Gayle Elizabeth LeClair was born on January 26, 1951 to Donald and Barbara LeClair in Gold Beach, Oregon.Mr. LeClair was born on June 4, 1930 and was employed as a car salesman, and Barbara Jean was born on July 8, 1930 in Redondo Beach, CA and worked as a bank teller at Western Bank. The couple were wed on February 10, 1950 and had two children together (Gayle and her younger brother Cleve*), but sadly divorced in September 1970. After his marriage ended he had a daughter named Leah with a woman he only dated for a short period of time. The woman put her up for adoption and Mr. LeClair wasn’t aware of her existence until around 2000. He went on to get remarried in December 1970 and had a son named Frank; the couple remained together until the early 1980’s. On September 22, 1985 Mr. LeClair remarried for a third time to a woman named Leola Wilson, who he remained with until his death.
Gayle LeClair was a petite, attractive young woman, with blue eyes and light blonde hair that she woreshort while in high school but according to her mother grew out in college, and often wore it tied up with a leather barrette. After graduatingfrom Gold Beach High School in 1969 LeClair went on to attend Southwestern Oregon Community College for two years. While at SWOCC she was active in the schools theater group, and during her first semester there was on the crew during a production of ‘Don’t Drink the Water.’ According to her mother, Gayle was a studious young woman that excelled in math and had dreams of continuing her education and becoming a teacher one day. When she lived at home she would (on occasion) attend service at Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Coos Bay. LeClair moved to Eugene in January 1972 after she graduated from community college and got a job at the Eugene Municipal Library as a clerk-typist.
After Gayle failed to come in for her scheduled shift at 10:30 AM on August 23, 1973 (or answer multiple phone calls) her supervisor went to her house to check on her. Upon arrival, there was no sign of forced entry and the front door was unlocked, and after walking towards LeClair’s bedroom the unidentified supervisor discovered her deceased from multiple stab wounds shortly after 11:00 AM; upon the discovery she immediately went next door and used a neighbor’s telephone to contact police. Gayle had a date with a known acquaintance the night before; they went to a drive-in movie then went back to her apartment for a nightcap. She was last seen alive by him at 1:30 AM, and after a conversation with detectives the young man was quickly cleared as a suspect.
Lieutenant Donald Lonnecker with the Eugene Police Department said the LeClair was dressed for bed when she was murdered and a ‘preliminary autopsy indicated no evidence of sexual assault.’ Before moving into the house she was killed in, from January 1972 to May 1973 she resided at 3760 Concord Street in the Bethel-Echo neighborhood of West-Eugene; she lived by herself in both residences. Mrs. Duane Brown lived next door to the victim on Concord Street and said where they weren’t close and didn’t talk often she said she was a ‘nice, pleasant person.’ Miss LeClair seemed to have a healthy relationship with her family, and before she was murdered her brother Cleve visited her (he lived in North Bend with their mother), and Barbara said of her daughter ‘she would pick up the phone in the evening just to ask how our day had been.’ Neither Gayle’s mother nor father could come up with any reason why anyone would want to hurt their daughter.
Members of law enforcement were immediately baffled at the motive behind the murder of LeClair. Lieutenant Lonnecker said that the victim ‘spent a lot of time socially with people’ and ‘had a lot of friends,’ and those that knew LeClair said she was ‘both outgoing and moody, depending on who knows her and in what way;’ he also said that she was ‘pleasant, and socially active,’ had a lot of friends, and a busy social life. Despite this, neighbors of LeClair didn’t seem to know her at all, and one of them even thought the house she lived in was vacant. According to an article published in The World on August 30, 1973, the small home that LeClair rented had lots of trees, shrubs and other greenery on the property despite being in a residential neighborhood, which would make it very easy for someone to hide in her yard and look through her windows. Her landlord, J. Sidney Armstrong, was a former Lane County District Attorney that moved into private practice, and at one point even dated the victim (although not recently). Armstrong told investigators that his ex ‘had a lot of boyfriends’ and was eventually cleared of any wrongdoing. On August 24, 1973 Lane County DA J. Pat Horton said they never recovered the murder weapon, but did clarify they think it was either a ‘knife or some other sharp instrument.’
At the time of her murder in August 1973, Ted Bundy seemed to be in between jobs: from February to April of that year he worked for King County Program Planning then took a break from employment until September 1973, when he got a position as the Assistant to the Washington State Republican chairman. Although it wasn’t as intense as their first few years together he was still in a relationship with Liz Kloepfer… but he was also seeing his ex-girlfriend Stephanie Brooks on the side as well (they rekindled their romance earlier that year). He was also getting ready to start law school at the University of Puget Sound (which he started the following month in September 1973). According to the ‘Ted Bundy Multiagency Investigative Team Report 1992,’ on the day of LeClair’s murder Bundy got into a car accident in Kloepfer’s eggshell blue VW Beetle.
Now, it’s widely accepted that Bundy’s murder rampage began in January 1974, when he brutally assaulted (and most likely left for dead) fellow University of Washington student Karen Sparks in her basement apartment. But, most people in the true crime community strongly suspect he started well before this (some people think as early as 1961 with little Ann Marie Burr in his hometown of Tacoma). I feel it’s worth mentioning that during his final death row interviews with Dr. Bob Keppel, Bundy confessed to starting his murder spree in 1972, not 1974:
Robert Keppel: ‘There’s a gal in 1971, Thurston County.’ Ted Bundy: ‘No.’ RK: ‘Not that far back. Nothing that far back?’ TB: ‘1972.’
Additionally, after Bundy was executed forensic psychologist Arthur Norman told New Jersey based news magazine ‘The SandPaper’ that the killer once told him that he murdered ‘two women in the Philadelphia area’ (most likely Elizabeth Perry and Susan Davis), which he suspected were his first two homicides. Dr. Norman even notified Atlantic City Prosecutor Jeffrey Blitz about his confession, who immediately shot down the story, calling it inconclusive. He never investigated it.
Ted confessed to abducting Roberta Kathleen Parks from Oregon State University on May 6, 1974: he drove her over 250 miles away to Taylor Mountain, where he raped and killed her. She is his only confirmed Oregon victim. In interviews with law enforcement, Bundy confessed to murdering two additional women in the ‘Beaver State’ but refused to elaborate any further; according to most law enforcement, Vicki Hollar and Rita Jolly are the best candidates. On June 29, 1973 seventeen year old Rita Lorraine Jolly left her family home to take a walk, something she did every night before bed. She never returned home. Not even two months later on August 20, 1973 twenty-four-year-old Hollar disappeared without a trace after leaving the Bon Marche in Eugene, where she had just gotten a new job as a seamstress two weeks prior. Detectives tried but were unable to question Ted regarding Vicki’s disappearance before his execution in 1989, eliminating the chance of closing the case in relation to the serial killer. I was not able to find anything from the Hollar family in regards to Bundy, however I did find a quote by Jill Jolly: ‘as I recall, my mother told me that the local detectives managed to get a direct question about Rita through to him before his execution, and his reply was ‘No. No more in Oregon.’ Bundy withheld many secrets in the end in hopes to parlay them into yet another stay of execution, and even told detectives that ‘there are other buried remains in Colorado’ (then of course he refused to elaborate any further).
Regarding how close the Bon Marche in Eugene was compared to LeClair’s residence, WebSleuths user BlueJean40′ points out that ‘both of these locations are relatively close on the same side of our city. Just wondered if anyone had read anything about them possibly being connected.’ Not even three months after LeClair was killed on November 5, 1973 twenty-three year old Suzanne Justis most likely hitchhiked from her home in Eugene to Portland, as her car was found left behind at home. She spoke to her mother from a phone booth located outside of the Memorial Coliseum. Justis told her mother she was planning on coming home the following day to pick up her young son from school but never showed up. No trace of her has ever been recovered.
Now, when I say this I’m in no way implying that Ted Bundy was responsible for every single murder that took place in the state of Oregon in 1973… but I am surprised that after two years of very intense research I’m still coming across names that I’ve never seen before. During my research into Gayle LeClair I learned about a young women named Faye Robinson (her high school yearbook spelled her first name ‘Fay’), who was found deceased from multiple stab wounds in the upper part of her body not even six months before LeClair in March 1973. Like Gayle, Robinson was educated and worked in county government: she graduated from the University of Oregon in 1970 and was employed by the Lane County Welfare Department.
Another girl I want to mention is 17 year old Susan Wickersham, who disappeared on July 11, 1973 after dropping off the family car at her mom’s POE in downtown Bend after joyriding around town with a girlfriend (some conflicting reports say she was at a party). Her remains were found on January 20, 1976 and her skull had a bullet hole behind the right ear with no exit wound. Lastly, a 15 year old girl named Alison Lynn Caufman disappeared out of Portland sometime in 1973 (I was unable to find an exact date or any more details about her) as well as eighteen year old Laurie Lee Caniday from nearby Milwaukie (yes, that’s spelled correctly).
Now, I want to (briefly) talk about the May 1969 Garden State Parkway killings separately from the other missing/murdered girls for a moment, just because I feel that they share some (very) general commonalities with the murder of Miss. LeClair (even though I personally don’t think Bundy was responsible for the murder of Susan Davis and Elizabeth Perry): like LeClair, both victims expired as a result of multiple stab wounds, and even though none of Ted’s other victims(that we know of, anyways) ever suffered from any similar types of injuries we do know that he used a (dull) knife to cut the throat of little Kimberly Dianne Leach in Florida on February 9, 1978.
Aside from Ted, another name that came up in relation to the murder of Gayle LeClair is Dayton Leroy Rogers, an American serial killer that has been linked to the slayings of at least eight ‘street’ women (which is code for sex workers/addicts/runaways) across Oregon. He was convicted of the murder of his final victim in 1988, and two years later in May 1989 he was sentenced to death after being found guilty of six additional homicides. Rogers was actually sentenced to death on three separate occasions, but all three times the Oregon Supreme Court vacated the decision and remanded the cases for a new trial; he was sentenced to death for a fourth time on November 16, 2015. According to Roger’s defense attorney, the killer said that he would have waived all future appeals and allocated to his atrocities in exchange for a life sentence rather than receiving the death penalty. His death sentence was overturned for the fourth time on November 12, 2021 partially thanks to a new law signed by Governor Kate Brown limiting the amount of ‘aggravating factors required for seeking the death penalty.’ Governor Brown commuted the death sentences of everyone on Oregon’s death row to life without parole on December 13, 2022. Dayton is still alive as of June 2024, and will live out the rest of his days behind bars.
Now, nothing in my research told me that TedBundy was ever considered a suspect in LeClair’s murder, despite her living in a fairly accessible area to him and fit neatly into his preferred age range, as he killed young females anywhere from 12 years old (possibly even as young as eight if you throw Ann Marie Burr into the mix) up to 26 years old (ski instructor Julie Cunningham). Miss. LeClair also fit the physical description of one of Ted’s victims, as she was beautiful and slim and had long hair and a petite build. But these superficial details are pretty much where any possible link to Bundy ends.
Mr. LeClair died at the age of 74 on January 27, 2009 due to a ‘smoking related illness.’ He was an avid outdoorsman, loved racing, and was a member of the Fraternal Order of Eagles. Gayle’s brother Cleve died of heart failure on May 9, 2009. He was active in a local HAM radio club and was trained to help run a radio station in the event of an emergency. Frank LeClair was able to tell me that Barbara LeClair passed away on December 11, 2024.
* Edit, January 2025: I would like to thank Gayle’s brother Frank, who was kind enough to reach out to me and point out a few mistakes I made and give me some updates about his sister’s case. He shared with me that a detective from the Eugene PD Cold Case Squad had been in touch with him in recent years, who shared they had uncovered a piece of evidence in relation to the murder that unfortunately at the time had not been properly processed into evidence, therefore there was no chain of custody and it wouldn’t hold up in court. But they did however send a piece of the sample to a laboratory that specializes in recovering DNA and they were able to uncover two partial but separate genetic profiles from the blood evidence. The detective shared with him that they needed a blood sample from an immediate family member in order to determine which portion belonged to Gayle, and unfortunately since Frank was only a half-sibling he didn’t qualify, as it needed to come from a ‘more direct relative.’ He helped them get in touch with Ms. LeClair’s motherBarbara, who happily volunteered a sample. After receiving it the lab was able to isolate the suspected killers DNA from the sample taken from the crime scene, however because of the age and the fact that the sample was degraded they weren’t able to obtain a full set of genetic markers.
But Frank did tell me that recently they were able to get genetic samples from every person of interest in relation to the case, and if they were deceased they got one from one of their children. So far investigators have been able to clear every suspect except for one, who died several years ago; his child has refused to voluntarily give up a DNA sample. The detective told Frank the names of a few different suspects that were eliminated after the DNA evidence was analyzed, but he forgot most of them. The ones that stuck out the most were Gayle’s date that night and the landlord, John Sydney Armstrong.
Gayle LeClair’s junior year picture from the 1968 Gold Beach Union High School yearbook.Gayle LeClair’s senior year picture from the 1969 Gold Beach Union High School yearbook.The final resting place of Gayle LeClair. She is buried at Rogue River Cemetery in Gold Beach, OR.LeClair listed in the Oregon state death index.LeClair mentioned in an article published by The World on February 10, 1954.An article about a play called ‘Don’t Drink the Water’ put on by Southwestern Oregon Community College in the fall of 1969. Gayle LeClair is mentioned at the bottom, it was published in The World on November 15, 1969.A newspaper blurb about the murder of Gayle LeClair published by The Albany Democrat-Herald on August 24, 1973.A picture of the Sylvan Street crime scene published in The Eugene Register-Guard on August 24, 1973.Part one of an article about the murder of Gayle LeClair published in The Eugene-Register Guard on August 24, 1973.Part two of an article about the murder of Gayle LeClair published in The Eugene-Register Guard on August 24, 1973.Part one of an article about the murder of Gayle LeClair published by The World on August 30, 1973.Part two of an article about the murder of Gayle LeClair published by The World on August 30, 1973.Gayle LeClair’s obituary published in The World on August 27, 1973.An article mentioning LeClair published by The Eugene Register-Guard on September 10, 1973.An article about multiple murders in Lane County, Oregon that mentions the murder of Gayle LeClair published by The Eugene Register-Guard on April 16, 1978 (there is more to this but it doesn’t mention LeClair).The first part of a newspaper article about serial killer Dayton Leroy Rogers that mentions the murder of Gayle LeClair published in The Eugene Register-Guard on September 19, 1987.The second part of a newspaper article about serial killer Dayton Leroy Rogers that mentions the murder of Gayle LeClair published in The Eugene Register-Guard on September 19, 1987.3760 Concord Street, where LeClair lived from January to May 1973.1781 Sylvan Street, where LeClair was murdered. Donald and Barbara’s marriage announcement published in The World on February 21, 1950.Donald and Barbara LeClair’s marriage certificate that was filed on June 5, 1950.A newspaper clipping about Mr. LeClair being charged with a DUI published in The World on January 9, 1969.Donald and Barbara’s divorce announcement published in The World on June 20, 1970 .Donald and Barbara LeClair’s divorce paperwork, filed on September 29, 1970.An obituary for Gayle’s brother Cleve published in The World on May 12, 2009.Some kind words written by a friend about Gayle’s brother Donald from his memorial page on Legacy.com.I was unable to find out much about Gayle but I did find this on WebSleuths that was written by someone that knew her.Bundy’s whereabouts on August 24, 1973 according to the ‘TB Multiagency Team Report 1992.’A list of just some of the missing (and murdered) girls from Oregon between 1969-78.Fay (Faye?) Robinsons senior picture from the 1966 Tigard High School yearbook.An article about Robinson’s murder published by The Statesman Journal on March 23, 1972.Dayton Leroy Rogers.
When I went to Seattle in April 2022 there were a few places I never got around to seeing, one of them being Bundy’s Issaquah dump site… but it certainly wasn’t for lack of trying: I drove around the same three mile area for almost two hours one day trying to find it (Google Maps really dropped the ball with that one, IMO). I finally had to give up because it was taking precious time away from other places I needed to see, and as I was driving away I remember thinking to myself that I’d never get back there again and I blew it. But, thankfully in May 2024 I was able to spend a few days in Washington state during my vacation to Oregon and I was finally able to locate it, with a little help with my friend Cole Kaiser, who is awesome and deserves recognition for his help.
Issaquah is a small city located about fifteen miles east of Seattle. Back in 1974, it was much (much) less populated than it is today, going from 4,500 residents to roughly 40,000. The Issaquah dump site is where Ted Bundy dumped the bodies of Janice Ann Ott, Denise Marie Naslund, and (most likely) Georgann Hawkins (despite her body never positively being identified). A University of Washington student, Hawkins was last seen in the early morning hours of June 11, 1974 after leaving a party early and stopping by her boyfriend’s dormitory room to get some Spanish notes for an upcoming final she was worried about.She stopped and chatted with a male friend named Duane (who was a Beta Theta Pi fraternity brother, like her bf) out his window then walked off into the night and was never seen again. Twenty-three year old Ott and nineteen year old Naslundboth disappeared on July 14th, 1974 from Lake Sammamish State Park, which is located just ten minutes away from the dump site. All three girls vanished without a trace until later that year on September 6th, when two hunters discovered what they strongly suspected were human skeletal remains while out looking for grouse.
Upon arrival Seattle based LE discovered a variety of human bones, most of which had been dispersed throughout the wooded area thanks to local wildlife (including, but not limited to, bobcats, bears, coyotes, and cougars). Among the bones found were teeth, a jawbone, pelvis, a skull, five femurs, and a spine, and investigators quickly determined that some of them belonged to Ott and Naslund. During Bundy’s death row confessions he also claimed that he buried Hawkins at the site as well, but investigators were never able to positively confirm this.
At the time of the murders in the mid-1970’s forensic experts (in most cases) needed either a mandible or skull to make a positive ID, as they often relied on matching teeth against dental records due to the fact that DNA testing wasn’t a ‘thing’ back then. Some of the bones that were found at the site were cremated and as a result were never able to be tested, as it was apparently ‘department policy’ to incinerate bones that were left unidentified in storage for too long. As I said earlier, the search team recovered five femur bones from the area, which retired King County Detective Dr. Robert D. Keppel said proved that Bundy dumped at least three victims there.
Looking at the pictures that I included below (of the site from the 1970’s to now), it’s obvious the area has undergone quite a transformation over the past fifty years. For example, Highlands Drive wasn’t there at all, and the Swedish Issaquah Campus wasn’t built until over 30 years after the murders took place. Additionally, back in 1974 the area could only be accessed through a narrow and winding dirt pathway, and the railway line that ran through the city’s Olde Town neighborhood was taken out and replaced by the Rainier and Issaquah-Preston walking trails that are still there today.
Despite The Issaquah dump site being the first one that was found it wasn’t the first one that Bundy utilized: six months after its discovery in March 1975 a second dumping ground of bodies was discovered at nearby Taylor Mountain when two forestry students from nearby Green River Community College stumbled upon skeletal remains while marking trees for a school project. I wonder what Bundy’s logic was for switching up his dump sites, moving from Taylor Mountain (where he left Lynda Healy, Brenda Ball, Kathy Parks, and Sue Rancourt) to Issaquah. Did he want to move somewhere else in an attempt to throw off law enforcement? We also know that he was impulsive and often made decisions quickly and without much thought: did he just stumble across this location one day and decide to utilize it? Or did Ted maybe have a close call at Taylor Mountain, possibly running into other (late night) hikers or even a policeman out on patrol?
During his January 1989 confession Ted told Dr. Keppel that he buried Georgann’s head in an area that was very close to the dump site, roughly 25–50 yards north parallel to the dirt road before turning left and walking about ten years ‘through the trees, eventually coming across an area he described as ‘very rocky’ and ‘very rocky.’ Investigators didn’t wait long to go looking for Hawkin’s remains after Bundy was put to death, and on February 15, 1989 search teams combed through the Issaquah dump site once again, but were unable to find any trace of the young co-ed. We do know that Ted was known to imbibe during his murders, and very well could have been drunk, high, or both. When you consider that and the fact that the murder was committed nearly fifteen years prior to his confession it might explain why no trace of George was ever found. Or… was Bundy purposefully giving investigators the bare minimum in an attempt to get another stay of execution. Or, was it all just another lie?
Jan Ott, Bundy’s first Lake Sam victim.Denise Naslund, who Bundy abducted roughly four hours after Jan Ott.Nine different shots of the dirt road leading to the Issaquah dump site in September 1974. Photo courtesy of the King County Archives/Tiffany Jean.A photo of the search of the Issaquah dump site. Picture courtesy of OddStops.Denise Naslund’s skull found in the dump site, was found by two hunters on a hillside just east of Issaquah less than ten miles from Lake Sammamish. Photo courtesy of KIRO-7.Denise Naslund’s hair at the Issaquah dump site. Photo courtesy of the King County Archives.Another shot of Denise Naslund’s hair at the Issaquah dump site. Photo courtesy of the King County Archives.A rib cage at the Issaquah dump site. Photo courtesy of the King County Archives.Another shot of the rib cage at the Issaquah dump site. Photo courtesy of the King County Archives.A picture from the Issaquah dump site. Photo courtesy of Oxygen.A mapping of where the different bones were found at the Issaquah dump site.Ted at the Issaquah dump site; he was there with Liz that day.This aerial photo was taken roughly two years before Bundy started using it as a dump site in September 1972. Picture courtesy of OddStops.An aerial photo taken of the dump site by the United States Geological Survey in 1977. Picture courtesy of OddStops.This is an aerial photograph taken by police of Bundy’s Issaquah dump site. Picture courtesy of OddStops. A map of map of Issaquah from 1950. Bundy’s dump site is just north of an abandoned cabin on the north side of the railway. Picture courtesy of OddStops.On the left is an older map that pinpoints the exact location of the dump site taken from ‘Ted Bundy: A Visual Timeline’ by Rob Dielenberg. On the right is a recent aerial photograph of the area. As of June 2024 the region was turned into a walking trail.The dump site as it looks today. Photo courtesy of OddStops.A snapshot taken at the Issaquah dump site on February 15, 1989 when investigators were looking for the remains of Georgann Hawkins after Bundy discussed her murder during his death row confessions. Photo courtesy of the King County Archives.Another picture taken at the Issaquah dump site on February 15, 1989. Photo courtesy of MSNBC.A picture of the possible dump site of Georgann Hawkins taken in February 1989. Photo courtesy of MSNBC.A screen grab of the map Cole Kaiser sent me that helped me get to the Issaquah dump site. Thanks homie.Driving by the Issaquah dump site as it looks today.A photo I took of the Issaquah Dump Site in May 2024.A photo I took of the Issaquah Dump Site in May 2024.A photo I took of the Issaquah Dump Site in May 2024.A photo I took of the Issaquah Dump Site in May 2024.A photo I took of the Issaquah Dump Site in May 2024.A photo I took of the Issaquah Dump Site in May 2024.A photo I took of the Issaquah Dump Site in May 2024.A photo I took of the Issaquah Dump Site in May 2024.
James Dean Knox was born on April 4, 1955 in Warsaw, NY; he has an older sister named Cynthia and a son named James Dean Knox III. Twenty four year old Knox was last seen on December 11, 1979 and his Grandmother (who saw him two days prior in her home in the southern part of Warsaw) waited ten days to report him as missing to the authorities. All of his clothes, possessions, and money was left behind.
I found very little information regarding this case on the internet, however this is the only instance where quite a few people from local (Warsaw, NY) Facebook groups reached out to me when I asked for more information, offering me their insight and even what they think may have happened to him. Per his best friend, Jimmy’s mother thinks that her son is in the witness protection program, however he feels that he fell in with the wrong crowd, began experiencing money issues and as a result wound up at the bottom of a well on an abandoned farm in nearby Java. Neither theory seems to have any merit to it.
Knox has blue eyes, dark blonde hair, is 5’11” tall, and weighed 150 pounds at the time of his disappearance; he was last seen wearing a red plaid jacket, blue jeans and black boots. He wore corrective lenses with plastic frames and was suffering from unknown health concerns, which he was apparently pretty upset over. Because of these ongoing issues he was on leave from his POE at the Leroy Machine Company.
Knox lived in the heart of Warsaw on Wyoming Street and frequently ate at a local pizzeria. Before his disappearance he served in the US Navy for roughly one month before being honorably discharged due to medical reasons on May 25, 1979.
Per WIVB both of Knox’s parents and his grandmother have passed away, and his sister still resides in Warsaw. As recently as 2021 New York State Police released a statement about Knox asking that anyone with information related to his disappearance come forward and contact Investigator John Neeley at 585-786-7244, referencing case #3029766. As of June 2024 no trace of Knox has ever been recovered.
Works Cited: 13wham.com/news/local/nysp-continues-to-investigate-warsaw-mans-disappearance-41-years-later charleyproject.org/case/james-dean-knox troopers.ny.gov/missing-knox-james-d
James Knox’s second grade picture from the 1963 Warsaw Elementary School yearbook.James Knox’s fourth grade picture from the 1965 Warsaw Elementary School yearbook.James Knox’s fifth grade picture from the 1966 Warsaw Elementary School yearbook.James Knox’s fifth grade picture from the 1966 Warsaw Elementary School yearbook.James Knox’s freshman year picture from the 1971 Warsaw High School yearbook.One of the more commonly circulated photo’s of Knox, it looks like a mugshot. One of the more commonly circulated photo’s of Knox. The only article I could find about Knox published by The Press and Sun-Bulletin on November 26, 2017.Some weather stats in Warsaw, NY from December 1979. The date Knox was last seen (December 11, 1979) it got as warm as 60 degrees… was he taking advantage of a nice day, went for a walk in the woods then got injured?The temperature in Warsaw, NY the week in December 1979 that Knox was last seen. 35 Wyoming Street in Warsaw, NY where Knox was living at the time he disappeared.In 2019 a Redditor going by the handle of ‘unleashthenuge’ posted this blurb about the disappearance of Knox, it’s a pretty interesting theory.A comment about Knox on his ‘WebSleuths’ page about some of his distinguishing characteristics.James’ sister Cindy’s freshman year picture from the 1967 Warsaw High School yearbook.
When I went to Utah in November 2022 there was one location I was completely unaware existed that I wish I (somehow) knew to include in my list: the supposed ‘Ted Bundy Ritual House’ just outside of SLC in Bountiful. The duplex-style residence is located at 1201 North 200 West, and is said to be ‘just across the street’ from Viewmont High School, which is where Deb Kent was abducted by Bundy on November 8, 1974 after his botched kidnapping attempt of Carol DaRonch just 45 minutes away in Murray. Kent was last seen at roughly 10:30 PM after leaving a showing of ‘The Redhead’ to go and pick up her brother from the nearby Rustic Roller Rink. According to eyewitnesses, there were loud screams heard from the parking lot at roughly the same time that she was last seen, and after the Kents realized that the family car had never left the parking lot they immediately contacted the police.
Before Bundy was executed in January 1989, he confessed to killing then 17 year-old Kent and pointed investigators to where he dumped her body. Upon searching Fairview Canyon later that May the only human remains that search crews located was a patella, which was found among the ten bags of animal bones that were collected. The kneecap was presumed to belong to Debra and was given to her family to hold onto, and it remained unidentified until 2015 when DNA testing confirmed that it belonged to her. After the positive ID the Bountiful PD returned the bone to Belva Kent along with her daughter’s official death certificate.
According to Redditor ‘je-m-en-fiche,’ Bountiful residents that lived in the area referred to it as the ‘Viewmont House’ because of its close proximity to the local high school. Looking into the residence, it’s in no way ‘close’ (in my opinion, anyways) to Viewmont HS, nor should it be considered just across the street (it’s actually 0.2 miles away, and is about a five minute walk). It was featured on the Travel Channel television show Ghost Adventures, ‘starring’ Zak Bagans and his group of cronies (including Aaron Goodwin and Nick Groff), specifically for the limited spin-off mini-series ‘Serial Killer Spirits.’ The episode, titled ’The Ted Bundy Ritual House,’ aired on October 26, 2019, and focused on the abandoned structure that has been uninhabited since a gas leak led to an explosion on July 4, 1997. The show’s creator and ‘lead investigator’ Zak Bagans claims that Bundy took Debra Kent there after abducting her after she left a showing of ‘The Red Head’ to go pick up her brothers from a nearby roller skating rink.
In addition to the TB ritual house, Ghost Adventures did episodes on HH Holmes (he killed a nine year old kid in a house in Irvington, Indiana and the current owner felt that dark and sinister forces had ‘overtaken the property’), Joliet Prison in Illinois (where John Wayne Gacy spent only a small amount of time), and an episode titled ‘Axe Killer Jail,’ where the team investigated a prison in Council Bluffs, IA, where SK Jake Bird was once housed.
Because the events of the episode are so ridiculously absurd, I’m not going to spend much time on a synopsis of it. In a nutshell, it began with some little ginger-haired boy that supposedly lived next door to the house (knowing Bagans it’s probably his own kid) peeing on a log on the front steps (Zak tells one of his cronies to smell it ‘for research,’ and he does), and of course the GA’s crew followed him home and gave him (and his mother) the third degree and told them exactly what they wanted to hear… and the guys ate it up like a piece of fucking cheesecake. When asked how he felt about the house the kid told Bagans that there were ten mean child-aged spirits that lived there and weretrying to kill him and they ‘better not go in there because they might kill you.’
In the beginning of the episode, a one-time resident of the home named Peter Kingston claimed that when they first moved in his family found weird, mysterious satanic symbols drawn on the walls, including various ‘devils signs’ (including a ‘big pentagram’ on the wall) and ‘666’s all over the place.’ At some point during the episode some guy named Vincent (who does not appear to be with Bagans’ crew and I don’t care enough about him to do any additional research) said that when he was in the house prior to the episode he was pushed down the stairs and almost went through the side railings. As the show progresses, the ghost hunters break out all their fancy bullshit equipment meant to detect supernatural activity, and of course everything they do results in some sort of captured phenomenon (I mean, no one would watch it if nothing happened), and plenty of jump scares and ‘sledgehammers of evil’ (Zak’s words, not mine) ensues.
One of the first things the GA team does upon entering the residence is attempt to open a portal on the floor near a pentagram using what Bagans calls a ‘geophone device,’ which he said ‘measures temperature and electromagnetic energy.’ However, according to the website HiggyPop that’ ‘isn’t strictly true. A geophone doesn’t detect heat or electromagnetic energy, as the name suggests it’s to do with geological movement and it actually detects vibration. The gadget Zak is using is called an EDI meter which has several functions built in, including EMF and thermometer as well as a geophone. Ironically the geophone is the one function of the device that Zak is not using.‘
In addition to the ‘geophone’ (that really isn’t a geophone), Bagans used night vision cameras, digital recorders, and a spirit box, which is a device that rapidly scans AM/FM radio frequencies in an attempt to pull paranormal messages out of the static and white noise. Two additional pieces of equipment the team used (that I have also never heard of before) is the Ovilus V (which is a tool that supposedly allows spirits to communicate with the living by selecting words from a internal database using their ‘energy’) and a TriField meter, which measures EMF in the form of radio-frequency, magnetic, and electric fields.
Zak and Aaron used an SLS camera in the upstairs part of the house, which is a device which ‘looks for’ human-like shapes in the darkness and supposedly can capture images in the absence of light that the human eye can’t see. According to the investigators, while using the camera in a hallway they captured what they described as a ‘mind-blowing figure,’ which was shown in the form of a ‘glitching and dancing stickman on the camera’s screen for a brief moment’ (I cannot make this up, they pulled it out of thin air).
After doing some research into the history of the structure, Bagans was wrong: Bundy never could have brought Deb Kent to this house, because it was actually occupied by two different families at the time of her abduction in November 1974. In an interview with KSNV, the Peterson family had five daughters residing there at the time Kent was abducted in November 1974, and ‘people have said that Ted Bundy took women over here and killed them in this house at the time that Debbie Kent got taken. We were living here. Two families were living here and never saw anything like that happen.’ … ‘I think it’s ridiculous because Ted Bundy never came over here. Nothing like that ever happened here.’ Cindy’s mother Rolean did share that she felt the residence was haunted (just not by Ted Bundy), and that the family experienced several strange things during their time in the house: on one occasion they were sitting in a front room and a white ball flew out the wall, seemingly out of nowhere.
Despite Bundy never having any actual ties to their former residence, Mrs. Peterson said that as mother of five young girls she made sure to always keep the doors locked, and ‘it was a really terrifying time for everybody here.’ She also commented that linking Bundy to the old residence only further exploits his victims, and that ‘he was a monster. And I don’t think he should be glorified in any manner at all. If they’re going to tell a story, they need to get their facts straight.’ KUTV out of Salt Lake reached out to Mrs. Belva Kent about the Travel Channel’s episode on the residence and she said that every time a movie or TV special is made about her daughter’s killer her family is forced to relive their pain and that the show only glorified the man that killed Debra.
According to a ‘deseret.com’ article published on July 5, 1997, the duplex went up in flames the day before after gas accumulated underneath the basement ceiling from a leak which caused the explosion (which was most likely ignited after the water heater kicked on). After an assessor was able to investigate the fire it was determined there was nearly $100K worth of damage done to the structure, with the first-floor apartment suffering the majority of it.
According to Redditor ‘OatyBisc,’ ‘I grew up in Bountiful (I even went to Viewmont HS where the abduction happened!) and this house has nothing to do with Ted Bundy other than proximity. I was excited to see an episode from my hometown but there were so many inaccuracies it drove me crazy! Debbie Kent’s body was never found, but they did find a patella at a site where they found bones from other murder victims and a few years ago they verified it was hers through DNA. This was maybe 20 miles or so from Bountiful, not 100 miles. Her headstone is in the city cemetery, but her body is not there. When she disappeared this house was occupied. It only looks bad now. I drive past it occasionally and it’s pretty worn and clearly burnt on the North end, but the fire was much later. It’s a spooky looking house and they have ghost tours there occasionally, but the Ted Bundy angle is a stretch.’ In addition to this, a Redditor going by the handle ‘pengony’ pointed out that when Bagans was told by locals that the house was completely unrelated to Bundy he told them that he didn’t care and was going to film there anyway.
Just as a side note, the episodes IMDB page gives a completely different narrative and outright fabrication of the truth: ‘Zak and the crew investigate an abandoned house in Bountiful, Utah, where locals claim notorious serial killer Ted Bundy murdered one of his victims. Overloaded with satanic rituals and violence, the home is drenched in a dark, sinister energy.’
Now… this isn’t just some old, dilapidated house with a possible (but, not really) link to Ted Bundy: referred to as the ‘Anson Call House,’ the residence was built by a pioneer of the Mormon faith (Anson Call, obviously) in the early days of Bountiful when it was known as Session’s Settlement (or North Canyon). The building, which began as a one-room cabin, was initially constructed in 1855 and the first additions to the home were made two years later when a dining room and kitchen area were built as well as a basement. Over the years a second floor was added, and it eventually turned into the structure you see today (or, before it blew up).
Interestingly enough though, Ted Bundy isn’t the house’s only murderous link: In Adam Call-Roberts blog post titled, ‘Mary & Anson Call: Hosts to a Killer,’ in October of 1857, Anson and Mary Call hosted then Utah Congressman John Doyle Lee overnight, blissfully unaware that just one month prior their guest participated in the ‘Mountain Meadows massacre.’ In September 1857 an emigrant group from Arkansas known as the Baker–Fancher party set up camp in Utah’s Mountain Meadows, which was a staging area in the southern part of the state that was used to get ready for the long crossing of the Mojave Desert by groups that were going west to California.
In the early morning hours of September 7, 1857 a group of Paiute Indian and Mormon militia men that were dressed as Native Americans attacked the circled wagons without warning. The party fought off their aggressors the best they could and the conflict went on for four days; in the process fifteen emigrant men were killed either in battle or while attempting to escape. Congressman Lee didn’t get involved in the dispute until the third day, when he approached the wagon party and convinced them to surrender their possessions and weapons in return for safe passage to nearby Cedar City. The emigrants (who were low on ammunition and supplies) accepted his offer and surrendered, and it was then that roughly 120 people from the Baker–Fancher party were then slaughtered, leaving only 17 small children behind. In 1874, Lee was arrested for leading the massacre: his first trial ended with a hung jury and two years later a second one took place in which the prosecuting attorneys put the blame solely on his shoulders. He was convicted and sentenced to death. On March 23, 1877, Lee was executed by firing squad at the very site of the massacre that took place twenty years before.
In conclusion, there’s a lot of different videos and podcasts on this residence, but one thing is for certain: Ted Bundy had absolutely nothing to do with this house.
A picture of the Anson Call House taken around 1920 with attached ‘milk diet’ sanitarium on the south side of the residence. Photo courtesy of Lewis and Jean Call.The Anson Call house around 1940 after the Sardoni remodel. Photo courtesy of Lewis and Jean Call.Another shot of the Anson Call House, showing the southeast corner. An older shot of the Anson Call House before the fire.The front of Anson Call home showing picket fence and old enclosed brick entrance and balcony.A side view of the house after the 1997 fire.The Anson Call House as it looks today.The entrance to those house, notice the ‘private property’ signs posted everywhere. Photo courtesy of news3lv.com.The side of the Anson Call House in its more recent years. Photo courtesy of The Travel Channel.An aerial view of the Anson Call House. Photo courtesy of The Travel Channel.The houses front porch light. Photo courtesy of news3lv.com. A drawing of the layout of the first floor of the Anson Call House. Photo courtesy of Lewis and Jean Call.The back entrance to the house as it looks today.The best screenshot I could get of the no trespassing sign on the Anson Call House. Screenshot courtesy of YouTube Channel ‘Lazarus Unknown.’Zak Bagans standing in the kitchen of the Anson Call House. Screenshot courtesy of The Travel Channel.A recent view of the kitchen in the Anson Call House. Screenshot courtesy of YouTube Channel ‘Lazarus Unknown.’Another shot of the kitchen in the Anson Call House. Screenshot courtesy of YouTube Channel ‘Lazarus Unknown.’Another shot of the kitchen in the Anson Call House. Screenshot courtesy of YouTube Channel ‘Lazarus Unknown.’A pentagram drawn on the living room floor of the Anson Call House. Screenshot courtesy of The Travel Channel.Some satanic drawings on the first floor walls in the Anson Call House. The GA team used UV flashlights to capture ‘hidden’ messages drawn on the walls of the Anson Call House. Screenshot courtesy of The Travel Channel.Some satanic drawings on the first floor walls in the Anson Call House. Screenshot courtesy of The Travel Channel.One of the living rooms in the duplex in the Anson Call House as it looks today. Screenshot courtesy of YouTube Channel ‘Lazarus Unknown.’Another shot of one of the living rooms in the duplex in the Anson Call House as it looks today. Screenshot courtesy of YouTube Channel ‘Lazarus Unknown.’Another shot of some ‘hidden’ messages drawn on the walls of the Anson Call House. Screenshot courtesy of The Travel Channel.Some more ‘hidden’ messages drawn on the walls of the Anson Call House. Screenshot courtesy of The Travel Channel.Some spray painted artwork on the wall in the Anson Call House. Screenshot courtesy of YouTube Channel ‘Lazarus Unknown.’A bedroom in the Anson Call House as it looks today. Screenshot courtesy of YouTube Channel ‘Lazarus Unknown.’A comment on a Reddit post about the TB Ritual House from the user ‘penogy.’ A comment on a Reddit post about the TB Ritual House from the user ‘Coleyb23.’ A comment on a Reddit post about the TB Ritual House from the user ‘lordglo.’ Deb Kent.Deb Kent’s patella, which remained unidentified until 2015. Photo courtesy of Tiffany Jean.Viewmont High School, located at 120 West 1000 North in Bountiful, UT. Photo taken in November 2022.The parking lot at Viewmont High School where Deb Kent was abducted from.A possible route from the Anson Call House to Viewmont High School in Bountiful, Utah.Anson and Mary Call.A picture of John D. Lee taken in December 1857. Photo courtesy of Adam Call Roberts.A picture of Congressman Lee just prior to his execution sitting next to his own coffin; how dark but appropriate for what he did.
In 2004 a California jury found Scott Peterson guilty of killing his 27-year-old pregnant wife, Laci and their unborn son, Conner after a five-month long trial. Since then, he’s had multiple (failed) attempts at an appeal but was successful in getting his death penalty conviction overturned in favor of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. However his latest attempt (taken up by the Los Angeles Innocence Project) claims that there is untested DNA evidence that is just sitting out there that could help prove that someone else killed Laci and Connor. Prosecutors disagree with him and came up with this 337-page rebuttal opposing his motion for new DNA testing, describing the ‘overwhelming’ case against him that earned him a guilty verdict in the first place.
I always knew John Wayne Gacy created artwork while in prison but I didn’t know Bundy did as well. Referred to as ‘the Ted Bundy Drawings,’ these five pieces of artwork were supposedly sketched by the killer himself, and it’s strongly speculated they depicted images that utilized metaphors as well as allusions and weren’t of his victims. They offer no explanation for his crimes against humanity, but do share some general, very loose commonalities, such as dark and intense eyes, over-exaggerated mouths, and a consistent ‘phallic’ type of shape.
Edmund Kemper was first eligible for parole in 1979, and he had additional (unsuccessful) hearings in 1980, 1981, and 1982; he waived his right to stand in front of the board in 1985. Kemper was again denied at his 1988 hearing where he said, ‘society is not ready in any shape or form for me. I can’t fault them for that.’ Once again, he was denied parole in 1991 and 1994, and he waived his right to a hearing in both 1997 and in 2002. He stood in front of the board was in 2007 but was once again denied, and at that time his attorney indicated he was content with remaining in prison. In 2012 he once again waived his right to a hearing, and was denied parole on February 2, 2017. Most recently he was denied parole on July 9, 2024 and his next parole hearing is (tentatively) scheduled for July 2031, when he will be eighty-two-years old
About the decision to keep Kemper incarcerated, Prosecutor Ariadne Symons said, ‘we don’t care how much of a model prisoner he is because of the enormity of his crimes.’
Deborah Lee Tomlinson was born on October 15, 1957 in Bitburg, Germany to Arthur and Sandra (nee Roup) Tomlinson.Arthur Vernon Tomlinson was born on September 22, 1937 in Modesto, California, and Sandra Lee Roup was born on December 31, 1939 in Livingston, Montana. According to the Tomlinson family tree, the couple had three daughters together: Deborah and her twin sisters, Jean and Joyce (b. 1958). At some point they divorced, and Mr. Tomlinson was briefly married again in 1968 (they quickly parted ways; he went on to have a relationship with Sally Morphisand in 1969 they had a son together named Daniel. He got married to Shelley Williams on August 30, 1975 in Orange, CA but their union also didn’t last long, and they split up in February of the following year. Mr. Tomlinson was married for a fourth time, and the couple had a son together. Sandra got remarried to Henry Nelson on May 10, 1963 in Billings, Montana.
After their parents parted ways Deborah, Jean, and Joyce went to live with their father and stepmother in California, and Sandra relocated to Oregon. Because of their parents’ divorce the girls were separated from their mother at a very young age, which Joyce felt prevented them from forming a strong bond because she wasn’t given a chance to raise her own babies.
According to most reports online, Deborah Lee Tomlinson disappeared from Creswell, Oregon** on her sixteenth birthday on October 15, 1973.Creswell is an incredibly small town with only one high school, and according to the 1970 census the reported population was made up of a mere 1,199 people (it went up to 5,031 in 2010). Referred to as ‘Debbie’ by family and friends (per Joyce, she hated being called ‘Deb’), Tomlinson had brown eyes, stood at 5’5” tall, and weighed 140 pounds (Joyce felt she may have been slightly heavier); she wore her golden-brown hair at her shoulders and had a ring of moles around her neck. In the initial days following her disappearance investigators strongly believed that she was a runaway,whichmost likely explains why I couldn’t find any newspaper reports or media coverage on her. One of the only other real takeaways I could find regarding her case was that she disappeared with an ‘unidentified teenage friend.’
** After I initially wrote the article on Deborah in April 2024 I was contacted by her sister Jean, and more recently Joyce. Both sisters were kind enough to help fill in some of the gaps in their family background and were able to provide me with some of their thoughts regarding her disappearance. According to Jean, their Aunt Helen told them in more recent years that Deborah had ran away from Eugene, not Creswell, and at one point the family had been contacted by a friend that claimed they had seen her in Santa Rosa, CA with ‘a black guy,’ which was a big deal as their father didn’t approve of people of color (Joyce also said she was there visiting a friend named Lyn). The family member also volunteered that they thought she may have been pregnant at the time as well, but nothing ever came out of that. About this alleged sighting, Joyce doesn’t feel it’s true, as that’s where their grandmother lived and Deborah would never have left the area without paying her a visit, especially if she had been pregnant (the two were especially close).
According to Jean, after their parents split up the girls were raised by their father in California, but because Deborah’s didn’t get along very well with their stepmother she had moved to Oregon to live with their mother (who she also clashed with). She also said that at the time her sister disappeared she seemed mostly happy but had been in a bit of a transition period in her life and may have been under the impression that moving out of state may have resulted in more lenient rules, but that wasn’t the case.
According to Joyce, Debbie was simply acting like any other teenager, doing things like sneaking out at night and smoking: one evening in a quick moment of anger their dad announced that he was pulling a ‘Pontious Pilot’ and was ‘washing his hands of her.’ When she left home Joyce said somehow she knew it would be the last time that she ever saw her, and to this day she struggles with her feelings towards her father about that event. Additionally, she strongly suspects that a missing person’s report was never filed in the days after she was last seen, as she never came across one after contacting local Oregon law enforcement. Because of this, I strongly feel that Debbie didn’t disappear exactly on October 15, 1973, and most likely vanished sometime around it.
Jean shared with me that in the years following her sister’s disappearance neither one of their parents wanted to talk much about her, as it brough up too many painful memories. Because of this she told me that she doesn’t know as much about her as she would like to, but she does know that Debbie loved rock n ’roll music and had gotten caught sneaking out at night several times while she still lived with them in California.
Shortly after Deborah disappeared Joyce told me that their stepbrother had reached out to let her know about a formerly missing woman had been found murdered that happened to have some moles around her neck in a pattern similar to Debbie’s (which she said appeared to be ‘almost like a spaced apart, like a necklace’); it obviously turned out not to be her.
When I asked if perhaps Debbie had run off with a guy, Jean shared with me that was what most likely happened, despite the fact the sisters weren’t allowed to date until they were sixteen. Regarding her feelings on the recent ‘genetic genealogy’ craze and if she thought it could help solve the mystery of what happened to her sister, she said that she has never been contacted by LE about it, however at one point she was told by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children that any records possibly related to Deborah were destroyed in a fire.
In 1984 Joyce and her husband took a road trip with their grandkids to visit their great-grandmother and Hank, and while there her stepfather shared that he caught Debbie sneaking out one night and she had been smoking marijuana. He told them that this freaked him out and he tried to do a ‘scared straight’ type intervention and had reached out to the local county sheriff (who had happened to be a friend of his), who had come to the house and had a conversation with his teenage stepdaughter; Debbie disappeared shortly after that.
At the time Tomlinson disappeared in October 1973, Ted Bundy was living at the Rogers Rooming House on 12th Avenue Northeast in Seattle, and where it was a five-hour drive (one way) from his residence to Eugene/Creswell, we know he had no problem with traveling long distances to look for prey. Despite being in a long term, (supposedly) monogamous relationship with Liz Kendall, while on a business trip with the Republican Party to California in the summer of 1973 he rekindled his romance with one time girlfriend Diane Edwards. Ted’s former flame visited him in Seattle on multiple occasions in the latter part of the year, and the couple at one point were even briefly engaged… but the happy times didn’t last long, and in January 1974 he abruptly and without reason cut off all contact with her.
On top of juggling two women, in September 1973 Ted enrolled in law school at the University of Puget Sound, and according to the ‘TB MultiAgency Investigative Team Report 1992,’ on Monday, October 15, 1973 when Tomlinson disappeared, he was in class. Additionally, at the time he was in between employment: in September 1973 he was the Assistant to the Washington state Republican chairman and remained unemployed until May 3 of the following year when he got a position with the Department of Emergency Services in Olympia.
In addition to Ted Bundy multiple other serial killers roamed the Pacific Northwest in the early to middle 1970’s: the first one (aside from Ted) that popped in my head was Warren Leslie Forrest, a double murderer that has been sentenced to two life terms in prison for the murders of Krysta Blake and Martha Morrison in 1974; he is also considered the prime suspect in at least five additional murders and disappearances going back as far as 1971. He has been in police custody since 1974 and on February 4, 2023 he was convicted on another murder count after DNA linked him to the murder of Martha Morrison.
On June 8, 1961, Portland police received a call from a housewife whose dog had returned home with a human foot in a paper bag, and when detectives went to her home the animal came back with a hand. Upon investigating, LE found several additional body parts around the woman’s neighborhood, and all of the appendages were deemed to be fresh and were completely drained of blood. Police went through local missing people’s reports and came across the file of twenty-three year old Joan Caudle, a housewife and mother of two that had recently been reported missing by her husband (who of course was an immediate suspect).
Joan’s husband told detectives that where she wasn’t normally a big drinker she had been a bit depressed recently because her mother had been sick, therefore there was a chance she had been at a bar having a few. Police then tracked down a barfly that had a string of arrests for public drunkenness and she told them she had been in a bar on the night of June 7 and met a man going by the name Marquette. The pair had seemingly hit it off when a woman approached them and stole his attention away, and when detectives showed the eyewitness a photograph of Joan Caudle, she said that was definitely the same woman from the bar.
Upon his arrest Marquette admitted that he raped and murdered the Portland housewife then he drained her blood, dismembered her body, and left her head to rot in the woods. Despite being found guilty of first degree murder the jury recommended leniency, and Marquette was sentenced to life in prison.After serving only eleven years of his sentence (during which he was described as a model prisoner), he was released on parole in 1973.
Not even two and a half years after Marquette was released on parole in April 1975, a fisherman discovered a mutilated corpse floating in a Willamette River slough in Marion County, Oregon; it had been bled dry and had been dismembered. Detectives determined the remains were those of thirty-seven-year-old Betty Lucille Wilson (one report said she was thirty-five), a North Carolina native who led a life of extreme poverty and had seven children since marrying her abusive husband at the age of 16. At the time she was killed she was living in an abandoned school bus.
While he was confessing to Wilson’s murder, Marquette also shared with detectives that he killed a second woman in a similar fashion sometime in 1974, and he led them to two shallow graves where he had disposed of the bulk of the remains. Unfortunately because the head was never found, there was no way the victim could be identified, and Marquette admitted that he didn’t know who she was. Her identity remains unknown.
Within a five-month period in the latter part of 1973 five young women went missing in Oregon, and three more were found murdered: first was Rita Lorraine Jolly, who disappeared on June 29 while taking a nightly walk in her West Linn neighborhood; her remains have never been found. On July 9, 1973 the body of Laurie Lee Canaday was recovered in the middle of the road at the intersection of Southeast Scott Street and McLoughlin Boulevard in Milwaukee,OR. Next was seventeen-year-old SusanWickersham from Bend on July 11; her body was discovered in January 1976, only five miles south of her hometown; she had suffered a gunshot wound to the head. Additionally, sometime in July 1973 fifteen-year-old Allison Lynn Caufman of Portland died as a result of head injuries after she was shoved from a car moving at a high rate of speed.
On August 20, 1973 twenty-four-year-old Illinois transplant Vicki Lynn Hollar was last seen getting in her black 1965 Volkswagen Beetle (with the running boards removed) after she left her place of employment at the Bon Marché in Eugene, where she had been working as a seamstress for about two weeks. It’s thought that she was headed home to her apartment, as she had plans of meeting up with a friend to attend a party in her neighborhood later that evening (she never showed up). Friends shared with police that she had a habit of picking up hitchhikers; her VW and personal belongings have also never been recovered. Just three days later on August 23, 1973, Gayle LeClair was found stabbed in her apartment in Eugene, OR. The twenty-two year old had recently moved to the area after she got a job at the Eugene City Library.
Just six days after Deborah Tomlinson was reportedly last seen, thirty-two-year-old VirginiaErickson disappeared from Sweet Home on October 21, 1973; although it’s never been proven, evidence points towards her husband being her killer and that it most likely took place while the two were ‘out on a hunting trip.’ Lastly, we have twenty-three-year-old divorcee Suzanne Justis, who went missing on November 5, 1973. From Eugene, Justis had hitchhiked to Portland (despite owning her own car), and had called her mom from a payphone outside of the Veterans Memorial Coliseum to let her know that she would be home the next day to pick up her son from school; she never showed up. Not one case has been solved.
Strangely enough, there was another young woman with the same first and last name as Deborah that had been brutally killed a little over two years after she was last seen in Colorado: nineteen-year-oldDeborah Kathleen Tomlinson was murdered in her apartment complex on Belford Ave in Grand Junction on December 27, 1975. In the days that followed her murder, detectives quickly exhausted all leads and the investigation quickly went cold. Forty-five long years went by. In an article published on December 3, 2020 by the website ‘WesternSlopeNow,’ the Grand Junction PD announced a break in the case: they had partnered with a DNA Technology Company calledParabon to analyze the unknown semen and blood that had been found with the victim at the original 1975 crime scene.
About the process, Parabon’s Chief Genetic Genealogist CeCe Moore said that they analyze ‘the DNA, so we can look at 850,000 genetic markers that will allow us to predict relationships that are distant.’ Also, just as a side note, Moore is the scientist that helped solve the 1971 murder of Roman Catholic schoolteacher Rita Curran out of Vermont (who up until recently was also an unconfirmed Bundy victim). After the samples that were collected from the original 1975 crime scene were processed, Parabon built a family tree using public records in an attempt to identify the unknown person-of-interest, and it was concluded that a man named Jimmy Dean Duncan killed Deborah K. Tomlinson. As ofApril 2024, law enforcement has found no connection between Duncan and Tomlinson, but found that he had a family member that lived close to the college she was attending at the time of her death. Detective Sean Crocker from the Grand Junction Police Department commented that ‘we believe Mr. Duncan visited this relative, and that’s how possibly he could’ve encountered Ms. Tomlinson.’ Jimmy Dean Duncan passed away in 1987.
Arthur Tomlinson died at the age of sixty-four on January 29, 2001 in Las Vegas, NV. Deborah’s mother Sandra Lee Nelson passed away from lung cancer at the age of sixty-three on February 2, 2003, and according to her death certificate, she had been the owner/operator of a café. Sandy’s husband Henry died on March 16, 1994 at the age of 54, most likely in a medical facility in Spokane, WA. Deborah’s brother Daniel Sean Tomlinson died in 2022 at the age of fifty-three in California.
Deborah’s sister Jean retired after almost twenty years in the RV Business in November 2023, and she currently lives in Henderson, Nevada with her husband of almost twenty years, Dave. In 2019 Joyce retired from the Bureau for Child Support Enforcement with the State of West Virginia, and was married to the love of her life until he passed away on May 26, 2003. She currently resides in St Thomas, Pennsylvania. If Deborah was anything like her sisters, she was a kind, compassionate person that would have done a lot of good in this world.
In the years following Deborah’s disappearance the twins remain close, although Jean admitted her disappearance has been incredibly hard on their family. She also confessed that a small part of her always thought her big sister would reach out to one of them when they were adults, after everyone had grown up. More than anything they want closure, and at the very least wish they had a body to properly lay to rest so their sister could be with the rest of their family. Debbie would have been an aunt and great aunt multiple times over, and it’s heartbreaking to think of her never getting to meet either of her brother-in-laws, or nieces and nephews. As of October 2025, Deborah Lee Tomlinson’s case remains open and she would be 68 years old. Joyce said that the family’s DNA is on file with the NCMEC website.
* In October 2025 I finally came across the Tomlinson family’s Ancestry page, which helped give me a lot of background into Deborah’s family life and background. I also updated the article with information from an interview that I did with her sister Jean in February 2025 as well.
A missing persons poster for Deborah.The girls standing with their dad and Aunt Jean, who Joyce said they were all especially fond of; sadly right after this picture was taken she moved to Virginia. Photo courtesy of the Tomlinson family archives.The three sisters in a picture during their time in the Bethlehem Lutheran Church Chancel Choir that was published in The Rohnert Park Cotati Clarion on June 26, 1968.Deborah (on the far left), Joyce, and Jean. Photo courtesy of the Tomlinson family archives.Some members of the Tomlinson family; it looks like Deborah and her sisters are in the front. Photo courtesy of the Tomlinson family archives.Tomlinson before she disappeared in 1973.What Debbie Tomlinson might have looked like at the age of 53 using age progressing technology, photo released on July 21, 2011.What Debbie Tomlinson might have looked like at the age of 58 using age progressing technology, photo released on June 28, 2016.According to the ‘Ted Bundy MultiAgency Investigative Team Report 1992,’ on October 15, 1973 when Tomlinson disappeared Bundy was supposed to be in class at The University of Puget Sound in Tacoma. Bundy’s fall 1973 law school schedule from the University of Puget Sound.Bundy’s route from where he lived at the Rogers Rooming house to Creswell, OR.Warren Leslie Forrest.A more recent picture of Warren Leslie Forrest.Warren Leslie Forrest’s van.Richard Laurence Marquette.A list of some other missing girls from Oregon from 1969-78. Tomlinson isn’t even listed.A comment on a Websleuth’s page about Deborah’s disappearance made by Joyce Sparks on October 16, 2013.A comment on a Websleuth’s post about Deborah Tomlinson made by user ‘Caring1.’A Websleuth’s comment on a post about Deborah made by a user named ‘theshadow45’ on August 27, 2017.A Websleuth’s comment on a post about Deborah made by a user named ‘Alleykins’ on August 27, 2017.Deborah Kathleen Tomlinson.An article about the murder of Deborah Kathleen Tomlinson published by The Daily Sentinel on January 14, 1976.The Tomlinson family tree, courtesy of Joyce Tomlinson.Deborah’s grandmother Nora and her father, Arthur. Photo courtesy of the Tomlinson family archives.Deborah’s father, Arthur Vernon Tomlinson. Photo courtesy of the Tomlinson family archives.Deborah’s mother listed in the 1940 census.Arthur Tomlinson from the 1951 Westwego High School yearbook.Deborah’s father listed in some Baptism’s that took place in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1951.An article about Mr. Tomlinson’s time in the military in Great Falls, Montana published in The Malmstrom Minuteman on May 25, 1956.A passport log for Deborah’s mother Sandra dated August 5, 1959.A passport log for Deborah, dated August 5, 1959.A passport log for Deborah’s sister Joyce dated August 5, 1959.A passport log for Deborah’s sister Jean dated August 5, 1959,Arthur Tomlinson in a list of people applying for a marriage license published in The Press Democrat on January 11, 1968.Mr. Tomlinson’s address; according to this, he was employed at Sonoma State Hospital at the time.Arthur Tomlinson and his second wife listed in the CA Divorce Index, 1966-1977.Jean and Joyce Tomlinson. Photo courtesy of the Tomlinson family archives.Some of the Tomlinson family at Jean’s wedding. Photo courtesy of the Tomlinson family archives.Some members of Deborah’s family at Joyce’s wedding. Photo courtesy of the Tomlinson family archives.Mr. Tomlinson’s second wife, Shelley.Henry Nelson’s obituary published in The Montana Standard on March 17, 1994.Deborah’s mothers death certificate.Deborah’s half-brother, Daniel Sean Tomlinson.Deborah’s half-brother, Daniel.Deborah’s baby sisters, Joyce and Jean.Deborah’s sister Jean and her husband, Dave.
Laura Ann Aime was born on August 21, 1957 to James and Shirlene (nee Tolton) Aime in Lehi, Utah. Mr. Aime was born on August 10, 1928 in Fairview, Utah, and after completing high school he joined the US Navy; after getting out of the military he went on to attend the University of Utah. Shirlene was born on April 12, 1934 in Orem, and the couple were married on January 14, 1951. According to the Aime’s marriage certificate, Jim worked as a steelworker for Geneva Steel.Laura was Jim and Shirlene’s second child, and she had four younger sisters (Evelyn, Michelle, Denna, and Tommi lyn) and an older brother named John. Mrs. Aime filed domestic abuse charges against her husband in April 1966, but they must have worked out their issues because they never divorced.
According to her autopsy, Laura had blue eyes, medium length blonde hair, was 5’10” tall, and weighed around 140 pounds. Before Aime dropped out she was a student at North Sanpete High School, and was at one-time a member of the Laurel Class in the Fairview North Ward. She loved animals, and one time a wild deer wandered out of the canyon and she began feeding it, and eventually was able to convince the creature into becoming a family pet. When Laura was eleven she was thrown into a barbed wire fence by her horse, injuring her ring finger, forearm, and upper arm. Jim Aime liked to take his daughter hunting, and she even helped him bag the first prize deer in a Utah hunting contest at the age of ten. Before she was killed Aime somehow seemed to show awareness that she knew her life was going to end soon in a tragic way: Mrs. Aime said one day out of the blue just a few weeks before her daughter died she told her: ‘at my funeral, I don’t want to be buried in a dress.’ Additionally, Evelyn Aime said that her older sister mentioned that she wanted the 1974 Terry Jacks classic, ‘Seasons in the Sun’ to play during the service as well.
Immediately before she disappeared Laura had been staying with her girlfriend Marin Beveridge, who didn’t live far from her childhood home. Despite being raised in a Mormon family, after leaving home she quickly fell in with the latter-day counter-cultural life, and with her long blonde locks and ‘hippie look’ she already had the stereotypical appearance of a runaway. Although the Aimes didn’t care for their daughter’s choice in friends they were just beginning to come to terms with her ‘nomadic’ lifestyle. Often teased about her height, Laura was given nicknames like ‘Wilt the Stilt,’ which greatly upset her, and her Aime’s suspected that the relentless mocking was what made her leave school. She was used to tough work as the family at one time lived in an old farm house in Mount Pleasant, where they kept a plethora of animals, including chickens, cows, peacocks, turkeys, hogs, goats, sheep, dogs and ‘dozens of cats.’ She was also a tomboy (especially during her early years), and she loved playing softball, and played on competitive teams as well as her families LDS ward, even going so far as to winning the 1972 state championship. Growing up, Laura loved horses and was an experienced rider; she even spent several of her teenage years in an all-girls horseback riding club called ‘The Silver Spurs,’ and participated in several competitions with them at different fairs and parades across Utah.
Before she disappeared Laura had been staying with her girlfriend Marin Beveridge, who didn’t live far from her childhood home. Despite being raised in a Mormon family, after leaving home she quickly fell in with the latter-day counter-cultural life, and with her long blonde hair and hippie look she already had the appearance of a runaway. Although the Aimes didn’t care for their daughter’s friends they were just beginning to come to terms with her ‘nomadic’ lifestyle. Often teased about her height, Laura was given nicknames like ‘Wilt the Stilt,’ which greatly upset her, and the Aime’s suspected that the relentless mocking was what made her leave school. Laura was used to tough work as the family at one time lived in an old farm house in Mount Pleasant, where they kept a plethora of animals, including chickens, cows, peacocks, turkeys, hogs, goats, sheep, dogs and ‘dozens of cats.’ She was also a tomboy (especially during her early years), and she loved playing softball, and played on competitive teams as well as her families LDS ward, even going so far as to winning the 1972 state championship. Growing up Laura loved horses and was an experienced rider. She spent several of her teenage years in an all-girls horseback riding club called ‘The Silver Spurs” in SanPete County, and participated in several competitions at different fairs and parades across Utah. Those that knew her remember her as a kind and loving person.
Laura Ann Aime was seventeen when she was abducted by Ted Bundy on Halloween night in 1974: the party she was at never really got going, and she left by herself around ten to get some cigarettes. About a half hour later she was picked up by an acquaintance named George Alley, who later told investigators that he dropped her off at The Knotty Pine in Lehi just after midnight (although according to Captain Borax, Browns as it was called by the locals closed at eleven, so perhaps it was closer to 11:00 versus 12:00). Quick Lehi factoid: ‘The Knotty Pine’ as it was once called was referred to as ‘Mo Browns’ because the gentleman that owned it was named Leon Brown and he reportedly had ‘a huge mole on his face’ (very clever). Alley also shared that Aime complained that before he picked her up a bunch of ‘cowboys’ ignored her outstretched thumb and drove right past her. From Browns, Aime again got bored and walked to Robinson Park. She was last seen wearing silver cross shaped earrings, a tan sleeveless turtleneck-style sweater with white horizontal stripes, a Navy Pea coat with a hood, light brown lace up shoes, and blue Levi’s with ‘patches on the rear;’ various sources report her wearing a halter top as well. Laura was wearing a ring with a yellow stone and had a rubber band around her wrist; her nails were adorned with black polish with silver flakes.
Although it’s (mostly) agreed on that Laura was last seen trying to hitchhike, there’s a few different possible narratives when it comes to where she was right before she disappeared. The most common theory I’ve seen is that she attended a house party at a mobile home in the suburbs of nearby Orem; a second says the party was in Lehi. The third possibility is that the party took place at the Knotty Pine Cafe in Lehi… (although there’s a FOURTH that says there was no party at all). BUT… every single one of these possibilities consistently placed her at the Knotty Pine Cafe for some period of time before she left to hitchhike to Robinson Park. One eyewitness came forward and shared with investigators that they saw Laura at the park in American Fork at around midnight, which is the last time that anyone reported seeing her alive. Robinson Park is about a 3.2 mile drive from the (former) Knotty Pine Cafe, and if she did walk it would have taken her roughly an hour (give or take) to do so. Due to the dropping temperatures (dipping as low as 45 °F) and the distance involved, it’s very likely that she tried to hitchhike back to Lehi after she was done hanging out at the park. Did Bundy see her there then pull up and offer her a ride? There’s also a possibility that he spotted Aime from a distance then crept up behind her and blitzed her, much like he did to Nancy Wilcox. As I mentioned earlier, Laura was in regular contact with her family after leaving home, and at first they weren’t too alarmed when they didn’t hear from her and figured it was only a matter of time before she got in contact with them. It wasn’t until Laura didn’t come home for a planned hunting trip with her father that the Aime’s knew that something was seriously wrong, as that wasn’t something she would miss without a good reason. After she disappeared her story didn’t make the news until her remains were discovered (like so many of the other case’s I’ve written about, for example Brenda Joy Baker out of Maple Valley, WA), which may have partially been due to her transient nature and nomadic lifestyle.
The remains of Aime were found less than a month after she vanished on Thanksgiving Day next to a stream in American Fork Canyon in the Wasatch Mountains by two BYU students that were looking for fossils for their Geology class (Raymond Ivins and Christine Shelly). Fearing that the murderer may still have been lurking in the area, the couple immediately went to the nearest ranger station and reported their discovery. Aime’s body was covered in leaves, twigs, and brush;she had been raped, sodomized, beaten then strangled to death with a pair of stockings. According to her autopsy report done by former Utah State Medical Examiner Dr. Serge Moore*, Laura had depressed skull fractures on the left side and back of her head and the necklace she was last seen wearing was tangled up in the pair of nylons that were cinched around her beck. She had numerous facial wounds (almost too many to count), and her body had deep wounds from where it had been dragged. LE deduced that the weapon used to inflict such brutal injuries was most likely either a pry bar or metal crowbar; her face was incredibly swollen and her tongue was hanging from her mouth. Aime had also suffered a vaginal puncture that may have been made by a weapon of some sort (perhaps an ice pick, and some have also wondered if it was a speculum which is what it’s thought Karen Sparks was assaulted with). Tire patterns that were found in the immediate area were said to be a match with Bundy’s Volkswagen Bug. *Just as a side note (per Kevin Sullivan), Dr. Moore never properly investigated either the temperature or the level of snow during the period that Smith and Aime were abducted. After complaints of sloppy work from Utah law enforcement Moore was investigated, and he officially lost his license in 1979after he failed to produce any proof that he graduated from a University in Mexico City.
Laura’s cause of death was listed as multiple head injuries with a skull fracture and strangulation. Also, I do want to point out that I’ve seen the date incorrectly listed as both November 26 and 27th, but according to my research, Thanksgiving Day in 1974 was on the 28th. About the discovery, Ivins said: ‘I looked and I thought, you know, it was a deer or something and … it was a girl … It looked like she had been …she was dead. It was really grotesque. There was blood around her neck and breasts and she was naked and lying on that hill and it was a freak-out and I lost it. I thought maybe the guy was still somewhere around and I just panicked, worrying about my girlfriend . . . and we ran down the trail …Came down and ran right through the creek and got in the car and just drove like a maniac, I guess as fast as I could, down to the ranger station and I reported it.’ Swabs taken from Aime’s vagina and anus showed the presence of non-motile sperm, and blood tests showed no signs of substance use aside from alcohol. In the early stages of the investigation it was suspected that her remains belonged to Debra Kent, who had gone missing from Viewmont High School in Bountiful nineteen days earlier.
Several days before she was killed Laura spoke with her mother on the phone: Mrs. Aime begged her daughter not to hitchhike, and told her that she was afraid that she would meet a fate like that of Melissa Smith from nearby Midvale, who had recently been brutally murdered. She assured her she would be ok and told her mom not to worry; it was the last time they would ever speak. After Laura disappeared Mrs. Aime said that ‘she was missing and she had no purse coat, no nothing. I called the sheriff’s office and they said, ‘What do you want us to do about it?’’ On Sunday, November 3 Shirlene reached out to Judy Olsens’ mom, who was confused by her call, saying ‘isn’t she with you? We haven’t seen her since Thursday when she and Judy and Mark left for the Halloween party?’ Two days later on November 5, 1974 Mrs. Aime called the local police to notify them that her daughter was missing, and when she pleaded with them to look for her she told that there were too many ‘young runaways to pursue each one, and after a couple of weeks I just knew she was dead.’ After the remains of a young woman were discovered on a nearby river bank Shirlene reached out to the sheriff’s for a second time, and was again told ‘there’s no way it’s her, it couldn’t be her’ and that the victim was closer to twenty-five and wasn’t as tall as Laura. However the next morning a story in the newspaper mentioned the young woman was wearing a ‘ring with a green stone,’ which happened to be a peridot, which was Laura’s birthstone. Mrs. Aime immediately ran to look in her daughter’s jewelry box, to see if her peridot ring was still there. It was, however, the rest of the coincidences were just too much for her to bear.
Within an hour both Mr. and Mrs. Aime were on their way to the University of Utah morgue, accompanied by Sheriff Mack Hollet and a copy of Laura’s dental charts.Jim said that she had been beaten so severely that he ‘didn’t even recognize her,’ was only able to positively ID her by the scars on her forearm from the horse injury that I mentioned earlier. When he realized that he was looking at his precious little girl, he let out a loud, gut wrenching wail. Shirlene said that she ‘couldn’t believe it had come from a human being.’ Additionally, the dental records that the Aime’s brought with them further verified that it was Laura. Her autopsy revealed a broken jaw, a fractured skull, bruises and lacerations to her head and shoulders, a deep cut to the back of the head, and injuries to the vagina and anus. The ME determined that she had died on November 20, which was roughly twenty days after she disappeared. Many years after his daughter’s murder, Mr. Aime was driving near the spot where her remains were discovered with a friend, and he shared: ‘my little baby was up there all by herself and there was nothing I could do to help her.’
Captain Borax was able to locate a copy of the Lehi Free Press from the night Laura was abducted, and it was apparently an election period in local county government: Mack Holley was running for Utah County Sheriff, and Noall Wootton was running for County Attorney. Wootton was busy promoting his stance on crime prevention while Sheriff Mack Holley was preoccupied with communicating his belief in strong family values, but both men openly discussed the need for increased protection against the dangers that lurked in the night. Together, Wootton and Holley wrestled with a real, live boogeyman that slithered through the shadows of Lehi and American Fork, but at the same time they had no problems with hiding information away from one another. Mack Holley was known to keep information to himself and refuse to share it, and about him Jerry Thompson said ‘all I kept getting was a runaround, so I basically said, ‘to hell with them.’ As early as December 3, 1974 (which is only six days after Aime was found), retired Utah County Sheriff’s Sergeant Owen Quarnery wrote to the FBI crime lab in DC about the case, saying: ‘The MO is similar in many respects to the Smith case. The victims in both cases were beaten, sexually assaulted and strangled. Also many of the wounds were similar in appearance.’
Despite Laura disappearing on the last day in October it was determined she had only been dead for roughy a week when her body was discovered. According to Kevin Sullivans book ‘The Enigma of Ted Bundy,’ her remains showed a very small decomposition, which strongly hints that her killer may have kept her alive after abducting her. Looking into SLC temperatures during November 1974, it was a relatively warm fall and wasn’t very cold meaning the body wouldn’t have preserved because of low temps.Less than two weeks before Aime disappeared on October 18, 1974 Melissa Anne Smith disappeared from nearby Midvale after leaving a pizza parlor at around 9:30 PM. Nine days later her naked remains were found in a nearby mountainous area, and just like with Aime the only thing found on her body was a cross on a delicate chain necklace. One strange commonality I wanted to point out is that unconfirmed Bundy victim Sandra Weaver was also found the same way.
According to David McGowans book ‘Programmed to Kill,’ Melissa Smith’s body was found almost entirely drained of blood, and revealed a somewhat strange abnormality: like Laura, she had not been murdered immediately and had been kept alive for possibly a week after she was abducted. Additionally, her make-up was applied neatly and none of her nails were broken. Strangely there were no signs of restraints or ligatures, so if she was held against her will before her life was taken, there was next to no signs of it (perhaps he kept her in a locked room of sorts?). Retired Colorado investigator Mike Fisher strongly felt that Bundy brought both Smith and Aime back to his first SLC apartment (located at 565 1st Ave), and further elaborated that on occasion other tenants would hear him going down to the cellar in the middle of the night and making noise.
Sullivan feels that Bundy could have kept Aime alive in two possible scenarios: the first one being he kept her in the basement of his rooming house, which was in the rear of the building and that he could keep locked, and because he was the apartment manager he had a key for the area. The second involves him pulling what he calls a ‘reverse Lynda Ann Healy,’ and he carried her into his room in the middle of the night when no one was awake to see (then down and out again when he disposed of her remains). Thinking about it, carrying the body of a young woman out of your room in the middle of the night sounds awfully bold (even if she was alive), but by that time he had lived there for a few months and had most likely gotten familiar with the behaviors of his fellow tenants. We know he didn’t admit to anything related to Laura Aime during his confessions however he did admit to keeping Deb Kent alive in his residence for a period of time before he took her life, so it’s fairly likely that he did the same with Aime (and Smith). Laura’s autopsy report states that in the middle of November 1974 two or three of her friends told LE they think they got phone calls from her but weren’t 100% certain if it was actually her or not.
In the summer of 1974 Sheriff Mack Holley created Utah County’s first Detective Division, and Laura Aime’s murder was their first investigation. Strangely enough, in an interview between (retired) Chief Investigator for Utah County Brent Bollock and True Crime blogger and creator Captain Borax, Bollock said that (former) Utah County Sheriff Mack Holley never believed that Bundy was responsible for Aimes murder, and even wrote about it in one of his books (which I was unable to locate online). In fact, Holley strongly felt that another man was responsible for her murder, one that was later convicted of killing his girlfriend, even going so far as telling a member of the team of investigating detectives: ‘Bundy had nothing to do with our case, so forget him. That man didn’t do our case. I wish you’d get that through your head.’
A little over a week after Aime disappeared on November 8, 1974, Bundy tried (but failed) to kidnap Carol DaRonch from the Fashion Place Mall on South State Street in Murray. After the 18-year-old telephone operator escaped, Ted quickly realized that he needed a new victim, so he drove roughly 25 miles away to Bountiful and abducted 17 year-old Debra Kent (this will also be important later). The family was attending a showing of ‘The Redhead’ at Viewmont High School that went later than expected and Deb volunteered to take the family car and pick up her two younger brothers at a nearby roller skating rink. On her walk out to the parking lot, Bundy abducted her, then killed her and dumped her body roughly 50 miles away in American Fork Canyon.
In 1977 investigators took a second look into Aime’s murder, and they spoke with her girlfriend Marin Beverige, who positively identified Bundy as an individual that was at Brown’s on the night she disappeared. In fact, Marin’s sister worked at the establishment and even claimed to see Ted pull up and pick up Laura the night she disappeared. Beverige told detectives that she first noticed him one day in September 1974, and remembered that he drove a Volkswagen and told her he was a student at the local university. She also recalled one occasion where she was sitting in the sunshine with Laura and a group of friends near a local high school and the man joined them. When a young guy teased Aime by putting some grass down her halter top, he objected, and ‘this guy came unglued and told him Laura was his. He was really weird.’ Marin said that the attractive young man kept randomly showing up all around Lehi, and always seemed to be looking for Laura. She recalled an event that took place one night at The Knotty Pine, where: ‘he came in and was sitting there talking and I got up…..When Laura said, ‘I’m ready to go,’ this guy said, ‘You can’t. I’m going to rape you.’ Laura just laughed and pushed him away.’’
Beverige informed detectives that she had seen the man on multiple occasions, andone evening he even knocked on her front door and asked to speak to Aime privately. She agreed and after the two went outside to speak alone: ‘Laura was really shook up. But she wouldn’t say what happened.’ About the events surrounding her friend’s disappearance, Marin had a completely different account of what happened that night, one that differed greatly from the one gathered by the Utah County Sheriff’s Department: according to Beverige, her, Laura, and a bunch of their friends had gathered at her house for a Halloween party, and some guys had brought a large amount of vodka and Laura had gotten pretty drunk: ‘It was about midnight or so, and she was pretty well drunk. And she wanted me to walk downtown with her to get some cigarettes.’ She said no, and as Aime walked away into the darkness it was the last time Marin ever saw her friend. ‘Around three or four o’clock some of us went to town to look for her, but we couldn’t find her.’ When Beverige was shown a lineup she immediately picked out Bundy; a female clerk employed at Brown’s picked him out as well. She was also asked to take a polygraph test which she agreed to, and passed.
Mrs. Aime called the early stages of her daughter’s murder investigation ‘damned frustrating,’ and said it was filled with ‘blunders, omissions and political jealousies,’ elaboratingthat two of the detectives working the case were incredibly uncoordinated: ‘one would come and ask me a question, and a couple hours later the other would come and ask me the same thing. Neither of them would tell the other anything.’ On one occasion a political rival of the (then current) sheriff came to speak with the family to ask them questions for his own personal investigation, and because the Utah County Sheriff’s Department was so unwilling to share information the Aimes would frequently receive phone calls from other police agencies, asking for information about their daughters murder. Not satisfied with how local LE were handling Laura’s murder, the Aime’s desperately wanted the experienced homicide detectives in Salt Lake City to help with the investigation, but they were turned down and told by (local) officers, ‘if we can’t solve it, no one else can.’ Mr. and Mrs. Aime felt that Laura’s murder had become somewhat coveted politically, and that whoever was able to solve it ‘could have written their own ticket politically.’ But unfortunately it went unsolved, and months went by without investigators learning anything new, and it wasn’t until August 1975, when a handsome young law student was arrested that everything started to come together, and Ted became the first decent suspect in her murder. It was at that point that a highly skilled investigator became involved in the case, Brent Bullock of the Utah County attorney’s office, who the family was incredibly pleased with, and was impressed and encouraged by his ‘professionalism, his relentless search for evidence, and his questioning of witnesses.’
When Bundy escaped prison for the first time in Aspen on June 7, 1977, Jim Aime ‘exploded in anger,’ and he ‘would have gone down there and searched for him myself, if I could have afforded to lay off work.’ Thankfully the father of five remained home with his family (he still had four daughters at home), but because Shirlene was so afraid for the safety of their other girls he bought her a .38-caliber pistol. As we all know Bundy was recaptured just a few days later on June 13, 1977, but he escaped for a second time later that same year on December 30 from the Garfield County jail in Glenwood Springs. By this time in the year they had ‘hocked’ the weapon as they were reportedly ‘hard-pressed financially,’ and by his second escape Jim had become even more angry and bitter, and said that his wife was ‘just scared to death. She quit her job so she can stay home and watch the kids. She won’t let those girls out of her sight.’
Laura’s murder wasn’t the only time that the Aime family had to deal with the ‘keystone cops:’ After graduating from high school John joined the military and became a radar specialist in the Army, but after his sister was killed it was as if the entire family’s lives fell apart. After leaving the service he began working in construction in Tacoma, and on April 28, 1975 at around 10 PM he reportedly approached a young woman on a street, briefly spoke with her, then physically accosted her. She testified that she was ‘grabbed by Aime and dragged toward a brushy area and that the defendant ran when she fell to the ground and screamed,’ (she also said that he tried to ‘drag her’), and after letting out an ear piercing scream he fled, but a passerby caught him and held him at gunpoint until police arrived. Aime later said that he had no intention of harming or molesting the young woman, and his wife Lynn was completely puzzled by that incident and couldn’t provide any explanation for her husband’s actions. John was taken to jail and investigators began digging into his past; a probation officer wrote: ‘he and his family have suffered as a result of his sister being raped and killed in Utah.’ While in jail in Tacoma Aime got married to a medical technician and an Air Force vet; it was an unusual ceremony that took place without the guards’ knowledge. After a two-day trial in June 1977, he was convicted of a misdemeanor assault and was sentenced to a five-year term at Washington’s Western State Hospital at Steilacoom for the rehabilitation of sex-offenders. For obvious reasons, this devastated both of his parents, and about the incident Mr. Aime said that he ‘was just a scared kid from the country.’
Before Bundy was put to death in Florida, he confessed to killing Laura Ann Aime on January 22, 1989 in a 90-minute confession with (retired) SLC Detective Dennis Couch. The following is an excerpt from Dick Larsen’s ‘The Deliberate Stranger:’ ‘Y’know, there’s always been something about that Laura Aime case, that one in particular, that’s really bothered Theodore. When several case files were given to Bundy in his jail cell, under the discovery procedure …. the first one he went for … and really tore into … was the Aime case…. ‘ When asked about his involvement in Aime’s murder, Ted lowered his head and refused to talk about it. Strangely enough, I’ve heard that he washed some of his victims’ hair and manicured some of their nails as well, but this is the first time I’ve written about a woman that he actually did it to. After Aime’s remains were found, law enforcement determined that her hair had been recently shampooed, making them believe her killer had returned to her corpse on multiple occasions to engage in acts of necrophilia. About this act is a passage from Michaud and Aynesworths book, ‘The Only Living Witness:’ ‘Bundy also indirectly touched on some old mysteries, such as Laura Aime’s freshly-washed hair, and Melissa Smith’s make-up: ‘If you’ve got time,’ he told Hagmaier, ‘they can be anything you want them to be.’’
According to an article published by The Salt Lake Tribune right before Bundy was executed, investigators had to exhume Aime’s remains in order to get another hair sample because the first one they obtained after her remains were initially discovered were misplaced. Jim Aime wept at the mere thought of it, but relented, saying ‘why not? They can’t hurt her any more. It seems like these things just couldn’t happen.’ About her daughter’s disappearance, Mrs. Aime commented that ‘there’s no way of putting it out of your mind…’
According to Ann Rule’s true crime classic, ‘The Stranger Beside Me,’ Laura’ toxicology report came back just over 0.1, which is obviously an indicator of impairment (at least from a legal standpoint), but at the same time wasn’t so extreme or outrageous that she wouldn’t have been able to defend herself (or at the very least scream or try to run away). Now, if she really was kept alive up until a week before her death, and she wasn’t murdered immediately after the Halloween party… Was Bundy plying her with alcohol up until her final moments? Another thing that is jumping out at me as being weird is… if Laura Aime was kept alive until roughly a week before her body was discovered, that would put her murder date sometime in between November 17-20 (roughly, give or take)… Did he somehow keep multiple victims alive at the same time (somewhere)? Were Aime and Deb Kent somehow kept alive together in an unknown location for a period of time? Did he kill the one in front of the other, like with the Lake Sammamish murders of Denise Naslund and Jan Ott?
Despite the way she was killed was very similar to Bundy’s MO and she fit the physical description of one of his victims,he initially denied any responsibility for Aime’s murder and refused to talk about her when he was questioned. However, (most likely) in an attempt to delay his execution in the days leading up to his death Ted finally confessed to the murder of Laura Ann Aime.
Mr. Aime died at the age of 59 on November 26, 1987. It appears that in 1980 Shirlene Aime adopted her granddaughter Danika, who was given the middle name of Laura after the aunt that she never had the chance to meet. Mrs. Aime died on November 1, 2011 in Reno, Nevada at the age of 77. Laura’s only brother John died at the age of 56 on November 29, 2010 in Gunnison, Utah but itappears that all of her sisters are still alive. Because it’s’ strongly suspected that Bundy kept her alive for a period of time after abducting her, the Aime family chose to list ‘November 1974’ as her official date of death on her gravestone.
Update: On April 1, 2026 the Utah County Sheriff’s Office officially confirmed that Ted Bundy was the individual responsible for the murder of Laura Ann Aime: while he had previously confessed to the murder just prior to his 1989 execution, investigators simply didn’t have the physical evidence to definitively close the case until recently. Using new forensic technology acquired in 2023, the Utah state crime lab was able to extract a single male DNA profile from evidence from the original 1974 crime scene; this profile provided an irrefutable match to Ted Bundy.
The Aime children: Laura (right ), John (left), and Evelyn (middle).A picture of Laura from Elementary School, courtesy of ‘Ted Bundy: I was Trying to Think Like an Elk.’A picture of Laura from the 1971 North Sanpete Junior High School yearbook, courtesy of ‘Ted Bundy: I was Trying to Think Like an Elk.’ Laura in a picture from her time in the ‘Silver Spurs Riding Club,’ courtesy of ‘Ted Bundy: I was Trying to Think Like an Elk.’ Laura Ann Aime. Her mother said she had ‘hell inside her’ after watching her ride her shining blue Arabian horse at top speed.Laura Ann Aime.Laura Aime.Laura Ann Aime.Laura Aime, blowing a bubble.A group picture from Laura’s time at North Sanpete High School; Laura is in the back row on the far right.Laura in a group photo.Photo courtesy of OddStops.The Aime’s residence. Photo courtesy of ‘Crimes Forgotten by Time.’ Investigators at the site where two students found the remains of Laura Ann Aime. Photo courtesy of OddStops.Investigators at the site where two students found the remains of Laura Ann Aime. Photo courtesy of OddStops.Investigators at the site where two students found the remains of Laura Ann Aime. Photo courtesy of ‘Ted Bundy: I was trying to Think like an Elk.’Investigators at American Fork Canyon carrying out the remains of Laura Aime.A picture from Laura Aime’s autopsy, courtesy of the series: ‘Hunting Ted Bundy.’A picture from Laura Aime’s autopsy, courtesy of the series: ‘Hunting Ted Bundy.’A picture from Laura Aime’s autopsy, courtesy of the series: ‘Hunting Ted Bundy.’A picture from Laura Aime’s autopsy, courtesy of the series: ‘Hunting Ted Bundy.’A picture from Laura Aime’s autopsy, courtesy of the series: ‘Hunting Ted Bundy.’A picture from Laura Aime’s autopsy, courtesy of the series: ‘Hunting Ted Bundy.’A picture from Laura Aime’s autopsy, courtesy of the series: ‘Hunting Ted Bundy.’A labeled aerial map of the dump site of Laura Aime in American Fork Canyon. The yellow line shows the trail the students took when they found her remains. Photo courtesy of OddStops.A labeled map of where Robinson Park is located compared to the dump site of Laura Aime in American Fork Canyon. A chart of the average temperatures in SLC in November 1974 when Laura was missing and possibly being kept alive somewhere.Aime’s gravesite at the Fairview Cemetery in Utah.Where ‘The Knotty Pine’ once stood in Lehi, UT, in the left hand side of the building. Picture taken in November 2022.Where ‘The Knotty Pine’ once stood in Lehi, UT. Picture taken in November 2022.Laura walked down this street the night she disappeared to go to the Knotty Pine. Photo courtesy of Captain Borax. An old advertisement for the Knotty Pine Cafe. Photo courtesy of Captain Borax.William S. Robinson Park in American Fork, Utah. Picture taken in November 2022.William S. Robinson Park in American Fork, Utah. Picture taken in November 2022.William S. Robinson Park in American Fork, Utah. Picture taken in November 2022.A statue at William S. Robinson Park in American Fork, Utah. Picture taken in November 2022.The entrance the American Fork Canyon. Picture taken in November 2022.The entrance the American Fork Canyon. Picture taken in November 2022.The entrance the American Fork Canyon. Picture taken in November 2022.A building at the entrance the American Fork Canyon. Picture taken in November 2022.A gate at the entrance the American Fork Canyon. Picture taken in November 2022.A sign for the Timpanogos Cave at the entrance the American Fork Canyon. Picture taken in November 2022.A sign for the Uinta National Forest at the entrance the American Fork Canyon. Picture taken in November 2022.This white SUV is where the PD coordinates took me from the OddStops website. This white SUV is where the PD coordinates took me from the OddStops website. Former Utah County Attorney, Noall T. Wootton. Photo courtesy of Captain Borax.An article about an antler contest that Mr. Aime won, published by The Pyramid on November 8, 1968.A picture of Mr. Aime with his award winning buck. Photo courtesy of Captain Borax.An newspaper blurb mentioning some of the Aime sisters, published by The Pyramid on September 9, 1971.A newspaper blurb mentioning some of the Aime girls, published by The Pyramid on June 8, 1972.An article about the murder of Laura Aime. An article about the murder of Laura Aime. An undated article about the murder of Laura Aime. An undated article about the murder of Laura Aime. An undated article about the disappearance of Laura Aime.Part one of an article on Aime published by The Deseret News on November 28, 1974.Part two of an article on Aime published by The Deseret News on November 28, 1974.An article on Aime published by The Idaho Statesman on November 29, 1974.An article about the disappearance of Laura Aime published by The Daily Herald on November 29, 1974.Part one of an article about the disappearance of Laura Aime published by The Daily Herald on November 29, 1974.Part two of an article about the disappearance of Laura Aime published by The Daily Herald on November 29, 1974.An article about Bundy mentioning Laura Aime published by The Daily Sitka Sentinel on November 29, 1974.An article about the disappearance of Laura Aime published by The Deseret News on November 30, 1974. An article about Laura Aime published by The Daily Herald on December 1, 1974.An article about Laura Aime published by The Daily Herald on December 3, 1974.An article about Laura Aime published by The Spanish Pyramid on December 5, 1974.An article about the disappearance of Laura Aime published by The Deseret News on December 7, 1974.An article about Aime published by The Deseret News on December 9, 1974.An article about Aime published by The Deseret News on February 7, 1975.An article about Aime published by The Del Rio News Herald on March 14, 1975.An article about Aime published by The Salt Lake Tribune on March 15, 1975.An article about Aime published by The Daily Herald on March 21, 1975.An article mentioning Aime published by The Eugene Register-Guard on April 24, 1975.An article mentioning Aime published by The Bulletin on October 3, 1975.An article mentioning Aime published by The Spokesman-Review on October 3, 1975.An article mentioning Aime published by The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner on October 4, 1975.An article about Bundy mentioning Laura Aime published by The Spokane Chronicle on October 22, 1975.An article about Bundy mentioning Laura Aime published by The Kitsap Sun on October 31, 1975.An article about Bundy being freed on bail that mentions Laura Aime published by The Ogden Standard-Examiner on November 21, 1975.An article about Bundy mentioning Laura Aime published by The Daily Herald on November 21, 1975.An article about Bundy mentioning Laura Aime published by The Spokesman-Review on March 4, 1976.An article about Bundy mentioning Laura Aime published by The Deseret News on September 9, 1977.An article about Bundy mentioning Laura Aime published by The Deseret News on December 16, 1977.An article mentioning Aime published by The Deseret News on April 3, 1978.An article mentioning Aime published by The Evening Independent on July 25, 1979.An article mentioning Aime published by The Deseret News on February 14, 1983.Part one of an article mentioning Aime published before Bundy was executed by The Daily Herald on January 5, 1989.Part two of an article mentioning Aime published before Bundy was executed by The Daily Herald on January 5, 1989.An article mentioning Laura Aime published just before Bundy was executed on January 22, 1989.An article mentioning Laura Aime after Bundy was executed published by The Deseret News Tribune on February 28, 1989.
A funeral card for Aime. Courtesy of Captain Borax.Laura Aime’s obituary published by The Daily Tribune on December 1, 1974.
Laura Aime’s obituary published by The Spanish Fork Press on December 4, 1974.Another obituary for Aime.A thank you to the local community from the Aime family regarding their kindness surrounding Laura being killed published by The Pyramid on December 26, 1974.Page one of Laura Aime’s autopsy report. Document courtesy of Erin Banks/CrimePiper.Page two of Laura Aime’s autopsy report. Document courtesy of Erin Banks/CrimePiper.Page three of Laura Aime’s autopsy report. Document courtesy of Erin Banks/CrimePiper.Page four of Laura Aime’s autopsy report. Document courtesy of Erin Banks/CrimePiper.Page five of Laura Aime’s autopsy report. Document courtesy of Erin Banks/CrimePiper.Page six of Laura Aime’s autopsy report. Document courtesy of Erin Banks/CrimePiper.Page seven of Laura Aime’s autopsy report. Document courtesy of Erin Banks/CrimePiper.Page eight of Laura Aime’s autopsy report. Document courtesy of Erin Banks/CrimePiper.Page nine of Laura Aime’s autopsy report. Document courtesy of Erin Banks/CrimePiper.James and his sister, Evelyn Aime.James and Shirlene Aime’s application for a marriage license.James and Shirlene’s marriage certificate.James and Shirlene Aime’s marriage certificate.A newspaper blurb about a domestic incident featuring the Aime’s published by The Daily Herald on April 29, 1966.James Aime’s WWII registration card.The second part of James Aime’s WWII registration card.John Aime.John Aime.Mrs. Aime and her family when she was a kid.Mrs. Aime. Photo courtesy of Ancestry.Shirlene Aime (left). Photo courtesy of Ancestry.Evelyn Aime from the 1977 American Fork High School yearbook.Michelle Aime from the 1977 American Fork High School yearbook.Michelle Aime from the 1978 American Fork High School yearbook.An article about Laura’s brother published by The News Tribune on May 1, 1977.An article about Laura’s brother published by The News Tribune on June 17, 1977.An article mentioning Aime published by The Orem-Geneva Times on August 7, 1980.A notice about Mrs. Aime adopting her granddaughter published in The Orem-Geneva Times on August 21, 1980.Mrs. Aime with the granddaughter she adopted, Danika.James Aime’s obituary published in The Daily Herald on November 29, 1987.A note about James Aime’s memorial service published in The Daily Herald on November 29, 1987.A screenshot of Evelyn Aime from an interview she did with Captain Borax, whose real name is Chris Mortenson. I keep calling him Captain Borax as if its the name his parents gave him that’s listed on his birth certificate.Marin Beverige.A screenshot of Sheriff Mack Holley’s published memoirs, ‘From the Journal of Sheriff Mack Holley, Utah County Sheriff’s Department Events, 1960 to 1985, BYU Basketball, Football, Personal Observations,’ published on January 1, 1986.
Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer was born on May 21, 1960 to Lionel and Joyce Dahmer in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; he was the oldest of two boys, and had a little brother named David (born on December 18, 1966). Joyce was born on February 7, 1936 in Columbus, Wisconsin and Lionel was born on July 29, 1936 in Milwaukee. In Jeffrey’s younger years his father was a chemistry student at Marquette University, and helater worked as a research scientist;Joyce was a teletype machine instructor. It’s been reported that Mrs. Dahmer was a hypochondriacthat was often greedy for attention, and multiple sources have claimed that Jeffrey was deprived of attention as an infant due to her intense struggle with mental illness and depression… Others however, suggest that he was generally adored and doted on throughout his entire childhood by both of his parents.
As little Jeffrey grew into toddlerhood his mother was beginning to spend more and more time in bed, and by the time he was in first grade his father was mostly absent, as he was away at school. One time Joyce attempted suicide by taking too much of one of her medications called Equanil, which is prescribed to help treat symptoms of anxiety and nervousness. As an adult Jeff said that from a very young age he was ‘unsure of the solidity of the family,’ and that he recalled a large amount of tension in the family home, as well as many fights between his parents in his formative years.
In his early years, Dahmer was a normal, ‘energetic, and happy child,’ but hebecame visibly subdued after having a double hernia surgery right before his fourth birthday. While in elementary school, little Jeffrey was a timid, quiet child that had few friends, and one of his teachers remembered seeing early signs of abandonment due to Mr. Dahmer’s glaring absence (as well as his mother’s severe mental health issues). It didn’t help that Joyce’s condition got even worse when she became pregnant with David, and after hisbrother was born Jeff became even more withdrawn, and the family’s fairly-frequent moves didn’t help him establish roots either. The same year David was born Mr. Dahmer graduated from college and got a job as an analytical chemist in Akron, Ohio.
From a young age, Jeff was interested in studying and preserving animal bones, and learned how to clean and preserve them. His fascination may have started at the age of four, when he saw his dad removing animal bones from beneath the family home. According to Lionel, his son was ‘oddly thrilled’ by the soundthey made and became preoccupied with bones,initially calling them his ‘fiddlesticks.’ On occasion Jeff would search underneath and around his family home looking for more animal bones, and would often explore the bodies of living creatures to help map out where certain ones were located. In May of 1968 the Dahmer’s moved to Bath Township in Ohio, which was the family’s third house in only two years. The residence stood on one and a half acres of thick trees and woods, complete with a small hut that was only a short jaunt from the home.
During dinner two years after his interest in bones began Jeff asked his dad what would happen if the bones from the chicken they were eating were placed in bleach. Lionel was pleased with what he thought at the time was scientific curiosity, and showed him how to preserve animal bones using bleach, and Jeffrey started incorporating these preservation skills into his collecting techniques. Later that same year, Joyce started taking more than the prescribed daily dose of her sleeping meds, laxatives, and Equanil, which only further alienated her family. Dahmer also started collecting the remains of dead animals (including roadkill), which he would then dissect and bury next to the hut on the family’s property, and on occasion he would place the skull on top of homemade crosses. According to one of Dahmer’s few friends, he shared with them that he was curious as to how animals ‘fit together,’ and on one occasion in 1975 he beheaded the carcass of a dog he found (just by chance) before he nailed its body to a treethen impaled its skull on a stick behind his house. Then later, as a ‘prank,’ he later invited a friend to look at what he did.
As a young child Jeffrey collected large insects, as well as the skulls of small animals that he expertly preserved in formaldehyde. In October of 1966 the Dahmer’s moved to Doylestown, Ohio and as a teenager Jeff was incredibly disengaged with his peers, and didn’t have very many friends. In later interviews he said that his strong interest in murder and necrophilia began around the age of fourteen, and it seems it was the end of his parents’ marriage and their bitter divorce that helped make him turn his desires into actions. Immediately beginning in his freshman year at Revere High School, Dahmer was seen as an outcast, and had started drinking beer and hard liquor at the age of fourteen, oftentimes concealing his booze inside his coat. When a school mate asked why he was drinking scotch during an early morning history class, he just shrugged his shoulders and told him the alcohol was his ‘medicine.’ Despite being mostly quiet and unwilling to communicate, during Jeffrey’sfreshman year he was seen as polite and highly intelligent by teachers even though he earned only average grades. Fun Serial Killer Fact #1: during his time in secondary school he played competitive tennis and briefly played in the band.
By the time he reached puberty, Jeff realized he was homosexual, a fact he initially attempted to hide from his parents. During his early teen years he had a short relationship with another boy around his age (although the two never engaged in sexual intercourse). By Jeff’s own admission he had started fantasizing about controlling and dominating a completely submissive male partner in his early to mid-teens, and his masturbatory fantasies slowly evolved to him focusing on chests and torsos, which became interwoven with the idea of human dissection. Around the age of sixteen Jeff developed a fantasy of rendering unconscious a male jogger that he found attractive then making sexual use of his body. He even made an attempt to hide in some bushes with a baseball bat in an attempt to kidnap the man, but (lucky for him) he didn’t happen to pass by that particular day. After his arrest Jeff later admitted that this was his first actual attempt to attack a victim.
Even though he was mostly seen as quiet,Dahmer was considered by his peers and teachers to be a class clown that frequently staged pranks, which earned him a catch phrase: ‘doing a Dahmer.’ These ‘pranks’ included ‘bleating’ and faking epileptic seizures or cerebral palsy at both school and local stores, and on occasion he would perform these antics for cash so that he could buy alcohol. By 1977 Dahmer’s grades had plummeted and his concerned parents hired him a private tutor; this resulted in only limited success. In that same year in a desperate attempt to save their marriage, Lionel and Joyce started marriage counseling, but despite this they continued to fight constantly. When Mr. Dahmer discovered his wife had participated in a short affair in September 1977, they finally decided to divorce, telling both of their sons that they wished to do so ‘amicably.’ Lionel moved out of the family home in early 1978, and despite the best of intentions the process of their separating quickly became increasingly hateful and acrimonious.
By the time of Dahmer’s first murder at the age of eighteen his alcohol consumption had completely spun out of control. A few weeks before he graduated one of his teachers observed him sitting by the school parking lot, drinking several beers. When they threatened to report him, Jeff told them he was experiencing ‘a lot of problems’ at home and that the school’s guidance counselor was aware of them. That spring, Joyce (breaking a court order) moved out of the family home with David and relocated to Chippewa Falls, to stay with family (without informing her ex-husband); Jeff had just turned eighteen and stayed behind. His parents’ divorce was finalized on July 24, 1978, and Mrs. Dahmer was awarded custody of their younger son as well as alimony.
Jeffrey committed his first murder three weeks after he graduated from high school on June 18, 1978:eighteen-year-old hitchhiker, Steven Hicks. He lured the young man (who had been hitchhiking to a rock concert at Chippewa Lake Park) to his house with the promise of ‘a few beers,’ and according to Jeff the sight of the bare-chested young man pulled at his deepest, darkest sexual desires. Unfortunately when the young man began talking about women he immediately knew that any passes he made would be rejected, and after several hours of chatting he told Jeffrey that he ‘wanted to leave.’ Now, this was the exact opposite of what he wanted to hear, so he bludgeoned Hicks to death with a 10-pound dumbbell. Dahmer later confessed that he hit his victim from behind twice as he was sitting in a chair, and when he quickly was rendered unconscious, strangled him to death with the bar of the dumbbell. He then took the young man’s clothes off before he ran his hands along his chest then stood over his remains and masturbated. A few hours after the murder Jeff dragged the remains to his basement, and the following day dissected his body; he later buried it in a shallow grave in his backyard. Several weeks later Dahmer dug up Hick’s corpse and stripped the flesh off his bones then dissolved it in acid before flushing the solution down the toilet. He crushed the bones with a sledgehammer then scattered them in the woods behind his home, and tossed Hicks’ necklace as well as the knife he used to dismember him off of the West Bath Road bridge and into the Cuyahoga River. Six weeks after this murder Lionel (along with his new fiancé) stopped by his former home, where they found Jeff living by himself.
After graduating from high school in August 1978 Dahmer went on to attend Ohio State University, where he planned on majoring in business but dropped out after only one quarter. He failed the majority of his courses, including Classical Civilizations, Administrative Science, and Introduction to Anthropology; the only class he did well in was Riflery, where he earned a B−. At the end of his only attempt at higher learning his GPA was a 0.45. On one occasion Lionel surprised his son with a visit only to find his dorm room a mess and was filled with empty liquor bottles. Despite the fact that he paid for two terms in advance, Jeff dropped out of school after just three months, and with no real plans for his life Mr. Dahmer insisted that his son join the military, and he enlisted in the Army in late December 1978 (I’ve also seen it listed as January 1979).
Dahmer was sent to basic training at Fort McClellan in Anniston, Alabamabefore beginning his training as a medical specialist at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, TX. On one occasion he was reprimanded for being drunk while stationed in Fort Sam Houston, which resulted in his entire platoon being punished, earning him a brutal beating from his fellow recruits. After training was completed Dahmer was sent to Baumholder, West Germany on July 13, 1979 and he served as a combat medic in the 2nd Battalion, 68th Armored Regiment, 8th Infantry Division. Reportedly during Jeff’s first year of military service he was an average or slightly above average’ soldier, and it’s speculated that his worsening alcohol abuse affected his performance and he was deemed to be ‘unsuitable for military service’ and in March 1981 he was discharged from the Army. Because Dahmer’s superior officers didn’t feel that any of the issues he had in the military would be applicable to civilian life, he received an honorable discharge.
On March 24, 1981 Jeffrey was sent to Fort Jackson, South Carolina for a military debriefing and afterwards was given a plane ticket for anywhere in the country. He chose Miami Beach in Florida because he was ‘tired of the cold’ and wanted to see if he could make it completely on his own. Dahmer also told investigators during his confession that he felt like he couldn’t go home to face his dad. While in Florida, Jeff found employment at a sandwich shop, and spent most of his money on booze. He was quickly evicted from the motel he was staying due to non-payment, and at first he spent his nights on the beach as he kept working at the delicatessen buthe eventually reached out to Lionel in September and asked if he could come back to Ohio.
After Dahmer’s atrocities came to light, investigators in Germany looked into any possible links between him and any homicides that took place while he was stationed there, and it was eventually determined that he did not commit any murders while serving in the Army overseas. After returning to Ohio he lived with Lionel and his stepmother, and upon moving in he insisted on being given chores to help keep him busy while he was looking for a job. While at home Jeffrey continued to drink heavily, and two weeks after returning home he was arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct; he was given a suspended 10-day jail sentence and was fined $60.
Mr. Dahmer attempted to wean his son off alcohol but was unsuccessful, and in December 1981 Jeffrey was sent to live with his grandmother Catherine in West Allis, Wisconsin. Lionel’s mother was a retired elementary school teacher (specifically history), and she was the only member of the family that Jeff was affectionate with, and his parents hoped that a combination of her influence and the change of location might help convince Jeffrey to quit drinking, find a job, and be a contributing member of society. Initially this arrangement worked out beautifully: he accompanied his grandmother to church on Sunday’s and helped her around the house and yard, all while trying to find employment. He also was mindful of (most of) her rules (despite continuing to smoke and drink), and in early 1982 he got a position as a phlebotomist at the Milwaukee Blood Plasma Center, a job he kept for ten months before eventually getting laid off. After this Jeff remained unemployed for over two years, during which he lived off of whatever spare cash Catherine was able to part with. Unfortunately, old problems reared their ugly head and on August 8, 1982 Dahmer was arrested for indecent exposure at the Wisconsin State Fair Park when he was observed exposing himself ‘on the south side of the Coliseum in which 25 people were present including women and children.’ He was convicted and fined $50 plus court costs.
In January 1985 Dahmer got a job as a mixer at the Milwaukee Ambrosia Chocolate Factory, where he worked third shift from 11 PM to 7 AM, six nights per week; he had a set schedule, and had Saturday nights off. Right after he started this position he had a run in at the West Allis Public Library, where he was propositioned by another man while reading who gave Jeffrey a piece of paper with an offer of fellatio. Although he did ignore him the event only stirred up familiar feelings of desire as well as fantasies of control and dominance, and after this event he began to visit the local gay scene, including bars, bathhouses, and bookstores. It’s also around this time that he stole a male mannequin, which he briefly used for sexual reasons until his grandma found it in a closet and forced him to get rid of it.
By late 1985, Dahmer had begun to frequent local bathhouses (which he felt were ‘relaxing’), but was growing increasingly irritated and frustrated during his encounters due to his partners’ moving, elaborating that: ‘I trained myself to view people as objects of pleasure instead of as people.’ It was because of this that in June 1986 he began giving his victims crushed up sleeping pills dissolved in liquor, then waited for them to pass out before he performed various sexual acts on their completely still, nearly lifeless bodies. To convince his physicians to keep him supplied with an adequate amount of this pharmaceutical, Jeff told them that he worked overnights and needed the medication to help him adjust to his new lifestyle. After roughly twelve reported instances of Dahmer acting inappropriately with other members, the bathhouses’ revoked his membership and he was forced to use hotel rooms to keep up with his habit.
It was around this time that Dahmer read an article in a local newspaper about an upcoming funeral of an 18-year-old male, and got the idea to steal his corpse and take it home (WTF?). He confessed that he went to the cemetery and attempted to dig up the remains but found the ground to be too hard and abandoned this particular project. On September 8, 1986 Jeff was arrested for lewd and lascivious behavior for masturbating in front of two 12-year-old boys near the Kinnickinnic River. At first he told police that he was simply urinating and had no idea there was anyone else around, but he quickly caved and admitted to what he did. The charge was changed to disorderly conduct andon March 10, 1987 he was sentenced to one year of probation and had to undergo mental health counseling.
On November 20, 1987 Dahmer encountered Steven Tuomo at a bar and convinced him to come back to the Ambassador Hotel with him, where he had rented a room for the evening. According to Jeff, he had no intention of killing the 25-year-old, and only intended to drug him then lie next to him and ‘explore his body.’ When he woke up the next morning he discovered that Tuomi was in bed next to him, and his chest was ‘crushed in,’ and was covered in ‘black and blue’ bruises. Dried blood was seeping out of his mouth, and Dahmer quickly noticed that his fists and one forearm were also covered in deep purple bruises. He later confessed that he had no recollection of killing the young man, and ‘could not believe this had happened.’
Jeffrey then went out and bought a large suitcase, which he used to take Tuomi’s remains out of the hotel room and to his grandmother’s house. One week later, he cut off Tuomi’s head, arms, and legs then fileted the bones off his body before cutting his flesh into small, easy to handle chunks. Dahmer then placed the skin inside plastic garbage bags then wrapped the bones inside a sheet and pounded them into dust with a sledgehammer. The entire dismemberment process took him approximately two hours and he got rid of everything except for the young mans head; he masturbated on the corpse before disposing of the remains. After having the head for roughly two weeks, Jeffrey boiled it in a mixture of bleach and Soilax (an alkaline industrial detergent) in hopes of preserving the skull, but it eventually became too brittle and he was forced to destroy it. He later admitted that after this particular event his ‘obsession with killing went into full swing’ and he ‘didn’t even try to stop it after that.’ Dahmer killed two more victims at Catherine’s house before she made him move out in 1988. She said that she had no knowledge of her grandson’s crimes but finally had enough of his drinking, his habit to bring young men home, and the horrible smells that started seeping from her basement.
In September 1988 Dahmer moved into his own apartment, a one-bedroom located at 808 North 24th Street in Milwaukee, and just two days after moving in he lured a 13-year-old Laotian boy to his residence by telling him that he wanted to take naked pictures of him.This act resulted in charges of second-degree sexual assault as well as sexual exploitation. Jeffrey pleaded guilty and said that to him the young victim looked much older, and while he was awaiting sentencing he once again put his grandmothers basement to use: in March 1989 he lured, drugged, strangled, sodomized, photographed, dismembered, and disposed of Anthony Sears. Dahmer found the aspiring model particularly attractive, and after his arrest he confessed that he didn’t want to ’lose him,’ and because of this he preserved a select few of his body parts, even going so far as to mummifying his head and genitals.
In May 1989 while on trial for child molestation, Dahmer was the very definition of sorrow, arguing poignantly in his own defense that he had seen the ‘error of his ways’ and even marked the event as a ‘turning point in his life.’ His counsel told the court that his young client needed treatment, not jail time, and to this the judge agreed: he handed down a one-year prison sentence with a day pass (of sorts), which allowed him to leave and go to work during the day on the condition that he returned to the prison at night. After his release he was also given five-years of probation. Dahmer was granted an early release after serving only 10 months of his sentence; when released he briefly lived with Catherine.
Over the next two years Dahmer would go onto murder twelve more young men. After his short stint in prison his next victim was Raymond Smith, a prostitute that Jeffrey lured to his home for sex. He gave the young man a drink laced with sleeping pills thenstrangled him to death; Jeff then took pictures of him in suggestive positions beforedismembering him. When he murdered his next victim (Edward Smith) he accidentally destroyed his skull while trying to dry it out in the oven, which made it blow up. Dahmer later told LE that he felt ‘rotten’ about this particular murder because he was unable to keep any ‘mementos’ from his body, which to him felt like a real waste.
As Jeff progressed with his hobby he began developing rituals, and started experimenting with different chemicals and eating the flesh of his victims. Healso attempted lobotomies, and drilled into the skull of Errol Lindsey while he was still alive and injected him with muriatic acid (which is another term for hydrochloric acid), which is a colorless solution with a very particular and pungent aroma that is technically classified as a ‘strong acid.’ He hoped this would put his victim into a permanent submissive state, but he woke up halfway through and said, ‘I have a headache; what time is it?’ After that, Jeffrey gave up in his attempt and strangled him to death.
A neighbor in Jeffrey’s building named Sandra Smith called the police on May 27, 1991 and told them that there was a young boy of Asian descent that was running around naked in the streets. Despite the fourteen-year-old being incoherent when officers arrived on the scene, they took Dahmer for his word that the boy was his lover and was 19-years-old. The cops, not wanting to get involved in a homosexual domestic dispute, simply escorted the two home. When arriving at Jeffrey’s apartment one of the officers ‘peeked his head around in the bedroom but didn’t really take a good look,’ then left after telling him to ‘take care’ of the boy. After they left, Dahmer injected hydrochloric acid into his brain, killing him. If the police even bothered conducting even a basic search of the residence they would have discovered the body of Tony Hughes.
Between 1978 and 1991 Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer took the lives of 17 boys and young men. When choosing his victims he was careful to choose men on the ‘fringes of society,’ that were borderline criminal or ‘runaways,’ which helped make their disappearance less noticeable which helped to reduce his chance of getting caught. During the murder process Dahmer would frequently stop what he was doing and take Polaroids of his victims so he could relive the experience over and over again.
On July 22, 1991 Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer’s rampage through the streets of Milwaukee ended when he was arrested after two police officers were led to his home after picking up his latest intended (escaped) victim, Tracy Edwards. The 32-year-old black man was wandering the streets with handcuffs hanging from his wrist, and officers decided to investigate his claims that a ‘weird dude’ had drugged then restrained him (God, finally). When they got to Dahmer’s apartment he calmly offered to get the keys for the cuffs, and Edwards claimed that the knife he threatened him with was in the bedroom. When the officer went in to look for it he noticed numerous Polaroids of dead bodies lying around, and after he was apprehended and brought into custody he softly muttered: ‘for what I did, I should be dead.’ As investigators searched his apartment they found a head in his refrigerator, three more in the freezer, as well as various additional horrors, including preserved skulls, and jars with formaldehyde-soaked genitalia. During interviews Dahmer said that he planned to build a private altar made out of the skulls of his victims’ (complete with globe lights and incense), which he hoped would be ‘a place where I could feel at home.’
After his arrest in Wisconsin, the Summit County Sheriffs as well as the (local) Bath Township PD combed the property of the Dahmer family’s former home, and unearthed hundreds of bone fragments in the wooded area behind the residence (located at 4480 West Bath Road), specifically a vertebra and two molars of his first victim (Steven Hicks). Jeff was charged for his murder three days later.
Dahmer’s trial of the century began in January 1992, and given that the majority of his victims were black there was a great deal of racial tensions surrounding it, therefore strict security measures were taken, including an eight-foot wall of bulletproof glass separating him from the public. The fact that there was only a single black juror only seemed to make matters worse. Even though he confessed to the atrocities during interviews with police, Dahmer pleaded not guilty to all charges in the beginning… but he eventually changed his plea to ‘guilty by virtue of insanity.’ Hisdefense argued that his gruesome behavior was proof that only someone that was insane would be able to commit such atrocious acts,but thankfully the jury believed the prosecution’s assertion that Jeff was completely aware that what he did was evil, but he chose to do it anyway.
On February 15, 1992 after only ten hours of deliberating, a jury of his peers found Jeffrey Dahmer guilty (and sane) on all counts. He was sentenced to fifteen consecutive life terms in prison, with a 16th one tacked on later that May. It’s been reported that he adjusted well to his new life at the Columbia Correctional Institution, and despite initially being kept away from the general population he was able to convince the jail administration to let him slowly integrate more with other inmates. He found religion in the form of books and photos sent to him by Lionel, and he was even given special permission by the prison to be baptized by a local pastor.
One day for his work assignment Jeffrey was instructed to work with two other inmates: convicted murderers Christopher Scarver and Jesse Anderson. After being left alone by guards to finish their work, Scarver brutally beat both men with a metal rod he swiped from the prison’s weight room, and on November 28, 1994 Dahmer was pronounced dead after roughly one hour; Anderson passed away a few days later. Right after the murders occurred a guard came out and publicly stated that Scarver (a suspected schizophrenic) said that ‘God told me to do it.’ After Jeff’s murder Scarver was bounced around from prison to prison, and eventually landed up in the Centennial Correctional Facility in Colorado, where he remains to this day; he is currently 59 years old. In 2012 an agent representing the killer announced that he planned on writing a tell-all book about how he killed Jeffrey Dahmer; as of March 2024 that book remains unpublished.
In 2015 Christopher Scarver did an interview with The New York Post about why he killed his two fellow inmates. He told them that he wasdisturbed not only by Dahmer’s crimes but also because he had a habit of creating ‘severed limbs’ out of prison food as a way to antagonize his fellow inmates. After being ‘taunted’ by both of his victims during their work detail, Scarver said that he confronted Jeffrey about what he did before beating him and the second inmate to death. Healso claimed that prison guards allowed the murders to happen because they left the three men alone together.
Joyce Dahmer passed away on November 27, 2000 at the age of 64 in Fresno, CA. Lionel and Shari Dahmer lived in Seville, Ohio until their deaths: Shari passed away on January 13, 2023, and Lionel died eleven months later from a heart attack on December 5, 2023. Jeff’s little brother David is still alive, but doesn’t seem to go out in public very much (or at all, really). I did find some recent pictures of him from the one time he recently ventured out and about, but the way they were taken I’m not including them here because it feels very intrusive and invasive.
Joyce Dahmer with a baby Jeffrey. Photo courtesy of the Dahmer family archives.Lionel, Joyce and a young Jeff. Photo courtesy of the Dahmer family archives.Lionel and a baby Jeff. Photo courtesy of the Dahmer family archives.Lionel, Joyce and a baby Jeffrey. Photo courtesy of the Dahmer family archives.Joyce and baby Jeffrey. Photo courtesy of the Dahmer family archives.Lionel and a young Jeff. Photo courtesy of the Dahmer family archives.Another shot of Lionel and a young Jeffrey. Photo courtesy of the Dahmer family archives.A young Jeffrey Dahmer. Photo courtesy of the Dahmer family archives.An early shot of the Dahmers. Photo courtesy of the Dahmer family archives.A screenshot of Lionel and a young Jeffrey. Photo courtesy of the Dahmer family archives.Another screenshot of Lionel and a young Jeffrey. Photo courtesy of the Dahmer family archives.A screenshot of a young Jeffrey. Photo courtesy of the Dahmer family archives.A young Jeffrey. Photo courtesy of Netflix.Jeffrey with his mom and baby brother David. Photo courtesy of the Dahmer family archives.Jeffrey giving David a kiss. Photo courtesy of the Dahmer family archives.Jeff and his dad on a bike. Photo courtesy of Netflix.A B&W shot of a young Jeff. Photo courtesy of the Dahmer family archives.Another B&W shot of a young Jeffrey. Photo courtesy of the Dahmer family archives.A young Dahmer standing next to a flower. Photo courtesy of Netflix.A screenshot of little Jeffrey Dahmer at an amusement park. Photo courtesy of Netflix.Little Jeffrey holding the family dog. Photo courtesy of Netflix.Another shot of Jeff holding his dog. Photo courtesy of Netflix.A picture of Joyce, Lionel, and Joyce. Photo courtesy of Netflix.A young Jeffrey, playing. Photo courtesy of Netflix.A young Jeffrey. Photo courtesy of the Dahmer family archives.Jeff, Lionel, and David Dahmer. Photo courtesy of Murderpedia.A B&W shot of the Dahmer family. Photo courtesy of Netflix.A young Jeff. Photo courtesy of Netflix.Jeffrey and David Dahmer. Photo courtesy of the Dahmer family archives.A young Jeffrey Dahmer. Photo courtesy of Netflix.A young Jeffrey in a swimming pool. Photo courtesy of Netflix.Another shot of Jeffrey Dahmer in a swimming pool. Photo courtesy of Netflix.A teenage Jeffrey Dahmer.A teenage Jeffrey Dahmer from his time at Revere High School.The Dahmer’s sitting around their kitchen table. Photo courtesy of Netflix (I apologize for the poor quality, it was the only one I could find).Dahmer in a photo for NHS, which he did not belong to. He would frequently sneak into yearbook photos for clubs and organizations he didn’t belong to. Dahmer is blacked out in a NHS picture he snuck into.Jeffrey Dahmer from the 1978 Revere High School yearbook.Dahmer making a face. Photo courtesy of Netflix.Dahmer with a schoolmate from Revere High School.Photo courtesy of Netflix.Dahmer at prom, with his date. Apparently during the event Dahmer left and went to McDonald’s. Photo courtesy of ‘Maniac Nanny.’Jeffrey Dahmer on the day of his graduation from Revere High School. Photo courtesy of Netflix.Jeffrey Dahmer with his father on the day of his high school graduation. Photo courtesy of Netflix.Jeffrey, Lionel, and David Dahmer. Photo courtesy of Murderpedia.Jeffrey Dahmer. Photo courtesy of Netflix.There’s a few pictures of Dahmer floating that are supposedly from his days in the military that are bogus, this is apparently one of the few that exist. Photo courtesy of Netflix.A photo of Dahmer passed out during his time in Germany. He’s drinking Thunderbird brand wine, which apparently is super cheap.Jeff and Lionel. I’m not sure who the woman is. Photo courtesy of the Dahmer family archives.Jeffrey, Lionel, and David Dahmer. Photo courtesy of Murderpedia.Jeffrey Dahmer in a screen grab from an (infamous) old video recording. Photo courtesy of Murderpedia.Dahmer walking into court after his arrest. Photo courtesy of Murderpedia.A shot of Dahmer being escorted into court. Photo courtesy of Murderpedia.A shot of Dahmer during his trial. Photo courtesy of Murderpedia.Lionel and Jeff doing an interview. Photo courtesy of MSNBC.Lionel and Jeff during Jeff’s time in prison. Photo courtesy of Murderpedia.Jeffrey Dahmer in a booking shot from Bath, Ohio in 1981. Photo courtesy of Agence France-Presse Handout.Jeffrey Dahmer in a booking shot from August 1982. Photo courtesy of the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Department.Dahmer’s 1991 mugshotJeff while in prison. Photo courtesy of Murderpedia. Another view of the Oxford Apartments at 924 North 25th Street where Dahmer lived and committed a large amount of his murders. Photo courtesy of The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.The flag flying at half-staff outside the Oxford Apartments after Dahmer was arrested. Photo courtesy of Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.A photo of the hallway outside of Dahmer’s apartment. Screenshot courtesy of Netflix.Another shot of the hallway outside of Dahmer’s apartment. Screenshot courtesy of Netflix.Dahmer’s former neighbor Pamela Bass stands outside his apartment. Photo courtesy of Oxygen.A shot of Dahmer’s apartment door after his 1991 arrest. Screenshot courtesy of Netflix.The layout of Dahmer’s apartment. Photo courtesy of Redditor ‘Sunny86JD.’A shot inside Dahmer’s bedroom, including his dresser and TV. Photo courtesy of the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Department.A shot inside Dahmer’s bedroom. Photo courtesy of Murderpedia.A shot inside Dahmer’s bedroom. Photo courtesy of Redditor ‘Sunny86JD.’Another shot inside Dahmer’s bedroom. Photo courtesy of Murderpedia.Dahmer’s drawer full of Polaroids. Notice the needle, which was involved in his ‘experiments.’ Photo courtesy of Netflix.Jeffrey Dahmer’s living room in his apartment. If you look in the top corner, near the ceiling you’ll notice a camera. Apparently Dahmer spent close to $1,000 for a security system (he installed extra locks on his doors as well). Photo courtesy of Murderpedia.The other side of Dahmer’s living room (notice his infamous smelly fish tank he said was responsible for the bad smell in his apartment). Photo courtesy of Murderpedia.Another shot of Dahmer’s living room. Photo courtesy of Murderpedia.A shot of Dahmer’s bathroom (it looks like its attached to his living room). Photo courtesy of Netflix.A shot of Dahmer’s apartment. Photo courtesy of A&E.A shot of Dahmer’s toilet inside of his loo. Photo courtesy of TMJ4.Tools Dahmer used to dismember his victims. Photo courtesy of The Milwaukee Police Department.Some additional tools Dahmer used to dismember his victims. Photo courtesy of The Milwaukee Police Department.A shot of the inside of Dahmer’s closet. Photo courtesy of The Milwaukee Police Department.A shot of Dahmer’s kitchen. Photo courtesy of The Milwaukee Police Department.The freezer and boxes of acid in Dahmer’s kitchen. Photo courtesy of The Milwaukee Police Department.A different perspective in Dahmer’s kitchen. Photo courtesy of Murderpedia.A freezer in Dahmer’s kitchen. Photo courtesy of Murderpedia.Two skulls found in Jeffrey’s apartment. Photo courtesy of Murderpedia. Three skulls inside the top drawer of Dahmers bedside filing cabinet.The full skeleton of Ernest Miller located in the bottom drawer of Dahmer’s bedside filling cabinet.Two skulls inside a cardboard box inside Dahmer’s bedroom.Some Polaroids that investigators found inside of a laptop cover inside of the cardboard box.Some skulls found in Dahmer’s apartment. Photo courtesy of the Milwaukee Police Department. Plastic bags that contained human remains, including two heads, the body of Oliver Lacey, and an assortment of body pats.A closet in Jeffrey’s apartment. Photo courtesy of Murderpedia.A close-up of some items found in a closet in Jeffrey’s apartment. Photo courtesy of Murderpedia.A close-up of some items found in a closet in Jeffrey’s apartment. Photo courtesy of Murderpedia.A vat of acid Dahmer used to dissolved bones. Photo courtesy of the Milwaukee Police DepartmentA giant pot Dahmer used to dissolved bones. Photo courtesy of the Milwaukee Police Department.A picture of Dahmer’s freezer in his apartment. Photo courtesy of Murderpedia.A picture of Dahmer’s refrigerator in his apartment. Photo courtesy of Murderpedia.A picture of Dahmer’s refrigerator door in his apartment. Photo courtesy of Murderpedia.A skull found in Dahmer’s apartment. Photo courtesy of Murderpedia.Some miscellaneous body parts of some of Dahmer’s victims. Photo courtesy of Murderpedia.Police bringing Dahmer’s bed out of his apartment. Screen grab courtesy of the Milwaukee Police Department.LE bringing the gigantic vat of acid out of Jeff’s apartment. Screen grab courtesy of the Milwaukee Police Department.Police bringing items out of Dahmer’s apartment. Screen grab courtesy of the Milwaukee Police Department.Police bringing items out of Dahmer’s apartment. Screen grab courtesy of the Milwaukee Police Department.Police bringing items out of Dahmer’s apartment. Screen grab courtesy of the Milwaukee Police Department.Police bringing items out of Dahmer’s apartment. Screen grab courtesy of TMJ4.LE taking evidence out of Dahmer’s apartment. Screen grab courtesy of Netflix.LE taking evidence out of Dahmer’s apartment and putting it into an official vehicle. Screen grab courtesy of Netflix.LE taking evidence out of Dahmer’s apartment. Screen grab courtesy of Netflix.LE taking evidence out of Dahmer’s apartment. Screen grab courtesy of Netflix.Technicians wearing hazmat suits lower Dahmer’s freezer down the stairs at his apartment building in 1991. Photo courtesy of The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.Another shot of techs lowering Dahmer’s freezer down the stairs at his apartment. Photo courtesy of The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.Technicians wearing hazmat suits lower a vat of acid down the stairs at Dahmer’s apartment building in 1991. Photo courtesy of The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.Technicians securing items taken out of Dahmer’s apartment on official police transport vehicles. Photo courtesy of The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.The boxes of acid being taken out of Dahmer’s apartment after his arrest in 1991. Photo courtesy of The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.Some of the vehicles used to take items out of Dahmer’s apartment. Screen grab courtesy of the Milwaukee Police Department.LE looking around the outside of Dahmer’s apartment building after his arrest in 1991. Screen grab courtesy of TMJ4.LE looking around the outside of Dahmer’s apartment building after his arrest in 1991. Screen grab courtesy of TMJ4.A police photographer taking pictures of some bones that were found in the back of a building across the alley from the apartment building where Dahmer resided. It could not be determined at the time whether they were human (I believe they were eventually determined to be unrelated to his case). Photo courtesy of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.After combing through Dahmer’s apartment investigators went through the dumpster in the back of his apartment building. Photo courtesy of TMJ4.Investigators looking at a bone found in a dumpster located in the back of Dahmer’s apartment building. Photo courtesy of TMJ4.After combing through Dahmer’s apartment investigators went through the garbage located in the back of his apartment building. Photo courtesy of TMJ4.The apartment where Jeffrey Dahmer once resided was torn down in 1992.The lot where Dahmer’s apartment once stood. Some of Dahmer’s Polaroids. Photo courtesy of ‘Maniac Nanny.’Dahmer victim, Ricky Beeks.A post-mortem Ricky Beeks. Photo courtesy of Murderpedia. A post-mortem, handcuffed Ricky Beeks. Photo courtesy of Murderpedia. A post-mortem shot of Ricky Beeks. Photo courtesy of ‘NairaLand.’A post-mortem shot of Ricky Beeks. Photo courtesy of ‘NairaLand.’Another post-mortem shot of Ricky Beeks. Photo courtesy of ‘NairaLand.’Another post-mortem shot of Ricky Beeks. Photo courtesy of ‘NairaLand.’Another post-mortem shot of Ricky Beeks. Photo courtesy of ‘NairaLand.’Another post-mortem shot of Ricky Beeks. Photo courtesy of ‘NairaLand.’The beginning of Dahmer’s dissection of Ricky Beeks. Photo courtesy of Murderpedia. The more advanced stages of Dahmer’s dissection of Ricky Beeks. Photo courtesy of Murderpedia. SOne body parts of Dahmer victim, Ricky Beeks. Photo courtesy of ‘NairaLand.’Dahmer victim, Ricky Beeks. Photo courtesy of ‘NairaLand.’The ME standing with some of the remains found at Dahmer’s apartment. The Summit County Sheriff’s Department looking through the area behind Dahmer’s childhood home. Photo courtesy of Supernaught. Another shot of the Summit County Sheriff’s Department looking through the area behind Dahmer’s childhood home. Photo courtesy of Supernaught. A local kid reading a note on the door at the home of Catherine Dahmer, which is located on South 57th Street in West Allis. The handwritten note asks that the family be left alone, and mentioned that they have been receiving prank calls. Photo courtesy of Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.The Ambrosia candy company, where Dahmer briefly worked. The bathroom where Jeffrey Dahmer was killed. Photo courtesy of Redditor ”DogaCascio.’The bathroom where Jeffrey Dahmer was killed. Photo courtesy of Redditor ”DogaCascio.’The bathroom where Jeffrey Dahmer was killed. Photo courtesy of Redditor ”DogaCascio.’The bathroom where Jeffrey Dahmer was killed. Photo courtesy of Redditor ”DogaCascio.’The remains of Jeffrey Dahmer. On November 28, 1994 he was bludgeoned to death by convicted killer Christopher Scarver. Photo courtesy of Redditor ‘Frikydraws.’The remains of Jeffrey Dahmer. Photo courtesy of Redditor ‘Frikydraws.’Dahmer’s autopsy photo. Courtesy of Redditor ‘Frikydraws.’Another post-mortem shot of Dahmer. Jeff’s name listed in the Wisconsin death index from 1979 through 1997.f Dahmer’s brain. Photo courtesy of Murderpedia.Another shot of Dahmer’s brain in a jar. It was eventually cremated, per his wishes. Photo courtesy of Murderpedia.A super cryptic drawing of an altar than Dahmer had planned to create at one point. Courtesy of Murderpedia.A map drawn by Jeffrey Dahmer. Courtesy of Murderpedia.A younger picture of Joyce Dahmer.A blurb about Joyce Dahmer, published in the LA Times published on December 6, 2000.A picture of Lionel Dahmer from the 1958 University of Wisconsin–Madison yearbook.David Dahmer from the 1982 Revere High School yearbook.Dahmer killer, Christopher Scarver. Jesse Anderson.
Another Bundy Blog: My Adventures around the Pacific Northwest (and everywhere else). 