The man who beat serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer to death inside a Wisconsin prison says he did it because of Dahmer’s creepy sense of humor — which included turning prison food into fake limbs covered with ketchup to resemble blood, the New York Post reports.
Christopher Scarver, who was sentenced to two life terms in prison for killing Dahmer and another man at Columbia Correctional Institution in 1994, said the confessed cannibal would leave the fake limbs around the prison where others would find them.
“He crossed the line with some people — prisoners, prison staff,” the newspaper quoted Scarver as saying. “Some people who are in prison are repentant — but he was not one of them.”
In a separate story, the Post quotes Dahmer’s former prison minister as saying the convict would make jokes about this cannibalistic past.
“If he saw a guard that was nervous and standing near enough to hear him, he would say, ‘I bite,'” the newspaper quoted the pastor, Roy Ratcliff, as saying. “Usually the guard would jump away and that would make Jeff laugh.”
“He sort of played with his persona to exaggerate it and make people more fearful,” Ratcliff said. “This was just his way — a morbid humor to deal with his hopeless situation.”
Scarver was convicted of killing Dahmer on November 28, 1994.
He told the Post that he killed Dahmer and another inmate, Jesse Anderson, after an altercation while they were together unsupervised on a work detail.
Scarver said he kept a newspaper article detailing Dahmer’s crimes, which included killing 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991, having sex with corpses, keeping some of the body parts and eating others.
Just before he killed Dahmer, Scarver said, he confronted him with the clipping. “I asked him if he did those things ’cause I was fiercely disgusted. He was shocked. Yes, he was,” the Post quoted Scarver as saying.
Scarver said he hit Dahmer twice in the head with a metal bar from a weight room. He then killed Anderson, who was working in a different room.