How Jeffrey Dahmer’s Victims Exposed Society’s Racism and Homophobia

Jeffrey Dahmer was one of the most prolific serial killers in the US, killing 17 people between 1978 and 1991. His story is now the subject of the controversial new Netflix series Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Storycreated by Ryan Murphy – one of the most popular queer creators today – and Ian Brennan. Despite repeated warnings, the continued murder of these youths, nearly all of them non-white and gay, was allowed. It is therefore important to understand how the 17 victims of Jeffrey Dahmer are also victims of society and the police who despised an entire community.

Dahmer was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1960 and moved with his family to Doylestown, Ohio, when he was six. He was the eldest of two children born to the marriage between Lionel Dahmera scientist and chemist, and Joyce Dahmeran instructor of teleprinting machines.

Jeffrey Dahmer’s childhood and adolescence will have been marked by his mother’s struggle with depression, his father’s absence due to his prioritization of work, frequent home changes and later the divorce of his father and mother.

Despite family difficulties, Dahmer was considered a happy child. But at the age of four he underwent an operation for a hernia, and he became more reserved from that point on.

During his childhood, Dahmer had a fascination with bones. Impressed by his son’s scientific curiosity, the father encouraged his interest by teaching him how to dissect dead animals on the road and instructing him on how to preserve their skeletons.

Around age 14, Dahmer started drinking. It was also during high school that he realized he was gay. Around this time he began to have sexual fantasies that involved unresponsive sexual partners and dissection.

Steven Hicks Was Jeffrey Dahmer’s First Victim

In 1978, when Jeffrey Dahmer was 18 years old, he gave a lift to another 18-year-old boy named Steven Hicks. She took him to her parents’ house, where they had sex. When Hicks wanted to leave, Jeffrey wounded him in the head twice and strangled him with an iron. Then he masturbated in front of the body. “I always knew that was wrong. The first murder was not planned,” Dahmer said in 1993.

At the time of his murder, Steven Hicks had just finished high school at Coventry High School. People who knew him described him as kind and empathetic. In the summer of 1978, Jeffrey Dahmer was enjoying life, having also graduated from high school and had his family out of the house. So while driving on June 18, 1978, Jeffrey noticed Hicks that he was on the side of the road hitchhiking: he was on his way to a concert at Chippewa Lake Park in Ohio. Realizing that he could easily manipulate Hicks, Jeffrey convinced Hicks to get in the car and accompany him home.

Once at Jeffrey’s house, he and Hicks started talking and listening to music while drinking beer. Jeffrey will have realized that Hicks was heterosexual and that her eventual attraction would have no answer. When Hicks asked him to take him to the concert as he had promised, Jeffrey Dahmer hit him on the head twice from behind. Hicks collapsed and was then strangled to death, then stripped naked and the killer masturbated in front of his dead body.

Unfortunately, Steven Hicks’ body was never found, as Jeffrey Dahmer meticulously disposed of the remains.

16 more victims followed over a 4-year period.

Nearly a decade after killing Steven Hicks, on November 20, 1987, Dahmer committed his second murder. Steven Tuomi was a twenty-five-year-old Michigan native whom Dahmer met in a bar and persuaded him to go with him to a hotel. According to the killer, he had no intention of killing Tuomi, but the next morning, upon waking up, Dahmer found Tuomi in bed dead, his chest crushed and his body full of bruises. This death eventually set off a four-year period in which he killed 15 more people.

The biggest shock provoked when the crimes were discovered was what Jeffrey Dahmer did with the victims’ bodies: he raped some of the corpses, kept body parts in vials and practiced cannibalism.

All this with neighborhood warnings to the police.

Jeffrey Dahmer’s approach to gay and non-white youth was premeditated

Jeffrey Dahmer found a method of approach that allowed him for years to take young people, especially gays and blacks, whom he came across in bars, bus stops, shopping centers and adult bookstores. He convinced them to come home with him, promising them alcohol and money in exchange for photographs, and then drugging them.

Between January 1988 and July 1991 he murdered 15 more people – two of whom were just 14 years old.

In 1989, Dahmer began keeping body parts from people he murdered, starting with his fifth victim, Anthony Sears24-year-old, multiracial, whom he met at a gay bar on March 25, 1989. Jeffrey has preserved the victim’s skull and genitals.

One of Dahmer’s 14-year-old victims, Konerak Sinthasomphone, of Laotian origin, was subjected to this violence, but managed to leave the house, naked and disoriented. Sinthasomphone was found by three women who called the police. But when it arrived, the two policemen accepted Dahmer’s story that the boy was her 19-year-old boyfriend and that he had been drinking too much. In reality, Sinthasomphone had his skull pierced and injected with hydrochloric acid, hence his weakness and confusion. The three women still did not believe the story told, pointing out to the police that the boy resisted the idea of returning to Dahmer’s apartment and that Sinthasomphone had head injuries and was bleeding from the anus. One of the policemen silenced them and released Dahmer, since from his perspective he and the boy were just having a “domestic argument”. The police then allowed Dahmer to return to his home with Sinthasomphone, where the victim was eventually murdered.

Throughout this period, the neighborhood of Dahmer’s building complained about the smell and sound of a chainsaw to the police, but Jeffrey Dahmer insisted that the smell was caused by spoiled meat or the death of his tropical fish.

Historically persecuted, invisible and belittled minorities were his focus, because they meant a lower risk of being discovered for their horrendous crimes. The police forces did not take seriously the various and continued complaints from the neighborhood of Damher and, even in an episode as extreme as that of the Sinthasomphone child, it was the word of the murderer (white and gay – “their problems”) that prevailed in the face of what was in front of everyone. That is, at a time when the so-called gay panic and the stigma against people living with HIV/AIDS prevailed, Jeffrey Dahmer took advantage of his own privilege, as well as exploited the racist, homophobic and still serophobic environment in society – and especially in the police – to carry out and perpetuate his crimes in series, pushing her out of his way.

Tracy Edwards managed to catch the killer

In 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer ran into three men at a gay bar and one of them, Tracy Edwards, 32 years old – accepted his offer of 50 dollars to go to his apartment and do a photo shoot. Edwards found a house full of signs of violence and a foul smell. Feeling cornered and with Jeffrey pointing a knife at him, the victim tried to find a way to escape and not fall for the tricks that the killer presented to him (such as not drinking the drink made by Dahmer and which, as usual, contained sedatives).

When, after having heard from Dahmer’s own mouth that he would “eat the heart“, Edwards attacked him and managed to escape. Police officers who accompanied Edwards back to Dahmer’s apartment found several skulls and other human body parts and photographs showing the victims in various states of dismemberment.

Jeffrey Dahmer was immediately arrested for the attempted murder of Edwards and, once in custody, confessed to 16 murders (one of which he couldn’t remember). In 1992, Dahmer was sentenced to 16 life sentences. Despite the sentence, he only spent two years in prison, as, on November 28, 1994, Dahmer was beaten with a metal bar by a fellow prisoner. He did not survive his injuries.

The lesson we can – and should – learn from these events

The macabre story of Jeffrey Dahmer has become a symbol of a killer’s exploitation of prejudice and discrimination against racialized and sexual minorities. One serial killer who used in his favor all the weaknesses of a community – poor, non-white, gay – to commit his crimes in front of everyone and even the police, such was the degree of confidence in the face of the force of prejudice.

These are minorities that today remain voiceless and unprotected and who were then subjected to complete contempt by the police who were thus complicit in the death of 17 people. And it was because of incompetence motivated by the cold and raw devaluation of the requests for help and the denunciations of these people.

The scope of the struggle is not always understandable, but in this story it is easy to see that the importance of the struggle for equality also passes through here. So that it doesn’t happen again.