Did Jeffrey Dahmer’s madness originate in his childhood?

What exactly made the Milwaukee Monster insane?

We know a lot about Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer’s murders, and what this monster in the body of a man did to his victims. For those who don’t, a quick summary: Jeffrey Dahmer was a serial killer and cannibal who killed seventeen men and boys over 13 years. He ate his victims’ flesh, dismembered and made sexual use of them, and also took various pictures from the different stages of said cruelties.

But where did the monster in him come from? What do we know regarding how his childhood may have influenced his actions later on? That’s what we are going to discuss in this article.

One quick conclusion often drawn for serial killers is that something agonizing happened in their childhood. However, this is not always the case; Jeffrey Dahmer, born on May 21st, 1960 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was not known to be necessarily mishandled growing up. Even though there were some difficulties, there are no known cases of physical abuse.

One of the said difficulties was the medical problems of Jeffrey’s mother, Joyce Annette, who needed most of the attention from his father. She struggled with depression, and it’s reported that she attempted suicide at least once. Some sources report that she was also tense, greedy for both attention and pity, and argumentative with her husband and their neighbors.

Young Jeffrey’s strange interests

Shortly before his 4th birthday, Jeffrey underwent double hernia surgery and was never quite the same after. Had he been a happy and energetic child before was he now quiet and timid in elementary school. Those were probably early signs of abandonment due to his father’s absence, as his studies kept him away from home most of the time, and his mother’s instability. So Jeffrey Dahmer did suffer some neglect in his childhood, but that alone is not a reason for one to go insane.

Jeffrey soon developed an interest in dead animals and their bones. Shortly after his surgery, he noticed how he liked the sound the bones made when his father removed them from beneath the house. This was the first time his interest in dead animals and their bones showed.

Soon after, the family moved to Ohio, where they lived in a house surrounded by one and a half meters of woodland, where Jeffrey started to collect large insects and the skeletons of small animals. He also preserved them in jars of formaldehyde.

Around two years later, Jeffrey asked his father what would happen if he attempted to put the bones in bleach. Lionel Dahmer thought this to be just his son’s curiosity and gladly explained it to him- not knowing Jeffrey would later use this technique to dissolve the bones of his victims.

Adolescence

While Jeffrey continued to have a great interest in “how animals are put together”, his mother became more and more mentally absent due to increasing her daily consumption of Equanil, laxatives, and sleeping pills.

Now that Jeffrey went to high school, he was seen more and more as an outcast. He began to drink pretty heavily but was still seen as polite and highly intelligent.

When reaching puberty, Jeffrey discovered that he was gay. He began fantasizing about dominating and controlling a completely submissive male partner in his early to mid-teens. This might have been a pre-sign to the necrophilia he would later develop- Dahmer just really liked to have an accommodating partner. Compromises weren’t his thing, and he most certainly did not care if that meant that his partner had to be dead.

At about 16, Jeffrey had been fantasizing about a certain male Jogger, in his imagination making him unconscious before making sexual use of his body. He even attempted to translate this into reality, but the Jogger didn’t pass by on that particular day. Dahmer later admitted this was his first attempt to attack and render an individual submissive to him.

By 1977, Dahmer was getting more and more poor grades, causing his parents to hire a private tutor for him, but with limited success. On top of that, his parent’s relationship experienced a really low point, eventually causing them to divorce the next year.

But before his parent’s divorce was finalized, and just three weeks after his highschool-graduation, Jeffrey committed his first murder. It was the start of the series of cruelties following the next couple of years.

Now we are definitely at a point in Jeffrey’s life where the young boy whose interests could have just been excused with youthful curiosity turned into the ruthless monster no one would ever think about to make excuses for.

But where was the turning point in his life? Was it the day his interest in dead animals and their bones started? Or when he first started to fantasize about his ideal, totally submissive partner? Or the first time he decided to go through with it, to make those daydreams become reality when he attempted to ambush that jogger?

I’d say it was a slow process. The way everything added up. And more than a tablespoon of yet unexplainable innated insanity.

It was my way of remembering their appearance, their physical beauty. I also wanted to keep … if I couldn’t keep them there with me whole, I at least could keep their skeletons.

Jeffrey Dahmer, recollecting his motivations for both photographing his victims, and retaining sections of their skeletal structure. February 1993. — The Journal Times, Dahmer offers no excuses

In conclusion, you can’t say that there was one thing that led to him behaving in this manner. It rather was a composition of several aspects, making Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer one of the most notorious serial killers in history. The signs were there- if the difficulties of his childhood can be seen as a reason for his later actions is arguable. The way I see it, they probably did have an impact on his later life, but they certainly are not enough to justify his personality and a human being doing all that.