School pal tells inside story of Jeffrey Dahmer — an awkward, alcoholic teen turned ‘Milwaukee Cannibal’ who drugged, raped and dismembered 17 victims

HORROR movie The Silence of the Lambs had just come out when neighbours complained of a stench, screams, scuffling and the growl of a chainsaw from flat 213 in their block.

The tenant was handsome, polite chocolate factory worker Jeffrey Dahmer, then 31, who always paid his rent on time and convincingly blamed the stink on rotten meat in his broken fridge.

Rotten flesh it was, but not chicken or pork.

Inside that fridge were three severed human heads and scattered around his flat were skulls, torsos, organs, hands and more than 70 Polaroids of mutilated bodies.

Gay Dahmer, dubbed The Milwaukee Cannibal, drugged, raped, murdered, dismembered and ate 17 men and boys from 1978 to 1991, strangling and stabbing them in a bloodfest ended only after a would-be victim led cops to his fly-infested flat in Wisconsin.

Now a chilling biopic of Dahmer, who in 1992 got life in jail without parole after pleading guilty to the killings, will tell how an awkward, alcoholic teen turned serial killer.

The trailer for My Friend Dahmer — based on the graphic novel by Dahmer’s school pal John Backderf — was shown at the Comic-Con comic book convention in California on Sunday.

The film is out in the autumn.

Dahmer was declared legally sane by a jury before sentencing.

But even he admitted he should have been executed for the “holocaust” he unleashed — although the state of Wisconsin has no death penalty.

Disney Channel TV star Ross Lynch, 21, who plays Dahmer in the film and has an uncanny resemblance, was so sickened by the storyline that he showered maniacally after filming.

Many scenes were shot in Dahmer’s childhood home in Bath, Ohio, where he lived with his parents and younger brother — and where in 1978 he used a dumbbell to bludgeon first victim, Steven Hicks, before strangling him.

Three weeks after graduating from high school, an 18-year-old Dahmer picked up hitchhiker Hicks, also 18, and lured him to his parents’ house while they were away.

After murdering Hicks, then pleasuring himself over his body, Dahmer cut him up and buried him in the back garden.

Talking about filming in Dahmer’s home, Lynch said: “On the last day I couldn’t wait to get out of there. But when I got home it took a while to be as social as I once was.”

Like The Silence of the Lambs killer cannibal Hannibal Lecter, played by Sir Anthony Hopkins, Dahmer collected insects as a child — before moving on to roadkill which he would dismember and pickle.

His dad Lionel was a chemist and, at his son’s request, showed him how to preserve animal bones in a bleach solution — a skill he would later use on his victims’ remains.

In the Milwaukee flat where he killed most of his victims police found a steel barrel full of acid and bones.

He also kept body parts such as heads and genitalia, which he later told cops he planned to make into a shrine.

The biopic depicts him in his teenage years as an outcast who acted up at school.

He drank heavily, discovered he was gay during puberty and had sex in his early teens. Years later, he told a probation officer he felt suicidal over his sexuality.

After his first killing, Dahmer spiralled into alcoholism. He flitted between jobs — which often fed his lust for blood and guts.

For two years he was an army medic and later he worked at a blood centre, drawing samples from volunteers.

After the first murder Dahmer did not strike again until the late Eighties, when he killed four more times while living at his gran’s in the Wisconsin city of West Allis.

In each case he boiled the victim’s head and dissected their flesh.

His fifth target, 24-year-old model and restaurant worker Anthony Sears, was the first whose head and genitalia he preserved — because he said he found him “exceptionally attractive”.

After Dahmer then got his own flat in Milwaukee, his murders got evermore grotesque.

He took photos of the dead in sexual positions, froze body parts and wrapped organs, including a heart, in plastic to later eat.

The faces of missing boys and men started to appeared on milk cartons in Milwaukee, yet the authorities failed to make a connection to Dahmer — by now also a convicted paedophile. He was reported in 1982 for indecent exposure in a park.

In 1986 he got a year’s probation for a sex act in front of 12-year-old boys.

In 1988 he was convicted of sexual assault after offering a 13-year-old boy $50 to go to his home to pose for nude photos — but was released on probation after serving a year in jail.

From prison, he had written to the judge: “What I did was deplorable. The world had enough misery in it without my adding more. Sir, it will never happen again.”

Dahmer’s father had less confidence. He wrote to the judge to ask that he “get some treatment” after his release.

He added: “I have tremendous reservations about Jeff’s chances when he hits the streets.”

After Dahmer’s release he continued his rampage through Milwaukee, mainly targeting handsome African-American male prostitutes and vulnerable young men.

Two months before his 1991 arrest, three police were called to his block by locals who had found a teenage boy naked and bleeding outside. He had fled from Dahmer.

But when Dahmer appeared, he convinced cops Konerak Sinthasomphone, just 14, was his lover, and officers handed the boy back to him, telling neighbours it was a “squabble between homosexuals”.

Two months later, the boy’s body was among the 11 victims found in Dahmer’s apartment.

He later admitted that before the boy escaped he had tried to put him in a zombie-like submissive state by drilling a hole in his head and pouring acid into it.

If those officers had helped the boy and run checks on Dahmer, there is a chance four later victims’ lives could have been saved.

The horrors of Dahmer’s flat were discovered after dad-of-six Tracy Edwards, 32, escaped his clutches. He had been invited for drinks after they met in a bar.

Dahmer then handcuffed him and went for him with a butcher’s knife. Edwards later described “confronting Satan himself”.

Police officers Rolf Mueller and Robert Rauth discovered a man’s head in the fridge and a drawer of vile Polaroids.

Mueller told reporters: “You think you have seen it all, then something like this happens.”

Searches of the flat revealed mummified scalps and preserved penises, hands, organs and entire skeletons — all of which had to be identified while families of missing men and boys anxiously waited.

Dahmer immediately apologised for murdering “so many people” — and appeared repentant.

In a later interview he said: “The only motive there ever was was to completely control a person — a person I found physically attractive . . . and keep them with me as long as possible, even if it meant just keeping a part of them.”