Mass-Murder Trail Leads Back to High School Days

The gruesome trail left by confessed mass murderer Jeffrey L. Dahmer began while he was an Ohio high school student and may include five states and Germany, police said Saturday.

Police sources told Reuters news service that Dahmer killed the first of his victims in 1978, the year he was graduated from high school near Akron, Ohio.

Milwaukee Police Chief Philip Arreola said at a news conference Friday that “the identity of one out-of-state victim has been confirmed,” and sources said it was from an Ohio case in 1978.

Police also said investigations were under way linking Dahmer with killings of young men and boys in another Ohio case as well as murders in Hollywood, Fla., and Fresno, Calif. Dahmer has admitted killing men from and Wisconsin.

Police in Germany want to question Dahmer about five mutilation killings near an Army base where he served in the early 1980s.

Fresno police continued a preliminary investigation Saturday into whether a human foot found in a field there four months ago can be linked to the Dahmer case.

Detectives contacted authorities in Milwaukee after learning that the suspect may have visited his mother, Joyce A. Flint, in Fresno last year.

“Mrs. Flint doesn’t have anything to say to anybody,” said her attorney, Patience Milrod. “You can imagine her state of mind.”

Milwaukee probation reports, which portray Dahmer as lonely and estranged from his family, indicate that he did not visit his mother last year.

One report shows that on March 25, Dahmer said his mother had called him and they had talked for the first time in five years.

Dahmer, 31, a former employee of the Ambrosia Chocolate Co., has admitted killing 11 people in his apartment, and police say he killed six others. He is a convicted child molester with a history of alcohol abuse.

Meanwhile, grieving relatives of the victims struggled to understand how their loved ones could have been willingly taken in. One clue came from the man who escaped from Dahmer on Monday and alerted police.

“He seemed so normal,” said Tracy Edwards, 32, a father of six who met Dahmer at a mall and was led there by an invitation to a party. “He turned from Mr. Right to Mr. It. . . . It was like I was confronting Satan himself.”

Edwards fled from Dahmer’s apartment with a handcuff dangling from one wrist. He had spotted a large knife under Dahmer’s bed.