The Gruesome Debate That Took Place Over Jeffrey Dahmer's Brain
By ANDREW AMELINCKX
History - Science
On February 17, 1992, a judge sentenced Jeffrey Dahmer to 15 consecutive life sentences for murdering and sometimes cannibalizing men and teen boys. He served a little over two years in prison shortly before being killed by a fellow inmate named Christopher Scarver, who beat Dahmer to death at the Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin.
Since the investigators considered Dahmer's body as evidence, they held onto it for more than a year until Scarver was finally convicted of Dahmer's murder. After the authorities released the corpse to Dahmer's parents, both his father, Lionel Dahmer, and his mother, Joyce Flint, agreed on what to do with their son's body, but the brain was a very different matter.
While Flint wanted the brain of her son to be used for medical research to determine whether there were biological factors that led to his murderous spree, Lionel simply wanted to put what his son had done behind him. However, the serial killer himself seemed to believe that what led him to kill and cannibalize his victims was biological. "I knew I was sick or evil, or both," he had said.
The case for Dahmer’s brain went to the Wisconsin state court. In December 1995, a judge ordered Jeffrey Dahmer's brain to be cremated, and the scientists at Fresno State University in California never got the chance to examine it as they had hoped to.