On the twenty-first day of May 1960 in West Allis, Wisconsin, Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer was born to parents Lionel and Joyce Dahmer. Just before his tenth birthday, his family moved to Bath, Ohio. According to Lionel Dahmer, his son was the typical American boy, “bright loving child…very outgoing” however, by age 7 he was “socially awkward.” This social awkwardness is attributed to the sexual molestation Jeffrey suffered at the young age of six at the hands of a neighbor. Though a former lover of Jeffrey Dahmer has made the claim that Lionel himself sexually abused Jeffrey; an allegation that Lionel Dahmer firmly denies in his book, A Father's Story.
Just before his tenth birthday, his family moved to Bath, Ohio. Jeffrey was given the honor of naming his new baby brother, whom he named David. It was shortly after this that his mother Joyce would be hospitalized for anxiety and his parents' marriage first began to show signs of collapsing.
At about the age of 13, Jeffrey first became curious about animals, particularly the insides of animals. He started going out in search of animal carcasses in order to investigate and dissect the animal. This was the “starting point of his downward spiral” (L. Dahmer, 1994), “and it just happened to coincide with the start of puberty.”
Dahmer attended Revere High School, where he once conned himself and classmates into the executive offices of then Vice President Walter Mondale in 1977.
It was in high school that he first realized he was only sexually attracted to men.
He would soon discover that those feelings would be forever linked to the desire to lie next to them as they lay unconscious or to the desire to kill them. He found himself sexually excited at the thought of either fantasy.
In an interview Jeffrey once stated, “it started at the age of 14 or 15. I started having excessive fantasies of violence intermingled with sex and it just got worse and worse. I didn't know how to tell anyone, so I didn't. I just kept it all inside.”
One of the fantasies was to lay next an unconscious man; a fantasy he was going to try to make a reality. He decided to attack a local jogger, club him and lie next to his body. He knew the jogger's schedule and that he ran the same time everyday. For whatever reason, that jogger did not run that day and Jeffrey never tried to put that plan into motion again.
As the fantasies got worse, a then 16-year-old Dahmer turned to drinking in order to deal with his fantasies. He would drink alcohol before going to school everyday; one classmate would later say that she thought it was weird that he was getting drunk at 8 am in the morning. Jeffrey called the alcohol his “medicine.”
In addition to his drinking, Dahmer's home life was falling apart. His parent's marriage was going from bad to worse, what was once just fighting was now becoming violent. At school, he was known as the class clown, but his drinking and fantasies kept him from truly connecting with people. His father said in his book that, “he didn't connect or interact with people. When one fails to connect to people one falls into a fantasy world. After a while those fantasies can become real.”
In 1978, Jeffrey's life as he knew it was turned upside down in several ways and it would send him into a tailspin that would make his father's prediction come true.
In 1978, Jeffrey Dahmer:
• graduated Revere High School
• watched his parents get divorced
• watched his father moved out
• watched as his mother and brother moved away
• murdered his first victim: Steven Hicks
In June 1978, Jeffrey picked up a hitchhiker from the side of the road, took him home to his deserted family home, had sex with him, murdered him, dismembered his body and placed him in a garbage bag in order to get rid of the body. On the way to do this though, he was pulled over by the police for swerving across the yellow line. Just as he had lied years before to get into the executive offices of Vice-President Mondale, he lied to the police who let him go without ever knowing the truth about why he was driving erratically.
Commenting on his murder of Hicks, Dahmer said, “I wish I had just kept going, but I didn't. I turned around and picked him up. That is when the fantasy became reality.” He returned to his family home with the body. Using the skills he had developed as a child dissecting animals, he removed the flesh from the bones, broke the bones into small pieces using a sledgehammer and threw the fragmented bones out in the woods behind his home where they would remain undiscovered for over a decade.
