'Why I killed Jeffrey Dahmer': Christopher Scarver discusses killer's death and 'prison-wide plot' for the first time

The latest headlines from our reporters across the US sent straight to your inbox each weekday

Your briefing on the latest headlines from across the US

Please enter a valid email address

Please enter a valid email address

SIGN UP

I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy policy

More than 20 years after the incident, Christopher Scarver has for the first time talked about why he killed fellow prisoner Jeffrey Dahmer, who was serving 16 life sentences for the murder, rape and dismemberment of seventeen men and boys.

Scarver said that he fatally struck Dahmer twice over the head with a metal bar after growing unnerved by the killer, who he claims would fashion severed limbs out of prison food and drizzle them with with packets of ketchup as blood.

"He would put them in places where people would be," Scarver, now 45, told The New York Post.

"He crossed the line with some people - prisoners, prison staff. Some people who are in prison are repentant - but he was not one of them."

Dahmer, whose crimes are thought to have involved necrophilia and cannibalism, was according to Scarver accompanied by at least one guard at all times when he was out of his cell because of friction with other inmates at Wisconsin’s Columbia Correctional Institution.

"I saw heated interactions between [Dahmer] and other prisoners from time to time," Scarver, who was serving time for killing his boss during a robbery, recalled.

He said that he never interacted with Dahmer, trying to keep his distance from him, until the morning of 28 November, 1994, when he was left unshackled by guards to clean bathrooms with Dahmer and another inmate, Jesse Anderson.

Scarver alleges that he was poked in the back with a mop while filling his bucket.

"I turned around, and [Dahmer] and Jesse were kind of laughing under their breath," he said. "I looked right into their eyes, and I couldn’t tell which had done it."

The three men then split up, with Scarver following Dahmer toward a locker room where he cornered him and confronted him with a newspaper article detailing Dahmer's crimes which he had been keeping in his pocket. Dahmer was apparently shocked and "started looking for the door pretty quick". Scarver crushed his skull with two swings of a metal bar.

"He ended up dead. I put his head down," he said.

Seeing no officials around, Scarver then dealt similar blows to Anderson.

"Pretty much the same thing [happened] - got his head put out," Scarver recounted.

He alleged that all this was no accident, and that correctional officers hated Dahmer, wanted him dead and thus left him alone with Scarver.

"They had something to do with what took place. Yes," Scarver said, noting that the guards disappeared just before he hit Dahmer with the 20-inch, 5-pound metal bar.

Scarver refused to elaborate over fear of reprisals.

"I would need a good attorney to ensure there would not be any retaliation by Wisconsin officials or to get me out of any type of retaliatory position they would put me in," he said.

An investigation that followed the killings found that Scarver had acted alone. We have reached out to Wisconsin Correction Department for a comment.