The Story of Jeffrey Dahmer: His Victims, and His Dad's Reveal of the "Red Flags" He Missed

Jeffrey Dahmer and his horrific crimes have once again captured the world’s attention thanks to the massive success of the Netflix series Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, and the release of the documentary Conversations With a Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes. But, in case you haven’t seen those yet, here’s the story of one of the world’s most notorious killers... from his childhood to his ultimate demise.

By all accounts, it seems like Jeffrey Dahmer was born on May 21st, 1960, to a perfectly normal family. His mother, Joyce Annette, was a teletype machine instructor — while his father, Lionel Dahmer, was first a chemistry student and then a research chemist. Soon, however, cracks began to form between the two parents. Due to his mother’s bouts of depression and overall difficult mental state, she wasn’t always able to give her son her full attention. With Lionel now working full-time, young Dahmer was left with no doting parent.

At about the age of four, Dahmer underwent double hernia surgery, which reportedly turned him from an “energetic and happy child” into a quiet and timid kid. Despite this, his elementary school teachers later said that he did have a few friends at this point in time. When he was six years old, the family moved from Wisconsin to Ohio. There, Joyce gave birth to Dahmer’s younger brother. Dahmer was given the honor of naming his sibling, calling him David. In 1968, the family moved to their permanent residence in Bath Township, Ohio.

The home, which would later become the scene of Dahmer’s first terrible crime, stood on one-and-a-half acres of woodland. Not far from the main house was a small hut that Dahmer used to collect deceased animals like insects and squirrels. This is where he begins to show an interest in anatomy — and a near obsession with bones. He would explore the woods around their home to find remains of animals. Then, he would take them back to the hut and dissect them.

Reportedly, during a family dinner, Dahmer casually asked his father, the chemist, what would happen to chicken bones if they were soaked in bleach. Lionel was happy with the question, thinking that his son took an interest in science. Dahmer, however, had more practical uses in mind for this knowledge. He later also asked his father how to best preserve animal bones. His father’s answers became techniques that Dahmer would use on his human victims later in life.