July 2026 – Jeffrey Dahmer Memorial

Take Care, Take Care, Take Care: Lionel Dahmer and the Son He Could Not Save

Near the end of A Father’s Story, his own memoir, Lionel Dahmer arrives at the only piece of advice he says he can offer any father who comes after him. Not a lesson, not a warning sign to watch for — just three words, repeated: “Take care, take care, take care.” It is the closest thing to a conclusion a man can reach after spending a book, and a life, unable to answer the question underneath it: what did I miss, and could I have stopped this?

This is not the story of Jeffrey’s crimes. It’s the story of the man who raised him, watched him drift further from reach with every passing year, and has spent every year since trying to understand where he failed to hold on.

A boy who looked like himself

Lionel recognized his son in a mirror before he ever recognized danger in him. Jeff was a shy, awkward child, and Lionel had been exactly that kind of child too — inordinately shy, easily disoriented by change, socially unable to read the room. When Jeff’s first-grade teacher described a boy who paced the schoolyard alone and did “nothing” at recess, Lionel absorbed it through the lens of his own childhood: a phase, an adjustment, something a person could learn to live with, the way he had.

That identification cuts through the whole first half of the book. “I saw no reason why my son could not learn to live with them, too,” he writes of Jeff’s early isolation — and admits, decades later, that he was wrong. “While I had suffered from shyness, Jeff had begun to suffer from a near total isolation. While I had known the power of an odd fascination, Jeff had begun to move into the grip of a profound perversity.” The two conditions looked identical from the outside. Lionel now believes they were never the same thing at all.

One memory recurs for him more than any other. Coming home from work, he found Jeff alone at the edge of their lawn after a rainstorm, sobbing, arms flailing, mired in mud, their dog barking wildly around him — a small boy in a full-scale panic at the feeling of being pulled down into the earth. Lionel still asks himself, all these years later, whether that was a moment he should have read differently. He never resolves the question. He simply keeps returning to it.

The house he left him in

By 1978, Jeff’s parents’ marriage had collapsed entirely. Custody went to Joyce for David, the younger son; Jeff, nearly eighteen, was old enough to be left out of the arrangement altogether — which meant, for a stretch of that year, he was effectively left alone. Lionel had moved into a motel. Joyce and David eventually left too. Jeff stayed in the family house by himself.

When Lionel’s new partner, Shari, first walked through that house, she found it in poor shape — little food, a broken refrigerator — and, on the coffee table in the family room, a pentagram drawn in chalk. Lionel didn’t understand what he was looking at until later: Jeff had been performing séances alone in the house, trying to contact the dead.

Lionel moved back in immediately once he learned Jeff was alone. But the sequence itself — a boy left in an empty house for an unspecified stretch of a collapsing marriage, filling the silence with attempts to summon spirits — sits in the record as one of the more quietly disturbing details of his adolescence, and Lionel’s own book puts it there without much comment, simply narrated as one more thing that happened.

Not long after, Lionel and Shari drove Jeff to Ohio State University, a college he’d shown no enthusiasm for and was attending, by his father’s own account, “more or less on my orders.” What Jeff packed for the trip has stayed with Lionel: no books, no clothes anyone would expect of a freshman, but a snakeskin from Boy Scout camp and two photographs of his dog.

What a father chooses not to see

The most difficult passage in A Father’s Story isn’t about a single incident. It’s Lionel’s accounting of everything he didn’t see, laid out in a single unbroken run of admissions: he hadn’t recognized Jeff’s alcoholism until Shari found him drunk in his room. He hadn’t thought his son a thief until his own mother discovered a stolen mannequin in Jeff’s closet. He hadn’t understood Jeff was gay until information surfaced after an arrest for molesting a child — despite years of no dates, of taking a “friend” to prom, of never once expressing interest in a woman. And he had used the word “crazy” about his own son more than once, he admits, always in frustration, never once considering that he might mean it literally.

“It was a level of obliviousness, or perhaps denial, that was scarcely imaginable, and yet it was real,” he writes. “It was as if I had locked my son in a soundproof booth, then drawn the curtains so that I could neither hear nor see what he had become.”

Research chemist/author Lionel Dahmer, father of confessed serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, standing outside of Columbia Correctional Institute where his son is imprisoned. (Photo by Steve Kagan/Getty Images)

That is about as unflinching as a father’s self-assessment gets, and this memorial has no interest in softening it on his behalf. But it’s worth naming plainly what Lionel does not do in this passage: he doesn’t reach for excuses, and he doesn’t stop at diagnosing his own blindness — he goes further, into the much harder territory of asking whether he was the source of what he failed to see.

The question he cannot put down

After the arrest, in the same Inside Edition interview where Shari wept for the victims’ families, Lionel offered a theory: that Jeff’s “madness” might trace back to medication Joyce had taken during her pregnancy. He later admits the theory went essentially unexamined — a father grasping for any explanation that wasn’t simply this came from somewhere in me.

But the genetic question doesn’t stay external for long. In his own writing, Lionel turns it back on himself directly, cataloguing his own childhood fascinations — with hypnosis, with building explosive devices, with once wiring the living room couch to shock visiting cousins as a “joke” — and asks, in language he doesn’t try to make comfortable, whether “some of the compulsions that overwhelmed my son may have had their origins in me.” He wonders whether his own “need for control,” his own violent impulses arising from childhood powerlessness, might have “come to Jeff through me.” His own psychologist, he notes, eventually had to caution him against overstating any single cause — a reminder Lionel includes in his own book, seemingly aware that his rumination was in danger of becoming its own kind of compulsion.

He never reaches a conclusion. He states this outright, more than once: he will never know how much of it was genetic, how much environmental, how much simple bad luck. What he does arrive at is a kind of standing verdict on fatherhood itself — that it is, in his words, “a grave enigma,” and that the only honest thing he can pass on to any father after him is the warning to pay closer attention than he did.

What was left, once there was nothing left to do

Once Jeff was sentenced and sent to Columbia Correctional Institution, eleven hours from home, Lionel writes that his role as a father had “almost disappeared” — reduced to visits, letters, and small, non-essential provisions. What grew in that reduced space, unexpectedly, was conversation. Father and son spent visits discussing intelligent design, evolution, the origins of life — Jeff, Lionel writes, had read thirteen books on the subject and engaged with real intellectual hunger. “It felt stimulating,” Lionel writes, “and I miss Jeff’s inquiring mind.” Alongside Roy Ratcliff’s ministry and Jeff’s baptism, this period represented something Lionel describes, without irony, as his son’s humanity “restoring itself.”

That restoration makes what follows harder, not easier. In July 1994, months before the attack that killed him, Jeff was attacked with a razor by another inmate. A prison chaplain reassured Lionel afterward that Jeff would be secure. Lionel later learned that Jeff had been left unsupervised for twenty to forty minutes with a different inmate — one with a documented history of attacking others and threatening to kill white people — despite an internal report flagging a specific threat against Jeff that CCI staff concluded was “not substantive.” When the fatal attack came that November, Lionel didn’t describe it as senseless or unforeseeable. He described feeling “lulled” and “betrayed” — and guilty, for not having pushed harder on prison security after the first warning sign.

Take care, take care, take care

Lionel Dahmer’s memoir does not end in resolution, and this piece won’t manufacture one on his behalf. He remains, in his own words, “a man in constant rumination” — uncertain whether nature or negligence or sheer chance produced what his son became, certain only that he will carry the not-knowing for the rest of his life. The mud on the lawn, the pentagram on the coffee table, the snakeskin in the college bag, the razor attack nobody took seriously enough — none of it adds up to an answer. It adds up to a father who kept looking anyway, long after looking stopped being able to change anything, and who left behind three words for anyone who might be standing where he once stood, not watching closely enough.

Sources cited

Dahmer, Lionel. A Father’s Story.
Masters, Brian. The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer.
Schwartz, Anne E. Monster: The True Story of the Jeffrey Dahmer Murders.
Kennedy, Patrick, and Robyn Maharaj. Grilling Dahmer: The Interrogation of the Milwaukee Cannibal.

The Topaz Ring

In the summer of 1987, Jeffrey walked into Bailey, Banks & Biddle at Northridge Mall in Milwaukee and paid roughly $1,500 for a ring — a large blue topaz set in gold. Asked about it later, his explanation was almost disarmingly ordinary: he had “always had an interest in jewelry and especially rings,” and the size of the stone appealed to him.

A year later, in the summer of 1988, he pawned it. Not at a jeweler this time, but at a gold-and-silver exchange on Bluemound Road, where he bargained the clerk up to $189 for a ring he’d paid nearly eight times that for. His own stated reason was blunt: his drinking had left him short on cash.

That gap — $1,500 down to $189 — is not, on its own, remarkable. People pawn jewelry for a hundred reasons that have nothing to do with anything sinister. What makes this exchange worth examining is what came next.

The question that was actually being asked

The document containing this account is not a jewelry appraisal. It’s a police report, compiled after Jeffrey’s arrest, following a tip from the Brookfield Police Department that he had pawned a ring in their city. Investigators weren’t interested in the ring as a ring. They were asking a direct question: did this come from one of his victims?

His answer was immediate and flat — no, and he “again denied selling any of the jewelry which he obtained from any of his victims.” Then, without being pressed further on the point, he added something no one had asked for: that if there was any jewelry taken from victims, “he simply threw it out in the trash, along with body parts.”

That sentence is doing an enormous amount of work in very little space. It is, technically, a hypothetical — if there was jewelry, here’s what would have happened to it. But it’s delivered with the same flat tone as everything else in his account, sliding a detail about disposing of human remains into what started as a question about a pawn ticket.

Setting this against what trophy-taking actually looks like

Criminologists who study sexual homicide offenders have a specific term for what Jeffrey is being asked about here: trophy-taking — retaining an item connected to a victim, not for its resale value, but for what it does psychologically. The research is consistent on this point: items are kept “not for monetary reasons but to serve the offender psychologically,” allowing the offender to revisit and relive the experience privately. The most commonly documented trophies across offender studies are body parts, photographs of the crime scene, and — specifically — jewelry or clothing taken from the victim.

Jeffrey is a documented case of exactly this behavior, just not with jewelry. Skulls, Polaroid photographs, and other remains were recovered from his apartment — trophies in the fullest sense the research describes. Which makes his specific denial here worth sitting with rather than passing over. He is not claiming he kept nothing. He is drawing a very precise line: photographs, yes; skulls, yes; a victim’s ring, no — that would have gone in the trash.

Whether that line is true is not something this record can settle. It’s possible jewelry genuinely held no significance to him the way other remains did — trophy-taking research does note that offenders are selective, not indiscriminate collectors, and what becomes meaningful to one offender may hold no charge for another. It’s also possible this was simply the safer thing to say to an investigator, a way to admit to the pattern in general terms — “if there was jewelry” — while denying the one form of it that would have been easiest to trace back to a named victim through a pawn shop record, exactly as this one was traced.

A small object, honestly

There is no way to resolve that ambiguity from this document alone, and this piece isn’t going to pretend otherwise. What’s certain is narrower: a ring bought for $1,500 out of an ordinary, almost sweet fondness for jewelry, pawned a year later for a fraction of that as his drinking worsened, and finally surfacing again after his arrest as the subject of a question about whether it had ever belonged to someone he killed. An object that started as a small personal indulgence ended its documented life sitting inside an interrogation about trophies and trash.

Sources cited

Police report excerpt, Brookfield Police Department tip regarding Jeffrey Dahmer pawn transaction, released records.
Sage Reference, Encyclopedia of Murder and Violent Crime — “Trophy Taking.” https://sk.sagepub.com/ency/edvol/violentcrime/chpt/trophy-taking
Walter, N. et al. (2024). “Trophy, souvenir, or simple theft? Taking items from the victim in sexual homicide.” Behavioral Sciences & the Law. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/bsl.2660
“The collectors: Serial sexual offenders who preserve evidence of their crimes.” ResearchGate. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259158356_The_collectors_Serial_sexual_offenders_who_preserve_evidence_of_their_crimes

Jeffrey Dahmer and the Jokes He Left Behind

Humour is not a word anyone expects to find near this story. But it is there, threaded through the record in two very different forms — the jokes a horrified public told about him, and the small, dark moments of levity that actually happened around him, inside the jail cells and interrogation rooms where his story was still unfolding in real time. Both are worth looking at honestly. Neither is comfortable.

The jokes that swept the country

Within two weeks of Jeffrey’s arrest, jokes about him were already circulating nationally. On August 6, 1991, The New York Times ran an editorial addressing the phenomenon directly, arguing that the jokes existed because “there is a need for people to distance themselves from the horror.”

That explanation is a reasonable one, and it was echoed by people who had no choice but to sit with the horror professionally. Anne Schwartz, the reporter who broke the story and covered the trial from the front row, later wrote that many of her fellow journalists told jokes throughout the proceedings specifically “in order to keep their sanity.”

But distance may not be the whole story. Within months, a publisher named Hart Fisher had turned Jeffrey’s crimes into a comic book through his company, Boneyard Press, and described the appeal to television cameras without any apparent discomfort: “It’s something you can’t get anywhere else — if you like the truth, if you like something a little bit more fresh, a little bit more bloody, we’ve got the meat.” That is not the language of someone trying to create distance. It is the language of someone selling proximity.

The joke cycle sat inside a larger pattern that scholars have since traced through the entire “serial killer” media boom of the early 1990s — the same years that gave the culture Hannibal Lecter as a sanitised, almost lovable version of the same figure. Anthony Hopkins later recalled being approached by twelve-year-old children asking him to perform Lecter’s “fava bean” line for their entertainment. Somewhere between the Times editorial and the comic book and the children asking a fictional cannibal to do a bit, the line between “processing horror” and “consuming it as entertainment” gets difficult to locate.

Jeffrey was not insulated from any of this. Letters reached him in prison keeping him “up-to-date on the latest ‘Jeffrey Dahmer’ jokes,” according to his father’s own account, and reporting from inside the jail described him as “visibly perturbed” by the jokes that followed him even among fellow inmates. Whatever function the jokes served for the public telling them, for the man they were about, they were simply one more form of the notoriety he could not escape.

The humour that actually happened around him

Separate from the joke cycle is something stranger: a handful of genuinely dark, unplanned moments of humour that occurred in the actual rooms where his case was being handled — not jokes told about him from a distance, but small human moments that happened to be, in a bleak way, funny.

The most widely cited is also the earliest. Minutes after Tracy Edwards escaped Apartment 213 and police discovered what was inside, one of the responding officers radioed dispatch: “The intoxicated Asian naked male [laughter heard in background] was returned to sober boyfriend.” A second officer, informed he’d be heading back to the station, added: “My partner’s gonna get deloused at the station” — followed by more laughter on the recording. This is gallows humour in its purest form: officers who had no idea yet what they’d just walked into, laughing at a domestic-dispute call minutes before it became one of the most notorious crime scenes in American history.

Inside the jail itself, the record shows a mix of hostility and small, incongruous moments of connection. Guards placed Jeffrey under 24-hour suicide watch — a light kept permanently on, flashlights turned on his face as he tried to sleep, three guards watching him urinate “and laughing as well,” according to Brian Masters’ account. He once sharpened his toothbrush in protest of what he considered unfair treatment, a small act of defiance that cost him a night sleeping on the concrete floor in his underwear. And yet amid the hostility, Masters records one genuinely tender moment: a guard, stepping away from his post for fifteen minutes overnight, told him simply, “Now don’t do anything stupid, Jeff.” Masters calls it “a tiny moment of connection” — and it is hard to disagree.

Jeffrey’s own complaints about jail carry a dry, almost absurd quality of their own. Asked what the days were like, he described having “nothing to do but watch the ants crawl around on the floor,” and described the bed bugs at night as something you could feel “jumping on your eyelids and nose.” A former inmate told the Milwaukee Sentinel that the guard posted outside his cell “reads him the paper, and talks to him about what he did to people and things” — offered as evidence of favourable treatment, but reading, out of context, almost like a description of an unlikely daily routine between two people stuck in a small space together.

Even the investigators had their own strange footnote. Detective Patrick Kennedy, who spent hours across the interrogation table extracting Jeffrey’s confession, moonlighted off duty as McGruff the Crime Dog, touring Milwaukee schools in a furry costume to teach children about the dangers of drugs. The man who sat with Jeffrey through some of the most disturbing testimony in American criminal history spent his weekends in a dog suit warning eight-year-olds about strangers.

Why this belongs in the record

None of this softens what happened. The jokes, the comic books, the gallows humour on a police radio — none of it changes the seventeen lives that were taken, and this memorial has never tried to weigh one against the other. But humour is also one of the most honest windows into how a society actually processes something it cannot fully absorb, and how the people closest to a case — reporters, guards, detectives — survive proximity to it day after day. The jokes told about Jeffrey say more about the country’s appetite for monsters than they do about the man himself. The small, dark moments that happened around him say something quieter: that even inside the most controlled, hostile environment imaginable, ordinary human behaviour — boredom, dry humour, a guard’s offhand kindness — kept finding its way through.

Sources cited

Schwartz, Anne E. Monster: The True Story of the Jeffrey Dahmer Murders.
Masters, Brian. The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer.
Dahmer, Lionel. A Father’s Story.
Kennedy, Patrick, and Robyn Maharaj. Grilling Dahmer: The Interrogation of the Milwaukee Cannibal.
The New York Times, editorial on serial killer jokes, August 6, 1991.
Academic discussion of the joke cycle, comic book publication, and Hannibal Lecter comparison drawn from a scholarly text on Dahmer and the construction of the serial killer figure in media.

August 24, 1993: A Crisis Report

On 24 August 1993, a report was filed at the Columbia Correctional Institution describing what staff called “unusual and bizarre behaviours.” Jeffrey had been discovered in his cell with a plastic bag wrapped around his head. Staff were able to get him to hand it over. He told a social worker he intended to make a noose out of his bedsheet. Later, while being escorted to the clinic for observation, he deliberately banged his head against a door and a window; when guards moved to restrain him, he warned them, “Watch out, I’ll bite.”

He was placed in restraints.

Fourteen months later, on 28 November 1994, he was dead.

It would be easy to read the intervening year as a straight line — crisis to conclusion — but that is not what the record supports, and it is not the aim of this piece. What the record does support is a single, specific, dated moment of documented psychological crisis, described in exactly those terms by the institution itself, at a point when nobody involved could have known what would happen fourteen months later. It deserves to be examined on its own terms.

What the behaviours actually indicate

Read individually, each element of that August report corresponds to a recognised category in the clinical literature on prison suicide risk, not simply a list of “acting out.”

A plastic bag over the head is a concrete, means-based gesture — not a symbolic complaint but an act with a specific method already in motion. The statement to the social worker about a bedsheet noose is a direct verbal communication of both method and intent, the kind of disclosure that risk-assessment frameworks treat as one of the clearest available warning signs precisely because it is not ambiguous. The head-banging that followed, once he was already under observation, reads as an escalation under acute distress rather than a separate incident — three connected behaviours across a single day, not three isolated ones.

Research into near-lethal and severe self-harm among prisoners is explicit that behaviours of this kind function as genuine precursors to more serious attempts, not as manipulation to be discounted. A related finding is worth sitting with directly: in jail populations, the majority of people who go on to die by suicide were not on formal suicide watch at the time of their death. Threats, gestures, and disclosed intent — exactly the pattern documented here — are consistently under-weighted by the systems meant to catch them.

Why a person reaches this point

The literature on why incarcerated people arrive at this kind of crisis does not point primarily to individual pathology. From the inmate’s own perspective, the dominant factors identified across studies are fear of the unknown, distrust of an authoritarian environment, a felt loss of control over one’s own future, isolation from family and outside relationships, shame, and the broadly dehumanising conditions of confinement itself. Separately, research consistently links poor emotional regulation, mental health strain, and a lack of meaningful social support to inmate suicidality — and specifically ties a lack of purposeful work activity to both suicidal ideation and suicide attempts.

That last point lands with particular weight here. The same records that document this crisis also show Jeffrey’s failing work evaluations in the same period, and his own words to a corrections officer: “I don’t care if you give me all zeros, I have a lot of time to do it.” Read in isolation, that line sounds like indifference. Read against the research, and against what happened weeks later, it reads more like the flattened affect of someone already in trouble.

The isolation question

The full incident report does not survive in the released excerpt to confirm his exact housing status that day, but the sequence itself is suggestive: a bag over the head, a stated intention to fashion a noose from a bedsheet, then head-banging severe enough to require restraint — none of this plausibly happens over an extended period with a cellmate present and unremarked upon. The likelier reading is that he was alone at the time, whether by assignment, protective custody, or circumstance. We treat this as a reasoned inference rather than a documented fact, and welcome correction if the full housing record says otherwise.

If that inference holds, there is a substantial body of research worth engaging with. People in solitary confinement make up a small fraction of the total prison population but account for a dramatically disproportionate share of prison suicides. Even protective custody — isolation intended to keep someone safe — carries the same psychological costs as punitive isolation, because the mechanism of harm is the isolation itself, not the reason for it. Some of the clearest data comes from outcomes after release: people who had spent time in restrictive housing were substantially more likely to die by suicide in the year after leaving prison than those who had not, with the risk compounding for each additional stay in isolation.

The institutional response and its limits

The response to the August incident was restraint and observation. This was, by any account, a genuine safety measure in the moment. But it is worth naming plainly what it was not: it was containment, not treatment. Nothing in the record suggests a sustained clinical intervention followed — no indication of ongoing psychiatric support, no apparent reassessment of his housing or work assignment in light of what had just happened. This matches a broader, well-documented pattern in correctional mental health: the system is generally built to respond to the moment of crisis, and far less equipped to address what produced it.

Where this sits against “The Mind That Wouldn’t Stay”

This memorial has already argued, in the “Trance States” piece, that Jeffrey’s dissociative episodes were clinically significant rather than incidental. That argument was built largely from pattern — testimony, later evaluation, retrospective analysis. August 1993 offers something different: a single, dated, contemporaneously documented crisis, described as serious by the institution at the time it happened, not reconstructed afterward. It does not replace the broader argument. It anchors it.

A crisis, not a footnote

None of this reframes what Jeffrey did, or asks the reader to weigh his suffering against the suffering he caused. Those are separate facts, and this memorial has never tried to make one cancel out the other. What this record shows is narrower and, we think, still worth stating clearly: fourteen months before his death, in an institution that documented it themselves, Jeffrey Dahmer was in genuine psychological crisis — and the response he received was restraint, not care. That is true, it is documented, and it belongs in the fuller account of who he was.

By April 1992 — sixteen months before this crisis — Jeffrey was on an antidepressant, two 20mg capsules of Prozac each morning, and was being seen three times a week by a clinical psychologist who did not consider him imminently suicidal at that time. Whether that level of care was still in place by August 1993 isn’t something this report confirms — it simply isn’t mentioned. But the contrast stands on its own: a year and a half earlier, someone was checking on him several times a week. In August 1993, what survives is a crisis and a set of restraints, nothing else. If his care had quietly lapsed somewhere in that gap, this is where it becomes visible.

Primary source: Columbia Correctional Institution incident report, 24 August 1993, released under open records request.

Cain, C. et al. — Jails in Crisis: Study Identifies Those at Risk of Suicide Behind Bars, Florida Atlantic University. https://www.fau.edu/newsdesk/articles/suicide-jails-study.php
U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of Corrections — jail suicide risk factors and inmate-perspective drivers (fear, distrust, isolation, shame, dehumanisation). https://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/doj/012475.pdf
Examining Risk and Protective Factors for Suicidal Behaviors: A Cross-Sectional Study Among Portuguese Male Inmates, PMC. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11817471/
Prevention of Suicidal Behavior in Prisons: An Overview of Initiatives Based on a Systematic Review of Research on Near-Lethal Suicide Attempts, PMC. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5120691/
Vera Institute of Justice — Study Links Solitary Confinement to Increased Risk of Death After Release (JAMA/North Carolina cohort study). https://www.vera.org/news/study-links-solitary-confinement-to-increased-risk-of-death-after-release
Prison Policy Initiative — The research is clear: Solitary confinement causes long-lasting harm (6–8% of prison population, ~50% of prison suicides). https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/12/08/solitary_symposium/

Codex Ballads: The New Door213 Album Is Out

Codex Ballads, the new full-length album by Door213, is out now on Enough Records.

The title is the key to the whole record. A codex is a book that must be deciphered — and these are ballads written the same way, songs with a hidden double meaning folded inside them. On the surface, they are love songs. Read again, they are rebellion songs — songs set against a system that is unforgiving, that decides who is beyond saving and closes the book on them. Every track holds both meanings at once, and neither cancels the other.

The album carries an openly Christian tone. Its themes are God, forgiveness, divine presence, and the strength it takes to seek redemption — told through the visual and lyrical language of one specific life: Jeffrey Dahmer, who in his final years repented of his life of crime and violence, delivered his soul to God, was baptised, and did what little a man in his position could to make amends with the past. The album reflects on why that mattered — and extends the same possibility outward, to everyone who has repented of pain they caused and wonders whether the door is still open. The record’s answer is that it is.

The sound is a mix of hip-hop ballad and medieval hints — strong beats underneath, choir-like textures above, deep poetry throughout. The lyrics are God-seeking; to some listeners they may land as prayers. It is music built for the space between the club and the chapel.

Two of the album’s strongest tracks — Don’t Forsake Me (Jeff Version) and Swallow Me Whole (Jeff Version) — were made in collaboration with Jeff Knapp, aka GoH | Mr. Whatever, a German multidisciplinary artist and musician. His voice against Necro’s gives the album’s message its clearest expression, in both sound and visual art. Don’t Forsake Me already has an official video, a prayer crossing time and space:

Alongside the album, the two artists also produced a separate single, Feels Like Coming — a song about love and about arriving where we long to be, with the one we desire to love, no matter the distance, and no matter whether they are living or dead. It belongs to the same universe as Codex Ballads and is best listened to together with it. Its video is also out:

Tracklist:

Heaven Complete
Don’t Forsake Me (Jeff Version)
I’ll Do It All For You
Love Is Eternal
The Beast Is Hiding Among Your Friends
Meat Grinder
Reborn
Don’t Forsake Me
If I Die Before I Wake
A God That IS Good
Swallow Me Whole (Jeff Version)
Swallow Me Whole

Codex Ballads is available now — listen on Spotify, Deezer, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Etc, with wider streaming platforms to follow.

Door213 is the project of Necro (they/them), Portuguese multidisciplinary artist and founder of this memorial. GoH | Mr. Whatever is the project of Jeff Knapp (he/him), German multidisciplinary artist and musician.

The Diagnosis He Never Had: Jeffrey Dahmer and the Psychopathy Question

Ask almost anyone to describe Jeffrey Dahmer in one word, and somewhere in the first three answers you will hear it: psychopath. In the popular imagination, the words “serial killer” and “psychopath” are simply synonyms — one implies the other, automatically, in both directions.

Here is what the actual record says: Jeffrey Dahmer was examined by more forensic psychiatrists and psychologists than almost any defendant of his era. He was tested, interviewed, evaluated before trial and during it, by experts for the defense, the prosecution, and the court. And across all of it, psychopathy is the diagnosis that never arrives.

This article is about that absence — what it means, what it doesn’t, and why the distinction matters more than a label should.

What Psychopathy Actually Is

Psychopathy is not, strictly speaking, a diagnosis at all. It does not appear in the DSM, psychiatry’s diagnostic manual; the nearest DSM category, antisocial personality disorder, overlaps with it but is not the same thing. Psychopathy is a research construct, given its modern shape by Robert Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist–Revised (PCL-R) — a 20-item instrument, scored 0 to 2 per item by a trained examiner, maximum 40 points, with a conventional diagnostic threshold of 30 in North America.

The traits it measures fall into two clusters. The first is interpersonal and affective: glibness and superficial charm, grandiosity, pathological lying, manipulativeness, lack of remorse, shallow emotions, callous absence of empathy. The second is behavioural: impulsivity, parasitic lifestyle, poor behavioural controls, early and versatile criminality. The classic psychopath — the Ted Bundy type — is charming, grandiose, remorseless, and lies as easily as breathing.

Hold that portrait in mind, and now look at the man in the record.

What He Was Actually Diagnosed With

The experts at Jeffrey’s 1992 trial disagreed about many things, but their diagnostic vocabulary is consistent and conspicuous. Borderline personality disorder. Schizotypal features. Paraphilia — necrophilia — as the engine of the crimes. Alcohol dependence. Anxiety and depression, treated with Prozac at Columbia Correctional, as documented in the 1992 competency evaluation the memorial published earlier this year. (See “A Mind in Pieces” for the full diagnostic history.)

What no evaluator who examined him made central — not the defense experts, not the prosecution’s Dr. Park Dietz, not the court’s appointees — was psychopathy. The forensic literature since has noticed the same thing. A scholarly analysis of media portrayals notes plainly that Dahmer does not fit the clinical criteria for psychopathy, despite decades of media reporting to the contrary. Forensic psychology teaching materials routinely use him as the standard counter-example: Bundy the textbook psychopath, Dahmer the emotionally disturbed, compulsion-driven opposite.

And in 2018, the question was put to the instrument itself. A research team led by criminologist Eric Hickey retrospectively scored five serial killers commonly assumed to be psychopaths — Dahmer, Bundy, Gacy, Kemper, and Ridgway — using trained raters and the PCL-R. Only Bundy crossed the diagnostic threshold. Jeffrey Dahmer scored 23 out of 40: elevated, certainly, but seven points below the cutoff — closer to the general prison population than to the Bundys of the world. The researchers used his case specifically to illustrate their central finding: not all serial killers are psychopaths, and the most infamous one of all wasn’t.

Trait by Trait, Against the Record

Set the checklist beside the documented man, and the mismatches are striking.

Glibness, charm, grandiosity. Jeffrey was, by every firsthand account, socially awkward, monosyllabic, and self-effacing to the point of self-erasure. His documented self-descriptions run the other direction entirely: he called his crimes “a nightmare,” himself something that should have been put to death. His one flash of wit about fame — rolling his eyes at “the price of my infamy” — is wry and deflating, the opposite of grandiose.

Pathological lying and manipulativeness. Here honesty requires precision. During the crime years, Jeffrey lied constantly and sometimes with chilling effectiveness — most catastrophically in the Konerak Sinthasomphone incident. Deception in the service of concealment was fully present. But the psychopathic trait is lying as a way of being, gratuitous and lifelong. And the moment concealment ended, something remarkable happened: he became almost pathologically truthful. Sixty hours of confession. Every victim identified, including those police could never have connected to him. Photographic tests seeded with living men to catch him lying — he never once took the bait. Detectives and psychiatrists alike remarked that they had never seen a defendant so intent on being accurately understood.

Lack of remorse, shallow affect. This is the heart of the construct, and it is where the record diverges most sharply. The man who told Roy Ratcliff, unprompted, that he believed he deserved execution — and then asked whether continuing to live was itself a sin against God — was not performing shallowness. He wept over Steven Hicks alone in a dorm room at Ohio State. He described his own emotional numbness not with indifference but with grief: he hadn’t cried in years and didn’t know if he still could. A psychopath does not mourn his missing feelings. Mourning them is precisely the thing psychopathy takes away.

And the honest counterweight. The 1992 competency evaluation contains a harder sentence: one evaluator described him as lacking sincere empathy and real remorse. That assessment exists; the memorial does not hide it. Psychopathic traits were present in Jeffrey Dahmer — a 23/40 is not a zero, and no one should mistake this article for a claim that he was empathically whole. The question is not whether he had elevated traits. It is whether “psychopath” is the accurate frame. The instrument built to answer exactly that question says no.

Why the Label Matters

Because “psychopath” is not just a word — it is a full stop. It says: born without conscience, nothing here to understand, no door that anyone could have knocked on. It converts a human catastrophe into a species difference, and in doing so it lets everyone off the hook — the family that couldn’t reach him, the systems that missed him, the society that would rather have monsters than mirrors.

(Photo by Curt Borgwardt/Sygma via Getty Images)

The documented reality is harder to sit with. Jeffrey Dahmer appears to have had a conscience — damaged, buried under dissociation and alcohol and compulsion, but present and in pain. He knew what he was doing was monstrous; he said so, before and after arrest. The engine of his crimes was not the absence of feeling but a compulsion that overwhelmed the feeling that was there. That is not an exoneration — seventeen men and boys are dead, and elevated traits plus intact knowledge of wrong makes moral responsibility heavier, not lighter. But it is a different tragedy than the one the label tells. The psychopath story says such men must be detected and caged, because nothing else was ever possible. Jeffrey’s actual story — the lonely, drowning, help-resisting, guilt-carrying reality of it — suggests something more disturbing and more useful: that he was reachable, at least in principle, and no one reached him until a pastor with a whirlpool tub arrived twenty-two months before the end.

The memorial exists for precisely this kind of distinction. Getting the label right is not pedantry. It is the difference between a warning the world can learn from and a monster story it can only repeat.

Sources: E. Hickey et al., retrospective PCL-R assessment of serial murderers (2018), as reported in K. Ramsland, “Are All Serial Killers Psychopaths?”, Psychology Today (2025); R. Hare, Psychopathy Checklist–Revised; Jeffrey L. Dahmer, Competency Evaluation, Case No. F-912542 (April 27, 1992); Brian Masters, The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer (1993); Lionel Dahmer, A Father’s Story (1994); Roy Ratcliff, Dark Journey Deep Grace (2006). Related memorial articles: “A Mind in Pieces,” “The Mind That Wouldn’t Stay,” “A New Primary Source: The 1992 Competency Evaluation.”

Jeffrey And The Tin Whistle: A Small Document About Hope

Some primary sources arrive looking important. Court transcripts, psychiatric evaluations, sworn statements. And some arrive looking like this: a Wisconsin Department of Corrections property receipt, form DOC-237, the most bureaucratic piece of paper imaginable — and quietly one of the most human documents in the memorial’s collection.

Here is what it records. On May 10, 1994, a package arrived by mail at Columbia Correctional Institution for inmate 177252, Dahmer, Jeffery (the prison misspelled his first name). It came from a specialty shop called Anyone Can Whistle, in West Hurley, New York. It contained three items, listed in a staff member’s careful capitals:

1 — CLARKE TIN WHISTLE 1 — TIN WHISTLE INSTRUCTIONAL CASSETTE TAPE 1 — TIN WHISTLE INSTRUCTION BOOK

He signed for it on May 17. His signature — the same one on the Thanksgiving card he would send Roy Ratcliff six months later — sits at the bottom, next to a paragraph in which he formally agrees that none of his musical equipment exceeds $350 in value. The whistle cost a fraction of that. It is, famously, one of the cheapest real instruments in the world.

What a Tin Whistle Is

For readers who have never met one: the tin whistle — also called the penny whistle — is a small six-holed folk flute, one of the simplest instruments ever made. The Clarke company has been producing them in England since 1843, rolling a sheet of tinplate into a cone around a wooden mouthpiece block, essentially unchanged for nearly two centuries. It is the classic beginner’s instrument of Irish and Celtic folk music: cheap, light, easy to start, genuinely difficult to master.

If you don’t think you know its sound, you almost certainly do. It is the bright, airy, high voice threaded through most Celtic folk music — the sound most people today would describe, not inaccurately, as “the Lord of the Rings flute.” The Clarke in particular is known for a breathy, slightly husky tone that players call “chiff.”

It is also, in its upper octave, piercing. Gloriously, unapologetically piercing. Hold that thought.

The Date

Readers of this memorial may recognise May 10, 1994.

It is the day Jeffrey Dahmer was baptised — the day of the solar eclipse and the Gacy execution, the day Roy Ratcliff drove through a darkened afternoon to immerse him in a prison whirlpool tub, the day he came up out of the water saying “thank you.” We wrote about it at length in “The Day Jeffrey Dahmer Was Baptised.”

On that same day, in the prison mailroom, someone was logging his tin whistle.

Nobody planned this. The package simply arrived when it arrived, and a staff member stamped the date. But the coincidence is documented on both ends — Ratcliff’s memoir on one side, this DOC-237 form on the other — and it is hard not to sit with it for a moment. On the day grace entered his life through water, music entered it through the mail.

Why This Little Form Matters

Look at what he ordered. Not just the whistle — the instruction book and the instructional cassette. The full curriculum, for an instrument that costs less than a pizza.

That is not the purchase of a man passing time. That is the purchase of a man who intends to learn something — methodically, properly, from the beginning, the way he seems to have done everything. Readers of our analysis of his letters (“In His Own Hand”) will recognise the pattern instantly: this is the same person who flagged his own spelling mistakes in casual letters to penpals. Of course he ordered the book and the tape. He was going to do it right.

And there is something in that which deserves to be said plainly. In May 1994, Jeffrey Dahmer was two and a half years into a sentence of over nine hundred years. He had no prospect of release, ever. And he ordered a beginner’s instrument with a beginner’s course, which is one of the most future-oriented acts a person can perform. Nobody learns an instrument for today. Learning an instrument is a bet on tomorrow — on the version of yourself, weeks or months away, who can do something you currently cannot. It is hope, in the shape of a small tin cone.

He had six and a half months left. He didn’t know that. He was planning to get better at something.

The Lighter Part, Because It’s Real Too

And now the part that made us laugh, because humanisation includes comedy.

A Clarke tin whistle, in the hands of a beginner, in a concrete cell block, is an event. The upper octave of a tin whistle can cut through a pub full of fiddles; in a hard-surfaced prison unit it would have ricocheted off every wall like a musical fire alarm. Somewhere in Unit 6 of Columbia Correctional in the summer of 1994, the most notorious inmate in Wisconsin was working his way through a beginner’s instruction book — first the long slow notes, then the first wobbly scales, then, presumably, the first recognisable tune, played over and over the way beginners do.

We have no documentation of how his neighbours felt about this. We suspect we don’t need any.

There is something almost cinematic in the image: the man the world called a monster, sitting on his bunk with a Victorian-era folk instrument and a cassette tape, squeaking earnestly toward competence while the block goes quietly insane around him. It is ridiculous. It is endearing. It is deeply, stubbornly human. It goes on the shelf beside the taquitos, the Walter Mondale photo, and the letter about the frogs singing at night — the growing collection of small documented facts that refuse to fit the monster story.

Provenance

This document was shared with the memorial by our team member Sylli, whose contributions to the archive keep proving invaluable. It joins the letters, the Ratcliff card, and the 1992 competency evaluation in the memorial’s growing collection of primary sources — the paper trail of an actual human life, preserved one unglamorous form at a time.

Whether he ever got any good, no record says. That was never really the point. The point is that he wanted to.

Primary source: Wisconsin Department of Corrections Property Receipt/Disposition, form DOC-237, inmate 177252, dated May 10, 1994 (received) and May 17, 1994 (signed). Document courtesy of Sylli. Background on the instrument: Clarke Tinwhistle Co. (est. 1843).

In His Own Hand: What Jeffrey Dahmer’s Letters Reveal — and What They Don’t

Almost everything ever written about Jeffrey Dahmer was written by someone else. The trial transcripts, the psychiatric evaluations, the books, the documentaries — all of it filtered through other people’s frameworks and other people’s words. What has rarely been examined with any care is the small body of text he produced himself: the letters, cards, and documents in his own hand.

The memorial has gathered four such documents, spanning 1989 to 1994 — from his life before arrest to the final weeks before his death. This article looks at them through the lens of psycholinguistics: the scientific study of how language use reflects psychological states. It is, as far as we know, the first attempt to do so.

We want to be clear from the outset about what this is and is not. This is an exploratory reading of a very small sample, informed by published research — not a clinical analysis, and not a diagnosis. Where the science supports an observation, we cite it. Where we are simply describing what is on the page, we say so.

The Science, Briefly

The research foundation for this kind of reading comes largely from the work of psychologist James Pennebaker and colleagues, whose studies of “function words” — pronouns, articles, prepositions — have shown that the small, unnoticed words in a person’s writing correlate with psychological states more reliably than the dramatic ones. A few findings matter for what follows:

First-person singular pronouns. Elevated use of “I,” “me,” and “my” is one of the most replicated linguistic markers of self-focused attention, and correlates with psychological distress and depression across many studies.

Absolutist words. Research by Al-Mosaiwi and Johnstone (2018) found that words like “always,” “never,” and “completely” appear at significantly higher rates in the writing of people experiencing depression and suicidal ideation.

Politeness strategies. Linguists Brown and Levinson documented how people manage requests and social risk through “negative politeness” — hedging, apologising for imposing, softening. The degree and style of this management reflects how a writer perceives social relationships.

Concrete sensory detail. Genuine, present-focused writing tends to contain specific sensory observation; detached or dissociated writing tends toward abstraction and flatness.

With that foundation, here is what the documents show.

1989: The Letter to Judge Gardner

The earliest document is also the only one from Jeffrey’s life before the arrest — a written request to Judge William Gardner for sentence modification, following his 1988 conviction.

The surviving fragment reads: “This is why, Judge Gardner, I am requesting from you, a sentence modification. So that I may be allowed to continue my life as a productive member of our society. Respectfully Yours, Jeff Dahmer.”

Three things stand out.

First, the register. This is careful, formal, institutional English — “requesting,” “sentence modification,” “a productive member of our society.” He is writing in the language of the system he is addressing, mirroring its vocabulary back to it. This is a documented social-linguistic skill called register matching, and it shows an acute awareness of audience.

Second, the self-focus. In two sentences: “I am requesting,” “that I may be allowed,” “my life.” This is entirely natural in a plea letter — the genre demands it — but it is worth noting because of how sharply it contrasts with the last document in this collection, five years later.

Third, the handwriting itself. Unlike the later letters, this one is printed rather than cursive — deliberate, separated letterforms, the writing of someone taking visible care to be legible and correct before authority. We note this as a physical description only. Graphology — the claimed reading of personality from letter shapes — performs no better than chance in controlled studies, and the memorial will not lean on it. What we can say without pseudoscience is simply that the document is neat, effortful, and controlled, which is consistent with everything witnesses documented about his self-presentation.

There is a painful irony in this letter that needs naming: at the time he wrote these words about continuing life as a productive member of society, the worst years were still ahead. Whether the letter was cynical performance or something he believed in the moment he wrote it is unknowable. The competency evaluation we published previously documents that he resisted the therapy ordered alongside that sentence — so the record suggests, at minimum, that the words and the follow-through did not match.

April 1993: The Penpal Letter

The second document is a full letter to a correspondent, dated 4-24-93, written from Columbia Correctional Institution.

It opens: “Hi how are you? I hope that this letter finds you healthy and in good spirits. Over here in Wisconsin all of the snow has melted, the birds sing during the day, and the frogs sing at night. It feels like Spring is finally here.”

For a man so often described as affectless, this passage deserves attention. It contains layered, specific, sensory observation — snow melting, birds by day, frogs by night — organised into a small, almost literary parallel structure. This is not flat writing. Whatever else was true of Jeffrey Dahmer in April 1993, he was noticing the world through a prison window and translating it into warm, conventional, socially fluent prose. Research associates this kind of concrete present-tense sensory detail with genuine engagement rather than detachment; his conversational writing, at least here, does not read as dissociated.

The letter then moves to practical matters, and here the politeness patterns are striking. Asking his correspondent for money — twenty-five dollars, in a letter that explains he earns twenty dollars a month and spends it on cigarettes — he writes: “I hate to ask this of you, but could you please send over a check or money order…” This is textbook negative politeness: acknowledging the imposition, softening the request, apologising in advance. He manages the social risk of asking with the same care he applies to his handwriting.

And then there is the smallest and perhaps most telling detail in the whole collection. Mid-letter, he misspells a word, crosses it out, and writes above it: “sp?”

He is flagging his own spelling error, in a casual letter to a penpal, with a proofreader’s annotation. This is self-monitoring — a live record of a mind checking its own output for correctness even in low-stakes writing. It is one visible data point of the carefulness that runs through everything: the neat letterforms, the managed politeness, the register control. The competency evaluation documented a man of high measured intelligence with obsessive-compulsive behavioural features; this little “sp?” is what that looks like on paper.

December 1993: The Hand

The third document is not primarily text at all. Sent to a correspondent named Dahlia in December 1993, it is a traced outline of his own hand, signed with his name and his inmate number, 177252, written on the palm.

The accompanying words are minimal — a greeting, “Thank you!”, “Love, Jeff.” There is little language to analyse here, and we will not overreach. But the artefact itself says something the letters cannot: asked to give something of himself to a stranger, he gave the outline of his own hand — the most literal self-portrait available to a man with no possessions. He labelled it with the two identifiers the world had left him: his name, and his number.

We offer no psychological claim about this. We simply note that people across every culture trace their hands as a way of saying I was here, this is me — children do it in school, prisoners have done it for as long as there have been prisons. It is among the most human gestures there is.

November 1994: The Thanksgiving Card

The final document is the card he sent to Roy Ratcliff, the minister who baptised him, in the last weeks of his life. Ratcliff described it in Dark Journey Deep Grace as one of his most treasured possessions.

The handwritten message reads: “Thank you for your friendship, and for taking the time and effort to help me understand God’s word. God bless you and your family! Sincerely, Jeff Dahmer.”

Set beside the 1989 Gardner letter, the shift in linguistic orientation is unmistakable. The 1989 letter is built around the self: I am requesting, that I may be allowed, my life. The 1994 card is built almost entirely around the other person: your friendship, your time and effort, you and your family. The only self-reference — “help me understand” — casts himself as a learner receiving something, not an agent demanding something.

The research on pronoun orientation is relevant here: outward-directed, other-focused language is associated with connection and gratitude; inward-directed language with distress and self-focus. On a sample of two short documents we cannot claim a measured trajectory — we want to be honest about that. But the direction of the shift matches, exactly, what every witness to his final years described: Ratcliff’s account of a man surprised that anyone would keep visiting him, the Thanksgiving card itself, the documented seriousness of the spiritual turn. The language on the page and the testimony about the man point the same way.

What This Does and Does Not Show

Read together, the four documents give us a consistent portrait in some respects and an honest limit in others.

What is consistent: carefulness. Across five years, two facilities, three genres, and audiences ranging from a judge to a penpal to a pastor, every document shows the same controlled, effortful, correctness-monitoring writer — neat letterforms, managed register, softened requests, a spelling annotation in a casual letter. The linguistic record matches the behavioural one: the politeness noted by detectives, the precision about the baptismal words, the methodical habits documented everywhere.

What is suggestive but not provable: the shift from the self-focused instrumental language of 1989 to the other-focused gratitude of 1994. It aligns with the documented biography of his final years. It is also two short texts, in different genres, and we will not pretend that is a dataset.

What is absent: the markers one might expect. In this small sample there is little of the absolutist vocabulary associated with depressive writing, no flattened affect in the conversational prose — the spring passage is the opposite of flat — and no linguistic strangeness at all. And perhaps that is the finding. The man whose inner life contained what his did wrote letters that are, linguistically, almost aggressively ordinary: polite, careful, warm within convention, worried about spelling. The gap between the interior documented in the clinical record and the surface of these pages is the same gap everyone who met him described — and here it is, preserved in ink.

This article is part of an ongoing series examining primary sources. See also: “A New Primary Source: The 1992 Competency Evaluation” and “The Mind That Wouldn’t Stay: Jeffrey Dahmer’s Dissociative Episodes and What They Tell Us.”

Documents: letter to Judge William Gardner (1989, court record); letter to a correspondent, April 24, 1993; hand tracing sent to Dahlia March, December 1, 1993; Thanksgiving card to Roy Ratcliff, November 1994 (reproduced in Ratcliff, Dark Journey Deep Grace, 2006). Research references: Pennebaker, The Secret Life of Pronouns (2011); Al-Mosaiwi & Johnstone, Clinical Psychological Science (2018); Brown & Levinson, Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage (1987).