Steven Mark Hicks was an 18-year-old White/Caucasian man from Coventry Township, Ohio who disappeared on June 18, 1978, after a chance encounter while hitchhiking near Bath Township, near Akron. Jeffrey Dahmer picked him up, invited him to the Dahmer family home to drink beer, and later told investigators that when Hicks tried to leave he struck him in the head with a weight, strangled him and carried the body into a crawl space beneath the house. Dahmer dismembered the remains, attempted to conceal them on the property, then dug up, broke and scattered or reburied bone fragments in the woods behind the residence.

The crime was undiscovered for more than thirteen years. Nothing publicly tied a suspect to Hicks’s disappearance until Dahmer’s arrest in Milwaukee in July 1991. He identified Hicks from a photograph, led Ohio investigators to the Bath Road property and provided locations where remains had been buried. Forensic work recovered hundreds of bone fragments and blood evidence that the Summit County coroner confirmed belonged to Hicks.

Dahmer was indicted in Ohio and, after his Wisconsin trial and sentencing, pleaded guilty to aggravated murder for Hicks’s killing on May 1, 1992; a life sentence was imposed to run consecutively to his Wisconsin terms. Hicks is recognized as Dahmer’s first known murder victim. Did anyone in the Bath Township area in June 1978 ever see Hicks hitchhiking or give him a ride?