According to the book, Milwaukee Massacre, the first time Jeff’s relationship with alcohol was noticed, was in seventh grade. A classmate noticed his stash of gin in the locker. He said “I don’t remember much about him other than his drinking. He pretty much kept to himself all the time.”
Alcohol lowers people’s inhibitions. In Jeff’s case he would start doing clown acts that became known as “Doing A Dahmer”. This included things like bleating like a sheep, faking epileptic seizures, sitting in the library and yelling out the librarian’s name. Another classmate said “His behavior manifested a deep need for some sort of attention. He was desperate for attention. But he wasn’t considered anybody’s responsibility. No one ever confronted him or tried to help him. No one ever did anything about it. We just found ways to ignore him.” One of the most haunting things must be the National Honor Society photo. In one of his pranks, Jeff sneaked into the group portrait, where he certainly hadn’t earned a spot. There’s a spooky silhouette, blacked out with a marking pen. The president of the group was so incensed that he ordered Jeff’s image blotted out. It became something of a cheap metaphor for Jeff Dahmer’s life. He tried to get attention, but wound up being erased.
There was one time that we definitely know of that a teacher saw him drinking. In the Shrine it says: One of the teachers at Revere High School saw him sitting on the grass outside the parking lot, with a twelve-pack of beer in a brown paper bag. Three of the cans were already empty. The teacher, Mr Smesko, told Jeff that he really ought not to bring alcohol to school and that he would have to report the matter. Jeff told him that he was having ‘a lot of problems’ and that the guidance counsellor, Mr Kungle, knew all about it. The ‘problems’ were thought by both teachers to revolve around his parents’ divorce. They did not know that he was also struggling with dark thoughts in his head. Mr Smesko could not help noticing, not only that Jeff’s eyes were glossy and bloodshot, as one would expect him to observe, but also that the boy was ‘solemn and depressed’. It is not often that a teacher in the course of a routine reprimand should notice such a detail of mood.
To me, one of the biggest signs of screaming for help during high school is described in the book My Friend Dahmer.
One evening when the school year was coming to an end, the Dahmer Fanclub wanted Jeff to do something big. Like a command performance as how they called it. They started collecting money to give Jeff so he would do his thing in the local mall. The total amount was 35 dollars and Jeff agreed. At the time Jeff was drinking heavily and Derf Backderf recalls in their senior year he never had a normal conversation with Jeff. Not one. Whatever personality he once had was gone. He was always drunk or in character or both. In My Friend Dahmer he says that Jeff already reeked of booze at 7:45 in the morning. Saturday came and it was time for Jeff’s Command Performance. The Dahmer Fanclub picked him up at home and they drove to the mall. During the 10 minute ride, Jeff drank an entire sixpack. It was this moment that Derf was hit with the realization that Jeff was not just odd but truly scary. At the mall, a group was already waiting for him. Waiting to perform his act. Apparently the act went on for 2 hours. Derf recalls it wasn’t as much fun as he anticipated. It actually creeped him out. By late afternoon they had enough. The day would become legend but it ended quietly. There was no grand finale. Derf and another friend walked to the car and made plans for the evening. Jeff was not invited. In the book he says “in truth I couldn’t wait to ditch the guy fast enough.” They dropped Jeff off at home and that meant the end of the Dahmer Fanclub. After this, they excluded Jeff from their friend group. Jeff was alone again with only his own thoughts to keep him company. In the movie My Friend Dahmer you can get a good idea of how chilling an terrifying this must have looked.
By the time Jeff was legally an adult, he was already an alcoholic. His roommate during his one term at Ohio State has said that Jeff used to take bottles to class with him and came back drunk. Jeff got back from the army early because of his alcoholism. In his final year of service, two roommates recalled:
– “He would drink and have his headphones on, kind of be shut out from the rest of the world. He wouldn’t move. He wouldn’t even go out for chow. He wouldn’t get takeout food. He’d drink until he passed out and then wake up and drink some more. There were a lot of people who used to drink, but not like him.”
– “He always had that look about him, something sinister. He would never explode, he never showed anger. He would never act it out. He was very calculating. I don’t know, he was on a steady decline in life. He was on a losing skid and didn’t know how to pick himself up.”
It’s important to remember the effects of drinking alcohol excessively has on the developing brain. Research has shown that young people who drink alcohol regularly, lose motivation to do well in school. This is also noticeable with Jeff. He had the intelligence but went from As to Fs in his senior year. It reduces your feeling of empathy. We know Jeff wasn’t a psychopath but he did seem to not have the normal empathic feelings. He even wondered himself why he didn’t felt more remorse for what he had done. His alcohol dependence definitely had something to do with that. In my opinion it helped him or made it more easier to dissociate himself.
It also makes you act more impulsively and have trouble with your memory. An extreme example and one Jeff has experienced atleast one is the alcohol black out. There are two different ones. But the one Jeff had on the night he killed Steven Tuomi where he experienced complete amnesia, often spanning hours, is known as an “en bloc” blackout. With this severe form of blackout, memories of events do not form and typically cannot be recovered. It is as if the events simply never occurred.
In the Shrine, Jeff said this about the black out:
‘I felt complete shock,’ he recalls. ‘Just couldn’t believe it. Shock, horror, panic, I just couldn’t believe it happened again after all those years when I’d done nothing like this.’ He had a terrible hangover, but fought himself to his feet to ponder what could have occurred. First, he dragged the body to the closet and shut it in, out of sight. Then he spent the next five hours pacing up and down the hotel room, smoking cigarettes non-stop, ‘wondering what to do, how to handle the situation’.
‘It’s almost like I temporarily lost control of myself,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what was going through my mind. I have no memory of it. I tried to dredge it up, but I have no memory of it whatsoever.’ They had been drinking rum, but where was the bottle? It was missing. That might mean that he had taken it out and left the door open, that somebody might have peered inside, it might mean anything. He searched everywhere for the bottle. Had he thrown it out of the window? ‘I looked down, went down to the sidewalk under the window, I don’t know what I did with it. Sometime during the night I must have taken the bottle and put it somewhere. I never did find out what happened to it. That scared the hell out of me, haunted me for a long time.’ If he could not remember when he killed Steven, it was evident from the bruises how he had done it. But why? It was put to him years later that to beat a man to death suggested an access of rage. ‘You’re right, you’re right,’ he said. ‘I can’t side-step that. That shocked me in the morning. Where that rage came from or why that happened, I don’t know. I was not conscious of it. Why I had the rage, why I took it out on him, I don’t know. I must have pounded awful hard, because the rib-cage had broken, I could feel the bone. Everything went blank on me.’
Because alcohol makes you act more impulsively, you can also become more agressive. While sober it seemed Jeff could control his anger fairly well. But while being a drunk shit I do believe he had a temper. I think the best example is when he got arrested for disorderly conduct. He was drunk and abusive. He threatened to shoot the bartender because she refused to serve him. She called the police and 4 police officers were needed to hold Jeff down. He spent the night at the police station.
During his years of killing, Jeff continued to drink heavily. I think it’s amazing he never poisoned himself with it. He needed alcohol during the dismemberment of the bodies otherwise he wasn’t able to. I often wonder how much alcohol played a part in Jeff actually acting on his fantasies of killing people to keep them with him.
Jeff himself said during his hearing for the sexual assault case: “I am an alcoholic. Not the sort that has to have a drink every single day, but when I do drink, I go overboard.”
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Jeffrey Dahmer Memorial 