with the judge not to release him without treatment, he was released after just ten months and went to live again with his grandmother, before moving into his rooms in the Oxford apartments in May 1990.
    Exactly a year later, a naked fourteen-year-old Laotian boy, Konerak Sinthasomphone, was found wandering on the streets of the Milwaukee neighbourhood in which Dahmer’s flat was located. He talked to a couple of women, but was largely incoherent, having been given a drugged drink by Dahmer. The police were called and took the boy back to Dahmer’s flat to investigate. Dahmer told them, however, that Konerak was his nineteen-year-old boyfriend and that there had been