There is a detail in Jeffrey Dahmer’s story that most people gloss over. Among the videotapes found in Apartment 213 when police catalogued its contents in July 1991 were several films — Blade Runner, Star Wars, and The Exorcist III. Not the original Exorcist. The third one. And according to one of his surviving victims, Jeffrey watched it repeatedly, in what was described as a trance-like state.
This is not a footnote. This is a window.
What The Exorcist III Actually Is
Most people who haven’t seen it assume The Exorcist III is a standard horror sequel — more possession, more spinning heads, more priests with holy water. It is almost none of those things.
Written and directed by William Peter Blatty himself — the author of the original Exorcist novel — it is the third installment in what Blatty called his Trilogy of Faith. It is, at its core, a philosophical film. A meditation on evil, on whether God exists, on whether a good God could permit the suffering we witness in the world. Blatty’s prime interest was always loss — or lack — of faith.
The film follows Lieutenant Kinderman, a weathered detective investigating a series of brutal murders in Georgetown that cause him to question why little boys could be allowed to suffer so viciously at the hands of a god. The murders bear the hallmarks of a serial killer called the Gemini — based in part on the real-life Zodiac Killer, one of several serial killers who enjoyed The Exorcist.
The twist is theological and disturbing: the murderer is the spirit of the Gemini Killer, who after being executed, made a deal with the demon Pazuzu. Angry at Father Karras defeating him in the first film, the demon allowed the Gemini Killer’s spirit to possess the recently deceased body of Father Karras as revenge on all good.
What makes the film extraordinary is not its horror — it is its conversations. The Gemini Killer, locked in Cell 11 of a psychiatric ward, receives visits from Lieutenant Kinderman. And what passes between them is unlike almost anything else in horror cinema — Brad Dourif out-Hannibal Lectures Hannibal Lecter, and The Exorcist III was released a year before The Silence of the Lambs.
The Gemini Killer and the Question of Evil
The Gemini Killer is not a screaming monster. He is articulate, philosophical, sardonic. He talks about evil with the precision of someone who has thought about it carefully for a long time. He talks about his childhood, his abusive father, the forces that shaped him into what he became.
There is such viciousness and hatred in the Gemini Killer — anger at the abusive father he had as a child, anger at the religion he was part of, pure hatred for so many. And yet he speaks. He reasons. He makes arguments. He is not beyond language or thought.
This is the detail that matters for understanding Jeffrey.
A man who confessed everything — who sat with Detective Murphy for sixty hours and described his crimes with complete cooperation — who was described as frank and without guile — was watching a film about a killer who speaks from a cell about evil, about childhood, about the forces that made him. In a trance-like state. Repeatedly.
Jeffrey wasn’t watching a horror film. He was watching something that felt like a mirror.
The Parallel: A Body That Doesn’t Belong to Its Inhabitant
The central theological horror of The Exorcist III is possession — a body inhabited by a soul that has no right to be there. Father Karras’s body, walking and speaking, but controlled by something else entirely. The real Karras trapped somewhere inside, exhausted, wanting only to be released. Jason Miller’s entire performance is predicated on the idea that Karras just wants to move on. Brad Dourif on the other hand is an electric presence — a barely restrained performance of evil.
Jeffrey described his own psychology in terms that map onto this with uncomfortable precision. He spoke of a compulsion he could not control, a force operating through him that he did not understand and could not stop. He said “I hated no one” at his sentencing. He said he believed he was completely out of his mind. He described himself as sick, or evil, or both — as if those were two separate things that might or might not explain the same actions.
The question the film asks — who is responsible when a body commits acts that the soul inhabiting it didn’t choose? — was not an abstract philosophical puzzle for Jeffrey. It was the question of his life.
Kinderman and God’s Silence
Kinderman is a man completely angry at the idea of a God — so upset that something could exist, just to sit back and watch people be murdered. When he gets the call that Father Dyer was murdered, there’s a breakdown in his eyes that is painful to watch — a man brutalized by his lack of faith and his anger towards the possibility that God exists and didn’t intervene to save a man who devoted his entire life to His faith.
Jeffrey, in his prison years, was wrestling with the same question from the opposite direction. Not why doesn’t God intervene to stop evil — but can God forgive the person through whom the evil came? Both questions orbit the same silence. Both questions go unanswered in the film. Kinderman does not receive a satisfying theological resolution. The evil is stopped, but the questions remain.
Crucified without nails to the high wall of Cell 11, Kinderman recites an increasingly bitter list of the things he believes in — mostly the human capacity for evil and the non-intervention of an uncaring God. Blatty is interested in the words most of all: the dialectic of intellectual debate, the ritual litany of naming, the recitation of prayers.
Jeffrey was reading his Bible in the same years he was watching this film on repeat. He was attending Bible correspondence courses. He would later be baptised. The film’s central unresolved tension — between the reality of evil and the possibility of a God who permits it — was the tension he was living inside.
Cell 11
There is one more detail that is almost too precise to be coincidental.
The Gemini Killer lives in Cell 11. He speaks from behind a window, in a locked room, separated from the detective who comes to visit him. Articulate. Cooperative. Frank. Describing what he did and why with a clarity that unsettles everyone who hears it.
Jeffrey Dahmer, by the time he was watching this film on repeat, had already been arrested. He had already confessed. He would spend the rest of his short life in a cell of his own, receiving visitors, speaking with a pastor, asking the same questions the film never answers.
He watched a man in a cell speak about evil and childhood and God’s silence, over and over, in a trance-like state.
He was watching himself. Or the version of himself he was afraid he might be. Or the version he was desperately trying not to be.
Why This Film, and Not The Original
The original Exorcist is about evil arriving from outside — possessing an innocent child, threatening an ordinary family, requiring priests to drive it back out. The framework is ultimately reassuring: evil is external, identifiable, and can be defeated.
The Exorcist III is about evil that is already inside. Already in the room. Already in the body. The question is not how to keep it out but what to do once it is there — and whether the person it came through is responsible for what it did.
That is a completely different film. And it is the one Jeffrey watched in a trance.
Sources: Wikipedia; Manor Vellum; Split Tooth Media; Slant Magazine; Milwaukee Police Department inventory, July 1991; survivor accounts.
Thirty years of true crime content have layered fiction on top of fact until the two are nearly indistinguishable. This article addresses the most persistent claims circulating about Jeffrey Dahmer that are either false, unverified, or significantly misrepresented.
He killed and mutilated a dog as a teenager.
False. Jeffrey Dahmer denied this throughout his life. What is documented is that he collected and dissected animal carcasses he found already dead, driven by a fascination with anatomy and the interior of living things. That is meaningfully different from harming a living animal. No evidence has ever been produced to support the claim that he killed a pet. He was, by multiple accounts, fond of animals.
He made terrorising phone calls to victims’ families.
Unverified. Some families of missing persons received anonymous calls from an unidentified man in the period before Jeffrey’s arrest. The attribution of those calls to Jeffrey has never been conclusively established. There are no recordings, no phone records, and no confession. Jeffrey denied making them. The claim is frequently presented as established fact. It is not.
He killed a fellow inmate in prison.
False. Jeffrey Dahmer did not kill anyone in prison. He was killed on November 28, 1994, by Christopher Scarver, alongside fellow inmate Jesse Anderson, while on a cleaning detail at Columbia Correctional Institution. This is fully documented. The rumour that he committed a prison murder appears to exist because people assume he must have continued killing. He did not.
He was a cannibal who consumed his victims.
Misleading. Jeffrey did consume parts of some victims — he was honest about this. But the word “cannibal,” as it is used in headlines and true crime content, implies predatory contempt. What Jeffrey described was the opposite: a desperate need for the person not to leave, to remain part of him permanently. It was a catastrophically distorted expression of attachment, not hatred or hunger. The framing matters. The popular framing is wrong.
He targeted Black men because he hated Black people.
Oversimplified and contradicted by the record. The majority of Jeffrey’s victims were men of colour, and that fact deserves honest acknowledgment. However, the conclusion that this was motivated by racial hatred is not supported by Jeffrey’s own extensive accounts of his crimes, his attraction to his victims, or the testimony of those who knew him. The men who attacked and killed him in prison believed they were punishing a racist who had hunted Black men as prey. That belief was built on the same flattened mythology, not on the documented record. The reality is more complex, and complexity is not the same as excuse.
His father Lionel abused him.
False, and directly contradicted by Jeffrey himself. This claim circulates widely, particularly in the wake of dramatised portrayals of the Dahmer family. Jeffrey consistently and clearly stated throughout his confessions, interviews, and correspondence that he was not abused by his parents or by anyone else in his life. He described his parents as caring people who loved him. He did not use his childhood as a mitigating narrative, and he had every reason to do so had it been true. Attributing his crimes to parental abuse is not only factually unsupported — it also removes Jeffrey’s own voice from the record and replaces it with a convenient fiction.
He gave his neighbour a sandwich made with human meat.
False. This scene was invented for the 2022 Netflix dramatisation Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story and has no basis in documented fact. It did not happen. It was not reported by any neighbour, referenced in any police record, or mentioned in any credible source. It is screenwriting, not history. The scene has since circulated as if it were real, which is a precise example of how dramatisation manufactures myth.
He contaminated the chocolate at the Ambrosia factory.
False. During his trial, Jeffrey was asked repeatedly whether he had ever contaminated the chocolate mixture at the Milwaukee Ambrosia Chocolate Factory, where he worked as a mixer on the night shift. The suspicion was understandable given the circumstances, but it was entirely unfounded. Jeffrey denied it each time, reportedly responding: “What kind of monster do you think I am?” No evidence of any kind — no contamination reports, no complaints, no corroborating testimony — was ever produced. The claim does not appear in any credible source. It circulates as dark rumour, nothing more.
A note on sources.
Jeffrey Dahmer was, by all accounts of those who interviewed and worked with him, unusually honest. He confessed to everything. He cooperated with investigators, researchers, and journalists at length. He did not minimise. He actively tried to help people understand what had happened and why. The persistence of fabrications and exaggerations about him is not a reflection of who he was. It is a reflection of what true crime does to people it decides are monsters.
Sources: Trial and confession records, 1991–1992; Stone Phillips interview, Dateline NBC, 1994; Brian Masters, The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer, 1993; Lionel Dahmer, A Father’s Story, 1994.
Before the confessions, before the courtroom, before the world decided what his name would mean — there was a boy. A boy who sang Christmas songs badly and didn’t apologise for it. Who made up love songs on the spot. Who spelled out his own name with pride, as if the letters themselves were something worth celebrating. Who told his father, over and over, that he loved him.
This is what Jeffrey Dahmer sounded like at nine years old. And it matters.
There is a recording. It circulates quietly, passed between people who care enough to seek it out — a child’s voice, preserved on tape, from 1969. Jeffrey Dahmer is nine years old.
What you hear is not what you might expect. There is no shadow here, no foreboding, nothing that retrospect can weaponise into a sign of what was coming. There is only a boy — singing, playing, showing off, loving.
He sings Jingle Bells and stops midway. “I don’t remember the rest,” he says, with complete unbothered honesty, and then continues anyway. He makes up songs on the spot — a love song, a Christmas song, something that begins with “yeah yeah baby” and goes wherever it wants to go. He hits toys against what sounds like a wooden floor. He spells out his name — Jeffrey Dahmer, or sometimes just Jeff Dahmer — with the particular pride of a child who has recently learned that his name is something worth knowing.
And then, over and over, in a voice that asks for nothing in return: “I love you, Lionel. I love you. I love you.”
He had just had his first swimming lesson.
Reading the Child
What do you hear when you listen carefully?
You hear a child who is completely at ease. There is no hesitation, no self-consciousness, no awareness that he might be doing anything wrong or strange. He sings badly and doesn’t care. He forgets the words to Jingle Bells and announces the fact plainly before continuing anyway. He invents songs on the spot — love songs, Christmas songs, songs that go wherever they want — with the particular freedom of a child who has not yet learned that creativity requires an audience’s permission.
You hear warmth. The repeated declarations of love to his father — “I love you, Lionel, I love you, I love you” — are not performed for the recorder. They are simply what is there, spilling out naturally alongside news of his first swimming lesson, alongside the singing, alongside the ordinary joy of the afternoon. He is a child who feels something and says it.
You hear confidence. He spells his name with pride — Jeffrey Dahmer, or sometimes just Jeff Dahmer — as if the letters are an achievement worth announcing. Which, at nine years old, they are.
None of this is extraordinary. That is exactly the point.
1969
It is 1969. Jeffrey Dahmer is nine years old.
The family is living at 4480 West Bath Road in Bath, Ohio — the house Joyce had fallen in love with on sight, the one with woods nearby and a pond, the one that felt, for a brief time, like somewhere they might finally stay. Jeffrey had been happy there at first. He explored the woods with his dog Frisky. He collected rocks with a school friend. He liked the space and the quiet.
But the house that sounded like stability was already beginning to fracture. Lionel and Joyce’s marriage was deteriorating — the arguments, the medication, the long absences. Brian Masters writes of Joyce during this period as increasingly desperate, her consumption of pills growing, her emotional availability to her children narrowing. Lionel was at work, always at work. The boy who had once been described as cheerful and energetic was becoming, according to those who knew him, quieter. More inward. More alone.
And yet.
In this recording, made sometime in 1969, none of that is audible. What you hear instead is a child in full flight — singing, laughing, showing off, loving. Whatever was gathering in the background of his life had not yet reached him here, in this moment, with a recorder running and his father nearby.
He was still just a boy.
Why It Matters
Why does a child’s recording matter?
Because the easiest thing in the world is to let a name become only what it’s most associated with. Jeffrey Dahmer — two words that have carried, for decades, the full weight of seventeen deaths, of things so dark that most people flinch before they finish the sentence. That weight is real. It should never be minimised.
But a person is not only what they did wrong. That is the memorial’s founding argument, and this recording is one of the clearest pieces of evidence for it. Here is a child who loved his father openly and said so. Who sang badly and didn’t care. Who was proud of his name. Who had a first swimming lesson and wanted the whole world to know.
That child existed. He was real. And he deserves to be part of the record.
Jeffrey Dahmer spelled his name on a tape recorder in 1969 — with the pride of a nine-year-old who has recently learned that his name is something worth knowing.
He was right. It was.
Sources: Personal listening notes; Lionel Dahmer, A Father’s Story, 1994; Brian Masters, The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer, 1993.
On March 19, 1964, a four-year-old boy named Jeffrey Dahmer was taken to a hospital for a double hernia operation. He brought with him a ragged, floppy-eared stuffed dog he had slept with since the age of two. He watched Bewitched in the ward with other children. He went under anaesthesia. He woke up in severe pain and asked his mother if the doctors had cut off his penis.
That question — asked by a confused, terrified four-year-old in a hospital bed — is one of the most significant details in Jeffrey Dahmer’s documented history. It has been noted, briefly, in almost every serious account of his life. But it has rarely been examined with the rigour it deserves. This article attempts to do that.
What Happened
The hernia was the result of a birth defect — a double hernia, which required surgical correction. Lionel Dahmer describes the weeks preceding the operation in A Father’s Story:
“One day in spring of 1964, Jeff began to complain about an area of tenderness in his groin area. This tenderness worsened, and a small bulge appeared in his scrotum. We took him to the doctor right away, and he was subsequently diagnosed as suffering from a double hernia.”
Surgery was scheduled, and Jeffrey chose his stuffed dog to accompany him. The operation was performed. When he regained consciousness, it was to significant pain — pain in his groin, in a sensitive area he did not yet have full vocabulary or understanding for. In that pain and disorientation, he formed the only explanation available to a four-year-old mind: that something had been taken from him.
As an adult, speaking to forensic psychiatrist Dr. Judith Becker twenty-seven years later, Jeffrey confirmed that the pain had been so severe he genuinely believed his genitals had been removed. This was not a passing childhood misunderstanding that dissolved with time. It remained — vivid, bodily, real — into adulthood.
Lionel’s Account: The Permanent Flattening
What makes Lionel’s account so significant is not just what he describes happening, but what he describes happening after.
“When he awoke, of course, it was to a great deal of pain. So much pain, I learned later, that he asked Joyce if the doctors had cut off his penis. He remained in the hospital for several days and even after he returned home, his recovery seemed to move forward slowly. For long hours, he remained on the sofa in the living room, his body wrapped in a large, checkered bathrobe. During that period, he moved slowly, ponderously, like an old man. The ebullience which had marked his childhood, his buoyancy and energy drained away. During any period of recovery, of course, a certain flattening of mood could be expected. But in Jeff this flattening began to take on a sense of something permanent. He seemed smaller, somehow more vulnerable, perhaps even sadder than at any time before.”
Lionel — a chemist, a precise observer of detail — was careful to note the distinction. He understood that some mood flattening was expected after surgery. What he was observing was something else: a change that did not reverse. A before and an after. He filed it, noted it, carried it with him.
Joyce’s Diary and the Question of Preparation
Joyce wrote in her diary that Jeffrey had been “so good in the hospital” but that he “really disliked the doctor after this ordeal.” According to Brian Masters, she spent as much time with him as she could during his hospitalisation. At night, Jeffrey would tell her: “You can go home now, mommy. I’ll sleep.”
That detail — a four-year-old releasing his mother, performing bravery, managing her feelings alongside his own — is worth pausing on. It suggests a child who had learned, or was learning, to contain his distress.
But what Joyce’s diary does not record is any preparation. We do not know what Jeffrey was told before the operation — or indeed if he was told anything meaningful at all. Lionel’s account mentions that the diagnosis was explained to them, and that surgery was scheduled. What was explained to Jeffrey, in language a four-year-old could understand, is not documented. That gap is significant.
What Research Tells Us: Childhood Surgical Trauma
The psychological impact of surgery on young children is not a new area of study. Research dating back several decades has established that surgical procedures in early childhood carry a measurable risk of traumatic stress responses — and that this risk is shaped by a specific set of factors.
Children who undergo surgery before the age of five are considered particularly vulnerable. At this developmental stage, the child’s capacity to understand what is happening to their body is limited. They cannot place the experience in a meaningful framework. Pain that arrives without comprehensible cause is experienced differently than pain that has an explanation — and for young children, even explanations that adults consider clear are often fragmentary or misunderstood.
The risk of post-surgical traumatic stress is documented to be higher in cases where parental preparation is inadequate, where the child spends longer in hospital, where a parent is experiencing their own mental health difficulties or high levels of stress, and where the family lacks sufficient social support. In Jeffrey’s case, multiple factors were present simultaneously.
Joyce Dahmer was experiencing significant mental health difficulties during this period. Her deteriorating relationship with Lionel, her own anxiety and instability, and the demands of a household under pressure meant that even her efforts to be present with Jeffrey in the hospital were taking place within a context of parental stress. The social support available to the family was limited. Jeffrey spent several days in hospital and continued recovering slowly at home.
The Developmental Context: Age Four and the Body
Jeffrey was four years old when the surgery took place. This is not an incidental detail.
In developmental psychology, the period between roughly three and six years of age is recognised as a critical window for the development of body awareness, genital identity, and what is sometimes called bodily integrity — the sense that one’s body is one’s own, that it has boundaries, and that those boundaries can be trusted. Children at this age are engaged in the active process of understanding what their body is, how it works, and what it means.
A surgical procedure in the groin region, performed without full comprehension, with severe pain on waking, in a context where the child may not have been adequately prepared — strikes directly at this developing sense. The question Jeffrey asked — did they cut off my penis? — was not random. It was the specific fear that corresponded to the specific vulnerability of his developmental stage. He was asking, in the only language available to him: is my body still mine? Is it still intact?
That this question remained with him into adulthood, confirmed to Dr. Becker twenty-seven years later as a genuine and vivid memory, suggests that the answer he received — or didn’t receive — was not sufficient to resolve it.
Pain Management in 1960s Paediatric Medicine
There is another dimension of this event that is rarely discussed: the medical context of the 1960s.
It is now well-documented that for much of the twentieth century, paediatric pain management was significantly inadequate by contemporary standards. Medical understanding of children’s pain was shaped by a now-discredited assumption — that infants and young children did not experience pain in the same way as adults, or that their nervous systems were insufficiently developed to process it fully. This belief influenced anaesthetic and post-operative care in ways that left many children undertreated.
The severe pain Jeffrey experienced on waking from anaesthesia — pain significant enough for a four-year-old to conclude that part of his body had been surgically removed — was not unusual for the period. It was, in fact, representative of a systemic failure in paediatric medicine that would not begin to be seriously addressed for another two decades.
Jeffrey was not simply unlucky. He was a child who underwent surgery in an era when children’s pain was structurally underestimated and undertreated. What he experienced was real, severe, and inadequately managed — and he carried it.
Brian Masters and the Echoes
Brian Masters, in The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer, returns to the hernia operation repeatedly throughout his account of Jeffrey’s life. He saw it clearly as one of the formative events — not the cause, but a significant and underexamined contribution. His analysis is worth quoting at length:
“Suddenly his embryonic autonomy is shattered by a rude invasion; his little powers of decision are roughly withdrawn and he becomes an object in the hands of strangers. His ability to maintain control is undermined, disregarded even perhaps cancelled. He experiences ‘loss of control, autonomy and competence.’ And he does not know why. Not knowing why, he will wonder and invent.”
And further:
“Jeff Dahmer’s own imaginings about the insides of people’s bodies began with his hernia operation and the intrusion into his. Control was something lost in infancy and never recovered. With his victims he at last placed himself in the position where he could control not only what happened to them but what happened to their bodies. He could handle their intestines as his had been handled, cut them in the same place as he had been cut, restore himself of that autonomy of which he had been robbed, by stealing theirs. The tactile intimacy of the operation had at the same time mingled the feeling of sexual privilege with that of corporal invasion, which is why he chose to regain control and restore his stolen potency not with his enemies, not through hatred but with a loved object. The combination was disastrous.”
Masters was not arguing that the surgery made Jeffrey Dahmer a killer. He was arguing that it left a mark — a specific, bodily, lasting mark — that shaped the nature of what his compulsions later took.
The Lasting Echoes
The connections that Masters identifies — between the hernia surgery and Jeffrey’s later behaviour — are not speculative in the crude sense. They follow a recognisable psychological logic.
His fascination with the interiors of bodies began with roadkill, with the same morbid curiosity about what things looked like inside. He told people he wanted to know how things worked. About the killing of his first victim, Steven Hicks, Masters wrote: “In a cruel, pitiful echo of the experiments with roadkill, he slit open the belly to see what it looked like inside.”
He positioned his victims to expose the chest and abdomen. He opened bodies. He listened to the sounds they made. He handled organs. These were not random expressions of violence — they were organised around a specific bodily preoccupation that had its roots in a specific bodily event.
The control dimension is equally traceable. Jeffrey described, in various interviews, the compulsion to ensure that the people he brought to his apartment would not leave him. His methods — drugging, eventually killing — were organised around preventing abandonment, ensuring permanence, maintaining control over the presence of another person. A child who woke from surgery to find strangers had been inside his body without his understanding or consent, who asked his mother if something had been taken from him, grew into a man for whom control over bodies — his own and others’ — became the organising obsession of his adult life.
What This Tells Us
The hernia operation does not explain Jeffrey Dahmer. Nothing explains Jeffrey Dahmer in full — the constellation of conditions, the failed interventions, the compulsions and their catastrophic expression were the result of many things converging over many years.
But the operation deserves more serious attention than it typically receives. It was not a minor childhood event. It was a medically significant procedure performed at a critical developmental moment, with inadequate preparation, in the context of parental stress, with severe undertreated pain on recovery, leaving a child changed in a way his father could observe and name but not reverse.
Lionel saw it. Masters saw it. Jeffrey confirmed it, twenty-seven years later, to a forensic psychiatrist.
What this memorial can do — what it exists to do — is hold the full truth of who Jeffrey Dahmer was and what shaped him. The body remembers what the mind cannot always articulate. His did, clearly, for the rest of his life.
Sources: Lionel Dahmer, A Father’s Story (1994); Brian Masters, The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer (1993); Joyce Dahmer’s diary, as cited in Masters; testimony of Dr. Judith Becker, trial record 1992; research on paediatric surgical trauma and post-operative PTSD in children; historical documentation of paediatric pain management practices in mid-20th century medicine.
Jeffrey Dahmer was born with blue eyes. But on the nights he went out — to Club 219, to the bars on Milwaukee’s near north side, searching for someone to bring home — he wore yellow contact lenses.
He bought them to look like Emperor Palpatine.
This detail, introduced at his 1992 trial by forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz, tends to get filed under strange facts about Jeffrey Dahmer and left there. It deserves considerably more than that. Because this detail, when examined properly, is one of the most revealing windows into the interior world of a man most people never tried to understand.
What the Trial Revealed
At his 1992 trial, forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz explained Jeffrey’s obsession with both Emperor Palpatine from Return of the Jedi and the Gemini Killer from The Exorcist III. What these characters have in common, Dietz testified, is that they are evil and corrupt and powerful, and both have the ability to use special powers to control others. He was consistently clear that making others suffer was not Jeffrey’s desire — but that Jeffrey did identify with the power of these characters.
Both characters are portrayed in their films with yellow eyes. And Jeffrey went to the extreme of buying contact lenses with that yellow tint, which he would wear when he went to the clubs. He wanted to be more like those people, and he described some sense of using the films to get himself in the proper mood.
His defence attorney Wendy Patrickus put it plainly: “He really identified with the Emperor. He wanted like that mind control. He had those yellow eyes. So Jeff found some place where he could get contact lenses that were yellow eyes. And before he went out at night, he put in the contact lenses. He had to get himself charged up by trying to emulate a devil or evil person to fulfil his fantasies.”
The contacts were found in a pawn shop. He didn’t go to an optician and order them specially — he found them, recognised them, and bought them. That detail feels important. It was opportunistic rather than planned. He saw them and something clicked.
Who Was the Emperor?
Emperor Palpatine — Darth Sidious — is the ultimate villain of the original Star Wars trilogy. He appears fully in Return of the Jedi (1983), the film Jeffrey was watching. He is physically diminished, disfigured, hooded. He commands absolute loyalty. He controls people through unseen forces. He cannot be defeated by conventional means. He is not physically powerful — he is powerful in a way that transcends the physical entirely.
He is also, crucially, someone who spent decades hiding in plain sight. A man who was overlooked, underestimated, dismissed — and who privately held more power than anyone around him knew. The contrast between external appearance and interior reality is the whole character.
Jeffrey Dahmer worked at a chocolate factory on the night shift. He lived in a small apartment with no air conditioning. He bought his clothes at thrift stores and kept Budweiser cans in his fridge. He was overlooked and underestimated and dismissed his entire life — by his parents, by the army, by his neighbours, by the police who returned Konerak Sinthasomphone to him. Nobody saw him as powerful. Nobody saw him at all.
Except in those yellow eyes, in his own mirror, before going out.
The Psychology: Schizotypal Personality Disorder
Jeffrey Dahmer was diagnosed with schizotypal personality disorder, among other conditions. Understanding what this means is essential to understanding what the yellow contact lenses were actually doing.
People with schizotypal personality disorder may believe they have magical control over others. They may think that ordinary occurrences have special meaning just for them — what clinicians call ideas of reference. They often have a profound sense that they possess something others do not — a power, a perception, a connection to forces that operate outside ordinary reality.
The most identifying characteristic of schizotypal personality disorder is perhaps magical thinking — a way of thinking that turns the ordinary into the magical and gives regular events great relevance. It can show up as superstitious beliefs, a sense of telepathy or clairvoyance, or a tendency to imbue objects and events that others consider commonplace with profound symbolic meaning.
The yellow contact lenses were not costume jewellery. They were a ritual object. A talisman. When Jeffrey put them in, something shifted in how he experienced himself. The feeling of power — even if it was entirely interior, entirely constructed, entirely a product of his own psychology — was real to him as a sensation. He could feel it.
This is something that people with schizotypal personality disorder will recognise instantly. The magic feeling is not delusion in the clinical sense — it does not break entirely with reality. It is something more like an intensification of reality, a sense that certain objects or actions or moments carry a charge that others cannot perceive. Putting on those lenses, looking in the mirror, seeing yellow eyes looking back — something in his nervous system responded to that. Something quieted, or amplified, or both.
Power as the Theme
What is striking about Dietz’s testimony is his insistence on the word power — and his equal insistence that it was not about causing suffering. Jeffrey told him clearly and repeatedly: the appeal was not the torture, not the domination in a sadistic sense. It was the power itself. The sense of being someone who mattered, who could not be overlooked, who commanded something.
This maps precisely onto what we know about his life. A man who felt fundamentally powerless — who had been shaped by chaos he couldn’t control, who spent his adult life in a small apartment working a night shift, who could not form or sustain any relationship, who described his interior world as Infinity Land, a place where closeness meant annihilation — found in these fictional characters a vision of the self he couldn’t access any other way.
Emperor Palpatine was not loved. He was feared and obeyed. For someone who had never been able to achieve closeness — for whom intimacy was precisely what the rules of Infinity Land said would destroy you — power without closeness may have been the only form of connection that felt safe to reach for.
The Contacts and The Exorcist III
The yellow eyes connected two obsessions. The Emperor’s pale yellow gaze in Return of the Jedi. The Gemini Killer’s burning yellow eyes in The Exorcist III. Two characters — one from a space opera, one from a philosophical horror film — sharing a single visual detail that Jeffrey made his own.
FBI profiler Robert Ressler reasoned that Jeffrey’s interest in these films was about the power the possessed had over the minds and bodies of the rest of the world, and over reality itself.
Two films. Two sets of yellow eyes. One man in a pawn shop in Milwaukee, recognising something.
What It Tells Us
The yellow contact lenses are not evidence of evil. They are evidence of someone trying, in the only way available to him, to feel like something other than what his life had made him.
A deeply isolated man, diagnosed with a disorder that made intimacy feel dangerous and reality feel porous and magical, found in fictional figures of power a reflection of who he wished he could be. He took that reflection and made it physical — put it literally in his eyes — and went out into the world carrying something that was entirely invisible to everyone around him.
Nobody at Club 219 knew they were looking at Emperor Palpatine. Nobody knew what those eyes meant to the man behind them.
Only Jeffrey knew. And in the space of that private knowledge, something in him felt powerful for a little while.
Sources: Trial testimony of Dr. Park Dietz, Milwaukee 1992; Wendy Patrickus, The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes; Robert Ressler, FBI; DSM-5 diagnostic criteria for schizotypal personality disorder.
There is something extraordinarily revealing about the art a person chooses to live with. Not the art they display for others, to impress or signal taste, but the art that hangs in private rooms, the images that become part of the daily backdrop of a life. The painting you look at every morning. The photograph framed on a wall you pass a hundred times a day without consciously registering it. These choices are rarely random. They are expressions of an inner world, of what a person finds beautiful, necessary, or true.
When police entered Apartment 213 on the night of July 22, 1991, they catalogued everything. Among the evidence was something that most accounts treat as peripheral detail — the art on Jeffrey Dahmer’s walls. But those walls, and what hung on them, tell a story that is worth examining carefully.
The Living Room
Brian Masters, in The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer, describes the living room that Officers Mueller and Rauth first encountered as “small but pleasantly furnished” — an oriental rug, blue curtains, a healthy pot-plant on a tall pedestal, a large comfortable armchair. And then, quietly noted: “some fine pictures on the wall, and one framed picture of a naked male model.”
The word “fine” is significant. Masters is a precise writer, and he is not using the word carelessly. The pictures were not crude or squalid. They were fine — chosen with something like care, something like taste. This was not a bare or neglected space. It was a room in which someone had made deliberate aesthetic decisions.
Jeffrey Dahmer’s living room, photographed by Milwaukee police on the night of his arrest, July 22, 1991. Fighting Forms by Franz Marc (1914) is visible on the left wall. A framed photograph of a male model is visible on the right.
Fighting Forms — Franz Marc, 1914
The most significant work in Jeffrey Dahmer’s apartment was a reproduction of Fighting Forms, painted by the German Expressionist Franz Marc in 1914.
Marc was a founding member of Der Blaue Reiter — The Blue Rider — a group of artists who believed that colour and form could express the spiritual world more truthfully than representation ever could. He had a deep, almost religious reverence for animals, seeing in them an innocence and purity that humanity had lost. He developed a precise and personal theory of colour symbolism: blue for the spiritual and masculine, yellow for the feminine and joyful, red for violence and passion.
Fighting Forms, Franz Marc, 1914. Oil on canvas. Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich.
Fighting Forms was painted in the final months before the First World War. It is one of the most abstract works Marc ever produced — two opposing forces, one dominated by violent, churning red, the other by deep, absorptive black, locked in a collision that has no resolution and no clear victor. There are no animals, no recognisable figures. There is only the pure language of colour and form, expressing what Marc called “the spiritual essence of things.” It is one of a series of four works he painted that year — Playing Forms, Forms in Combat, Cheerful Forms (now destroyed), and Fighting Forms. Three months after completing them, Marc enlisted in the German Army. He was killed at the Battle of Verdun on March 4, 1916, before orders could reach him to withdraw from the front.
That Jeffrey Dahmer owned a reproduction of this painting — that he looked at it every day — is not a trivial detail.
Fighting Forms is a painting about two irreconcilable forces. About the impossibility of harmony between opposing natures. About something that cannot be stopped, something that moves toward its end with the logic of a natural force, indifferent to the damage it causes. Marc painted it on the edge of a war he could feel coming but not prevent. He painted it as a man who had run out of animals to use as symbols for the duality he felt in the world, and had moved instead to pure abstraction — to the forces themselves, stripped of any mediating form.
Jeffrey Dahmer stood before this painting in his living room. He lived with it. Whatever drew him to it, whatever he saw in those two churning, colliding masses of red and black, was something he felt the need to look at every day.
Behind the Door — Archaeological Reminiscence of Millet’s Angelus
The third work identified from Apartment 213 hung in the least public place of all — the back of the front door itself. A print of Archaeological Reminiscence of Millet’s Angelus, painted by Salvador Dalí in 1933–35.
Dalí built the piece around Jean-François Millet’s The Angelus (1857–59), a quiet painting of two peasants pausing at dusk to pray over a basket between them. Dalí became privately convinced the painting wasn’t really about a harvest at all — that Millet had originally painted a child’s coffin between the two figures and painted over it. He was, eventually, proven right: an X-ray of Millet’s canvas later revealed a rectangular, coffin-like form beneath the visible basket. Dalí spent years reworking the image obsessively, and in this version the two humble peasants become towering, hollowed-out ruins — stone monuments eroded by time, facing each other across an empty plain, with actual architectural wreckage crumbling at their feet.
That this was the image chosen for the door — not the living room, not the bedroom, but the threshold itself, the last thing seen leaving and the first thing seen coming home — is difficult to read as accidental. Whether or not Jeffrey knew the painting’s buried history, he lived daily with a reworking of a scene about grief hidden beneath a scene of quiet ritual. Two monumental figures, worn down to their structure, facing each other over a landscape of ruins.
The Photographs
In the bedroom and hallway, the art took a different form. Masters documents “framed photographs and posters of male nudes taken in ‘artistic’ poses and clearly intended to be attractive to a homosexual man.” These were not the Polaroids — those were hidden. These were displayed. Framed. Hung. Chosen for the walls in the way anyone might choose art for the walls of their home.
The distinction matters. Jeffrey Dahmer was a man who separated, with care, what was private from what was visible. The framed photographs of male nudes in artistic poses were not hidden. They were part of the apartment’s decoration — the legitimate, curated face of his aesthetic world.
We know from Brian Masters’ account of his adolescence that from a young age Jeffrey was drawn to the male form with a specific intensity: the chest, the abdomen, the smooth musculature of the body without its personhood. The magazines he sought out as a teenager were those showing “photographs of muscular torsos and hairless chests.” The fantasy that formed in those years was not of relationship, but of possession — of being close to something beautiful and keeping it. The photographs on his walls were the legal, visible expression of the same impulse. The male body as aesthetic object. Beautiful and arrested.
Three specific works have been identified among the photographs displayed in Apartment 213:
Jean Marais — Raymond Voinquel, 1938. A black and white fine art photograph of French actor and cultural icon Jean Marais, shot by one of France’s foremost portrait photographers. Marais reclines, bare-chested, in dramatic chiaroscuro light — the image has the quality of classical painting, the body rendered with the same reverence one might give to sculpture.
Jean Marais, Raymond Voinquel, 1938.
LA Nude — Victor Skrebneski, 1984. Skrebneski was a Chicago-based master of black and white photography known for his classical, sculptural approach to the body. In this image, a nude male figure carries a globe on his shoulders in the pose of Atlas — shot from below, the musculature lit dramatically against deep black. The body as architecture. The body as myth.
LA Nude, Victor Skrebneski, 1984.
Fred with Tires — Herb Ritts, 1984. One of the most iconic images in twentieth century photography, and the photograph widely credited with launching Ritts’ career. A nude male figure leans against a stack of tyres, the industrial setting in stark contrast with the classical beauty of the body. Ritts — along with Robert Mapplethorpe and Bruce Weber — provoked a radical change in how the nude was depicted in the 1980s.
Fred with Tires, Herb Ritts, 1984.
The Altar That Was Never Built
There was a third layer to Jeffrey Dahmer’s visual world — one that existed only in drawings and notes found in the apartment. He had been planning what he called a shrine: a precisely designed aesthetic space, hand-drawn in plans that specified colours and materials. Black carpet. Black plush chair. Windows covered with black shower curtains. A black table. Fluorescent eyes set into a wall plaque. And along the table — painted skulls, arranged in a composition.
Jeffrey Dahmer’s hand-drawn plans for the shrine, recovered from Apartment 213, July 1991.
He wanted to build something. He wanted to create an environment, an interior world made entirely to his own specifications, expressing the aesthetic of his deepest and most damaged desires. The shrine was never completed. But its plans reveal something important: Jeffrey Dahmer thought in visual terms. He composed. He arranged. He had a sense of what things should look like, of the emotional effect of colour and placement and form. He was, in the saddest and most terrible sense, an artist of a kind — one whose medium had become irredeemable.
The Drawings
In prison, Jeffrey received letters. Many of them. And to some of those who wrote, he wrote back — and drew.
What survives in circulation are small, intimate things. A hand tracing on lined paper, dated March 1, 1993 — his signature above it, J.H. Dahmer, and below the outline of his fingers: Jeff Dahmer. 177252. His name and his number. He placed his hand flat on the paper, traced around it, and sent it to a stranger. There is something almost unbearably human about that gesture — the oldest mark a person can make, the first thing children do with a piece of paper and a pen.
And then there is the sketch labelled in his own handwriting: my leg and foot. A pencil drawing, careful and observational, of his own body. He looked at himself and drew what he saw. Not a fantasy, not an abstraction — just his leg, his foot, rendered with quiet attention.
These drawings belong in any serious examination of Jeffrey Dahmer’s visual world. They are not the work of a man who had stopped seeing. He was still looking — at his hand, at his body, at the world around him — and still finding it worth recording. The same impulse that hung Fighting Forms on his living room wall, that sketched plans for a shrine he would never build, was still alive in cell 177252. Diminished, constrained, reaching through a pen and a piece of lined paper — but alive.
What the Art Tells Us
There is a version of Jeffrey Dahmer’s story that presents him as simply monstrous — a man without inner life, without feeling, without the kind of interior world that makes a person legible as human. The art on his walls pushes back against that version.
A man who chooses Fighting Forms to live with is a man who feels the conflict in himself — the red and the black, the two forces that cannot be reconciled — and who finds in abstraction a language for something he cannot otherwise name.
A man who frames a 1938 vintage photograph by one of France’s greatest portrait photographers, alongside two of the defining works of 1980s art photography — Skrebneski and Herb Ritts — is not a man without aesthetic knowledge or taste. He had a curated collection. He chose with intention.
A man who draws detailed plans for a shrine — who specifies fluorescent eyes and painted skulls and the precise quality of black he wants — is a man with an interior aesthetic world that is coherent, structured, and deeply felt.
And a man who traces his own hand on a piece of lined paper and sends it to a stranger — who sketches his leg and labels it in his own handwriting — is a man who was still present. Still here. Still marking his existence in the only ways left available to him.
None of this excuses anything. It does not soften the crimes or their consequences. But it is part of the truth of who Jeffrey Dahmer was. And this memorial exists to hold the full truth, however uncomfortable — to see the human being behind the name, however much the world has decided that is not worth doing.
The art on his walls was part of his inner life. It deserves to be seen as such.
Sources: Brian Masters, The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer (1992); Milwaukee Police Department inventory, July 1991; Franz Marc, Fighting Forms (1914), Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich; Raymond Voinquel, Jean Marais (1938); Victor Skrebneski, LA Nude (1984); Herb Ritts, Fred with Tires (1984).
There is a door in Milwaukee that no longer exists. Apartment 213, Oxford Apartments — the place Jeffrey Dahmer lived from 1990 until his arrest in July 1991. The door is gone. The building was demolished in 1992. But the number remains, and for those of us who have spent years thinking about who Jeffrey was and what his life meant, it carries enormous weight.
Door213 is a music project born directly from that weight.
What Door213 Is
Door213 is not a project about crime. It is not shock value, and it is not provocation. It is an attempt to do in music what this memorial does in words — to sit with complexity, with grief, with the parts of Jeffrey’s story that most people refuse to look at directly. The inner world. The loneliness. The questions that never got answered. The faith he found at the end.
The name is the door itself — the threshold between what the world saw and what was actually happening inside. Door213 lives in that space.
The project deals in duality, symbolism, and the sacred and profane existing side by side. Sonically it moves between worlds — nu-metal, hip-hop, jazz, Arabic influences, Portuguese — because Jeffrey himself was a man of contradictions, and the music reflects that. Nothing here is simple. Nothing here is meant to be.
None of my Friends Understand What It Means
The debut album. Love, chaos, and the cosmic connection of two souls — the kind of connection that cannot be explained to anyone on the outside, that exists in a language only two people speak. The title alone says everything about what it means to feel something this deep for someone the world has already judged and dismissed.
This is where Door213 began: in the place where understanding lives, even when no one else can follow you there.
The second album deepened the mythology. Fate, life, death — two similar, lost souls finding each other inside a bedroom with a window into the city night. The imagery here is intimate and cinematic at once: a private space, a nocturnal world outside, two people who recognise something in each other that they have never found anywhere else.
The bedroom with the city night beyond the window would become a recurring motif in Door213’s visual world — and would eventually become the cover of Aftermath itself.
Atmospheric, nocturnal, unhurried. Jazz Records Vol. I settled into a quieter register — music for late hours, for sitting alone with something you can’t fully name. This Nightscape We Live In became its quiet centrepiece, a track that asks what it means to exist in the dark, to be alive in hours that belong to no one.
The fourth album, releasing April 18, 2026, is Door213’s most fully realised work yet. Nine tracks. A cover image — two figures floating horizontally in an amber-lit bedroom, one in white above and one in black below, fingers barely touching, Milwaukee glowing through the window behind them — that contains the entire thesis of the album in a single frame.
Yin and yang. Light and dark. The one who left and the one still reaching.
Aftermath deals with love across impossible distances. Tracks like Fusion and The Strangeness Within move between the sensual and the spiritual, always returning to the same question: what remains after everything is gone? The album closes in Portuguese — Angel — a final breath in another language, a door closing gently.
What’s Coming
Monstros e Sonhadores — Monsters and Dreamers — is Door213’s next project, written entirely in Portuguese. It is the most intimate work yet: the monsters we carry inside us, and the dreamers we remain in spite of them. No release date yet. It arrives when it’s ready.
The Inner World
Door213 exists because some stories deserve more than documentation. Jeffrey Dahmer’s story has been told in courtrooms, in true crime podcasts, in Netflix series. What it hasn’t always been given is tenderness. The music tries to offer that — not cheap forgiveness, not excusing anything, but the harder and rarer thing: the willingness to see a full human being.
That is what this memorial was built for. That is what Door213 carries in every track.
The door at Apartment 213 is gone. But doors, once they exist in the imagination, never fully close.
Jeffrey Dahmer was not simply a serial killer. He was a profoundly mentally ill human being who received almost no professional help during the years when intervention might have mattered. By the time psychiatrists formally evaluated him, it was in a courtroom, under oath, in the context of determining whether he should be held legally responsible for seventeen murders.
The diagnoses that emerged from those evaluations — and from subsequent academic research — tell a story that is more complex, more human, and more heartbreaking than most coverage ever acknowledges. This article attempts to compile and explain them properly, in one place, for the first time on this memorial.
The Legal Context
Jeffrey pleaded guilty but insane to fifteen counts of murder in January 1992. The trial that followed was not about whether he had committed the crimes — he had confessed to everything. It was about whether he understood what he was doing was wrong, and whether a mental disease had rendered him unable to control his behaviour.
The defence called three expert witnesses. Forensic psychiatrist Carl Wahlstrom diagnosed Jeffrey with necrophilia, borderline personality disorder, schizotypal personality disorder, alcohol dependence, and a psychotic disorder. The prosecution’s forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz diagnosed him with substance use disorder, paraphilia, and schizotypal personality disorder. Independent experts George Palermo and Samuel Friedman also testified, with Palermo concluding Jeffrey had a severe mixed personality disorder with antisocial, obsessive-compulsive, sadistic, fetishistic, borderline and necrophilic features.
Despite the weight of diagnoses, the court ruled him sane — primarily because he maintained comprehension of the legal and moral wrongfulness of his acts, took steps to hide his crimes, and tended to plan the murders beforehand, proving the crimes were not impulsive and uncontrollable acts in the context of mental illness.
Legal sanity and mental illness are not the same thing. Jeffrey was mentally ill and legally sane simultaneously. Both things were true.
Borderline Personality Disorder
Borderline personality disorder is characterised by intense emotional instability, a profound fear of abandonment, unstable and turbulent relationships, impulsive behaviour, and a fragile, shifting sense of self. It is not a disorder of coldness or detachment — it is almost the opposite. People with BPD feel things intensely, sometimes overwhelmingly, and their inner world is one of profound instability.
Jeffrey’s BPD manifested in specific and recognisable ways. The desperate need for connection — the longing, as clinical psychologist Samuel Friedman testified, for companionship — that drove his crimes was not the flat indifference of a psychopath. It was the anguished reaching of someone who could not form or sustain relationships through any ordinary means and whose disorder had catastrophically distorted the expression of that need.
The pattern of his adult life — the alcohol as emotional regulation, the isolation, the sense of being fundamentally different and fundamentally alone — is entirely consistent with untreated BPD in a person who had never received appropriate support.
Schizotypal Personality Disorder
This is the diagnosis that appears most consistently across all the expert evaluations, and it is the one most relevant to understanding Jeffrey’s interior world.
Schizotypal personality disorder involves ideas of reference — the belief that ordinary occurrences have special meaning — magical thinking, the sense of having some form of special power or perception, unusual perceptual experiences, and excessive social anxiety rooted not in negative self-judgement but in paranoid fears about others.
The yellow contact lenses, the ritual use of films before going out, the sense that certain objects and moments carried a charge others couldn’t perceive — these are textbook schizotypal presentations. So is the profound social isolation, the inability to form close friendships, the feeling of being fundamentally unlike other people.
Research suggests that childhood trauma, neglect, abuse, stress, and family dysfunction can increase the risk of developing schizotypal traits. People with the most severe cases usually have a combination of childhood trauma and a genetic basis for their condition. Jeffrey’s childhood — the parental conflict, Joyce’s mental health crises, the constant upheaval, the emotional unavailability of both parents — maps directly onto that profile.
Alcohol Use Disorder
Jeffrey had an alcohol abuse problem and started drinking heavily in high school. His drinking led him to become withdrawn and socially awkward. Eventually, his alcohol use disorder would force him to drop out of college.
Alcohol was Jeffrey’s primary coping mechanism from adolescence onward. It lowered the threshold for acting on impulses he was otherwise able to suppress. It was what the army discharged him for. It was what filled his apartment in the form of empty Budweiser cans when he was depressed. It is what Lionel tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to address.
Untreated alcohol use disorder in the context of BPD and schizotypal personality disorder is a particularly dangerous combination — each condition amplifying the others, each closing off the exits that might otherwise have been available.
A Physical Blow During Basic Training
Before Jeffrey ever reached Germany, his body had already sustained damage that belongs in any honest account of his psychiatric history. During basic training at Fort McClellan, Alabama, his persistent drinking got the entire platoon punished for his insubordination — and several of the men made sure he felt the consequences personally. The beating was severe enough to rupture his ear-drum, a wound that left him with recurring ear-aches for years to come. A blow forceful enough to cause that kind of damage is also the kind of physical trauma known to worsen pre-existing psychiatric conditions, erode impulse control, and deepen emotional dysregulation. It is one more layer of pressure added to an architecture that was already beginning to crack.
A Psychotic Disorder
The diagnosis of a psychotic disorder — distinct from psychosis as a symptom within another condition — acknowledges that Jeffrey experienced periods of significant detachment from reality. Symptoms including delusions, hallucinations, and disorganised thinking may have made him detached from reality at certain moments.
This is not the same as saying he was psychotic during his crimes. The prosecution’s case rested precisely on the evidence that he was not — that he planned, concealed, and understood what he was doing. But psychotic episodes, when they occurred, would have contributed to the overall disintegration of a mind that was already fragmented across multiple serious conditions.
The Trance States
There is one detail in the documented record that receives almost no serious attention, and it is one of the most potentially significant: the trance-like states.
Brian Masters documents at least one account of Jeffrey entering what can only be described as a dissociative or fugue-like episode — a period of apparent absence, of being present in body but not in mind, during which his behaviour seemed to shift beyond his ordinary conscious awareness. Jeffrey himself, at various points, described experiences consistent with dissociation — a sense of watching himself from outside, of compulsion overtaking volition, of not quite being present during the worst of what he did.
This has been largely ignored by the researchers and forensic professionals who evaluated him. It deserves not to be.
If these episodes were frequent rather than isolated, their origin could plausibly have been neurological rather than purely psychiatric. Temporal lobe involvement — temporal lobe epilepsy, complex partial seizures, or structural abnormalities in the temporal region — is associated with dissociative states, compulsive and repetitive behaviour, altered perception, and in some cases paraphilias. It was, on paper, exactly the kind of thing a neurological examination might detect.
As it turns out, that examination was performed. A competency evaluation conducted in April 1992 confirms 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. This does not rule out every possible neurological contribution to the trance states, and EEGs in particular can miss intermittent or deep-seated abnormalities, especially when not conducted during an actual episode. But it meaningfully narrows the most obvious biological explanation. Joyce’s instinct that something physical might be found was tested, and the tests that existed in 1992 did not find it. The trance states remain real, documented, and significant — but the evidence available points toward a psychological and developmental origin rather than an undetected structural one. See our companion piece, “The Mind That Wouldn’t Stay,” for a fuller exploration of the dissociative reading.
Insomnia, Depression, and the Medication He Was Given
One documented but often overlooked aspect of Jeffrey’s medical history is his prescription for Halcion — a benzodiazepine sedative containing triazolam — prescribed by a physician for insomnia. Jeffrey worked the night shift at the Milwaukee Ambrosia Chocolate Factory and told his doctor he needed help adjusting to that schedule. The prescription was legitimate. The use he put it to was not.
That he required a sedative prescription at all is significant. Insomnia is a common companion to anxiety, depression, and the kind of psychological fragmentation that characterised Jeffrey’s inner life. Benzodiazepines like Halcion are also prescribed for anxiety — it is not possible to know from the documentary record whether anxiety was part of the clinical picture that prompted the prescription, but it would be entirely consistent with everything else we know about him.
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Depression is not formally listed among his trial diagnoses, but it is strongly implied throughout the record. The periods of total collapse — when he would stop shaving, stop bathing, let the apartment fill with empty beer cans, and cease functioning in any ordinary sense — are consistent with depressive episodes. Lionel mentioned his son’s suicidal thoughts after conviction. Jeffrey himself said, in various formulations over the years, that he did not care whether he lived or died.
By April 1992, we know this was addressed, at least in part: the competency evaluation prepared ahead of his trial documents a prescription for Prozac — two 20mg capsules each morning — from his treating psychiatrist Dr. Richard Arnesen, alongside sessions three times a week with clinical psychologist Dr. Patricia Allen. What isn’t documented is whether that level of care continued through the remainder of his incarceration; see our companion piece, “August 24, 1993: A Crisis Report,” which examines what the record shows roughly a year and a half later. What is clear is that the suffering was real and consistent — present since adolescence, visible on paper as early as the 1986 MMPI, and addressed only partially and only very late.
The Asperger’s Hypothesis
More recently, researchers have proposed an additional framework. A study by Silva, Ferrari and Leong in the Journal of Forensic Sciences (2002) proposed that Jeffrey was most likely on the autistic spectrum, specifically with the hypothesis of him having Asperger’s disorder.
The case for this is not trivial. Jeffrey’s social difficulties went beyond anxiety or paranoia — there was something in the texture of his social interactions, his inability to read and respond to ordinary social cues, his preference for solitary rituals and highly structured activities, his intense and specific interests, that some researchers believe points toward autism spectrum presentation.
His own words at various points support this reading: “The subtleties of social life were beyond my grasp. When children liked me, I did not know why. Nor could I formulate a plan for winning their affection. I simply didn’t know how things worked with other people.” That description is not of someone who doesn’t want connection. It is of someone who cannot navigate the basic social architecture through which connection normally forms.
What Was Not Diagnosed: The Absence of Psychopathy
It is worth stating clearly what Jeffrey was not diagnosed with, because the popular image of him as a psychopath — cold, calculating, without feeling — is contradicted by the clinical record.
Photograph of Jeffrey Dahmer taken during his trial. (Photo by: Universal History Archive/ Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Psychopathy, characterised by a fundamental absence of empathy and remorse, shallow affect, and manipulative interpersonal behaviour, does not fit. Other evidence does not support a diagnosis of psychopathy. Jeffrey wept during his confession. He expressed genuine remorse at his sentencing. He underwent sincere religious conversion. Reverend Roy Ratcliff, who spent months with him, described a man with genuine emotional depth and authentic spiritual searching. These are not the behaviours of a psychopath.
He had empathy. It was distorted, misdirected, catastrophically expressed — but it was there.
The Central Question
The question that runs through all of this is not whether Jeffrey was mentally ill. He clearly was, significantly, with multiple overlapping conditions that had been present since childhood and that received essentially no treatment until he was in prison for murder.
The real question is what might have happened had any of this been identified and treated earlier. The BPD, the schizotypal traits, the alcohol dependence, the insomnia, the depression that was never formally named — these were not invisible. They were present, and they were ignored.
(Photo by Curt Borgwardt/Sygma via Getty Images)
There were points of potential intervention throughout his life — the withdrawn child after the hernia surgery, the isolated teenager collecting animal bones, the army discharge for alcoholism, the beating that ruptured his ear-drum, the earlier arrest. At each of these junctures, the system that might have helped him either missed him entirely or responded inadequately.
Jeffrey Dahmer was not a monster who emerged fully formed from nowhere. He was a severely ill person, carrying a constellation of serious conditions through a childhood and adolescence that offered him almost nothing in the way of support, understanding, or care.
That does not explain away what he did. Nothing explains that away. But it is part of the truth — and the memorial exists to hold the whole truth.
A Final Note, Corrected
This article originally claimed that no neurological examination was ever performed on Jeffrey Dahmer — no CAT scan, no MRI, no EEG — and that the questions about a possible biological origin for his trance states and compulsive behaviour were never seriously pursued while he was alive.
That claim was incorrect, and the record deserves to be set straight. A competency evaluation dated April 27, 1992, conducted ahead of his trial, confirms that Jeffrey underwent an electroencephalogram, a CAT scan of the brain, and a chromosomal analysis. All three were reported as negative for pathology. He was also administered a substantial battery of psychological testing across multiple dates in 1991 and 1992, building on earlier testing from 1986 and 1989, including the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, the Rorschach, and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory — corroborating findings of high IQ and an absence of psychotic thinking.
So the picture is more complete, and more carefully examined, than this article previously suggested. The biological question Joyce had always asked — was there something in the brain — was in fact tested, at least to the extent 1992 neurology allowed. The tests came back clean.
What remains true is this: those tests happened before trial, in the context of determining legal competency and sanity — not in the context of ongoing psychiatric care during his three years at Columbia Correctional Institution afterward. No further neurological investigation is documented during his incarceration, and the trance states, the dissociative episodes, the compulsive patterns that defined his adult life were not revisited neurologically after 1992. The brain itself was never studied after death, despite Joyce’s wish that it be — a separate and still-accurate fact, addressed in our article “The Dehumanisation of Jeffrey Dahmer.”
What we got wrong was the claim that no examination ever took place. What remains accurate is that the examination that did take place was early, limited to the tools available in 1992, and was never revisited as his case — and his trance states — continued to raise unanswered questions for the rest of his life.
After his death on November 28, 1994, there was a brief window. Joyce requested that Jeffrey’s brain be preserved for scientific study, believing that research might yield something useful — not to excuse what he did, but to understand it. Lionel opposed it. The dispute went to court. In the end, the brain was cremated along with the rest of his remains.
Whatever was there — if anything — is gone. We will never know.
Sources: Trial testimony of Dr. Carl Wahlstrom, Dr. Park Dietz, Dr. George Palermo, Dr. Samuel Friedman, Dr. Fred Berlin, 1992; Jeffrey L. Dahmer, Competency Evaluation, Case No. F-912542, April 27, 1992 (primary source document); DSM-5 diagnostic criteria; Silva, Ferrari & Leong, Journal of Forensic Sciences 2002; Strubel, Comorbid Psychopathologies 2007; Brian Masters, The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer 1993; Lionel Dahmer, A Father’s Story 1994; Wikipedia. Note: formal diagnosis of depression is not documented in available trial records; its presence is inferred from behavioural accounts.
I’ve been studying Jeff since 2022.
Not in the way people often assume.
Not out of admiration, and never to justify anything.
But because something about it made me stop… and look closer.
I’ve always been drawn to the things that don’t have simple answers.
To the quiet spaces between what is visible and what is hidden.
To the parts of human nature that most people turn away from, because they are too uncomfortable, too heavy, or too complex to hold for long.
What draws me in isn’t what he did.
It’s everything surrounding it.
The psychology.
The loneliness.
The contradictions that can exist within one person — how someone can be both deeply human and deeply broken at the same time.
I don’t believe that understanding equals excusing.
And I don’t believe that looking closer means losing your sense of right and wrong.
To me, it means the opposite.
It means being willing to sit with something difficult, without immediately reducing it to something simple just to feel safe again.
I’ve never seen the world in black and white.
There are always layers. Always reasons. Always something beneath the surface, even if we don’t like what we might find there.
And maybe that’s why I’m here.
Not to defend.
Not to glorify.
But to understand.
Because sometimes, understanding is the only honest way I know to look at things.
This is a part of me.
Quiet, complex, and real.
And I’m not here to hide it.
Jeffrey Dahmer woke up on the morning of November 28, 1994 — a Monday, Thanksgiving week — and did what he had been doing every morning for nearly three years. He got up. He got dressed. He went about his day.
He had no idea it was the last one.
The Morning
By late 1994, Jeffrey had been at Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin for almost three years. He was no longer in protective isolation. After a first year spent largely separated from general population, he had gradually been integrated — attending classes, eating communal meals, performing work duties. He had earned, through quiet compliance and genuine religious engagement, a degree of ordinary prison life that most had assumed he would never be allowed.
He had been baptised six months earlier, in May 1994, submerged in the prison whirlpool by Reverend Roy Ratcliff of the Church of Christ. They had met every week since. Five days before his death — on November 23 — Jeffrey and Ratcliff had their final Bible study session together. They discussed the Book of Revelation. Its subjects: death, punishment for sins, and what comes after.
On the morning of November 28, Jeffrey left his cell to conduct his assigned work detail. He had been on cleaning duty for three weeks. That morning he was assigned to the gymnasium with two other inmates — Jesse Anderson, convicted of murdering his wife, and Christopher Scarver, serving life for a murder committed in 1990.
The three were taken to the gym by corrections officers, unshackled, and left to clean the bathrooms. They were left unsupervised for approximately twenty minutes.
What Happened in the Gym
Scarver had despised Jeffrey from the moment they arrived at Columbia at roughly the same time in 1992. He had kept his distance, watching from across the yard, repulsed by what he knew of Jeffrey’s crimes. He had carried a newspaper clipping about those crimes in his pocket for a long time — a physical reminder of his disgust.
That morning, while Scarver was filling a mop bucket with water, someone poked him in the back. He turned around. Both Jeffrey and Anderson were laughing quietly. He couldn’t tell which of them had done it.
Scarver retrieved a 20-inch metal bar from the weight room. He followed Jeffrey into a staff locker room and confronted him — showing him the newspaper clipping, asking him directly if he had done those things.
Jeffrey was shocked. He started looking for a way out. Scarver blocked the door.
According to Scarver, Jeffrey’s last words were: “I don’t care if I live or die. Go ahead and kill me.”
Scarver brought the bar down. He crushed Jeffrey’s skull with two blows. He then crossed the gym to where Anderson was working and did the same to him. The entire thing took roughly twenty minutes.
At approximately 8:10 in the morning, a corrections officer discovered Jeffrey on the bathroom floor with catastrophic head wounds. He had been beaten across the skull and his head had been repeatedly slammed against the wall.
He was still alive. He was rushed to a nearby hospital.
He was pronounced dead one hour later. He was 34 years old.
The Guard Question
Jeffrey was not supposed to be in an unsupervised situation with other inmates. He had known enemies in the prison — he had survived an earlier attack in July 1994 when inmate Osvaldo Durruthy slashed at his throat with a razor blade embedded in a toothbrush as he sat in the prison chapel. He had received only superficial wounds that time.
Scarver himself later said he believed it was no accident that he ended up alone with Jeffrey that morning. Prison officials, he claimed, knew how much he despised Jeffrey. They knew the history. And on November 28, they left the three of them together, unshackled, unsupervised, for twenty minutes.
Whether this was negligence or something more deliberate has never been officially established. The Wisconsin Department of Corrections blamed staffing issues. The investigation concluded without any guards being held accountable.
But the question remains. It has never been fully answered.
Joyce
When news of Jeffrey’s death reached his mother Joyce, her response cut through everything:
“Now is everybody happy? Now that he’s bludgeoned to death, is that good enough for everyone?”
It was the cry of a mother. Whatever she had done and not done, whatever had passed between them — in that moment, she was simply a woman whose child had been killed.
No Services
Jeffrey had left instructions in his will. He wanted no services conducted. No funeral. No headstone. No ceremony of any kind.
His wishes were respected, in that sense. There was no public funeral. No gathering. No words spoken over him in a church or at a graveside. The man who had been the subject of global media coverage for three years was disposed of, in the end, with complete silence.
His body was held by investigators — it was evidence in his own murder case — for nearly a year. Christopher Scarver was sentenced in May 1995 for the killings. Only then were Jeffrey’s remains released to his family.
On September 17, 1995 — almost ten months after his death — Jeffrey Dahmer’s body was cremated. His ashes were divided equally between his parents. Lionel took his half back to Ohio. Joyce took hers to California.
The Brain
Before cremation, doctors had opened Jeffrey’s skull and removed his brain. It had been preserved in formaldehyde at the Dane County Medical Examiner’s Office since his autopsy.
What followed was one final, painful dispute between his parents.
Joyce wanted the brain donated to science. She believed, and had always believed, that something biological had contributed to what Jeffrey became — and she wanted to know what. She told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: “Jeff always said that if he could be of any help, he wanted to do whatever he could.”
Lionel refused. He wanted the brain cremated with the rest of his son’s remains. He argued that Jeffrey had requested cremation and that this request extended to every part of him. To retain the brain against his wishes, Lionel said, would be legally and morally wrong.
Two scientists had written to the court requesting access. One, Jonathan Pincus of Georgetown University, described it as “an unparalleled chance to possibly determine what neurological factors could have contributed to his bizarre criminal behaviour.”
The case went to the Wisconsin state court. On December 13, 1995 — more than a year after Jeffrey’s death — Columbia County Circuit Judge Daniel George ordered the brain cremated. The scientists never studied it. Whatever was there — whatever might have explained something, or explained nothing — was gone.
What Was Left
Jeffrey Dahmer died at 34. He had been in prison for two years and nine months. He had been baptised six months before his death. He had met with his pastor five days before it. He had, by every account of those closest to him, been sincere in his faith and genuine in his remorse.
He died in a bathroom, on a Monday morning, before most people had finished breakfast. He died because he was left unsupervised with a man who hated him, for twenty minutes, in a maximum security prison. He died with his head on the floor.
He had asked for no ceremony. He got none.
He had asked to be cremated. He was — eventually, in pieces, disputed even in death, his brain held in a jar while his parents fought over it in court.
He had said, months before he died, that he sometimes wondered whether he was sinning against God by continuing to live. Reverend Ratcliff, who loved him, had no answer for that.
“I don’t care if I live or die.”
He had been saying some version of that for years. His mother had called him weekly and whenever she expressed concern for his safety, he told her: “It doesn’t matter, Mom. I don’t care if something happens to me.”
He meant it. He had meant it for a long time.
The baptism, the Bible study, the weekly meetings with Ratcliff — those were not the actions of a man who had given up. They were the actions of a man trying, quietly and seriously, to make something meaningful from whatever time remained. He was not performing. The people who were there said so.
He deserved more time.
Photographs of Jeffrey Dahmer deceased exist and have circulated widely online. The Memorial does not share them and will not share them. As we do not publish photographs of the victims out of respect for their dignity and humanity, we extend that same respect to Jeffrey. A person’s death is not public property. We ask anyone using those images for display — on social media, forums, or elsewhere — to please consider removing them. They do not dignify the human being who passed away. They never have.
Sources: Wikipedia; Biography.com; The Washington Post; Los Angeles Times; Reverend Roy Ratcliff, Dark Journey Deep Grace (2008); Christopher Scarver, New York Post interview (2015); Wisconsin Department of Corrections records.
Jeffrey Dahmer Memorial 