The Chosen One

On June 1, 1990, twenty-year-old Christopher Scarver walked into a Wisconsin Conservation Corps training office in Milwaukee with a .25 caliber pistol. He demanded money from the site manager and was handed fifteen dollars, then shot Steve Lohman, a twenty-seven-year-old carpentry supervisor, in the head. Scarver later told doctors that voices called him the son of God, and he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. He was sentenced to life in April 1992.

On November 28, 1994, at Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin, Scarver was sent to clean a gym with two other inmates and no officer watching. He took a metal bar from a weight machine and beat both men. One was Jeffrey Dahmer, serving fifteen consecutive life terms for murders in Milwaukee and a sixteenth from Ohio. The other was Jesse Anderson, convicted of stabbing his wife, Barbara, and blaming two Black men. Dahmer died within the hour. Anderson died two days later.

Scarver received two more life sentences in 1995, to be served consecutively. He spent about sixteen years in segregation and was later moved to a prison outside Wisconsin. In interviews published in 2015 he said he had been repelled by Dahmer’s crimes and by the way Dahmer taunted other inmates with food shaped to look like body parts. Lawyers who had known both men disputed that account.