As the identity of the last of 11 murder victims found in Jeffrey L. Dahmer`s Milwaukee apartment was released Saturday, police in Ohio prepared to search for the remains of a man Dahmer reportedly confessed to killing 13 years ago.
Elsewhere Saturday, in Florida and California, police continued to examine unsolved homicides that resemble the Milwaukee slayings, looking for a possible Dahmer link.
Investigators from Hollywood, Fla., have asked Milwaukee police to question Dahmer about 6-year-old Adam Walsh, whose abduction and slaying in 1981 became a major national story.
And in Fresno, Calif., police are searching for a tie between Dahmer and a dismemberment slaying discovered there in March.
Of the 11 males Dahmer admitted killing in Milwaukee, four had strong Chicago connections, including 24-year-old Ernest Miller, a dancer whose identity was released late Friday night.
Dahmer also has allegedly told police about six other killings outside Milwaukee.
Late Saturday night, Dahmer`s attorney, Gerald Boyle, said his client has denied culpability in any deaths outside Wisconsin or Ohio.
Boyle said Dahmer wanted him to make this statement because of reports that Dahmer might be involved in several slayings across the country. Boyle said he talked with Dahmer at 4 p.m. Saturday and Dahmer asked Boyle ”to tell the world that I didn`t do these things.”
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Boyle said, however, that Dahmer has told police about an incident in Ohio.
”We are planning to excavate the property at 4480 W. Bath Rd., the Dahmer family`s former home,” said Capt. John Gardner of the Bath Police Department in suburban Akron. ”We will be searching for any evidence of criminal activity.”
Gardner declined to comment on reports Dahmer told investigators that years ago, when he was 18 years old and living in his parents` home, he had sex with a young man at the house, killed him and then buried him on the grounds.
A detective from Bath and one from the Summit County sheriff`s police met with Dahmer on Friday concerning a missing persons report on Steven M. Hicks, who vanished June 18, 1978.
The detectives were expected to return to Ohio by Saturday night, Gardner said, and the search is to be held Monday.
Police have roped off the 1 3/4-acre lot, and the current resident is cooperating with the investigation, Gardner said.
Hollywood police, meanwhile, are waiting to see how Dahmer responds to questions about Adam Walsh before sending detectives to Milwaukee, said department spokeswoman Stephanie Ramirez.
They have established that Dahmer, for six months in 1981, was in Miami and Miami Beach, about 15 minutes by freeway from the Hollywood shopping mall from which Walsh was kidnapped.
After a frantic national search, the boy`s severed head turned up two weeks later in a canal 120 miles north.
”At this point we don`t have anything concrete,” Ramirez said, except that ”the connection was made with mutilations and decapitations.”
Saturday, coincidentally, was the 10th anniversary of the Walsh abduction.
In Fresno, police said Saturday they are trying to find out if Dahmer may be tied to the slaying of a man whose severed left foot was discovered March 30 in a vacant industrial lot.
Dahmer`s mother, Joyce Flint, lives in Fresno, and that fact, coupled with the nature of the slaying, led police to look into Dahmer, said Lt. Jerry Davis.
”What we have right now is a new lead in an open homicide investigation,” Davis said. ”No one knows at this point whether Dahmer was even in Fresno at the time.”
Davis said his agency has sent files on the case to Milwaukee police and is waiting for information from them.
Milwaukee police have asked investigators in neighboring West Allis, where Dahmer lived with his grandmother from 1982 to 1988, to examine their files of unsolved slayings.
Investigators searched the West Allis home Tuesday after Dahmer`s arrest, West Allis Police Capt. Austin Dunbar said. They also plan to interview his father, Lionel Dahmer, but right now have no plans to dig up the back yard, Dunbar said.
Milwaukee officials early Saturday released the name of the last victim found in Dahmer`s apartment victim-Anthony Sears, a 26-year-old restaurant manager and aspiring model who was last seen on March 25, 1989.
Hours earlier, police had identified Ernest Miller, who, according to an aunt, had gotten his life together since leaving Milwaukee for Chicago some two years ago.
Miller, who was a friend of Tony Hughes, another victim, disappeared before returning to Chicago after a family get-together in Milwaukee on Labor Day, 1990, Vivian Miller said.
Of the 11 murders Dahmer is accused of, five took place after a May 27 incident in which police had a chance to arrest him.
It was shortly after midnight and Sandra Smith, 18, and her cousin, 17-year-old Nicole Childress, were outside their apartment building.
They said they saw an Asian boy running north on 25th Street, dazed, naked and bleeding, with cuts and scrapes on his body.
”And then I saw Jeff trying to lure him back to his house,” Smith said of Dahmer. Childress called the police.
”Jeff told us there was no need for the police,” Smith recalled. ”He said, `This is my friend Jim.` ”
But the women were doubtful.
The boy was Konerak Sinthasomphone, a member of a Laotian family who 10 years ago fled their strife-torn country for peace and opportunity in the U.S. Ironically, he was also the brother of a boy who three years ago was sexually assaulted by Dahmer.
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When police arrived at 25th Street the morning of the 27th, Dahmer told them Konerak was 19 years old, that he was a houseguest who had had too much to drink, that he was his lover.
Smith and Childress tried to tell the officers that the boy was in trouble, but they refused to listen, telling the citizens to ”get lost,”
Smith charged.
The officers then pursued their probe, telling the boy (who one police source described as incoherent at the time) to sit on the car. They talked only with Dahmer.
Soon, satisfied, they left, and Konerak walked off with the man who would kill him.
Asked why the police didn`t listen to her story, Smith said, ”I think it was prejudice, because Jeff and they were white, the boy was Asian, and we were black.”