Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested on July 22, 1991, after one of his would-be victims, Tracy Edwards, managed to escape from Dahmer’s Milwaukee apartment and alert a pair of passing police patrolmen. After Edwards led the officers to the apartment from which he had escaped, they discovered Polaroid pictures of dismembered bodies. Initially, Dahmer tried to resist arrest but he was quickly overpowered. As police searched the apartment, they uncovered human remains including four severed heads in his kitchen and the preserved genitals of several of his victims.
Despite his trying to evade capture after police uncovered his crimes, Dahmer later offered full cooperation with the police in interviews, choosing to speak without a lawyer present and to lay out all of his recollections of his brutal slayings. He was also entirely open concerning his dismemberment and sexual use of their remains. “[I] created this horror and it only makes sense I do everything to put an end to it,” he said at the time as he was assisting police in identifying his victims, per Brian Masters’ “The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer.” Dahmer also assisted by admitting his guilt in the courtroom, meaning that rather than the jury being tasked with ascertaining his guilt or not, their role was to determine whether he was sane and therefore responsible for his actions when he committed them.
