Bio

Christopher J. Scarver Sr. was born on July 6, 1969, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He was the second of five children and grew up in that city. He attended James Madison High School but dropped out in the eleventh grade.

His mother forced him out of her house after he became addicted to alcohol and marijuana. Scarver later joined a Wisconsin Conservation Corps job program as a trainee carpenter. He said his supervisor, Edward Patts, promised he would be hired full time when the program ended. After Patts was dismissed, Scarver did not get a full-time job there.

He began to drink heavily after leaving the program. Scarver later said that while drunk he started to hear voices calling him the "chosen one." He was later diagnosed with schizophrenia and was said to have been suffering from messianic delusions.

Murder Story

On June 1, 1990, Christopher J. Scarver went to the Wisconsin Conservation Corps training office where site manager John Feyen and employee Steve Lohman were present. Scarver forced Lohman down at gunpoint with a .25 caliber semiautomatic pistol and demanded money from Feyen. After receiving only $15, Scarver shot Lohman four times in the head, killing him. Authorities say Scarver shot Lohman twice more after he was dead. Feyen then wrote Scarver a check for $3,000. As Feyen ran to his car, Scarver fired at him but missed. Police arrested Scarver a few hours later at his girlfriend’s apartment, where he had been planning to turn himself in. Scarver pled not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect. Psychiatrists disagreed about his fitness for trial. In 1992, a jury convicted him of murder and he was sentenced to life in prison. He was sent to the Columbia Correctional Institution.

On the morning of November 28, 1994, Scarver was on a work detail in the Columbia Correctional Institution gymnasium with Jeffrey Dahmer and Jesse Michael Anderson. When corrections officers left the three unsupervised, a confrontation took place. Scarver went to the weight room and took a metal bar, which he used to bludgeon Dahmer. He later attacked Anderson with a wooden stick in the showers. Afterward, Scarver returned to his cell and told a corrections officer, "God told me to do it. Jesse Michael Anderson and Jeffrey Dahmer are dead." Both men were mortally wounded. Dahmer was declared dead about an hour after arriving at the hospital. Anderson died two days later after doctors removed him from life support.

Scarver was assessed for mental illness and found competent to stand trial on the two new murder charges. He changed his plea to no contest in exchange for a transfer to a federal penitentiary. He was convicted of each murder and received two additional life sentences. When asked about his sentence, Scarver was quoted as saying, "Nothing white people do to blacks is just."

In 1995, Scarver was transferred to federal custody under register number 08157-045. He underwent psychiatric evaluation at MCFP Springfield and was later sent to ADX Florence, where he remained until 2000. That year he was transferred to the Wisconsin Secure Program Facility when it opened. In 2001, a federal judge ordered that Scarver and about three dozen other seriously mentally ill inmates be relocated from that facility. Scarver was later moved to the Centennial Correctional Facility in Colorado. In 2005 he filed a federal civil rights suit claiming cruel and unusual punishment; a district court dismissed parts of the suit and a 2006 appeal was unsuccessful. Scarver has said he was held for 16 years in solitary confinement. In 2012, an agent representing Scarver said he was willing to write a tell-all book about the murder of Dahmer.