Featured Image Credit: Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Department/REUTERS/Alamy
Topics: US News, True Crime
Jess Hardiman
Topics: US News, True Crime
The man who killed murderer Jeffrey Dahmer by bludgeoning him to death with a metal bar believes he may have been set up, having previously spoken out about why he chose to attack the serial killer. Watch his son speak about the incident here:
Dahmer, who is the subject of Ryan Murphy’s new Netflix series, Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, was convicted of the brutal killing of 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991. He also admitted to having eaten the flesh of his victims.
After being sentenced to 16 terms of life imprisonment in both Wisconsin and Ohio, Dahmer was beaten to death at Columbia Correctional Facility in Wisconsin by fellow inmate Christopher Scarver in 1994.
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Speaking to the New York Post in 2015, Scarver recalled what Dahmer was like in prison, saying he would often be involved in ‘heated’ exchanges.
Scarver, who was 45 at the time of the interview, recalled: “He would put them in places where people would be.
“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.”
He continued: “I saw heated interactions between [Dahmer] and other prisoners from time to time."
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Scarver added: “There was no impression."
While Scarver watched Dahmer from afar in the prison yard, he never approached him as he did not wish to become the target of the killer’s sickening brand of humour.
“I never interacted with him,” he said.
However, things escalated drastically on 28 November 1994, when Scarver found himself suddenly angered by Dahmer while they were in the prison’s gymnasium with a third inmate, Jesse Anderson.
Convicted murderer Scarver, then aged 25, had grown 'fiercely disgusted' by Dahmer’s crimes, having kept a newspaper article in his pocket about how he killed, dismembered and sometimes ate his victims.
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On this occasion, the trio had been led – unshackled – to clean the bathrooms by correction officers, and were left unattended to carry out their duties.
After grabbing a mop, Scarver was filling a bucket with water when he felt someone poke him in the back.
“I turned around, and [Dahmer] and Jesse were kind of laughing under their breath,” Scarver said.
“I looked right into their eyes, and I couldn’t tell which had done it.”
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After the three split up, Scarver decided to follow Dahmer towards the staff locker room, picking up a 20-inch, 5lb metal bar from the weight room and confronting the serial killer with the newspaper story that he’d been carrying.
He continued: “I asked him if he did those things ’cause I was fiercely disgusted. He was shocked. Yes, he was.
“He started looking for the door pretty quick. I blocked him.”
Scarver added: “He ended up dead. I put his head down.”
After bludgeoning Dahmer, he went over to a locker room where Anderson – who had been serving a life term for killing his wife –was working.
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“He stopped for a second and looked around,” Scarver remembered.
“He was looking to see if any officials were there. There were none. Pretty much the same thing [happened] – got his head put out.”
Scarver, who pleaded no contest to the murders, and is currently serving three life sentences in Colorado, doesn’t think it was an accident that he had been left alone with Dahmer, claiming prison officials had wanted him dead.
“They had something to do with what took place," he said, adding that the guards had disappeared just before the attack.
Scarver’s son, also named Chris Scarver, echoed this idea in a 2014 interview with CNN, when reporter Jean Casarez asked about how there was still a question as to whether or not his dad had been ‘set up’ by guards as he should not have been left alone with the two men in prison.
Scarver Jr replied: “I think about that all the time. It makes me wonder if he even did it.”