Jesse Anderson

Jesse Michael Anderson (May 3, 1957 – November 30, 1994) was a convicted American murderer who was murdered in prison, along with serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, by fellow inmate and convicted murderer Christopher Scarver.

Anderson was raised in Alton, Illinois. When Anderson was a teenager, his father died of a heart attack and his mother remarried. He attended Alton High School and graduated in 1975. In 1984, he graduated with a degree in Business Administration from Elmhurst College. On March 30, 1985, he married Barbara E. Lynch in Chicago.

Prior to his arrest for murder, the Andersons lived in Cedarburg, Wisconsin, with their three young children. He was treasurer of the Lions Club and did volunteer work at the Divine Word Catholic Church.

On April 21, 1992, the Anderson couple went to a movie and dinner at a T.G.I. Friday's outside the Northridge Mall in northwest Milwaukee. After dinner, Jesse stabbed Barbara five times in the face and head, and then stabbed himself four times in the chest, though most of his wounds were superficial. Barbara went into a coma and died from her wounds two days later.

Anderson blamed two African-American men for attacking him and his wife. He presented police with a Los Angeles Clippers basketball cap he claimed to have knocked off the head of one of the assailants. When details of the crime were made public, a university student told police Anderson had purchased the hat from him a few days earlier. According to employees at a military surplus store, the red-handled fishing knife that was used to murder Barbara was sold to Anderson a few weeks earlier. Police stated that the store was the only one in Milwaukee that sold that type of knife. On April 29, Anderson was charged with murder. On August 13, he was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 60 years.

On the morning of November 28, 1994, while imprisoned at Columbia Correctional Institution, Anderson and serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer were left unattended while cleaning a restroom at the prison gymnasium with fellow inmate Christopher Scarver. Scarver reported that he was "disgusted" by a newspaper report detailing Dahmer's crimes against black people, and had previously pleaded an insanity defense at his 1992 trial where he told a psychiatrist, "Nothing white people do is just". In a 2015 blog post, Scarver disputed some of these statements. After a confrontation with Dahmer and Anderson, Scarver retrieved a steel bar from the weight room, followed Dahmer to the locker room, and struck him in the head. He then tracked down Anderson and bludgeoned him as well. Dahmer was declared dead about one hour after the attack, and Anderson died two days later, when doctors at the University of Wisconsin Hospital in Madison removed him from life support.