A Curiosity Born from a Show
If there's one thing true about watching a true crime documentary of a serial killer, then that would be its lasting effect on your mind, even after you finish watching it. On the recommendation of a friend, I recently watched Dahmer - Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, and ever since the end of the 10th episode, I started my own expedition of understanding things. As I incessantly continue to read and watch everything I can find about Dahmer on the web, I have come to this conclusion of what must have happened, which led to all that Dahmer did, or in Lionel Dahmer's language, the origin of his derangement.
The Man Behind the Monster
Jeffery Dahmer (1960-1994) infamously known as the Cannibal of Milwaukee or The Monster of Milwaukee for murdering and dismembering 17 young men and boys between the year 1978 to 1991. Dahmer was eventually captured and arrested in 1991 when one of his victims Tracy Edwards escaped and led the Milwaukee police back to his apartment where all the horrors of his crimes took place. He was trial and convicted for 15 counts of murder and was sentenced to 15 terms of life imprisonment in 1992. Unfortunately, Dahmer was bludgeoned to death by a fellow inmate in jail in 1994 while he was serving his sentence.
Dahmer is so infamous that often people dress up like him on Halloween to scare off everyone.
A Father's Story: Lionel Dahmer’s Search For Answers
Many psychologists, journalists, and police investigators tried to understand and uncover why Dahmer did what he did. Even his father, Lionel Dahmer, in his own effort to find answers, wrote a memoir called A Father's Story, to find out what could have contributed to his son's mental derangement, which led him to commit murders, practice necrophilia, and then cannibalism. The book is a chronology of Jeffrey Dahmer's life, starting from Dahmer's birth to his arrest and subsequent trials and imprisonment. When his son got arrested and charged with the vicious crimes, Lionel Dahmer largely held himself responsible for failing as a father. Through his book, he scrutinized every possible thing contributing to Dahmer's monstrous actions, including himself, who admitted in the book about his own obsession with making bombs and fear of abandonment. For this reason, he took it upon himself to pass a monstrous genetic inheritance to Jeffery.
Loneliness and Abandonment
Loneliness, disconnection, and abandonment appear to play central roles in shaping Dahmer’s behavior. During interrogations, Dahmer himself explained many incidents that influenced his path, showing an unusual level of honesty about his motivations. His honesty and intellect in the deep understanding of his own motive for killing those men is unsettling for anyone to witness. A person with such a steady mind after committing such a horrendous crime is what makes everyone as fascinated in knowing the psyche of Dahmer as they were appalled by his heinous acts. Dahmer's mental stability and composure are one crucial point that the court did not find him criminally insane, but rather legally sane for his trials. Even Dahmer himself denied having committed any of the murders out of insanity. Nor did he blame anyone other than himself for his acts of crimes. He took full accountability for his actions without pinning it on either his parents or society at large. He was fully aware of his actions; he knew that those were wrong, yet he did it anyway. Upon asking what drove him to commit all those murders, he would term as "compulsion". The fear of abandonment was very pronounced in Dahmer's case as he, in his interviews, would say that initially he would only consider killing his victims only when they wanted to leave.
Roots of Detachment: A Broken Family
Starting with his family during his childhood, which he would later remark made him “unsure of the solidity of family.” This is largely because of the constant fighting between the parents and their equally neglectful treatment of Dahmer. Parental negligence and emotional distance of the parents from Dahmer, and social disconnection, largely made Dahmer a reserved person who mostly remains in his room and in his own world. An emotionally distant father and a mentally troubled mother didn't make it easier for Dahmer to receive the care and attention as a child.
In his interview with Stone Philips and in his various statements during the investigation of his crimes, Dahmer would say, the reason for killing those young men is getting absolute control and dominance over the person. Control and domination are the words Dahmer had repeatedly said in his exclusive interviews with Stone Phillips and Nancy Glass. This mirrors his own submissive place in life. The reason why he would make his victim unconscious before killing them is that he would not get an absolute submission with a moving body, and that the body has to be still and unmoving, in other words, completely submissive. This echoes Dahmer's fantasies as an adolescent and newly discovered sexual preference as a gay man, where he would dominate and control his partner.
A Morbid Fascination: From Dissection to Cannibalism
Another thing is the dismemberment of the bodies of the victims. Quite early in his childhood, Dahmer found a fascination towards dissecting animals, a hobby he would share doing with his father. In fact, it was Lionel Dahmer who introduced him to taxidermy and dissecting animals such as roadkill. Dahmer would even go on collecting the bones of dead animals around his house. Fiddlesticks, as Dahmer would playfully refer to those animal bones. The early exposure to the inside of the animals got him curious, so much so as to have a thrill, an arousal at a later part of his life. In his interviews, he openly admitted getting aroused by the act of dismembering his victims, an act that would further give him absolute control over the bodies beyond death. This morbidity even led Dahmer to cannibalize his victims, which he stated in his interviews as an attempt to permanently preserve them by making them a part of him.
A Hidden Identity and Silent Struggle
The sexual preference of Dahmer as being gay is another reason to consider for his twisted acts. Dahmer, although gay, had never admitted his sexual preference openly to his family. He said himself in his interview with Stone Phillips that he and his father never spoke about him being interested in other men. Dahmer was gay in an America where homosexuality was still considered a taboo, an aberration. The fear of judgment and dismissal based on his homosexuality made him a closeted gay man for quite some years. In fact, Dahmer, in his life, except for his secret sexual ventures and encounters with other gay men, had never spoken about his sexual preference out in the open. He kept it secret from his family, from his friends, and from the world. On asking about his sexual preference by Nancy Glass in his interview, Dahmer stated he still hasn't come to terms with his homosexuality and that it has caused him a lot on a personal level. This, in many ways, reflects Dahmer's own conflict about the acceptance of his sexuality and internal homophobia.
Conclusion
Thus, Jeffrey Dahmer’s transformation into “The Monster of Milwaukee” wasn’t born overnight—it was shaped over years by a combination of factors. A dysfunctional family, parental negligence and emotional distance, social isolation, sexual fantasies of control and dominance, a morbid hobby of dissecting animals and subsequent sexual arousal, and a hidden sexual preference and fear of rejection, all get intertwined and gave birth to the monster the world has seen in the name of Jeffery Dahmer.
P.S.: This analysis is solely based on Jeffrey Dahmer’s interview with Stone Phillips and Nancy Glass, where the interviewers delved into the psyche of Dahmer by asking him a series of questions about his crimes and motives, as he explained in his answers as to what led him to commit such inhuman crimes. The intent of this piece is just to put together a rendition of understanding about his psychological reasoning as he presented it in his own words in his interview with Stone Phillips and Nancy Glass.
Read more Review: Monster - The Ed Gein Story
Comments
Post a Comment