A Devouring Need: Jeffrey Dahmer

On July 22 1991, in an unassuming apartment complex in Milwaukee, police arrested Jeffrey Dahmer and removed barrels and vats containing body parts of his male victims. Dahmer, known popularly as the Milwaukee Cannibal, has since become a Bogey of popular American folklore for his predation on young men and boys and specifically for consuming their flesh. Between the years of 1978 and 1991 Dahmer killed 17 young men and boys and has entered American folklore as a true bogey of the modern era, though in truth he was in essence no different than the lunatics of medieval Europe or indeed of ancient antiquity and even beyond, reaching back into our atavistic past where we and neanderthals killed and ate each other