Several high-profile criminals have been killed by fellow inmates while serving life sentences, in cases that have sparked debates about prison justice. From serial killers bludgeoned in bathrooms to elderly mobsters beaten to death, these notorious figures met violent ends behind bars.
Jeffrey Dahmer's Fatal Attack
Jeffrey Dahmer, known as the "Milwaukee Cannibal," murdered, dismembered, and ate the flesh of 17 male victims between 1978 and 1991. He was caught after one victim escaped and raised the alarm, leading police to find a severed head and other body parts in his flat.
Dahmer met his end aged 34 while serving multiple life sentences at Columbia Correctional Institute in Wisconsin. Fellow inmate Christopher Scarver beat him over the head with a 20-inch metal bar while they were alone in a bathroom. Scarver, a convicted murderer, told guards, "God told me to do it," and later claimed Dahmer had angered him by shaping his food to look like body parts in the prison canteen. Scarver, 56, remains behind bars.
Robert Pickton and Whitey Bulger
Robert Pickton took female victims to his pig farm near Vancouver, Canada, in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He bragged of killing 49 women—many of them sex workers—over 15 years to an undercover officer. He was convicted of six murders and sentenced to life, becoming one of Canada's most notorious serial killers. In 2024, aged 74, he was speared in the head with a broken broom handle by another inmate at Port-Cartier Institution in Quebec.
James "Whitey" Bulger, former boss of Boston's Winter Hill Gang, was convicted of 11 murders in 2013 after years on the FBI's most-wanted list. On October 30, 2018, the 89-year-old, using a wheelchair, was transferred to Hazelton prison in West Virginia. He was dragged by inmates to a spot out of camera view and beaten around the head with a padlock attached to a belt until he died, with his eyes also gouged out.
Other Infamous Prison Deaths
Richard Loeb, who with Nathan Leopold kidnapped and murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks in Chicago in 1924 "just for kicks," was killed in the shower room at Statesville Prison, Illinois, on January 28, 1936. His throat was slashed by inmate James Day, who claimed Loeb made sexual advances toward him. Day was found not guilty of murder.
Albert DeSalvo, the self-confessed Boston Strangler who murdered 13 women in the 1960s, was found stabbed to death on November 25, 1973, at Walpole maximum security prison after a dispute over drug sales. His alleged killer, a mobster, escaped conviction after a hung jury. In 2013, DNA tests from one victim confirmed DeSalvo's guilt.
