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A Father's Story
The father of serial murderer Jeffrey Dahmer, unaware of his son's ghastly crimes until they were publicized, explores his relationship with his son and the origins of madness in a memoir that examines the dark side of human nature. Reprint.
Hardcover
First published March 1, 1994
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About the author
Lionel Dahmer
3 books80 followersLionel Dahmer graduated from University of Wisconsin in 1959, in 1962 he finished Marquette University, receiving Master of Science. In 1966 he became a graduate of Iowa State University, obtaining Doctor of Philosophy. He served as a senior research chemist at PPG Industries, Barberton, OH, 1960-1962, and research supervisor in analytical chemistry, since 1968. Later he has mainly worked as a writer.
Lionel Dahmer is known for his work A Father's Story. But he gained a fair measure of unwanted media attention as the father of Jeffrey Dahmer, a serial killer who was convicted in the early 1990s of murdering fifteen youths in the Milwaukee area.
Lionel Dahmer is known for his work A Father's Story. But he gained a fair measure of unwanted media attention as the father of Jeffrey Dahmer, a serial killer who was convicted in the early 1990s of murdering fifteen youths in the Milwaukee area.
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September 25, 2022
This is a very difficult meditation on blame and a dignified, moving and quite riveting exercise in soul-baring and self-laceration by a stoic harshly condemning his own stoicism and trying with his scientist’s rationalism to be even-handed whilst facing the hardest question : how did this human being, your son – who you were entrusted with - go so wrong? Lionel Dahmer comes up with at least four suggestions, all inadequate.
I found out that after this book was published that Joyce Dahmer, Jeffrey’s mother, interpreted it as a direct attempt to blame her, the mother. After this book was published she broke her silence. She agreed to take part in a tv programme in which Jeff, Lionel and herself discussed their lives. It’s all on Youtube. I'll come to that in a moment.
Back to Lionel. He describes a terrible marriage with Joyce. They were unsuited to put it mildly. Lionel was withdrawn, cold, unemotional, passive, these are all his words, and Joyce was demonstrative, emotional, the complete opposite. Joyce had a whole catalogue of emotional and physical problems, which were incessant for years, and Lionel frankly states that he stayed away from her as much as possible, and buried himself in his untroubling laboratory. Many heated arguments ensued, in some of which Joyce became somewhat violent.
Lionel describes episodes from Joyce’s pregnancy :
At times, her legs would lock tightly in place, and her whole body would grow rigid and begin to tremble. Her jaw would jerk to the right and take on a similarly frightening rigidity. During these strange seizures, her eyes would bulge like a frightened animal, and she would begin to salivate, literally frothing at the mouth. p34
Joyce didn't remember any of that at all. Lionel says the doctor could find no physical reason for these attacks and thought the condition was psychological (but she was not referred to a psychiatrist at that point). Joyce was already on a whole 20-pill drug regime, and the doctor added phenobarbital.
In the tv show Joyce says this is all rubbish. She was outraged. She announced she was writing her own book, provisionally called “An Assault on Motherhood”, but said that she didn’t want to cast any blame on Lionel as she perceived him to have blamed her. She says :
Jeff’s condition was proven to have nothing to do with his upbringing – I don’t want parents frightened to death thinking that the little things they do or the little things they miss are going to result in them having a child that is going to cause all this pain and anguish…..I want to get across that we as women just can’t take this kind of thing anymore if something bad happens to our son.
Your heart goes out to her. Yes, Lionel is saying – maybe the drugs given to my wife harmed my son in the womb. But hang on, is that actually blaming Joyce? No – more like blaming the ignorance of the doctor. But she interprets this as blame the mother. It is true that Lionel makes a point of including Joyce’s decision not to breastfeed – that does sound perilously close to calling her names. But at that point Joyce had read only excerpts, so maybe she would have discovered later that in fact Lionel blames himself :
Rather than having developed a natural fatherhood, I had learned, as if by rote, what a father should do.
Lionel is withering about his inability to see what he thinks was in front of his eyes, the depth of Jeff’s problems, his social withdrawal, his teenage alcoholism – no friends, no girlfriends, no interests, no sports, no music, a failure at everything he turned his hand to. One term at college – expelled , never went to any classes. One spell in the army – kicked out for alcohol problems.
A parent will always want to forgive, smooth over, downplay, minimise, believe that a problem is just a phase, not make a mountain out of a molehill. The parents of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were in the same dilemma – they suspected, they worried, they confronted, they accepted explanations they shouldn’t have, what could they do? Even when Jeffrey gets a prison sentence for sexually abusing a 14 year old boy, Lionel remains doggedly optimistic – this will be the short sharp shock he needed. Now he’ll turn the corner. Well, he didn't.
Finally Lionel begins to see ghastly points of similarity between him and Jeff – the emotional vacuity, the desire for order and control. Searching back in his own life he produces this remarkable attack on his own mother, a woman he has previously spent pages praising :
Even more telling was my mother’s tendency to finish things for me. I would start some task, working slowly through it, as I always did, and suddenly my mother would appear, and in a few quick strokes, either of mind or hand, she would finish it for me. Even though done in a helpful, loving manner, it was a gesture that powerfully reinforced my sense of myself as slow and inept [and fostered an] infuriating sense of weakness and inferiority
You can see his intelligent restless miserable questioning, picking up every psychological stone, is the answer under here, maybe this one, could it be this? Over here? Why did my son kill 17 men?
The trial of Jeffrey Dahmer was to determine if he was guilty or not guilty by reason of insanity – prison or mental institution? In these cases the victims’ families wait breathlessly for the verdict – they know the guy will be locked up for life, but they need this one last thing, they need for the murderer to be sane. So when Jeffrey Dahmer was found guilty and sane by the jury they cheered and wept. They needed to be able to blame him, with no ifs and buts. He did it, not his mental illness. He did it because he wanted to. He didn’t have to do it, he chose to do it. Evil. 100% guilty as sin. We don’t want no doctors muddying the waters. Murder in the first degree. We need to blame with a clear conscience.
The following people have been blamed for the crimes of Jeffrey Dahmer:
His mother (the pregnancy drugs, plus her general craziness and temper)
His father
His paternal grandmother (for screwing up his father)
and
Jeffrey himself.
What did Jeffrey say about this matter of blame and responsibility? He’s asked this question in the interview. He says very firmly that all this shoving the responsibility onto this person or that person or alcohol or drugs, it’s all bullshit. I did it. The blame is mine and mine alone. But wait… he says a little more than that :
I always believed the lie that the theory of evolution is truth, that we all came from the slime and when we died that was it. So the whole theory cheapens life. And I started reading books that show how evolution is a complete lie. I’ve since come to believe that the Lord Jesus Christ is the true Creator.
So… maybe if the theory of evolution had not poisoned Jeff’s mind to the extent where he thought human life was cheap and worthless, he wouldn’t have killed all those men. So, maybe, the guy who should get the blame is
Charles Darwin
It’s a theory.
I found out that after this book was published that Joyce Dahmer, Jeffrey’s mother, interpreted it as a direct attempt to blame her, the mother. After this book was published she broke her silence. She agreed to take part in a tv programme in which Jeff, Lionel and herself discussed their lives. It’s all on Youtube. I'll come to that in a moment.
Back to Lionel. He describes a terrible marriage with Joyce. They were unsuited to put it mildly. Lionel was withdrawn, cold, unemotional, passive, these are all his words, and Joyce was demonstrative, emotional, the complete opposite. Joyce had a whole catalogue of emotional and physical problems, which were incessant for years, and Lionel frankly states that he stayed away from her as much as possible, and buried himself in his untroubling laboratory. Many heated arguments ensued, in some of which Joyce became somewhat violent.
Lionel describes episodes from Joyce’s pregnancy :
At times, her legs would lock tightly in place, and her whole body would grow rigid and begin to tremble. Her jaw would jerk to the right and take on a similarly frightening rigidity. During these strange seizures, her eyes would bulge like a frightened animal, and she would begin to salivate, literally frothing at the mouth. p34
Joyce didn't remember any of that at all. Lionel says the doctor could find no physical reason for these attacks and thought the condition was psychological (but she was not referred to a psychiatrist at that point). Joyce was already on a whole 20-pill drug regime, and the doctor added phenobarbital.
In the tv show Joyce says this is all rubbish. She was outraged. She announced she was writing her own book, provisionally called “An Assault on Motherhood”, but said that she didn’t want to cast any blame on Lionel as she perceived him to have blamed her. She says :
Jeff’s condition was proven to have nothing to do with his upbringing – I don’t want parents frightened to death thinking that the little things they do or the little things they miss are going to result in them having a child that is going to cause all this pain and anguish…..I want to get across that we as women just can’t take this kind of thing anymore if something bad happens to our son.
Your heart goes out to her. Yes, Lionel is saying – maybe the drugs given to my wife harmed my son in the womb. But hang on, is that actually blaming Joyce? No – more like blaming the ignorance of the doctor. But she interprets this as blame the mother. It is true that Lionel makes a point of including Joyce’s decision not to breastfeed – that does sound perilously close to calling her names. But at that point Joyce had read only excerpts, so maybe she would have discovered later that in fact Lionel blames himself :
Rather than having developed a natural fatherhood, I had learned, as if by rote, what a father should do.
Lionel is withering about his inability to see what he thinks was in front of his eyes, the depth of Jeff’s problems, his social withdrawal, his teenage alcoholism – no friends, no girlfriends, no interests, no sports, no music, a failure at everything he turned his hand to. One term at college – expelled , never went to any classes. One spell in the army – kicked out for alcohol problems.
A parent will always want to forgive, smooth over, downplay, minimise, believe that a problem is just a phase, not make a mountain out of a molehill. The parents of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were in the same dilemma – they suspected, they worried, they confronted, they accepted explanations they shouldn’t have, what could they do? Even when Jeffrey gets a prison sentence for sexually abusing a 14 year old boy, Lionel remains doggedly optimistic – this will be the short sharp shock he needed. Now he’ll turn the corner. Well, he didn't.
Finally Lionel begins to see ghastly points of similarity between him and Jeff – the emotional vacuity, the desire for order and control. Searching back in his own life he produces this remarkable attack on his own mother, a woman he has previously spent pages praising :
Even more telling was my mother’s tendency to finish things for me. I would start some task, working slowly through it, as I always did, and suddenly my mother would appear, and in a few quick strokes, either of mind or hand, she would finish it for me. Even though done in a helpful, loving manner, it was a gesture that powerfully reinforced my sense of myself as slow and inept [and fostered an] infuriating sense of weakness and inferiority
You can see his intelligent restless miserable questioning, picking up every psychological stone, is the answer under here, maybe this one, could it be this? Over here? Why did my son kill 17 men?
The trial of Jeffrey Dahmer was to determine if he was guilty or not guilty by reason of insanity – prison or mental institution? In these cases the victims’ families wait breathlessly for the verdict – they know the guy will be locked up for life, but they need this one last thing, they need for the murderer to be sane. So when Jeffrey Dahmer was found guilty and sane by the jury they cheered and wept. They needed to be able to blame him, with no ifs and buts. He did it, not his mental illness. He did it because he wanted to. He didn’t have to do it, he chose to do it. Evil. 100% guilty as sin. We don’t want no doctors muddying the waters. Murder in the first degree. We need to blame with a clear conscience.
The following people have been blamed for the crimes of Jeffrey Dahmer:
His mother (the pregnancy drugs, plus her general craziness and temper)
His father
His paternal grandmother (for screwing up his father)
and
Jeffrey himself.
What did Jeffrey say about this matter of blame and responsibility? He’s asked this question in the interview. He says very firmly that all this shoving the responsibility onto this person or that person or alcohol or drugs, it’s all bullshit. I did it. The blame is mine and mine alone. But wait… he says a little more than that :
I always believed the lie that the theory of evolution is truth, that we all came from the slime and when we died that was it. So the whole theory cheapens life. And I started reading books that show how evolution is a complete lie. I’ve since come to believe that the Lord Jesus Christ is the true Creator.
So… maybe if the theory of evolution had not poisoned Jeff’s mind to the extent where he thought human life was cheap and worthless, he wouldn’t have killed all those men. So, maybe, the guy who should get the blame is
Charles Darwin
It’s a theory.
August 20, 2016
This book presents a rare opportunity to see an evil man, whom most of us dismiss as an abomination, through the eyes of a loving parent.
It's hard enough to wrap one's head around the atrocity known as serial murder, now imagine that that the serial murderer is your son.
Except Lionel Dahmer didn't have to imagine. Instead he had to somehow unify the son he thought he knew and loved with a monster capable of unthinkable acts of violence.
A Father's Story is clearly Lionel Dahmer's attempt to understand his son's evolution into one of the world's most renowned serial killers with particular emphasis on his personal role. Where did he go wrong? Did he pass on to Jeff some genetic predisposition, some biological need for absolute control? Was he too distant, too oblivious? On the other hand, was it his son's alcoholism? His wife's use of barbituates and other drugs during her pregnancy? Was it somehow related to a childhood surgery in which Jeff feared his penis had been cut off?
The answers to these questions are interesting, but not as interesting as the process. In that sense, I'm not sure Lionel's insights into Jeff are particularly worthwhile in terms of what they reveal about Jeff, but they are certainly worthwhile in terms of what the reveal about him and about human nature in general. Throughout the book Lionel needs to find a narrative about his son that he can live with, one that he can accept, one that resonates.
To me, an outsider, the obvious answer to a question like Jeffrey Dahmer is that he is simply a sociopath. He lacks a conscience and the ability to empathize. He sees people, relationships, and the world in terms of their ability to meet his needs, whatever those needs might be. Not all sociopaths are killers, of course. And just like anything, sociopathy probably exists along a spectrum. However, sometimes you have the perfect storm. What starts off as a normal curiosity about anatomy turns into an odd preoccupation with bones and entrails that is somehow eventually linked to Jeff's sexuality. He feels isolated by the violent and perverse nature of his fantasies. He is also gay in a time when people just aren't gay. His parents are in a volatile and unhappy marriage. He turns to alcohol and becomes an alcoholic. And then fate provides him an opportunity to live out a recurring fantasy. He comes across a shirtless hitchhiker, whom he takes home and eventually murders.
Lionel, however, isn't happy with the "perfect storm" scenario, which is admittedly vague and non-specific. After all, this is his son, his offspring, his responsibility. It was he, Lionel Dahmer, who unleashed Jeffrey on this world. He needs answers. Real answers. Ultimately, he feels guilty and he needs to know if he is somehow to blame.
Bottom line: this is a compelling read. That said, I think we learn more about Lionel in these pages than we do about Jeffrey. I recently watched the famous Stone Phillips interview with Jeffrey, his father, and his mother. For the most part, Jeff was a fairly average kid, who grew into a awkward teen whose alcoholism went unnoticed by his parents who were distracted by their own problems. He had odd fantasies about laying down with unconscious men. Fantasies he couldn't share with anyone. Eventually, he crosses a line that once crossed propels him further into his perversions. Throughout the interview, what struck me about Jeff was his repeated assertions that everything he did, he did because he wanted to. I was attracted to these men. I wanted to have sex with them without having to deal with their sexual desires. I didn't really want to kill them. It was a means to an end. A selfish end. At one point he discusses his conversion to creationism. He reveals he was once an atheist and seems to suggest that had he believed in God, he would not have done what he did. He actually suggests and seems to believe in that moment that without a belief in God there is nothing to deter someone from hurting others.
I would argue a conscience and empathy keep atheists like me from hurting people to get what we want. I would further argue that most of us are born with some innate sense of "right" vs. "wrong." Society and societal norms further shape and develop our sense of morality. Religion may certainly play a role. But clearly a lack of a Savior or Creator was not Dahmer's problem. His lack of conscience, his lack of empathy, his inability to consider the cost of fulfilling his own perverted fantasies (genetic, learned, or some combination thereof), these were Dahmer's problem.
One final afterthought. There were signs. It seems there are always signs. Jeff was withdrawn at home. (okay, so lots of teesn are withdrawn at home). Jeff was an alcoholic. (okay, so lots of kids hide drug or alcohol abuse from their parents). As a teen, Jeff never dates or talks about girls. (okay, so some guys are shy and awkward about the opposite sex.) Jeff drops out of college and is repeatedly drunk. (okay, so not everyone is cut out for college. He certainly isn't the first young man who just can't get his act together.) Jeff stole a male manikin from a store, which his grandmother finds in his closet. (okay, okay, so some adult males do stupid things). Jeff is convicted of molesting a 13 year old boy. (Ah...hmmm...okay, so this was definitely a red flag.) Jeffrey seems obsessed with pornography. (big deal...right?) Jeff performs weird experiments on dead animals...using various chemicals to dissolve their bones. His grandmother, whom he lives with, reports strange odors coming from her basement. (I don't know...pretty weird). Jeff installs a state of the art security system in his small rundown apartment. He puts a lock on his bedroom door. He buys a large freezer so he can buy meat on sale? (I know, I know. Hindsight is 20/20. But there were serious signs, particularly the molestation.) How does a man who drugs and molests a 13 year old boy fall through the cracks? That's a question worth asking ourselves. Forget why Jeff did what he did. I'm not sure we (society) could have stopped the anomaly that was Jeff...but we certainly identified him early on. Why then did we just let him go?
It's hard enough to wrap one's head around the atrocity known as serial murder, now imagine that that the serial murderer is your son.
Except Lionel Dahmer didn't have to imagine. Instead he had to somehow unify the son he thought he knew and loved with a monster capable of unthinkable acts of violence.
A Father's Story is clearly Lionel Dahmer's attempt to understand his son's evolution into one of the world's most renowned serial killers with particular emphasis on his personal role. Where did he go wrong? Did he pass on to Jeff some genetic predisposition, some biological need for absolute control? Was he too distant, too oblivious? On the other hand, was it his son's alcoholism? His wife's use of barbituates and other drugs during her pregnancy? Was it somehow related to a childhood surgery in which Jeff feared his penis had been cut off?
The answers to these questions are interesting, but not as interesting as the process. In that sense, I'm not sure Lionel's insights into Jeff are particularly worthwhile in terms of what they reveal about Jeff, but they are certainly worthwhile in terms of what the reveal about him and about human nature in general. Throughout the book Lionel needs to find a narrative about his son that he can live with, one that he can accept, one that resonates.
To me, an outsider, the obvious answer to a question like Jeffrey Dahmer is that he is simply a sociopath. He lacks a conscience and the ability to empathize. He sees people, relationships, and the world in terms of their ability to meet his needs, whatever those needs might be. Not all sociopaths are killers, of course. And just like anything, sociopathy probably exists along a spectrum. However, sometimes you have the perfect storm. What starts off as a normal curiosity about anatomy turns into an odd preoccupation with bones and entrails that is somehow eventually linked to Jeff's sexuality. He feels isolated by the violent and perverse nature of his fantasies. He is also gay in a time when people just aren't gay. His parents are in a volatile and unhappy marriage. He turns to alcohol and becomes an alcoholic. And then fate provides him an opportunity to live out a recurring fantasy. He comes across a shirtless hitchhiker, whom he takes home and eventually murders.
Lionel, however, isn't happy with the "perfect storm" scenario, which is admittedly vague and non-specific. After all, this is his son, his offspring, his responsibility. It was he, Lionel Dahmer, who unleashed Jeffrey on this world. He needs answers. Real answers. Ultimately, he feels guilty and he needs to know if he is somehow to blame.
Bottom line: this is a compelling read. That said, I think we learn more about Lionel in these pages than we do about Jeffrey. I recently watched the famous Stone Phillips interview with Jeffrey, his father, and his mother. For the most part, Jeff was a fairly average kid, who grew into a awkward teen whose alcoholism went unnoticed by his parents who were distracted by their own problems. He had odd fantasies about laying down with unconscious men. Fantasies he couldn't share with anyone. Eventually, he crosses a line that once crossed propels him further into his perversions. Throughout the interview, what struck me about Jeff was his repeated assertions that everything he did, he did because he wanted to. I was attracted to these men. I wanted to have sex with them without having to deal with their sexual desires. I didn't really want to kill them. It was a means to an end. A selfish end. At one point he discusses his conversion to creationism. He reveals he was once an atheist and seems to suggest that had he believed in God, he would not have done what he did. He actually suggests and seems to believe in that moment that without a belief in God there is nothing to deter someone from hurting others.
I would argue a conscience and empathy keep atheists like me from hurting people to get what we want. I would further argue that most of us are born with some innate sense of "right" vs. "wrong." Society and societal norms further shape and develop our sense of morality. Religion may certainly play a role. But clearly a lack of a Savior or Creator was not Dahmer's problem. His lack of conscience, his lack of empathy, his inability to consider the cost of fulfilling his own perverted fantasies (genetic, learned, or some combination thereof), these were Dahmer's problem.
One final afterthought. There were signs. It seems there are always signs. Jeff was withdrawn at home. (okay, so lots of teesn are withdrawn at home). Jeff was an alcoholic. (okay, so lots of kids hide drug or alcohol abuse from their parents). As a teen, Jeff never dates or talks about girls. (okay, so some guys are shy and awkward about the opposite sex.) Jeff drops out of college and is repeatedly drunk. (okay, so not everyone is cut out for college. He certainly isn't the first young man who just can't get his act together.) Jeff stole a male manikin from a store, which his grandmother finds in his closet. (okay, okay, so some adult males do stupid things). Jeff is convicted of molesting a 13 year old boy. (Ah...hmmm...okay, so this was definitely a red flag.) Jeffrey seems obsessed with pornography. (big deal...right?) Jeff performs weird experiments on dead animals...using various chemicals to dissolve their bones. His grandmother, whom he lives with, reports strange odors coming from her basement. (I don't know...pretty weird). Jeff installs a state of the art security system in his small rundown apartment. He puts a lock on his bedroom door. He buys a large freezer so he can buy meat on sale? (I know, I know. Hindsight is 20/20. But there were serious signs, particularly the molestation.) How does a man who drugs and molests a 13 year old boy fall through the cracks? That's a question worth asking ourselves. Forget why Jeff did what he did. I'm not sure we (society) could have stopped the anomaly that was Jeff...but we certainly identified him early on. Why then did we just let him go?
May 7, 2013
Jeffrey Dahmer will long be remembered as one of the most gruesome and appalling serial killers of all time. But if there was any hope that the reader might gain any insight into his mental makeup by reading this memoir, by the man who should have known him better than any other, it is quickly dashed.
Lionel Dahmer reveals himself as a cold, emotionally distant father and husband who's greatest influence upon his oldest son seems to have been to create an atmosphere of such utter disregard and disinterest that Jeffrey's withdrawal into an interior landscape of cruel and twisted emotional violence is not only hastened, it is almost ensured. Between long, rambling barely-coherent attempts to place his son's crimes into the context of his own failings as a person (Not a revelation goes by without an accompanying "Perhaps I had been naive..." or accompanying admission that Dahmer Senior had also had similar desires "but never took them that far", as if he is so desperate to claim any sort of emotional connection that he is willing to take some sort of pale credit for his son's monstrosities.) and slimy, ham-fisted attempts to place the blame for Jeffrey's behaviour on anybody else but him-- particularly his first wife, the fragile and quite-obviously emotionally bullied birth mother of his son's, Lionel gives us less an insight into his son's psyche than a pure view of a father and husband of stunning emotional disassociation: a weak, deluded, egotistical and loathsome little man whose multiple failings read like a litany of dissemblances and pitiful excuses.
A final chapter, added after Jeffrey's death in prison, simply adds a film of utter loathing to the reading experience, as father somehow contrives to tie in a possible redemption for his son with an incoherent, self-serving diatribe about the righteousness of intelligent design.
This could have been a searing odyssey of truthfulness and revelation, giving the reader real insight into a father's relationship with one of the most notorious monsters of our time. Instead, it is a worthless smattering of excuses, self-justifications, and oily smarminess. It is an utter disgrace.
Lionel Dahmer reveals himself as a cold, emotionally distant father and husband who's greatest influence upon his oldest son seems to have been to create an atmosphere of such utter disregard and disinterest that Jeffrey's withdrawal into an interior landscape of cruel and twisted emotional violence is not only hastened, it is almost ensured. Between long, rambling barely-coherent attempts to place his son's crimes into the context of his own failings as a person (Not a revelation goes by without an accompanying "Perhaps I had been naive..." or accompanying admission that Dahmer Senior had also had similar desires "but never took them that far", as if he is so desperate to claim any sort of emotional connection that he is willing to take some sort of pale credit for his son's monstrosities.) and slimy, ham-fisted attempts to place the blame for Jeffrey's behaviour on anybody else but him-- particularly his first wife, the fragile and quite-obviously emotionally bullied birth mother of his son's, Lionel gives us less an insight into his son's psyche than a pure view of a father and husband of stunning emotional disassociation: a weak, deluded, egotistical and loathsome little man whose multiple failings read like a litany of dissemblances and pitiful excuses.
A final chapter, added after Jeffrey's death in prison, simply adds a film of utter loathing to the reading experience, as father somehow contrives to tie in a possible redemption for his son with an incoherent, self-serving diatribe about the righteousness of intelligent design.
This could have been a searing odyssey of truthfulness and revelation, giving the reader real insight into a father's relationship with one of the most notorious monsters of our time. Instead, it is a worthless smattering of excuses, self-justifications, and oily smarminess. It is an utter disgrace.
September 11, 2010
The most interesting and emotionally challenging book I read during my bygone period of fascination with the sorts of issues that delve into the supremely dark sewers of human nature -- and serial killers certainly fit and (greatly define) the bill.
It's heartbreaking and of course covers all the obvious and familiar terrain of how gut-wrenchingly awful Dahmer's crimes were, but with an added twist (i.e. his father is writing it) differentiating it from the standard true crime genre narrative. This is the kind of twist which really gets ones moral examination gears spinning, and indeed spinning futilely in circles quite often. Something that really challenges the extents and limitations of empathy, sympathy, pity, and so on.
It's heartbreaking and of course covers all the obvious and familiar terrain of how gut-wrenchingly awful Dahmer's crimes were, but with an added twist (i.e. his father is writing it) differentiating it from the standard true crime genre narrative. This is the kind of twist which really gets ones moral examination gears spinning, and indeed spinning futilely in circles quite often. Something that really challenges the extents and limitations of empathy, sympathy, pity, and so on.
May 29, 2025
To anyone who saw the Netflix drama Monster about Jeffrey Dahmer this book will be very familiar as the tv show is very true to Lionel’s (Jeffrey’s father) retelling of events. The makers recreated accurately scenes from the book, the only deviation being that they are slightly easier on Lionel than he is on himself.
Having said that, while Lionel is able to take some responsibility for how Jeff (this is how he refers to his son throughout the book creating a lacuna between the child he raised and Jeffrey the serial killer) and talks about how therapy and the wisdom of his second wife has helped him understand the missteps he made as a parent one gets the feeling that given the opportunity to do it all again he’d make the same mistakes. This is not to blame him – none of us are in a position to say definitively whether murderers are born or made- but to highlight that the flaws in his character, that he himself describes as being too analytical foregoing emotion, as problem solving rather than identifying the root of the problem, of lacking empathy are so deeply rooted that even with an epiphany of self-awareness he cannot shake them off.
Throughout the book Lionel takes responsibility for almost giving up on his first born, finding him lacking the ambition, confidence and vitality that drove himself as a younger man and admits that as Jeff hit his teenage years Lionel focussed his attention and (though he never says it explicitly it is clear to all) love on his younger son. He retells how after his separation from their mother he discovered that Jeff (aged about 17) had been left alone to fend for himself for weeks while his mother upped and disappeared with his younger brother. Lionel muses on how Jeff must have felt to see his father pay no attention to his welfare, check that he was ok or spend more than a few minutes with him before rushing off to track down the son that was with his mother. Lionel acknowledges that abandoning his already abandoned son was probably deeply wounding but there is still a remove there, as though he has come to that conclusion because a therapist has guided him to it rather than he has felt his own way there. While there is little sympathy to be had for a murderer like Dahmer one can only imagine what it must be like to have your father describe you thus,
”My mind recalled only a young man who was passive and more or less nondescript, a failure at almost everything he’d ever tried, a mixer in a chocolate factory, a job that placed him barely above a menial labourer…All his life, he had been so very small…so small that I’d scarcely seen him at all…Jeff who spoke in mumbled sentences…then slunk away, embarrassed and ashamed…so small and insignificant a man…so grey and unaccented and generally pathetic a figure…”
This torrent comes in a single page towards the end of the book, a book written with the express intent of recognising how his behaviour may have negatively impacted his son and this is how he describes him. With parents like this who needs enemies springs to mind. He goes on to say,
”My son had lived in a hideous world, but I could not see it as a world that bore any relationship to mine.”
There is a tragedy in his unawareness that he did live in a different world to his son and that was his own making, by being disinterested in him, by devoting his time to his younger son by removing himself emotionally from Jeff by choosing, for years, to keep Jeff distant. In fairness he does finish by likening his own early behaviour to his son’s and questions whether a different set of circumstances (or parents which is the unwritten implication) would have seen him commit terrible acts. Who can say for certain whether it was nature, nature, exposure to medication in utero or the fusing of all three in the crucible of adolescence, but what Lionel does show is that even with the best intentions, even with effort and willingness one cannot change one’s character.
Having said that, while Lionel is able to take some responsibility for how Jeff (this is how he refers to his son throughout the book creating a lacuna between the child he raised and Jeffrey the serial killer) and talks about how therapy and the wisdom of his second wife has helped him understand the missteps he made as a parent one gets the feeling that given the opportunity to do it all again he’d make the same mistakes. This is not to blame him – none of us are in a position to say definitively whether murderers are born or made- but to highlight that the flaws in his character, that he himself describes as being too analytical foregoing emotion, as problem solving rather than identifying the root of the problem, of lacking empathy are so deeply rooted that even with an epiphany of self-awareness he cannot shake them off.
Throughout the book Lionel takes responsibility for almost giving up on his first born, finding him lacking the ambition, confidence and vitality that drove himself as a younger man and admits that as Jeff hit his teenage years Lionel focussed his attention and (though he never says it explicitly it is clear to all) love on his younger son. He retells how after his separation from their mother he discovered that Jeff (aged about 17) had been left alone to fend for himself for weeks while his mother upped and disappeared with his younger brother. Lionel muses on how Jeff must have felt to see his father pay no attention to his welfare, check that he was ok or spend more than a few minutes with him before rushing off to track down the son that was with his mother. Lionel acknowledges that abandoning his already abandoned son was probably deeply wounding but there is still a remove there, as though he has come to that conclusion because a therapist has guided him to it rather than he has felt his own way there. While there is little sympathy to be had for a murderer like Dahmer one can only imagine what it must be like to have your father describe you thus,
”My mind recalled only a young man who was passive and more or less nondescript, a failure at almost everything he’d ever tried, a mixer in a chocolate factory, a job that placed him barely above a menial labourer…All his life, he had been so very small…so small that I’d scarcely seen him at all…Jeff who spoke in mumbled sentences…then slunk away, embarrassed and ashamed…so small and insignificant a man…so grey and unaccented and generally pathetic a figure…”
This torrent comes in a single page towards the end of the book, a book written with the express intent of recognising how his behaviour may have negatively impacted his son and this is how he describes him. With parents like this who needs enemies springs to mind. He goes on to say,
”My son had lived in a hideous world, but I could not see it as a world that bore any relationship to mine.”
There is a tragedy in his unawareness that he did live in a different world to his son and that was his own making, by being disinterested in him, by devoting his time to his younger son by removing himself emotionally from Jeff by choosing, for years, to keep Jeff distant. In fairness he does finish by likening his own early behaviour to his son’s and questions whether a different set of circumstances (or parents which is the unwritten implication) would have seen him commit terrible acts. Who can say for certain whether it was nature, nature, exposure to medication in utero or the fusing of all three in the crucible of adolescence, but what Lionel does show is that even with the best intentions, even with effort and willingness one cannot change one’s character.
Read
October 13, 2022Under what criteria can this book be judged? I’ve decided that it cannot be, or at least I cannot—and certainly yellow stars are inappropriate. Is there a comparative piece of writing? Perhaps the only thing more idiosyncratic than the crimes Jeffrey Dahmer committed is this curious analysis by his father, which is more autobiography than criminology or portraiture. If it is sensationalism (like so many other books about serial murder), then he certainly has a bizarre method for doing so; if it is a clarification of facts, then it is incomplete and meandering; if it is an apology, it is sincere but just totally weary from years of apology. It is what it is. Lionel is befuddled and so am I.
Much of the most monstrous details of Dahmer’s actions were unknown to me. When he stood trial in the early 1990’s I was fairly young, and I remember equating him with Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart”… in that, a murdered body was carefully dismembered and hidden away in a home. I vaguely knew that the whole affair was wrapped up in sexuality somehow, but remember mostly the mechanics of its concealment—notably, Dahmer’s freezer, ultimately impounded by police, as seen on television. This book only provides occasional and cursory gruesome details, and understandably so. I looked elsewhere and found calculated necrophilia, human taxidermy, trepanation, and cannibalism—all ultimately at the rate of one murder per week.
Lionel splashes around in his personal failure as a husband, a father, a citizen, whatever. But none of it is worse than my own family. He tries out the blame shoe on everybody and everything—media, drugs, Mom, school, genetics, and mostly himself. His writing isn’t captivating, it is sentimental and emotionless at the same time, often forgivably hokey, but I couldn’t put it down. Is he lying about anything? I just don’t know, can’t know.
To say that this book humanizes Jeffrey Dahmer is incorrect; it does have the effect, and horribly so, of making me, and I might assume almost any reader, consider that as aberrant as this situation is, it is shared culturally in America today, and even personally. Lionel whether intentionally or not draws a line from his fucked up family to your fucked up family. I feel guilty, I feel paranoid, I apologize on behalf of all humans to…I don’t know to whom…to all humans.
Much of the most monstrous details of Dahmer’s actions were unknown to me. When he stood trial in the early 1990’s I was fairly young, and I remember equating him with Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart”… in that, a murdered body was carefully dismembered and hidden away in a home. I vaguely knew that the whole affair was wrapped up in sexuality somehow, but remember mostly the mechanics of its concealment—notably, Dahmer’s freezer, ultimately impounded by police, as seen on television. This book only provides occasional and cursory gruesome details, and understandably so. I looked elsewhere and found calculated necrophilia, human taxidermy, trepanation, and cannibalism—all ultimately at the rate of one murder per week.
Lionel splashes around in his personal failure as a husband, a father, a citizen, whatever. But none of it is worse than my own family. He tries out the blame shoe on everybody and everything—media, drugs, Mom, school, genetics, and mostly himself. His writing isn’t captivating, it is sentimental and emotionless at the same time, often forgivably hokey, but I couldn’t put it down. Is he lying about anything? I just don’t know, can’t know.
To say that this book humanizes Jeffrey Dahmer is incorrect; it does have the effect, and horribly so, of making me, and I might assume almost any reader, consider that as aberrant as this situation is, it is shared culturally in America today, and even personally. Lionel whether intentionally or not draws a line from his fucked up family to your fucked up family. I feel guilty, I feel paranoid, I apologize on behalf of all humans to…I don’t know to whom…to all humans.
October 31, 2025
Fascinating book. Mr. Dahmer goes deep with the introspection and wonders whether he, too, walked close to the edge of Jeff’s madness. So honest. And Lionel’s wife? A champion.
April 30, 2012
Every parent knows this one unavoidable truth: worry comes with joy when we look at our children. We worry when they are little; Is that cough the flu? Is that rash chicken pox, or something worse? When they go to school, we worry how they will act in the broader world opening up to them; Are they ready and eager to learn? Will they be kind and respectful of others? As they mature different worries appear to replace the old ones; Will someone break their heart? Will they do something stupid and dangerous (just like I did), but not make it out alive to grow old and live to tell the tale?
This parental worry will continue, to varying degrees, for all parents, forever.
But for most parents the world over, these and similar worries are the only ones they will have to face. For Lionel Dahmer, a whole new set of worry was opened up for him in relation to his child, a son he called Jeff. Did my boy commit these horrific murders? Why didn't I see the signs? How did my own boy spiral down to a place I couldn't reach, and couldn't fix?
Reading this book, I couldn't fathom what ring of hell Lionel Dahmer existed in (and probably still exists) as he grappled with the reality of his son, and the dark choices that son made. Dahmer recaps his life as father to Jeffrey, and struggles to find answers to what happened. Some of his theories are like looking for a needle in a haystack. Other theories have weight, but there is no way to measure their validity. The sadness and the inescapable reality of a book like this is that Dahmer, like the rest of us, will never really know what made his son do what he did. He can speculate; he can point a finger at this situation or that situation; he can look inward and berate himself for all his failings as a parent. But sadly, there isn't an answer. As a reader, I came away with an enormous amount of sympathy for Lionel, his x-wife, their family, the victims and their families, and all the potential of those victims torn away by Jeffrey Dahmer's heinous acts. Looking at all the baby and boyhood photos of Jeffrey, it wasn't hard to sympathize for the potential that was lost in Jeffrey himself.
But no answers.
Lionel Dahmer writes what I felt was a candid, honest struggle to come to terms with his son and his actions. It's one of those books you read and are honestly glad you don't have to ask the kind of questions he was forced to ask himself as a parent. There but for the Grace of God...
This parental worry will continue, to varying degrees, for all parents, forever.
But for most parents the world over, these and similar worries are the only ones they will have to face. For Lionel Dahmer, a whole new set of worry was opened up for him in relation to his child, a son he called Jeff. Did my boy commit these horrific murders? Why didn't I see the signs? How did my own boy spiral down to a place I couldn't reach, and couldn't fix?
Reading this book, I couldn't fathom what ring of hell Lionel Dahmer existed in (and probably still exists) as he grappled with the reality of his son, and the dark choices that son made. Dahmer recaps his life as father to Jeffrey, and struggles to find answers to what happened. Some of his theories are like looking for a needle in a haystack. Other theories have weight, but there is no way to measure their validity. The sadness and the inescapable reality of a book like this is that Dahmer, like the rest of us, will never really know what made his son do what he did. He can speculate; he can point a finger at this situation or that situation; he can look inward and berate himself for all his failings as a parent. But sadly, there isn't an answer. As a reader, I came away with an enormous amount of sympathy for Lionel, his x-wife, their family, the victims and their families, and all the potential of those victims torn away by Jeffrey Dahmer's heinous acts. Looking at all the baby and boyhood photos of Jeffrey, it wasn't hard to sympathize for the potential that was lost in Jeffrey himself.
But no answers.
Lionel Dahmer writes what I felt was a candid, honest struggle to come to terms with his son and his actions. It's one of those books you read and are honestly glad you don't have to ask the kind of questions he was forced to ask himself as a parent. There but for the Grace of God...
May 29, 2025
An anguished memoir written by the father of a serial killer, trying to imagine what went so horribly wrong inside his family. At first he seems to attribute some blame to Jeffery Dahmer's mother and her mental health issues, but later suggests the problem was due to medications prescribed during the pregnancy.
The father comes across as remote and unemotional, and his attempts to peer back in time, to retrospectively search for clues and warning signs, are reminiscent of a similar grasping in My Friend Dahmer, an account from a childhood friend. The friend seems to know more than the father. Jeffery Dahmer developed a drinking problem in high school, but his father seems oblivious to this and many other things.
In the early sections of this book, I was perturbed by the author's use of "of course". For example: "My father, of course, did not know anything of my inner life." Why "of course"? In that same paragraph, discussing his own early fantasies around sex, he writes: "These are the sorts of things, of course, that fathers rarely know about their growing sons."
The author takes a scientific approach, so I wondered where he is getting his information. I imagine that some fathers do know about the inner lives of their sons, based on their shared experiences and communication.
Thankfully, this strange usage —"of course"— did not persist. I'm surprised it was not edited out.
Often psychologists talk about serial killers and the "need for control" or the "fear of abandonment" — attributes which describe most of my friends and certainly my own self. This is an anguished memoir, as the author tries to find common ground with his son, and desperately searches for something, anything, to explain the unexplainable.
Published in 1994, so this book does not grapple with Jeffery Dahmer's own death (killed in prison in late 1994).
Another disturbing aspect of this memoir is the media frenzy inflicted on the family, as well as all the weirdness (mail and phone calls) from fans, sympathizers, etc. Two talk shows (Geraldo and Donahue) both hosted a disguised man "Mike" who started horrible and false rumours about the family. The side effects of this horrible tragedy claimed many additional victims, including the families of all the young men who died.
The father comes across as remote and unemotional, and his attempts to peer back in time, to retrospectively search for clues and warning signs, are reminiscent of a similar grasping in My Friend Dahmer, an account from a childhood friend. The friend seems to know more than the father. Jeffery Dahmer developed a drinking problem in high school, but his father seems oblivious to this and many other things.
In the early sections of this book, I was perturbed by the author's use of "of course". For example: "My father, of course, did not know anything of my inner life." Why "of course"? In that same paragraph, discussing his own early fantasies around sex, he writes: "These are the sorts of things, of course, that fathers rarely know about their growing sons."
The author takes a scientific approach, so I wondered where he is getting his information. I imagine that some fathers do know about the inner lives of their sons, based on their shared experiences and communication.
Thankfully, this strange usage —"of course"— did not persist. I'm surprised it was not edited out.
Often psychologists talk about serial killers and the "need for control" or the "fear of abandonment" — attributes which describe most of my friends and certainly my own self. This is an anguished memoir, as the author tries to find common ground with his son, and desperately searches for something, anything, to explain the unexplainable.
Published in 1994, so this book does not grapple with Jeffery Dahmer's own death (killed in prison in late 1994).
Another disturbing aspect of this memoir is the media frenzy inflicted on the family, as well as all the weirdness (mail and phone calls) from fans, sympathizers, etc. Two talk shows (Geraldo and Donahue) both hosted a disguised man "Mike" who started horrible and false rumours about the family. The side effects of this horrible tragedy claimed many additional victims, including the families of all the young men who died.
March 10, 2011
This is one of the most underrated and rarest books, it took me forever and great effort to find it but it was well worth it.
Lionel Dahmer shares his and his son's tragic and sad story and provides some theories on why his son came to be a pedophile and necrophiliac monster, you could sense while you're reading the book that he's in unbelievable mental anguish, guilt ridden, blaming him self for it and his wife and struggling to make sense of what happened and trying to rationalize it.
Amazing book, was written with an emotional depth and great sincerity.
Lionel Dahmer shares his and his son's tragic and sad story and provides some theories on why his son came to be a pedophile and necrophiliac monster, you could sense while you're reading the book that he's in unbelievable mental anguish, guilt ridden, blaming him self for it and his wife and struggling to make sense of what happened and trying to rationalize it.
Amazing book, was written with an emotional depth and great sincerity.
May 9, 2023
Blasted through this audio book in less than 24 hours!
While I don't feel I learned much more about Jeffrey Dahmer, seeing a new perspective of his life was highly interesting and extremely sad. A side to the story we rarely get to hear when the infamy of someone's crimes overshadows who they were and the people that loved them.
So much speculation on what the actions we take as parents, or the genetics passed on to our children, can do to create the "perfect storm" of a compulsive killer like Jeff.
So many questions and possibilities that we may never have answers to...
While I don't feel I learned much more about Jeffrey Dahmer, seeing a new perspective of his life was highly interesting and extremely sad. A side to the story we rarely get to hear when the infamy of someone's crimes overshadows who they were and the people that loved them.
So much speculation on what the actions we take as parents, or the genetics passed on to our children, can do to create the "perfect storm" of a compulsive killer like Jeff.
So many questions and possibilities that we may never have answers to...
November 26, 2022
For assurely as Jeff had become “Jeffrey,'' we were to become “the Dahmers.”
"Do you forgive your son?" Ms. Glass asked pointedly.
"That's a tough question," I replied. I paused a moment, then added, "I cannot say that I forgive him."
later in the book,
When I think back on the interview I gave to Inside Edition so many months ago, I hear the interviewer's question once again: “Do you forgive your son?"
Yes, I do.
⛔⛔REVIEW IS LONG AND INTENDED ONLY FOR THOSE WHO ARE DEEPLY INTERESTED IN READING THE BOOK, NOT FOR CASUALTIES.
🅾I'D STRICTLY ADVICE YOU TO NOT READ THIS BOOK AS A 3RD PERSON, READ IT AS IF YOU ARE LIONEL. IT WILL MAKE YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT ASPECTS OF THE BOOK YOU AGREE WITH AND WHAT ASPECTS YOU DONT AGREE WITH.
⛔IF YOU DON'T FOLLOW THE ABOVE RULE, THEN THERE'S NO POINT IN READING THE BOOK.
⛔THIS BOOK, TELLS YOU WHAT JEFFREY DID AND THE REASONS BEHIND IT.
🅾I WILL NOT BE GIVING MY OPINIONS ON THIS BOOK, BECAUSE ITS NOT MY RIGHT TO SAY ANYTHING. ALL THE INVESTIGATIONS AND ALL HAVE BEEN DONE. THE CONVICT IS DEAD. WE CAN DO NOTHING BUT ACCEPT WHATEVER HAPPENED. BUT, I WILL DEFINITELY TELL YOU EVERYTHING THAT THE BOOK HAS DISCUSSED ABOUT JEFFREY.
🅾 NOTE- TO PEOPLE WHO HAVE GIVEN THEIR THOUGHTS AND OPINIONS ON THIS BOOK, I'D POLITELY REQUEST YOU TO STOP, BECAUSE THIS IS NOT FICTION. NOT A FAIRYTALE WHICH CAN BE CHANGED BY CHANGING CHARACTERS. IT HAPPENED. ITS A FACT. ACCEPT IT.
🅾NEITHER ME OR YOU KNOW EXACTLY WHAT LIONEL IS GOING THROUGH, SO IT'S BETTER TO ONLY SYMPATHISE AND NOT GIVE YOUR OWN OPINIONS. SOMEONE'S PAIN SHOULD NOT BE ARGUED OVER. IT SHOULD BE FELT AND SYMPATHISED WITH.
✅WHAT MADE ME PICK THIS BOOK?-
🔯Jeff intrigues me, because, the love that Lionel felt towards his son was highly relatable to me, do not take this the wrong way, I am NOT a murderer.
🔯It was relatable in a way that is hard to explain, maybe its the Asian gene in me or whatever.
🔯But, I believe that you all can relate to it, at least the initial few chapters, they were very day-to-day life events that me and you usually go through.
⏺You will get an insight like, how you go to school, I go to school , Jeff when too. But what was different about him?
⏺You picked colleges, I worried about college, Jeff did too. But what was so different about him?
⏺You sit down with your family for dinner, I do too, Jeff did too. But what was different about it?
⏺You felt sexual attraction the first time with someone, I did too, Jeff did too. But what was different about him?
⏺I had stuffed animals too, you did too, Jeff did too. But what was different about him?
⏺I wanted to read this book because all 8 billion people live the same life Jeff did. then why was he the way he was. WHY!?
🅾Did I cry? Yes.
🅾Surprised? Yes.
🅾Satisfied? Not really.
✅SOME DETAILS-
1️⃣Book is written solely from Lionel's POV.
2️⃣Its less than 200 pages.
3️⃣If you read it, start from preface and read the acknowledgements too.
4️⃣This book DOES NOT discuss the actual crime in detail(the whole cannibalism, sexual assault, where how with whom it happened), because press, media, police already did. Every detail is out on the internet.
5️⃣This book discuss the life of Jeff from a father's eyes.
6️⃣This book is NOT a memoir completely.
7️⃣It DOES contain adult theme(cannibalism, pedophilia, alcohol abuse, drug overdose, rape, depression, suicide, anxiety)at least as much as Lionel could describe through his eyes.
8️⃣I'll be quoting a LOT from the book, make sure you read it DEFINITELY.
✅ WHY YOU SHOULD READ THIS-
🅾If you have depression, anxiety.
🅾If you have dysfunctional relationships with your parents, or child. READ THIS BOOK.
🅾Reader, give this book to your parents to read.
🅾It's closer to reality that you could ever imagine.
✅HOW SHOULD YOU READ THIS BOOK-
1️⃣I read this book in parts, I read 2 chapters a day and then I thought about what I had read.
2️⃣I read 3 chapters the next day and then thought about them, analyzed them.
3️⃣Then next day 3 chapters, and so on.....
4️⃣As I said earlier , try reading it as Lionel, not as a stranger on the internet.
✅THE REVIEW-
PREFACE-
But I wasn't told what these other mothers and fathers were told, that their sons were dead at the hands of a murderer. Instead, I was told that my son was the one who had murdered their sons. And so, my son was still alive. I couldn't bury him. I couldn't remember him fondly. He was not a figure of the past. He was still with me, as he still is.
❎LIONEL+JEFFREY=1960-
Lionel , himself as a child- Borderline obsession with chemicals, fire, bones and everything that is sciency.
Any signs of mental disorders? No.
Any kind of abuse/assault? No.
Parental neglect? A little bit.
Personality- Extreme shyness and inability to gauge human emotions. Preferring to be in his own company.
Relationship with Joyce(Wife #1)- During pregnancy#1 it went downhill because of the difficulties that Joyce faced and Lionel having difficulty in understanding them. Mothers get sleepless, cravings, loose control over emotions. Jeff's mom was and I quote, her emotional state began to deteriorate. A recurrent dream plagued her, one in which she was continually being chased by a large black bear. She sometimes screamed in her sleep. At times I would try to calm her, making the typical suggestions of an analytic mind, recommending that she walk around a bit, or drink a glass of warm milk, but never moving to engage the actual dream, or the roots from which it sprang.
When he was four, and pointed to his belly button and asked what would happen if someone cut it out, was that merely an ordinary question from a child who had begun to explore his own body, or was it a sign of something morbid already growing in his mind? When, at six, Jeff broke several windows out in an old, abandoned building, was that only a typical boyhood prank, or was it the early signal of a dark and impulsive destructiveness? When we went fishing, and he seemed captivated by the gutted fish, staring intently at the brightly colored entrails, was that a child's
natural curiosity, or was it a harbinger of the horror that was later to be found in Apartment 213?
In me, of course, an early obsession with fire had led to nothing more unusual than chemistry, to a life-long work in scientific research. Jeff's momentary fascination with bones might just as easily have pointed to an early interest that might have led eventually to medicine or medical research. It might have led to orthopedics or anatomical drawing or sculpture. It might simply have led to taxidermy. Or, more likely, it might have pointed to absolutely nothing, and been forgotten.
He stared wonderingly as a beaker of phenolphthalein turned dark pink when I introduced ammonia into the solution. The steady click of the Geiger counter briefly amused him.
🅾🅾 Jeff's childhood/young-adulthood- 🅾🅾
⏺Neglect? Yes.
From dad- He was getting PhD in chemistry so he kept busy with work, due to fighting with Joyce he preferred his lab more..
From mom-Post partum depression, side effect of pills.
🅾Abuse of ANY kind? I want to clarify the rumors that no, he wasn't abused by his dad. They hardly talked.
🅾Intelligence as a child- Extremely shy but excellent work ethic.
🅾Friendships- One or two when he was 3 or 4.None when he turned six or seven.
🅾Dates-None. Didn't go to prom.
🅾Emotional connection with parents- None.
🅾 " " " others- None.
🅾Academics- Excellent.
🅾Team work/Extracurricular participation/Volunteering-Absolutely no.
🅾Interest in gaming/ outing-None.
🅾Personality- Closed off and shy. Expressionless. "Hmm" type of guy.
🅾Any health issues- Initial flues when he was 2 and 3 . Severe and EXTREME alcoholism after turning 18 which continued till the last victim was murdered. No reason known as for why he turned towards bottle. No break-ups or anything that might have made him seek comfort in drinking.
🅾Jobs- 3 jobs. Veteran. 2 other that I don't recall. Expelled from all three for drinking too much.
🅾Father-son relationship- Read all the quotes that I mention-
Now, when I look at photographs of my son at this age, I can't help but wonder if strange shapes were already forming in his mind, odd notions that he himself could not understand, vague fantasies that might have frightened even him, but which he could not keep at bay.
❎Everything that Lionel ignored, now comes back to haunt him and he's like, "Oh, so that's what it meant."
On the way home that evening, I recalled my own early shyness. It seemed to me that Jeff's behavior during the preceding weeks had been more or less the same as mine had been on those occasions when I'd suddenly found myself thrust into unfamiliar surroundings. As a boy, I'd been horribly shy, just as he was. Each year, I'd dreaded moving up to the next grade, even when that move would not mean any change in school buildings, and despite the fact that I would still be surrounded by children I already knew. It was as if some element of my character yearned for complete predictability, for rigid structure. Change, whether good or bad, was something fearful to me, something to be avoided. Awkward and insecure, plagued by a grave sense of my own inadequacy, as a child I had conceived of the world as something hostile and suspicious, a place that sometimes confused me, and which, because of that, I had come to regard with a sense of grave uneasiness.
But the part of Jeff that was most in danger was invisible to me. I could see only those aspects of his character that he chose to show, which resembled some of my own characteristics—the shyness, the general tone of acceptance, the tendency to withdraw from conflict. I suppose, like most fathers, I even took some comfort, perhaps even a bit of pride, in thinking that my son was a bit like me.
❎GRANDMA'S HOUSE-1964-
His social life, which should have been expanding, narrowed to a circle that was no larger than his mind, an imagined world in which his friends were phantoms, his lovers mere lumps of unmoving flesh.
He had made no effort to control his drinking. In fact, the only efforts he had made at all were those designed to make sure that he had a full supply of liquor. As we later discovered, that included selling his own blood plasma at a local blood bank, a practice he had engaged in so often that the blood center had finally marked his name, preventing him from making visits too frequently.
The police were then summoned, and while Sinthasomphone(the underage victim) labored to recover, they asked him where he'd gotten the drug. Once on his feet again, the boy took police officers to Jeff's apartment. Jeff was not at home when they arrived, but detectives soon determined that he worked as a mixer at nearby Ambrosia Chocolate. It was there that they arrested him.
After receiving the phone call that informed me of these things, I realized for the first time that Jeff had, in fact, crossed that line which divides willful self-destruction from the equally willful destruction of another. Somsack Sinthasomphone had been an innocent victim, by law a child, and my son had purposely lured him to his new apartment, drugged, and then sexually abused him.
But even when I thought of him as a man, a prisoner, a murderer, it seemed to me that my son was very far away from me. He was far away in the distance that physically separated us, and which was obvious; but he was also far away in his character and personality, which, it seemed to me, was no less obvious. In both of these senses, he was where I wanted him. Safely away. Far, far away.
For the darker side of my parenthood was still beyond my grasp.
I tried to keep my son in the role of victim, someone who had haplessly gotten ensnared in a net of terrible circumstances.
Jeff had hit bottom as a son, absolute bottom, and I could feel that he was taking me down with him, dragging me into the utter chaos that he had made of his life, and doing it publicly.
I wanted to take him back to that early boyhood time, to freeze him there, so that he could never reach beyond the innocence and harmlessness of his childhood, never reach any of the people whose lives he had destroyed . . . never reach me. Each time I thought of the older Jeff, I pushed him aside, shut him up in a closet, smothered him in the darkness, where he sat, alone, with whatever it was he had done. I did not even want to consider the things he might have done, or in any way bring them to mind. At the very thought of murder, my mind closed down or shifted to the side, a maneuver that I would be using for months to come.
We were no longer merely parents, and we never would be again. We were the parents, and I, in particular, was the father of Jeffrey Dahmer. Jeffrey, not Jeff. Jeffrey Dahmer was someone else, the formal public name for a man who was, at least to me, still Jeff, still my son. Even my son's name had become public property, foreign to me, a press report's designation, the name of a stranger, an abrupt depersonalization of someone who, at least to me, was still incontestably a person.
I stepped forward, put my arms around him and began to cry. While I held him, Jeff stood in place, still showing no emotion.
.
.
.
.
.
“You need to sleep."
He thought a moment, as if going over the events of the last few days, then he rolled his eyes up toward the ceiling. “I really messed up."
“Yes, but Shari and I will stand by you, Jeff."
"Sorry," he said again, but with that same deadness and lack of emotion.
He did not seem to comprehend the enormous consequences of what he had done.
“Sorry," he repeated.
Sorry?
But for what?
For the men he had killed?
For the anguish of their relatives?
For the torment of his grandmother?
For the ruin of his own family?
At that point, I believed that it was my son's madness that most powerfully and permanently separated us. He lived in a world behind his eyes. I could never enter that world. We would always be separated by the barrier of his mental illness. In a sense, I saw nothing but his insanity.
The fact that seemed hardest to understand was that we, ourselves, had done nothing to deserve such unwanted attention. But this was a fact that no longer mattered. Perhaps it had never mattered. We were the Dahmers. We had ceased to be anything else.
That night, we hardly spoke at all. It was as if each of us had been gutted. Drained, exhausted, still partly numb, we sat on the sofa and stared at the television. But as we both separately realized, even this light, generally relaxing activity, so common among ordinary people at the end of the working day, was now filled with extreme and unavoidable tension for us. For at any moment, in the middle of comedy, at the tail end of drama, just before a commercial, we might suddenly see the face of my son, a face that I, at least, profoundly did not want to see.
"Do you forgive your son?" Ms. Glass asked pointedly.
"That's a tough question," I replied. I paused a moment, then added, "I cannot say that I forgive him."
later in the book,
When I think back on the interview I gave to Inside Edition so many months ago, I hear the interviewer's question once again: “Do you forgive your son?"
Yes, I do.
⛔⛔REVIEW IS LONG AND INTENDED ONLY FOR THOSE WHO ARE DEEPLY INTERESTED IN READING THE BOOK, NOT FOR CASUALTIES.
🅾I'D STRICTLY ADVICE YOU TO NOT READ THIS BOOK AS A 3RD PERSON, READ IT AS IF YOU ARE LIONEL. IT WILL MAKE YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT ASPECTS OF THE BOOK YOU AGREE WITH AND WHAT ASPECTS YOU DONT AGREE WITH.
⛔IF YOU DON'T FOLLOW THE ABOVE RULE, THEN THERE'S NO POINT IN READING THE BOOK.
⛔THIS BOOK, TELLS YOU WHAT JEFFREY DID AND THE REASONS BEHIND IT.
🅾I WILL NOT BE GIVING MY OPINIONS ON THIS BOOK, BECAUSE ITS NOT MY RIGHT TO SAY ANYTHING. ALL THE INVESTIGATIONS AND ALL HAVE BEEN DONE. THE CONVICT IS DEAD. WE CAN DO NOTHING BUT ACCEPT WHATEVER HAPPENED. BUT, I WILL DEFINITELY TELL YOU EVERYTHING THAT THE BOOK HAS DISCUSSED ABOUT JEFFREY.
🅾 NOTE- TO PEOPLE WHO HAVE GIVEN THEIR THOUGHTS AND OPINIONS ON THIS BOOK, I'D POLITELY REQUEST YOU TO STOP, BECAUSE THIS IS NOT FICTION. NOT A FAIRYTALE WHICH CAN BE CHANGED BY CHANGING CHARACTERS. IT HAPPENED. ITS A FACT. ACCEPT IT.
🅾NEITHER ME OR YOU KNOW EXACTLY WHAT LIONEL IS GOING THROUGH, SO IT'S BETTER TO ONLY SYMPATHISE AND NOT GIVE YOUR OWN OPINIONS. SOMEONE'S PAIN SHOULD NOT BE ARGUED OVER. IT SHOULD BE FELT AND SYMPATHISED WITH.
✅WHAT MADE ME PICK THIS BOOK?-
🔯Jeff intrigues me, because, the love that Lionel felt towards his son was highly relatable to me, do not take this the wrong way, I am NOT a murderer.
🔯It was relatable in a way that is hard to explain, maybe its the Asian gene in me or whatever.
🔯But, I believe that you all can relate to it, at least the initial few chapters, they were very day-to-day life events that me and you usually go through.
⏺You will get an insight like, how you go to school, I go to school , Jeff when too. But what was different about him?
⏺You picked colleges, I worried about college, Jeff did too. But what was so different about him?
⏺You sit down with your family for dinner, I do too, Jeff did too. But what was different about it?
⏺You felt sexual attraction the first time with someone, I did too, Jeff did too. But what was different about him?
⏺I had stuffed animals too, you did too, Jeff did too. But what was different about him?
⏺I wanted to read this book because all 8 billion people live the same life Jeff did. then why was he the way he was. WHY!?
🅾Did I cry? Yes.
🅾Surprised? Yes.
🅾Satisfied? Not really.
✅SOME DETAILS-
1️⃣Book is written solely from Lionel's POV.
2️⃣Its less than 200 pages.
3️⃣If you read it, start from preface and read the acknowledgements too.
4️⃣This book DOES NOT discuss the actual crime in detail(the whole cannibalism, sexual assault, where how with whom it happened), because press, media, police already did. Every detail is out on the internet.
5️⃣This book discuss the life of Jeff from a father's eyes.
6️⃣This book is NOT a memoir completely.
7️⃣It DOES contain adult theme(cannibalism, pedophilia, alcohol abuse, drug overdose, rape, depression, suicide, anxiety)at least as much as Lionel could describe through his eyes.
8️⃣I'll be quoting a LOT from the book, make sure you read it DEFINITELY.
✅ WHY YOU SHOULD READ THIS-
🅾If you have depression, anxiety.
🅾If you have dysfunctional relationships with your parents, or child. READ THIS BOOK.
🅾Reader, give this book to your parents to read.
🅾It's closer to reality that you could ever imagine.
✅HOW SHOULD YOU READ THIS BOOK-
1️⃣I read this book in parts, I read 2 chapters a day and then I thought about what I had read.
2️⃣I read 3 chapters the next day and then thought about them, analyzed them.
3️⃣Then next day 3 chapters, and so on.....
4️⃣As I said earlier , try reading it as Lionel, not as a stranger on the internet.
✅THE REVIEW-
PREFACE-
But I wasn't told what these other mothers and fathers were told, that their sons were dead at the hands of a murderer. Instead, I was told that my son was the one who had murdered their sons. And so, my son was still alive. I couldn't bury him. I couldn't remember him fondly. He was not a figure of the past. He was still with me, as he still is.
❎LIONEL+JEFFREY=1960-
Lionel , himself as a child- Borderline obsession with chemicals, fire, bones and everything that is sciency.
Any signs of mental disorders? No.
Any kind of abuse/assault? No.
Parental neglect? A little bit.
Personality- Extreme shyness and inability to gauge human emotions. Preferring to be in his own company.
Relationship with Joyce(Wife #1)- During pregnancy#1 it went downhill because of the difficulties that Joyce faced and Lionel having difficulty in understanding them. Mothers get sleepless, cravings, loose control over emotions. Jeff's mom was and I quote, her emotional state began to deteriorate. A recurrent dream plagued her, one in which she was continually being chased by a large black bear. She sometimes screamed in her sleep. At times I would try to calm her, making the typical suggestions of an analytic mind, recommending that she walk around a bit, or drink a glass of warm milk, but never moving to engage the actual dream, or the roots from which it sprang.
When he was four, and pointed to his belly button and asked what would happen if someone cut it out, was that merely an ordinary question from a child who had begun to explore his own body, or was it a sign of something morbid already growing in his mind? When, at six, Jeff broke several windows out in an old, abandoned building, was that only a typical boyhood prank, or was it the early signal of a dark and impulsive destructiveness? When we went fishing, and he seemed captivated by the gutted fish, staring intently at the brightly colored entrails, was that a child's
natural curiosity, or was it a harbinger of the horror that was later to be found in Apartment 213?
In me, of course, an early obsession with fire had led to nothing more unusual than chemistry, to a life-long work in scientific research. Jeff's momentary fascination with bones might just as easily have pointed to an early interest that might have led eventually to medicine or medical research. It might have led to orthopedics or anatomical drawing or sculpture. It might simply have led to taxidermy. Or, more likely, it might have pointed to absolutely nothing, and been forgotten.
He stared wonderingly as a beaker of phenolphthalein turned dark pink when I introduced ammonia into the solution. The steady click of the Geiger counter briefly amused him.
🅾🅾 Jeff's childhood/young-adulthood- 🅾🅾
⏺Neglect? Yes.
From dad- He was getting PhD in chemistry so he kept busy with work, due to fighting with Joyce he preferred his lab more..
From mom-Post partum depression, side effect of pills.
🅾Abuse of ANY kind? I want to clarify the rumors that no, he wasn't abused by his dad. They hardly talked.
🅾Intelligence as a child- Extremely shy but excellent work ethic.
🅾Friendships- One or two when he was 3 or 4.None when he turned six or seven.
🅾Dates-None. Didn't go to prom.
🅾Emotional connection with parents- None.
🅾 " " " others- None.
🅾Academics- Excellent.
🅾Team work/Extracurricular participation/Volunteering-Absolutely no.
🅾Interest in gaming/ outing-None.
🅾Personality- Closed off and shy. Expressionless. "Hmm" type of guy.
🅾Any health issues- Initial flues when he was 2 and 3 . Severe and EXTREME alcoholism after turning 18 which continued till the last victim was murdered. No reason known as for why he turned towards bottle. No break-ups or anything that might have made him seek comfort in drinking.
🅾Jobs- 3 jobs. Veteran. 2 other that I don't recall. Expelled from all three for drinking too much.
🅾Father-son relationship- Read all the quotes that I mention-
Now, when I look at photographs of my son at this age, I can't help but wonder if strange shapes were already forming in his mind, odd notions that he himself could not understand, vague fantasies that might have frightened even him, but which he could not keep at bay.
❎Everything that Lionel ignored, now comes back to haunt him and he's like, "Oh, so that's what it meant."
On the way home that evening, I recalled my own early shyness. It seemed to me that Jeff's behavior during the preceding weeks had been more or less the same as mine had been on those occasions when I'd suddenly found myself thrust into unfamiliar surroundings. As a boy, I'd been horribly shy, just as he was. Each year, I'd dreaded moving up to the next grade, even when that move would not mean any change in school buildings, and despite the fact that I would still be surrounded by children I already knew. It was as if some element of my character yearned for complete predictability, for rigid structure. Change, whether good or bad, was something fearful to me, something to be avoided. Awkward and insecure, plagued by a grave sense of my own inadequacy, as a child I had conceived of the world as something hostile and suspicious, a place that sometimes confused me, and which, because of that, I had come to regard with a sense of grave uneasiness.
But the part of Jeff that was most in danger was invisible to me. I could see only those aspects of his character that he chose to show, which resembled some of my own characteristics—the shyness, the general tone of acceptance, the tendency to withdraw from conflict. I suppose, like most fathers, I even took some comfort, perhaps even a bit of pride, in thinking that my son was a bit like me.
❎GRANDMA'S HOUSE-1964-
His social life, which should have been expanding, narrowed to a circle that was no larger than his mind, an imagined world in which his friends were phantoms, his lovers mere lumps of unmoving flesh.
He had made no effort to control his drinking. In fact, the only efforts he had made at all were those designed to make sure that he had a full supply of liquor. As we later discovered, that included selling his own blood plasma at a local blood bank, a practice he had engaged in so often that the blood center had finally marked his name, preventing him from making visits too frequently.
The police were then summoned, and while Sinthasomphone(the underage victim) labored to recover, they asked him where he'd gotten the drug. Once on his feet again, the boy took police officers to Jeff's apartment. Jeff was not at home when they arrived, but detectives soon determined that he worked as a mixer at nearby Ambrosia Chocolate. It was there that they arrested him.
After receiving the phone call that informed me of these things, I realized for the first time that Jeff had, in fact, crossed that line which divides willful self-destruction from the equally willful destruction of another. Somsack Sinthasomphone had been an innocent victim, by law a child, and my son had purposely lured him to his new apartment, drugged, and then sexually abused him.
But even when I thought of him as a man, a prisoner, a murderer, it seemed to me that my son was very far away from me. He was far away in the distance that physically separated us, and which was obvious; but he was also far away in his character and personality, which, it seemed to me, was no less obvious. In both of these senses, he was where I wanted him. Safely away. Far, far away.
For the darker side of my parenthood was still beyond my grasp.
I tried to keep my son in the role of victim, someone who had haplessly gotten ensnared in a net of terrible circumstances.
Jeff had hit bottom as a son, absolute bottom, and I could feel that he was taking me down with him, dragging me into the utter chaos that he had made of his life, and doing it publicly.
I wanted to take him back to that early boyhood time, to freeze him there, so that he could never reach beyond the innocence and harmlessness of his childhood, never reach any of the people whose lives he had destroyed . . . never reach me. Each time I thought of the older Jeff, I pushed him aside, shut him up in a closet, smothered him in the darkness, where he sat, alone, with whatever it was he had done. I did not even want to consider the things he might have done, or in any way bring them to mind. At the very thought of murder, my mind closed down or shifted to the side, a maneuver that I would be using for months to come.
We were no longer merely parents, and we never would be again. We were the parents, and I, in particular, was the father of Jeffrey Dahmer. Jeffrey, not Jeff. Jeffrey Dahmer was someone else, the formal public name for a man who was, at least to me, still Jeff, still my son. Even my son's name had become public property, foreign to me, a press report's designation, the name of a stranger, an abrupt depersonalization of someone who, at least to me, was still incontestably a person.
I stepped forward, put my arms around him and began to cry. While I held him, Jeff stood in place, still showing no emotion.
.
.
.
.
.
“You need to sleep."
He thought a moment, as if going over the events of the last few days, then he rolled his eyes up toward the ceiling. “I really messed up."
“Yes, but Shari and I will stand by you, Jeff."
"Sorry," he said again, but with that same deadness and lack of emotion.
He did not seem to comprehend the enormous consequences of what he had done.
“Sorry," he repeated.
Sorry?
But for what?
For the men he had killed?
For the anguish of their relatives?
For the torment of his grandmother?
For the ruin of his own family?
At that point, I believed that it was my son's madness that most powerfully and permanently separated us. He lived in a world behind his eyes. I could never enter that world. We would always be separated by the barrier of his mental illness. In a sense, I saw nothing but his insanity.
The fact that seemed hardest to understand was that we, ourselves, had done nothing to deserve such unwanted attention. But this was a fact that no longer mattered. Perhaps it had never mattered. We were the Dahmers. We had ceased to be anything else.
That night, we hardly spoke at all. It was as if each of us had been gutted. Drained, exhausted, still partly numb, we sat on the sofa and stared at the television. But as we both separately realized, even this light, generally relaxing activity, so common among ordinary people at the end of the working day, was now filled with extreme and unavoidable tension for us. For at any moment, in the middle of comedy, at the tail end of drama, just before a commercial, we might suddenly see the face of my son, a face that I, at least, profoundly did not want to see.
September 20, 2016
I did not like the book because I did not like Lionel. There were flashes of attempted sincerity, but overall I felt he wanted me to think him a hero and was manipulating the book even to the point of confessing his own arson and his high-school bombing that had not been discovered so that I would approve of him. I do not. There were signs he should have seen but he denies them. I thought he wanted to blame the mother Joyce, who no doubt was mentally unbalanced also. Lionel seems to me to be a psychopath.
Joyce, in a later interview, was shocked at the things Lionel said about her and she said to Stone Phillips in the interview on youtube that the things in the book were false. I am also suspicious of her truthfulness. She distanced herself from Jeffrey from his beginning as a baby by not nursing him, to the end of her mothering of him at age eighteen by abandoning him to live alone in their home. She left him her car and he promptly picked up hitchhiker Steve Hicks and murdered him and cut him up. She must have seen some signs.
This book gave me no understanding of Jeffrey Dahmer, he is just evil. I believe Satan is the Father of Lies, and Jeffrey and his family seem his disciples, in my opinion.
Jeffrey seemed like Lionel, both seemed untruthful, ruthless, willful, manipulative, egotistical and just evil. These traits probably go back in ancestors and forward in descendants unless weeded out.
Both Jeffrey's mother and Lionel's mother seemed untruthful denyers. Jeffrey's grandmother lived with him in her house while he murdered at least four people and had their bodies in the house. She had a nose which smelled (death odors), eyes which saw (his doll-mannequin), ears which heard (males voices partying). She covered up for Jeff and pretended he was harmless and innocent, but finally asked him to move out. She knew!
Bad families are no excuse for personal evil. Admittedly, they are a deterrent to mental health. The lies brought out by this book are great for psychology and analyzing, but the book left me with an unpleasant feeling of disgust and slime.
Joyce, in a later interview, was shocked at the things Lionel said about her and she said to Stone Phillips in the interview on youtube that the things in the book were false. I am also suspicious of her truthfulness. She distanced herself from Jeffrey from his beginning as a baby by not nursing him, to the end of her mothering of him at age eighteen by abandoning him to live alone in their home. She left him her car and he promptly picked up hitchhiker Steve Hicks and murdered him and cut him up. She must have seen some signs.
This book gave me no understanding of Jeffrey Dahmer, he is just evil. I believe Satan is the Father of Lies, and Jeffrey and his family seem his disciples, in my opinion.
Jeffrey seemed like Lionel, both seemed untruthful, ruthless, willful, manipulative, egotistical and just evil. These traits probably go back in ancestors and forward in descendants unless weeded out.
Both Jeffrey's mother and Lionel's mother seemed untruthful denyers. Jeffrey's grandmother lived with him in her house while he murdered at least four people and had their bodies in the house. She had a nose which smelled (death odors), eyes which saw (his doll-mannequin), ears which heard (males voices partying). She covered up for Jeff and pretended he was harmless and innocent, but finally asked him to move out. She knew!
Bad families are no excuse for personal evil. Admittedly, they are a deterrent to mental health. The lies brought out by this book are great for psychology and analyzing, but the book left me with an unpleasant feeling of disgust and slime.
May 25, 2009
I can't even describe how interesting this book was. Maybe it's because secretly I am a sicko who wants to know more about the minds of serial killers and their families. Once I started reading this I could not put it down, it was just that good. You could tell how much Lionel loved his sonand how heart broken he was when he found out about Jeffrey's secret life. I highly reccomend this book.
Read
November 10, 2025❥- Though I’m not going to leave a rating on this book, as I often don’t with memoirs, biographies, or any books surrounded around someone’s personal life, I will say that this is a very interesting read. Particularly because it’s clear Lionel Dahmer had to argue whether his son, Jeffrey Dahmer and his horrendous actions were because of nurture, nature, or both just to try to make any sense of it. His psychologist later makes a very daring point to Lionel. He essentially says, “You argue these points, but have you considered that maybe genetics and environment may have nothing to do with this?” I think this also alludes to the question The Jeffrey Dahmer in the Netflix original “Monster” show alludes to when Jeff (played by Evan Peters) asks the priest “Do you believe people can be born evil?” If someone asked me that right now, the obvious answer would be yes. However after reading this story, I don’t think i’m any closer to knowing whether Jefferey Dahmer was actually born evil anymore than Lionel Dahmer is. As this story unfolds from his father’s point of view, there are endless possibilities about what could’ve contributed to Jeffery’s behavior and obsessions. There is psychological research that proves mental illnesses and generational trauma can be inherited. We also know sociologically, all environments are huge factors in a child’s development both in and outside of the home. There is also the case of what effects the medications his mother took while pregnant with him could’ve had on his neonatal development. The possibilities are endless which I think why Lionel Dahmer, even after all the changes he’s made to this story is still plagued with too many questions and self doubt. For a better peace of mind I think it would be best if he instead accepts that some people do bad things with no explanation whatsoever. Considering that Jeffrey’s brain was never studied, we may never know if he was suffering mentally, if he was a product of his unstable environment, or if he simply just was.
March 12, 2022
TW: Cheating, depression, murder, rape, torture, child abandonment, toxic relationships, divorce, parent death, child molestation
*****SPOILERS*****
About the book:On July 23, 1991, Milwaukee chemist Lionel Dahmer discovered - along with the rest of the world - that his son Jeffrey was a murderer who, over a period of many years, had carried out some of the most ghastly crimes ever committed in the United States.
A Father's Story cannot claim to have discovered the ultimate solution to the enigma of either the criminal or his deeds. It is, in fact, not the story of Jeffrey Dahmer at all, but of a father who, by slow, incremental degrees, came to realize the saddest truth that any parent may ever know: that following some unknowable process, his child had somewhere crossed the line that divides the human from the monstrous.
Release Date: 03/01/1994
Genre: Memoir
Pages: 255
Rating: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐
What I Liked:
• The view point of the dad
• The writing reads so easy
• Pictures included 🙌🏻
What I Didn't Like:
• The sections where the dad talks about his sexual side is odd
Overall Thoughts: Reading a memoir or biography without pictures is like having a cookbook without pictures of the recipe. So I really appreciate that the dad did include some photos into this book.
Honestly it's super hard for me not to kind of blame the parents for the way he felt. The father describes Jeffrey as feeling lonely and that's why he would murder people and then want to be close to them because he felt like if he didn't that they would leave him. So, I have to wonder if this abandonment comes from his youth where his mother was always depressed and unable to be there with him and the father was constantly leaving him to go off to work. They added another sibling that they were paying more attention to because he was colic and let's be honest he was the best kid so they're going to give him more attention where as Jeffrey was odd so they probably stay clear of him. Then as he reaches adulthood his parents do get divorced but rather than his mother taking him with her she leaves them in the house alone and then his dad is constantly trying to send him away to do other stuff.
The sections where the father says that Jeffrey was like him in certain ways I think it was a reach. It felt almost like he was wishing he was the one that was able to go through with killing people too. So odd.
It was super sad at parts. It seemed like he was sorry in a way for him doing things. Like not having control to stop himself. The part where his dad was tying his tie made me tear up.
Final Thoughts: it's worth a read but the dad just was not a good person at all. Not only did he treat his son(s) as a burden but he also pretty much ditches his mother. He sends his troubled son to her and then when she's in her 80s he leaves her to live on her own in another state. Then she goes downhill and he let's a family friend take over the care for his mother. She gets even worse and rather than move her near him they keep her in a home in Milwaukee.
IG | Blog
*****SPOILERS*****
About the book:On July 23, 1991, Milwaukee chemist Lionel Dahmer discovered - along with the rest of the world - that his son Jeffrey was a murderer who, over a period of many years, had carried out some of the most ghastly crimes ever committed in the United States.
A Father's Story cannot claim to have discovered the ultimate solution to the enigma of either the criminal or his deeds. It is, in fact, not the story of Jeffrey Dahmer at all, but of a father who, by slow, incremental degrees, came to realize the saddest truth that any parent may ever know: that following some unknowable process, his child had somewhere crossed the line that divides the human from the monstrous.
Release Date: 03/01/1994
Genre: Memoir
Pages: 255
Rating: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐
What I Liked:
• The view point of the dad
• The writing reads so easy
• Pictures included 🙌🏻
What I Didn't Like:
• The sections where the dad talks about his sexual side is odd
Overall Thoughts: Reading a memoir or biography without pictures is like having a cookbook without pictures of the recipe. So I really appreciate that the dad did include some photos into this book.
Honestly it's super hard for me not to kind of blame the parents for the way he felt. The father describes Jeffrey as feeling lonely and that's why he would murder people and then want to be close to them because he felt like if he didn't that they would leave him. So, I have to wonder if this abandonment comes from his youth where his mother was always depressed and unable to be there with him and the father was constantly leaving him to go off to work. They added another sibling that they were paying more attention to because he was colic and let's be honest he was the best kid so they're going to give him more attention where as Jeffrey was odd so they probably stay clear of him. Then as he reaches adulthood his parents do get divorced but rather than his mother taking him with her she leaves them in the house alone and then his dad is constantly trying to send him away to do other stuff.
The sections where the father says that Jeffrey was like him in certain ways I think it was a reach. It felt almost like he was wishing he was the one that was able to go through with killing people too. So odd.
It was super sad at parts. It seemed like he was sorry in a way for him doing things. Like not having control to stop himself. The part where his dad was tying his tie made me tear up.
Final Thoughts: it's worth a read but the dad just was not a good person at all. Not only did he treat his son(s) as a burden but he also pretty much ditches his mother. He sends his troubled son to her and then when she's in her 80s he leaves her to live on her own in another state. Then she goes downhill and he let's a family friend take over the care for his mother. She gets even worse and rather than move her near him they keep her in a home in Milwaukee.
IG | Blog
August 28, 2019
Someone should have told Lionel to hire an editor before releasing ‘A Father’s Story’ for publication. So many spelling errors.
As for the content of the book, I judge it to be inauthentic. Fake. The sincerity that Dahmer entreats the reader to believe in is flashy and almost non-existent.
Though, I was oddly amused at the father-and-son interactions.
I don't think that the humor was intended. But it appeared that way nonetheless.
To summarize, I am mostly disappointed. This was a great opportunity to get into the mind of Dahmer, to understand more of his personality; His psyche. This could have been a great revelation into how father and son interacted and if Lionel had fully delved into his relationship with his son, I would have been interested.
However, I'm not interested in hearing the man's self-justification on why he would not have known about Jeffrey and that it couldn't possibly be him who's the problem. Even the smattering of Jeffrey's childhood pictures serves as Lionel's vindication as to why this should not be blamed on his parenting. (I thought he was going to pin it on his wife during the beginning chapter, lol)
It's like, Look, he's smiling like a happy kid, I raised him right. It's not my fault he turned out this way! Exactly like that.
It seems like Lionel was more focused on having the reader empathize with his own plight rather than providing any deeper revelation on his son. This, I understand. But it makes this novel nothing more than cheap reading material for a train ride.
So thank you, next.
As for the content of the book, I judge it to be inauthentic. Fake. The sincerity that Dahmer entreats the reader to believe in is flashy and almost non-existent.
Though, I was oddly amused at the father-and-son interactions.
The only thing odd about the kitchen was that he had bought a freezer.
“Why’d you buy that?” I asked.
“To save money,” Jeff answered. “When there’s a sale, I can stock up on things.”
If anything, this struck me as a sensible idea, and I continued on my tour.
A short corridor led to the bathroom and bedroom, and it was cut off from the living room by a sliding door. Jeff had put a lock on that door, as if to seal it off completely.
“Why the lock?” I asked.
“Just to make it safer,” Jeff answered. “Against burglars.”
I don't think that the humor was intended. But it appeared that way nonetheless.
To summarize, I am mostly disappointed. This was a great opportunity to get into the mind of Dahmer, to understand more of his personality; His psyche. This could have been a great revelation into how father and son interacted and if Lionel had fully delved into his relationship with his son, I would have been interested.
However, I'm not interested in hearing the man's self-justification on why he would not have known about Jeffrey and that it couldn't possibly be him who's the problem. Even the smattering of Jeffrey's childhood pictures serves as Lionel's vindication as to why this should not be blamed on his parenting. (I thought he was going to pin it on his wife during the beginning chapter, lol)
It's like, Look, he's smiling like a happy kid, I raised him right. It's not my fault he turned out this way! Exactly like that.
It seems like Lionel was more focused on having the reader empathize with his own plight rather than providing any deeper revelation on his son. This, I understand. But it makes this novel nothing more than cheap reading material for a train ride.
So thank you, next.
March 30, 2008
Okay -- I make no apologies for reading a lot of "true crime," but let me just say that this particular book stands out from the crowd. One would assume that Lionel Dahmer wrote (or did not write) this book either to capitalize on or atone for his son's crimes ("I Was Jeff Dahmer's Dad!"); what's unexpected is the candor, humility, and thoughtfulness of his account, and the little ways in which its genuine strangeness bypasses "shock value." (His descriptions of his own childhood pyromania are pretty amazing, as are his expressions of sad, mild sympathy for his son.) In many ways, this is the novel I wouldn't mind reading about the math-professor father of a serial killer. Jeff Dahmer we know; *this* is the interesting man.
September 23, 2014
It is so sad that Jeffery ' s father feels so much remorse for what his son did. I can't begin to imagine the nightmare that has become of this man's life after his son committed such gruesome crimes. Throughout the book Mr. Dahmer questions himself if he should have known what his son was up to and tries to figure out if there were signs in Jeffreys childhood that he was disturbed.
Many books have been written about this serial killer but only his father can give an internal insight on the killer before he became infamous.
Many books have been written about this serial killer but only his father can give an internal insight on the killer before he became infamous.
February 13, 2013
I didn't know who Jeffrey Dahmer was. I only knew that this was a book by a father over his son, a serial killer. As a father I was compelled to read this book. It was partly because of the morbid curiosity about a nightmare that feels so very far away and yet so vivid: the unstoppable process of utter damnation of your child. Partly because one always wants to find answers, even when the formulated questions are so impossible. What I take out of this book is something geometrical.... we are the space of our isolation, we are the space defined within our limits, the limits change, the isolation remains.... sometimes it grows so much that we even forget that there is something else outside. Worlds alongside other worlds, reaching without hope, clashing, breaking.
October 4, 2023
Wow.... que j'ai aimé ce livre là !!!
J'avais vu la série quand c'est sortie (je l'ai même écouté 2 ou 3 fois) et ce livre nous permet de suivre mais avec une autre vision que celle de Jeffrey, celle de son père.
Vraiment bien écrit et il ne cherche pas à le faire prendre en pitié non plus..
Agrémenté de quelques photos de leurs albums personnels.
Super lecture, je recommande à tout ceux qui ont aimé la série !
J'avais vu la série quand c'est sortie (je l'ai même écouté 2 ou 3 fois) et ce livre nous permet de suivre mais avec une autre vision que celle de Jeffrey, celle de son père.
Vraiment bien écrit et il ne cherche pas à le faire prendre en pitié non plus..
Agrémenté de quelques photos de leurs albums personnels.
Super lecture, je recommande à tout ceux qui ont aimé la série !
November 1, 2022
3.5. The overuse of the word “analytical” did my head in in the early chapters- almost enough for me to give up and DNF. I’m glad I did though, because by the end of the book the writing and reflection was fantastic. I think a lot of people could get something out of this book, particularly parents or those hoping to become parents. It was absolutely a sad read, and left me feeling for everyone involved in Dahmer’s murders, but I’m glad I’ve read it.
August 21, 2012
An important but unfortunately poorly written work.
When serial killers are apprehended, we hear all about their crimes and the horrible acts they committed. And to a lesser extent, we are get a sense of the victims and their families, but very rarely do we ever hear from the family members of the killers and what they must go through as they are often turned into pariahs for what their children/siblings did. This makes Lionel Dahmer's book A Father's Story such an important work. However, as Dahmer repeatedly states, he has "an analytical mind" so the work tends to toward calculated prose, that gives very little emotional insight into what his experience was like, so that the book boils down to little more than a litany of events from Jeffrey Dahmer's childhood and trial, making it difficult to empathize with him or his wife.
Hoever, Dahmer should be commended for avoiding sensationalism and trying to capitalize off his son's crimes. The book is simply, as the title states, a father's story, sort of Dahmer's way of working through and trying to understand how his son could possibly be capable of the horrible acts he committed.
The book does give some insight into what may have caused Jeffrey Dahmer to become the killer the world know him as. Jeffrey Dahmer was born into a perfect storm of hereditary and environment. Lionel Dahmer bravely confesses his own early experiments with perversity, a long stint as a pyromaniac culminating in almost burning down a neighbors garage, attempting to hypnotize a girl when he was thirteen in the hopes of "having [his] way with her" and his own dissociative personality that was a lesser version of what developed in his son. Also, Jeffrey's birth mother, Joyce was greatly mentally disturbed (what mental disorders she exactly had, Dahmer never states) and was on numerous medications while pregnant with Jeffrey; and Dahmer correctly questions what effect all of this had on his son.
Throughout the book, we sense the immense feeling of guilt Lionel Dahmer feels that he somehow through his own genes and faulty parenting contributed to what his son became, and through this alone are given a glimpse into the suffering the Dahmer family went through.
When serial killers are apprehended, we hear all about their crimes and the horrible acts they committed. And to a lesser extent, we are get a sense of the victims and their families, but very rarely do we ever hear from the family members of the killers and what they must go through as they are often turned into pariahs for what their children/siblings did. This makes Lionel Dahmer's book A Father's Story such an important work. However, as Dahmer repeatedly states, he has "an analytical mind" so the work tends to toward calculated prose, that gives very little emotional insight into what his experience was like, so that the book boils down to little more than a litany of events from Jeffrey Dahmer's childhood and trial, making it difficult to empathize with him or his wife.
Hoever, Dahmer should be commended for avoiding sensationalism and trying to capitalize off his son's crimes. The book is simply, as the title states, a father's story, sort of Dahmer's way of working through and trying to understand how his son could possibly be capable of the horrible acts he committed.
The book does give some insight into what may have caused Jeffrey Dahmer to become the killer the world know him as. Jeffrey Dahmer was born into a perfect storm of hereditary and environment. Lionel Dahmer bravely confesses his own early experiments with perversity, a long stint as a pyromaniac culminating in almost burning down a neighbors garage, attempting to hypnotize a girl when he was thirteen in the hopes of "having [his] way with her" and his own dissociative personality that was a lesser version of what developed in his son. Also, Jeffrey's birth mother, Joyce was greatly mentally disturbed (what mental disorders she exactly had, Dahmer never states) and was on numerous medications while pregnant with Jeffrey; and Dahmer correctly questions what effect all of this had on his son.
Throughout the book, we sense the immense feeling of guilt Lionel Dahmer feels that he somehow through his own genes and faulty parenting contributed to what his son became, and through this alone are given a glimpse into the suffering the Dahmer family went through.
Read
October 16, 2022No rating. I feel uncomfortable giving one. It is not badly written or anything of that sort.
This book won't tell you what was psychologically or medically wrong with Jeff. It doesn't get into diagnosis.
Lionel and Joyce Dahmer should not have been married nor had children with each other. They were a bad fit.
I don't understand why they stayed married. Lionel says that the marriage was pretty much bad from the start.
I understand why Joyce stayed. (Mentally ill mother, no job or income of her own) BUT, Lionel had the job, money, and means to leave the marriage.
I don't like that the brunt of blame is put on Joyce. I don't believe that how Jeff turned out was solely because of her mental illnesses and the medication she took while pregnant with him.
Joyce after all did get help for her problems. (funnily enough, Joyce went to the same mental health clinic I go to)
Lionel just tuned out and worked. Left his family alone and sans help.
I also don't like that Jeff's prison minister pretty much said that if Jeff had had God in his life, the murders wouldn't have happened. AND, it rubs me the wrong way that the minister thinks that Jeff is in Heaven next to God/Jesus.
The only good people in Jeff's life were his paternal Grandma and his stepmother, Shari. They come off as loving and compassionate women. If Jeff had been raised by them, I think he would've turned out better.
This book won't tell you what was psychologically or medically wrong with Jeff. It doesn't get into diagnosis.
Lionel and Joyce Dahmer should not have been married nor had children with each other. They were a bad fit.
I don't understand why they stayed married. Lionel says that the marriage was pretty much bad from the start.
I understand why Joyce stayed. (Mentally ill mother, no job or income of her own) BUT, Lionel had the job, money, and means to leave the marriage.
I don't like that the brunt of blame is put on Joyce. I don't believe that how Jeff turned out was solely because of her mental illnesses and the medication she took while pregnant with him.
Joyce after all did get help for her problems. (funnily enough, Joyce went to the same mental health clinic I go to)
Lionel just tuned out and worked. Left his family alone and sans help.
I also don't like that Jeff's prison minister pretty much said that if Jeff had had God in his life, the murders wouldn't have happened. AND, it rubs me the wrong way that the minister thinks that Jeff is in Heaven next to God/Jesus.
The only good people in Jeff's life were his paternal Grandma and his stepmother, Shari. They come off as loving and compassionate women. If Jeff had been raised by them, I think he would've turned out better.
May 6, 2015
I read this book in one afternoon, finding it impossible to put down once I started. I was shocked to find Lionel Dahmer's writing so compulsively readable, well-written, and hauntingly open. I cannot imagine what it took to examine all of his own inner demons, to analyze them and dissect them, in the hopes of being able to understand the horrifying actions of his son. I find it abominable that people can be so hateful to parents of murderers, especially parents like the Dahmer's who, like so many others, do what they believe is a good job raising their children and guiding them to be decent, law-abiding citizens. How do you cope when finding out the life your son has led is not only different, but one that will attach him to infamy? How do you reconcile the son you love unconditionally has ended the lives of so many other beloved sons? I cannot imagine it. But I applaud Lionel Dahmer for writing his memoir, charging and challenging parents to be more aware of their children's' struggles, to not let them fade to the periphery like he did, in hopes of saving a future child from the dark path his son went down. A reality check for all, especially parents, this is a heart wrenching book that gave me a very different perspective of the notorious Jeffrey Dahmer.
May 17, 2012
This is one of the most heartbreaking stories I have ever read. Lionel Dahmer was the father of Geoffry Dahmer who murdered 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991. His voice in this book is a very honest and human one (in stark contrast to the typically sensational tone associated with these kinds of crime stories) - it is the voice of a father trying to make sense of what caused his son's insanity and its horrific repercussions, and of a man who dearly loved his son, in spite of his struggle to process these revelations. From a certain point Lionel knew his son was terribly troubled, but he never could have imagined how bad things really were. He has since come to question almost everything he thought he knew about his child and the history they shared, not to mention his own level of responsibility for how his son's path developed. Incredibly sad but very powerful and sensitively written.
February 16, 2019
It's impossible to review a real-life occurrence. The story of Jeffrey Dahmer will always be one that both haunts and interests me. I read this account of his story, from the perspective of his father, because I will be writing a research paper about Jeffrey Dahmer this semester in my English course. I most likely would not have read this if it weren't for the research I require for this paper, but I am honestly glad that I did. While Lionel seemed slightly untrustworthy or hypocritical at times, he provided a perspective on Jeffrey that I had never really heard before. Overall, this book was surprisingly well written and brutally honest in the places where it had to be.
March 2, 2022
Great read, more so because I really enjoy reading another persons point of view of the trauma that is realising someone you’ve lived their whole life, is a serial killer. I can’t even imagine.
Great read.
Great read.
September 19, 2021
A heartbreaking book, that's how I can describe it. Guilt and confusion seeps through its pages on every turn. And also a lot of sorrow. Lionel says he was always reserved in his emotions, but I see a wide range of them in this book. It's truly painful to read his words, witness his mind looking for answers, looking for some sort of path. And this was written before Jeffrey was murdered in prison by a fellow inmate (I read the version without the addition about the murder that came after). It's just overall a truly informational book. I always believed that Jeffrey was a victim of circumstances but now - I am not so sure. And I never will know the real answer. But this book is a so needed window into a life of a parent of a serial killer. Not always the parents are monsters, not always they are responsible for their children becoming what they end up becoming. In Lionel's case - he did everything he could and saw fit doing for Jeff, his son. And the outcome was still a single man taking many lives and shattering so many others in the process of dissolving his own loneliness.
I would call this an essential read for anyone who's interested not only in Dahmer case, or serial killers as a whole - but to everyone interested in true crime. Deeply thought provoking - this book provides us with more questions than answers, but in essence just confirms that no one knows a person truly if they are keen on keeping a lot of secrets.
I would call this an essential read for anyone who's interested not only in Dahmer case, or serial killers as a whole - but to everyone interested in true crime. Deeply thought provoking - this book provides us with more questions than answers, but in essence just confirms that no one knows a person truly if they are keen on keeping a lot of secrets.
November 24, 2013
Jeff has always has a uncomfortable hold over me, I am fascinated by the human psyche and just how far the rabbit hole goes. That saying I do not condone ANYTHING he did, but as humans we do have a a little bit of a sick undercurrent, slowing down at accident scenes, a interest in our own demise! Anyway I digress! I was looking for this book for a long long time and was absolutely delighted when I picked it up in a second hand shop for 25p!! I have read a lot if literature pertaining to Jeff's crimes , people who think they could explain it based on psychiatric judgements etc so it's refreshing to reading an account from a entirely personal view, not a doctors or a someone who poured over hours of transcripts but from his actual father. Heartbreaking in parts this book really opened up my eyes to the fallout of his crimes, the effect on his family, who has no idea. That's something I have never seen covered before. I shall add this to my Jeffery Dahmer collection and be uber thankful I stepped into the charity shop that day!
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