By JULIET PEREZ
Staff Writer
Jeffrey Dahmer was born on May 21, 1960, and had a pretty normal childhood with a hard-working father and a steady home. Into early adolescence, Dahmer began to isolate himself and started to examine the corpse of animals, and began to drink too much. He still graduated high school despite his drinking problems but 3 weeks after he graduated he killed his first victim at only 18 years old. Dahmer went on to college, however, but later dropped out and enlisted in the army where he was a medic in Germany, again his alcoholism caused him to be discharged and he was sent to live with his grandma. In 1987 he killed his second victim and later would kill 17 males in the next 4 years.
The murders he committed were not just normal killings, Dahmer would beat them to death, drug them, assault them, and strangle them. He claimed that his desire to kill came from “obsessive desires, thoughts wanting to control them, to possess them permanently”. His second victim, Steven Tuomi, was beaten to death, but when Dahmer woke up the next morning he had no memory of doing so, indicating that he was in a blacked-out state when he was committing murders. He said “I was just planning on drugging him and spending the night with him, I had no intention of hurting him”, he also says that he didn’t kill people because he hated them or was angry at them but simply because he wanted to “keep them with him”. After Tuomi, Dahmer would go on to kill 7 more men until 1991. During this period he began to do disturbing things to the corpses of the victims, he would dismember them and take pictures of the process, he would assault them even when they were dead, preserve body parts for display and even for consumption. He said in an interview the reason for the cannibalism was because “It was a way of making me feel that they were a part of me”, the reason for keeping the skulls, he quotes, “If I couldn’t keep them there with me whole, at least I felt that I could keep their skeletons”. At this point, Dahmer was working at a chocolate factory, where he assaulted a 13-year-old boy, the same boy’s brother would later be another one of Dahmer’s victims. This led to him getting five years of probation, one year of work release camp, and getting registered as a sex offender. He got released two months early and started renting an apartment, where he continued his gruesome murders. Despite regular appointments with his probation officer, he killed 12 more men. That summer of 1991 he killed at least one person every week. He found new techniques to use on his victims such as drilling the skulls, and injecting hydrochloric acid and boiling water into their brains. He says that he never felt repulsed or disgusted by what he was doing, although he knew it was wrong, he said it was “addictive” and gave him an “energy surge”. He also says that in order to make the killing easier he would have to “dehumanize” his victims and view them as only “objects of pleasure”. Watching the movie Exorcist 3 was a part of his ritual for killing his victims because it put him in the “mood to murder”. He says in an interview “I felt so hopelessly evil and perverted that I actually derived a sort of pleasure from watching the tape”.