Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer was born on May 21, 1960 to Lionel and Joyce Dahmer in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; he was the oldest of two boys, and had a little brother named David (born on December 18, 1966). Joyce was born on February 7, 1936 in Columbus, Wisconsin and Lionel was born on July 29, 1936 in Milwaukee. In Jeffrey’s younger years his father was a chemistry student at Marquette University, and he later worked as a research scientist; Joyce was a teletype machine instructor. It’s been reported that Mrs. Dahmer was a hypochondriac that was often greedy for attention, and multiple sources have claimed that Jeffrey was deprived of attention as an infant due to her intense struggle with mental illness and depression… Others however, suggest that he was generally adored and doted on throughout his entire childhood by both of his parents.
As little Jeffrey grew into toddlerhood his mother was beginning to spend more and more time in bed, and by the time he was in first grade his father was mostly absent, as he was away at school. One time Joyce attempted suicide by taking too much of one of her medications called Equanil, which is prescribed to help treat symptoms of anxiety and nervousness. As an adult Jeff said that from a very young age he was ‘unsure of the solidity of the family,’ and that he recalled a large amount of tension in the family home, as well as many fights between his parents in his formative years.
In his early years, Dahmer was a normal, ‘energetic, and happy child,’ but he became visibly subdued after having a double hernia surgery right before his fourth birthday. While in elementary school, little Jeffrey was a timid, quiet child that had few friends, and one of his teachers remembered seeing early signs of abandonment due to Mr. Dahmer’s glaring absence (as well as his mother’s severe mental health issues). It didn’t help that Joyce’s condition got even worse when she became pregnant with David, and after his brother was born Jeff became even more withdrawn, and the family’s fairly-frequent moves didn’t help him establish roots either. The same year David was born Mr. Dahmer graduated from college and got a job as an analytical chemist in Akron, Ohio.
From a young age, Jeff was interested in studying and preserving animal bones, and learned how to clean and preserve them. His fascination may have started at the age of four, when he saw his dad removing animal bones from beneath the family home. According to Lionel, his son was ‘oddly thrilled’ by the sound they made and became preoccupied with bones, initially calling them his ‘fiddlesticks.’ On occasion Jeff would search underneath and around his family home looking for more animal bones, and would often explore the bodies of living creatures to help map out where certain ones were located. In May of 1968 the Dahmer’s moved to Bath Township in Ohio, which was the family’s third house in only two years. The residence stood on one and a half acres of thick trees and woods, complete with a small hut that was only a short jaunt from the home.
During dinner two years after his interest in bones began Jeff asked his dad what would happen if the bones from the chicken they were eating were placed in bleach. Lionel was pleased with what he thought at the time was scientific curiosity, and showed him how to preserve animal bones using bleach, and Jeffrey started incorporating these preservation skills into his collecting techniques. Later that same year, Joyce started taking more than the prescribed daily dose of her sleeping meds, laxatives, and Equanil, which only further alienated her family. Dahmer also started collecting the remains of dead animals (including roadkill), which he would then dissect and bury next to the hut on the family’s property, and on occasion he would place the skull on top of homemade crosses. According to one of Dahmer’s few friends, he shared with them that he was curious as to how animals ‘fit together,’ and on one occasion in 1975 he beheaded the carcass of a dog he found (just by chance) before he nailed its body to a tree then impaled its skull on a stick behind his house. Then later, as a ‘prank,’ he later invited a friend to look at what he did.
As a young child Jeffrey collected large insects, as well as the skulls of small animals that he expertly preserved in formaldehyde. In October of 1966 the Dahmer’s moved to Doylestown, Ohio and as a teenager Jeff was incredibly disengaged with his peers, and didn’t have very many friends. In later interviews he said that his strong interest in murder and necrophilia began around the age of fourteen, and it seems it was the end of his parents’ marriage and their bitter divorce that helped make him turn his desires into actions. Immediately beginning in his freshman year at Revere High School, Dahmer was seen as an outcast, and had started drinking beer and hard liquor at the age of fourteen, oftentimes concealing his booze inside his coat. When a school mate asked why he was drinking scotch during an early morning history class, he just shrugged his shoulders and told him the alcohol was his ‘medicine.’ Despite being mostly quiet and unwilling to communicate, during Jeffrey’s freshman year he was seen as polite and highly intelligent by teachers even though he earned only average grades. Fun Serial Killer Fact #1: during his time in secondary school he played competitive tennis and briefly played in the band.
By the time he reached puberty, Jeff realized he was homosexual, a fact he initially attempted to hide from his parents. During his early teen years he had a short relationship with another boy around his age (although the two never engaged in sexual intercourse). By Jeff’s own admission he had started fantasizing about controlling and dominating a completely submissive male partner in his early to mid-teens, and his masturbatory fantasies slowly evolved to him focusing on chests and torsos, which became interwoven with the idea of human dissection. Around the age of sixteen Jeff developed a fantasy of rendering unconscious a male jogger that he found attractive then making sexual use of his body. He even made an attempt to hide in some bushes with a baseball bat in an attempt to kidnap the man, but (lucky for him) he didn’t happen to pass by that particular day. After his arrest Jeff later admitted that this was his first actual attempt to attack a victim.
Even though he was mostly seen as quiet, Dahmer was considered by his peers and teachers to be a class clown that frequently staged pranks, which earned him a catch phrase: ‘doing a Dahmer.’ These ‘pranks’ included ‘bleating’ and faking epileptic seizures or cerebral palsy at both school and local stores, and on occasion he would perform these antics for cash so that he could buy alcohol. By 1977 Dahmer’s grades had plummeted and his concerned parents hired him a private tutor; this resulted in only limited success. In that same year in a desperate attempt to save their marriage, Lionel and Joyce started marriage counseling, but despite this they continued to fight constantly. When Mr. Dahmer discovered his wife had participated in a short affair in September 1977, they finally decided to divorce, telling both of their sons that they wished to do so ‘amicably.’ Lionel moved out of the family home in early 1978, and despite the best of intentions the process of their separating quickly became increasingly hateful and acrimonious.
By the time of Dahmer’s first murder at the age of eighteen his alcohol consumption had completely spun out of control. A few weeks before he graduated one of his teachers observed him sitting by the school parking lot, drinking several beers. When they threatened to report him, Jeff told them he was experiencing ‘a lot of problems’ at home and that the school’s guidance counselor was aware of them. That spring, Joyce (breaking a court order) moved out of the family home with David and relocated to Chippewa Falls, to stay with family (without informing her ex-husband); Jeff had just turned eighteen and stayed behind. His parents’ divorce was finalized on July 24, 1978, and Mrs. Dahmer was awarded custody of their younger son as well as alimony.
Jeffrey committed his first murder three weeks after he graduated from high school on June 18, 1978: eighteen-year-old hitchhiker, Steven Hicks. He lured the young man (who had been hitchhiking to a rock concert at Chippewa Lake Park) to his house with the promise of ‘a few beers,’ and according to Jeff the sight of the bare-chested young man pulled at his deepest, darkest sexual desires. Unfortunately when the young man began talking about women he immediately knew that any passes he made would be rejected, and after several hours of chatting he told Jeffrey that he ‘wanted to leave.’ Now, this was the exact opposite of what he wanted to hear, so he bludgeoned Hicks to death with a 10-pound dumbbell. Dahmer later confessed that he hit his victim from behind twice as he was sitting in a chair, and when he quickly was rendered unconscious, strangled him to death with the bar of the dumbbell. He then took the young man’s clothes off before he ran his hands along his chest then stood over his remains and masturbated. A few hours after the murder Jeff dragged the remains to his basement, and the following day dissected his body; he later buried it in a shallow grave in his backyard. Several weeks later Dahmer dug up Hick’s corpse and stripped the flesh off his bones then dissolved it in acid before flushing the solution down the toilet. He crushed the bones with a sledgehammer then scattered them in the woods behind his home, and tossed Hicks’ necklace as well as the knife he used to dismember him off of the West Bath Road bridge and into the Cuyahoga River. Six weeks after this murder Lionel (along with his new fiancé) stopped by his former home, where they found Jeff living by himself.
After graduating from high school in August 1978 Dahmer went on to attend Ohio State University, where he planned on majoring in business but dropped out after only one quarter. He failed the majority of his courses, including Classical Civilizations, Administrative Science, and Introduction to Anthropology; the only class he did well in was Riflery, where he earned a B−. At the end of his only attempt at higher learning his GPA was a 0.45. On one occasion Lionel surprised his son with a visit only to find his dorm room a mess and was filled with empty liquor bottles. Despite the fact that he paid for two terms in advance, Jeff dropped out of school after just three months, and with no real plans for his life Mr. Dahmer insisted that his son join the military, and he enlisted in the Army in late December 1978 (I’ve also seen it listed as January 1979).
Dahmer was sent to basic training at Fort McClellan in Anniston, Alabama before beginning his training as a medical specialist at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, TX. On one occasion he was reprimanded for being drunk while stationed in Fort Sam Houston, which resulted in his entire platoon being punished, earning him a brutal beating from his fellow recruits. After training was completed Dahmer was sent to Baumholder, West Germany on July 13, 1979 and he served as a combat medic in the 2nd Battalion, 68th Armored Regiment, 8th Infantry Division. Reportedly during Jeff’s first year of military service he was an average or slightly above average’ soldier, and it’s speculated that his worsening alcohol abuse affected his performance and he was deemed to be ‘unsuitable for military service’ and in March 1981 he was discharged from the Army. Because Dahmer’s superior officers didn’t feel that any of the issues he had in the military would be applicable to civilian life, he received an honorable discharge.
On March 24, 1981 Jeffrey was sent to Fort Jackson, South Carolina for a military debriefing and afterwards was given a plane ticket for anywhere in the country. He chose Miami Beach in Florida because he was ‘tired of the cold’ and wanted to see if he could make it completely on his own. Dahmer also told investigators during his confession that he felt like he couldn’t go home to face his dad. While in Florida, Jeff found employment at a sandwich shop, and spent most of his money on booze. He was quickly evicted from the motel he was staying due to non-payment, and at first he spent his nights on the beach as he kept working at the delicatessen but he eventually reached out to Lionel in September and asked if he could come back to Ohio.
After Dahmer’s atrocities came to light, investigators in Germany looked into any possible links between him and any homicides that took place while he was stationed there, and it was eventually determined that he did not commit any murders while serving in the Army overseas. After returning to Ohio he lived with Lionel and his stepmother, and upon moving in he insisted on being given chores to help keep him busy while he was looking for a job. While at home Jeffrey continued to drink heavily, and two weeks after returning home he was arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct; he was given a suspended 10-day jail sentence and was fined $60.
Mr. Dahmer attempted to wean his son off alcohol but was unsuccessful, and in December 1981 Jeffrey was sent to live with his grandmother Catherine in West Allis, Wisconsin. Lionel’s mother was a retired elementary school teacher (specifically history), and she was the only member of the family that Jeff was affectionate with, and his parents hoped that a combination of her influence and the change of location might help convince Jeffrey to quit drinking, find a job, and be a contributing member of society. Initially this arrangement worked out beautifully: he accompanied his grandmother to church on Sunday’s and helped her around the house and yard, all while trying to find employment. He also was mindful of (most of) her rules (despite continuing to smoke and drink), and in early 1982 he got a position as a phlebotomist at the Milwaukee Blood Plasma Center, a job he kept for ten months before eventually getting laid off. After this Jeff remained unemployed for over two years, during which he lived off of whatever spare cash Catherine was able to part with. Unfortunately, old problems reared their ugly head and on August 8, 1982 Dahmer was arrested for indecent exposure at the Wisconsin State Fair Park when he was observed exposing himself ‘on the south side of the Coliseum in which 25 people were present including women and children.’ He was convicted and fined $50 plus court costs.
In January 1985 Dahmer got a job as a mixer at the Milwaukee Ambrosia Chocolate Factory, where he worked third shift from 11 PM to 7 AM, six nights per week; he had a set schedule, and had Saturday nights off. Right after he started this position he had a run in at the West Allis Public Library, where he was propositioned by another man while reading who gave Jeffrey a piece of paper with an offer of fellatio. Although he did ignore him the event only stirred up familiar feelings of desire as well as fantasies of control and dominance, and after this event he began to visit the local gay scene, including bars, bathhouses, and bookstores. It’s also around this time that he stole a male mannequin, which he briefly used for sexual reasons until his grandma found it in a closet and forced him to get rid of it.
By late 1985, Dahmer had begun to frequent local bathhouses (which he felt were ‘relaxing’), but was growing increasingly irritated and frustrated during his encounters due to his partners’ moving, elaborating that: ‘I trained myself to view people as objects of pleasure instead of as people.’ It was because of this that in June 1986 he began giving his victims crushed up sleeping pills dissolved in liquor, then waited for them to pass out before he performed various sexual acts on their completely still, nearly lifeless bodies. To convince his physicians to keep him supplied with an adequate amount of this pharmaceutical, Jeff told them that he worked overnights and needed the medication to help him adjust to his new lifestyle. After roughly twelve reported instances of Dahmer acting inappropriately with other members, the bathhouses’ revoked his membership and he was forced to use hotel rooms to keep up with his habit.
It was around this time that Dahmer read an article in a local newspaper about an upcoming funeral of an 18-year-old male, and got the idea to steal his corpse and take it home (WTF?). He confessed that he went to the cemetery and attempted to dig up the remains but found the ground to be too hard and abandoned this particular project. On September 8, 1986 Jeff was arrested for lewd and lascivious behavior for masturbating in front of two 12-year-old boys near the Kinnickinnic River. At first he told police that he was simply urinating and had no idea there was anyone else around, but he quickly caved and admitted to what he did. The charge was changed to disorderly conduct and on March 10, 1987 he was sentenced to one year of probation and had to undergo mental health counseling.
On November 20, 1987 Dahmer encountered Steven Tuomo at a bar and convinced him to come back to the Ambassador Hotel with him, where he had rented a room for the evening. According to Jeff, he had no intention of killing the 25-year-old, and only intended to drug him then lie next to him and ‘explore his body.’ When he woke up the next morning he discovered that Tuomi was in bed next to him, and his chest was ‘crushed in,’ and was covered in ‘black and blue’ bruises. Dried blood was seeping out of his mouth, and Dahmer quickly noticed that his fists and one forearm were also covered in deep purple bruises. He later confessed that he had no recollection of killing the young man, and ‘could not believe this had happened.’
Jeffrey then went out and bought a large suitcase, which he used to take Tuomi’s remains out of the hotel room and to his grandmother’s house. One week later, he cut off Tuomi’s head, arms, and legs then fileted the bones off his body before cutting his flesh into small, easy to handle chunks. Dahmer then placed the skin inside plastic garbage bags then wrapped the bones inside a sheet and pounded them into dust with a sledgehammer. The entire dismemberment process took him approximately two hours and he got rid of everything except for the young mans head; he masturbated on the corpse before disposing of the remains. After having the head for roughly two weeks, Jeffrey boiled it in a mixture of bleach and Soilax (an alkaline industrial detergent) in hopes of preserving the skull, but it eventually became too brittle and he was forced to destroy it. He later admitted that after this particular event his ‘obsession with killing went into full swing’ and he ‘didn’t even try to stop it after that.’ Dahmer killed two more victims at Catherine’s house before she made him move out in 1988. She said that she had no knowledge of her grandson’s crimes but finally had enough of his drinking, his habit to bring young men home, and the horrible smells that started seeping from her basement.
In September 1988 Dahmer moved into his own apartment, a one-bedroom located at 808 North 24th Street in Milwaukee, and just two days after moving in he lured a 13-year-old Laotian boy to his residence by telling him that he wanted to take naked pictures of him. This act resulted in charges of second-degree sexual assault as well as sexual exploitation. Jeffrey pleaded guilty and said that to him the young victim looked much older, and while he was awaiting sentencing he once again put his grandmothers basement to use: in March 1989 he lured, drugged, strangled, sodomized, photographed, dismembered, and disposed of Anthony Sears. Dahmer found the aspiring model particularly attractive, and after his arrest he confessed that he didn’t want to ’lose him,’ and because of this he preserved a select few of his body parts, even going so far as to mummifying his head and genitals.
In May 1989 while on trial for child molestation, Dahmer was the very definition of sorrow, arguing poignantly in his own defense that he had seen the ‘error of his ways’ and even marked the event as a ‘turning point in his life.’ His counsel told the court that his young client needed treatment, not jail time, and to this the judge agreed: he handed down a one-year prison sentence with a day pass (of sorts), which allowed him to leave and go to work during the day on the condition that he returned to the prison at night. After his release he was also given five-years of probation. Dahmer was granted an early release after serving only 10 months of his sentence; when released he briefly lived with Catherine.
Over the next two years Dahmer would go onto murder twelve more young men. After his short stint in prison his next victim was Raymond Smith, a prostitute that Jeffrey lured to his home for sex. He gave the young man a drink laced with sleeping pills then strangled him to death; Jeff then took pictures of him in suggestive positions before dismembering him. When he murdered his next victim (Edward Smith) he accidentally destroyed his skull while trying to dry it out in the oven, which made it blow up. Dahmer later told LE that he felt ‘rotten’ about this particular murder because he was unable to keep any ‘mementos’ from his body, which to him felt like a real waste.
As Jeff progressed with his hobby he began developing rituals, and started experimenting with different chemicals and eating the flesh of his victims. He also attempted lobotomies, and drilled into the skull of Errol Lindsey while he was still alive and injected him with muriatic acid (which is another term for hydrochloric acid), which is a colorless solution with a very particular and pungent aroma that is technically classified as a ‘strong acid.’ He hoped this would put his victim into a permanent submissive state, but he woke up halfway through and said, ‘I have a headache; what time is it?’ After that, Jeffrey gave up in his attempt and strangled him to death.
A neighbor in Jeffrey’s building named Sandra Smith called the police on May 27, 1991 and told them that there was a young boy of Asian descent that was running around naked in the streets. Despite the fourteen-year-old being incoherent when officers arrived on the scene, they took Dahmer for his word that the boy was his lover and was 19-years-old. The cops, not wanting to get involved in a homosexual domestic dispute, simply escorted the two home. When arriving at Jeffrey’s apartment one of the officers ‘peeked his head around in the bedroom but didn’t really take a good look,’ then left after telling him to ‘take care’ of the boy. After they left, Dahmer injected hydrochloric acid into his brain, killing him. If the police even bothered conducting even a basic search of the residence they would have discovered the body of Tony Hughes.
Between 1978 and 1991 Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer took the lives of 17 boys and young men. When choosing his victims he was careful to choose men on the ‘fringes of society,’ that were borderline criminal or ‘runaways,’ which helped make their disappearance less noticeable which helped to reduce his chance of getting caught. During the murder process Dahmer would frequently stop what he was doing and take Polaroids of his victims so he could relive the experience over and over again.
On July 22, 1991 Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer’s rampage through the streets of Milwaukee ended when he was arrested after two police officers were led to his home after picking up his latest intended (escaped) victim, Tracy Edwards. The 32-year-old black man was wandering the streets with handcuffs hanging from his wrist, and officers decided to investigate his claims that a ‘weird dude’ had drugged then restrained him (God, finally). When they got to Dahmer’s apartment he calmly offered to get the keys for the cuffs, and Edwards claimed that the knife he threatened him with was in the bedroom. When the officer went in to look for it he noticed numerous Polaroids of dead bodies lying around, and after he was apprehended and brought into custody he softly muttered: ‘for what I did, I should be dead.’ As investigators searched his apartment they found a head in his refrigerator, three more in the freezer, as well as various additional horrors, including preserved skulls, and jars with formaldehyde-soaked genitalia. During interviews Dahmer said that he planned to build a private altar made out of the skulls of his victims’ (complete with globe lights and incense), which he hoped would be ‘a place where I could feel at home.’
After his arrest in Wisconsin, the Summit County Sheriffs as well as the (local) Bath Township PD combed the property of the Dahmer family’s former home, and unearthed hundreds of bone fragments in the wooded area behind the residence (located at 4480 West Bath Road), specifically a vertebra and two molars of his first victim (Steven Hicks). Jeff was charged for his murder three days later.
Dahmer’s trial of the century began in January 1992, and given that the majority of his victims were black there was a great deal of racial tensions surrounding it, therefore strict security measures were taken, including an eight-foot wall of bulletproof glass separating him from the public. The fact that there was only a single black juror only seemed to make matters worse. Even though he confessed to the atrocities during interviews with police, Dahmer pleaded not guilty to all charges in the beginning… but he eventually changed his plea to ‘guilty by virtue of insanity.’ His defense argued that his gruesome behavior was proof that only someone that was insane would be able to commit such atrocious acts, but thankfully the jury believed the prosecution’s assertion that Jeff was completely aware that what he did was evil, but he chose to do it anyway.
On February 15, 1992 after only ten hours of deliberating, a jury of his peers found Jeffrey Dahmer guilty (and sane) on all counts. He was sentenced to fifteen consecutive life terms in prison, with a 16th one tacked on later that May. It’s been reported that he adjusted well to his new life at the Columbia Correctional Institution, and despite initially being kept away from the general population he was able to convince the jail administration to let him slowly integrate more with other inmates. He found religion in the form of books and photos sent to him by Lionel, and he was even given special permission by the prison to be baptized by a local pastor.
One day for his work assignment Jeffrey was instructed to work with two other inmates: convicted murderers Christopher Scarver and Jesse Anderson. After being left alone by guards to finish their work, Scarver brutally beat both men with a metal rod he swiped from the prison’s weight room, and on November 28, 1994 Dahmer was pronounced dead after roughly one hour; Anderson passed away a few days later. Right after the murders occurred a guard came out and publicly stated that Scarver (a suspected schizophrenic) said that ‘God told me to do it.’ After Jeff’s murder Scarver was bounced around from prison to prison, and eventually landed up in the Centennial Correctional Facility in Colorado, where he remains to this day; he is currently 59 years old. In 2012 an agent representing the killer announced that he planned on writing a tell-all book about how he killed Jeffrey Dahmer; as of March 2024 that book remains unpublished.
In 2015 Christopher Scarver did an interview with The New York Post about why he killed his two fellow inmates. He told them that he was disturbed not only by Dahmer’s crimes but also because he had a habit of creating ‘severed limbs’ out of prison food as a way to antagonize his fellow inmates. After being ‘taunted’ by both of his victims during their work detail, Scarver said that he confronted Jeffrey about what he did before beating him and the second inmate to death. He also claimed that prison guards allowed the murders to happen because they left the three men alone together.
Joyce Dahmer passed away on November 27, 2000 at the age of 64 in Fresno, CA. Lionel and Shari Dahmer lived in Seville, Ohio until their deaths: Shari passed away on January 13, 2023, and Lionel died eleven months later from a heart attack on December 5, 2023. Jeff’s little brother David is still alive, but doesn’t seem to go out in public very much (or at all, really). I did find some recent pictures of him from the one time he recently ventured out and about, but the way they were taken I’m not including them here because it feels very intrusive and invasive.
Works Cited:
https://finwise.edu.vn/jeffrey-da-1693995524238782/ Retrieved on March 1, 2024.
Hicks, Tony (April 27, 2012). ‘Hicks: Jeffrey Dahmer’s killer is shopping a memoir.’ Contra Costa Times. Retrieved March 18, 2024.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Dahmer Retrieved on March 19, 2024.
Smith, Jo (September 18, 2023). ‘Jeffrey Dahmer Brags About Mummified Genitals in Box in Newly Released Prison Call.’ Retrieved on March 19, 2024 from https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/us-news/jeffrey-dahmer-brags-mummified-genitals-30967305
Another Bundy Blog. 