His grandmother noticed early on that Jeffery was not a normal young man. He was constantly drunk and she noticed an unusual smell emitting from her basement and garage. When she confronted him about it, he said the smell was the result of cleaning products, but when his father confronted him about the smell, he "admitted- to him that he had been putting dead rodents into acid and scraping off the skin because he wanted to see what would happen to them (Dahmer 92). Throughout the next several months, Dahmers behavior only became more unusual and unnatural. "In the family room I found a wooden table on which a pentagram had been drawn in chalk. At the time I was mystified, but later I learned that Jeffery had conducted a séance because he was trying to contact the dead- (Dahmer 92). Dahmers father knew his son was unusual, but what he didn't know was that while living at his grandmother's house, Jeffery killed four people and kept them either in the basement, garage or buried them in the yard or woods. Dahmer would get drunk and bring men home where he would kill them and wake up the next morning sleeping with their corpses; not knowing what to do with them he would bury them or stash them in his grandmothers basement (Bauman 136). Soon after his fourth killing, he moved out of his grandmothers house and into his own apartment in Milwaukee (Bauman 135).
Over the next several years, Dahmer kept his job at the Ambrosia Chocolate Co. and for part of it he was on work release because he was put in jail for 10 months for fondling a 13 year old boy (AP Officials). In March of 1990, Dahmer was released from jail. His statements to the police were "what I did was deplorable. The world has enough Misery in it without my adding more to it- (AP Officials). When he got out of jail he moved back to his apartment and continued his job with little incident.
This downtime was short-lived. On July 22, of 1991, two police officers were patrolling some city streets when a naked man named Tracy Edwards came running up to them, yelling something about a crazed man trying to kill him.
