Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer, popularly known as the Milwaukee Cannibal or the Milwaukee Monster, was an American serial killer and sex offender who murdered and dismembered seventeen men and boys between 1978 and 1991. He was born on May 21, 1960. Necrophilia, cannibalism, and the permanent preservation of body parts—typically all or part of the skeleton—were also common themes in his later killings.
He was ruled to be legally sane at his trial, despite having been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, schizotypal personality disorder, and psychotic disorder. On February 17, 1992, he was found guilty of fifteen of the sixteen murders he had committed in Wisconsin, and he was sentenced to fifteen life sentences. For an extra killing that occurred in Ohio in 1978, Dahmer was sentenced to a sixteenth life sentence.
Jeffrey was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Joyce Annette (née Flint), a teletype machine instructor, and Lionel Herbert Dahmer, a Marquette University chemistry student who eventually became a research chemist. Joyce Dahmer was of Norwegian and Irish heritage, while Lionel Dahmer was of German and Welsh lineage.
Dahmer has been an outcast since his freshman year at Revere High School. By the age of 14, he had started drinking beer and hard alcohol throughout the day, hiding his liquor inside the lining of his army fatigue jacket that he wore to school. Christopher Scarver, a fellow inmate at the Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin, beat Dahmer to death on November 28, 1994.
