Born
11 Oct 1967, Illinois

Death
21 Aug 1984, Chicago, Cook County, Illinois

Tragically, Daniel Bridges was one of the victims of Chicago’s serial murderer, Larry Eyler who was convicted of murdering 21 young men and boys between 1982 and 1984 and sentenced to death by lethal injection, died of AIDS-related complications in 1994 while incarcerated on death row. He was known as “The Interstate Killer” as many of his victims were discovered close to the Interstate Highway and is also known to have killed an additional 20 more young men and boys.

On August 21, 1984, 16-year-old Daniel Bridges of Upton was lured to Eyler’s apartment. The youngest of thirteen children, Bridges was a neglected child and habitual runaway who, although heterosexual had been a male prostitute since the age of twelve. Bridges had been a close acquaintance of victim Ervin Gibson, and is known to have been wary of Eyler, whom he had described to an NBC reporter (commissioned to film a documentary focusing on child exploitation in America two months before his murder) as a “real freak” who was well known to the male prostitutes of Uptown. Inside Eyler’s apartment, the youth was bound to a chair with clothesline before he was beaten, tortured, then stabbed to death. Eyler then dismembered Bridges’ body in his bathroom. His body was cut into eight pieces; each of which was completely drained of blood before being placed inside six separate plastic bags.

The dismembered body of Daniel Bridges was discovered by a janitor named Joseph Balla on the morning of August 21, 1984. His remains had been placed inside a garbage dumpster close to Eyler’s apartment and within a unit not intended for usage by tenants within Eyler’s apartment complex. Believing the bags to have been illegally dumped, Balla chose to remove the bags from the garbage receptacle to inspect the contents. Removing the first bag from the disposal unit caused the bag to split open and reveal the contents to be a severed human leg.