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Jeffrey Dahmer

American serial killer (1960–1994)

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 9, 2026
Entity authorityQ298364
Source-derived summary

Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer (; May 21, 1960 – November 28, 1994), also known as the Milwaukee Cannibal or the Milwaukee Monster, was an American serial killer and sex offender who killed and dismembered seventeen men and boys between 1978 and 1991.

Dahmer committed his first murder in Ohio in 1978; he did not resume killing until 1987. The modus operandi for many of his later crimes involved him luring a victim to his Wisconsin apartment where they would be drugged, sexually assaulted, and murdered. Many of his later murders involved necrophilia, cannibalism, and the permanent preservation of body parts—typically all or part of the skeleton.

Dahmer was arrested in 1991 after an intended victim escaped from his apartment. Although diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD), schizotypal personality disorder (StPD), and a psychotic disorder, he was declared legally sane at his trial. He was convicted of 16 counts of murder (15 in Wisconsin and one in Ohio) and sentenced to 16 terms of life imprisonment without parole in 1992.

On November 28, 1994, Dahmer was beaten to death by Christopher Scarver, a fellow inmate at the Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin.

Early life

Childhood

Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer was born on May 21, 1960, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the first of two sons to Lionel Herbert Dahmer, a Marquette University chemistry graduate school student and later a research chemist, and Joyce Annette Dahmer (née Flint), a teletype machine instructor. Lionel was of German and Welsh ancestry, and Joyce was of Norwegian and Irish ancestry.

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“Jeffrey Dahmer” enters the record as american serial killer (1960–1994). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Jeffrey, Dahmer and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1960, 1994, 1978, 1991—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1960-05-21. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Jeffrey, Dahmer and American.
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“Jeffrey Dahmer” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Jeffrey, Dahmer and American provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q298364. VIAF identifies the subject as 6584207. The Library of Congress control number is n92014113. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1960, 1994, 1978 and 1991.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Jeffrey Dahmer” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.