Dahmer claimed his first victim when he was 18, almost immediately after graduating from high school. While his parents were gone for the day, Dahmer picked up a young hitchhiker named Steven Hicks (via Biography). After getting Hicks drunk, Dahmer became enraged when Hicks wanted to leave. He struck Hicks over the head, and then strangled him to death with a barbell.
From the time of this murder in 1978 until he was apprehended in 1991, Dahmer took the lives of 17 young men. Thirteen of these murders took place during the two year period from 1989 to 1991. Obsessed with creating a sex slave, Dahmer experimented with the bodies of many of his victims, trying out different ways to damage their brains with the hopes of getting them into total submissions of their will. The holes that Dahmer bored into their skulls to fill with acids and cleaning solutions never had the intended results, leading to Dahmer bludgeoning or strangling them to death in the end.
While Dahmer was luring unsuspecting men into his apartment, he was employed by the Ambrosia Chocolate Factory. Beginning his career there in 1985, Dahmer perhaps felt the need to bring in reminders of his savagery to the workplace. After he was arrested, Dahmer admitted to investigators that he kept the head of one of his victims in his work locker. Co-workers recalled later that Dahmer would bring meat dishes into the workplace, which would be slathered in what Dahmer referred to as his "special gravy" (via Murderpedia). He refused to allow anyone a taste.
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