The following is the first 4 chapters of my book “Jeffrey Dahmer: The Gruesome True Story of a Hungry Cannibalistic Rapist and Necrophiliac Serial Killer”

The Loss of Innocence

Jeffrey could have become whatever he wished, but he chose to become a killer. And not just any killer.

One of the worst killers the world has ever seen .

Our story begins on the 21st of November 1960.  Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer was born in West Allis, Wisconsin, to Joyce Annette and Lionel Herbert Dahmer. Joyce was a teletype machine instructor, while Lionel studied analytical chemistry at Marquette University.

As a baby, Jeffrey received all the attention a child could wish for; his parents took good care of him. However, as the years passed and their marriage became tense, they began to neglect him somewhat. The marriage was not peaceful, due in part to Joyce’s personality. She was the type of person who continuously demanded attention, even going as far as faking sickness to get it. It didn’t help that Lionel was very busy with his studies and spent extended periods of time away from home, only to return to find his wife pretending to have a nervous breakdown.

Despite initially being a happy and playful child, this suddenly changed after Jeffery underwent a double hernia surgery at the age of six. He began to become more quiet and subdued. In school, Jeffrey was considered to be a quiet and shy boy who showed signs of neglect, but who had fortunately managed to make some friends.  There are claims that a neighbor molested him at some point in his younger years, but no one has confirmed these allegations. Dahmer himself would later recall having been present on several occasions when his parents argued. These scenes were upsetting for a growing child. Fortunately, Dahmer’s parents’ love for him didn’t change at any point.

As a young boy, Jeff fell completely in love with animals. The family had a pet dog, and, at one point, they helped nurse a bird back to health from an injury. Lionel would later recall that Jeffrey watched the bird fly away back into the wild with ‘wide, gleaming eyes’ and that it had probably been the happiest moment in his life.

Shortly after, Jeffrey came upon his father sweeping some animal bones out from under their home. The child felt intensely curious when he saw the body parts and asked his father what they were. Lionel noticed that when young Jeffrey heard the crunching noises the bones made, he seemed to be oddly thrilled and requested to touch them himself. The chemist would later come to understand that this was the very first sign of what his son would eventually become.

In 1966, Lionel graduated and found a job as a research chemist. Unfortunately for the family, it would require them to uproot and move to Akron, Ohio. Joyce was pregnant with their second son, David. Her pregnancy was a troublesome one, which made her weak and prone to sickness. Jeffrey, now seven, gradually received less and less attention, and he began to lose his self-confidence and all remnants of his previously bubbly nature. Soon, he was even afraid of the idea of starting a new school. His father tried not to worry, hoping Jeffrey just hadn’t adapted to his new home yet. In reality, it was far more than that.

After buying and moving into a new home in April 1967, the young Dahmer seemed to begin to get used to his new life, and even found a new friend named Lee. Jeffrey also grew close to a female teacher, who he eventually gifted a bowl of tadpoles that he had caught on his own. Later, he would find out that his teacher had given the bowl to Lee instead. This event angered Jeffrey and led him to sneak into the boy’s garage and poison the animals’ water with motor oil, killing all of them.

This occasion wasn’t the last time Jeffrey came into contact with dead animals.

The young Dahmer was fascinated with hunting his neighborhood for the corpses of critters. He often took them home and dissected them, sometimes getting rid of the bones in the woods near his home to avoid raising suspicion. When he went out fishing with his father, Jeff’s favorite part of the activity was cutting open the fish and gutting them. Nobody paid any attention to this proclivity.

One night, during a family dinner, Jeff asked his father what would happen if he put the chicken bones left on their table in a bleach solution. His father was pleasantly surprised by the child’s curiosity and decided to teach him how to bleach animal bones, safely and correctly. There was no harm in it, his father thought. After all, it was merely a childish curiosity. His father was perhaps even relieved by Jeffrey’s request because he had shown such little interest in other hobbies to that point.

If someone had known what was really happening, however, Dahmer’s story may have ended very differently.

Jeffrey wasn’t just inspecting the insides of animal corpses and preserving their bones for science.

He was getting ready for something much worse.

 

An Odd Young Man

Jeffrey’s high school years arrived, and he began to grow in stature. He became a tall, awkward youth who shifted from random silent, shy states to extroverted ones. He developed a penchant for playing crude practical jokes when he was drunk, a habit that would continue throughout the years up to his death. Classmates stated that the teenage Dahmer would arrive to class looking disheveled and with a can or two of beer in his bag to consume during class while the teacher was talking. A curious classmate once asked him why he continuously drank during class, to which Dahmer responded: “It’s my medicine.”

His jokes were cruel. He often mimicked his mother’s interior designer, who had cerebral palsy, to the enjoyment of many of his peers. Other times he would paint chalk outlines in the halls of his school, reminiscent of those found at crime scenes once law enforcement had removed the body.

He was considered to be very intelligent and polite but regularly received average grades due to his extreme apathy and lack of interest in studying or reading. His parents hired a private tutor, but nothing changed. Dahmer wasn’t willing to make an effort, and there was only so much the tutor could do for him.

It was around this age that Dahmer discovered two important things that would define him as a human being and mold him into what he’d later become.

The first was that he was gay. He first noticed it as a small attraction towards other men, but even in these early stages of realization, Dahmer kept it from his parents. He had a brief relationship with another boy, but it didn’t get very far.

Then he had a second, separate realization. He began to fantasize about dominating another male: taking complete control and doing whatever he wished to the potential partner, without their consent.

He wanted to hurt somebody, to make sexual use of them, and perhaps kill and dissect them in the process. The limits of sex and dissection began to blur, as Dahmer included one within the other in his fantasies. His desire for violence became so overwhelming that he began to make plans for his first victim.

The idea that would spark his killer instinct finally came to him: on several occasions, he had spotted a male jogger who he found attractive. He knew that the man’s route passed by a section of thick bushes. Dahmer had the perfect place to hide, as well as the perfect opportunity to take advantage of his victim if he could successfully render him unconscious. One day, Dahmer decided to make his fantasy come true. Armed with a baseball bat, he went to the bushes and lay in wait, patiently expecting the jogger. To the man’s extreme good fortune, he didn’t jog that route on that particular day, and Dahmer decided to give up on his fantasy. If the would-be victim had passed through the bushy area, Dahmer almost certainly would have followed through with his plan.

In the Dahmer household, Lionel and Joyce’s marriage was getting worse. The couple had less and less patience for each other. Arguments were becoming an even more regular event, and Jeffrey was having a hard time seeing them fight. His alcoholism became worse than before, and he became more despondent as time passed.

His terrible and secret habit of dissecting animals and skinning them became the only thing that moved Jeffrey and gave him any motivation. His parents and other grown-ups watched on as his peers spoke of dreams, careers, and plans while Dahmer sunk further into apathy and purposelessness. He was more comfortable lying on his bed alone in his room than making an effort in his studies or looking for a job. At this point, even interacting with other people had become a challenge for him.

Even worse, nobody could quite see what Jeffrey was truly harboring on the inside because of his guarded and closed nature. He didn’t argue with anyone, never got involved in his parents’ increasingly common fights, and kept his strange habits secret enough for everyone to find him merely weird and not actually troubled or sick.

When Jeff was almost eighteen, his parents finally gave up on their marriage and got divorced. Where Joyce had been a self-centered woman with barely any attention for Jeffrey, Lionel’s new fiancée, Shari, was more attentive toward the boy. She recommended that Jeffrey start college after high school, and Lionel agreed.

It looked like the young man was going to turn over a new leaf. He seemed as though he might get an education that could help him progress as a human being. Jeffrey had a chance to start over and become a regular person despite his awkward teenage years and childhood.

Unfortunately, Jeffrey’s fate was about to darken. He was about to let loose the demon that inhabited his mind on the world. He was about to become the killer the world would remember. The construction of a horrific legacy was about to begin.

A Taste of Blood

Jeffrey graduated from high school in the summer of 1978. He was now 18 years old. Lionel Dahmer had gone on a business trip with his new wife, while Jeffrey’s mother, Joyce, and younger brother, David, had relocated to Wisconsin. Jeffrey was left alone at home with his thoughts and desires. It was just a matter of time before he acted on them.

It wouldn’t take long.

Just three weeks after graduating, with nobody around to supervise him or give him a moment of pause before making a rash decision that he’d never be able to take back, Jeffrey Dahmer took his first life.

Eighteen-year-old Steven Mark Hicks was his victim. Dahmer had thought of picking up a male hitchhiker and killing him before, but now he had the freedom to do so. As it happened, Hicks pulled his car over while Dahmer was out looking for someone to fulfill his fantasies with, and the would-be killer eagerly stopped and picked the young man up.

They exchanged a few words, and the young Dahmer invited Hicks to his home for some beers. Steven agreed; he was unaware that Dahmer wanted to have forceful sex with him as well.

The two arrived at Dahmer’s home. He pulled some alcohol out of the fridge, put some rock music on the radio and began enjoying Hicks’ company.

However, at some point in the conversation, Dahmer realized that Steven was not gay like himself. There was an awkward exchange, and Steven said that he wanted to go home. Dahmer thought he’d heard wrong. Go home? Why would his victim want to go home? This request was awkward for Dahmer; after all, he’d had so many things in mind for when night fell. Hicks was about to ruin it all by leaving.

Something snapped in Dahmer’s mind. He approached Steven, who was sitting down, from behind. Dahmer held a 10 lb. dumbbell in his hand. Hicks had no time to react as Dahmer slammed the heavy object into his head twice, knocking him unconscious. The bludgeoning wasn’t the end of the attack, however. Dahmer knelt over Steven’s body and strangled him to death with the bar of his rudimentary weapon. He then stripped the fresh corpse of its clothes and masturbated over it with sick pleasure.

Jeffrey Dahmer had finally acted on his fantasies, and the sensations felt strange. Part of him wanted to weep over what he’d done, but another part was glad that he’d finally followed through on years of fantasies. It was a mix of emotions, but Dahmer wasn’t in a hurry to kill again. Yet.

The next day, Dahmer was finally able to put into practice what he’d been learning for years — he dragged the body downstairs to a crawl space, dissected it, and buried the remains in a shallow grave in his backyard. Several weeks later, he would exhume the body parts, remove the flesh from the bones, then dissolve it in acid and flush the remaining solution down the toilet.

Six weeks later, Lionel and Shari returned home. They found Jeffrey home alone and not doing anything productive with his life. He agreed to enroll at the Ohio State University, with hopes of majoring in business.

Initially, his father had high hopes for his son. However, Dahmer immediately proved that he was not going to stop abusing alcohol anytime soon. He didn’t accomplish anything at the University and couldn’t even get through the first term before quitting. Within three months, Dahmer had already dropped out and was back to slouching around at home.

His father was having none of it. If Jeffrey wasn’t going to study, there was space in the Army for him. So Jeffrey Dahmer enlisted in the U.S. Army just a few months later, in January 1979. He trained to become a medical specialist at Fort Sam Houston. He was considered an effective soldier and was stationed in Baumholder, West Germany a few months later. Once there, Dahmer fulfilled the role of a combat medic. It wasn’t the best position for him since he couldn’t stand looking at blood (a strange detail that psychologists would later explain as guilt over Steven Hick’s murder), but Dahmer tried his best to perform.

While the army officially recorded his performance as a soldier as being “average or above average,” there were some ugly rumors about Dahmer that, in retrospect, chill the blood. In 2010, one soldier said that Dahmer had repeatedly raped him during a 17-month period, while another stated that he had been drugged and raped by Dahmer within the confines of an armored vehicle in 1979.

Alcoholism and loneliness continued to drag Dahmer down, and he was eventually declared unfit for service. The army formally and honorably discharged him in March 1981. Not long after, the army sent Dahmer to Fort Jackson for debriefing. As part of his release from service, the military subsequently provided Dahmer with a ticket to a destination of his choice, anywhere in the country.

Deciding where to go was tough for Dahmer. Ultimately, he felt that he had disappointed his father too much to return to Ohio. He didn’t want to go back there with his tail between his legs. Instead, he chose to travel to Miami Beach, Florida, where he began to work hard to live by his own means. He got a job at a sandwich place. Nobody could have guessed that the tall young man preparing their lunch was a killer who would soon go on to become legendary among murderers.

Dahmer’s alcoholism was ever-present, and despite having a stable job, he found himself unable to keep up with his responsibilities. His landlord evicted him for missing rent payments. The young man knew he only had one person to run to and soon called his father to ask if he could return to live with him in Ohio. Lionel accepted.

Coming home was a source of simultaneous comfort and discomfort for Dahmer. His return allowed him to walk around familiar territory, but also reminded him of what he had done to Steven Hicks. He hadn’t been able to get over it yet, and one detail nagged at him, causing him to worry about getting caught. As soon as he had the chance to be home alone, Dahmer unearthed the bones he’d buried in his father’s backyard and took a sledgehammer to them, pulverizing the body parts completely and then scattering them in the woodlands behind the family home.

As he disposed of the bones, Dahmer hoped that his murder experiment had ended and that he would recover from his fantasies. Unfortunately for both him and his victims, he had only temporarily quashed these dreams of control, pain, and murder.

In fact, they could all come flooding back at any moment…

No Escaping Who You Are

Only three weeks after having returned to Ohio, in October 1981, Jeffrey screwed up again, frustrating his father and stepmother tenfold. He drank too much and got arrested for drunken and disorderly conduct. Lionel was not as forgiving as on previous occasions. He and his wife decided that Jeffrey had to go somewhere where he could start over for real. While Jeff had mostly been a cold, quiet boy during his life, he had shown to carry affection for his grandmother, Lionel’s mother. Lionel hoped that Jeffrey could start over at her home in West Allis, Wisconsin. He thought a change of scenery could help Jeffrey to become more responsible and mature.

Upon moving to West Allis, Jeffrey Dahmer immediately adapted to a new, calmer life than the one he’d had in both Ohio and Florida. His grandmother paid more attention to his behavior than his parents ever had. He accompanied her to many activities and helped her out with a variety of chores . His only trouble in obeying his grandmother came when it came to quitting alcohol, but his professional life took a general turn for the better. He even found a decent job at a blood plasma center, where he helped collect blood from donors.

Meanwhile, however, Dahmer’s personal life continued to decline. His behavior became increasingly stranger, and his grandmother was worried. At one point, she entered the young man’s room and was shocked to find a fully-dressed male mannequin inside his closet, which he’d used as a sex toy of some kind, as well as a .357 Magnum under his bed. The elderly woman wasn’t sure if he was capable of using the firearm, but Dahmer had never shown her his violent side. She would eventually ask Dahmer to throw it away.

In 1982, the following year, Dahmer was arrested for indecent exposure in front of a crowd of over 25 women and children. He was convicted and fined $50 plus court costs. Lionel was always there to pay for whatever costs were generated by Dahmer’s mistakes. Time and again he crossed his fingers, hoping that his son would change his ways. This undying hope became a recurring pattern that Lionel repeated even after Jeffrey was caught. He had a warm heart when it came to his son, despite the constant disappointments.

In January 1985, Dahmer gained employment as a mixer at the Milwaukee Ambrosia Chocolate Factory, where he worked eight hours (at $9 per hour), six nights a week. He enjoyed the job and the freedom that came with it. Around this time, he visited the West Allis Public Library and spent some of his time off reading books and newspaper articles.

His fantasies were reignited there.

While at the library one day, shortly after he had started work at the chocolate factory, a man walked past Dahmer and lay down a note on his table, offering to perform fellatio on Dahmer. Despite the fact that Dahmer avoided answering the man’s note, it aroused him. He recalled the fantasies that had lain dormant in his mind, those of control and dominance that he’d wanted to practice for so long. Consequently, Dahmer soon started to actively seek out sexual partners at gay bars, bookstores, and bathhouses in the area, trying to find men interested in fulfilling his desires. He ultimately preferred the bathhouses for their added privacy, increased intimacy, and the relaxing atmosphere that surrounded them.

Dahmer used the bathhouses to find consensual sexual partners at first, but soon he began to feel uncomfortable and frustrated with the fact that his lovers moved and made noises while he was pleasuring them. As has already been stated, Dahmer required total control and dominance, and his acts of sexual intercourse were no different. To Jeffrey, other men were simply objects of pleasure, not people. He soon thought of ways he could reduce the influence that a partner had during sex and began to purchase sleeping pills.

Dahmer engaged in consensual acts of intercourse until June 1986, when his curiosity overwhelmed him, and he began to drug his victims by lacing their beverages with sedatives. He then took advantage of their bodies, raping them with no regard for their comfort or consent. This pattern occurred a dozen times until the bathhouse’s administration grew wary of him and revoked his membership. They barred Dahmer from entering the bathhouse again. However, those in charge didn’t press charges, so Jeff Dahmer simply walked away from his violent crimes without consequence.

Around this time, Dahmer read in the newspaper about the funeral of an 18-year-old male, who had recently died and been buried. He saw the boy’s picture and imagined himself raping the corpse, which aroused him. He visited the grave one night with a spade and began to dig, but found the soil too hard to penetrate and decided to abort his plan.

That same year, police arrested Dahmer again for indecent exposure. He was caught masturbating in front of two boys in August near the Kinnickinnic River. The police brought him into the station for questioning. Although he initially admitted to having been pleasuring himself, he later changed the story to state that he was only urinating when witnesses spotted him. The prosecution changed the charges to disorderly conduct and the court sentenced Dahmer to one year’s probation, as well as a series of counseling visits.

Law enforcement had already arrested Dahmer twice, and yet still nobody realized his real, sinister capability. This oversight continued to occur on further occasions, with family members, neighbors, and even law enforcement officers failing to see past his quiet, shy façade to spot the monster lurking behind. The real Dahmer, for all his fantasies and one murder victim already to his name, was invisible to everyone around him.

His murderous tendencies had lain dormant for years, but a mixture of factors had reawakened the real Dahmer and brought forth his urges once again. His aforementioned ability to blend in, plus Dahmer’s blatant disregard for getting caught, acted as an incredibly useful tactic for Dahmer.

It was one that would soon come in handy when he once again began to kill.

Check out the rest of Jeffrey story for Free on Amazon.

 

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