Dímelo

Wait, so what happened to Jeffrey Dahmer’s only Hispanic victim, Richard Guerrero?

With many of Dahmer’s victims’ stories coming to light thanks to the new Netflix series, the story of Richard Guerrero remains unacknowledged.

[One-sentence description of what this media is: "A photo of a vaccine site on USC campus" or "Gif of dancing banana". Important for accessibility/people who use screen readers.]

Editor’s note: This article contains the topic of murder which may be triggering content not suitable for our entire audience. Reader discretion is advised.

Hollywood has taken an interest in notorious serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. This September, Netflix released an original series titled “Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” starring Evan Peters as Jeffrey Dahmer. The series shows a terrifying walkthrough of how Dahmer killed and ate many of his victims. Though the stories of many victims have been brought to light, a handful of the other victim’s stories have been ignored.

[One-sentence description of what this media is: "A photo of a vaccine site on USC campus" or "Gif of dancing banana". Important for accessibility/people who use screen readers.]

One of the victims rarely talked about includes Richard Guerrero – Dahmer’s only Hispanic victim.

Guerrero’s story has been in the dark for decades, but here is Guerrero’s story and how it came to a tragic end:

Richard Guerrero was born in 1967 and is of Mexican descent. Not much was disclosed about his childhood, or where he grew up.

On March 24, 1988, at just 21 years old, Guerrero had been reported missing.

According to police reports, Guerrero had $3 in his pocket and carried no proof of identification when he was last seen leaving his family’s home in Madison, Wisconsin to go to a friend’s house an hour away in Milwaukee. He never arrived at the friend’s home nor returned to his own.

Authorities believe that Guerrero met serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer sometime that evening at a bar in Milwaukee and went with Dahmer back to his home in West Allis, Wisconsin. It is believed that Dahmer lured Guerrero to his house similar to his past victims, by offering them payment in exchange for a photoshoot. Guerrero might have consented to appear for Dahmer’s photos that night to earn some additional cash.

Dahmer then drugged Guerrero with sleeping pills and then strangled him with a leather strap. After the strangulation, Dahmer had intercourse with the dead corpse prior to dismembering it.

After Guerrero has been declared missing, his sister, Janie Hagan, already had a feeling that something was off about her brother’s disappearance.

“If he had wanted to leave, he would have at least called my mother and let her know that everything was fine, instead of leaving us in the dark, with my mother praying to God every day to send her son home,” Hagen told the Sentinel Journal, a local Milwaukee newspaper years after his disappearance.

The family hired a private investigator to look into Guerrero’s case since Hagen felt, at the time, that the police were not taking her brother’s case seriously, likely due to their ethnicity. Richard’s father, who worked at a golf course, lost a large portion of his life savings since the private investigators scammed the family and ran away with their money.

Guerrero’s remains were never found but his death was confessed by Dahmer himself during interrogations in 1991.

Hagen addressed her brother’s murderer in Spanish at Dahmer’s trial in 1992, during which numerous families of the victims testified. Hagen called Dahmer “diablo, el puro diablo” (the devil, the pure devil).

Twenty years after the trial, in 2012, Hagen continues to feel the burden of losing her brother right in the public eye. She spoke to her local FOX affiliate about the loss of her brother.

“He was only 21. I have a son that’s 21 now. I can only imagine what my mother went through. That was her child. That was her baby,” Hagen said.

The memories remain to haunt Hagen to the point of tears. “My mind is like a VCR - it just pauses and it rewinds and it always takes me back to that courtroom.”