The Milwaukee apartment where a skull sat beside Polaroids of the dead

The handcuff was loose.

That is what the man told the officers, anyway, when he flagged them down on the night of July 22, 1991.

Tracy Edwards had escaped an apartment, and one of his wrists was still shackled.

He led two Milwaukee police officers back to the building.

Inside, the officers found a bedroom.

On a table, or near it, were Polaroid photographs.

The photographs showed dismembered bodies.

They showed human remains in various states.

And in the same room, among the items police would catalogue, was a human skull.

The exact number of Polaroids is not detailed in the source.

The specific condition of the skull is not detailed either.

What is documented is the placement: the photographs and the skull were found in the same apartment.

That detail would become central to the case.

It was the evidence that turned a report of a man with a handcuff into an arrest.

The man in the apartment was Jeffrey Dahmer.

The officers took him into custody.

What else was in that apartment?

That is the question the photographs and the skull leave open.

The record does not say how many images were scattered there.

The record does not say how the skull came to rest where it was found.

The record says only that they were there, together, on the night Tracy Edwards flagged down the police.

The discovery led to Dahmer's arrest.

Everything else — the years before, the other remains, the confession — came after.

THE EARLY YEARS AND FIRST KILLING

The first killing was in Ohio in 1978.

Between that year and 1991, the record says, Jeffrey Dahmer murdered 17 young men and boys.

The crimes involved sexual assault, dismemberment, and necrophilia.

His victims were predominantly young men, many of them African American or Asian American.

He often met them at gay bars, bus stops, or shopping malls.

The escalation spanned more than a decade.

It is a span of time measured in years, not in a single burst of violence.

His father, Lionel Dahmer, and stepmother, Shari Dahmer, later testified about their attempts to understand his behavior.

They also wrote about those attempts.

The specific details of Dahmer's childhood and any early warning signs are not in the source.

What the record establishes is the pattern: the meetings, the places, the ages.

What the record does not establish is how a seemingly ordinary person reached that first killing.

Was there a moment of decision?

Was there a slow drift?

Was there a single trigger?

That would require evidence the source does not provide.

The first killing came in Ohio.

The others followed, primarily in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

No accomplices were charged.

The record names Jeffrey Dahmer as the sole perpetrator.

It is a chronology of seventeen deaths.