Even if Jeffrey Dahmer hadn’t admitted to the murder of 17 young men, there was plenty of evidence to prove otherwise – stacks of Polaroid photos showing his victims alive, dead, and dismembered.
Like a lot of serial killers, Dahmer loved collecting trophies, and as well as skulls, severed penises, hands, and flesh, these included visual reminders. In fact, many of the men who died at his hands had been enticed to his apartment with the promise of $100 for posing for photographs. This meant investigators had a clear narrative – man alive, man dead, man butchered.
They found 84 photographs and a knife in Dahmer’s bedside table at 213 Oxford Building, 25th street, Milwaukee, along with the remains of 11 men in various states of decay.
I have to admit the first time I ever saw one of the photographs he took I was shocked. A headless man was bent backwards, if you know yoga, it was a camel position. It looked unnatural, uncomfortable and just generally sickening.
Anne E. Schwartz wrote in her book The Man Who Could Not Kill Enough, one of the polaroids “showed a man’s head, with the flesh still intact, lying in a sink.” A second photograph “displayed a victim cut open from the neck to the groin, like a deer gutted after the kill.” Others show Dahmer engaging in sexual acts with the corpses. We know that he masturbated over the remains of both Steven Hicks and Steven Tuomi, but it is unclear to what sexual acts are referred to in the photos, which were of his later victims in the early 1990s.
Dahmer is regarded as not only a serial killer but a necrophile.
