Dahmer, Jeffrey (1960-1994)

At his 1992 trial, Jeffrey Dahmer, an alcoholic worker in a chocolate factory, admitted to the murder of seventeen young men during a thirteen-year killing spree. His gruesome full disclosure, including accounts of cannibalism, fired the popular imagination and helped spawn a virtual cottage industry of books, trading cards, movies, and other products. But behind the monstrous ghoul of popular imagination, there lurked a desperately lonely young man whose killings were the result of years of progressive mental illness.

While pregnant with Dahmer, his mother, Joyce, endured a particularly trying pregnancy, suffering extended bouts of nausea and nervousness and strange fits of rigidity. Doctors prescribed morphine and phenobarbital, among other medications. At one point Joyce was taking twenty-six pills a day, immersing her fetus in a soup of powerful depressants. Joyce Dahmer also found nursing to be acutely unpleasant and within a week of Dahmer's birth was nursing him from a bottle. Nevertheless, Dahmer grew into a happy, normal child, although displaying an aversion to the roughhousing of most boys and a predilection for nonconfrontational games based on themes of stalking and concealment, such as hide-and-seek or kick the can. But after a hernia operation, six-year-old Dahmer's behavior changed profoundly. He became remote, fearful, and distant—sitting for hours in front of the television without moving. Even his body language changed. His movements grew stiff and labored, like those of an old man.

By the time he began grade school, Dahmer had become so shy and reclusive that a teacher felt compelled to bring his behavior to his parents' attention. Nothing was done, and young Dahmer grew increasingly remote, submerged in a realm of unpleasant fantasies and, in increasing degrees, alcohol. In early adolescence, he often occupied himself by collecting road kills, stripping the flesh and assembling the bones in a nearby wood—once mounting a dog's head on a stick as a bizarre totem. In his late teens, Dahmer's obsessions had begun to overwhelm him. So fearful was he of others that he could only relate to them as inert objects. In 1978 he committed his first murder, picking up a hitchhiker and bringing him back to his parents' house where he plied him with beer and marijuana. As the hitchhiker prepared to depart, Dahmer killed the boy with a piece of gym equipment.

Unaware of Dahmer's blossoming psychosis, his father, Lionel—divorced and remarried—continued to counsel the apathetic boy to the best of his ability, insisting on his enrollment at Ohio State University. At the end of Dahmer's first quarter, he had earned a cumulative GPA of.45. He was returned home, and Lionel drove to the university to pick up his possessions, where he was further dismayed to learn that his son had done little else than drink, selling his plasma to secure the necessary funds. In frustration, his father insisted Dahmer join the military. Packed off to boot camp, Dahmer seemed to blossom under the rigid discipline, but the improvement was short-lived. Stationed for active duty in Germany, his behavior quickly lapsed into a nonstop debauch. He received an early discharge for drunkenness.

Now at his wits' end, the elder Dahmer packed his son off to live with his aging grandmother in a suburb outside Milwaukee. There, Dahmer's behavior became increasingly bizarre. Once, his grandmother found a fully clothed male mannequin in his closet; another time, a.357 under his bed. At times the house would be suffused with unpleasant odors. As he had in the past, Dahmer lamely explained away his activities, though he now convinced no one. Finally, he moved out of his grandmother's house. On the first day at his new apartment, he was arrested for drugging and molesting a thirteen-year-old Laotian boy. Dahmer served a year in a Milwaukee work-release program, during which time his father lobbied aggressively for additional treatment for his alcoholism. It was to no avail. In March of 1990, Dahmer was released on probation.

In the year and a half before his arrest, Dahmer, now living on his own, was able to indulge his tastes fully, killing thirteen men in the ensuing months. His modus operandi consisted of haunting the bars and street corners, trolling for a likely victim from amongst the hustlers who worked his neighborhood, many of them black, a fact that would later lead to charges that the murders were racially motivated when, in fact, the race of his victims was merely a consequence of proximity. To conceal his activities, Dahmer bought a freezer, installed an elaborate security system, and separated his bedroom from the rest of the apartment with a heavy metal door. Once secure within apartment 213, Dahmer would drug, then strangle his victim, molest the corpse, and finally eat or preserve parts of his victim as he saw fit, disposing of the remains with quicklime and an enormous plastic bucket. He was finally apprehended when a victim escaped his clutches, returning accompanied by police officers, who discovered polaroids of dead and dismembered men strewn about Dahmer's bedroom.

Hoping an insanity defense might lead to institutionalization rather than imprisonment, Dahmer chose a jury trial—during which he was protected from would-be assailants with the aid of a bullet-proof glass booth. Dahmer had said he wanted to find out why he did such things, but the only elucidation to come was to the ravenous public, who ate up the details of Dahmer's crimes. The jury, unmoved by his plea of insanity, sentenced him to nine consecutive life terms.

In prison, Dahmer found Jesus as well as the death he had long desired. He was fatally bludgeoned in 1994 while mopping a bathroom facility. (Dahmer's assailant, himself a convicted killer of questionable mental health, claimed he had acted under God's direction.) A figure at once pathetic and monstrous, Dahmer was generally reviled, although there was still something in his deflated appearance that generated sympathy. The wounded little boy had not been vanquished by the man's acts. And the enormous volume of letters Dahmer received after his incarceration, more often sympathetic than threatening, would seem to bear this out: he was not alone in his alienation. Ultimately, Dahmer killed not out of hatred, but out of loneliness.

In a final footnote to Dahmer's story, in 1996 a Milwaukee civic group bought his belongings for $407,000 to prevent their public auction on behalf of the victims' families. Instead of the auction block, Dahmer's possessions were incinerated, and the money was distributed to the families without fanfare.

—Michael J. Baers