Memories Haunt Kin of Dahmer Victims

A year after the discovery of severed heads and body parts in Jeffrey Dahmer’s apartment, the victims’ families say their suffering hasn’t ended.

“Every time you think you’ve got it under control, something else happens,” said Stanley Miller, an uncle of victim Ernest Miller.

The unwelcome reminders come in many forms: books, serial-killer trading cards, a comic book depicting Dahmer’s crimes.

“They reduced them (the victims) down to comic characters,” Miller said. “You can only take so much.”

On the night of July 22, 1991, a handcuffed man escaped from Dahmer’s apartment and led police back there. Inside the stench-filled rooms they found the remains of 11 males--painted human skulls, preserved genitals in a closet, severed heads and body parts in the freezer and torsos disintegrating in an acid-filled vat.

The next day, Dahmer--whose lawyer contended that the killer had an uncontrollable desire for sex with corpses and feared being alone--admitted to killing 17 boys and men.

He told police he had sex with corpses. He said he photographed the bodies as he cut them up, acidified some bones and flushed the remains down the toilet. He tried to create zombie-like sex slaves out of some of his victims by drilling holes in their heads.

Most of the victims were black. Many were homosexual.

The former chocolate factory worker was found sane by a jury on Feb. 15 and sentenced to 15 consecutive life terms for murders committed during 1989-91. Dahmer, 32, also was sentenced to life in prison for killing a hitchhiker in his boyhood home of Bath, Ohio, in 1978.

He wasn’t charged in one Milwaukee case because of a lack of evidence.

Even some of the jurors found their lives altered by Dahmer’s crimes.

Lori Sundt, a 32-year-old telephone operator, doesn’t think about the trial very often, but the grisly details sometimes flash through her mind.

“I have problems with cooking,” Sundt said. “At times while I’m processing the beef and getting it ready to marinate, it crosses my mind--the dismemberment and how he dressed the body and took the meat off the bones.”

For the victims’ families, the pain is less forgiving. Some still attend weekly counseling meetings, and a group organized a vigil last month in remembrance of the discovery of Dahmer’s crimes.

“You have some good days and some bad days,” said Shirley Hughes, whose 31-year-old son, Anthony, was one of Dahmer’s victims.

“You just wake one day and you might feel fine,” she said. “Later on in the day something might come through your mind and just click and you think you’re just going to lose it and you’re just going to die.”