Suspect Admits Killing, Dismembering 11 Men : Crime: Part of his statement is read at hearing. Skulls, other body parts were found in a Milwaukee apartment.

Authorities said Wednesday that paroled child molester Jeffrey L. Dahmer had confessed to drugging, chopping up and even boiling at least 11 men whose body parts were found in his apartment, while Dahmer’s lawyer called his client sick and remorseful.

Meanwhile at a custody hearing, the 31-year-old Dahmer was ordered held in lieu of a $1-million cash bond after a prosecutor read a nauseatingly graphic synopsis from a statement that Dahmer allegedly gave police.

Dahmer, a pale, wispy-haired loner recently fired from his job as a laborer at a chocolate factory, was not in court as the first gruesome details of his misdeeds were made public. He is expected to be present at a hearing today where authorities will probably charge him with at least one and possibly more counts of homicide.

Dahmer indicated “that he had killed the persons whose heads and skulls he had and had dismembered their bodies,” said Milwaukee County Dist. Atty. E. Michael McCann as he read from an affidavit.

“Dahmer further stated that he had met these individuals either at taverns or shopping areas and had induced them to return with him to his home by offering money so that he could take pictures of them. . . . Dahmer further stated that he would drug these individuals and usually strangle them” before dismembering the bodies.

Jailed for 10 months after a 1988 sexual assault case involving a teen-age boy, Dahmer was arrested again Tuesday after a man in handcuffs flagged down a police car and said he had escaped from Dahmer’s apartment after being shackled and threatened with a knife. Police then searched the apartment near downtown Milwaukee and found a ghoulish collection of severed body fragments, some of them refrigerated. Neighbors said a stench had been oozing from the apartment for months.

Speaking to reporters, Gerald Boyle, an attorney who also represented Dahmer in the 1988 case, said his client was cooperating with police in trying to identify the victims. Boyle said he had spoken with Dahmer for about 45 minutes early Wednesday and found him “remorseful,” “quiet,” “deliberate,” and “hurting” while taking full responsibility for the alleged murders.

“He said, quote, he has no one to blame but himself, not the courts and not the probation department,” Boyle said. “He said there comes a time when you have to be completely honest and this is the time.” However, Boyle did not indicate whether Dahmer had revealed to him why he had committed the murders.

Early in the day, Boyle had indicated that he felt Dahmer appeared competent to stand trial. However, after hearing the McCann recitation from the affidavit later in court, Boyle said an insanity plea was not out of the question.

Milwaukee Police Chief Phillip Arreola had harsh words for those authorities who released Dahmer early from his yearlong jail sentence on the morals charge and then failed to adequately supervise him while he was on probation. He called it “a damning indictment” of the judicial system.

“Here we see the dramatic and tragic results,” Arreola said.

But Joe Scislowizc, a spokesman for the state Department of Corrections, told the Associated Press the requirement that probation agents visit probationers’ homes was waived in Dahmer’s case because the agent’s workload was heavy and Dahmer lived in a high-crime neighborhood.

Scislowizc said the agent met with Dahmer monthly in her office.

“There were no signs, apparently, no overt signs, no clues, no hints, of a nature that would cause this agent to do anything other than what she did,” he said. “He gave no sign he was involved in any kind of activity of this kind.”

Even while detectives sifted through missing persons reports and pathologists tried to piece together the body parts, police were inundated with calls from people around the country looking for lost loved ones.

So far, authorities said they have identified only one of the victims in Dahmer’s apartment, 23-year-old Oliver Lacy, a Chicago native who recently moved into his mother’s home in Milwaukee.

Among those expressing concern were relatives of the teen-age boy whom Dahmer was convicted of assaulting after paying the youngster $50 to pose nude for a picture. The Milwaukee Sentinel reported Wednesday that the boy’s 14-year-old brother has been missing since May 26 and family members fear that the disappearance might be connected to Dahmer. However, the paper quoted one family member as saying police told her they had no information linking Dahmer and the missing youth.