Jeffrey Dahmer biography

Synopsis

Early Life

Serial killer. Jeffrey Dahmer was born in Milwaukee on May 21, 1960, into the loving household of Lionel and Joyce Dahmer. He wanted for nothing in his formative years, and was a happy child until the age of six, when some minor surgery, which coincided with the birth of his brother, seemed to effect a change on the boy, and he became increasingly insular and lacking in self-confidence.

A career opportunity for his father, around the same period, resulted in the family moving from Iowa to Ohio, and the boy's insecurities deepened; by his early teens he was disengaged, tense and largely friendless.

He claims that compulsions to murder and necrophilia had occurred to him from the age of fourteen, but it appears that the breakdown of his parents' marriage, their acrimonious divorce, and the psychological stresses associated with these events may have been the catalyst for turning these earlier thoughts into actions.

First Victims

Just after he graduated from high school, in June 1978, he picked up a hitchhiker named Steven Hicks, took him home to his parents' house, where they drank beer and had sex. When Hicks tried to leave, Dahmer killed him with a blow to the head with a barbell. He dismembered the corpse of his first victim, packed it in plastic bags and buried them in the woods behind the house. It would be another nine years before he took his second victim.

At the same time of his first killing, his alcohol consumption became uncontrolled and, in January 1979, when Dahmer dropped out of Ohio State University after only one term, due to drunkenness, his recently remarried father insisted that he enlist in the Army, and he was posted to Germany.

This drinking problem persisted, until two years later the Army discharged him for alcoholism. It is not believed that he took any more victims while in the Armed Forces, and he returned home to Ohio following his discharge, where he exhumed Hicks' decomposing remains, pulverized them with a hammer, and scattered the pieces even more widely in the woods.

An arrest in October 1981 for disorderly conduct prompted his father to send Dahmer to live with his grandmother in Wisconsin, but the alcohol problems persisted. His next arrest occurred some years later, in September 1986, for masturbating in front of two young boys, for which he received a one-year probationary sentence.

In September 1987 he took his second victim, Steven Toumi, whom he met in a gay bar. They checked into a hotel room, drank heavily and, next morning, Dahmer claims to have found Toumi dead beside him. He bought a large suitcase to transport Toumi's corpse to his grandmother's basement, where he had sex with, and masturbated on it, before dismembering it and disposing of the remains in the rubbish.

Arrest and Sentencing

He developed a pattern of murder that was to persist for the duration of his thirteen year killing spree: he sought out mostly African-American men at gay meeting places, lured them home to his grandmother's basement with promises of money or sex, where he would ply them with alcohol laced with drugs, strangle them, have sex with the corpse or masturbate on it, then dismember the corpses and dispose of them, usually keeping their genitals or skulls as souvenirs. He often took photos of each victim at various stages of the murder process, so he could recollect each act afterwards and relive the experience. This re-enactment included assembling the skulls and masturbating in front of them, to achieve gratification.

His grandmother eventually tired of the late nights and drunkenness, although she had no knowledge of the other activities, and she forced him to move out in September 1988, but not before he had killed another two victims on the premises.

At this point he had an extremely lucky escape: an encounter with a thirteen-year-old Laotian boy resulted in charges of sexual exploitation, and second-degree sexual assault, being laid