Richard Guerrero, a 22-year-old Hispanic/Latino man from Milwaukee, disappeared on March 24, 1988. He was last known to have left his family’s home intending to visit a friend, but he never arrived. Guerrero reportedly had only a few dollars with him and no identification. When he failed to return, his family quickly became alarmed, and he was formally reported missing to the Milwaukee Police Department several days later.
There was no known reason for him to deliberately cut off contact with his family, and his disappearance remained unresolved for more than three years.
What happened to Guerrero did not become known until the 1991 investigation of Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer. According to investigators and the criminal complaint eventually filed against Dahmer, Guerrero encountered Dahmer at a Milwaukee bar during the evening of his disappearance. Dahmer persuaded Guerrero to accompany him to the West Allis home of Dahmer’s grandmother at 2357 South 57th Street. Dahmer was living there at the time, and the house would later be identified as the location of several of his killings.
Dahmer subsequently admitted that after bringing Guerrero to the house, he gave him a drink containing sleeping medication. After the drug took effect, Dahmer killed Guerrero by strangulation. He then dismembered the body in the basement and disposed of the remains. Investigators were never able to recover Guerrero’s remains, and the identification of him as one of Dahmer’s victims ultimately depended heavily on Dahmer’s confession, the circumstances of Guerrero’s disappearance, photographs, and information developed during the broader serial-homicide investigation. FBI records later specifically identified Guerrero as a victim killed at Dahmer’s grandmother’s West Allis residence and noted that no remains had been recovered.
For Guerrero’s family, the years between his disappearance and the discovery of the truth were filled with uncertainty. He remained officially missing until Dahmer’s arrest exposed a series of killings involving victims from Milwaukee and the surrounding area. Dahmer was arrested by Milwaukee police on July 22, 1991, after another intended victim escaped from his apartment with a handcuff attached to his wrist and alerted officers. Police entered Dahmer’s apartment and discovered human remains and other evidence, launching an investigation that eventually connected him to 17 killings.
As detectives questioned Dahmer, he began identifying earlier victims whose bodies had never been found. Guerrero was among them. Investigators matched Dahmer’s account with the unresolved 1988 missing-person case, including Guerrero’s date of birth and Milwaukee Police Department records. Authorities concluded that the homicide had occurred at the West Allis residence in March 1988.
On August 22, 1991, Milwaukee County prosecutors formally added Guerrero’s death to the criminal case against Dahmer. The amended complaint charged Dahmer with first-degree murder for intentionally causing Guerrero’s death at the South 57th Street residence. Guerrero’s case was one of three additional killings added that day, increasing the number of Wisconsin homicide charges against Dahmer to fifteen. Dahmer waived his right to a preliminary hearing, and a court commissioner found sufficient probable cause to send the charges forward for trial.
Dahmer ultimately did not contest that he had committed the killings. In January 1992, he entered guilty pleas to all fifteen Wisconsin homicide counts while asserting that he should not be held legally responsible because of mental disease or defect. That meant the central question before the jury was not whether he had killed Guerrero and the other victims, but whether Dahmer met Wisconsin’s legal standard for insanity when the crimes were committed.
After a highly publicized sanity trial lasting several weeks, the jury rejected the insanity defense. On February 15, 1992, jurors determined that Dahmer was legally responsible for the killings, including Guerrero’s murder. Two days later, Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Laurence Gram Jr. sentenced Dahmer to fifteen consecutive life terms in prison. The sentences ensured that he would spend the remainder of his life incarcerated.
Guerrero’s sister, Janie Hagen, was among the relatives who addressed the court during sentencing. She described the devastating effect her brother’s killing had on their family and asked the judge to make certain Dahmer would never again be free. Her appearance underscored how the case had begun not as a known homicide, but as a family desperately searching for someone who had simply vanished.
No other suspect has been identified in Guerrero’s death. The investigation, Dahmer’s admissions, the amended criminal complaint, his guilty plea, the jury’s sanity verdict, and the resulting life sentence established Jeffrey Dahmer as the person legally responsible for killing Richard Guerrero. Because Guerrero’s remains were never recovered, his family was denied the physical recovery that sometimes brings a measure of closure in a missing-person case, but the 1991 investigation finally provided an answer to the disappearance that had begun on March 24, 1988.
