Dahmer, Jeffrey

On July 22, 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer, age 31, was arrested in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and became one of the most notorious serial killers in American history. His crimes were so horrific and his motivations so disturbing that few persons have been able to fully grasp the depth of his psychopathology. At age 8, Jeffrey is believed to have been sexually abused by a neighbor boy. His father, oblivious to Jeffrey's inner struggles, recalled that his son was a loner and a poor student. He was unaware of his adolescent son's use of alcohol, his more than scientific interest in dissecting road kills, and his penchant for young men. In 1978, at age 18, only 3 weeks after his senior high school prom, Jeffrey killed and dismembered his first victim, a 17-year-old male, a deed kept secret from everyone. This coincided with years of family turmoil culminating in the divorce of Jeffrey's parents. His mother took the youngest son, David, to live with her, while Jeffrey remained with his father.

This perceived abandonment by his mother and the estrangement he felt with his father only added to Jeffrey's distorted thinking. He joined the military but was discharged for abuse of alcohol. He began working a night shift at the Ambrosia Chocolate Company in Milwaukee and in 1986 received a year's probation for exposing himself to young boys. He struggled with his sexual orientation and felt that being gay was wrong. His inner struggles and depression found him frequently contemplating suicide, but he was also developing increasingly aberrant sexual fantasies, which enhanced his capacity for killing. He struggled against the urge to harm other human beings but was torn by the sexual fantasies and driven by his need to control his life by controlling others. After the first homicide, Dahmer is reported to have visited graveyards in hopes of retrieving a corpse rather than kill another person, but he finally yielded to his growing fantasies, and his attempts to succeed in education and employment failed miserably.

To most of his victims, he seemed like an average person wanting to be sociable. A resident of Milwaukee's West Side, Dahmer lived alone in an apartment. He frequented bars, some of them gay, looking for contacts. Initially, he used his grandmother's basement to have sex with drugged men and act out some of his deviant fantasies. He often rented cheap rooms at bathhouses, where he gave alcohol laced with drugs such as Halcion (a sleeping pill) to his victims. Potential victims, many of them African American or Asian, were then brought to his apartment. He brought others directly to his apartment, had sex with them, and then offered them tainted alcohol. The process became routine for him. Dahmer then handcuffed his victims, who were unaware that the alcohol had been laced with drugs, and led them into the bedroom. This was his killing room, where he kept and disposed of his victims. Most of his victims were strangled to death and dismembered. While some of his victims lay unconscious, Dahmer drilled holes into their skulls in attempts to make zombies out of them. In this state, he either hoped or fantasized they would become his sex slaves and never leave him. Dahmer also cannibalized several of his victims.

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