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In The Woman Who Drove Away, we used the case of Karen Greenlee to argue that Jeffrey was not a preferential necrophile. This piece asks the same question about the word most often attached to his name: cannibal. The Milwaukee Cannibal. It is in the headlines, the documentary titles, the true-crime thumbnails.

The answer is not a denial. Jeffrey ate parts of some of his victims, and he said so himself. The real question is what cannibalism was for him. Was it the centre of his pathology, or something at its edges? To answer that, it helps to look at a man for whom it was unmistakably the centre.

Renée

Her name comes first. Renée Hartevelt, born in 1955, was a Dutch student of French literature at the Sorbonne. She was 25. On 11 June 1981, her classmate Issei Sagawa, then 32, invited her to his apartment at 10 Rue Erlanger under the pretext of translating poetry for a school assignment. While she read at a desk with her back to him, he shot her in the neck with a rifle.

Over the following days he violated her body and ate parts of it. He then tried to dispose of her remains in the Bois de Boulogne, where he was arrested. Her name is far less known than his. On this site, we try to keep that order right.

A desire that came first

What makes Sagawa’s case so clarifying is how openly the act was the fantasy. He traced his cannibalistic desires back to the first grade. Years before Paris, in Japan, he tried to take flesh from a sleeping woman, but she woke and fought him off; he was charged with attempted rape and never revealed his real intention to the authorities.

He chose Renée, by his own account, because of the health and beauty he believed he lacked, describing a wish to absorb her energy. Decades later, he told an interviewer that his ultimate intention had been to eat her, not necessarily to kill her. Speaking to Vice, he described how “My desire to eat a woman had changed into an obligation.”

For Sagawa, killing was the means. Eating was the end. The fantasy began with the mouth and ended there.

What Jeffrey said

Jeffrey’s own words point somewhere else entirely.

In his supplementary report of 24 July 1991, Detective Patrick Kennedy recorded Jeffrey’s account of his motive. He said he would have preferred his victims to stay alive, but that “it was better to have them with him dead than to have them leave.” When he sensed someone was about to go, that was when he decided to kill.

The same report records his explanation of the cannibalism: eating parts of a victim was “his way of keeping them with him even longer and making his victims part of himself.” He said much the same to Dr Judith Becker, telling her that it made him feel as though they were “even more a part of me,” as quoted in Brian Masters’ The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer.

When FBI profiler Robert Ressler asked what lay at the root of his fantasies, Jeffrey answered that it all revolved around “having complete control.” Asked what had aroused him after the death of Steven Hicks, he replied: “By the captivity.”

Masters, who had access to Dr Kenneth Smail’s interviews, notes that the cannibalism was a fairly late development in Jeffrey’s offending and did not apply to all of his victims. It was not where the story began.

The shape of each fantasy

Put the two men side by side and the difference is structural.

In Sagawa’s case, the object of desire was the act of eating itself. It was lifelong, it came first, and everything else, including the killing, served it.

In Jeffrey’s case, the object of desire was a companion who could not leave. The killing served that wish. So did the keeping: the photographs, the skulls, the planned temple, the failed attempts to create a living “zombie” who would stay. The cannibalism was one more expression of the same impossible wish, arriving late and appearing only sometimes. He ate in the way he did everything else: to hold on to someone.

This is the same distinction we drew with Karen Greenlee. Greenlee’s desire was directed at the dead as such. Jeffrey’s was directed at a person he could not keep alive and would not let go. Both the necrophilia and the cannibalism were terrible consequences of that loneliness, not its source.

None of this makes what he did less horrifying. It makes it more precise.

Two reckonings

The cases diverge again in what came after.

French medical experts deemed Sagawa unfit for trial in 1983, and he was held in a psychiatric institution before being deported to Japan the following year. Japanese authorities ruled him sane, but could not obtain his case files because the French case had been closed, and so he walked free. He checked himself out of Matsuzawa Hospital on 12 August 1986 and remained free until his death.

He then built a career from what he had done. He wrote a memoir, In the Fog, detailing the murder, appeared in adult films, and sold paintings of naked women. He also wrote about other crimes, including a book on the 1997 Kobe child murders. Throughout his life, he showed no remorse. He died of pneumonia on 24 November 2022, aged 73, with a funeral attended only by relatives. He was never tried for Renée’s death.

Jeffrey waived his right to a lawyer during interrogation and confessed in exhaustive detail. He pleaded guilty but insane, was found sane by a jury in February 1992, and received fifteen consecutive life sentences in Wisconsin, followed by another in Ohio. He told the court he did not want to be free. He never profited from his crimes, and he was killed in prison in November 1994.

We are not ranking these men against each other. We are noting that one sought an audience, and the other sought an ending.

Why the word matters

“Cannibal” does a lot of work in the public image of Jeffrey Dahmer. It turns him into a creature of appetite, something from a horror film. That image is easier to live with than the truth, which is that his crimes grew from something recognisably human: a terror of being left, pushed to a monstrous extreme.

Sagawa is what the word actually describes. Jeffrey is something else, and understanding that difference is part of seeing both him and his victims clearly.

Sources

• Det. Patrick Kennedy, Milwaukee Police Department supplementary report, 24 July 1991
• Robert K. Ressler, I Have Lived in the Monster (1997), interview with Jeffrey Dahmer
• Brian Masters, The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer (1993)
• AFP, “Japanese cannibal who walked free dies age 73,” December 2022
• Newsweek, “Issei Sagawa Dead: Why Notorious Cannibal Killer Never Saw Jail,” December 2022

Christopher Scarver, the applause that followed 28 November 1994, and the victims the cheering required everyone to forget.

I. The Applause

This article does not begin with a metal bar in a prison gymnasium. It begins with what happened afterwards, in living rooms and newsrooms and radio call-in shows across America, when the news broke that Jeffrey Dahmer was dead.

There was satisfaction. There was open celebration. There were jokes within hours. Commentators reached, again and again, for the same formulation: that someone had finally done what the justice system would not. The man who swung the bar was transformed, almost instantly, into a folk hero — an instrument of cosmic correction. Thirty years later, the sentiment survives intact. Spend five minutes in the comments beneath any video about the killing and you will find it, thumbs-up counts in the thousands: he did the world a favour. Give that man a medal.

This article is not primarily about Christopher Scarver. It is about that applause — what it required people to forget, whom it required people to erase, and what it reveals about the moral logic of the audience. Because the hero narrative only functions if you never look too closely at it. Look closely, and it comes apart in your hands.

II. Steve Lohman

The first thing the hero narrative requires you to forget is a man named Steve Lohman.

In 1990, Lohman worked at a Wisconsin Conservation Corps job-training programme office in Milwaukee — an ordinary employee of a programme that existed to give young people trade skills and a path into work. On the morning of 1 June 1990, Christopher Scarver, a former trainee carpenter in that programme, returned to the office with a pistol. Scarver had been promised a full-time position by a supervisor named Edward Patts; when Patts was dismissed, the job evaporated, and Scarver’s grievance did not.

He held Lohman at gunpoint and demanded money. Handed only fifteen dollars, Scarver shot Lohman in the head, killing him — and then shot his body twice more. Site manager John Feyen, the other man in the office, wrote Scarver a cheque for three thousand dollars and fled for his life. Scarver was arrested within hours, still in possession of the gun, the cash, and the cheque.

Fifteen dollars. That is what Steve Lohman’s life was traded against — a man who, by every available account, had done nothing to Scarver at all. He was simply present, in an office, on a Friday morning, doing a job.

When the world made Christopher Scarver a hero four years later, it made a hero of the man who did this. And in doing so, it erased Steve Lohman a second time. His name appears in almost none of the celebratory retellings. There is no folk mythology about him, no comment sections demanding he be remembered. The avenging-angel story has no room for the inconvenient fact that the angel’s first killing was of an innocent man, over pocket money and a job that fell through.

Any honest account of 28 November 1994 has to begin here, because this is who was standing in that gymnasium. Not an instrument of justice. A man who had already demonstrated, in the most final way possible, what he was capable of doing to a person who had wronged no one.

III. The Man Himself

The second thing the hero narrative cannot survive is an honest look at Scarver’s mind — and here this memorial must hold itself to its own standard. We have argued, across many articles, that “monster” is a word people use when they want permission to stop thinking. That principle does not bend for convenience. It applies to Christopher Scarver too.

By his own account and by contemporaneous reporting, Scarver’s life had been coming apart well before June 1990. A high-school dropout, put out of his mother’s home over his drinking, he descended into heavy alcohol use after the promised job collapsed — and began hearing a voice that told him he was “the chosen one.” He was subsequently diagnosed with schizophrenia. He would later say that God had directed his actions; his sense of divine selection and special purpose persisted through his incarceration. After the 1994 killings he was evaluated at a federal medical centre for prisoners, and in 2001 a federal judge ordered him relocated, alongside roughly three dozen other seriously mentally ill inmates, out of Wisconsin’s supermax facility — a court effectively certifying what had been evident for a decade.

This was the man the public canonised: not a righteous everyman pushed to a breaking point, but a psychotic, profoundly unwell prisoner whose delusions had already cost one innocent man his life. The people cheering for him were not cheering for justice. They were cheering for the output of an untreated mental illness, because on this one occasion its violence happened to land on someone they hated.

There is a genuine tragedy in Scarver’s story, and it deserves to be named without strategy or irony: a young man’s psychosis went unaddressed at every stage where intervention might have changed the outcome, and three people died. That is not heroism. It is systemic failure wearing the costume of fate.

IV. 28 November

The facts of that morning are brief, and their brevity is part of the indictment.

At Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin, three inmates were assigned to a cleaning detail in the prison gymnasium area: Christopher Scarver, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Jesse Anderson. The guards left. For roughly twenty minutes, the three men — one of them the most publicly hated prisoner in America, one of them a diagnosed schizophrenic serving life for homicide — were unsupervised. In that window, Scarver took a metal bar from the exercise equipment and beat both men about the head. Jeffrey died that morning, 28 November 1994. Anderson died of his injuries two days later, on 30 November.

Scarver himself has claimed the arrangement was no accident — that officials knew his feelings and wanted the outcome they got. That specific claim is his alone and unproven. But it points at a question that does not require his testimony to stand: how does an institution whose singular job is custody leave that particular combination of men alone with gym equipment? Whatever the answer — negligence, indifference, or something worse — the institution’s failure is a load-bearing part of this story, and the hero narrative papers over it completely. If Scarver is an avenging angel, no one has to ask why the state’s most scrutinised prisoner was unprotected in the state’s care.

And then there is Jesse Anderson — the second man killed that morning, and the great inconvenient absence in every celebratory retelling. Anderson was serving life for stabbing his wife Barbara to death in 1992 and then wounding himself and telling police that two Black men had attacked them — a lie that sent Milwaukee’s police searching for phantom Black assailants in a city still raw from the Dahmer case’s own racial wounds. Anderson was, by any measure, a despicable man. He is also entirely missing from the hero story, because his death cannot be dressed up as righteous vengeance on behalf of anyone’s victims. He simply doesn’t fit the script — so the script forgets him. A “hero” narrative that has to quietly delete one third of the morning’s dead in order to function was never a description of events. It was always a story people wanted.

V. The Myth-Making

In 2015, Scarver gave an extended interview to the New York Post — his fullest public account, and a masterclass in how mythology gets built after the fact.

In it, Scarver said that Dahmer had taunted other inmates by shaping prison food into the forms of severed limbs and dressing them with ketchup as blood. He described confronting Dahmer with a newspaper clipping about his crimes in the moments before the attack, demanding to know whether the reports were true. He presented the killings as a considered act with a moral architecture around it.

The ketchup story has since been repeated in thousands of articles, videos, and documentaries as established fact. It is nothing of the sort. It is a single uncorroborated claim, made two decades after the event, by the one person with the strongest possible interest in making the killing look deserved. No guard, no chaplain, no fellow inmate has verified it, and it sits uneasily beside the accounts of those who actually spent time with Jeffrey in his final years — Reverend Roy Ratcliff among them, who baptised him and visited him weekly, and who described a subdued, remorseful man preoccupied with the question of his own guilt, not a taunting provocateur.

Why did an unverifiable claim become canon overnight? Because the audience needed it. The celebration of 1994 had always carried a small, unexamined discomfort — a defenceless man beaten to death in state custody is an ugly thing to cheer — and the ketchup story dissolved that discomfort on contact. See, he was taunting them. He brought it on himself. The myth is not evidence about Jeffrey Dahmer. It is evidence about what the cheering public required in order to keep cheering.

VI. What the Cheering Means

Strip away the mythology and this is what remains: a mentally ill man who had murdered an innocent stranger over fifteen dollars beat two prisoners to death with a metal bar while the institution charged with keeping all three of them alive looked elsewhere. For this, he was celebrated across the nation — and is celebrated still.

Sit with the logic of that celebration for a moment, because it is the entire subject of this article. The public’s case against Jeffrey Dahmer was that killing human beings is an absolute wrong — so absolute that his own documented mental illness, his confession, his cooperation, and his expressed remorse could not mitigate it one degree. We do not dispute that his acts were terrible; this memorial has never disputed it. But the same public then applauded a killing — unlawful, unsanctioned, carried out on a defenceless man — and called it justice. The principle held for exactly as long as it took to find a victim nobody would mourn.

That is not a principle. It is bloodlust with a permission slip.

The cheering asked nothing of anyone. It did not ask who Christopher Scarver was, or who Steve Lohman was, or why Jesse Anderson vanished from the story, or how a state prison came to function as an execution chamber by inattention. It asked only that everyone agree the victim deserved it — and on that agreement, a triple murderer became a folk hero, an innocent man’s death became a footnote, and an institutional failure became fate.

Christopher Scarver was not a monster. This site does not deal in that word, and his story — the untreated psychosis, the system that failed him at every turn before failing everyone through him — deserves the same unsentimental honesty we extend to Jeffrey’s. But he was no hero either. The heroism was manufactured afterwards, by an audience that wanted its hatred sanctified, and the manufacturing had costs: Steve Lohman erased, Jesse Anderson deleted, the state absolved, and the comfortable fiction installed that what happened in that gymnasium was justice rather than the last, entirely preventable failure in a story that had been full of them.

The monstrous thing was never any one man in that room. It was the applause outside it.

Sources and notes

• Contemporary reporting on the murder of Steve Lohman (1 June 1990) and Scarver’s conviction and life sentence (1992).
• Reporting on the events of 28 November 1994 at Columbia Correctional Institution, including the unsupervised work detail and the deaths of Jeffrey Dahmer (28 November) and Jesse Anderson (30 November).
• Christopher Scarver interview, New York Post, April 2015 — treated throughout as an uncorroborated primary account, not established fact.
• Roy Ratcliff, Dark Journey, Deep Grace, for the counter-portrait of Dahmer’s demeanour in his final years.
• Court records and reporting on Jesse Anderson’s 1992 conviction for the murder of Barbara Anderson.
• 2001 federal court order relocating seriously mentally ill inmates, including Scarver, from the Wisconsin Secure Program Facility.

There are two records of Jeffrey Dahmer’s time in the Army, and they do not describe the same man.

The first was assembled by Brian Masters in the early nineties, from Dahmer’s own account and from the soldiers who served alongside him. It describes a young man so withdrawn that almost nothing about him registered — quiet, moody, permanently half-drunk, remembered by his colleagues mainly as someone who was there.

The second emerged much later, from two men who came forward long after his arrest. It describes a predator who was already operating.

Both records concern the same twenty-one months at the same small base in the Rhineland-Palatinate. Reconciling them is the work of this article, and it cannot be done cleanly.

The base

He enlisted in January 1979, six months after killing Steven Hicks, at his father’s urging and as an alternative to the semester he had already drunk his way out of at Ohio State. He trained as a medical specialist at Fort Sam Houston in Texas. In mid-1979 he was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 68th Armored Regiment, 8th Infantry Division, at Baumholder in West Germany, and joined the squad at the Battalion Aid Station as a combat medic.

He would be there until March 1981. His service reports describe him as an average to slightly above average soldier.

What almost nobody noticed

Masters makes an observation about this period that is worth quoting in substance, because it frames everything else. For a man who spent nearly two years in one place, remarkably little is known about his life there or the impression he made — and Masters reads that absence as evidence in itself. Dahmer ate with people, went to restaurants with them, made small talk. He made no effort to know anyone or to be known, and so his privacy went unexamined.

What his colleagues did notice was that he was sexually innocent, and it became something of a project. Taken aback that he had no girlfriend and had never kissed a girl, a group of them brought him to a brothel at Vogelweh. Two soldiers his own age walked him inside and introduced him to one of the women. When they regrouped, he had slipped out without doing anything. They put it down to shyness until he told them he had never wanted to go and did not need a girl.

One of the older men formed a private theory that he was homosexual — not because of the brothel, and not because of anything obviously effeminate, but because he always seemed to be hiding something. Masters calls this astute, and it is difficult to disagree.

By his own account he had no sexual contact of any kind in Germany. He found the gay bookshops in Frankfurt and bought pornography. He understood by then that what he wanted was, in the terms available to him, inadmissible — and he concluded that further isolation was the only safe course. That is not a small thing to note. He knew what he was capable of, and his solution was to be alone.

His pleasures were solitary. He walked in the countryside. He described, years later and with real animation, watching a family of wild boars come down a snowy hillside at a distance and mistaking them at first for boulders. He liked target shooting and thought about taking it up properly after the Army. And soldiers could buy liquor at half price, of which he took full advantage — the drinking that would eventually end his service.

On at least one occasion the drink brought Steven Hicks back, and he broke down sobbing. Masters is careful about what that means, and so should we be: by then the remorse had given way to self-pity, grief less for what he had done to Hicks than for the burden it had placed on himself.

One further contemporaneous account is worth setting alongside the rest. David Rodriguez, then eighteen, shared a room with Dahmer and six other men for close to a year in 1979, and the two trained together in the same Army medical unit. When reporters reached him in July 1991 he described someone who drank gin constantly and struck him as a weakling — a man he found incapable of what was then being reported from Milwaukee. He also remarked, and this is the detail that lingers, that Dahmer had never shown any particular interest in their anatomy classes.

It cuts against a tidy reading. In the one setting where the human body was formally on the timetable, the man who would later be defined by what he did to bodies was, by his roommate’s account, bored.

Thanksgiving, 1979

One night from this period is documented in detail, and it is the strangest thing in the record.

For Thanksgiving 1979, Carlos Cruz — who served in the same squad at the Aid Station — invited some of the younger soldiers to dinner at his home. Dahmer was among them, as was a soldier named Preston Davis. Heavy snow began to fall, and Cruz suggested everyone stay the night.

Dahmer and Davis fell into an argument. Davis told him to get back to Baumholder. At half past ten, Dahmer walked out of the door into the snow.

Baumholder was around eight miles away, around a mountain, in sub-zero temperatures. Cruz went out to look for him for fifteen minutes, came back for heavier clothing, searched another half hour, then gave up and assumed he had found a taxi.

Four hours later Dahmer was at the door. Davis called out that the orphan was back and they brought him inside. He was confused and vague, his mind elsewhere. He had lost his glasses. His jacket was not as cold as it should have been after four hours outdoors, and neither was he. Cruz took him to the kitchen, where he washed his hands energetically, and thought he saw what looked like blood on his clothing. Dahmer sat and stared at the table. He said he could not remember where he had been or what he had done, but assumed it must have been something bad.

A few days later Cruz asked him what was wrong. He could not or would not say. But he offered one remark, and it has hung over the whole episode ever since:

Sometimes the best thing for the soul is to confess.

Masters treats the night with appropriate restraint. The blood was something Cruz thought he noticed, not something established. The likeliest explanation, he suggests, is that Dahmer found somewhere to sit out of the wind and stayed there with his thoughts.

This matters because the episode has hardened, in retelling, into something the source does not support. The version that circulates online — and which appears in later true-crime writing, including Willis Morgan’s Frustrated Witness — has him returning covered in blood. Masters has a host who thought he noticed something on a jacket in a kitchen at two in the morning. Those are not the same claim, and the distance between them is roughly the distance between an observation and a story.

But nor is it nothing. A man walked into a blizzard, lost four hours he could not account for, and came back saying he assumed he had done something bad.

What came out later

Neither Preston Davis nor Billy Joe Capshaw appears in the 1993 account as anything other than a fellow soldier. Both came forward afterwards, and what they described changes the shape of the period entirely.

Davis, a twenty-year-old Black medic, was tasked with training Dahmer when he arrived. He has said Dahmer was openly racist and became obnoxious when drinking, and that he would boast, drunk, about having killed someone in Ohio — a claim nobody had reason to take seriously at the time, and which was true.

In a written account published by the veterans’ advocacy organisation Protect Our Defenders, Davis describes a field exercise in the autumn of 1979 during which their vehicle broke down and the two men were left isolated together for three or four days. He states that during that period he was sexually assaulted, that the assault included penetration, and that he believes he was drugged, because he lost time and has gaps in his memory. He has said he thinks the only reason Dahmer did not kill him was that Dahmer had no way of getting back to base alone.

Davis left the unit shortly afterwards. His record, previously strong, deteriorated. He has described the decades that followed — drinking, drug use, a marriage that ended, contact lost with his sons, and surgery for the injuries.

Capshaw arrived after Davis left. He was seventeen, and became Dahmer’s roommate. He has said the abuse ran for something close to seventeen months: that he was tied to the bunk with rope from the motor pool, that his clothing was taken from him, that he was beaten before or after being raped, and that he cannot say with certainty how many times it happened. He reported it. He underwent a rape examination. He has said he learned roughly a decade later that the kit had been discarded.

After his own discharge he returned to Arkansas and, by his account, did not leave his room for five years. He did not speak about any of it until after his father died.

How to hold this

These accounts were never tested in a courtroom. Dahmer was never charged with either assault, and he has been dead for over thirty years, so they never will be. That is a real limitation and it should be stated rather than glossed over.

What can be said is this. Both men are named, both have spoken publicly and at length, and their accounts are independent of one another and separated in time. Neither had anything obvious to gain. And the method Davis describes — drugging, memory loss, hours he cannot account for — is precisely the method Dahmer used, provably and repeatedly, a decade later in Milwaukee.

Nor do the accounts of the men who noticed nothing count against them. Rodriguez shared a room with Dahmer for a year and saw a harmless drunk; Capshaw shared a room with him and describes being tied to a bunk. Both can be true, and the fact that they are is the most disturbing thing about the whole period. Whatever he was doing, he was doing it in a barracks full of people, and it was visible to precisely those he chose and to nobody else.

There is also the matter of the honourable discharge. He was released in March 1981, six months before his expected date, on grounds of alcohol abuse. Nothing in his file records a sexual assault. Capshaw’s report went nowhere and his examination kit was destroyed. Whatever else that tells us, it tells us the Army’s paperwork is not a record of what happened at Baumholder — it is a record of what the Army processed.

The site has argued this before in a different context. When the institutions around a man decline to look, the resulting silence in the file gets mistaken for evidence of nothing happening.

The German investigations

One further thread needs handling carefully, because it is routinely misrepresented.

Four days after his arrest, on 26 July 1991, police across Germany reopened files on unsolved murders and disappearances from his time in the country. Five unsolved murders at Baumholder were re-examined. Federal authorities also reviewed all cases of unidentified male victims and missing men from that window. One case that drew attention was that of Erika Hansthuh, twenty-two, found stabbed and strangled in the snow some fifty miles from Baumholder on 30 November 1980, days after hitchhiking from Heidelberg.

Nothing came of any of it.

A federal police spokeswoman said at the time that no links to Dahmer had been made. Four of the five murder victims were women, which does not match his pattern in any respect. He was never charged with an offence in Germany. He denied, through his attorney, any killings beyond those he had admitted, and on this point there has never been evidence to contradict him.

It is worth saying plainly, because the internet has spent thirty years implying otherwise: there is no evidence Jeffrey Dahmer killed anyone in Germany. The investigations were a reasonable thing for German police to do and they found nothing. Treating an opened and closed file as a shadow of guilt is exactly the kind of reasoning this site exists to refuse.

What Baumholder was

The temptation is to pick one of the two records. Either the isolated depressive drinking himself out of a career, or the predator hiding in plain sight.

The evidence supports both, and the discomfort of holding them together is the honest position.

He was withdrawn to the point of invisibility, and he assaulted at least two men. He was so unremarkable that a biographer could find almost nothing about twenty-one months of his life, and one of the men living in that blank space was being tied to a bunk. A roommate remembered a wimp who drank gin and could not have done any of it. He told a colleague that confession is good for the soul, and confessed nothing for another twelve years.

What Germany demonstrates is that the interval between Steven Hicks in 1978 and Steven Tuomi in 1987 was not the pause it is usually described as. Something was operating throughout. It simply did not produce a body, and so it produced no record — until two men decided, decades on, to supply one.

Sources: Brian Masters, The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer (1993); Associated Press, 26 July 1991; United Press International, 28 July 1991; Deseret News, 28 July 1991 (David Rodriguez interviews); Preston Davis’s published account for Protect Our Defenders; Billy Joe Capshaw’s public interviews and statements; U.S. Army service records as reported. Allegations of assault are the accounts of the men who made them and were never adjudicated.

There is a stretch of 1981 that nobody watched.

Between his discharge from the Army in March and his arrival at his grandmother’s house that December, Jeffrey Dahmer spent roughly six months in Miami Beach, Florida. It is the least documented period of his adult life. There were no arrests. No employment records have surfaced. No psychiatric contact, no probation officer, no family in the same state. For half a year, the only account of where he was and what he was doing comes from Jeffrey himself, told afterwards, and from a father hearing it down a telephone line from a thousand miles away.

That is precisely why it is worth writing about.

Leaving

On 24 March 1981 he was sent to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, for debriefing, and given a travel voucher good for anywhere in the United States. He chose Florida. The reasoning, as he later described it, was straightforward and almost hopeful: he did not want to go back to the cold, and he thought the sun and the ocean might do something for him.

Before he flew, he did something worth noting. He packed his trunk — fatigues, jacket, trousers, everything he owned in the Army, along with his government correspondence — and sent it home to 4480 West Bath Road. Into that trunk he also put the German pornographic magazines he had bought in Europe, rather than carry them to Florida. Masters reads this as an attempt to start clean, and it is hard to read it any other way. He was posting his past to Ohio and getting on a plane without it.

There is a detail in that shipment which matters. His father did not know he had left the Army. The trunk arrived unannounced, with no note and nothing to say where Jeffrey had gone. The discharge papers followed a few days later. It was another month before the telephone rang.

He had, in the most literal sense, disappeared from the view of everyone who knew him.

Sunshine Subs

What he found in Miami Beach was a motel room and a job at a sandwich shop called the Sunshine Sub Shop, half a mile down the road. He worked seven days a week. By his own later account, he spent essentially all of what he earned on drink.

Two things about this period are striking, and both cut against the story people expect.

The first is that he made no attempt to find the gay bars or bathhouses of a city that had plenty of both. Miami Beach in 1981 was not a difficult place to find that scene. He did not look. Whatever he had gone south to escape, he was not chasing it there.

The second is Julie.

She was an English girl working at the sub shop, in the country on a visitor’s visa and working illegally. She and Jeffrey became friends — the only female friend, Masters records, that he would have until after his arrest a decade later. She wanted to legitimise her status and eventually asked him to marry her so she could stay. He liked her. He discouraged her, and declined.

It is a small, ordinary episode, and there is almost nothing else like it anywhere in his life. Two people working the same counter, one asking the other for a serious favour, the other saying no but staying friendly. She telephoned him in Ohio a few times afterwards, just to see how he was getting on. That is the entire recorded content of the friendship, and it is more than he managed with anyone else for ten years.

The beach

When the money ran out and he could no longer pay for the motel, he took what he owned and slept on the beach. He went there from work at the end of a shift and slept under the sky.

The image has a certain romance to it, which is worth resisting. He was twenty-one, working seven days a week at a sandwich counter, drinking the proceeds, and homeless. The sun and the ocean he had flown south for had not done what he hoped. Masters records the conclusion he reached there, and it is the reason this period matters: the thoughts he had gone to Florida to escape had come with him. They had not been left in the trunk.

What he took from that, in Masters’ account, was not that he needed help. It was that the thoughts needed to be starved — that there must be nothing left to think about.

That is the sentence to sit with. He had run three thousand miles, changed his climate, taken a job, made a friend, slept on sand under stars, and the conclusion he drew from its failure was not I should tell someone. It was that escape does not work and something else would have to.

Where the sources disagree

The record of this period is thin enough that its two main sources contradict each other, and the honest thing is to say so rather than to pick the more convenient version.

Masters, working from Jeffrey’s own account, has him running out of money, leaving the motel, and camping on the beach until he called his father for the fare home.

Lionel’s memoir tells it differently. In one of those phone calls, he writes, Jeffrey said he was living with a woman — an illegal alien who had offered him money to marry her. Lionel and Shari advised him against it.

The two versions can be partly reconciled: Julie is plainly the woman in both accounts, though the direction of the offer differs, and it is possible Jeffrey stayed with her for a period before or after the beach. But it is equally possible that he simply told his father something more respectable than the truth. A young man sleeping rough and calling home has reasons to improve the story.

The endings differ too. Masters has Lionel sending the fare. Lionel records that Shari refused to send money at all, and instead left a plane ticket waiting at the airport — she would bring him home, but she would not fund him where he was.

We cannot resolve these, and we are not going to pretend to. What both accounts agree on is the shape: he ran out of everything, and he called Ohio.

Coming back

Lionel went to Cleveland airport expecting a downtrodden son. From a distance, Jeffrey was smiling and looked cheerful. Up close, his father realised he was drunk — that the cheerfulness was the drink. He was filthy, his clothes stained and unwashed, a scraggly untended moustache, a cigarette hanging from his mouth. He apologised for having had a few too many on the plane.

Within days he had brightened. He chopped wood, helped take down a tree, gathered branches, made himself as useful as he possibly could. Lionel’s reading was that the Army had at least left him a work ethic.

Then, with winter coming, they decided to insulate the water pipes. Jeffrey helped in the attic. But when it came to the crawl space beneath the house, he was emphatic that his father should not go down there. He would do it himself.

Lionel watched him work on his back, wrapping the copper lines and tying the insulation with braided twine. He came out dusty and enthusiastic, ready for the next job.

The crawl space was where the remains of Steven Hicks had been stored three years earlier.

And within that same period at Bath — while his father and Shari were at work — he went out to the drainage pipe, retrieved the bags of bones he had hidden there, carried them to the woods beyond the property, and smashed them with a rock until they were splinters. The skull he pulverised. He scattered the fragments across the trees by hand.

I had to, he said of it later.

What the silence contains

Two weeks after coming home he was arrested at the Ramada Inn for drinking vodka straight from the bottle in the lounge, refusing to leave, and swearing at the officers who came. Disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. It went no further than a municipal citation, but it settled the question of whether he could stay in Bath. In December, Lionel and Shari sent him to Catherine’s house in West Allis.

Which brings this period into focus. Miami Beach sits between two structures — the Army, which had held him for two years and then expelled him, and his grandmother’s house, which would hold him for six. In between there is a gap where nothing held him at all.

It is tempting to treat that gap as empty because so little is recorded in it. But something happened in those six months, and the evidence for it is what he did immediately afterwards. He came back to Ohio and destroyed the last physical trace of Steven Hicks, thoroughly, with his hands. That is not the act of a man who had put it behind him. It is the act of a man who had spent half a year discovering that he could not.

The beach is not the interesting part. What is interesting is that he went there to become someone else, and came back knowing it could not be done.

Sources: Brian Masters, The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer (1993); Lionel Dahmer, A Father’s Story (1994). Where the two accounts conflict, both are given.