Dahmer, Jeffrey Lionel

(b. 21 May 1960 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; d. 28 November 1994 near Milwaukee, Wisconsin), serial killer and cannibal convicted of fifteen murders and responsible for seventeen or more. The racial aspects of his killings and the poor performance of the police caused investigations and protests.

Dahmer’s father, Lionel Herbert Dahmer, a research chemist with a reputation as hard working, earned a Ph.D. in chemistry from Iowa State University in 1966. Dahmer’s mother, Joyce Annette Flint, exhibited emotional disturbances and odd physical symptoms. A second son, David, was born when Jeffrey was seven. The marriage was troubled, and both pregnancies were difficult physically and emotionally. Lionel Dahmer later wondered if Jeffrey Dahmer’s dark future was influenced by the prescription drugs Joyce Dahmer used during these years, and various writers have speculated that Jeffrey felt abandoned when David was born. Until his preteen years Jeffrey Dahmer seemed shy and fearful of new situations but happy, even ebullient when secure with his family. Rumors later circulated that Jeffrey was sexually abused by a neighbor when he was eight, but both Dahmer and his father disputed this.

Dahmer attended Hazel Harvey Elementary School near Akron, Ohio, beginning in 1966. Between the ages of ten and fifteen he withdrew emotionally, and his interests darkened. He collected roadkill and dissolved the animals in acid. Even his posture changed, becoming stiff, and his nervous shyness was uncontrollable. He also discovered alcohol, and by the time of his graduation from Revere High School in Bath, Ohio, in 1978, he was a full-fledged alcoholic. Emboldened by drink, he was a class clown. His classmates referred to any outrageous prank as “doing a Dahmer.”

In 1978, after years of arguments and unhappiness, Dahmer’s parents divorced bitterly. Because Dahmer was legally an adult, both the court and the parents showed great concern for David but little for Jeffrey. In fact Joyce Dahmer and David Dahmer moved out, leaving the eighteen-year-old Jeffrey Dahmer alone. His father, with a new partner, Shari Jordan, moved back in but spent most of the next months locating David. Jeffrey’s alcoholism caused tensions with his father and Shari. He attended Ohio State University for one quarter in the fall of 1978, then dropped out. Forced to support himself, he joined the U.S. Army in January 1979.

Dahmer served three years in the army, including time in Baumholder, Germany, before his discharge for excessive drinking. Considered brilliant, he was an adequate soldier but spent much time quietly drunk in the barracks listening to heavy metal music. Tall, blond, and clean-cut, Dahmer was good-looking except for his blank stare. Although he could be violent, he was usually passive.

Unbeknownst to everyone, Dahmer had already killed his first victim on 18 June 1978, soon after his graduation from high school and his parents’ divorce. The crime was clearly sexual. Dahmer picked up a hitchhiking fellow teenager, took him home, had sex with him, and murdered him. Dahmer reported sexual fantasies at age fourteen, when he realized he was homosexual. He also explored scenarios of power, control, and violence. He killed the hitchhiker for wanting to leave.

When questioned about unsolved homicides, Dahmer insisted he killed no one while in the army or while he drifted in south Florida following his discharge from military service. The murders began again, however, after he moved in with his paternal grandmother, Catherine Dahmer, at 2357 South Fifty-seventh Street in West Allis, Wisconsin, in 1982. Dahmer was arrested for indecent exposure at the Wisconsin State Fair in 1982 and for exposing himself to two small boys in 1986, later insisting he simply had been urinating. Some gay bathhouses in Milwaukee barred Dahmer for drugging other patrons. In 1985 Dahmer took a night-shift job mixing ingredients at the Ambrosia Chocolate Company in Milwaukee.

Dahmer later explained that he could not stand to be abandoned, so he killed to keep his pickup partners with him. He often saved their cleaned skulls as souvenirs and even cut off chunks of their flesh to eat. Wanting to make zombies who would be living sex toys incapable of independent thought, he conducted gruesome experiments, injecting acid into his victims’ brains. This killed some, and others he stabbed or strangled. He photographed the men before and after death.

While living with his grandmother, Dahmer killed three men. His grandmother complained of odors, which Dahmer attributed to chemical experiments. In 1988 he rented his own apartment in Milwaukee, and in 1990 he moved to 213 Oxford Apartments, 924 North Twenty-fifth Street.

Convicted of sexually assaulting minors in August 1988 and again in January 1989, Dahmer was only sentenced to work release, not to prison. In vain, Dahmer’s father pleaded for help, including the alcoholism treatment promised as part of parole. Dahmer killed once in 1989, but then the murders gained momentum. He committed four in 1990 and eight in 1991, including two murders within three days after he lost his job. Those murders may also have been triggered by a phone call in March 1991 from Dahmer’s mother, who had been absent for five years. On 26 May 1991 a fourteen-year-old Laotian boy escaped Dahmer’s apartment, but incredibly the police returned the frightened child to Dahmer, who told the officers they were quarreling lovers. The police did not investigate, despite the apartment’s odors. Dahmer killed the boy, then performed oral sex on his corpse.

Finally, on 22 July 1991 a victim escaped Dahmer and convinced police to investigate. Officers carried out body parts, a heavily locked refrigerator containing the head of a previous victim, and vats of acid as a numbed public and the media watched.

Dahmer found many of his victims, all in their teens or twenties, in gay bars or public places such as malls. After inviting them home for a drink, or promising pay for nude photo modeling, he drugged them. The murderer’s confessions led to his conviction, and he was sentenced by a jury to fifteen consecutive life sentences with no parole eligibility for 936 years. While serving his sentence at the Columbia Correctional Institution near Milwaukee, Dahmer was killed on 28 November 1994 by Christopher Scarver, a psychotic fellow inmate. In a macabre aftermath reminiscent of his upbringing, his parents legally fought over Dahmer’s cremated remains and whether their son’s brain, preserved after autopsy, should be studied or destroyed. The brain was cremated. In a legal decision evocative of Solomon, Dahmer’s ashes were divided, half going to each parent.

Dahmer’s legacy is dual: horror at the outer reaches of human consciousness and behavior and shock at the social and political flaws his story illuminates. Because many victims were nonwhite and the police had returned the Laotian boy to Dahmer and made crude jokes afterward, protesters accused Milwaukee officials of racial discrimination and homophobia. Three officers responsible for the return were suspended without pay, and the police department was investigated. Nevertheless, the public outcry continued. Commentators also sadly noted how many opportunities to stop Dahmer the police and the justice system had wasted. More basic is a gruesome fascination with the sexual nature of the crimes, the cannibalism, and the macabre motive of zombie making. Starting his murders so young, Dahmer seems both pitiful and peculiarly repugnant.

Books about Dahmer include Edward Baumann, Step into My Parlor: The Chilling Story of Serial Killer Jeffrey Dahmer (1991); Richard Tithecott and James Kincaid, Of Men and Monsters: Jeffrey Dahmer and the Construction of the Serial Killer (1997); Don Davis, The Milwaukee Murders (1997); and Robert J. Dvorchak and Lisa Holewa, Milwaukee Massacre (1991). Lionel Dahmer, A Father’s Story (1994), provides insight colored by a father’s sense of responsibility. Moira Martingale, Cannibal Killers (1994), contains a detailed chapter on Dahmer. Robert K. Ressler and Tom Shachtman, I Have Lived in the Monster (1997), includes a lengthy interview with Dahmer.

Bernadette Lynn Bosky