Jesse Michael Anderson (1957 – November 30, 1994) was an American criminal who was murdered in prison, along with infamous serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, by fellow inmate Christopher Scarver.
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Anderson was raised in Alton, Illinois. He attended Alton High School and graduated in 1975. When Anderson was a teenager, his father died and his mother remarried.[1]
On April 21, 1992, Anderson stabbed his wife, Barbara E. Anderson, thirty seven times. After going into a coma, Barbara died from her wounds on April 23. Anderson blamed two African-American men for attacking him and his wife as they left a Milwaukee restaurant, T.G.I. Friday's, at the Northridge Mall. Anderson 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 and the cap were made public, a local teenager told police Anderson had purchased the hat from him a few days earlier. Anderson was tried for the murder, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison. Prior to his arrest for the murder of his wife, Anderson lived in Cedarburg, Wisconsin.[2]
Anderson was bludgeoned to death in prison in the same incident which led to the death of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Anderson died two days after Dahmer when doctors at the University of Wisconsin Hospital in Madison removed him from life support.[3]
Prison officials held 25-year-old Christopher J. Scarver as the sole suspect in the murders of Dahmer and Anderson. Scarver was reported as having psychiatric problems and having hostility toward whites, and since both Dahmer's and Anderson's crimes affected blacks, officials did not rule out racial retaliation.