Milwaukee Child Molester May Have Killed 17 People : Crime: Suspect is charged in four slayings. Officials in Germany reportedly want to question him about mutilation deaths there.

The convicted child molester whose apartment was strewn with body parts is thought to have killed at least 17 people, authorities said Thursday.

Parts of 11 bodies, including severed heads in cold storage, were found in Jeffrey L. Dahmer’s apartment Monday. Investigators learned about six additional victims from Dahmer and from information provided by other people, Police Chief Philip Arreola said.

The Milwaukee Journal, meanwhile, reported that police in Germany want to question Dahmer about five mutilation killings near an Army base where Dahmer had served in the early 1980s.

Dahmer served for about two years at Baumholder, Germany, said Joyce Wiesner, a spokeswoman for the Army Reserve in St. Louis. He was discharged as a private first class on May 24, 1981, she said.

Dahmer, who is on probation for the 1988 sexual assault of a teen-age boy, was charged Thursday in Milwaukee County Circuit Court with four counts of first-degree intentional homicide and as a habitual criminal. He was being held on $1-million bail.

He appeared in court, sitting quietly, and hardly spoke.

Dahmer, 31, confessed to drugging, strangling and dismembering the victims, photographing the victims in various stages of dismemberment and boiling some of their skulls, authorities said.

Medical Examiner Jeffrey Jentzen said the remains were “not inconsistent with cannibalism. . . . We may have opinions on that at a future time.”

In a four-page criminal complaint based on statements by Dahmer, the circumstances of each of the four killings were described.

Dahmer committed homosexual acts with three of the four victims and kept one man’s heart “to eat later,” the complaint said. He met two victims on Milwaukee streets, one at a Chicago gay bar and another at a Chicago gay pride function.

In each case, the victim was invited back to the apartment, eventually was given a “sleeping potion,” strangled, dismembered and the body parts kept in a vat, refrigerator or freezer, the complaint said.

Police were led to the apartment Monday by a handcuffed man who escaped from it and flagged down officers.

A street minister who said he met Dahmer, a former chocolate factory worker, in a tavern in the last month said Dahmer hated homosexuals and blacks and suffered from problems with alcohol.

Arreola said police were investigating whether some of the killings occurred outside of Milwaukee. He said they were also investigating a comment by Dahmer’s stepmother that the family recalled bones and body parts at his grandmother’s house in a Milwaukee suburb in 1988.

Relatives of Dahmer, who is from Medina, Ohio, said they discovered a vat filled with bones and slime three years ago.

Dahmer’s father, Lionel, investigated and found “bones and the residue in the containers, but he couldn’t tell if they were human or animal bones,” Dahmer’s stepmother, Shari, told the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

“Jeffrey said it was an animal he found,” she said. “When he was young, he liked to use acid to scrape the meat off dead animals. He told Lionel that’s what he was doing.”

Reports published Thursday said the suspect’s mother is a Fresno, Calif., resident. She was identified as Joyce A. Flint, 55, by the Eau Claire. Wis., Leader-Telegram, which quoted sources. Telephone calls and attempts to contact Flint were unsuccessful.

Four victims whose remains were found in Dahmer’s apartment have been identified: Oliver Lacy, 23; Jeremiah Weinberger, 23, and Matt Turner, 20, all of Chicago, and Joseph Bradehoft, 25, of Greenville, Ill.