Dahmer became more reclusive, especially at home, where Lionel and Joyce Dahmer’s marriage was about to implode.
Dahmer’s father remembers his son as being extremely shy during those years, but Dahmer himself says he was shutting down in the wake of his home life, which was becoming a battleground between his parents as they headed for divorce.
“There was so much tension in the home, I didn’t really feel like being up and happy all the time,” he said. “But I wasn’t extremely reclusive. I was a very private person. I liked to keep my thoughts to myself.”
Still, Dahmer’s father, Lionel, feels profound guilt that he and his then-wife Joyce weren’t less volatile, especially in front of Jeffrey and his younger brother, David. (Six years younger than Dahmer, David has since changed his name to distance himself from his deranged older sibling.)
“It makes me sick that we didn’t have a more ‘Ozzie and Harriet’ family,” said Lionel. “It makes me sick that it wasn’t, and I’ll feel that way until my death.”
His then-wife Joyce, however, said she didn’t think that her fracturing relationship had an impact on the kids, or played a role in Dahmer’s coming murder spree.
“Marriage became a very unhappy place, but I didn’t think it affected the children, because they were never physically abused,” said Joyce, who had been called a “monster maker” for being the mother of one of the world’s most notorious serial killers. “It’s a terrible feeling and I wish I could come up with an answer. It isn’t useful to speculate. I ask the universe why would this be allowed to happen, and I don’t have an answer for that. I’d like one.”
Drinking doesn’t diminish sick fantasies
Dahmer took to drinking, but rather than shutting down his fantasies, the booze made him even more obsessive. The alcohol also diminished any inhibitions his mind might have had, and his fantasies began growing darker and more dangerous with every passing day.
“The subtleties of social life were beyond my grasp. When children liked me, I did not know why. Nor could I formulate a plan for winning their affection. I simply didn’t know how things worked with other people…. And try as I might, I couldn’t make other people seem less strange and unknowable,” Dahmer said.
Still, he played tennis and clarinet in the school band, worked on the school newspaper his senior year, and tried to fit in, even sneaking into the yearbook photo of the National Honor Society as a prank.
But days were difficult for Dahmer at Revere High, and he was almost always drunk. According to classmates, he snuck both beer and hard alcohol into school via the lining of his army fatigue jacket, and despite his extracurricular activities, was generally seen as an outcast.
“It seemed so clear all along that he was someone saying, ‘pay attention to me,’” said classmate Martha Schmidt, who remembered Dahmer drinking scotch in class, telling anyone who asked why that it was “his medicine.”
But no one did, and Jeffrey Dahmer was essentially left alone with his thoughts.
He graduated from high school in 1978, and on the same day his friend Backderf – creator of the comic strip commemorating his high school classmate - left for college, Dahmer went for a drive.
Chapter 2: Dahmer turns fantasy to reality
It was the summer of 1978 when Steven Hicks decide to hitchhike to a rock concert at Ohio’s Chippewa Lake Park.
When he didn’t come home the next day, his parents didn’t worry, but when six days passed with no word from their son, they contacted police, who retraced the recent high school grad’s steps only to find absolutely nothing.
“It was like he had just disappeared,” said Carol Hewett-Varner, a detective who would eventually be assigned to the county’s only unsolved missing persons case. “It was just the big mystery in this office. What happened to Steven Hicks?”
It turned out to be the worst possible thing. Hicks was picked up by 18-year-old Dahmer, who had been harboring fantasies of stopping for a hitchhiker for as long as he could remember.
“I don’t know where it came from,” he confessed in the Stone Phillips interview. “I had this recurring fantasy of meeting a hitchhiker on the road and taking him hostage and doing what I wanted to him.”
When he saw Steven Hicks, he debated, but his mother had moved, taking his younger brother with her following the divorce, and his father was living in a motel, so “I acted on my fantasies, and that’s where everything went wrong.”
Dahmer invited Hicks over to drink a few beers, but when Hicks announced it was time to leave, Dahmer decided he didn’t want to lose his new friend, and so he hit him in the back of the head with a 10-pound free weight, then strangled him, dismembered his body and buried the remains in the woods behind his father’s house.
Many years later, he was worried he hadn’t hidden the remains well enough, so he exhumed them, smashed the bones with a sledgehammer and scattered them, where they would mix in with leaves, twigs and the remains of the road-kill animals Dahmer had surreptitiously dissected.
The aftermath of a murder
Later that summer, Dahmer went to college as well, Ohio State University. But because of his drinking, Dahmer flunked out of the university, and was selling plasma to earn enough money to pay for his booze, until his despairing father encouraged him to join the Army.
“I told him, ‘There just doesn't seem to be any other way to go right now,’” Lionel told CNN.
For a time, the Army seemed to agree with Dahmer.
“He came back from boot camp looking like just a wonderful physical specimen, smiling, helped me out cutting wood. We were encouraged,” said Lionel, who by this time had met his second wife, Sheri.
But it’s hard for an alcoholic to quit drinking, especially when trying to suppress memories of murder, along with the fantasies and obsessions that murder had unleashed. So Dahmer drank and dreamed of his next kill.
“Once it happened the first time, it seemed like it had control of my life from there on in,” he said.
Dahmer was trained as a medic and assigned to Baumholder, Germany, where he became an angry violent alcoholic.
According to an article in the Independent, he repeatedly raped his roommate, Billy Joe Capshaw, who allegedly returned to his home in Arkansas so damaged that he locked himself in his bedroom for five years.
“I could not say I was raped, I could not do that to my Daddy. He fought in the Pacific,” said Capshaw, who told the magazine he spent 26 years in therapy before he was able to speak of his ordeal.
Eventually, Dahmer was booted from the Army, and in 1981 he headed to Florida – the Army had given him a plane ticket anywhere he wanted to go - where he delivered sub sandwiches from a blue van and slept on the beach.
After a few months, he returned to Ohio, and his father did what he could to help Dahmer land a job.
“I would give him my car to go look for a job, and he would end up drinking and leaving the car. He forgot where he left the car many times,” Lionel said.
Discouraged, Lionel sent Dahmer to live with his grandmother, Catherine, in West Allis, Wisconsin, a metropolitan suburb of Milwaukee, and he landed employment as a laborer at the Ambrosia Chocolate Factory.
It would mark the start of what would become a murder spree that stunned a nation.
Chapter 3: Second victim opens the floodgates
Steve Tuomi, a native of Michigan who in 1987 was living in Milwaukee and working at a restaurant, was 24 when he ran into Jeffrey Dahmer at a local nightclub.
The two talked for a while before Dahmer told Tuomi he had a room at the Ambassador Hotel and invited Tuomi to spend the night.
When they arrived at the hotel room, Jeff gave his new friend a drink, although Tuomi had no idea it was liberally spiked with sleeping pills. Taking that drink would be the last thing he would ever do.
When Jeff woke up the next morning, he said he found Tuomi’s bruised, battered body lying next to him, and had no memory of the events that led to the young man’s deat
h.
“When I woke up, my arms were bruised, his chest was bruised and he had blood coming out of his mouth,” Dahmer remembered. “I have no memory of beating him to death, but I must have. And that’s when the obsession went into full swing.”
Dahmer left the hotel to purchase a suitcase, then loaded Tuomi’s body into it and enlisted the help of a bellboy to carry the suitcase and its grisly contents to a cab.
He took the case to his grandmother’s house, where he secretively dismembered Tuomi’s body, smashing bones into smaller bits, then loading the parts into garbage bags that he left out at the curb for the trash trucks.
No part of Tuomi’s body has ever been found.
Tuomi’s family reported him missing in 1989, two years after his ill-fated encounter with Jeffrey Dahmer.
Trouble at grandma’s house
Having killed twice, Dahmer had twice given in to his dark desires, and the hold his fantasies had on him was now that much deeper. And like a drug addict who needs a bigger fix, he found himself going deeper and deeper into the depths of hell with every future kill.
“After the second time, it seemed like the compulsion was too strong and I didn’t even try to stop it after that,” Dahmer said. “It just escalated, slowly but surely. It took more and more deviant type behaviors to satisfy my urges.”
On January 18, 1988, Dahmer spotted 14-year-old James Doxtater, whose Native American heritage included both Oneida and Stockbridge roots.
Albeit young, Doxtater was Dahmer’s type – slender and dark-skinned with a shock of dark hair.
Dahmer offered Doxtater $50 to pose nude for photographs after the two met up at a bus stop near a popular Milwaukee gay bar known as Club 219. The boy agreed.
As he had done with Tuomi – and as he would do with every future victim - Dahmer gave the boy, who went by the nickname Jamie and liked to play pool and ride his bike, a drugged drink and then strangled him, stashing his body underneath a blanket in the wine cellar until he had enough time to destroy the remains.
That grisly process again involved acid and a sledgehammer, which Dahmer used to crush Doxtater’s bones before placing the remains at the curb for the garbage truck.
Doxtater ended up being the 17th and final victim to be identified by Dahmer, who went through photographs of missing young men during the days following his eventual arrest, since he had successfully disposed of any evidence of his earliest victims.
Killing was a means to an end
According to Dahmer, killing wasn’t his main focus when he invited young men back to his place, and he got no pleasure from it.
“I just wanted to have the person under my complete control, to not even consider their wishes. Having total mastery over that person, that was the motive. I wanted to keep them with me as long as possible, even if it meant just keeping a part of them,” he said.
To that end, he began saving body parts, especially skulls, although his collection over time grew to include whole heads, hearts and excised muscles stored in his freezer.
“After I left the home, that’s when I started wanting to create my own little world, where I was the one who had complete control,” he said. “I just took it way too far.”
Things begin to escalate
A few months later, on March 24, 1988, 21-year-old Richard Guerrero left his Milwaukee home on the way to visit a friend, carrying little more than $3 in his pocket.
His family never heard from him again.
“Doing something like this, not calling, that wasn’t him,” said his sister, Janie Hagen, in an interview with the Milwaukee Sentinel after news of Dahmer’s arrest led them to question whether or not Richard was one of his 17 victims.
When they found out what happened, it brought both relief and horror.
“It’s a relief to know for sure, but then again, in our hearts we knew to expect the worst,” Hagen said in a second interview.
On the night he disappeared, Guerrero ran into Dahmer, who invited the young man back to his grandmother’s house for beer and to pose for nude photos.
After the two had sex, Dahmer drugged and strangled the victim, ridding himself of the body – at least most of the body - in what was becoming standard fashion, a mix of acid and a sledgehammer to shatter the bones.
Around this time, oblivious to the murders occurring in her home, Dahmer’s grandmother found a .357 Magnum beneath his bed and a male mannequin in his closet, both of which freaked her out enough to kick her grandson out of her house.
It was a few months after the murder of Robert Guerrero, but Dahmer, who then found an apartment near the chocolate factory where he worked, was just getting started.
The day after he moved, he was arrested for drugging and molesting a 13-year-old Laotian boy whose brother would later become one of Dahmer’s most familiar victims.
Dahmer was convicted of molesting the boy, but sentencing was delayed for a few months, so he temporarily moved back in with his grandmother to await his fate.
Dahmer begins saving trophies
It was the night before Easter Sunday, 1989, and Anthony Sears, a restaurant worker who had just been promoted, was hanging out at the Milwaukee gay bar La Cage when he ran into Jeffrey Dahmer.
The slight candy factory worker invited Sears back to his place, and Sears enlisted his friend, Jeffrey Conners, to give them a ride.
Conners reminded Sears that the next day he was having lunch with his mother, and told the 21-year-old that if he needed a ride in the morning, to give him a call.
Outside Dahmer’s grandmother’s house would be the last time Conners would see Sears, who was drugged and strangled before dawn.
Dahmer dismembered Sears’ body in his grandmother’s bathtub.
While Dahmer had previously disposed of his victims, in this case, Dahmer kept Sears’ skull and his scalp, because he liked the young man’s ponytail. He also kept his genitals, and stored both in a metal box with a lock.
“If I could’ve kept him longer, all of him, I would have,” Dahmer later said of Sears.
A close call
In late March of 1989, while visiting his mother’s home, Lionel Dahmer ran across a locked box that he believed contained porn, and he asked Dahmer to open it. Dahmer declined, protesting that he deserved “at least one square foot of privacy,” and fled to the backyard.
“I was outside, and I was thinking, ‘I’ve got to stop this from happening. It’s all going to come crashing down now,’” Dahmer remembered.
Lionel Dahmer was taking the box to the basement to open it when Dahmer returned, promising to open the box in the morning. Lionel agreed. The next day, Dahmer showed his father the contents of the box, which now contained a plethora of gay porn.
Lionel had no way of knowing that the box had earlier contained the mummified head and genitals of one of Dahmer’s victims. Those items, Dahmer then stored in a locker at work, which allowed him to visit his keepsakes during breaks.
“I told Jeff I can’t imagine how I would have reacted had I seen what was in the box,” Lionel Dahmer said. “I don’t know what would have happened. I probably would have lost it.”
As for Dahmer, he had yet again gotten away with murder.
“The box wasn’t opened, and the lies continued,” he said.
Prison term temporarily protects young men
Police had promised the family of Dahmer’s Laotian molestation victim that he would be sent away for a long time, so none of the family members attended the sentencing hearing in May of 1989.
“What I have done is very serious. I’ve never been in this position before. Nothing this awful. This is a nightmare come true for me,” Dahmer said at the time. “If anything would shock me out of my past behavior patterns, it’s this. The one thing I have in my mind that is stable and that gives me some source of pride is my job. I’ve come very close to losing it because of my actions, which I take full responsibility for... All I can do is beg you, please spare my job. Please give me a chance to
show that I can, that I can tread the straight and narrow and not get involved in any situation like this ever again... This enticing a child was the climax of my idiocy... I do want help. I do want to turn my life around.”
Had they been in court, they would have been shocked to learn that Dahmer was sentenced to just one year of jail on work release, which allowed him to keep his job, followed by five years of probation.
His stepmother, Shari, later suggested that his time in prison might have been responsible for his killing spree.
“Something happened to him in prison that he would never talk about,” Shari Dahmer said. “Everyone knows what happens to a child molester in prison. I don’t know if that’s what happened, but, when he came out, he was hardened.”
And as much as she might like to believe that, given that he had already racked up several murders, a link between Dahmer’s killing spree and short prison term seems unlikely.
Dahmer ended up serving just 10 months of his term, and once it ended, he found a new apartment, this time number 213 at the Oxford Apartments on Milwaukee’s east side.
It would become a playground and a museum for Dahmer, and a graveyard for a dozen more young men.
Time away makes Dahmer ravenous
Raymond Lamont Smith and Dahmer had one thing in common. Both were just fresh out of prison – Smith on burglary charges – and were relishing in their newfound freedom.
But on May 20, 1990, 33-year-old Smith - who sometimes went by the name Ricky Beeks – would find that his freedom was not to last.
His family didn’t realize he was even missing at first. Smith had told them he was headed to Rockford, Illinois, to visit his daughter, so when they didn’t hear from him, they believed he was still across state lines.
True Crime Stories Volume 4: 12 Shocking True Crime Murder Cases (True Crime Anthology) Page 19
