Jeff Dahmer did not want to be with a person who would move, be energetic, express desires of his own, perhaps suprise him and demand too much of him. Jeff wanted a person who would lie down and permit himself to be stroked and admired, and finally used merely as an aid to masturbation. Obviously these people are not so easy to find so Jeff tried to find replacements so he wouldn’t have to kill. He got a mannequin from a Boston Store. Jeff saw the male mannequin and decided he wanted it. He used a big sleeping bag cover to put it in. He carried it right out of the store after closing time. He never thought of the store maybe having cameras or the possibility of being locked in the store. He got a taxi and took it home.
He used the mannequin to lay with and masturbate but was disappointed with it because it wasn’t like the real thing. “I just went through various sexual fantasies with it, pretending it was a real person, pretending that I was having sex with it.” But it wasn’t enough to satisfy him.
Brian Masters says in the Shrine, “This behavior seems less odd when one considers how many shops devoted to sexual aids sell a great number of inflatable dolls which men use to extend onanistic activity; nor the number of times men in art museums, thinking themselves alone, are seen by hidden cameras to run their hands over the bodies of statues.”
Even though Jeff pretended to have sex with the mannequin, it ofcourse did not actually involve penetration. That was not his purpose. It helped with the fantasy. He said: “I was walking around Southridge and saw this mannequin that sort of caught my eye. I wanted that mannequin, so I went into the store. There’s nobody in there. Stayed there until closing time. No alarms went off. Nothing. I got the mannequin undressed, got a taxi back home, and stored it in the closet at Grandma’s house. And I used to play around with it after.. dressing it up and undressing it. Pretending it was real.”
After a week or two his grandma stubbled on it. She asked Jeff what it was and how he got is. Jeff told her a story that he got it from a store that had extra mannequins for sale. His grandma called Jeff’s dad so Jeff got rid of it. He took it to the basement and smash it up and put it in the trash.
According to Lionel, Catherine Dahmer told Shari about the mannequin in one of their conversations about Jeff drifting downward again. She was wondering how he got. Did he steal it or order it somewhere? Jeff’s grandma couldn’t imagine what Jeff wanted with such a thing. After Shari told Lionel, he called him up. Jeff’s reaction was completely calm and unemotional. He said that he had taken it only to prove that he could. He liked the clothes on the mannequin but taking the mannequin itself was just a prank. Lionel thought Jeff was acting on an impulse which was natural to him. But Shari saw it differently. She thought the mannequin was a sign of something deeply wrong with Jeff. She said, “There’s something wrong with this story, I don’t know what it is, but there’s something wrong.”
Jeff said he wanted to have something real instead of fake like the mannequin but he needed to have complete control. In the end it seems the only way he thought that was possible was killing the men he found beautiful, who had the best physique.
“It would have been better if I’d just stuck to the mannequins. Much, much better.”
Jeffrey Dahmer Memorial 