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When we are presented with a case such as Jeffery Dahmer’s we began to ask ourselves, why did he comitt such acts of evil ? To answer this question we have to look back at his early childhood and the environment that he grew up in. As any first born son Jeffery Dahmer’s father treated his son with all the love a father could possibly give their child. Growing up Dahmer was very active and out-going, he had many friends growing up in Milwaukee.
As any child they grow up with curiosity, Dahmer asked many questions like any other child, “What is that?” “what does this do?” and so on.. When Dahmer turned seven years old his parents gave him a dog after a recent moving situation that led Dahmer to feel left out or feel inferior to people around him. After the moving situation his parents wanted him to feel more apart of the family and allowed him to name his new brother, he named him David.
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His parents forced Dahmer to be involved in as many activities as he possibly could participate in just so that involvement in activities would eventually lead to involvement with friends or people in general.
Later on when Dahmer was ten years old his mother was hospitalized for depression and anxiety, that was when his parents marriage began to spiral downhill. While his mother was being hospitalized Dahmer began to collect dead rodents and opening the carcasses to see what was inside.
Dahmer was basically going through puberty all by himself, his father was always at work and his mother was being hospitalized leaving Dahmer to handle growing up by himself. During these teenage years Dahmer began to fantasize about men sexually and this sexual attraction eventually became an attraction to the murder of men. Of course Dahmer kept these demons inside his head, in the seventies homosexaulity was uncommon and with Dahmer being an outsider there was no one that he could communicate these wicked thoughts.
At age fourteen he thought of actually laying next to an unconscious man. He knew that there was a man who would jog around his area and planned to take a bat and knock him out unconscious, unfortunately for Dahmer the jogger did not go for a job that day. Dahmer knew that there was nothing normal with his evil thoughts, when he was in high school he continued to have these malicious thoughts of murder and began to drink to cope with his thoughts. He even began to drink at school as early as 8 A.M.
His parents marriage was going downhill during his high school years and he began to further distance himself from others. Dahmer began to act even more strange, he began to “act out” during class and his classmates just thought it was all a joke and even named him the “class clown.” His classmates just thought Dahmer was weird in general and whenever someone was doing something unusual or erratic they named is “ doing the Dahmer.” As bizarre as it may seem one day Dahmer was asking classmates for money to see him act out in the local mall. He went to the local mall and went up to a woman giving out free samples of sunflower seeds and spit them all out screaming “I’m allergic!”
Unlike his peers, his high school teachers described him as being someone who was very polite and respected authority. He would do really well in school and sometimes he would completely fail a class, there was no inbetween. His teachers also noticed that in high school he did not have any friends. His teachers noted that he was anti-social in many cases.
After he graduated from high school his parents finally separated, his dad moved out, his mom took his little brother and moved to Wisconsin leaving Dahmer all alone this was when he continued to have even darker thoughts. Soon enough his demented thoughts turned into reality.
At eighteen years old he picked up a hitchhiker, Steven Hicks, he invited him back to the house and were just “hanging out.” When Hicks was trying to leave Dahmer knocked him out dead and to hide the body he cut him up into pieces just like he would the road kill when he was younger. As he was headed to a dump site he was pulled over by a police for swerving off the road, the police noticed something fishy was going on and they noticed a bag in the back of his car, as Dahmer had done before he lied to the police ever so slick. He told the police that, “ he was troubled by his parents divorced and couldn’t sleep so he thought a trip to the dump would take his mind off things.(2005)” He eventually got rid of the body.
In the month of August his father returned home, he encouraged Dahmer to go out and socialize and get involved with activities but Dahmer was only interested in drinking and getting drunk, he even got arrested for public intoxication. His father took him to AA meetings but that did not help Dahmer. His father then enrolled him at Ohio State, but Dahmer hated school so he decided to unenroll in school. Dahmer’s dad knew that the list of opportunities for Dahmer were getting shorter and shorter everyday that past by. His father made him enlist in the army, he was a medic on the field which further taught him about the anatomy of the human. After six months in the army Dahmer began to gain some sort of confidence and became for outgoing. Later on the army sent him off to Germany and that was when his bad habits returned, he continued to drink like there was no tomorrow. “His superiors noticed and gave Dahmer and early discharge.(2005)”
A year later after his return home from the army Dahmer started going to church and his thoughts of homosexuality were going away but that of murder was still there. Three years later in a library a man gave him a note asking for sexual desires, he declined, but that awoke his sexual desires he wanted others to fulfill his sexual needs, “ he didn’t want to be burdened by anyone else’s needs.(2005)” Dahmer became more gruesome, he purchse a mannequin and began to use it in a sexual manner.
He later discovered gay bars. On November 1978 he met a man named Steve at the bar. They later went to a hotel and Dahmer had put sleeping pills in his drink and the next morning Steve was beaten to death. Dahmer had no recollection of what had happened the night before but he didn’t panic he knew exactly what to do. He put Steve’s body in a suitcase and took it back home and dismembered the body.
After he got rid of Steve’s body he returned to the gay bar only to meet a fourteen year old in front of a bus station, Dahmer offered the boy $50 to stay the night with him. They had oral sex and Dahmer strangled the boy to death. Dahmer was known to strangle his victims. The cruelest and stomach curling thing he did with the boys’ body was after the body had gone through rigor mortis he would continue to have sex withe corpse for two weeks.
Two months after killing the boy he picked up 21-year old Richard Guerrero from the same gay bar as his previous victims, he drugged him and strangled him to death. He had sex with the corpse and got rid of it the next day via city garbage collection.
On one occasion things did not go as planned for Dahmer, his grandmother kicked him out of the house for a foul odor and late nights out. Dahmer found his own apartment and tried to lure a 13 year old into his apartment, the boy was scared and ran out. “Dahmer was convicted on second-degree sexual assault charges (2005)” he was only sentenced to a one year work release program.
Three weeks after his prison release he went on a murder spree, he killed 13 more people most of them being African- Americans.
One night Dahmer lured another victim he had drugged a 14 year old named Connor. Dahmer went out to the liquor store and Connor woke up and ran out of the apartments, a neighbor noticed him naked and bruised and called the police. Dahmer returned to the apartment with a room full of police and insisted that Connor was his “gay-lover” and was of age, the police believed Dahmer and left Connor alone to die. The bodies kept piling up in his apartment so he decided to purchase a 57 gallon tub filled with acid to dissolve the bodies. Sometimes Dahmer would boil his victims skin.
Dahmer never wanted his “lovers” to leave him. He had abandonment issues ever since he was a child this then led up to Dahmer eating his victims flesh he said, “ it made me feel like they were a permanent part of me(2005).”
In 1991 Tracy Edwards had escaped Dahmer’s apartment and ran to a passing police car. The officers entered his apartment and discovered Dahmer’s polaroids that he had taken of his victims and they also found “fully fleshed skulls.”
Dahmer was taken to court and was found guilty but Dahmer’s defense team argued that he was mentally insane. In a 10 to 2 jury decision they found Dahmer sane. The judge then sentenced Dahmer to fifteen life terms in prison. On November 28, 1994 he was beaten to death by a prison inmate Chistopher Scarver.
The Twisted Path of Jeffrey Dahmer. (2024, Jan 24). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/the-twisted-path-of-jeffrey-dahmer-essay
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