Jeffrey Dahmer was born with blue eyes. But on the nights he went out — to Club 219, to the bars on Milwaukee’s near north side, searching for someone to bring home — he wore yellow contact lenses.
He bought them to look like Emperor Palpatine.
This detail, introduced at his 1992 trial by forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz, tends to get filed under strange facts about Jeffrey Dahmer and left there. It deserves considerably more than that. Because this detail, when examined properly, is one of the most revealing windows into the interior world of a man most people never tried to understand.
What the Trial Revealed
At his 1992 trial, forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz explained Jeffrey’s obsession with both Emperor Palpatine from Return of the Jedi and the Gemini Killer from The Exorcist III. What these characters have in common, Dietz testified, is that they are evil and corrupt and powerful, and both have the ability to use special powers to control others. He was consistently clear that making others suffer was not Jeffrey’s desire — but that Jeffrey did identify with the power of these characters.
Both characters are portrayed in their films with yellow eyes. And Jeffrey went to the extreme of buying contact lenses with that yellow tint, which he would wear when he went to the clubs. He wanted to be more like those people, and he described some sense of using the films to get himself in the proper mood.
His defence attorney Wendy Patrickus put it plainly: “He really identified with the Emperor. He wanted like that mind control. He had those yellow eyes. So Jeff found some place where he could get contact lenses that were yellow eyes. And before he went out at night, he put in the contact lenses. He had to get himself charged up by trying to emulate a devil or evil person to fulfil his fantasies.”
The contacts were found in a pawn shop. He didn’t go to an optician and order them specially — he found them, recognised them, and bought them. That detail feels important. It was opportunistic rather than planned. He saw them and something clicked.
Who Was the Emperor?
Emperor Palpatine — Darth Sidious — is the ultimate villain of the original Star Wars trilogy. He appears fully in Return of the Jedi (1983), the film Jeffrey was watching. He is physically diminished, disfigured, hooded. He commands absolute loyalty. He controls people through unseen forces. He cannot be defeated by conventional means. He is not physically powerful — he is powerful in a way that transcends the physical entirely.
He is also, crucially, someone who spent decades hiding in plain sight. A man who was overlooked, underestimated, dismissed — and who privately held more power than anyone around him knew. The contrast between external appearance and interior reality is the whole character.
Jeffrey Dahmer worked at a chocolate factory on the night shift. He lived in a small apartment with no air conditioning. He bought his clothes at thrift stores and kept Budweiser cans in his fridge. He was overlooked and underestimated and dismissed his entire life — by his parents, by the army, by his neighbours, by the police who returned Konerak Sinthasomphone to him. Nobody saw him as powerful. Nobody saw him at all.
Except in those yellow eyes, in his own mirror, before going out.
The Psychology: Schizotypal Personality Disorder
Jeffrey Dahmer was diagnosed with schizotypal personality disorder, among other conditions. Understanding what this means is essential to understanding what the yellow contact lenses were actually doing.
People with schizotypal personality disorder may believe they have magical control over others. They may think that ordinary occurrences have special meaning just for them — what clinicians call ideas of reference. They often have a profound sense that they possess something others do not — a power, a perception, a connection to forces that operate outside ordinary reality.
The most identifying characteristic of schizotypal personality disorder is perhaps magical thinking — a way of thinking that turns the ordinary into the magical and gives regular events great relevance. It can show up as superstitious beliefs, a sense of telepathy or clairvoyance, or a tendency to imbue objects and events that others consider commonplace with profound symbolic meaning.
The yellow contact lenses were not costume jewellery. They were a ritual object. A talisman. When Jeffrey put them in, something shifted in how he experienced himself. The feeling of power — even if it was entirely interior, entirely constructed, entirely a product of his own psychology — was real to him as a sensation. He could feel it.
This is something that people with schizotypal personality disorder will recognise instantly. The magic feeling is not delusion in the clinical sense — it does not break entirely with reality. It is something more like an intensification of reality, a sense that certain objects or actions or moments carry a charge that others cannot perceive. Putting on those lenses, looking in the mirror, seeing yellow eyes looking back — something in his nervous system responded to that. Something quieted, or amplified, or both.
Power as the Theme
What is striking about Dietz’s testimony is his insistence on the word power — and his equal insistence that it was not about causing suffering. Jeffrey told him clearly and repeatedly: the appeal was not the torture, not the domination in a sadistic sense. It was the power itself. The sense of being someone who mattered, who could not be overlooked, who commanded something.
This maps precisely onto what we know about his life. A man who felt fundamentally powerless — who had been shaped by chaos he couldn’t control, who spent his adult life in a small apartment working a night shift, who could not form or sustain any relationship, who described his interior world as Infinity Land, a place where closeness meant annihilation — found in these fictional characters a vision of the self he couldn’t access any other way.
Emperor Palpatine was not loved. He was feared and obeyed. For someone who had never been able to achieve closeness — for whom intimacy was precisely what the rules of Infinity Land said would destroy you — power without closeness may have been the only form of connection that felt safe to reach for.
The Contacts and The Exorcist III
The yellow eyes connected two obsessions. The Emperor’s pale yellow gaze in Return of the Jedi. The Gemini Killer’s burning yellow eyes in The Exorcist III. Two characters — one from a space opera, one from a philosophical horror film — sharing a single visual detail that Jeffrey made his own.
FBI profiler Robert Ressler reasoned that Jeffrey’s interest in these films was about the power the possessed had over the minds and bodies of the rest of the world, and over reality itself.
Two films. Two sets of yellow eyes. One man in a pawn shop in Milwaukee, recognising something.
What It Tells Us
The yellow contact lenses are not evidence of evil. They are evidence of someone trying, in the only way available to him, to feel like something other than what his life had made him.
A deeply isolated man, diagnosed with a disorder that made intimacy feel dangerous and reality feel porous and magical, found in fictional figures of power a reflection of who he wished he could be. He took that reflection and made it physical — put it literally in his eyes — and went out into the world carrying something that was entirely invisible to everyone around him.
Nobody at Club 219 knew they were looking at Emperor Palpatine. Nobody knew what those eyes meant to the man behind them.
Only Jeffrey knew. And in the space of that private knowledge, something in him felt powerful for a little while.
Sources: Trial testimony of Dr. Park Dietz, Milwaukee 1992; Wendy Patrickus, The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes; Robert Ressler, FBI; DSM-5 diagnostic criteria for schizotypal personality disorder.
Jeffrey Dahmer Memorial 