Category: Analysis

The word “necrophile” has been attached to Jeffrey Dahmer’s name for over three decades, usually without much thought about what it actually means. It appears in headlines, documentaries, and casual conversation as though it were self-evident. But forensic psychology draws real distinctions within that word, and those distinctions matter — not to excuse anything, but to understand it. The clearest way to see what Jeffrey was not is to look closely at someone who genuinely was. Her name is Karen Greenlee, and her case is one of the best-documented examples of preferential necrophilia in American history.

Sacramento, December 1979

On 17 December 1979, Greenlee was working as an apprentice embalmer at Sacramento Memorial Lawn in California. Her task that morning was simple: drive a 1975 Cadillac hearse carrying the body of John Mercure, a 33-year-old man who had died a week earlier, to his burial. His family was waiting at the cemetery, dressed in black.

The hearse approached the entrance — and then turned around and sped away. Greenlee had absconded with both the vehicle and the body.

She was found two days later near Alleghany, a remote community in Sierra County, having attempted suicide with an overdose of Tylenol and codeine. She survived. What she left behind was a four-and-a-half-page confession letter in which she admitted to sexual contact with somewhere between twenty and forty deceased men over the course of her time in the funeral industry.

Then came the detail that made the case famous: necrophilia was not a crime in California in 1979. There was simply no law against it. Greenlee could only be charged with stealing the hearse and interfering with a burial. She pleaded guilty and received eleven days in jail, a $255 fine, and probation with mandatory therapy. Mercure’s mother, Marian Gonzales, later sued Greenlee and the mortuary for severe emotional distress — a reminder, before anything else is said, that these acts were not victimless. A grieving family stood at a cemetery gate and watched their son’s body be driven away by the person entrusted with it.

The Unrepentant Necrophile

In 1987, Greenlee gave a long interview to writer Jim Morton, published under the title “The Unrepentant Necrophile” in Adam Parfrey’s anthology Apocalypse Culture. It remains one of the only extended first-person accounts of necrophilia ever recorded, and it is remarkable for its complete lack of evasion.

Greenlee described her attraction as exactly that — an attraction. She spoke about a preference for the bodies of young men. She described the sensory experience of the morgue in the language other people use for perfume or music, stating plainly that she found “the odor of death very erotic”. She called herself a “morgue rat”. She framed her necrophilia not as a compulsion she fought, but as something closer to an orientation: this was what she wanted, in itself, for its own sake.

That last part is the key to everything that follows. For Greenlee, the corpse was the object of desire. Death was not an obstacle, a by-product, or a price. It was the point.

And here is the fact that must be stated plainly, because the comparison ahead is meaningless without it: Karen Greenlee never killed anyone. She never assaulted a living person, never abducted one, never threatened one. Across the twenty to forty encounters she described, and across her entire working life in the funeral industry, not one living human being was harmed by her hands. She did not need to hurt anyone, because hurting people was never any part of what she wanted. She went to work at a mortuary, and the dead arrived on their own.

She did cause harm — real harm, of a kind this memorial will not minimise. John Mercure’s family were left standing at a graveside; his mother suffered enough that she sued for severe emotional distress; and the dead men themselves could not consent to what was done to them. But the harm was grief and violation, not violence. There is no body count. There was never a danger to the living public, and after her arrest she completed therapy, left the funeral trade, and lived out an ordinary private life.

That is what a preferential necrophile looks like when the paraphilia stands alone, uncoupled from any impulse to kill: transgressive, distressing to the bereaved, illegal in most jurisdictions today — and not lethal.

The Object of Desire

Now place Jeffrey Dahmer beside her, and the picture inverts.

Let it be said clearly, because this memorial does not flinch from the record: Jeffrey committed sexual acts with the bodies of his victims, and he admitted this in his confessions. Nothing in this article disputes that. The question is not whether those acts occurred, but what they meant — what he was actually seeking.

And on this point, the record is unusually consistent. In his confessions to Milwaukee police, in his conversations with psychologists, and in Dr. Judith Becker’s trial testimony, the same theme returns again and again: what Jeffrey wanted was a companion who would not leave. A living person, present, compliant, permanently his. He told investigators that he killed because his victims wanted to go — that the killing itself was, in his own framing, a means to an end, and the part of the process he found hardest.

A preferential necrophile does not describe killing as the hardest part. A preferential necrophile does not need to kill at all — as Greenlee’s entire history demonstrates. Her desire was fully satisfied by bodies that were already dead, arriving by natural means, in a building designed to receive them. Seventeen people are dead because of Jeffrey Dahmer. Nobody is dead because of Karen Greenlee. If death itself had been the thing Jeffrey wanted, he had the same option she had, and every reason to take it: morgues, mortuaries, cemeteries, the whole quiet infrastructure of the already-dead. He did not go there. He went to bars and bus stops, looking for people who were alive.

The Experiments That Settle the Question

If any single piece of evidence resolves this, it is the one that is hardest to write about: the drilling experiments.

In the final period of his crimes, Jeffrey attempted to create what he called a compliant, “zombie-like” companion by drilling into the skulls of drugged, living victims and injecting acid or boiling water — attempts which caused unimaginable suffering and death. Dr. Becker’s testimony explored these attempts in detail at trial.

Strip away the horror for one clinical moment and look at what the act reveals about desire. These were attempts to keep a person alive. Damaged, will-less, catastrophically harmed — but alive. A man whose actual attraction was to corpses would have no conceivable reason to attempt this. The experiments only make sense as the actions of someone for whom death was the problem, not the goal — someone trying, in the most monstrous way imaginable, to stop his companions from crossing the line into death, because on the other side of that line they were no longer what he wanted, only what he could keep.

Greenlee drove a body away from its burial because the body was what she desired. Jeffrey drilled into living skulls because the living person was what he desired. These are not two examples of the same paraphilia. They are close to opposites.

What the Classifications Say

Forensic taxonomy supports the distinction. Anil Aggrawal’s widely used classification of necrophilia separates, among other categories, the regular or preferential necrophile — whose primary erotic interest is the dead body itself — from the homicidal necrophile, who kills and whose contact with the dead follows from the killing. Greenlee is a textbook example of the first category. Jeffrey, to the extent the label applies at all, falls into the second — and even there, his own accounts complicate it, because his stated desire was never for the dead but for the permanently present.

Brian Masters reached a similar conclusion in The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer: the engine underneath everything was a terror of abandonment and a hunger for total possession. The post-mortem acts were the wreckage of that hunger, not its fulfilment.

Why Precision Matters

None of this is exculpatory, and it should not be read as an attempt to soften the record. Seventeen men and boys are dead. What was done to them, before and after death, was done. A diagnostic distinction does not move a single gram of that weight.

But this memorial exists on the premise that understanding is not the same as excusing, and that lazy labels obstruct understanding. “Necrophile”, applied to Jeffrey as a primary description, points investigators of the human condition in exactly the wrong direction. It suggests a man drawn to death, when every serious piece of evidence describes a man in flight from it — from departure, from abandonment, from the empty apartment. Karen Greenlee shows us what genuine preferential necrophilia looks like: unambiguous, self-described, oriented toward death itself — and, crucially, harming no living person. The paraphilia by itself does not produce corpses. Something else has to be present for that, and in Jeffrey’s case that something else was not a love of the dead. Jeffrey Dahmer, held against that mirror, does not match. He was something else — arguably something lonelier, and in its consequences, something infinitely worse.

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Sources: Jim Morton, “The Unrepentant Necrophile”, in Adam Parfrey (ed.), Apocalypse Culture (1987); contemporary press coverage of the 1979 Sacramento case; Milwaukee Police Department confession records; trial testimony of Dr. Judith Becker (1992); Brian Masters, The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer (1993); Anil Aggrawal, Necrophilia: Forensic and Medico-Legal Aspects (2011).

Every account of Jeffrey Dahmer eventually arrives at the same question, and almost always phrases it the same way: how did he get away with it for so long?

The question contains an assumption worth examining. It assumes the answer lies in him — in his cunning, his ordinariness, his ability to pass. It assumes that the obstacle he had to overcome was a city looking for him.

Milwaukee was not looking for him. To understand the thirteen years between Steven Hicks and Tracy Edwards, you have to understand the place, and the place was not a neutral backdrop against which one man operated. It was a city with a specific economy, a specific geography of race, a specific police department, and a specific set of assumptions about whose disappearance constituted an emergency. He did not slip through the gaps. He moved through a structure that was already built.

The brutal decade

The Milwaukee of the 1980s was a city coming apart economically, and the numbers are stark. Between 1979 and 1983, some fifty thousand manufacturing jobs left the city. Across the decade as a whole, the metropolitan area lost roughly a fifth of its industrial employment — a rate about three times the national average. Schlitz shut its Milwaukee brewery in 1981. Allis-Chalmers, once the largest industrial employer in Wisconsin, went bankrupt in 1987.

This was the city that had called itself the machine shop of the world. By 1986, service work had overtaken manufacturing for the first time. The economist Marc Levine’s summary of the period is blunt: the 1980s were the brutal decade in Milwaukee.

Two consequences matter for this history.

The first is personal. This is the labour market in which Jeffrey Dahmer worked the third shift at the Ambrosia Chocolate Factory — eleven at night to seven in the morning, six nights a week. The nocturnal, marginal, replaceable work he did was not incidental to how he lived. It set his hours, and his hours were the city’s empty ones.

The second is structural, and far more important. Deindustrialisation did not fall evenly. Nearly half of Black male workers in Milwaukee held manufacturing jobs, and the plants that closed were concentrated on the north side, where Black Milwaukee lived. The collapse landed hardest on precisely the neighbourhoods that already had the least, and it produced a population of young men with irregular work, unstable housing and every reason to accept fifty or a hundred dollars from a stranger who wanted to take photographs.

Dahmer’s offer was not exotic. It was an offer that made sense in that economy.

The most segregated city in America

Milwaukee has been ranked, decade after decade, among the most racially segregated metropolitan areas in the United States. It still is. The pattern was built deliberately over the twentieth century through redlining, restrictive covenants that barred Black residents from most of the city, and suburban zoning that priced them out of everywhere else. Black Milwaukee was confined to the near north side, and stayed there.

This is not background colour. It is the operative fact of the case.

Segregation determined who lived in the neighbourhood around the Oxford Apartments. It determined that a white man in that building was unusual. It determined which parts of the city the police patrolled as territory to be contained rather than served. And it determined, decisively, whose reports were believed.

Milwaukee’s police department had been shaped for twenty years by Chief Harold Breier, who ran it from 1964 to 1984 and whose relationship with the city’s Black population was one of open hostility. He was gone by the time Dahmer moved to 25th Street, but a department does not change its habits in five years. When the Dahmer case broke, Black and gay leaders in the city argued that the force still operated on Breier’s assumptions. The evidence suggests they were right.

Walker’s Point

The other Milwaukee that matters here is a few blocks of Walker’s Point, south of downtown, where the city’s gay bars were concentrated.

Club 219, at 219 South 2nd Street, opened in early 1981 out of a short-lived predecessor called Trash. It became one of the central spaces in Milwaukee’s gay life — bright, loud, a dance bar with drag shows, eclipsed in scale by La Cage Aux Folles after 1984 but never displaced in affection. It stayed open until 2005. The building is still there, under another name.

Dahmer met Steven Tuomi there in September 1987. He met Raymond Smith and Richard Guerrero there. In May 1991 he met Tony Hughes there, and because Hughes was deaf, he wrote his offer down on a piece of paper. He met Jamie Doxtator at a bus stop outside it.

It matters how this is told. Club 219 was not a hunting ground that happened to have people in it. It was a community’s living room, in a city that gave that community very few places to exist, and it was full of people who knew each other. Eric Wynn, one of the few Black drag performers regularly working the club in the eighties, has described building a small following of young Black men who came to his shows because they saw someone like themselves on stage. Tony Hughes was one of them; he taught Wynn to fingerspell the alphabet.

Then some of them stopped coming.

Nineteen funerals

Set against this is the fact that makes the whole period legible: these were the worst years of the AIDS epidemic.

By 1987, when Dahmer began killing regularly in Milwaukee, more than half a million people in the United States were living with HIV. A bartender at Club 219 during those years, Scott Gunkle — who served Dahmer and found him entirely unremarkable — has described a year in which he attended nineteen funerals, someone dying every fortnight.

Consider what that does to the meaning of an absence.

In a community losing men constantly, a familiar face vanishing from the bar was not a mystery. It was the ordinary shape of the era. He got sick. He went home to family. He was too ill to come out. He died and nobody was told. There was no gap where an alarm should have sounded, because the alarm had been sounding continuously for years and everyone had learned to live inside it.

This is the single most under-examined element of the case. AIDS did not merely coincide with Dahmer’s most active period. It supplied the cover.

Who gets looked for

The families reported them. This needs saying plainly, because the standard account leaves the impression that these men vanished unnoticed.

Richard Guerrero’s father reported him missing two days after he disappeared in March 1988, and paid for notices with his son’s photograph in the local press. Jamie Doxtator’s mother reported him the day after he failed to come home. Reports were filed, again and again, by families who knew immediately that something was wrong.

Nothing came of them.

There is no single decision to point to — no officer who looked at a file and dismissed it. That is what makes it a structural failure rather than an individual one. A missing persons report on a young Black or Latino or Native man from the north side, in a city that had spent decades treating those neighbourhoods as a containment problem, simply did not generate urgency. It went into a system that had already decided what it was worth.

Seventeen men and boys died. The overwhelming majority were Black, Latino, Asian or Native American. That is not a coincidence of who happened to be in the bars. It is a description of whose disappearance a city was prepared to tolerate.

27 May 1991

Everything above converges on one night, and if the article has a centre, this is it.

Fourteen-year-old Konerak Sinthasomphone escaped from Apartment 213, drugged and bleeding, while Dahmer was out buying alcohol. He was found in the street by Sandra Smith and Nicole Childress, two young Black women, who called 911. Glenda Cleveland, Smith’s mother and Childress’s aunt, called as well.

Three officers responded: John Balcerzak, Joseph Gabrish and Richard Porubcan. Dahmer returned and told them the boy was his nineteen-year-old boyfriend, drunk after an argument. He gave a name that was not Konerak’s.

The officers believed the white man. They walked the boy back up to Apartment 213 — where the body of Tony Hughes was lying — and left. The entire investigation took sixteen minutes. A later review found they had violated departmental rules fifteen times, including failing to run any records check on Dahmer, which would have shown he was a convicted child sex offender then on probation.

Roughly ten minutes after they left, Glenda Cleveland telephoned again. She spoke to Balcerzak. She was told the matter was handled, and he declined to take the names of the two witnesses. She called again in the following days, after seeing the missing boy’s photograph in the paper. She called the FBI. Nobody acted.

Konerak was killed within the hour of the officers’ departure. Dahmer went on to kill four more men.

And there is a detail that turns the whole thing from failure into something closer to indictment. Konerak was the younger brother of Somsack Sinthasomphone — the boy Dahmer had assaulted in 1988, the offence for which he was on probation that very night. The same family, twice, by the same man. The record connecting them was one records check away.

The audio of the officers’ radio traffic later became public. They can be heard joking about reuniting the lovers, and about needing to be deloused after their time in the apartment.

What the city did afterwards

The response was immediate and furious. There were marches, vigils and sit-ins through August 1991. Jesse Jackson came to Milwaukee. The family of Oliver Lacy filed a federal suit against the city, arguing that the police had discriminated by failing to respond properly to complaints from minority citizens — and that Lacy and three other men would be alive had Dahmer been arrested on 27 May. The community activist Queen Hyler put the case bluntly: this is a very racist city.

Chief Philip Arreola — the first Milwaukee chief in modern times appointed from outside the department, brought in as a community-policing reformer — suspended the three officers.

His own force turned on him. In a survey of 1,339 officers, ninety-eight per cent said the suspensions were wrong and around ninety-three per cent declared no confidence in his leadership.

Balcerzak and Gabrish were eventually dismissed after a lengthy hearing process. They appealed, were reinstated with back pay, and returned to the department. Balcerzak later served as president of the Milwaukee Police Association.

That sequence is the whole story in miniature. The city was told exactly what had gone wrong, in public, with recordings. And the institution absorbed it and continued.

The empty lot

The Oxford Apartments were bought in 1992 by the Campus Circle Project, a redevelopment initiative connected to Marquette University, for $325,000. The forty-nine-unit building was demolished that November, fifteen months after the arrest, at the urging of victims’ families. The chocolate factory came down the following year; the Milwaukee Bucks’ arena stands on part of that ground now.

The lot at 924 North 25th Street is still empty. Grass and a chain-link fence.

There were proposals over the years — a playground, a park, a missing persons centre, a memorial to the seventeen. None was built. The objection, then and now, is that a memorial would draw the wrong kind of visitor. The current alderman for the area has called the idea a terrible one. Some of the victims’ relatives agree; others have wanted a memorial for thirty years.

So the site of the most notorious crimes in the city’s history is a fenced rectangle of nothing, and the seventeen men and boys have no marker anywhere in Milwaukee.

The point of asking about the city

None of this diminishes what Jeffrey Dahmer did or shifts the responsibility for it. He chose every one of those men. He is answerable for all of it.

But “how did he get away with it” has an answer, and the answer is not that he was brilliant. He was arrested twice for sexual offences during the killing years and served neither a serious sentence nor a serious assessment. He was on probation while killing. He was caught, in effect, by three officers who then handed his victim back to him. He was not hard to see. He was simply not looked at.

What let him continue was a city where a certain kind of man could vanish without consequence — because the plants had closed on his side of town, because the police had spent decades treating his neighbourhood as hostile territory, because his community was burying men every fortnight anyway, and because when his mother or father filed a report, the report went nowhere.

Dahmer did not create those conditions. He found them, and used them for thirteen years.

That is the part that should be uncomfortable, and it is the reason this article exists. A man like him is rare. A city like that was not.

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Sources: Encyclopedia of Milwaukee (UW-Milwaukee); Marc Levine, UWM Center for Economic Development; Brown University Diversity and Disparities Project; Wisconsin LGBT History Project; WUWM Milwaukee Public Radio; Associated Press and UPI contemporaneous reporting, 1991–92; Christian Science Monitor, August 1991; Milwaukee Journal Sentinel; Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission findings.

There is a stretch of Jeffrey Dahmer’s life that almost nobody writes about. It runs from December 1981 to September 1988 — nearly seven years — and it takes place in a small, tidy house at 2357 South 57th Street in West Allis, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee. It was the house Lionel Dahmer had grown up in. It belonged to his mother, Catherine.

The reason it goes unexamined is easy enough to understand. Nothing about it fits the story people expect. There is no squalor here, no isolation, no absent family. There is a grandmother who cooked his meals and washed his clothes, a church on Sundays, a lawn to mow, a garden, a steady job. By any ordinary measure these were the most stable years of Jeffrey Dahmer’s adult life.

Three men were murdered in that house.

Both things are true, and the difficulty of holding them together is precisely why the period deserves attention. West Allis is where the comfortable explanations fail.

Catherine

Catherine Dahmer has been reduced, in most tellings, to a location — the grandmother’s house, the grandmother’s basement. She was a person, and the sources are unusually clear about what sort.

She was a lifelong Presbyterian who attended church every Sunday. Both Lionel’s memoir and Brian Masters’ account describe the same woman: kind, patient, unfailingly decent, working from the old-fashioned assumption that people will behave well if they are treated well. She was, by 1981, elderly and lonely, and the arrangement suited her as much as it suited anyone. Jeffrey would have room and board; in return he would help around the house and keep her company.

Asked directly whether he loved her, Jeffrey could not manage the word. He said instead that she had lived in that house a long time. It is a strange, sidestepping answer, and Masters reads it as an inability to make emotional contact rather than an absence of feeling — Jeffrey knew perfectly well that she was lovable and said so freely, but would not apply the verb to himself. Describing her, he had no such difficulty. He called her, in his own words, what you could call a perfect grandmother, and listed the qualities: kind, church-going, easy, supportive.

Masters makes an observation that is worth sitting with. Catherine Dahmer could have been a genuinely formative influence on her grandson, had he come to her earlier. By the time he arrived he was twenty-one, and it was too late. He could recognise her goodness. He could not absorb it.

What the house provided

He was sent there in the winter of 1981 because his father and stepmother had run out of options. He had been discharged from the army for drinking, sent to Ohio, arrested at a hotel within a fortnight for public drunkenness, and could not be trusted alone in the house or with the car. West Allis was a temporary measure. Lionel put him on a bus expecting him back within weeks.

Three months later, when Lionel and Shari drove up to visit, Jeffrey had decided he was staying. His father found him happier than he had been at any point since the army — mothered, fed, laundered for, with his days given a shape.

And that shape held for a while. He worked in the garden and mowed the lawn. He helped with the shopping and the cleaning. He went to church with his grandmother. He found work as a phlebotomist at the Milwaukee Blood Plasma Center, drawing blood — a skill he had learned as an army medic. He attended Alcoholics Anonymous. A young woman in the congregation took an interest in him, and his father encouraged him to call her. He never did.

After the plasma centre let him go — ten months, poor performance — there was a stretch of unemployment that ought to have been dangerous and was not. Masters describes something close to a genuine remission during 1982 and 1983: Jeffrey read the Bible alone as well as with his grandmother, gave money to street people, sent donations to missionaries. He was consciously trying to smother something in himself, and for a period it appeared to work. The memory of Steven Hicks receded. He imposed rules on his own body and kept them.

This is the part of West Allis that resists a simple reading. The conditions were exactly those that had ruined him before — no job, no structure, time on his hands — and this time they did not. What made the difference was a household: someone expecting him at meals, someone noticing when he came in, somewhere to be on a Sunday morning.

In January 1985 he was hired as a mixer at the Ambrosia Chocolate Factory, working the third shift, eleven at night until seven in the morning, six nights a week. He began paying his grandmother three hundred dollars a month in rent. His early performance reviews there were not merely adequate but warm — resourceful, congenial, neat, an asset to his department.

By every external signal available to his family, this was a young man slowly assembling a life.

What the record shows underneath

The external signals were wrong, and the documentation of how wrong is unusually complete.

On 7 August 1982, at the Wisconsin State Fair, he was arrested for exposing himself in a crowded area near the Coliseum. He was convicted twelve days later and fined. Two details are worth noting. The first is that the arresting officer’s account describes exposure rather than the urination Dahmer claimed. The second is that when asked for his address, he gave Bath, Ohio — his father’s house — rather than West Allis. Whatever else was disintegrating in him, he did not want his grandmother’s name on the charge sheet.

On 8 September 1986, two twelve-year-old boys reported a man masturbating by the Kinnickinnic River Parkway. Their description was accurate enough that a patrol officer stopped Dahmer nearby within the hour, and both boys identified him. He was charged with lewd and lascivious behaviour and indecent exposure, and received probation and court-ordered counselling.

Between and around these two arrests, a third thread runs. In 1985, sitting in the West Allis Public Library, a stranger dropped a note in his lap propositioning him. He did not act on it. But the sources — and Dahmer himself, repeatedly — identify that moment as the hinge. His defence counsel would later call it the critical moment of his life. What had been contained by Bible study and self-discipline began, from that point, to erode.

The court-ordered therapy after the 1986 arrest produced its own record. He kept every appointment and turned his chair away from the therapist, sitting in silence for the full fifty minutes. The one session where he spoke at any length was about the Christmas presents he had bought for his grandmother. When the therapist tried to open up the relationship, he stopped talking.

What they saw, and what they did with it

This is the most valuable material West Allis offers, because it is a record of ordinary people responding reasonably to warning signs and getting nowhere.

Catherine found a full-size male mannequin in his bedroom closet, fully dressed. She could not imagine where it had come from or why. Challenged, Jeffrey said calmly that he had stolen it from a shop on a dare, that he had liked the clothes, and that he had already thrown it away. The matter, as far as he was concerned, was closed.

She found a gun under his bed. Jeffrey described it as a target pistol; when his father came to look, it was a .357 Magnum with a two-and-a-half-inch barrel. A family conference followed. Lionel took the gun away, had a friend sell it, and gave his son the proceeds.

She noticed he was gone for whole weekends. She was stopped on her own staircase one morning and told to go back up because he was not dressed, and later saw him steering a badly drunk man toward the bus stop. She came home from Sunday service more than once to a smell in the garage she could not place and did not believe was the cat box.

Each time, Jeffrey had an answer ready. The odours were chemical cleaners. They were chicken parts he was experimenting on with bleach and acid. When Lionel flew in to investigate personally and pressed him, the answer became a dead raccoon collected from a gutter. Lionel searched the garage and the basement and found nothing but stored lamps, a projector, Christmas decorations, firewood, a washer and dryer.

The pattern in these exchanges is worth naming precisely, because it is not stupidity. Catherine identified every genuine warning sign in the house. She reported them all. Crucially, she often reported them to Shari rather than to Lionel, saying she did not want to burden him — which meant the person best placed to act received the information at one remove, filtered and softened, and always after the fact.

And Lionel accepted each explanation in turn. His memoir is unsparing about this. He describes allowing himself to believe there was a line in his son that would not be crossed, a boundary between self-destruction and harm to others. He describes conversations conducted entirely in half-sentences, both of them maintaining a wall neither would name. As he puts it: this dreadful silence we called peace.

It is the most honest sentence anyone connected to this case has written.

The murders

None of the above should be read as a portrait of domestic life with the deaths as an appendix. They happened in that house, while all of it was going on.

In September 1987, Dahmer killed Steven Tuomi at the Ambassador Hotel in Milwaukee, bought a large wheeled suitcase from a Woolworth’s at the Grand Avenue Mall, and brought the body back to West Allis by taxi while his grandmother slept. The driver helped him load the case.

On 17 January 1988, he met James Doxtator at a bus stop and brought him back to the house. Jamie had told his mother that if he ever left home he would keep in touch. He was reported missing the following day.

On 27 March 1988, he killed Richard Guerrero, aged twenty-three, in the same house. Guerrero’s father reported him missing two days later and placed notices with his son’s photograph in the local press. Nothing came of them.

On 25 March 1989 — by which time Dahmer had moved out and moved briefly back, awaiting sentencing — he met Anthony Sears outside a bar. A friend of Sears’, uneasy, drove them both to West Allis and extracted a promise that Sears would call within a couple of hours so he could collect him. Sears was killed at the house that night. His friend went back the next morning to look for him and did not know which door to knock on.

Three men died in Catherine Dahmer’s home. A fourth was carried into it in a suitcase.

Being eased out

The end came through an accumulation rather than a discovery.

In 1988 a man named Ronald Flowers was brought to the house, drugged, and survived. That incident, along with the late-night arrivals, the drinking, and the general uneasiness about his guests, prompted a family conference — Lionel, Catherine, and Lionel’s sister Eunice. Dahmer’s own description of the outcome was that he was sort of eased out. Two decisions came from that meeting: he would find his own place, and he would seek help for his drinking. Lionel took him to Family Services on West Highland Avenue that April. The alcohol programme lasted four sessions.

There was one further factor. Catherine had found objects in his room — statues of griffins, a copy of The Satanic Bible, black lights — arranged in something like an altar. For a lifelong Presbyterian this was not eccentricity but horror. Jeffrey’s account was that he was merely curious about the unknown and that none of it meant anything.

He moved out on 26 September 1988. The structure that had held him — imperfectly, incompletely, but genuinely — was gone.

On the first day in his new apartment he approached a thirteen-year-old boy, Somsack Sinthasomphone, offered him money to pose for photographs, drugged him, and assaulted him. The boy escaped, was hospitalised, and led police back to the apartment. Dahmer was arrested at the chocolate factory.

The first day.

What West Allis actually tells us

The temptation with this period is to reach for one of two easy conclusions: that the love of a good woman nearly saved him, or that it made no difference at all. Neither survives contact with the record.

The structure demonstrably worked. Employment, a household, a routine, someone waiting up — these produced the longest stretch of relative stability in his adult life, and the sources show him actively using it, reaching for religion and discipline as tools against something he knew was in him. That effort was real. It was not sufficient.

And the failure was not for want of noticing. Catherine Dahmer saw the mannequin, the gun, the absences, the drunk stranger, the smell in the garage. She reported all of it. The system around her — a father seven hours away who wanted to believe his son, a family conference that removed one pistol, four sessions of alcohol counselling, a therapist facing the back of a chair — absorbed every one of those signals and converted them into nothing.

She spent her last years in a nursing home with dementia, searching at night for a staircase that was not there. Jeffrey wanted to write to her from prison, to tell her he loved her and that he was sorry for what he had brought on her. He was not allowed a pen, in case he used it on himself.

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Sources: Lionel Dahmer, A Father’s Story (1994); Brian Masters, The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer (1993); Milwaukee County court records; West Allis Police Department arrest reports as cited in Masters.

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.

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.

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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.”