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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).

A New Primary Source: The 1992 Competency Evaluation

Most of what the public knows about Jeffrey Dahmer’s psychiatric history comes filtered through trial testimony, journalism, and decades of secondhand retelling. It is rare to encounter the underlying clinical paperwork itself — the actual document a forensic evaluator typed up in the weeks before his trial, before any of it had been summarised, dramatised, or simplified for a courtroom or a headline.

The memorial has obtained a copy of one such document: Jeffrey Dahmer’s competency evaluation, Case No. F-912542, dated April 27, 1992. It was prepared ahead of his trial to assess his fitness to stand trial and his sanity at the time of the offences. It is dense, clinical, and unglamorous — exactly what a real psychiatric record looks like, as opposed to how one gets portrayed on screen.

We are publishing what it contains, and being transparent about what it changed in our own previous reporting.

What the Document Shows

The evaluation is thorough. It draws on interviews, a review of police and medical examiner records, and a substantial body of testing — some of it newly administered, some of it years old.

Neurological testing. The document states plainly that Jeffrey underwent an electroencephalogram (EEG), a CAT scan of the brain, and a chromosomal analysis. All three were reported as negative for pathology. No structural abnormality. No seizure activity. No chromosomal anomaly.

Psychological testing, across years. The evaluator references a substantial battery: the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (Revised), the Rorschach, and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. The MMPI had first been administered in 1986, then again twice in 1989, while Jeffrey was on probation — years before the murders that led to his arrest came to light. It was administered again across several dates in late 1991 and early 1992, following his arrest. The evaluator notes that the 1986 and 1989 profiles point to a personality disorder with symptoms of anxiety and depression, while the 1991 and 1992 profiles — taken after a substantial period of incarceration — show a worsening of adjustment and greater intrapsychic discomfort. The three profiles together were strongly associated, in the evaluator’s words, with acting-out behaviour and a negative therapeutic prognosis.

A documented mental health history that begins with absence. The evaluation states clearly that Jeffrey had never received treatment in a psychiatric hospital, and had not received counselling as a child or adolescent — despite a reportedly family history of emotional difficulties and substance abuse. The clinical record of his interior life, in other words, effectively begins in adulthood, after most of the damage had already been done.

Outpatient therapy he resisted. As an adult, Jeffrey was ordered by the court into outpatient therapy with a Milwaukee psychologist, Dr. Evelyn Rosen. He did not participate voluntarily, and resisted her attempts to work with him. He was also referred to the DePaul outpatient alcohol treatment programme following his discharge from a work release programme, and began seeing a Dr. William Crowley roughly one month before his arrest in July 1991 — though he later said he could not be open in that therapeutic context because of the criminal nature of the behaviour he was engaged in. He was, in effect, in treatment while still actively killing, and unable to say so.

What was happening to him at the moment of evaluation. By April 1992, Jeffrey was being seen approximately three times a week by Dr. Patricia Allen, the clinical psychologist at Columbia Correctional Institution. She reported that he was being treated for anxiety and depression, housed in a restricted unit while being oriented to the prison setting. He had been prescribed Prozac — two 20mg capsules in the morning — by his treating psychiatrist, Dr. Richard Arnesen. Dr. Allen noted he seemed to be experiencing less severe bouts of depression at that time, though she did not consider him imminently suicidal.

The document also notes that Jeffrey reported being subject to both taunting and threats from fellow prisoners during this period, and that he had become, in his own word, “paranoid” — while acknowledging there was a realistic basis for that fear.

What This Document Corrected

When we first wrote about Jeffrey’s psychiatric history on this memorial, we made a factual error. We claimed that no neurological examination — no CAT scan, no MRI, no EEG — was ever performed on him, and that the question of a biological origin for his trance states and compulsive behaviour was never seriously pursued.

That claim was wrong, and this document is why we know it.

We have gone back and corrected both articles affected by this discovery. In “A Mind in Pieces: The Psychiatric Diagnoses of Jeffrey Dahmer,” the Trance States section and the closing “Final Note” have both been revised to reflect what this document shows: that an EEG and CAT scan were in fact performed, ahead of his trial in 1992, and came back negative. We have left the original error visible rather than quietly editing it away, because the memorial believes that transparent correction is part of doing this work honestly.

This finding also bears on “The Mind That Wouldn’t Stay: Jeffrey Dahmer’s Dissociative Episodes and What They Tell Us,” which explores the trance states and dissociative patterns documented throughout his life. A negative EEG and CAT scan do not rule out every possible neurological contribution — these are blunt instruments, especially when not administered during an active episode — but they meaningfully narrow the most obvious structural explanations. The evidence points more strongly toward the psychological and developmental account that article lays out, rather than an undetected physical abnormality.

Why This Matters

A 34-year-old clinical document might seem like a small thing to build an article around. We think it matters for a specific reason: it is a piece of Jeffrey Dahmer as he actually was on paper in April 1992, not as he has been since reconstructed, dramatised, or argued over. It shows a man who had been formally tested and found neurologically unremarkable, who had a documented history of resisting help when help was offered, who was, at the exact moment of evaluation, on antidepressants, in a restricted unit, frightened of the other men around him, and being seen three times a week by a psychologist who did not think he was about to die by his own hand.

None of this changes what he did. It does change what the historical record actually says — and getting that record right, including correcting our own mistakes within it, is the whole basis on which this memorial asks to be trusted.

Primary source: Jeffrey L. Dahmer, Competency Evaluation, Case No. F-912542, April 27, 1992.

Why We Are Here: Voices from the Memorial Community

The jeffreydahmer.memorial was built on a conviction: that Jeffrey Dahmer deserves to be understood as a full human being, not reduced to the worst of what he did. Over time, a community has gathered here — researchers, writers, people with lived experience of loneliness, people with faith questions, people who simply couldn’t stop reading once they started. They come from different countries, different generations, different frameworks entirely.

We asked some of them five questions. What follows are their answers, in their own words.

How did you first hear about Jeffrey?

Some came to his story through the shock of the original news cycle. Others found him decades later, through a film, a novel, or a Netflix series watched during an ordinary evening.

Debbie, 66, found herself watching the news in 1991 by accident, immediately after serving on a jury in an unrelated murder trial — her first experience of the justice system. She came home exhausted from testimony about things she had never wanted to see, turned on the television, and heard a reporter describing body parts and drilled skulls. She lunged for the remote. For decades she kept it that way. Then, last December, recovering from a hip replacement, she flipped through Netflix and saw Dahmer: Monster. “Hey, I remember that dude,” she thought. She watched it. She started researching. “It hit me like a ton of bricks out of left field,” she says. “It’s definitely not something I was looking for or wanted. But here I am.”

Sylli, 46, heard about Jeffrey in 1991 when she was twelve years old and the story made headlines around the world. As a child, she couldn’t fully understand the complexity of what had happened. She only knew it was a story that stayed in her mind long after the news coverage faded. It wasn’t until 2022, when the Netflix series was released, that her interest was truly reignited. What started as renewed curiosity soon became something much deeper.

Gray, 22, came to Jeffrey the way many of her generation did — through the Netflix series, which led her immediately to the real case. “I found that the show does not come close to what actually happened,” she says. She went far past it.

Yarrow, 37, heard about Jeffrey in 2016 and found in his story something that would become personally significant in unexpected ways.

Eden G. encountered the name through a friend who loved film — a passing mention of My Friend Dahmer that lodged and eventually became something much more.

Lucy first came across Jeffrey through Poppy Z. Brite’s novel Exquisite Corpse, which quoted from his 1994 autopsy report. “His feet were still shackled because people were that afraid of him,” she recalls. “I found this to be weird then and even weirder now, especially considering that not only was Jeff deceased but had been rather placid in prison.” Years later, the Netflix series drew her back. She went looking for the real case.

Frisky, 40, saw him for the first time as a teenager, in a television interview. “Something inside me stirred feelings I had never experienced before,” she says. “He felt close and familiar, as if at some point in life I would come across something of his again, or get to know him more deeply.” She has never forgotten the feeling.

What called your attention to his story?

The answers to this question fall into patterns — but the patterns are wider and more varied than one might expect.

For many it was his honesty. Gray was struck by what she describes as the rarity of it: “Other serial killers, like Ted Bundy, don’t even come close to the level of self-reflection Jeffrey had done. He never once tried to lie his way out of the consequences of his actions, he knew what he had done.” She points to something he said in his confessions — that if nobody had caught him, he would have kept going — as evidence of a self-knowledge that moved her. “He knew himself and his compulsions so well that even he agreed that his getting caught was ‘better’ for everybody else and humanity in general.”

Lucy was struck by the same quality. “I think that his openness and honesty about his life and crimes makes it easier to connect with him. If he’d lied constantly or made excuses for his behaviour, this would have been difficult.”

For Sylli, it was the complexity that drew her deeper. “The more I learned, the more I realized that there were no simple answers. I became interested in understanding the person behind the headlines — the loneliness, the isolation, the psychology, and the many contradictions that existed within him. His story challenged me to look beyond black-and-white thinking.”

Frisky was drawn immediately to the human being behind the headlines. “What struck me most about his story was, quite literally, his loneliness and his complete lack of self-worth. I found myself wondering how such a handsome man could be so utterly alone. It was heartbreaking.”

How do you define your connection with him?

This is the hardest question, and the answers here are the most personal. They range widely — and that range is honest.

Gray describes a connection that is grounded in recognition. “Jeff, except of course for the gruesome killings, has a lot in common with me character-wise and mental health-wise. His coping mechanisms reminded me a lot of my own. The fact that he was heavily misunderstood and so extremely lonely that he had difficulties even forming normal human relationships also reminded me a lot of myself.” She is careful to locate the connection precisely: it is not spiritual, but human. It is the experience of seeing something of yourself in someone else’s story.

Sylli describes Jeffrey as “a quiet presence that accompanies me through my thoughts, my writing, and my creative work.” She thinks of him often in terms of nostalgia — not for the events of his life, but for a feeling she cannot easily name. “He is a source of inspiration, curiosity, and imagination.”

Lucy notes that the connection changed her social world as much as her inner one. “I have met quite a few friendly, like-minded people due to our common interest in Jeff. Being part of the online community who study and discuss Dahmer has definitely made a positive impact on my life.”

Yarrow speaks from a different framework entirely. A practicing druid, they describe Jeffrey as a constant presence and an ally — someone who, over time, has become part of their spiritual practice. For them, his story was also the beginning of a journey toward self-understanding: “Jeff having to accept himself as a gay man led me to accept myself as primarily attracted to men.”

Eden G. describes an experience that arrived unbidden and stayed. They see Jeffrey in dreams. Once, when their cat died and they were drifting toward sleep, they heard a voice they recognised as his. “I guess as a guide and a friendly soul that’s just floating around, paying attention to similar energy out and about the world.” For them, the connection is not chosen. It was received.

Frisky describes Jeffrey as her emotional anchor. She is in his presence every day — in her thoughts, in her prayers. Seeing his face, reading about him, learning something new about him lifts her spirits when she is low. She knows how that sounds. She offers it anyway, because it is true.

Debbie describes herself simply as hyperfixated, in the way her neurodivergent autistic brain hyperfixates on things. “It hit me like a ton of bricks out of left field.” She finds him handsome. She is sixty-six years old and completely unashamed. There is something refreshing in that.

Has this connection changed you?

Almost universally: yes.

Sylli describes the most unexpected transformation. Creativity had always been part of her, she says, but it remained in the background. Through her engagement with Jeffrey’s story, something dormant came back to life. She is now writing a novel. “In many ways, studying Jeffrey’s case led me back to myself. It helped me recognize abilities and creative instincts that I had overlooked for years.”

Gray found in his story a mirror for her own mental health experience, and through that mirror, a way to understand herself better. “Something about that honesty made me feel understood.”

Yarrow found self-acceptance. Through Jeffrey’s story — through the difficulty of his own reckoning with his sexuality in a time and place that offered no path forward — Yarrow was able to reckon with their own.

Eden G. says they might have gone down a different, darker path without it. They describe this as a kind of redirection, a steadying presence during difficult moments.

Frisky says simply: she is not the same person she was before. “I see everything differently now, even in my daily life. Something inside me has changed forever, but I can say with certainty that this change has been positive and empowering.”

What would you say to people who refuse to forgive or understand?

The responses to this question are the most carefully worded. All of them, in different ways, resist telling people how to feel.

Gray makes a distinction she considers essential. “Too many people treat forgiveness and forgetting as if they are the same thing, but they are not. Forgiveness does not mean excusing, justifying, or being okay with what someone has done. It means acknowledging the harm for what it is.” She adds: “Whether you choose to forgive is entirely your decision.”

Sylli takes the same position from a different angle. “I understand why many people struggle with forgiveness, and I would never tell anyone how they should feel. Understanding and excusing are two very different things. Seeking to understand someone’s psychology, struggles, or motivations does not mean approving of their actions.”

Lucy directs her response toward the specific problem of misinformation. “It does frustrate me to see people basing their opinions about the Jeffrey Dahmer case on what they’ve seen in the Netflix show when so much of it was fictionalised. I would encourage people to watch Jeff’s interviews, or footage of his father, Pat Kennedy, or Pamela Bass, to get a clearer picture of who he was as a person outside of his criminal activity.”

Frisky draws on her faith. “If the Lord is willing to forgive, then who are we as human beings to judge? In truth, no one has that right, not when compared to the immense love of our Heavenly Father.”

Eden G. is direct: “He did the crimes, and when he was alive he admitted to every single one of them. That alone is rare in serial killer cases. Not boasting — just admitting to it. That’s about as good as a criminal can do when it comes to responsibility.”

A Note from the Memorial

These seven voices represent something the memorial has always believed: that the people drawn to Jeffrey Dahmer’s story are not a monolith. They are researchers and writers, people in recovery and people in grief, people of faith and people of none, people who found self-acceptance here and people who simply couldn’t look away. They come from different countries, different decades of their lives, different ways of understanding the world.

What they share is a refusal to look away — and the conviction that looking away never helped anyone understand anything.

The memorial is grateful to everyone who shared their story here.

The Mind That Wouldn’t Stay: Jeffrey Dahmer’s Dissociative Episodes and What They Tell Us

When the psychological dimensions of Jeffrey Dahmer’s life are discussed, the conversation almost always centres on diagnoses — borderline personality disorder, paraphilias, necrophilia, psychopathy. What receives far less attention is something Jeffrey himself described repeatedly and directly: a progressive inability to stay present in his own mind, to feel things in the way he understood feeling was supposed to work, to control the thoughts that arrived without warning and would not leave.

This is not a question of whether Jeffrey Dahmer was legally sane. Courts examined that at length in 1992 and reached a verdict. It is a different question, and a harder one: what was actually happening in the psychological architecture of a man who described himself as having shut down, who said his thoughts came at him “like arrows from out of the blue,” who told a psychiatrist that he hadn’t cried in years and didn’t know if he still could?

What Dissociation Actually Is

Before approaching Jeffrey’s documented experience, it is worth being precise about what dissociation means, because the word is both overused in popular culture and more specific than it appears.

Dissociation is not a single thing. It exists on a spectrum. At the mild end, it includes the ordinary experience of “zoning out” during a drive you cannot remember making, or finding yourself at the end of a task with no memory of completing it. In its more severe forms, dissociation involves a genuine rupture between a person’s conscious experience and their sense of self — depersonalisation (feeling detached from one’s body or thoughts), derealisation (the sense that the world is unreal), and in the most acute cases, significant amnesia for periods of time or for traumatic events.

Research shows that children who endure repeated abuse or neglect are more likely to develop dissociative disorders later in life. This survival strategy can become deeply ingrained, making it difficult for them to feel present and connected to reality even in adulthood. The dissociative state begins as a defence — the mind’s means of escaping what the body cannot escape — and may become, over time, a habitual pattern of response to stress, threat, or intolerable emotion.

When parents and caregivers are safe and responsive, children gradually form a coherent sense of self. When caregivers are frightening, neglectful, or inconsistent, that integration process can be disrupted. The child who cannot rely on their caregivers for co-regulation begins, instead, to regulate alone — and one of the means of alone-regulation is to not be fully present in an experience that is otherwise unbearable.

The Early Evidence

Jeffrey Dahmer’s childhood, as documented by his father Lionel in A Father’s Story and by Brian Masters in The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer, contains multiple features that the scientific literature associates with later dissociative tendencies.

His mother Joyce suffered severe emotional instability throughout his infancy — episodes of medication dependency, mental hospitalisation, and emotional volatility that created what the research literature characterises as a frightening, inconsistent caregiving environment. His father Lionel was by his own admission absorbed in his career and emotionally unavailable. The family moved repeatedly through Jeffrey’s early childhood, removing him from every stable relationship he built.

Jeffrey himself, when speaking with psychiatrists in 1991, described his father as always too busy, and his mother as functioning in a sedated haze for much of his childhood. He described spending enormous amounts of time alone, creating private worlds — most notably “Infinity Land,” a game involving figures who were annihilated by proximity, spiralling toward a central void.

By his teenage years, Lionel Dahmer was observing in his son what he described as an “awesome air of secretiveness,” a difficulty reaching him, a sense that Jeff was retreating progressively from contact with the world. “Jeff never showed much emotion outside,” Lionel recalled. Teachers described a student who was present but absent, capable but unreachable, intelligent but applying that intelligence to nothing.

By the time Jeffrey left school, Brian Masters documents, he had effectively ceased to form the kind of emotional connections that would have tethered him to shared reality. He was stuck in an early phase of emotional development — not because he had chosen to remain there, but because the developmental bridge across which most children travel had been, in his case, too unstable to cross.

“I Started Shutting Down”

The most direct evidence of a dissociative pattern comes from Jeffrey’s own words, documented across his police interrogation, his psychiatric evaluations, and his confessions.

Reflecting on the period of his parents’ divorce — which coincided, catastrophically, with the murder of Steven Hicks in June 1978 — Jeffrey told psychiatrists: “Maybe I started shutting down during the divorce proceedings. It was my way of shutting out any painful thoughts, just taking an attitude of not caring or pretending not to care, to save myself the pain of what was going on. That was effective, it worked.”

The phrase “shutting down” is significant. It describes not merely suppression but a deliberate — and then habitual — withdrawal from emotional presence. This is consonant with what researchers describe as the coping function of dissociation: a complex mental process arising in response to traumatic experiences or extreme stress that disrupts the typical integration of various aspects of consciousness. It is well established that experiencing multiple traumatic events during childhood can prompt children to develop dissociation as a self-regulatory mechanism, significantly affecting their mental and behavioural functioning.

What Jeffrey describes as “shutting down” — and identifies explicitly as a learned response to pain — is recognisable in this framework. He found, at eighteen, in the worst summer of his life, that he could prevent emotional experience from reaching him by this method. He continued using it for the rest of his life. And as with many coping strategies that begin as protective, it became, over time, a cage.

Thoughts He Could Not Control

Alongside the “shutting down” — the chosen withdrawal — Jeffrey also described experiences that were not chosen at all. He spoke, in his interrogation with Detective Dennis Murphy, of violent intrusive fantasies that arrived without warning. He said he did not know where they came from, had not sought them, had not derived them from anything he had read or watched. They came, in his words, “like arrows, shooting into my mind from out of the blue.”

This description has a precise psychological name: ego-dystonic intrusive thoughts. These are thoughts experienced as alien to the self — unwanted, disturbing, intrusive, and fundamentally at odds with how the person wishes to experience themselves. Jeffrey repeatedly described his violent urges in these terms: he did not want to have them, was horrified by them, tried to suppress them, and found them returning.

This dimension of his experience is recorded in the psychological tests administered to him in 1987, when he completed the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory. Among the statements he marked as true: “Ideas keep turning over and over in my mind and they won’t go away.” And: “I keep having strange thoughts I wish I could get rid of.”

These are not the statements of a man who has embraced his violent desires or finds them ego-syntonic. They are the statements of someone who is at war with his own inner life, who recognises the thoughts as something imposed upon him rather than generated by him — and who cannot make them stop.

The Compulsion Question

The legal proceedings in 1992 drew a sharp distinction between deliberate control and compulsive behaviour. The prosecution argued Jeffrey was in complete control throughout his crimes; the defence argued he was in the grip of a compulsion that overrode his will. Brian Masters, examining the evidence carefully, identified both dimensions as present and genuinely in tension.

On one hand, Jeffrey planned methodically — he chose victims deliberately, lured them with care, managed the aftermath with precision. On the other, the frequency of the crimes accelerated dramatically in the final years, until the incidents multiplied until they were treading upon one another’s heels in a frenzy of unfocused caprice. The methodical quality broke down. The gaps between episodes shortened from years to weeks to days.

This acceleration is consistent with what the research literature documents in dissociation-linked violence: dissociative states marked by high emotional intensity and impaired impulse control can result in violent behaviour during dissociative episodes. The impaired impulse control is not consistent across time; it worsens as the underlying dissociative pressure builds.

Jeffrey himself described the state immediately preceding each crime as one in which normal inhibitory processes failed. He spoke of being “swamped” by a surge of feeling that was no longer accessible to reason. This is a description of a state, not a justification for an outcome.

What Science Currently Understands

It is important to be honest about the limits of what can be concluded.

Jeffrey Dahmer was never formally diagnosed with a dissociative disorder. His psychiatric evaluations identified various personality features — schizoid tendencies, a borderline dimension, profound narcissistic deficit — but no evaluator working with him made a formal dissociation diagnosis. This matters: it means that what we are examining here is a pattern observable in the evidence, not a clinical verdict.

What the scientific literature allows us to say with some confidence is this: emotional neglect, emotional abuse, and the broader experience of childhood trauma have been found to have significant indirect effects on emotional regulation difficulties through dissociative experiences. Jeffrey’s childhood environment included multiple forms of these — emotional unavailability, parental mental illness, repeated disruption, abandonment. The scientific groundwork for dissociative coping was laid early.

Chronic early stress affects neural systems involved in memory, emotion regulation, and self-representation. We do not have neurological data on Jeffrey Dahmer. But we have his own testimony about what it felt like to be inside his mind: the shutting down, the thoughts arriving like arrows, the stifled emotions he did not know how to recover. “I don’t even know if I have the capacity for normal emotions or not,” he told a psychiatrist, “because I haven’t cried for a long time. You just stifle them for so long that maybe you lose them, partially at least.”

There is also a documented relationship between dissociation and substance use. Jeffrey’s alcohol dependency — which began at fifteen and never fully remitted — operated, in his own account, as a suppression mechanism: he drank to quiet the thoughts he could not otherwise silence, and to maintain the “shutting down” when it threatened to fail.

What This Means for Understanding

The memorial is not a clinical journal. We are not arguing a diagnosis. What we are doing is what we have always done: looking at the full documented humanity of a person whose life has been consistently reduced to its worst chapters.

The picture that emerges from this documentation is not of a man who experienced no interior life, or who moved through his crimes in a state of cold, untroubled calculation. It is of a person who was, from childhood, fighting a losing battle with his own mind — who found a coping strategy in “shutting down” that helped him survive an impossible adolescence and then progressively cost him access to everything it might have meant to be a person in the world; who was assailed by thoughts he did not want and could not control; who knew, in the clearest possible terms, that something in him was wrong, and who did not know what to do with that knowledge.

This does not mitigate what he did. Nothing does. Seventeen people were killed by a man who could not find any other way to live with what he was. That is the devastating truth of the matter.

But it is also true that we cannot understand how such a thing happens — and perhaps, over time, find better ways to identify and reach people before the worst occurs — unless we are willing to look at all of it, including the parts that require us to see a human mind in genuine distress, rather than a monster in comfortable possession of itself.

Primary sources: Lionel Dahmer, A Father’s Story (1994); Brian Masters, The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer (1993). Scientific references: Demirci & Yıldız (2024), Frontiers in Psychiatry; Serafini et al. (2024), PMC; APIBHS (2025); Psychology Today (2026); Fiorelli et al. (2025), PMC.

Feels Like Coming: On Arrival, and What It Costs to Get There

The title will stop some people in their tracks. That’s intentional.

Feels Like Coming is the new single from Door213 — a collaboration between Necro (Portugal) and Jeff Knapp (Germany) — and it carries a double meaning that is worth sitting with rather than dismissing. Yes, the obvious reading is there. But the one that drives the music, the one that drives the video, is something else entirely: I feel like I’m arriving to where you are.

The video makes this literal. Through fields, forests, highways at night — Necro runs. Not metaphorically. The whole visual structure is a journey toward someone, across distance, across time, across whatever separates the living from the dead. It is the same impulse that drives the memorial itself: the refusal to accept that a wall exists between the present and 1994, between the world and the man the world discarded.

The provocative title is the point of entry. What you find inside is the journey.

Feels Like Coming will be available on all major streaming platforms on July the 1st.

One Semester: Jeffrey Dahmer at Ohio State University

In September 1978, a eighteen-year-old arrived at the Columbus campus of Ohio State University with a bag that contained a snakeskin from Boy Scout camp and two photographs of his dog.

He had packed no books. He had no declared major beyond a vague gesture toward business. He had no interest in being there at all. He was going, as his father Lionel Dahmer would later write, more or less on orders.

What nobody knew — not Lionel, not his new partner Shari who had enthusiastically taken Jeffrey shopping for college clothes, not the three roommates waiting in Room 541 of Ross House dormitory — was that Jeffrey Dahmer had already committed murder. Three months before he set foot on that campus, he had killed a nineteen-year-old hitchhiker named Steven Hicks. He had spent the summer alone with what he had done. And now he was supposed to go to university.

How He Got There

The summer of 1978 was, by any measure, a catastrophic unravelling of every structure in Jeffrey’s life.

His parents’ divorce, years in the making, became final that July. His father Lionel had already moved out. His mother Joyce, in defiance of a court order, loaded the car in August and took twelve-year-old David to Wisconsin, leaving Jeffrey alone in the house on Bath Road. There was half a gallon of milk in the refrigerator and nothing else. The refrigerator itself was broken.

For weeks, no one noticed.

When Lionel eventually discovered what had happened — he had been unable to call or visit under the terms of the court order — he arrived to find Jeffrey, in Brian Masters’ words in The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer, looking “like an orphan, disoriented and vague.” He and Shari moved in immediately and set about sorting the situation. The solution they arrived at was college.

Shari drove Jeffrey shopping. She talked about how exciting it would all be — new people, new environment, a whole new experience. Jeffrey went along with it. His response to most suggestions at this period of his life was passive acquiescence. He nodded. He accepted. He forgot.

The university plan had originated earlier, at a family dinner following Jeffrey’s high school graduation. Lionel had told his sons that he could no longer afford to pay for college; the divorce had depleted him. Jeffrey’s grandparents offered to pay instead, if Jeffrey improved his grades. The decision had been made around him, for him, about him — without much consultation of the person most affected.

Shari and Lionel drove him to Columbus. Lionel felt, he would later write, some relief that his son was gone.

Room 541

Jeffrey was placed in Ross House dormitory, Room 541, sharing with three roommates: Craig Chweiger, Michael Prochaska, and Jeffrey Gerderick.

He gave them good reason, almost immediately, to think him strange.

He spent most of his time lying on his back in the top bunk, playing a Beatles album on repeat. The track he returned to most was I Am the Walrus. He pinned a photograph of Vice President Walter Mondale to the wall. He stacked all the room’s furniture in one corner for no apparent reason. He kicked the tiled wall of the bathroom and damaged it, again for no apparent reason.

Most of all, he drank.

The roommates’ account, gathered later by Lionel when he came to collect Jeffrey’s belongings, described a daily pattern of hard liquor — two bottles of whiskey a day — that left Jeffrey unable to get up for his morning classes. He would sometimes tape lectures so he could listen to them while he drank. He sold blood plasma at a university donation centre with such frequency that the staff eventually marked his fingernails to prevent him giving too often. He had no friends, no acquaintances. He seemed, as Masters records, to “appear to live in limbo.”

When the roommates went out together in the evenings, they left Jeffrey behind. He was considered, simply, too strange to bring along.

There was a row of beer and wine bottles lined up along the top of his closet. When Lionel collected his belongings at the end of the semester, it was the first thing he saw.

The grade report arrived a few days before Jeffrey himself did. After a full quarter at Ohio State, he had earned a cumulative grade point of 0.45 — two hours of college credit. He had failed Introduction to Anthropology. He had not completed Greco-Roman History. His highest grade was a B- in Riflery.

When Lionel told him he would not be returning, Jeffrey looked relieved. A burden had been lifted.

What He Was Carrying

It is impossible to understand the Ohio State semester without understanding what Jeffrey was carrying through it.

In June 1978, three months before he enrolled, Jeffrey had picked up a hitchhiker on a rural Ohio road and taken him back to the house on Bath Road, which was empty. Steven Hicks was nineteen years old. He had been on his way to see his girlfriend. He had taken off his shirt in the summer heat.

After a few hours, when Hicks said he was leaving, Jeffrey struck him with a barbell, strangled him, and spent the rest of that night and the following days in a state of terror, dismembering the body and scattering the remains.

He was eighteen years old. He was then left alone in that house for the rest of the summer, with what he had done.

Lionel Dahmer, reflecting years later on the Ohio State period, would write that he knows now what Jeffrey was listening to in his silences, what pictures were flashing behind his eyes as he sat slumped on the living room sofa giving monosyllabic answers to questions. He was watching it again and again. His father described it as a horror show running ceaselessly behind Jeffrey’s moving eyes.

How trivial, Lionel would write, his talk of college and careers must have seemed to Jeffrey at that time. How odd and unrealisable all of it — my system of values, built on work and family, like quaint, incomprehensible artifacts from a vanished civilisation.

Masters’ account draws on interviews with Jeffrey himself, who confirmed that at Ohio State he broke down and cried alone in his room — once, and about Hicks. Not about any of the failures at university. About Steven Hicks.

After

By December 1978, it was agreed on all sides that Jeffrey would not return to Ohio State. Lionel began looking for what he could do with his son. Jeffrey cycled through aborted attempts at employment, was arrested drunk and disorderly at a local Ramada Inn, and finally exhausted the available options.

In January 1979, Lionel drove Jeffrey to the Army recruiting office in Akron. Jeffrey filled in the forms on what Lionel described as automatic pilot. He enlisted for three years.

He seemed, as he left for basic training, afraid.

The brief Army period that followed would be the only time in Jeffrey’s adult life when his drinking was controlled by external discipline — during the first weeks when no alcohol was permitted. When it was permitted again, he rushed back to it. He was discharged early, for alcohol dependency, in March 1981.

The Ohio State semester was one door closing among many. But it closes with particular weight. It was the first attempt by anyone to provide Jeffrey with the structures of an ordinary life — routine, study, peer community — after the summer in which everything had gone wrong. It failed completely, because the summer had left him carrying something no university semester, however well-intentioned, could contain or address.

He left that campus with 0.45 of a grade point and a beer bottle collection lined along a closet shelf. He left knowing something no one else in that dormitory knew, something he would carry for another thirteen years until, finally, in July 1991, he told Detective Patrick Kennedy what had happened on Bath Road in the summer of 1978.

Primary sources: Lionel Dahmer, A Father’s Story (1994); Brian Masters, The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer (1993).

A note on chronology: Steven Hicks was murdered on 18 June, 1978. His remains were not found until 1991.

The Human Being He Was: Documented Moments of Warmth in Jeffrey Dahmer’s Life

This article is not an attempt to redeem Jeffrey Dahmer, minimise his crimes, or suggest that the warmth documented here cancels out what he did. It does not.

What it is, is an honest accounting of something the public record shows but the media has largely ignored: that Jeffrey Dahmer was a human being, and that human beings — even those who commit terrible things — contain contradictions. He was capable of warmth. He was capable of genuine tenderness. He was capable, at moments, of reaching toward something good.

These moments are real. They are documented. They deserve to be known.

The Bird

In the early 1960s, when the family was living in Ames, Iowa, Jeffrey was out riding with his father when he spotted something on the pavement ahead. He insisted they stop.

It was a nighthawk that had fallen from its nest and lay helpless on the hard ground. Jeffrey urged his father to pick it up. Together, they took it home.

Over the next several weeks, the family nursed the bird — feeding it milk and corn syrup from a baby bottle, then solid food, watching it grow. When it was finally strong enough, they released it on a bright spring day. Lionel Dahmer, in his memoir A Father’s Story, writes that it may have been the single happiest moment of Jeffrey’s life.

Jeffrey’s eyes were wide and gleaming. He watched the bird rise into the sky.

The Animals He Cared For

Joyce Dahmer’s diary notes that from very early in his life, Jeffrey showed unusual tenderness toward animals. At eighteen months, with a pet turtle, she wrote that he was “so very gentle.”

He had a series of pets throughout childhood — dogs, cats, fish, rabbits — and formed deep attachments to them. His dog Frisky, a cheerful animal who came with the family through multiple moves, held a special place. When the family relocated and could not always bring animals along, the loss of pets caused him real grief. He never grew accustomed to it.

Brian Masters, in The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer, notes that Jeffrey Dahmer never harmed an animal he knew personally. Whatever else his relationship to living creatures became, his affection for the animals in his care was genuine.

His Brother

When Joyce became pregnant with David, she worried about how Jeffrey would react. She needn’t have.

He patted her stomach before the birth, wanting the baby to know it had a brother. When David arrived, Jeffrey was good to him — not jealous, attentive, present in a way that sometimes surprised his parents.

Joyce wrote plainly: he loves Davy and is good to him.

It is a small record. But it is a true one.

The Tadpoles

When he was about eight years old, Jeffrey caught tadpoles in a stream near school and brought them to a teacher he liked. He gave them to her as a gift — simply and innocently, as an expression of affection.

She thanked him, and he was happy.

The story does not end there. When he later discovered she had given the tadpoles to another boy, he was devastated — not merely disappointed, but genuinely hurt by what felt like a betrayal. His response was destructive, and it was wrong. Lionel Dahmer identifies what followed as the first act of violence in his son’s life.

The memorial includes this story whole. The gift was real. The hurt was real. The response was wrong. All three are true simultaneously, and to tell only the first part would be dishonest.

The Newspaper Round

During the years the family lived in Bath, Ohio, Jeffrey had a neighbourhood friend named Steven. When Steven went on holiday, Jeffrey quietly took over his newspaper delivery round for him.

There was no fanfare in it. He simply did it. It is, in many ways, an unremarkable act of friendship — the kind that happens between children in neighbourhoods everywhere, and is barely remembered. But it happened, and it was kind.

The Dog in the Road

By the time Jeffrey was in high school, his closest companion was a boy with whom he shared the particular bond of mutual numbness. They drank together and existed in parallel, not really reaching each other.

One day, driving together, his companion began deliberately speeding up to hit dogs walking along the road. Over the course of that single afternoon, he did it repeatedly. Jeffrey was sickened. He told him to stop, then told him to let him out of the car.

He never forgot the frightened eyes of one small dog that went spinning over the hood.

Brian Masters writes that this moment — this instinctive refusal, this recognition of cruelty — may have been among the last times something genuinely responsive stirred in Jeffrey Dahmer. That it was among the last makes it worth noting, not dismissing.

His Grandmother

From 1981 until the crimes began in Milwaukee, Jeffrey lived with his paternal grandmother, Catherine Dahmer, at her home in West Allis, Wisconsin.

It was the most stable, most human period of his adult life.

He mowed her lawn. He shovelled her walks. He helped with the flowerbed. They watched television together after dinner. He smoked outside because she couldn’t tolerate smoke in the house, and he respected that without complaint.

He described her as “very kind, goes to church every Sunday, easy to get along with, very supportive, loving, just a very sweet lady.” It is, for Jeffrey Dahmer, an unusually warm description of another person.

During this same period, he gave money to people on the street and made small donations to missionary organisations. He was attempting, in his own way, to be good. For a time — perhaps two years — he managed it.

After the Arrest

When Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested in July 1991 and began confessing to police, he did something no one required of him.

He worked without stopping to identify every victim.

Detective Dennis Murphy sat with him through sixty hours of conversation. Jeffrey went through scores of photographs of missing persons, working until each one had been named. He said he did it because he did not want the families of those missing young men to wonder and gnaw at their hearts for years — because he had created the horror, and it fell to him to bring it to a complete end.

Detectives deliberately included photographs of men who were alive to test his veracity. He never once faltered. Some of the identifications were made possible only through him; without his cooperation, the families of several victims might never have known what had happened.

This was not innocence. It was not redemption. It was a man, at the end of everything, trying to do the one last small thing he could.

What This Means

These moments exist. They are documented in primary sources by people who were there — his father, the detective who spent sixty hours with him, the researchers who interviewed people who knew him.

They do not cancel out what he did. Nothing cancels out what he did.

But the memorial has always held that genuine humanisation requires looking at the whole person — not only the crimes, not only the horror, but also the child who wept at the release of a bird into a spring sky, the boy who was gentle with animals, the man who worked through the night to give names back to the dead.

These things are real. He was real. The contradiction is uncomfortable, and it is true.

Primary sources: Lionel Dahmer, A Father’s Story (1994); Brian Masters, The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer (1993).

Don’t Forsake Me: A Music Video About Prayer, Grace and What Crosses Time

Door213 and GoH | Mr. Whatever have released the official music video for Don’t Forsake Me (Jeff Version), a collaborative alternative and hip-hop ballad written, composed, produced and performed by both Vânia Netas and Jeffrey Knapp.

The song was written as a prayer — a plea not to be abandoned in the dark. The video extends that prayer into image.

What the Video Shows

The visual structure takes place across two spaces that exist in different dimensions of time.

In the first, two figures — Vânia and Jeff — pray separately, each in their own sacred space. They are not together. They do not know each other is there. But the intention is the same: to reach through darkness toward something or someone who needs light.

In the second, Jeffrey Dahmer sleeps in a simple bedroom. He wakes slowly, as though something has reached him across the distance. He moves to the window. Light begins to spiral around him, lifting him — not dramatically, but gently, the way grace tends to arrive.

The two spaces are connected by prayer. The video makes that visible.

What It Is About

Don’t Forsake Me is about forgiveness, redemption, and faith — not as abstract concepts but as things people actually do, reach toward, and sometimes find. It is about the idea that genuine intention can cross time and space, that a prayer offered sincerely does not simply disappear.

It is also about the memorial’s central conviction: that Jeffrey Dahmer was a human being, that he suffered, that he sought grace in the final months of his life, and that the people who believe in holding his full humanity are not wrong to do so.

The video does not argue. It prays.

The Collaboration

Don’t Forsake Me (Jeff Version) is a joint work between Door213 (Vânia Netas, Portugal) and GoH | Mr. Whatever (Jeffrey Knapp, Germany). Both artists wrote, composed, produced and sang the track. Both voices are present throughout.

The video was generated and edited by the artists themselves.

Don’t Forsake Me (Jeff Version) is available now.

The Day Jeffrey Dahmer Was Baptised

On the morning of May 10, 1994, two events dominated the news in Wisconsin.

The first was a near-total solar eclipse. The noon sky darkened to something eerie and unsettling, the kind of darkness that makes people stop and look up and wonder what it means.

The second was the execution of John Wayne Gacy in Illinois. As was common ritual, reporters gathered opinions from people on the street. Was the eclipse a sign from God? Was it divine condemnation of the execution? Was it mercy? Everyone had a reading for the darkness.

Roy Ratcliff, a Church of Christ minister from Madison, Wisconsin, was driving through that same darkened afternoon toward the Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage. He was not going to witness an execution. He was going, as he would later write, to assist in a new birth.

He was going to baptise Jeffrey Dahmer.

How It Began

The chain of events that led to that afternoon began on an ordinary Wednesday evening five weeks earlier — April 6, 1994.

Curtis Booth, a minister in Oklahoma active in prison work, had been contacted by a prisoner in Wisconsin who wanted to become a Christian. Booth reached out to Rob McRay, a preacher in Milwaukee. McRay knew that Ratcliff lived closer to the prison and called him at suppertime — unusual timing, since both men had Wednesday evening services.

Before telling Ratcliff the prisoner’s name, McRay asked if he was sitting down. April 1st had been only a few days earlier, he said. This might sound like a hoax.

The prisoner’s name was Jeffrey Dahmer.

Ratcliff had never done prison work. He agreed to look into it.

Two Years Before the Water

What is less often noted is that Jeffrey’s turn toward faith did not begin in prison.

At his sentencing in 1992, Jeffrey read aloud from 1 Timothy 1:15-16: a passage about Christ coming to save sinners, “of whom I am the worst,” and about the worst of sinners being shown mercy as an example of what grace can do. He chose that passage deliberately. He read it in court, to the people whose lives he had destroyed. The media, according to what he told Ratcliff later, generally left that part out when they aired the coverage.

The seed was already there, two years before anyone baptised him.

May 10, 1994

Jeffrey had not been told the date of his own baptism. When he arrived in the conference room where Ratcliff was waiting, Ratcliff noted that he had not known the chaplains had kept him in the dark about this. Jeffrey arrived, in his prison uniform, excited.

He confirmed clearly that he understood what baptism meant in relation to his sins. He said he knew it washed them away, and that if anyone needed that, it was him. He said he was looking forward to it and counting on it.

He asked carefully about the exact words Ratcliff would say during the baptism. Other inmates had told him the words really mattered. He wanted to make sure everything was done right.

Before they were escorted to the baptism area, the prison chaplain made an unexpected suggestion: that Jeffrey consider an Islamic practice of rubbing hands against a rough surface for redemption rather than proceeding with Christian baptism. Ratcliff and Jeffrey looked at each other. Ratcliff declined on behalf of both of them. Jeffrey nodded in quiet gratitude.

Walking through the prison corridors toward the medical facility, another inmate called out to Jeffrey. “Hey J.D., how’s it going?”

Jeffrey answered: “Great! I’m going to be baptized today!”

The inmate’s face lit up. One of the prisoners walking the other way began humming a gospel tune. The guards and the chaplain said nothing to stop any of it.

The Whirlpool

The baptism took place in a prison whirlpool tub in the medical area.

The tub was small. When Jeffrey entered the changing room to put on the white polyester baptismal robe someone had prepared, Ratcliff waited in the hallway with the chaplain and a guard. They shared stories of baptisms they had witnessed. The chaplain spoke movingly of his daughter’s baptism. The mood in that hallway, according to Ratcliff’s account, was reverential.

When Jeffrey came out, he had already climbed into the tub and was turning around, figuring out the logistics. The tub was too small for him to stand. He had to curl into something close to a fetal position.

Ratcliff placed his hands on Jeffrey’s head and one shoulder. He said the words: baptising him upon his confession of faith in Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, for the forgiveness of sins.

He pushed him under the water until he was completely immersed.

When Jeffrey’s head broke the surface, Ratcliff said what he always says when he baptises someone: “Welcome to the Family of God.”

Jeffrey looked at him. The expression on his face, as Ratcliff would later describe it, was one of gladness and surprise.

He said simply: “Thank you.”

After

Walking back through the corridors, Jeffrey had a bounce in his step. He was, according to Ratcliff, obviously filled with joy.

Before Jeffrey was returned to his unit, Ratcliff made a request of the chaplain: he wanted to visit Jeffrey regularly — every week — to help him develop his faith. He didn’t want to simply disappear from his life.

Jeffrey’s reaction was one Ratcliff did not expect. He had a shocked look on his face.

He said he had assumed Ratcliff would leave and he would never see him again.

A man who had been expecting abandonment, surprised by continued care. It is a small detail. It stays with you.

Ratcliff visited weekly for the next seven months, until November 28, 1994.

What Happened on November 28

Ratcliff was driving home from the gym with his wife on a Monday morning, his day off. He was talking about things he intended to mention to Jeffrey when he visited on Wednesday. He had been thinking about a Thanksgiving card Jeffrey had sent him, which he described as one of his most treasured possessions.

He turned up the radio.

The announcer said Jeffrey Dahmer had been attacked and taken to hospital with massive head injuries.

Jeffrey died that day.

Ratcliff conducted a memorial service for him. Among those present was a sister of one of Jeffrey’s victims. She had been deceived into attending and arrived bitter. Afterwards she sought out Ratcliff. She said that hearing him describe Jeffrey as he had known him had helped her. She said she believed God had forgiven Jeffrey. She said she could forgive him, too, and move on.

Ratcliff later used an honorarium from Shari Dahmer for conducting the service to buy a wall clock for his living room. He calls it Jeff’s clock. It is there to remind him, he writes, of the lessons he learned and the value of time well spent.

His summary of the seven months is quiet and precise. Jeffrey, he writes, was ready to die. Ratcliff was the one who was unprepared.

Was He Sincere?

This is the question that follows any account of Jeffrey Dahmer’s baptism, and Roy Ratcliff addresses it directly in Dark Journey Deep Grace.

He notes something important about how the question is usually asked. The person asking, he observes, typically hoped to hear the answer no. Not because they had evidence of insincerity. But because a sincere Jeffrey Dahmer was a more difficult thing to hold in mind than an insincere one. People wanted a way to exclude him — from Christianity, from grace, from the category of people worth considering. The question was less about evidence than about permission.

Ratcliff was convinced of Jeffrey’s sincerity by a single moment. At the end of one of their Bible study sessions, just as the guard gave the signal that time was up, Jeffrey said something unprompted. He said he felt very bad about his crimes. He said he believed he should have been put to death by the state for what he had done.

Ratcliff agreed with him.

Jeffrey’s response was not what most people would expect from someone performing faith for an audience. He asked: “If that is true, am I sinning against God by continuing to live?”

It is a genuine theological question. It could only be asked by someone who had taken the framework seriously enough to follow it to uncomfortable places — who believed in the gravity of what he had done, believed in the reality of God’s justice, and was genuinely trying to understand what it meant to go on living under both.

You cannot perform that question. You can only ask it.

What This Means

The memorial does not ask you to feel certain about what happened to Jeffrey Dahmer after his death, or about the metaphysics of grace and forgiveness. Those are questions that belong to faith, and faith belongs to each person who holds it.

What the documentary record shows is a man who, in the final seven months of his life, engaged seriously with questions of guilt, meaning, and redemption. Who asked to be baptised not in a moment of crisis but after sustained conversation and study. Who cried out on the morning of the baptism to fellow inmates with simple joy. Who sat in a small whirlpool tub in a prison in Wisconsin, curled into himself to fit, and came up from the water saying thank you.

Roy Ratcliff called him Jeff. He drove through an eclipsed sky on the day of another man’s execution to offer him this. He visited every week for seven months. He was unprepared for him to die.

Dark Journey Deep Grace by Roy Ratcliff with Lindy Adams (Leafwood Publishers, 2006) is the primary source for the account in this article. It is the only firsthand account of Jeffrey Dahmer’s spiritual life written by someone who was present. The memorial recommends it unreservedly.