The foul smell was too hard to ignore. He knew something wasn’t right. But before he could do something about it, Jeffrey was cuffing his hands. He brought out a big butcher knife from the kitchen to threaten him, thinking he was successfully restrained.
This was his pattern. Only this time, things were different. He wasn’t like his other victims. Jeffrey made one careless mistake; the handcuffs weren’t cuffed properly.
This time, he won’t get away with it.
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THE CRIME
On July 22, 1991, Tracy Edwards escaped from his creepy captor’s apartment. While running down the street in a frenzy of fear and panic, he approached two cops. Edwards had handcuffs on which the cop couldn’t unshackle. The police then asked Edwards to take them back to the place where he came from so that they could get a hold of the key to the metal around his wrists.
There was something wrong with the apartment from the get-go. The foul smell, similar to age-old garbage, came first. While the officer went inside to fetch the key, he noticed a knife on the bedroom floor.
But that wasn’t the end of it. In this apartment, police found body parts and severed heads in his fridge, freezer, filing cabinet, and a kettle, which “contained what are thought to be decomposing hands and a male genital organ,” per TIME’s report.
The same night, Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested.
The string of crimes first started in 1978 when 18-year-old Jeffrey Dahmer lured Steven Hicks (18), to his house under the pretext of driving him to a concert later. The felony wasn’t a planned one.
When Hicks told Jeffrey that he wanted to leave, Jeffrey snapped. He wanted him to stay. Citing that as a reason, the only way Jeffrey thought he could make Hicks stay was by killing him. And so, on June 18, 1978, Jeffrey Dahmer strangled Steven Hicks.
The following crime doesn’t take place until a decade later.
Jeffrey Dahmer killed 16 young men in the course of his lifetime. On February 17, 1992, he was convicted of fifteen of the sixteen murders he had committed in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and was sentenced to fifteen terms of life imprisonment. Later on, he was also found guilty of the murder of Steven Hicks in Ohio and was sentenced to a sixteenth term of life imprisonment.
On November 28, 1994, Dahmer was beaten to death by Christopher Scarver, a fellow inmate at the Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin.
THE PSYCHOLOGY BEHIND
From the outside, it would seem like Jeffrey Dahmer had a relatively normal childhood. He was the first child and doted upon by his father Lionel Dahmer with whom he was close.
The dynamics changed when Dahmer’s younger brother, David Dahmer, was born. This sudden shift in family affairs hit him hard. He was no longer the only object of his parent’s attention and had to share it with his brother.
In his later actions, we can see traits of the ‘Oldest Child Syndrome’. He was controlling, easy to fall into obsession, domineering, and craved power. All these characteristics can, in one way or another, be attributed to him being the older sibling.
By the age of 13, Dahmer reached the self-discovery of his sexual orientation. He found out that he was attracted to boys. But since there wasn’t a concept of ‘coming out back in his time, he kept it inside him.
The biggest traumatic event in his life occurred when he was 18 years old. Dahmer had just graduated high school when his parents got divorced and his mother left abruptly with his younger brother. Following the departure of his ex-wife, Lionel Dahmer also shifted out of the house leaving Dahmer alone to fend for himself.
He had been abandoned by his parents. This deeply affected his psyche and pulled the trigger.
Jeffrey Dahmer would suffer from abandonment issues for the rest of his life. The year his parents left was the year he killed Steven Hicks, his first victim.
Upon a careful study of his pattern of crime and victims, it is evident that his urge to kill the person arose because of his fear that the other person would leave him. He did not want any of his victims to leave and resorted to killing them to prevent this from happening.
Along with that, his controlling and domineering nature was another reason. He did not wish to adhere to anyone else’s wishes or desires or needs. Hence, killing them seemed like the only way to dominate the person wholly, to him.
Since he did not wish for the person to leave, he tried his level best to preserve different parts of his victim’s bodies in order to make him feel like they were still with him.
Inside his apartment, he kept the skulls/heads of his victim along with preserving other parts of their bodies, mostly genitalia or hands.
Another way for him to feel like his victims didn’t leave was, very crudely, to eat different parts of their bodies. Jeffrey Dahmer was infamously called Milwaukee Cannibal because of this exact reason. This was his deranged way of ingesting his victims to feel closer to them somehow.
Dahmer’s grandmother was religious and he was raised as a protestant. Attributing to this, he had a religious conflict inside him as well. Since his actions didn’t comply with his religion, he sought the darker side of religion to find a way to justify his behavior.
Dahmer worshiped Satan and started believing that he was inherently evil. He got into it so much that he would put on yellow lenses to give himself an eerie, creepy, evil persona before he set out to score his next victim.
Dr. Fred Berlin – Director of the Sexual Disorders Clinic at John Hopkins University testified that Jeff Dahmer was unable to conform his conduct at the time that he committed the crimes because he was suffering from Paraphilia, or more specifically, Necrophilia, a mental disease.
Dr. George Palermo – A forensic psychiatrist, concluded that, because Dahmer had been teased by his peers as a child, and had chosen never to defend himself, he had internalized feelings of hostility. It was his opinion that, because of his ‘chronic’ inability to form relationships, and his frustrated homosexual desires, Jeff Dahmer had developed into a Sexual Sadist.
THE SERIES
‘Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story’ the Netflix series has recently been gaining a lot of attention around the world. For those curious minds who want to know more about this peculiar case of Jeffrey can always go back to this dramatic representation of the life and crime of Jeffrey Dahmer. The series is a rollercoaster ride in itself and keeps you hooked from the get-go. You think that it’s going in one direction but takes a complete 360-degree turn the very next minute. It’s a clever portrayal of the volatile and unpredictable nature of Jeffrey Dahmer.
‘Conversations With a Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes’ is another Netflix true crime documentary about the serial killer. The tapes are now released, years after Dahmer’s arrest back in 1991, and give the viewer a more factual and scientific insight into the crimes of Jeffrey Dahmer. The series includes actual medical professionals who worked with Dahmer and is a much more reliable source of information.
References:
Jenkins. (n.d.). Jeffrey Dahmer | Biography, Crimes, Death, & Facts. Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved November 2, 2022, from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jeffrey-Dahmer
Jeffrey Dahmer | Crime Library | Serial Killers. (n.d.). Crime Museum. Retrieved November 1, 2022, from https://www.crimemuseum.org/crime-library/serial-killers/jeffrey-dahmer/
Jentzen, J. M. (2017, September 1). Micro Disasters: The Case of Serial Killer JeffreyDahmer. PubMed Central (PMC). Retrieved November 2, 2022, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6474573/
Berlinger, J. (Director). (2022, October 7). Conversations with a killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes. https://www.netflix.com/in/title/81173345
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