There is a stretch of 1981 that nobody watched.
Between his discharge from the Army in March and his arrival at his grandmother’s house that December, Jeffrey Dahmer spent roughly six months in Miami Beach, Florida. It is the least documented period of his adult life. There were no arrests. No employment records have surfaced. No psychiatric contact, no probation officer, no family in the same state. For half a year, the only account of where he was and what he was doing comes from Jeffrey himself, told afterwards, and from a father hearing it down a telephone line from a thousand miles away.
That is precisely why it is worth writing about.
Leaving
On 24 March 1981 he was sent to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, for debriefing, and given a travel voucher good for anywhere in the United States. He chose Florida. The reasoning, as he later described it, was straightforward and almost hopeful: he did not want to go back to the cold, and he thought the sun and the ocean might do something for him.
Before he flew, he did something worth noting. He packed his trunk — fatigues, jacket, trousers, everything he owned in the Army, along with his government correspondence — and sent it home to 4480 West Bath Road. Into that trunk he also put the German pornographic magazines he had bought in Europe, rather than carry them to Florida. Masters reads this as an attempt to start clean, and it is hard to read it any other way. He was posting his past to Ohio and getting on a plane without it.
There is a detail in that shipment which matters. His father did not know he had left the Army. The trunk arrived unannounced, with no note and nothing to say where Jeffrey had gone. The discharge papers followed a few days later. It was another month before the telephone rang.
He had, in the most literal sense, disappeared from the view of everyone who knew him.
Sunshine Subs
What he found in Miami Beach was a motel room and a job at a sandwich shop called the Sunshine Sub Shop, half a mile down the road. He worked seven days a week. By his own later account, he spent essentially all of what he earned on drink.
Two things about this period are striking, and both cut against the story people expect.
The first is that he made no attempt to find the gay bars or bathhouses of a city that had plenty of both. Miami Beach in 1981 was not a difficult place to find that scene. He did not look. Whatever he had gone south to escape, he was not chasing it there.
The second is Julie.
She was an English girl working at the sub shop, in the country on a visitor’s visa and working illegally. She and Jeffrey became friends — the only female friend, Masters records, that he would have until after his arrest a decade later. She wanted to legitimise her status and eventually asked him to marry her so she could stay. He liked her. He discouraged her, and declined.
It is a small, ordinary episode, and there is almost nothing else like it anywhere in his life. Two people working the same counter, one asking the other for a serious favour, the other saying no but staying friendly. She telephoned him in Ohio a few times afterwards, just to see how he was getting on. That is the entire recorded content of the friendship, and it is more than he managed with anyone else for ten years.
The beach
When the money ran out and he could no longer pay for the motel, he took what he owned and slept on the beach. He went there from work at the end of a shift and slept under the sky.
The image has a certain romance to it, which is worth resisting. He was twenty-one, working seven days a week at a sandwich counter, drinking the proceeds, and homeless. The sun and the ocean he had flown south for had not done what he hoped. Masters records the conclusion he reached there, and it is the reason this period matters: the thoughts he had gone to Florida to escape had come with him. They had not been left in the trunk.
What he took from that, in Masters’ account, was not that he needed help. It was that the thoughts needed to be starved — that there must be nothing left to think about.
That is the sentence to sit with. He had run three thousand miles, changed his climate, taken a job, made a friend, slept on sand under stars, and the conclusion he drew from its failure was not I should tell someone. It was that escape does not work and something else would have to.
Where the sources disagree
The record of this period is thin enough that its two main sources contradict each other, and the honest thing is to say so rather than to pick the more convenient version.
Masters, working from Jeffrey’s own account, has him running out of money, leaving the motel, and camping on the beach until he called his father for the fare home.
Lionel’s memoir tells it differently. In one of those phone calls, he writes, Jeffrey said he was living with a woman — an illegal alien who had offered him money to marry her. Lionel and Shari advised him against it.
The two versions can be partly reconciled: Julie is plainly the woman in both accounts, though the direction of the offer differs, and it is possible Jeffrey stayed with her for a period before or after the beach. But it is equally possible that he simply told his father something more respectable than the truth. A young man sleeping rough and calling home has reasons to improve the story.
The endings differ too. Masters has Lionel sending the fare. Lionel records that Shari refused to send money at all, and instead left a plane ticket waiting at the airport — she would bring him home, but she would not fund him where he was.
We cannot resolve these, and we are not going to pretend to. What both accounts agree on is the shape: he ran out of everything, and he called Ohio.
Coming back
Lionel went to Cleveland airport expecting a downtrodden son. From a distance, Jeffrey was smiling and looked cheerful. Up close, his father realised he was drunk — that the cheerfulness was the drink. He was filthy, his clothes stained and unwashed, a scraggly untended moustache, a cigarette hanging from his mouth. He apologised for having had a few too many on the plane.
Within days he had brightened. He chopped wood, helped take down a tree, gathered branches, made himself as useful as he possibly could. Lionel’s reading was that the Army had at least left him a work ethic.
Then, with winter coming, they decided to insulate the water pipes. Jeffrey helped in the attic. But when it came to the crawl space beneath the house, he was emphatic that his father should not go down there. He would do it himself.
Lionel watched him work on his back, wrapping the copper lines and tying the insulation with braided twine. He came out dusty and enthusiastic, ready for the next job.
The crawl space was where the remains of Steven Hicks had been stored three years earlier.
And within that same period at Bath — while his father and Shari were at work — he went out to the drainage pipe, retrieved the bags of bones he had hidden there, carried them to the woods beyond the property, and smashed them with a rock until they were splinters. The skull he pulverised. He scattered the fragments across the trees by hand.
I had to, he said of it later.
What the silence contains
Two weeks after coming home he was arrested at the Ramada Inn for drinking vodka straight from the bottle in the lounge, refusing to leave, and swearing at the officers who came. Disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. It went no further than a municipal citation, but it settled the question of whether he could stay in Bath. In December, Lionel and Shari sent him to Catherine’s house in West Allis.
Which brings this period into focus. Miami Beach sits between two structures — the Army, which had held him for two years and then expelled him, and his grandmother’s house, which would hold him for six. In between there is a gap where nothing held him at all.
It is tempting to treat that gap as empty because so little is recorded in it. But something happened in those six months, and the evidence for it is what he did immediately afterwards. He came back to Ohio and destroyed the last physical trace of Steven Hicks, thoroughly, with his hands. That is not the act of a man who had put it behind him. It is the act of a man who had spent half a year discovering that he could not.
The beach is not the interesting part. What is interesting is that he went there to become someone else, and came back knowing it could not be done.
Sources: Brian Masters, The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer (1993); Lionel Dahmer, A Father’s Story (1994). Where the two accounts conflict, both are given.
Jeffrey Dahmer Memorial 