November 28,

Serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, serving 15 consecutive life sentences for the brutal murders of 15 men, is beaten to death by a fellow inmate while performing cleaning duty in a bathroom at the Columbia Correctional Institute gymnasium in Portage, Wisconsin.

During a 13-year period, Dahmer, who lived primarily in the Midwest, murdered at least 17 men. Most of these men were young, gay African Americans who Dahmer lured back to his home, promising to pay them money to pose nude for photographs. Dahmer would then drug and strangle them to death, generally mutilating, and occasionally cannibalizing, their bodies. Dahmer was finally arrested on July 22, 1991, and entered a plea of guilty but insane in 15 of the 17 murders he confessed to committing. In February 1992, the jury found him sane in each murder, and he was sentenced to 15 consecutive life sentences.

Two years later, Dahmer was killed at the age of 34 by fellow inmate Christopher Scarver, who also fatally beat the third man on their work detail, inmate Jesse Anderson. Scarver’s motive in killing the two men is not entirely clear; however, in his subsequent criminal trial he maintained that God told him to kill Dahmer and the other inmate. Scarver, already serving a life term for murder, was sentenced to additional life terms and transferred to a federal prison.

On November 28, 1994, convicted serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer and two other inmates at the Columbia Correctional Institute in Wisconsin were assigned to clean the gym showers. They were escorted there by prison guards at about 7:50 a.m. and left to do their work unsupervised.

Twenty minutes later, a guard returned to find Dahmer laying on the ground, bleeding profusely from his head. He had been beaten in the head with a metal bar, and the other prisoner in the group, Jesse Anderson, was also injured in the attack and died two days later. The third prisoner, Christopher Scarver, immediately told guards, “God told me to do it. Jesse Anderson and Jeffrey Dahmer are dead.”

Dahmer was taken to the hospital, still barely alive. Within an hour, the “Milwaukee Cannibal” who’d killed at least 17 people between 1978 and 1991 was dead. At 34 years old, he’d lived longer than any of his victims.

The Man Who Killed Jeffrey Dahmer

Christopher Scarver in 1992.

Christopher Scarver was in prison serving a life sentence for a murder he committed in 1990 when he was 20 years old. Scarver was a high school dropout who’d been kicked out of his mother’s house because of his alcoholism. He’d been hired as a trainee carpenter in a Wisconsin Conservation Corps job program after being guaranteed a job upon completing his training.

When no job materialized, he went to the program office and demanded money before shooting the manager in the head. Police found him soon after sitting on the steps of his girlfriend’s apartment building. He told police that he’d planned to turn himself in because he knew that what he had done was wrong.

Scarver claimed that he hadn’t been in control of his actions at the time of this first killing and reported hearing voices that told him he was “the chosen one.” He pleaded insanity, and court psychiatrists couldn’t agree on whether or not he was competent to stand trial.

Nevertheless, he was tried in 1992 and sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole until 2042. In prison, he met Jeffrey Dahmer.

Why Scarver Killed Dahmer

The 17 victims of Jeffrey Dahmer.

Scarver wasn’t the first inmate to attack Jeffrey Dahmer. The cannibal killer had been kept out of the general prison population for the first year of his sentence because his high-profile trial and unspeakably macabre crimes were sure to make him a target for prison violence. Indeed, at a chapel service in July 1994, another inmate tried to slit Dahmer’s throat with a homemade knife, but the tip of the flimsy blade broke off.

Scarver would later say that he was disgusted by Dahmer’s crimes and the serial killer’s gleeful unrepentance. Scarver said that at mealtimes Dahmer used to mold his food into the shapes of severed human limbs, complete with ketchup for the blood. According to other reports, Dahmer once hung up a sign for a “Cannibals Anonymous” meeting and delighted in telling guards and other inmates, “I bite.”

Scarver said that he was so disgusted by Dahmer’s behavior and crimes that he began to carry a newspaper clipping about Dahmer’s murder spree in his pocket. He believed that the guards hated Dahmer as much as he did and left them unattended because they hoped he would kill the notorious cannibal.

Jesse Anderson, the other inmate that Christopher Scarver killed.

There was also a racial element to both Dahmer and Anderson’s crimes that may have further enraged Scarver as a Black man. Most of Dahmer’s victims were young Black or Latino men, and Jesse Anderson had made headlines in Wisconsin after killing his wife and trying to blame the murder on Black men.

Both men’s crimes had roiled racial tensions in the Midwest, and this element surely didn’t escape Scarver’s notice. In 1990, Scarver had been asked by a court-appointed psychiatrist if he felt a life sentence would be a just punishment for his crime. He replied, “Nothing white people do to Blacks is just.”

Booking photo of Scarver after he was transferred to a prison in Colorado.

Scarver said that the attack had not been planned and that he had reacted because someone poked him in the back while he was cleaning. But he also claimed that before killing Dahmer he had shown him the newspaper clipping and asked if he’d really done those things. Then, he grabbed a metal bar from the weight room and hit Dahmer twice across the skull. During the attack, Scarver said that Dahmer made no attempt to fight back.

For the killings of Dahmer and Anderson, Scarver was sentenced to two additional life sentences. In 2003, he was relocated to a maximum-security prison in Colorado where he has since self-published two books of poetry. He describes his first volume of poems as a “journey from despair, to hope, from mistrust to finding the good in others.”

As for Dahmer, he would surely have died in prison eventually had Scarver not attacked him. However, the way he died in 1994 bears an eerie resemblance to his own first murder, 19-year-old Steven Mark Hicks who Dahmer bludgeoned with a dumbbell before strangling him to death. But unlike Hicks, whose flesh Dahmer melted with acid and whose bones he crushed with a sledgehammer, Dahmer was quickly cremated and his ashes were split between his parents, and his cannibalistic reign of terror ended forever.