Highlighted Crime
Story of the Week -
On November 28, 1994, serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, who
was serving 15 consecutive life sentences for the brutal murders of 15 men, was
beaten to death by a fellow inmate while performing cleaning duty in a bathroom
at the Columbia Correctional Institute gymnasium in Portage, Wisconsin.
During a 13-year period, Dahmer, who lived primarily in
the Midwest, murdered at least 17 men. Most of these men were young, gay
African Americans who Dahmer lured back to his home, promising to pay them
money to pose nude for photographs. Dahmer would then drug and strangle them to
death, generally mutilating, and occasionally cannibalizing, their bodies.
Dahmer was finally arrested on July 22, 1991, and entered a plea of guilty but
insane in 15 of the 17 murders he confessed to committing. In February 1992,
the jury found him sane in each murder, and he was sentenced to 15 consecutive
life sentences.
Two years later, Dahmer was killed at the age of 34 by
fellow inmate Christopher Scarver, who also fatally beat the third man on their
work detail, inmate Jesse Anderson. Scarver’s motive in killing the two men is
not entirely clear; however, in his subsequent criminal trial he maintained
that God told him to kill Dahmer and the other inmate. Scarver, already serving
a life term for murder, was sentenced to additional life terms and transferred
to a federal prison.
Check back every
Monday for a new installment of “This Week in Crime History.”
Michael Thomas Barry is a columnist for www.crimemagazine.com and is the author
of seven nonfiction books that includes the soon to be released In the Company of Evil – Thirty Years of
California Crime, 1950-1980 and the award winning Murder and Mayhem 52 Crimes that Shocked Early California, 1849-1949.
Visit Michael’s website www.michaelthomasbarry.com
for more information. His books can be purchased from Amazon through the
following links:
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