Jeffrey Dahmer: The Butcher of Milwaukee's Human Slaughterhouse

It was sultry in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on Monday evening, July 22, 1991, as the midnight hour approached. Out on routine patrol, Po­lice Officers Robert Rauth and Rolf Mueller had just turned onto North 25th Street on the west side of town, a tough section of the city replete with slums, drug dealers, and transients.

People were regularly assaulted and/or robbed in the neighborhood, and there were the expected bar fights that the police had to break up on a regular basis. On a more violent scale women were often raped, sometimes in the street, and there was even an occasional murder. It wasn't one of the safest beats in the city, and the acts of lawlessness that regularly occurred there had always been somewhat predictable. Until the night of July 23, that is.

Officers Rauth and Mueller weren't particularly surprised when they saw the young, good-looking black man run out of the Oxford Apartments and into the street, waving his hands and yelling for them to stop. Such a display was a com­mon sight, and the persons seeking at­tention were often naked and freaked out on drugs and alcohol. But they sensed that there was something differ­ent about this incident. The man seemed sober and in control of his actions. As the two cops pulled to the side of the street to see what was amiss, they no­ticed something shiny dangling from the man's left wrist. When the man ap­proached their cruiser, they saw that it was a pair of handcuffs that had been fastened around only the one wrist.

"Hey, what's the problem?" asked one of the officers as the man ran to their car.

"There's a guy in there trying to kill me!" the man gasped, as he pointed to­ward the Oxford Apartments. The man, in a state that seemed mixed between exhaustion and extreme fright, was placed inside the squad car.

After a few minutes, the cops were able to calm the man somewhat. He told them his name was Bruce Wilcox, and said that the man who lived in apart­ment 213 was trying to kill him with a large knife that he kept under his bed. Although the cops were a little skeptical due to the neighborhood and the fact that they thought they had seen every­thing in the course of their careers, the two officers gave Wilcox the benefit of the doubt and assured him they would check it out. They asked him to accom­pany them to identify the man. Still shaking from fear, Wilcox reluctantly agreed.

As they walked down the blue-car­peted hallway on the second floor of the apartment building, the officers became starkly aware of an awful, putrid stench that grew stronger with each step that took them closer to apartment 213. The smell was almost unbearable by the time they reached the door of the apart­ment, and when the lone occupant opened it, the odor nearly overwhelmed both lawmen.

The officers were let into the small, dingy unit by a tall, soft-spoken man with blond hair and a pale complexion. With little prompting from the cops, the man politely identified himself as 31-­year-old Jeffrey L. Dahmer. His breath reeked of alcohol, and he appeared to be intoxicated. Officers Rauth and Mueller asked Dahmer what was causing the horrible stench, but he didn't reply. In­stead he sat down on the couch and, with a blank look in his eyes, asked them if he could drink a beer and smoke a cigarette.

Officer Mueller headed for the bed­room, while Rauth remained in the liv­ing room and attempted to learn more about Bruce Wilcox's allegations against Dahmer from the suspect him­self. Rauth's efforts, however, appeared futile. Dahmer was in an alcohol-in­duced stupor, and wasn't saying much.

When Mueller reached the oppres­sive, fly-infested bedroom, he found a 12-inch butcher knife hidden under the bed, just as Wilcox had said he would. He also noted a Polaroid camera lying on the bed, and several photographs protruding from a drawer in a tall, 18th- century style chest of drawers.

When he viewed them, Mueller sud­denly felt light-headed and nauseous. Several of the Polaroid shots depicted nude men engaged in homosexual sex acts, and others showed numerous corpses in various stages of mutilation and dismemberment. The flesh on one of the corpses, from its chest down, had been stripped cleanly away, he guessed from some type of acid! His stomach retching, Officer Mueller could see that the grisly photos had been taken in the bedroom where he now stood.