Anthony Sears

 

 

A couple of days after Jeffrey Dahmer had moved into his new apartment, he found himself arrested on sexual assault charges. The accuser was a thirteen-year-old Laotian boy. (Jeff claimed that he’d thought the kid to be nineteen, which is ridiculous. I mean, it’s generally pretty damn easy to identify a thirteen-year-old, as many bartenders and bouncers will tell you.) Anyway, whilst Dahmer was waiting to be sentenced (he was out on bail), he proved that he was perfectly suitable for the bail program and totally trustworthy by brutally murdering a twenty-six-year-old man called Anthony Sears.

Anthony was African-American. He worked at a restauant in Baker’s Square and had recently been promoted. On the night of Easter Saturday, 1989, he was socializing at the Milwaukee bar La Cage aux Folles when he ran into Dahmer. He agreed to go back to his residence with him and enlisted his friend Jeffrey Connors to drive them.  Mr. Connors dropped them off and reminded Anthony that he was having lunch with his mother the next day, and that if he needed a lift home the next day he could call him. They parted for the night.

Mr. Connors never got a phone call the next morning. Neither he, nor anyone alse, ever saw Anthony Sears alive again. 

Dahmer had drugged the misfortunate Anthony and, true to form, strangled him. However, he then cleaned the victim’s skull and kept the scalp, because he liked Anthony’s ponytail and wanted to keep it. He’d evidently taken quite a liking to the good-looking young man. He later said, “If I could’ve kept him longer, all of him, I would have.” (The solution there would have been to not kill him in the first place and instead pursue a long-term relationship like a normal human being, but one digresses.) He took the skull with him to work a couple of days after, and would often take small breaks to go and admire it. Amazingly, the skull and scalp were found three years later in Dahmer’s apartment. 

When interviewed at that time, Mr. Sears’s grandmother took comfort in her faith. She said that she believed that Anthony was taken straight up into Heaven when he died. I believe the same. The Dahmer victims had a right to Heaven-they had already been through Hell.

Rest in peace, Anthony Sears.