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Crime

27th Sep 2022

The man who killed Jeffrey Dahmer on why he had to end the serial killer’s life

Steve Hopkins

Christopher Scarver carried a newspaper article around about Dahmer and confronted him about it

The man who beat Jeffrey Dahmer to death in jail did so because the serial killer “crossed the line” by taunting fellow inmates with his lust for human flesh.

Christopher Scarver — who killed Dahmer, then 34, along with another inmate in 1994 — said he grew to despise Dahmer because he would fashion severed limbs out of prison food, drizzle on ketchup as blood, then display them.

“He would put them in places where people would be,” Scarver told the New York Post in 2015.

See also: People urged to write to man who killed Jeffrey Dahmer in prison and ‘provided true justice’

“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.”

Scarver, who arrived at Wisconsin’s Columbia Correctional Institution around the same time as Dahmer in 1992, knew to keep his distance for the killer who had a personal escort – of at least one guard – at all times when he was out of his cell because of his friction with other inmates.

“I saw heated interactions between [Dahmer] and other prisoners from time to time,” Scarver told the Post, adding that he didn’t think much of the infamous killer: “There was no impression.”

Scarver said he never interacted with Dahmer because he didn’t want to become a victim of his sick humour. But that all changed on 28 November 1994 when Scarver, Dahmer and a third prisoner, Jesse Anderson, were led unshackled to clean bathrooms by correction officers who left them unattended.

Scarver, who was repulsed by the youth-molesting cannibal, kept a newspaper article detailing how Dahmer killed, dismembered — and in some cases ate — 17 men and boys, most young, gay African Americans, from 1978 to 1991, in his pocket. Dahmer was convicted of murdering 15 men and boys and sentenced to serve 15 consecutive life sentences in February 1997. His killing spree is now subject of a Netflix series, Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story.

Scarver, then a 25-year-old convicted murderer, had just retrieved his mop and was filling a bucket with water when someone poked him in the back, the Post reported.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVHHs-xllqo&feature=emb_imp_woyt

When he turned, Dahmer and Anderson were “kind of laughing under their breath,” Scarver recounted. Having, a short time later, grabbed a metal bar from the weight room, Scarver confronted Dahmer while clutching the news story he had been carrying.

“I asked him if he did those things ’cause I was fiercely disgusted. He was shocked. Yes, he was,” Scarver told the Post.

“He started looking for the door pretty quick. I blocked him. He ended up dead. I put his head down,” he said.

Scarver then approached Anderson, 37, and “pretty much the same thing [happened] — got his head put out,” Scarver said of Anderson, who was serving a life term for killing his wife in 1992.

In a separate article, the Post reported how Scarver saw Anderson as a racist as he defaced a portrait of the legendary civil-rights leader, Martin Luther King, and tried to pin his wife’s murder on two black men.

Scarver doesn’t believe it was an accident that he was left alone with Dahmer as prison officials knew he hated him, but did not elaborate on the suggestion to the Post.

The killer initially pleaded insanity to the murders but later changed it to “no contest” in exchange for a transfer to a federal penitentiary.

He was sentenced to two life terms on top of the life sentence he was already serving for killing his former boss, Steven Lohman, during a robbery in 1990.

Since the Dahmer story started airing on Netflix and making headline, people have been remembering the role Scarver played in the grisly piece of criminal history. Some have even encouraged people to write to him.

Read the New York Post’s interview with Scarver here.

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