How did Jeffrey Dahmer die and who is his killer Christopher Scarver?
The murderer at the centre of Netflix’s contentious new drama was killed in the Nineties
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Your support makes all the difference.Netflix’s newest addition to its true crime canon, which has sickened fans and drawn criticism from Whoopi Goldberg, tells the story of one of America’s most notorious serial killers: Jeffrey Dahmer.
Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story stars Mare of Easttown actor Evan Peters as the man also known as the “Milwaukee Cannibal” or the “Milwaukee Monster”, who committed the murder and dismemberment of 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991.
Read our key points to know about the true story behind the show here – and read about how he died in prison, below…
Dahmer’s death
On 28 November, 1994 – just two years after his sentencing – Dahmer was beaten to death by Christopher Scarver, a fellow inmate at the Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin.
The 34-year-old Dahmer had left his cell to conduct cleaning work, and he was accompanied by Scarver and another inmate, Jesse Anderson. The three men were left unsupervised in the showers of the prison gym for approximately 20 minutes.
At about 8:10am, Dahmer was discovered on the floor of the bathrooms with severe head wounds, having been bludgeoned with a metal bar and having had his head struck against a wall.
He was pronounced dead one hour later in hospital. Anderson was beaten with the same weapon and died two days later from his injuries.
Scarver, who was serving a life sentence for a murder committed in 1990, told authorities he attacked the pair and hidden the metal bar in his clothing before the killings.
Upon learning of his death, Dahmer’s mother Joyce told press: “Now is everybody happy? Now that he’s bludgeoned to death, is that good enough for everyone?”
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Some of the families of Dahmer’s victims responded positively to news of his death, while others thought he had escaped punishment. Catherine Lacy, the mother of victim Oliver Lacy, said: “The hurt is worse now, because he’s not suffering like we are.”
In 1995, Scarver was sentenced to two additional terms of life imprisonment for the murders of Dahmer and Anderson.
More than 20 years after the incident, Scarver spoke out for the first time about why he killed Dahmer.
Scarver said that he fatally struck Dahmer after growing unnerved by the killer, who he claimed would fashion severed limbs out of prison food and drizzle them with packets of ketchup as blood.
“He would put them in places where people would be,” Scarver told The New York Post.
“He crossed the line with some people – prisoners, prison staff. Some people who are in prison are repentant – but he was not one of them.”
Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story is out now on Netflix.