Personal Insight – Jeffrey Dahmer Memorial

A Photograph That Should Not Be Yours to Look At

A personal essay on the post-attack photograph of Jeffrey Dahmer that circulates online — why its treatment breaks with how we protect the dead, and how it has been used as a weapon against the living who write about him.

I am not going to describe it to you. If you are reading this, you almost certainly already know which photograph I mean — it has been circulated so widely, for so long, with so little resistance, that description has become unnecessary. That is itself the problem I want to write about.

On 28 November 1994, Jeffrey was attacked in the Columbia Correctional Institution and died the next day. In the interval between the attack and his death, a photograph was taken of him — injured, restrained by medical equipment, alive but only barely. That photograph exists. It should never have left the room it was taken in. It has been circulating for decades regardless, appearing in slideshows, forum posts, “documentary” video essays, and — for those of us who run spaces like this one — occasionally in our own inboxes, sent to us by strangers who know exactly what they are doing.

What We Don’t Do With the Dead

Every serious newsroom and every serious archive operates under a shared, mostly unwritten rule: you do not publish autopsy photographs. You do not publish crime scene photographs of a victim’s body. You do not publish a person’s final, most vulnerable moment for an audience to consume. This isn’t a legal requirement in most cases — it’s an ethical one, built over a long time, for a simple reason: a person’s suffering does not become public property just because the public is curious about it. Families are protected from this. Victims are protected from this. It is one of the few places where our culture still draws a hard line around dignity.

Jeffrey’s photograph sits outside that line. It circulates freely, captioned, reposted, used as a punchline or a piece of “closure” content, entirely unprotected by the norm that would shield almost anyone else’s worst moment from public consumption. And the reason is not subtle. It is that the people trading it have decided, somewhere along the way, that he forfeited the right to that protection — that what he did in life means his death is fair game, his suffering is entertainment, his most helpless moment is something other people are entitled to see.

I want to be completely clear, because this memorial has never once asked anyone to look away from what he did: seventeen people are dead because of him. That fact does not move, and nothing in this essay is asking it to. But the dignity of a corpse and the guilt of the person who once inhabited it are two separate questions, and our culture has quietly decided — through the sheer fact of how freely this image travels — that in his case, only one of those questions still matters.

The Photograph as Weapon

I did not go looking for this image. It found me, the way it finds most people connected to this work — sent by a stranger, unprompted, into a DM, timed for whatever moment would make it land hardest. It is used deliberately. Not to inform, not to document, but to hurt: to hurt anyone who has ever expressed sympathy for him, to hurt anyone doing the kind of careful, difficult work this memorial does, to hurt me specifically, for daring to hold both truths — that he did something unforgivable and that he was also a person whose ending deserved something better than becoming a weapon.

That is the part I need people to sit with. A photograph of a dying man’s face has become ammunition. Every time it’s sent, forwarded, reposted with a gloating caption, someone is using another human being’s final hours as a tool to punish the living. It does not punish him. He is not here to be hurt by it. It only ever lands on the people who are.

Why I’m Not Looking Away From This

I write often about difficult things on this site, and I try to write about them with rigor rather than sentiment. This piece is different, and I want to say so honestly: it is personal. Seeing that image, even unwillingly, even for the fraction of a second it takes to block and report the person who sent it, does something to me that doesn’t fully go away. I don’t think I’m alone in that, among the people who do work like this.

But I don’t think the answer is to stop saying so. Part of what this memorial exists to argue is that dignity isn’t conditional on innocence, and that the way we treat the dead says something true about us regardless of what the dead once did. A photograph like this one — traded like a trophy, weaponised against the living, stripped of every protection we’d extend automatically to almost anyone else — is not a neutral historical document. It is a small, ongoing act of disrespect, repeated every time someone shares it for the reaction rather than the record.

I’m not asking anyone to forget what happened in that apartment. I am asking whether a dying man’s face was ever supposed to be public property, and why so few people have thought to ask that question before now.

Necro

The Empty Lot

A building razed, a household buried in an unmarked landfill, and thirty years of grass at 924 North 25th Street: what Milwaukee’s great erasure accomplished, and what it could not.

A building razed, a household buried in an unmarked landfill, and thirty years of grass at 924 North 25th Street: what Milwaukee’s great erasure accomplished, and what it could not.

I. Fifteen Months

The Oxford Apartments outlived their most famous tenant’s freedom by only fifteen months.

The building at 924 North 25th Street was a 49-unit complex in Milwaukee’s Avenues West, and there was nothing about it that asked to be remembered. Jeffrey moved into Apartment 213 in May 1990, coming from his grandmother’s house in West Allis, and lived there for fourteen months. Twelve men died in that small second-floor unit. Neighbours complained to the building manager, Sopa Princewill, about the smells and the sounds; Jeffrey offered his excuses — a broken freezer, dead tropical fish — and the complaints never travelled further. Then came 22 July 1991, and the building became the most notorious address in America.

It never recovered, and nobody expected it to. By August 1992 only around fifteen of the forty-nine units were still occupied. The Campus Circle Project — a neighbourhood redevelopment initiative affiliated with Marquette University — bought the property for $325,000, offered the remaining tenants relocation help, and brought in the wrecking crews. Demolition began on 16 November 1992. The project’s leaders framed the building as a standing symbol of pain and violence, and its removal as an act of healing for the neighbourhood. Grass and flowers were planted where the foundations had been.

That was the plan in its entirety: remove, plant grass, heal. It is worth sitting with how much faith that sequence places in absence.

II. Thirty Years of Grass

Here is what stands at 924 North 25th Street today: grass, a few trees, and a black iron fence. No building. No plaque. No marker of any kind.

In the three decades since the demolition, every proposal for the site has failed. A memorial garden. A playground. New housing. Even, at the other extreme, a museum. None advanced past conversation. A Marquette official admitted as early as 1998 that no one was willing to take the parcel on — its history made ownership itself feel like contamination. So the lot has simply persisted, mown and fenced, a hole in the street grid that everyone understands and no one names.

The demolition was supposed to be an act of healing, and perhaps for the immediate neighbourhood, in 1992, it was. But look at what the erasure actually erased. The building is gone — and with it went the only physical place where Anthony Sears, Raymond Smith, Ernest Miller, David Thomas, Curtis Straughter, Errol Lindsey, Tony Hughes, Konerak Sinthasomphone, Matt Turner, Jeremiah Weinberger, Oliver Lacy and Joseph Bradehoft could have been remembered where they died. Milwaukee did not replace the site of the crimes with a site of mourning. It replaced it with nothing. Thirty years on, the men whose lives ended there have no marker on that ground, because giving them one would require the city to acknowledge the ground at all.

This is the “monster” logic we have written about many times, expressed in urban planning. The word monster exists to end thought; the empty lot exists to end memory. Both offer the same bargain: you will never have to look at this again, and the price is that you will never have to think about it again either — including the parts that deserved thought. The victims were part of what got bulldozed into silence.

The selectiveness of the erasure is its own tell. The childhood house in Bath, Ohio — where Steven Hicks died in 1978 — still stands, has been lived in for decades, and surfaces on the property market from time to time like any other house. His grandmother’s home in West Allis still stands. Even the Ambrosia Chocolate factory where Jeffrey worked was demolished for ordinary commercial reasons, its site now occupied by a basketball arena. Only the Oxford Apartments were removed as an act of meaning. The erasure was never really about the buildings. It was about which memories a city could bear to have addresses.

III. The Landfill

What the demolition did to the place, the summer of 1996 did to the things.

After Jeffrey’s death, his estate passed to the families of eleven of his victims, who had won civil judgments against him. In 1996 a court ordered his assets liquidated for their benefit, and Thomas Jacobson, the lawyer representing most of the families, announced an auction. He set the ambition at a million dollars, pointing to the staggering sums the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis auction had just fetched in New York — if Camelot could command that market, he reasoned publicly, the interest in this estate was undeniable. The inventory was a study in the case’s terrible ordinariness: a refrigerator, a Sears freezer, the 57-gallon drum, two sets of handcuffs, tools, a lava lamp.

Milwaukee recoiled. A civic group — Milwaukee Civic Pride, anchored by the real-estate developer Joseph Zilber, who put in $100,000 of his own — raised a pledge of $407,225 to buy the entire estate and keep it off the market. Zilber’s stated purpose was blunt: the “tools of death” should be destroyed, not sold to collectors and preserved in museums. The families accepted the offer in what was reported as a very close vote — a detail worth pausing on, because it means this was genuinely contested even among the people with the greatest standing to decide. Each of the eleven families received roughly $32,000 once the lawyers were paid.

And then, in June 1996, everything Jeffrey Dahmer had owned was hauled to an undisclosed landfill in Illinois and buried.

Let us be fair to everyone in that story, because fairness is the point of this site. The families’ vote deserves respect either way it had gone; there is no correct answer to the question they were asked. Zilber’s motive was decency — he wanted to spare the families the spectacle of a bidding war over the instruments of their grief, and to strangle the collectors’ market before it could feed. Nothing in this article should read as contempt for any of them.

But notice the form the solution took, because it is remarkable. The objects were not merely destroyed — they were buried in secret, in another state, at a location deliberately kept from the public. That is not disposal; disposal does not require secrecy. It is the inverse of a relic. Medieval cultures enshrined fragments of their saints so that presence could radiate from a known place; Milwaukee interred the possessions of its great sinner so that presence could radiate from nowhere. The unmarked landfill and the unmarked lot are the same gesture at different scales: the belief that meaning is a property of objects and coordinates, and that if you scatter the coordinates, the meaning dies too.

Thirty years of true-crime saturation, a Netflix series watched by hundreds of millions, and the steady traffic to sites like this one have delivered the verdict on that belief.

IV. What We Hold

This memorial keeps objects. Among them are things salvaged from Lionel Dahmer’s estate: photographs, a shirt, a red Bible whose pages carry fingerprints that appear under ultraviolet light. Given everything above, we owe our readers a straight answer to the obvious question: how is this different from the collectors’ market that Joseph Zilber spent $407,225 to prevent?

The honest answer is that the difference is not in the objects. It is in what is done with them. The murderabilia trade that Zilber feared treats objects as trophies — their value rises with the body count, and they are held privately, as proximity to infamy. What this memorial does with its objects is closer to what an archive does: they are studied, contextualised, written about, and used as evidence in work that treats every person in this story, victims included, as fully human. A fingerprint on a Bible is not a thrill here. It is a document — of a father’s grief, of a son’s strange late-life faith that we examined in the baptism article, of the fact that these were people whose hands touched things, which is precisely what both the landfill and the word monster were designed to make unthinkable.

We would also say, carefully, that the 1996 burial and the empty lot have not aged as their architects hoped. The erasure did not end the remembering; it only ended the city’s participation in it. The remembering moved elsewhere — into documentaries, streaming series, forums, and the collectors’ market that grew anyway around whatever objects escaped the landfill. By refusing to build anything at 924 North 25th Street, Milwaukee did not close the story. It abdicated its voice in the story, and left the telling to whoever showed up. Thirty years of grass behind a black fence, and still no memorial to the twelve men who died there: that is not healing. That is a city holding its breath.

Somewhere in Illinois, under unrecorded ground, there is a refrigerator, a freezer, a drum, a lava lamp. Somewhere in Milwaukee there is a rectangle of lawn where a building used to be. Both are supposed to mean nothing, by design. And both, by that very design, have become the most eloquent monuments the case has: monuments to the idea that if you cannot bear to think about something, you can bury it — and to the thirty years of evidence that you cannot.

Sources and notes

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporting on the Oxford Apartments’ purchase by the Campus Circle Project ($325,000), the November 1992 demolition, and the lot’s continued vacancy.
Contemporary reporting (Washington Post, Associated Press, Deseret News, May–June 1996) on the court-ordered liquidation of the estate, Thomas Jacobson’s planned auction, Milwaukee Civic Pride’s $407,225 pledge, Joseph Zilber’s role, the families’ close vote, and the June 1996 burial of the items in an undisclosed Illinois landfill.
Reporting on failed redevelopment proposals for 924 North 25th Street and Marquette University statements (1998) on the parcel’s unwanted status.
Reporting on the Bath, Ohio childhood home’s continued private ownership and periodic sale listings, and on the Ambrosia Chocolate factory site’s redevelopment.

The Temple: Infinity Land Rebuilt

We have written before about Infinity Land, the game Jeffrey Dahmer invented at nine years old — fleshless stick figures moving across a drawn landscape, annihilated if they came too close to one another, surrounded by spirals descending toward a black hole at the centre. That article argued the game never really ended; that it scaled up.

This is about what it scaled into.

What he was building

In the summer of 1988, Jeffrey bought a long black table and two statues of griffins. He was twenty-eight and still living in his grandmother’s house in West Allis. The purchase was not decorative. He had been turning an idea over since the previous year, and these were its first physical components: the table would be the altar, and the griffins — eagle-headed, lion-bodied, traditionally guardians of treasure — would protect it.

The design, as he described it after his arrest, called for skulls arranged along the table and two complete skeletons standing at either end. Incense. Blue lighting. He would sit in front of it.

He never finished it. When the apartment was searched in July 1991 police recovered the table, the griffins, eleven assorted heads and skulls, and the two skeletons — one from Ernest Miller, one from Oliver Lacy, whom he had defleshed specifically for the purpose. He had also looked into buying a freeze-drying machine, wanting to preserve bodies whole rather than reduce them to bone, and abandoned the idea when he found one large enough would cost around thirty thousand dollars.

The griffins were damaged before the end. One of the men he attacked fought back hard enough to knock the table and send them over. He kept the broken statues anyway.

Why it is the same object

Set the temple beside the game and the correspondence is close enough to be uncomfortable.

Infinity Land was populated by figures stripped of flesh — not people with contours, but bone. The temple was to be built from skulls and skeletons: the same reduction, carried out on real bodies.

In the game, the figures were arranged across a landscape and destroyed if they came too close. In the temple, the skulls were to be placed along a table at fixed intervals, permanently positioned, permanently apart. The proximity rule survives intact — it simply becomes a seating plan.

The game had a black hole at its centre, and Jeffrey described that nothingness to a prison therapist as soothing rather than frightening. The temple had a black table at its centre, and he described what he wanted from it in almost the same register. He called it a place where he could feel at home.

And in both, the essential feature is authorship. The nine-year-old drew the borders and decided the physics of his world. The adult was constructing a room in which he set the arrangement, the lighting, the rules, and the population — a space where nothing could arrive unannounced, change its mind, or leave.

The child made a world he controlled because he could not control the one he lived in. The adult was still making one. He was simply using different materials.

What the court could not decide

The temple became one of the strangest disputes of the 1992 trial, and the disagreement was not really about the facts.

For the defence, Dr Carl Wahlstrom pointed to it as evidence of a mind operating outside reality, citing Jeffrey’s intention to build a power-bestowing shrine alongside his attempts to create compliant companions as reaching psychotic proportions.

For the prosecution, Dr Park Dietz argued that it demonstrated nothing of the kind. Jeffrey did not truly believe the shrine would give him power, only that it might put him in contact with some spiritual force — which made it superstition rather than delusion, and superstition is not madness.

Dr George Palermo went further and simply declined to believe the temple existed as a plan at all, saying Jeffrey had mentioned it to him in passing and that he had reason to doubt it.

Brian Masters draws the distinction more usefully than any of them. A false idea is one that is factually wrong. A delusional idea is one that wrongly assigns power. The shrine was not a false idea — the table was real, the griffins were real, the skulls and the skeletons were real, and they were all found in the apartment. What was delusional was the expectation that sitting before them would confer anything at all.

He also places it in a longer tradition, and the comparison is bracing rather than flippant: churches across Europe have been built around body parts. Reliquaries hold bones. The faithful pin representations of damaged limbs to shrines in the belief that proximity to holy remains transmits power. The impulse to arrange the dead and draw strength from the arrangement is not, historically, a rare one.

What separates Jeffrey’s version is not the logic. It is that he supplied the relics himself.

Why a table

There is a further reading of the temple that belongs to Brian Masters, and it should be introduced as what it is: an interpretation, not a documented fact. We think it is worth stating anyway, because it asks a question nobody else thought to ask.

Why a table?

An altar, if you were designing one, would not obviously be a table. It might be lower. It might be smaller, or ornate, or raised. Jeffrey chose a long, flat, waist-height surface — and the reason that matters is what he actually used it for before any skull was ever placed on it. He draped the bodies of the men he killed across it. He arranged them on it and photographed their chests, abdomens and genitals. He made the first incision on it, before the dismemberment moved to the bathroom.

It was, functionally, an operating table.

On 19 March 1964, at the age of four, Jeffrey underwent a double hernia operation. We have written elsewhere about the psychology of early surgical trauma — that children under six suffer disproportionately because they cannot understand what is being done to them, that they become objects in the hands of strangers, that their emerging sense of autonomy is abruptly cancelled and nobody explains why. Afterwards, in pain that would have felt exactly like it, he asked his mother whether his penis had been removed. He told Dr Judith Becker about that question nearly thirty years later.

Masters’ argument is that control was taken from Jeffrey on an operating table at four and that he spent his adult life trying to take it back — that with his victims he was finally the surgeon rather than the passive child, handling their insides as his had been handled, cutting where he had been cut. On that reading, the black table is not an incidental piece of furniture. It is the operating table, rebuilt and owned, with him standing on the other side of it.

We flag the obvious limit: this is an interpretive claim, and Masters himself concedes it cannot be generalised — a great many children have hernia repairs and become nothing in particular. It explains rather more than a coincidence should, which is a reason to take it seriously and also a reason to be careful with it.

What is documented is narrower and stranger. At the 1992 trial, Dr Becker raised two things that had never been publicly examined: the hernia operation, and a childhood game called Infinity Land. Gerald Boyle prompted her gently on both. Neither was pursued.

Two keys, offered in open court, and nobody turned either one.

The thing worth saying plainly

There is a reading of the temple that treats it as the final proof of monstrousness — the horror-film altar, the serial killer’s trophy room. That reading is available and it is not entirely wrong.

But it misses what the Infinity Land parallel makes visible. The temple was not conceived as a display of what he had done. It was conceived as a place to sit. He described wanting to be in front of it, in the light and the incense, in the company of the dead — the only people, as he saw it, who had known him as he actually was.

A child who cannot find safety in the world builds a small one he can govern. That is ordinary. Nearly every frightened child does some version of it, and the ones who do are not marked for anything.

What is not ordinary is continuing to build it at thirty-one, out of people.

The continuity is the disturbing part, and it is also the part that resists any comfortable conclusion. The same need runs from the drawn spirals to the black table. The need itself was never the problem. What he was willing to do to satisfy it was.

Sources: Brian Masters, The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer (1993); Lionel Dahmer, A Father’s Story (1994); trial testimony, Milwaukee County Circuit Court, 1992; Milwaukee Police Department inventory of Apartment 213.

The Topaz Ring

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

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

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

The question that was actually being asked

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

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

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

Setting this against what trophy-taking actually looks like

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

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

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

A small object, honestly

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

Sources cited

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

Jeffrey And The Tin Whistle: A Small Document About Hope

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

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

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

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

What a Tin Whistle Is

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

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

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

The Date

Readers of this memorial may recognise May 10, 1994.

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

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

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

Why This Little Form Matters

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

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

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

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

The Lighter Part, Because It’s Real Too

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

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

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

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

Provenance

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

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

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

Why We Are Here: Voices from the Memorial Community

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

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

How did you first hear about Jeffrey?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What called your attention to his story?

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

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

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

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

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

How do you define your connection with him?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Has this connection changed you?

Almost universally: yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Note from the Memorial

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

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

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

Dissociation and the Mind: Understanding a Possible Psychological Mechanism in Jeffrey’s Case

Dissociation is often misunderstood, yet it may offer valuable insight into how emotional detachment, fantasy, and disconnection can shape human behavior. This article explores the psychology of dissociation, what happens in the mind during dissociative states, and why some researchers have questioned whether these processes may have played a role in Jeffrey’s psychological functioning. Where does reality end and emotional detachment begin?

Dissociation is one of the most misunderstood concepts in psychology. It is often portrayed as something dramatic or rare, yet dissociative experiences exist on a spectrum and can occur in many different forms.

At its core, dissociation refers to a disruption in the normal integration of consciousness, memory, emotion, identity, perception, or awareness. In simple terms, it is a state in which a person becomes disconnected from aspects of their own experience.

Most people have experienced mild dissociation at some point in their lives. Becoming completely absorbed in a book, driving for several miles without remembering the journey, or feeling temporarily detached during periods of intense stress are all examples of common dissociative experiences.

More severe forms of dissociation, however, can be profoundly disruptive.

Individuals may feel disconnected from their emotions, detached from their surroundings, or separated from their own sense of self. Some describe the experience as feeling numb, unreal, or as though they are observing life through a pane of glass. Others report feeling as though they are watching themselves from outside their body.

Psychologists generally view dissociation as a protective mechanism. When emotional experiences become overwhelming, the mind may create distance between the individual and what they are feeling. In traumatic situations, this can serve as a form of psychological survival.

The brain, in essence, attempts to reduce emotional pain by reducing emotional presence.

While this mechanism can be protective in the short term, long-term emotional detachment may come at a cost. Individuals who frequently dissociate can struggle to identify and process their emotions, maintain meaningful relationships, or remain fully engaged with reality.

Research has shown that chronic dissociation can be associated with feelings of emptiness, emotional numbing, social withdrawal, and an increased reliance on fantasy as a source of comfort or escape.

This aspect becomes particularly interesting when examining Jeffrey’s psychological history.

Throughout interviews and personal accounts, Jeffrey frequently described feeling detached from others. He often spoke about loneliness, isolation, and a persistent sense of being different from those around him. He also described spending extensive amounts of time immersed in fantasies, sometimes to the point where those fantasies appeared more emotionally significant than real-life relationships.

From a psychological perspective, fantasy can sometimes serve as a refuge from emotional discomfort. When reality feels painful, disappointing, or overwhelming, an internal world may become increasingly appealing. Over time, the boundary between fantasy and reality can become psychologically significant, not because the individual loses awareness of reality, but because emotional investment becomes concentrated within the fantasy itself.

Some researchers and mental health professionals have suggested that Jeffrey’s extreme emotional detachment may have shared certain characteristics with dissociative processes. His descriptions of emotional numbness, his tendency to retreat into fantasy, and his difficulty forming genuine interpersonal connections have led some observers to question whether dissociation may have influenced aspects of his psychological functioning.

However, it is important to acknowledge the limitations of retrospective analysis.

There is no definitive evidence proving that Jeffrey experienced dissociative episodes during the commission of his crimes. No psychologist can fully reconstruct another person’s internal experience decades after the fact. Any discussion of dissociation in Jeffrey’s case therefore remains theoretical rather than conclusive.

Nevertheless, the concept remains valuable because it offers a framework for understanding how a person can become psychologically disconnected from emotions that would ordinarily guide human behavior.

Empathy, fear, guilt, shame, and emotional reciprocity are not simply moral concepts; they are psychological experiences that help regulate how individuals interact with others. When emotional connection becomes severely impaired, the consequences can be profound.

This does not mean that dissociation causes violence, nor does it excuse violent behavior. Millions of people experience dissociative symptoms and never harm anyone. Human behavior is influenced by a complex interaction of personality, environment, mental health, life experiences, and individual choices.

Yet understanding dissociation may help illuminate one piece of a much larger psychological puzzle.

In Jeffrey’s case, the question is not whether dissociation explains his actions. It does not.

The more meaningful question may be whether chronic emotional detachment, immersion in fantasy, and a diminished connection to both self and others contributed to the psychological landscape in which those actions became possible.

While definitive answers may never exist, the question itself remains worthy of examination.

Understanding is not the same as excusing.

It is simply an attempt to better understand the extraordinary complexity of the human mind.

The Ethics of Humanisation: Why We Refuse to Look Away

There is a question that follows this memorial everywhere.

It arrives in comments, in emails, in the occasional hostile message from someone who found us through a search engine and didn’t like what they found. It is sometimes asked in good faith, sometimes not. But it deserves a serious answer either way.

The question is this: how dare you humanise Jeffrey Dahmer?

This article is our answer.

What Humanisation Actually Means

Let us be precise about language, because imprecision is where most of this debate goes wrong.

To humanise someone is not to excuse them. It is not to forgive them on behalf of people who were harmed. It is not to celebrate them, defend their actions, minimise their victims, or argue that what they did was anything other than what it was: terrible, real, and irreversible.

To humanise someone is simply to refuse to pretend they were not a person.

Jeffrey Dahmer was a person. He was born. He had a childhood. He had fears and habits and preferences. He suffered. He caused suffering. He died. Every one of those things is true simultaneously, and none of them cancels out the others.

When we say we are humanising Jeffrey Dahmer, we mean we are documenting the full reality of who he was — not the cartoon monster, not the true crime celebrity, not the symbol that has accrued around his name over thirty years. The person. The actual, complicated, damaged, damaging human being who existed in the world.

That is all we mean. It is, we think, enough.

The Criticism, Taken Seriously

The people who object to humanisation are not always wrong to object. Some of their concerns are worth taking seriously.

The most common argument is that humanising perpetrators disrespects victims — that attention and understanding directed toward someone like Jeffrey Dahmer comes at the expense of the people he killed and their families. This is worth sitting with. The victims of Jeffrey Dahmer were real people whose lives were ended violently, whose families carry grief that will never fully resolve. They deserve to be named, remembered, and honoured.

We agree with this completely.

The question is whether understanding Jeffrey Dahmer somehow prevents that. We do not think it does. Grief for victims and understanding of perpetrators are not in competition. They can — and should — coexist.

A second argument holds that humanisation creates dangerous sympathy — that understanding someone leads to excusing them, and excusing them leads to imitating them. This is a serious concern in the context of true crime culture, where parasocial relationships with killers can become genuinely unhealthy. We have seen this ourselves in the communities that surround figures like Jeffrey Dahmer, and we have written about it directly.

But there is a difference between unhealthy obsession and rigorous examination. One looks for permission. The other looks for truth. This memorial is trying to do the latter.

A third argument is philosophical: that some people, through their actions, forfeit their humanity. That Jeffrey Dahmer did things so far outside the bounds of acceptable human behaviour that to call him human is almost a category error.

We understand the impulse behind this argument. We do not accept it. Humanity is not a reward for good behaviour. It is a condition of existence. Jeffrey Dahmer was human in the way that all people are human — not because he deserved it, but because he was born.

Why Understanding Matters

There is a practical argument for humanisation that goes beyond ethics, and it is this: dehumanisation makes us less safe.

When we turn perpetrators into monsters — incomprehensible, alien, categorically different from the rest of us — we stop asking the questions that might prevent the next one. We tell ourselves that what happened was an aberration, a freak of nature, something that could not have been predicted or interrupted. We look away from the warning signs, the failures of family and school and mental health systems, the long slow accumulation of damage that precedes most violence.

Jeffrey Dahmer did not appear from nowhere. He was a child before he was a killer. He passed through institutions — schools, the Army, the justice system — that had opportunities to intervene and did not. He lived in a society that did not know how to reach people like him, partly because people like him had been rendered unthinkable.

Understanding how that happened does not excuse it. It might help prevent it from happening again. That seems worth something.

What This Memorial Is Actually Doing

We want to be direct about what this project is and is not.

This is not fan culture. We are not here because we find Jeffrey Dahmer attractive or exciting. We are not collecting memorabilia or writing fiction that romanticises his crimes. We are not arguing that what he did was acceptable or that his victims deserved what happened to them.

This is a research and documentation project. We are gathering primary sources, examining the historical record, and writing about what we find with as much rigour and honesty as we can manage. We believe that the historical record of Jeffrey Dahmer’s life has been distorted — by sensationalism, by the entertainment industry, by the true crime ecosystem that has grown up around him — and that distortion does no one any good.

We also believe, and will say plainly, that Jeffrey Dahmer’s humanity is not a controversial position. It is simply true. He was a person. Treating him as one is not radical. It is the minimum that honest examination requires.

What Humanisation Costs

We want to close with something that often goes unsaid in this debate.

Humanising Jeffrey Dahmer does not cost victims anything. It does not diminish their suffering or reduce the wrongness of what was done to them. It does not transfer anything away from them toward him.

What it costs is our comfort.

It is more comfortable to believe that people who do terrible things are fundamentally different from the rest of us. It is more comfortable to draw a clean line between the comprehensible and the monstrous, to place Jeffrey Dahmer firmly on the other side of it, and to stop thinking about him as a person.

We understand that comfort. We are choosing not to take it.

Not because it is easy. But because the truth deserves it. And because the people who came after him — the ones who are suffering right now in silence, accumulating damage, moving toward something terrible — deserve a world that is willing to look clearly at how these things happen.

That is why we are here. That is what we are doing.

We think it matters.

jeffreydahmer.memorial is a research and documentation project dedicated to the rigorous, humane examination of Jeffrey Dahmer’s life and the questions it raises. We are not affiliated with any entertainment production, true crime platform, or fan community.

“I Love You, Lionel”: Jeffrey Dahmer at Nine — A Portrait in Sound

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.

Looking closer

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.

Sylli