https://www.aetv.com/real-crime/jeffrey-dahmer-childhood-serial-killer-cannibal-bones
The following content contains disturbing accounts of violence. Discretion is advised.
When two Milwaukee police officers were flagged down in the late-night hours of July 22, 1991 by a man already in handcuffs claiming heâd narrowly escaped murder, they knew they were in for an unusual shift.
But nothing could have prepared them for what awaited at the perpetratorâs house: a second-story apartment on North 25th Street.
The home of 31-year-old killer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer.
Inside, they uncovered a grisly scene: seven skulls and four decapitated heads stuffed into a refrigerator; photographs of murder victims, in various states of dismemberment; and a 57-gallon barrel, containing multiple headless torsos and other body parts, decomposing with the assistance of corrosive chemicals.
He was bleaching the flesh off the bone. Just like heâd learned as a young child from his dad.
Thatâs according to Carl Wahlstrom, a forensic psychiatrist who interviewed and evaluated Dahmer and served as an expert witness in his trial.
[Watch Invisible Monsters: Serial Killers in America in the A&E app.]
âHe and his dad, as a father-son activityâŚbleached the connective tissue and the hairâ off rodentsâ corpses when they found animals whoâd died under their house, says Wahlstrom.
Eventually, only a pail full of bones would remain. âIt was like a personalized rattle,â says Wahlstrom. âThe family would call them his fiddlesticks.â
But, at the time, the unusual hobby wasnât about a love for goreâit was practiced out of an interest in science. Dahmerâs father, Lionel Dahmer, was a research
The bone bleaching was an extension of professional expertise.
After his arrest, Jeffrey Dahmer confessed to 17 murders (of which he was convicted for 16), admitting to authorities that he ate his victimsâ organs and had sex with their corpses.
But killers like Dahmer donât just emerge fully formed from one day to the next. They grow up and into their murderous roles.
Dahmerâs childhood was not without problems. His mother, Joyce Dahmer, suffered from depression and attempted suicide. His father, preoccupied with his doctoral work, was largely absent. David DahmerâJeffreyâs brotherâcame along when Jeffrey was 5 years old; throughout childhood, Jeffrey resented him as a competitor for their parentsâ scant attention. Between the time Jeffrey was 6 and 8 years old, his family moved frequently before finally settling in Bath, Ohio, where Jeffrey lived until he graduated from high school.
Over those early years, Joyce and David fought with regularity. Their relationship ended in a messy divorce, rife with allegations of âextreme cruelty and gross neglect of duty.â
According to Louis Schlesinger, a professor of psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and an expert on serial sexual murder, none of that information correlates to Dahmerâs killing spree.
âLots of people have conflicts with their brothers and sisters,â says Schlesinger. âHaving your mother attempt suicide and become hospitalized is not a pleasant event, but it doesnât make you become a serial killer.â
That said, Schlesinger acknowledges that there are childhood and adolescent behaviors that do correlate with the development of a serial sexual murderâstarting with a preoccupying sadistic fantasy, and a compulsion to act on it.
âWhen you do something like Dahmer did, you donât just one day do it,â explains Schlesinger. âIt begins in the mind.â
Wahlstrom says that, as an early adolescent, Dahmer had an âoff the chartsâ libido, and constant fantasies about doing harmâmore specifically, killing men and having sex with their corpses.
âIt took up about two-thirds of his day,â Wahlstrom says Dahmer told him. At age 13, Dahmer tried to actualize what was in his imagination: Heâd become overcome with lust for a male jogger in his hometown of Bath, Ohio, and so one day hid with a baseball bat near that joggerâs route, hoping to make his first kill. But Dahmer told Wahlstrom the man didnât go jogging that day and so he moved on.
âHe was a very disturbed kid and adolescent,â Wahlstrom says. âHe was very isolated from the people around him.â
Another strong correlate to serial sexual murder is animal cruelty. âThatâs clear in his case,â Schlesinger says, noting that as a teenager Dahmer had impaled a dogâs head on a stick in the forest behind his house.
But for Wahlstrom, the most striking anecdote Dahmer shared about animal cruelty dates from grade school.
>Right isn't that supposed to be a classic sign of a psychopath?
>I knew a man who claimed he loved to torture flies? pull off their wings.
>And another who liked to rescue flies from fly paper
>Both were sick.
cont'd
âHeâd gotten this tadpole, and brought it in to his teacherâŚand the teacher ended up giving it away to another kid,â says Wahlstrom.
Dahmer, incensed by the perceived slight, went to that studentâs house and found the tadpole in an aquarium, where he exacted his revenge.
âHe poured some gasoline on it and set it on fire,â says Wahlstrom. âHe said to me, âIf you want to call that torturing animals, I tortured animals.'â
But while animal cruelty is often a component of serial sexual murder, the strongest correlate, says Schlesinger, is the murderer himself having been a victim of childhood abuse. Thatâs a point, Wahlstrom says, that Dahmer emphatically denied.
âHe said he had very loving parents,â says Wahlstrom. â[And] that blaming [his] parents for these issues was completely off the mark.â
Wahlstrom, who also interviewed Dahmerâs friends and family members for the killerâs psychiatric evaluation (which he provided to the defense), said he didnât hear or observe anything to contradict the claim of a relatively peaceful family home.
Although his mother suffered with mental-health issues, Wahlstrom says he thinks she was a loving mother. âShe had the one-year baby book, with locks of his hair and lots of pictures,â says Wahlstrom. âHis parents seemed in the broad range of normal.â
On the clock todayâŚ(on the 180 mirror side)