Steven Mark Hicks was an 18-year-old White/Caucasian male from Coventry Township, Ohio, whose life ended on June 18, 1978, after a chance encounter with Jeffrey Dahmer. Although Hicks has sometimes been associated with Milwaukee because Dahmer later committed most of his murders there, Hicks was not killed in Wisconsin. Contemporary reports identify him as an Ohio resident who was killed at the Dahmer family home in Bath Township, near Akron.
That day, Hicks was hitchhiking in the Bath Township area while traveling to or from a rock concert at Chippewa Lake Park. Dahmer, who had recently graduated from high school and was living at his family's Bath Road residence, encountered Hicks along the road and offered him a ride. Dahmer later told investigators that he invited Hicks back to the house to drink beer. Hicks accepted, and the two spent time drinking and talking inside the otherwise largely empty residence.
According to Dahmer's later confession, the situation turned deadly when Hicks indicated that he wanted to leave. Dahmer said he did not want him to go. He struck Hicks in the head with a weight and then strangled him. After the killing, Dahmer carried the body into a crawl space beneath the residence and dismembered it. He initially attempted to conceal the remains on the property, later digging them up, breaking the bones into smaller pieces and scattering or reburying them in the wooded area behind the house. The crime remained undiscovered for more than thirteen years.
Hicks simply disappeared, leaving his family without an explanation of what had happened. There was no known suspect publicly tied to his disappearance at the time, and Dahmer went on with his life. He subsequently moved away from Ohio and eventually settled in the Milwaukee area, where he committed a series of additional murders. Nothing publicly connected the disappearance of Hicks to Dahmer until the summer of 1991.
The break in the case came after Dahmer was arrested in Milwaukee on July 22, 1991. Tracy Edwards had escaped from Dahmer's apartment while partially restrained and led police back to the residence. The resulting investigation uncovered human remains and other evidence of multiple homicides. During extensive questioning, Dahmer confessed to numerous killings and told investigators that his first victim had been a hitchhiker he killed at his family's Ohio home in 1978. He identified Steven Hicks from a photograph and provided authorities with information about where he had disposed of the remains.
Ohio investigators then converged on the former Dahmer property in Bath Township. Police, forensic personnel and anthropologists searched the grounds, particularly the wooded area behind the house. Investigators recovered numerous bone fragments, including pieces determined to be human, and also found evidence of blood in the crawl space. The Summit County coroner later confirmed that hundreds of recovered bone fragments belonged to Hicks, finally providing his family with an answer to a disappearance that had remained unresolved since 1978.
Dahmer was formally charged in Ohio in September 1991 while already being held in Wisconsin. A Summit County grand jury subsequently indicted him on two counts of aggravated murder and one count of kidnapping in connection with Hicks's death. The aggravated-murder counts represented alternative legal theories involving the same killing. Because Ohio's constitutionally valid death-penalty statute was not in effect when the murder occurred, prosecutors could not seek execution for the crime.
The Ohio prosecution was delayed while Dahmer's extensive Wisconsin murder case proceeded. In February 1992, he was sentenced in Milwaukee to 15 consecutive life terms for murders committed there. Summit County authorities then moved forward with bringing him back to Ohio so that Hicks's case could be resolved independently rather than disappearing among the Wisconsin prosecutions.
On May 1, 1992, Dahmer appeared in Summit County Common Pleas Court and pleaded guilty to aggravated murder for killing Hicks. There was therefore no full murder trial in the Ohio case; his guilty plea established his criminal responsibility. Judge James R. Williams imposed another life sentence, ordered to run consecutively to the 15 life terms Dahmer was already serving in Wisconsin. The sentence was the maximum available punishment for the 1978 offense. Hicks's family was permitted to address the court before sentencing, bringing formal judicial closure to a case that had remained a mystery for more than a decade.
Hicks is recognized as Dahmer's first known murder victim. Unlike many of the later killings associated with Dahmer's Milwaukee residences, his death occurred years earlier in rural Ohio, long before authorities understood the pattern of violence that would follow. His disappearance remained unexplained until Dahmer's 1991 arrest exposed the truth, led investigators back to the Bath Township property and ultimately resulted in the recovery of his remains, an aggravated-murder conviction and an additional life sentence for his killer.
