The series focuses on not just Dahmer and his crimes, but more prominently the many attempts neighbours and witnesses made to stop him in his tracks, while Milwaukee police turned a blind eye.

While Wisconsin State had abolished the death penalty, Dahmer’s 15-time life sentence in prison seemed to mark an inevitability that he would be killed there, lest he spend the rest of his life in solitary confinement.

It only took two years and two attempts for someone to take his life – with Christopher Scarver delivering the killer blow that killed the man known as “The Milwaukee Cannibal”.

By the time he was arrested, Dahmer had taken at least 17 lives, most of which were young men who were gay and/or of colour. He had decapitated some, eaten body parts of others, and in some cases had tortured them before they were killed.

For many, the death of Dahmer was seen as a blessing, blurring even the most stringent moral code. After all, when you hear he drilled a hole into a 14-year-old’s skull, before filling his brain with acid… it’s hard not to.

But what happened to Christopher Scarver, and why did he do it? Here’s the story behind the serial-killer killer, and where he is now.

What was Christopher Scarver in prison for?

Christopher J Scarver Sr, born 1969 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was originally in prison for the 1990 murder of Steve Lohman, a training program worker.

A high school dropout, Scarver had trained at the Wisconsin Conservation Corps work programme as a carpenter. He believed after the programme was complete he would be employed full-time, following a promise by supervisor Edward Patts.

However, when the job never materialised (Patts was fired before it could be), an angry Scarver had returned to the centre in order to confront him about it.

By that point, Scarver had been using marijuana for a number of years, and had begun drinking heavily. He’d also started getting motivated by a voice inside his head declaring him the “chosen one”.

On June 1, 1990, Scarver returned to the Corps centre to confront them, and found 27-year-old Steve Lohman, Patts’s replacement, and site manager John Feyen. Holding Lohman at gunpoint first, he’d demanded money, and when he only received $15, shot Lohman in the head. Despite Lohman being dead, Scarver would then shoot him two more times.

In order to spare his life, Feyen gave Lohman a $3,000 and his credit card to get him to go away.

Scarver was quickly caught, found with the money, gun and credit card from the attack, and arrested. He was convicted for the murder of Lohman, being given a life sentence, later saying he knew he’d done wrong and wasn’t sure why he’d snapped the way he did, having had no prior convictions or trouble.

In 1992, he was sent to Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin.

At the time of the murder, he had recently discovered he was expecting to become a father for the first time, and had been kicked out of his familial home by his mother (according to New York Times).

Why did Christopher Scarver kill Jeffrey Dahmer?

Christopher Scarver made international news when, on November 28 1994, he battered Jeffrey Dahmer to death using a metal bar for a prison weight.

The then 25-year-old also attacked and killed Jesse Anderson, a man convicted of murdering his wife, at the same time. All three were on cleaning duty at the time of the attack, and were left alone for 20 minutes by the prison guards in the changing rooms.

It should be noted that both Dahmer and Anderson’s murders provoked a massive response in race relations in Milwaukee as most of Dahmer’s victims were people of colour – largely Black or Hispanic – and Anderson initially led police on a goose chase for two Black men he said had committed his crime.

Some believe this was an added incentive for Scarver. However, officially the killings were not considered a racially-motivated crime by detectives.

In a tell-all interview with New York Post in 2015, Scarver said he was motivated to kill Dahmer not due to his vile crimes of murdering, dismembering and eating people – but because, in his eyes, Dahmer seemed unrepentant about it, even making jokes.

“He crossed the line with some people — prisoners, prison staff. Some people who are in prison are repentant — but [Dahmer] was not one of them,” he told the paper.

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