10 Serial Killer Crimes That Took Years To Solve

Over the course of his 13 year spree Dahmer murdered 17 young men. He avoided detection for all those years by choosing his victims from those living on the edges of society, often selecting people who were borderline criminal so their disappearances would be less noticeable.

Dahmer began in 1978 by murdering a hitchhiker who he had got drunk and brought back to his parents house, he buried the body behind the property. He didn't strike again until 1987 where he drunkenly killed a man in a hotel and brought the body back to his grandma's basement, in which he dismembered the body. After two more murders his grandma, unaware of his actions, threw him out.

In 1989, whilst facing a sexual assault charge he uses the basement once again to lure men in to rape and murder them. Over the next two years he claims his final 13 victims, during this time he develops rituals and experiments with cannibalism and chemical disposal of bodies.

Perhaps the saddest of all the Dahmer cases happened in 1991 when police were called to investigate the behaviour of a young man. Dahmer claimed he was his 19 year old lover but the boy was in fact 14. At the time the police only had a cursory look around the house before leaving. Dahmer went on to kill the boy.

On his arrest the police found body parts in his fridge and Polaroids of his victims. Pleading first not guilty, despite confessing, then changing to guilty by insanity. He was found guilty and sane, Dahmer was sentenced to 15 life sentences. Eventually, however, he was killed by a fellow inmate.