On the twenty-first day of May 1960 in West Allis, Wisconsin, Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer was born to parents Lionel and Joyce Dahmer. Just before his tenth birthday, his family moved to Bath, Ohio. According to Lionel Dahmer, his son was the typical American boy, “bright loving child…very outgoing” however, by age 7 he was “socially awkward.” This social awkwardness is attributed to the sexual molestation Jeffrey suffered at the young age of six at the hands of a neighbor. Though a former lover of Jeffrey Dahmer has made the claim that Lionel himself sexually abused Jeffrey; an allegation that Lionel Dahmer firmly denies in his book, A Father’s Story.

Just before his tenth birthday, his family moved to Bath, Ohio. Jeffrey was given the honor of naming his new baby brother, whom he named David. It was shortly after this that his mother Joyce would be hospitalized for anxiety and his parents’ marriage first began to show signs of collapsing.

At about the age of 13, Jeffrey first became curious about animals, particularly the insides of animals. He started going out in search of animal carcasses in order to investigate and dissect the animal. This was the “starting point of his downward spiral” (L. Dahmer, 1994), “and it just happened to coincide with the start of puberty.”

Dahmer attended Revere High School, where he once conned himself and classmates into the executive offices of then Vice President Walter Mondale in 1977.

It was in high school that he first realized he was only sexually attracted to men.

He would soon discover that those feelings would be forever linked to the desire to lie next to them as they lay unconscious or to the desire to kill them. He found himself sexually excited at the thought of either fantasy.

In an interview Jeffrey once stated, “it started at the age of 14 or 15. I started having excessive fantasies of violence intermingled with sex and it just got worse and worse. I didn’t know how to tell anyone, so I didn’t. I just kept it all inside.”

One of the fantasies was to lay next an unconscious man; a fantasy he was going to try to make a reality. He decided to attack a local jogger, club him and lie next to his body. He knew the jogger’s schedule and that he ran the same time everyday. For whatever reason, that jogger did not run that day and Jeffrey never tried to put that plan into motion again.

As the fantasies got worse, a then 16-year-old Dahmer turned to drinking in order to deal with his fantasies. He would drink alcohol before going to school everyday; one classmate would later say that she thought it was weird that he was getting drunk at 8 am in the morning. Jeffrey called the alcohol his “medicine.”

In addition to his drinking, Dahmer’s home life was falling apart. His parent’s marriage was going from bad to worse, what was once just fighting was now becoming violent. At school, he was known as the class clown, but his drinking and fantasies kept him from truly connecting with people. His father said in his book that, “he didn’t connect or interact with people. When one fails to connect to people one falls into a fantasy world. After a while those fantasies can become real.”

In 1978, Jeffrey’s life as he knew it was turned upside down in several ways and it would send him into a tailspin that would make his father’s prediction come true.

In 1978, Jeffrey Dahmer:

• graduated Revere High School

• watched his parents get divorced

• watched his father moved out

• watched as his mother and brother moved away

• murdered his first victim: Steven Hicks

In June 1978, Jeffrey picked up a hitchhiker from the side of the road, took him home to his deserted family home, had sex with him, murdered him, dismembered his body and placed him in a garbage bag in order to get rid of the body. On the way to do this though, he was pulled over by the police for swerving across the yellow line. Just as he had lied years before to get into the executive offices of Vice-President Mondale, he lied to the police who let him go without ever knowing the truth about why he was driving erratically.

Commenting on his murder of Hicks, Dahmer said, “I wish I had just kept going, but I didn’t. I turned around and picked him up. That is when the fantasy became reality.” He returned to his family home with the body. Using the skills he had developed as a child dissecting animals, he removed the flesh from the bones, broke the bones into small pieces using a sledgehammer and threw the fragmented bones out in the woods behind his home where they would remain undiscovered for over a decade.

His father Lionel returned to the family home and moved back in with Jeffrey. At this time, Jeffrey continued to drink harder in order to deal with his fantasies and guilt over killing Hicks. However, he would later admit that the kill calmed his fantasies and he was able to keep from killing again for almost nine years.

In 1979, he attended Ohio State University, but flunked out after two terms. At the urging of his father, Jeffery Dahmer joined the United States Army and received six months training as a medic. He went from a scrawny young man to a fit soldier. His father had hoped that the military would give Jeffrey the stability he needed to be in order to be a contributing member of society.

That hope turned into disappointment as Dahmer was discharged from the Army after serving only two of the six years he enlisted for. He was discharged because his drinking became so out of control that he was showing up to assignments drunk and his commanding officers could no longer ignore it.

In 1982, he moved in with his grandmother in West Allis, Wisconsin where he lived for six years. While living with his grandmother he made one of the two conversions he would make in his life. He stopped drinking, went to church and fought against the homosexual feelings that he now viewed as a sin.

August 1982, he had a small brush with the law and was charged with his first crime: indecent exposure. It was also during this time that he purchased a male mannequin from a department store. He would hide this mannequin in his closet during the day and at night use it to fulfill the fantasies that continued to haunt him. He continued this until his grandmother found the mannequin and made Jeffrey get rid of it.

In September 1986, he was arrested again for indecent exposure and was sentenced to a year in prison, of which he only served 10 months and was told to seek counseling, which he never did. During this time, he began to visit gay bathhouses, where he would drug men in order to make the men be the submissive partner.

This would bring up later questions like:

1. Did he do this to recreate the fantasy he had as a young teenager of laying next to an unconscious man?

2. Did he use the mannequin to fulfill that fantasy?

3. Was this just a precursor to what he would soon evolve into: a

necrophiliac – a person who slept with the dead?

In November of 1987, he went to a gay bar and met a man named Steven Tuomi. He would take this man to a hotel, have sex with him and wake the next morning to find him dead. He would later admit to having no memory of killing Tuomi, but knew that he had. He stuffed Tuomi’s body into a suitcase and took it back to his grandmother’s house, where he dismembered it in the basement.

In an interview before his death, Jeff said, “that was when the obsession really started and I chose to pursue it.”

He killed two more people in 1987, James Doxtator, age 14 and Richard Guerrero, age 25. With Doxtator, Dahmer entered a new phase of his obsession with killing his lovers. It was with Doxtator that he first experimented with necrophilia by having sex with the deceased body of Doxtator for a week before dismembering it. It was during this time that Jeffrey returned to drinking. His grandmother fed up with the drinking and strange odor coming from her basement asked Jeffrey to leave her home.

On September 25, 1988, Jeffrey was arrested for a third time, this time for sexually fondling a 13-year-old boy. He was again sentenced to serve a year in a prison work release camp, of which he served only 10 months. Just a few days before reporting in to serve his sentence, he killed his fifth victim, Anthony Sears and evolved again as a killer by boiling and mummifying Sears’ head and genitals, keeping them in his locker at work.

During his time in the work release camp, Jeffrey’s father petitioned the court not to just release Jeff, but to release him into an alcohol program. The judge ignored the request and released Jeffrey Dahmer. Just 2 weeks after his release, Jeffrey Dahmer would begin a yearlong killing frenzy that would leave 13 men dead. Those 13 men were:

• Edward Smith, age 36, June 1990

• Raymond Smith, July 1990

• Ricky Beeks, age 27, July 1990

• Ernest Miller, age 22, September 1990

• David Thomas, age 23, September 1990

• Curtis Straughter, age 19, February 1991

• Errol Lindsay, age 19, April 1991

• Anthony Hughes, age 31, May 24, 1991

• Konerak Sinthasomphone, age 14, May 27, 1991

• Matt Turned, age 20, June 30, 1991

• Jeremiah Weinberger, age 23, July 5, 1991

• Oliver Lacy, age 23, July 15, 1991

• Joseph Brandeholt, age 25, July 19, 1991.

Of the above-mentioned males, Sinthasomphone is the one most people remember because his plight made headlines once the truth about Dahmer had done became known.

He is remembered as the one who almost got away, but was given back to Dahmer by the police who should have saved him. Dahmer told police that he and the boy were having a lovers’ spat, the police left and Dahmer killed the 14-year-old boy that night. Sinthasomphone was also the brother of the 13-year-old boy Dahmer had molested in 1988, for which he went to prison for.

Dahmer was murdering his victim’s so fast that he was running out of room for them all. So according to his confession, he bought a 57-gallon drum, filled it up with acid and placed the dismembered body parts into it. Once the body parts would dissolve, he would flush the slushy like flesh down the toilet in his apartment. He would cook other body parts on the stove.

He took photographs of his victim’s in various stages of dismemberment and in an effort to keep his victims alive somehow, he began to eat the body parts of his victims for “sexual gratification.”

On July 22, 1991, Dahmer’s reign of terror ended when he picked up Tracy Edwards, who would later escape and bring the police straight to Dahmer’s door. Upon searching Dahmer’s residence, the police found:

• 83 photos of bodies in various stages of dismemberment

• Four fleshed skulls in the refrigerator

• Three torso’s of males in the 57-gallon drum, with maggots

• Cooked flesh and genitals on the stove

• Freezer full of arms, legs and other body parts

Dahmer confessed his crimes in a 159-page confession. He admitted to the killing of 17 men. Jeff would later admit that the confession felt, “cathartic to admit his crimes.” He pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity and was officially charged on August 22, 1991.Wisconsin had no death penalty so if Dahmer were to be found guilty without insanity he would face life in prison. However, if he were found guilty by reason of insanity, he would serve his sentence in a mental hospital.

His trial started on January 30, 1992 and he was found guilty without insanity on February 15 and sentenced to prison for a total of 937 years. At the sentencing hearing Jeffrey Dahmer made the following statement:

“I feel so sorry for what I did to those poor families…if I could give my life to bring back their loved ones I would. I am so very sorry.”

He was sentenced to Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin where he became known as inmate #177252. Jeffrey Dahmer would later say that he blamed his atheist views and evolution for his killing spree. He told his father, “if it all happens naturally why can’t I make my own rules?”

It was in prison that Dahmer underwent his second conversion and began speaking with a priest named Roy Ratcliff in April of 1994 and in May of that same year was baptized. Despite the conversion, he continued to have the fantasies that had haunted him nearly his entire life.

Jeffrey Dahmer had several attempts on his life while he was in prison, two of which sent him to the prison hospital in July and August of 1994. On November 28, 1994, at the age of 34, Jeffrey Dahmer was bludgeoned to death by fellow prisoner Christopher Scarver.

Psychological Reasons Behind Dahmer’s Crimes

Jeffrey Dahmer suffered from several psychological disorders, which in part lead to his behavior. Was he mentally ill? Was he in fact insane? In order to qualify as being insane one has to meet one of two criteria:

1. Can the person tell right from wrong?

2. If the person meets the first criteria, can the person act accordingly or does his or her actions happen out of the person’s control?

Jeffrey Dahmer’s own actions show that he felt guilt at times, that he tried to deny his fantasies and desires by drinking and that he at times acted without remembering anything later. He was continually evolving as a serial killer. Toward the end of his killing spree, he had advanced to killing almost one to two men a week.

Jeffrey Dahmer has been labeled with the following disorders:

• Sexual sadist

• Necrophilia

• Paraphilia

• Cannibalism

• Erotic Asphyxia

• Psychopathic

Despite the definitions and labels, nothing can truly explain what makes a man like Jeffrey Dahmer do what he did. Understanding the criminal mind is not impossible, but truly understanding the criminal mind is something that will never be achieved by someone with a college degree of any kind.