Exclusive: Green Bay murder suspect had interest in Jeffrey Dahmer, journalist says

GREEN BAY, Wis. (WBAY) - So many questions are being asked today as people try to understand how and why such a gruesome and horrific crime happened in Green Bay last week.

As we first reported Tuesday, 24-year-old Taylor Schabusiness was charged with intentional homicide, mutilating a corpse and sexual assault for the death of a 25-year-old man on the city’s west side.

Warning: The details of the case are graphic and disturbing.

We learned from court documents describing how the victim’s mother found her son’s head in a bucket in the basement of her home on Stony Brook Lane. Prosecutors say Schabusiness admitted doing meth, strangling the victim during sex, then dismembering his body.

In an Action 2 News exclusive, we discovered new information about the woman accused in the crime and what one expert says is an obsession with Jeffrey Dahmer.

“I think that when people see that in fiction, it’s one thing. And then when you find out that it happened in Green Bay, Wisconsin, or Milwaukee, Wisconsin, people just, you know, how could that be? How could that happen here?” Anne Schwartz says.

Schwartz was the reporter who broke the story on serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer in Milwaukee in 1991 and has since written two books about it, researching a criminal mind.

And her understanding of that particular case may now become very important.

“One of the things that I have found out from talking to different sources of mine on this case is that the suspect in this case had a very... had an infatuation almost with Jeffrey Dahmer and with Jeffrey Dahmer crimes.”

Dahmer killed and dismembered 17 men or boys in Ohio and Wisconsin between 1978 and 1991.

The crimes are unthinkable to most people.

“Thirty years later, it’s still the same. It’s still the same feeling, still very similar to finding out that someone like this was was living in in our midst. What makes it unusual is that it’s a woman,” Schwartz said.

Schwartz is closely following this brutal case. She, probably like many of us, is asking how?

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It’s impossible to get into the mind of someone police say could commit a brutal crime, but that is likely the job of forensic psychologists. As Schwartz read the criminal complaint in this case, she pointed out comments police say Schabusiness made to them including she “liked it.”

“And that is what makes this case different to me is that she is admitting -- if what is in the criminal complaint is accurate -- she is admitting that there’s a predilection to that, that there was a thrill to that in in some way.”

Schabusiness’s Facebook page is even more revealing, says Schwartz, such as a post from January, “Told an addict I’ll never stop buying you dope so I could sit back and watch you die.”

Schwartz said, “The fact that she is or was using social media to telegraph some of these sentiments makes her unusual, again, for someone that emulated the Jeffrey Dahmer case because he didn’t telegraph anything.”

Police say Schabusiness used meth and other drugs with the victim before his death. To that, Schwartz says, “People do drugs all the time and they don’t do this.”

While the focus for many of us is on the person charged in this crime, Schwartz doesn’t want people to forget about the victim. He hasn’t been identified, and police have told us his family is asking for privacy.

Schwartz says that’s who the case is really all about.

“And we can never forget that as much as we want to talk about that case is that’s what these cases really come down to.”

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