Tag: true crime

Forgiveness: What It Really Means, and Why Jeffrey Dahmer Deserves It

There is a comfortable version of forgiveness that most people practice without difficulty. Forgiving someone who apologised sincerely for something relatively minor. Forgiving a friend who let you down. Forgiving yourself for a mistake that cost you something but hurt no one else irreparably.

And then there is the other kind. The kind that costs something. The kind that the entire weight of Christian theology points toward and very few people are actually willing to extend.

Jeffrey Dahmer is a test case for that second kind. And most people fail it.

The Man Nobody Wants to Mention

Before he was the Apostle Paul — before he wrote half the New Testament, before he became one of the most important figures in the history of Christianity, before he was martyred for his faith in Rome — he was Saul of Tarsus.

Saul was a persecutor of Christians. Not metaphorically. Not bureaucratically. He was present at the stoning of Saint Stephen, the first Christian martyr — holding the cloaks of the men who threw the stones, giving his approval to the killing. He went house to house in Jerusalem dragging Christians out and throwing them in prison. He obtained letters authorising him to travel to Damascus to arrest believers there and bring them back in chains. He described himself later as having been, in his own words, a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a violent man.

He caused suffering. He caused death. He did it with conviction and with the full support of the religious establishment of his time.

And then, on the road to Damascus, everything changed.

The Road to Damascus

The conversion of Saul is one of the most dramatic moments in the entire New Testament. A blinding light. A voice asking “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” Three days of blindness. And then — transformation so complete that the man who had been hunting Christians became Christianity’s greatest evangelist.

What is theologically significant about this moment is not just that Saul changed. It is what the Church did with that change.

It did not erase his past. It did not pretend the stoning of Stephen hadn’t happened or that the families of those he had imprisoned hadn’t suffered. Paul himself never pretended otherwise — he called himself the foremost of sinners, the least of the apostles, one not even deserving to be called an apostle because he had persecuted the Church of God.

The Church held both truths simultaneously: this man caused real harm to real people, and this man was genuinely transformed by grace. Both things were true. Neither cancelled the other.

That is the radical heart of Christian forgiveness. And it is what most people refuse to apply to Jeffrey Dahmer.

Jeffrey’s Damascus

Jeffrey Dahmer’s conversion was quieter than Saul’s but no less genuine according to those who witnessed it.

It began with a Bible his father sent him in prison. It deepened through a correspondence course. It culminated in the spring of 1994 when Reverend Roy Ratcliff — a minister of the Church of Christ who had agreed to meet with him after Jeffrey expressed interest in baptism — submerged him in the prison whirlpool at Columbia Correctional Institution.

Ratcliff later wrote about Jeffrey with a clarity that cuts through the noise. He described a man who was sincere, who asked real questions, who struggled genuinely with what he had done and what it meant before God. He noted that Jeffrey’s questions were not the questions of someone performing remorse for an audience. They were the questions of someone who was genuinely trying to understand whether redemption was possible for a person like him.

Jeffrey himself said: “I hope God has forgiven me. I know society will never be able to forgive me.”

He met with Ratcliff every week from his baptism in May 1994 until five days before his death in November. Their last session together covered the Book of Revelation — its subjects, death, punishment for sins, and what comes after. He was not coasting. He was working.

What the Thief on the Cross Tells Us

If the story of Saint Paul isn’t enough, consider the thief on the cross.

In the Gospel of Luke, one of the two criminals crucified alongside Jesus turns to him and says simply: “Remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And Jesus replies: “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.”

No lengthy process of rehabilitation. No years of demonstrating changed behaviour. No committee deciding whether the repentance was sincere enough. A dying man, in his final hours, asking to be remembered — and the answer being yes.

The thief had presumably done enough to warrant execution by Roman standards. We don’t know what he did. We know that in his last moments he turned, and that turning was enough.

The theology here is explicit and radical: the reach of grace has no floor. There is no depth from which it cannot lift someone. There is no crime that places a person permanently beyond its reach.

The Prodigal Son

Jesus told a story about a son who took his inheritance early — essentially wishing his father dead — went to a foreign country and wasted everything on reckless living, and then came home in desperation, planning to beg to be taken on as a servant.

The father sees him coming from a long way off. He runs to meet him. He calls for a robe and a ring and a feast. He says: “This son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.”

The older son — the good one, the one who stayed, the one who did everything right — is furious. And the father’s answer to him is the heart of the parable: “We had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.”

The story is not about whether the prodigal deserved the feast. It is about the nature of the father. It is about what grace looks like when it is genuinely operating.

The people who insist Jeffrey Dahmer cannot be forgiven are, in the parable’s terms, standing outside the feast refusing to come in. That is their right. But it does not change what is happening inside.

Why People Refuse

The resistance to extending forgiveness to Jeffrey is understandable on a human level. His crimes were of a type that the mind struggles to hold. The nature of what he did — the intimacy of it, the specific choices involved — creates a revulsion that is visceral and real.

But Christian forgiveness was never designed for easy cases. It was designed precisely for the cases where human instinct says no. The entire point of the theology is that grace operates where human moral accounting breaks down — that it covers what we cannot cover ourselves, reaches where we cannot reach, holds what we cannot hold.

If forgiveness only extends to the people we find it easy to forgive, it is not forgiveness in the Christian sense. It is just social approval.

Paul understood this. He wrote in his first letter to Timothy: “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners — of whom I am the worst. But for that very reason I was shown mercy so that in me, the worst of sinners, Christ Jesus might display his immense patience.”

The worst of sinners. Shown mercy. So that the display of that mercy might mean something to everyone else.

What Jeffrey Said

At his sentencing in 1992, Jeffrey Dahmer spoke in court. He said:

“I know my time in prison will be terrible, but I deserve whatever I get because of what I have done. Thank God there will be no more victims and no more suffering. I believe I was completely out of my mind. I hated no one. I knew I was sick or evil, or both. I know that you cannot forgive me for what I have done. I ask for no consideration.”

He asked for no consideration. He said he deserved whatever he got. He acknowledged his illness. He expressed relief that there would be no more victims.

And then, two years later, he was baptised.

And then, six months after that, he was dead.

The arc of his last years was not the arc of a man performing for parole or reputation. He had no parole to seek. He had said himself he expected to die in prison. He was working through something privately, seriously, with a minister who had no reason to lie about what he witnessed.

The Question

If Saint Paul deserves to be called a saint — if the Church can hold together the man who approved the stoning of Stephen and the man who wrote “love is patient, love is kind” — then the question must be asked honestly:

Why not Jeffrey?

Not because what he did wasn’t devastating. Not because the families of his victims are required to forgive him — they are not, and their pain is not ours to adjudicate. But because the theology either means what it says or it doesn’t. Because grace either has no ceiling or it has one, and if it has one, Christianity needs to say so plainly.

Jeffrey Dahmer repented. He was baptised. He studied. He questioned. He asked whether God could forgive him and he was told yes. Reverend Ratcliff believed it. The minister who spent months with him, who had no reason to be deceived, believed it.

The thief on the cross asked to be remembered. He was told: today.

“I hope God has forgiven me.”

The theology says: yes.

Sources: The New Testament — Acts of the Apostles, Luke 23, 1 Timothy 1, Luke 15; Reverend Roy Ratcliff, Dark Journey Deep Grace (2008); Jeffrey Dahmer sentencing statement, Milwaukee, 1992.

The Man in Apartment 213: Jeffrey Dahmer’s Private World

There is a version of Jeffrey Dahmer that true crime coverage almost never reaches. Not the crimes, not the psychology, not the diagnosis — but the small, private, ordinary things. The colour he loved. The roses he planted. The fish he tended. The films he watched on a Tuesday night. The ice cream sodas he shared with his father on Saturday afternoons.

These details do not diminish what he did. But they are part of who he was, and the memorial exists precisely to hold that whole picture — the human being alongside the horror.

Yellow

Jeffrey’s favourite colour was yellow. Not tentatively, not occasionally — yellow was a running thread through his life. Yellow roses in his grandmother’s garden in West Allis, which Lionel would later mention during a prison visit: “The roses look good, the ones you planted. The yellow ones and the red ones.” A yellow toothbrush. A yellow bike. The colour of something warm and specific in a life that was otherwise deeply dark.

It is such a small and human detail. Jeffrey Dahmer had a favourite colour, and it was yellow.

Flannel

Jeffrey had a fondness for flannel long before it became a cultural statement. His neighbour Vernell Bass recalled often seeing him in flannel shirts, and he can be seen wearing flannel in several photographs from his adult years. It was comfortable, unpretentious, practical — the kind of clothing that asks nothing of the world and expects nothing back. Very Jeffrey.

The Blue Topaz Ring

Jeffrey admired jewellery, especially rings. In the summer of 1987 he bought a blue topaz ring for $1,500 — a significant sum for a man working the night shift at a chocolate factory. He wore it for about a year before pawning it when he was short on cash. The detail is quietly touching: a man who rarely spent money on himself, who kept a spare and functional apartment, who bought a beautiful ring and wore it until necessity took it away.

The Garden

Jeffrey genuinely enjoyed gardening. Lionel mentions it among the things he suggested as possible career paths, noting that Jeff “seemed to enjoy it, at least so far as I had observed him when he worked in the yard around my house.” At his grandmother Catherine’s house in West Allis, he tended the garden himself — those yellow and red roses were his. The man who worked the night shift at a chocolate factory and came home to an apartment that police would later describe as a slaughterhouse also knelt in the dirt and planted flowers.

The Fish

The aquarium in Apartment 213 was not decorative. Jeffrey was genuinely interested in tropical fish — four books on their care were found in his apartment, and during a visit to the House of Correction before his murders resumed, he talked to Lionel with real animation about his “new-found interest in aquarium fish.” He fed them. He read about them. The fish were alive and tended in that apartment while other things were happening there that no one should know about.

Jodi

Catherine’s cat was named Jodi — an orange female tabby. During a visit to his grandmother’s house filmed on Lionel’s video camera, Jeffrey got down on the floor and played with her. He knew exactly how she liked to be brushed. “She’s always trying to be brushed,” Lionel said during a prison visit. “You know how she likes that.” And Jeffrey did. He remembered.

And at West Allis, neighbours recalled a quietly tender relationship with animals more broadly. One neighbour remembered Jeffrey standing near the trash container in the backyard with a beer, surrounded by cats. Not a couple. A lot. Following him all over the place.

Sundays

Jeffrey vacuumed his apartment on Sundays. He generally kept both his home and his person very neat and tidy — the apartment that police described as orderly when they first entered it was not an accident. It was maintained. The oriental rug, the fish tank, the incense. He took care of his space.

When he was depressed, however, this changed completely. He would stop shaving, stop bathing, go days without taking care of himself, and the apartment would fill with empty beer bottles. The tidiness was a signal of his interior state. When it collapsed, so had he.

Budweiser

Jeffrey’s favourite beer was Budweiser — “the king” of beers, in his opinion. The police inventory confirmed it: Budweiser cans among the bottles of rum and other beers. He had a brand loyalty, an opinion about it. In the midst of everything, he had a favourite beer and a reason for it.

McDonald’s

Jeffrey described himself as practically living off McDonald’s at various points in his life — a detail captured in a Thanksgiving home video recorded by his father, where he mentioned it casually. He also took refuge at the nearest McDonald’s during his senior prom — having attended for reasons that remain unclear, he slipped away during the evening and spent time at the fast food restaurant before returning. The image of him sitting alone at McDonald’s during his own prom is one of the loneliest small facts in the entire story.

Chocolate Ice Cream Sodas

Every Saturday afternoon, during the years the family lived in Ohio, Lionel and Jeffrey drove to nearby Barberton for their regular chocolate ice cream sodas — a habit they had carried over from their earlier years in Ames, Iowa. Two people in a car, a standing tradition, a flavour they both liked. Lionel describes it with the casualness of someone who couldn’t know how precious it would later seem.

He Took German

Jeffrey took German in high school. Given his German and Welsh ancestry on his father’s side, and the two years he would later spend stationed in Baumholder, West Germany, it was perhaps not a coincidental choice. A language that connected him to something. He also kept a Latin learning kit in his apartment years later — a man who quietly, privately, kept trying to learn things.

Drag Queens

Jeffrey enjoyed camp and the theatricality of drag queens. The performance, the artifice, the deliberate construction of an identity for public display — it is easy to see why someone who spent his entire life performing a version of himself for the world around him might find something genuinely appealing in an art form built on exactly that. The drag queen knows she is performing. The audience knows it too. There is an honesty in the artifice that Jeffrey’s own performances never had.

The Films

The police inventory of Apartment 213 found several videotapes. Among them were Blade Runner, Star Wars, and Exorcist III. The presence of Exorcist III is interesting — it is not the famous original but the third instalment, a quieter and more philosophical film about a detective confronting evil and the existence of God. Blade Runner is perhaps the most telling: a film about beings manufactured to feel but not permitted to live, about the question of what makes something human, about a man hunting creatures who simply want more life.

According to accounts from one of his surviving victims, Jeffrey was seen watching one of the Exorcist films repeatedly, in a trance-like state. Also among the tapes: a recorded episode of The Bill Cosby Show — just a TV programme he wanted to keep.

The Music

When Milwaukee Police searched Apartment 213, they found a specific and revealing cassette collection. The confirmed tapes included Mötley Crüe and Def Leppard’s Hysteria — but the full picture of his musical world goes further than the inventory alone.

Jeffrey was a genuine fan of Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden — the dark, dystopian weight of those bands was a constant in his isolated life. In Germany, stationed at Baumholder, he decorated his barracks room with an Iron Maiden poster. A young man far from home, putting something on the wall that was his.

Alongside the heavy metal sat classical music and opera, which he played at high volumes inside the apartment — documented by neighbours and investigators alike. And perhaps most surprisingly, among the cassettes recovered were New Age and nature sound recordings — relaxation tapes, ambient sounds, the kind of thing sold for meditation and sleep. The contrast is almost unbearable to sit with: the same person, the same apartment, the same shelf.

Also worth noting — for the record — is what was not there. Despite persistent internet rumours, Jeffrey was not a KISS fan. No significant collection of their music was ever documented in his possession. The myth appears to have no basis in the evidence.

The Bible study cassettes and Creation Science tapes sat on the same shelf as the metal and the ambient sounds. The contradictions were absolute and apparently untroubling to him. He listened to what he liked.

Hated Sticking People With Needles

Jeffrey briefly worked as a phlebotomist at the Milwaukee Blood Plasma Center in the early 1980s, drawing blood from donors. He disliked the job because he hated sticking people with needles. The irony is extraordinary — and the detail deepens when you learn that at some point during this period, he took a vial of blood up to the roof and drank it out of curiosity. He spat it out. He didn’t like the taste. A man who would later do things of incomprehensible violence had no appetite for blood and couldn’t bear to cause the minor discomfort of a needle. The compartmentalisation that defined his psychology ran in all directions.

The Army and the Cigarettes

Jeffrey started smoking in the army and came home smoking a pack a day. He had also, by then, acquired a broken eardrum — the result of a severe beating by several fellow soldiers, leaving him bloody and his hearing damaged. He suffered periodic bouts of earache from it for years afterward. The army was supposed to be a fresh start, urged on him by his father. It became, instead, two years of escalating alcohol abuse, violence visited upon him by the men he lived with, and a discharge for being unfit for service.

Lambs, Tennis and Saturday Science Fiction

Among the books found in his room as a teenager were science fiction novels and Alfred Hitchcock’s Horror Stories for Children. He played intramural tennis for three years at Revere High School. He was on the school newspaper for one year. He participated in 4H for two years with his father — raising lambs, building fences, planting gardens, hiking in the metropolitan parks around Bath. Jeffrey Dahmer raised lambs.

He liked, according to Lionel, games with highly defined rules and repetitious actions — nothing confrontational, nothing that required improvisation. He preferred hide-and-seek, kick the can, ghost in the graveyard. The structure of rules was always important to him.

Infinity Land

When Jeffrey was around nine years old, he invented a private game he called Infinity Land. He drew stick figures — deliberately fleshless, just bone — and gave them one rule: if they came too close to one another, they were annihilated. The spirals he drew alongside them descended toward a black hole. He shared the game with his friend David Borsvold, who also collected rocks and studied dinosaurs with him.

Brian Masters, in The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer, saw Infinity Land as a key that unlocked the whole interior world — the fleshless figures, the danger of intimacy, the pull of oblivion. He returned to it throughout the book as a recurring image for Jeffrey’s descent. It even came up at the 1992 trial, mentioned by Dr Judith Becker, and then passed over without anyone pursuing what it might mean.

We will return to this game in a dedicated article. It deserves its own space.

The Apartment Itself

When police catalogued the contents of Apartment 213 after the arrest, the inventory ran to sixty-nine separate sheets. Among the horror there was also a life. Ornamental driftwood. Artificial peacock feathers. Two plastic griffins. An incense burner with incense sticks. A computer and a guide to learning DOS. A Latin learning kit. Bible study tapes and Creation Science cassettes alongside Numerology and the Divine Triangle. Fish food. An aquarium full of living fish.

He was working out — Anabolic Fuel, Vita, Yerba Prima supplements alongside Doritos and Ruffles chips. He had an Oral-B toothbrush and a contact lens cleaning kit and a tube of acne lotion. He had envelopes from Woolworth’s and a library card with his name on it. There was no air conditioning. When neighbours complained about smells coming from his apartment, he explained that his freezer had broken and meat had spoiled. He placed air fresheners throughout. The neighbours, for the most part, accepted this.

Two Sentences

At some point Jeffrey wrote down two sentences, side by side:

“When my father came home I was happy.”

“When my mother came home, I was watching TV.”

That is the entirety of it. No elaboration. The contrast is so precise and so devastating that it requires nothing else.

“She’s Lived in That House a Long Time”

When asked, at some point, whether he loved his grandmother, Jeffrey replied: “Yes, she’s lived in that house a long time.”

It is one of the strangest answers imaginable to that question. Not warmth, not a memory, not an expression of feeling — just the duration of her presence in a place. And yet it was clearly meant as an affirmation. He said yes. He just couldn’t, or didn’t, translate it into the emotional register that the question expected. His grandmother was part of the permanent furniture of his world. That was love, in his language.

“Much, Much Better”

Late in his prison years, Jeffrey said: “It would have been better if I’d just stuck to the mannequins. Much much better.”

It is as close as he ever came, in a single sentence, to expressing regret for the shape his life had taken. The mannequins — which he had been fixated on since adolescence, visiting department stores to be near them — represented the version of his compulsion that could have existed without victims, without horror, without the destruction of seventeen lives. Much much better. The repetition is not rhetorical flourish. It sounds like someone saying it to themselves, quietly, in the dark.

The Fear of Tornados (pending confirmation)

Jeffrey was reportedly afraid of tornados, a fear rooted in his Ohio childhood where tornado warnings were a genuine seasonal presence. For a boy who was already anxious, already vigilant, already watching the world with wariness — the unpredictability of a tornado, the way it could arrive without warning and take everything — may have hit something deep. We are still searching for the primary source on this detail and will update this article when confirmed.

What It Means

The point of gathering these details is not to soften the reality of what Jeffrey did. It is to resist the simplification that makes monsters of people we don’t want to understand. Jeffrey Dahmer had a favourite colour and planted roses and read science fiction and raised lambs and vacuumed on Sundays and drove to get chocolate ice cream sodas with his father and got down on the floor to play with Jodi the cat and watched Blade Runner alone at night in his apartment with no air conditioning.

All of this was true at the same time as everything else was true.

That is the hardest thing to hold. And it is the most important.

Sources: Lionel Dahmer, A Father’s Story (1994); Brian Masters, The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer (1993); Milwaukee Police Department Inventory, July 1991; IMDB. Tornado detail pending primary source confirmation.

The Dehumanisation of Jeffrey Dahmer

There is a word for what happens when a society decides that a person no longer deserves the basic protections extended to other human beings. That word is dehumanisation. It is not a metaphor. It is a documented psychological process with a name, a mechanism, and a history — and it happened to Jeffrey Dahmer both while he was alive and continues, with remarkable consistency, after his death.

This article is about that process. About what was done to him, why it was done, and what it reveals about the people who did it.

What Was Done to Him

When Jeffrey arrived at Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin in February 1992, he was placed in a cell and subjected to hours of relentless taunting from the surrounding cell block. Questions shouted through bars. Threats. Mockery. The noise escalated, got louder, cruder, more specific. Jeffrey said nothing. For hours, nothing at all. He sat in Cell 1 and waited.

This was not the worst of it.

Reports from that period describe Jeffrey being made to sleep naked on the floor of his cell during his first days at the institution. He was denied basic privacy. He was displayed, essentially, as a spectacle — the worst thing that had happened in Wisconsin in living memory, now contained and available for inspection.

An open door leads to the jail cell used to confine Jeffrey Dahmer between trial sessions. (Photo by © Ralf-Finn Hestoft/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

During his trial in 1992, he sat behind eight feet of bulletproof glass, separated from the courtroom — not for any genuine security reason, but because his presence was considered too dangerous to exist in the same physical space as ordinary proceedings. He was tried, in a real sense, as something other than a man.

And then there were the shackles. Each day of his trial, Jeffrey was escorted to court handcuffed in a wheelchair — because the leg irons placed on him were so heavy that they made walking impossible. A 6’1” man, unable to bear the weight of his own restraints, wheeled through courthouse corridors like freight.

One day, as he was being wheeled toward the courtroom, a woman passing in the hallway recognised him and let out a bloodcurdling scream. Jeffrey, unperturbed, muttered quietly: “I guess I should’ve shaved.”

In a wheelchair. In shackles so heavy he could not walk. Being wheeled through a public building while a stranger screamed at the sight of him. And his response was a dry, quiet joke about not having shaved. That is not the response of a monster. That is the response of a person — exhausted, dignified in the only way left available to him, and still, somehow, human.

The Psychology of Dehumanisation

Psychologists have studied dehumanisation extensively, particularly in the context of how ordinary people become capable of cruelty toward other human beings. The mechanism is consistent: first, you remove someone’s humanity in your own mind. You assign them to a category — monster, animal, thing — that exists outside the circle of moral concern. Once that categorisation is complete, cruelty becomes not only possible but, for many people, feels righteous.

Jeffrey Dahmer was an almost perfect candidate for this process. His crimes were so extreme, so far outside anything most people could comprehend or contextualise, that the leap to monster felt not only natural but necessary. To acknowledge his humanity would be to sit with something deeply uncomfortable — that a person, a recognisable human being, had done these things. That the distance between him and everyone else was perhaps not as vast as we need it to be.

It is easier, and psychologically safer, to make him into something else entirely.

The inmates who taunted him on his first night in prison were not psychopaths. They were ordinary people who had been given permission — by the media, by the trial, by the collective verdict of society — to treat this particular human being as less than human. The guards who allowed Jeffrey to be made to sleep on the floor were not monsters. They were people acting within a system that had already decided Jeffrey was beyond the protections that system normally provides.

He Dealt With It in Silence

What is striking, in every account of Jeffrey’s time in prison, is how he responded to this treatment. Not with rage. Not with breakdown. With a kind of quiet, contained dignity that the people around him seemed entirely unprepared for.

When the taunting on his first night reached its peak — Did the male parts taste good? Do you prefer dark meat or white meat? — Jeffrey said nothing for hours. He waited. And then, when one inmate shouted Hey Jeff, how’s the corpse?, he answered, after a pause, with three words: Chunky. Delicious and tasty.

The ward went quiet.

It was not aggression. It was not a breakdown. It was a man refusing, in the only way available to him, to be entirely erased. He turned the taunting back on itself with a precision that silenced the room. Whatever you think of him, whatever he did — that moment was human. That was a person navigating something impossible with the tools he had.

Detective Dennis Murphy, who spent sixty hours taking his confession, said Jeffrey was cooperative, frank, and without guile. Reverend Roy Ratcliff, who baptised him in prison and visited him regularly until his death, described a man who was sincere, reflective, and genuinely spiritually searching. The FBI agents who interviewed him found him completely credible.

These were people who actually sat with him. Who treated him as a human being capable of communication and reflection. And what they found, consistently, was exactly that.

What Happens Today

Jeffrey Dahmer has been dead for thirty years. And the dehumanisation has not stopped.

His death photographs circulate freely on blogs and social media. His face — split open, unrecognisable, the result of a brutal beating by a fellow inmate — is shared, reposted, used as profile pictures by people who consider this an act of justice or entertainment. The images are not difficult to find. They are treated as public property, as a spectacle to be consumed.

Compare this to how the photographs of his victims are treated. The families of those seventeen men have fought for decades to keep graphic images of their loved ones private. Society, broadly, respects this. The victims are afforded the dignity of death. Jeffrey is not.

This double standard is not justice. It is not about the victims. If it were about the victims, their families’ pain would be the centre of the conversation — and most of the people sharing Jeffrey’s death photographs have no particular investment in those families at all.

It is about something else. It is about the satisfaction of seeing a specific person degraded, even in death. It is about the continuation of a process that began the moment he was arrested — the process of making him into something that does not deserve what the rest of us are given automatically.

That is not justice. That is cruelty with permission.

The Comparison That Nobody Makes

Ted Bundy confessed to nothing voluntarily. He manipulated, performed, charmed, and deflected until the very end — defending himself in court, flirting with the press, using every tool available to him to avoid accountability. He was a diagnosed psychopath with no genuine remorse. He died having never fully owned what he did.

Jeffrey Dahmer confessed to everything. He cooperated completely. He expressed genuine remorse in terms that those closest to him found credible. He repented. He was baptised. He spent his final years in quiet reflection with a prison chaplain.

Bundy is a cultural icon. Jeffrey is a target.

The difference is not the severity of the crimes — Bundy killed more people. The difference is that Jeffrey’s crimes were of a type that made dehumanisation easier. The cannibalism, the necrophilia — these are the elements that push him beyond the boundary of what people can hold as human. And once beyond that boundary, anything becomes permissible.

Why It Matters

We are not asking anyone to forget what Jeffrey did. We are not asking for sympathy that erases the suffering of seventeen families. Those two things can exist simultaneously — grief for the victims and the recognition that a human being deserves to be treated as one, even after death, even in prison, even in the face of crimes that are almost impossible to comprehend.

The people who post his death photographs are not more moral than the people who don’t. They are not more protective of the victims. They are simply people who have found a target that society has declared acceptable — and they are doing what people always do when a target is declared acceptable.

Jeffrey Dahmer was a human being. He was a deeply traumatised, profoundly ill, ultimately destroyed human being who caused incalculable harm. He was also a man who planted yellow roses, who got down on the floor to play with a cat named Jodi, who said much much better quietly to himself in the dark.

Both of these things were true. They will always have been true.

The dehumanisation does not change that. It only tells us something about ourselves.

Sources: Anonymous inmate memoir; Reverend Roy Ratcliff, Dark Journey Deep Grace (2008); Detective Dennis Murphy, various interviews; Brian Masters, The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer (1993); Psychology research on dehumanisation.

The Thin Line: Jeffrey Dahmer Through the Eyes of Georges Bataille

In 1957, the French philosopher Georges Bataille published a book called Erotism: Death and Sensuality. It was not about serial killers. It was not about crime. It was a philosophical study of the deepest impulses in human nature — the desire for intimacy, the pull of transgression, the relationship between love and death, and the strange territory where the sacred and the forbidden become indistinguishable from each other.

Bataille died in 1962. He never knew Jeffrey Dahmer’s name.

And yet Erotism reads, in places, like a philosophical map of Jeffrey’s inner world — written thirty years before anyone knew that world existed. Not because Bataille was describing a killer, but because he was describing something in human nature that Jeffrey took further than almost anyone ever has. The concepts Bataille spent a lifetime developing — discontinuity, continuity, transgression, the sacred dimension of taboo — illuminate Jeffrey’s own words in a way that no clinical diagnosis ever quite manages.

This article is an attempt to place those two things side by side, with care and with honesty.

The Problem of Discontinuity

Bataille begins Erotism with a philosophical observation so simple it is easy to miss its weight. Every human being, he says, is a discontinuous being. We are each enclosed within ourselves, bounded by skin and bone and the limits of our own consciousness. We are born alone. We die alone. Between any two people there is a gulf — fundamental and unbridgeable — that no amount of communication can fully close.

This discontinuity, Bataille argues, is the source of the deepest human suffering. We long for what he calls continuity — a dissolution of the separate self into something larger, a merging with another being that ends the terrible isolation of individual existence. This longing, he says, is at the root of three things: physical eroticism, emotional love, and religious experience. All three are, at their core, attempts to escape discontinuity. To breach the wall between the self and the other. To touch, however briefly, the continuity that death alone can fully restore.

Now consider what Jeffrey said, in his own words, about why he did what he did.

“It made me feel like they were a permanent part of me.”

“I wanted to keep them with me as long as possible, even if it meant just keeping a part of them.”

“I could completely control a person — a person that I found physically attractive — and keep them with me as long as possible.”

This is not the language of hatred. This is not even, primarily, the language of desire in the conventional sense. This is the language of someone trying — in the most extreme and catastrophic way imaginable — to solve the problem Bataille identified. The problem of discontinuity. The unbearable separateness of being a self.

Jeffrey did not want to destroy. He wanted to fuse. He wanted continuity. He wanted the boundary to disappear. Bataille writes that eroticism is, at its core, the attempt to substitute for individual isolated discontinuity a feeling of profound continuity. Jeffrey’s words are that theory spoken aloud — not as philosophy, but as confession.

The Thin Line Between a Kiss and Cannibalism

Bataille’s most unsettling argument — and the one most directly relevant to Jeffrey — is about what he calls the logic of eroticism pushed to its extreme.

Physical eroticism, he argues, is already a form of violation. The erotic act dissolves the boundaries of the self. It is, at its most fundamental, an attempt to break the separateness of two discontinuous beings — to achieve, however briefly, a state of fusion. He writes that the whole business of eroticism is to destroy the self-contained character of the participants. Nakedness, he says, is the first gesture of this dissolution: the removal of the barriers that maintain discontinuity. What follows is a temporary merging, a momentary continuity, before the boundaries are restored and the two people are separate again.

He then asks: what happens when this logic is pursued without limits?

The Marquis de Sade, Bataille notes, defined murder as the pinnacle of erotic excitement. Bataille does not celebrate this. He analyses it. He says that the destructive element pushed to its logical conclusion does not necessarily take us out of the field of eroticism. That if the drive behind eroticism is the dissolution of the separate self — the achievement of continuity — then death is, in a terrible sense, its ultimate fulfilment. Death is the only truly permanent dissolution of discontinuity. Death makes the bounded self continuous with everything again.

This is the thin line. Between the kiss — which reaches across the discontinuity toward the other — and the extreme that Jeffrey enacted, there is a difference of degree, not of kind. Both are movements toward the same impossible thing. Both are attempts to end the isolation that Bataille says defines human existence. The kiss fails, as all such attempts must fail — the boundary returns, the two people are separate again, the discontinuity is restored. Jeffrey’s attempts failed too, in the same way, which is perhaps why they escalated. Each time the boundary came back. The continuity was lost. The person was gone and Jeffrey was alone again in Cell 213.

De Sade himself wrote: “There is no better way to know death than to link it with some licentious image.” Bataille uses this to illustrate the connection between eroticism and death that most people refuse to look at directly. Jeffrey lived inside that connection. He did not choose it. It was given to him — by what combination of neurology, trauma, and chance we do not fully know — and he could not find his way out of it.

Taboo and Transgression: The Desire Created by the Prohibition

One of Bataille’s most radical arguments is about the relationship between taboos and desire. We tend to think of taboos as simply prohibitions — things we are forbidden from doing. Bataille argues that this misses the essential dynamic. Taboos, he says, do not suppress desire. They create it.

He writes: “A transgression is not the same as a back-to-nature movement; it suspends a taboo without suppressing it. Here lies the mainspring of eroticism and of religion too.”

The taboo and the transgression need each other. The prohibition is what makes the transgression possible, what gives it its weight and its charge. Without the taboo, there is no transgression — only an act. The law is not the enemy of the desire; it is its precondition. The sacred and the forbidden are, for Bataille, the same thing seen from different angles.

He illustrates this with religious cannibalism. In certain archaic practices, he writes, the eating of human flesh is both the most forbidden act and the most sacred. The taboo does not create the taste of the flesh — but it stands as the reason the ritual cannibal consumes it. The prohibition is precisely what makes the act holy. The pious cannibal knows full well that this is forbidden; knowing the taboo to be fundamental, he violates it. The desire and the law are inseparable.

Jeffrey understood this, at some level, without ever having read Bataille. He knew that what he desired was forbidden. He fought it for years — the long years at his grandmother’s house, the Bible reading, the missionaries he sent money to, the genuine attempt at control. The awareness that it was wrong was not separate from the desire. It was part of it. The boundary was not an obstacle. It was, in Bataille’s terms, the very thing that made the desire what it was.

Sacrifice and the Sacred: The Baptism

Bataille draws an extended comparison between the erotic act and sacrifice. In sacrifice, he argues, the victim’s death reveals continuity to the witnesses. The discontinuous being is destroyed and in its place what remains — what the spectators experience in the silence that follows — is the continuity of all existence. Death dissolves the particular back into the universal. The bounded self becomes unbounded. This, Bataille says, is the sacred.

He writes: “A violent death disrupts the creature’s discontinuity; what remains, what the tense onlookers experience in the succeeding silence, is the continuity of all existence with which the victim is now one.”

And then there is this: in May 1994, Jeffrey Dahmer was baptised in a steel tub inside Columbia Correctional Institution by Reverend Roy Ratcliff. He was convicted of seventeen murders. He had been in prison for two years. He would be dead in six months.

Jeffrey had arrived, by the end of his life, at something that Bataille’s framework can help us understand. He had been pursuing continuity through one path his entire adult life — the only path available to the thing in him that needed it. In prison, with Ratcliff visiting weekly, reading the Bible, discussing death and redemption and whether he deserved to continue living, he found another path to the same place. Religious eroticism, in Bataille’s terms, is the pursuit of continuity through the sacred — the dissolution of the self not through physical transgression but through union with something beyond individual existence.

Jeffrey told Ratcliff that he sometimes wondered whether he was sinning against God by continuing to live. He had internalized his own discontinuity as the deepest problem of his existence. The baptism — the immersion, the dissolution, the emergence — was perhaps the first time he had tried to reach continuity in a way that did not destroy another person in the process.

Bataille writes that the paths toward continuity vary. Their object, he says, has a great variety of aspects. Jeffrey had spent his life on one path. In his last year he tried another.

Where Bataille’s Theory Has Limits

It would be dishonest to use Bataille’s framework without acknowledging where it becomes insufficient.

Bataille’s analysis of transgression is ultimately descriptive. He is tracing the logic of certain human impulses — mapping the terrain between the sacred and the forbidden, between desire and death. He is not excusing. He is understanding. And understanding, as this memorial has always argued, is not the same as condoning.

But there is a dimension that Bataille’s theory of transgression does not fully account for, and it is the most important one: consent. Bataille writes about eroticism as a mutual dissolution. The sacrifice, even in its most archaic forms, was performed within a collective ritual framework. The transgression operated within a structure, however violent, that held some meaning for those involved.

Jeffrey’s victims did not choose dissolution. They did not consent to become part of someone else’s search for continuity. They were people with their own discontinuities, their own desires for continuity, their own inner worlds every bit as rich and real as Jeffrey’s. They were not symbolic victims in a ritual. They were Steven, James, Richard, Anthony, Raymond, Edward, Ernest, David, Curtis, Errol, Tony, Konerak, Matt, Jeremiah, Oliver, Joseph — and the first, Steven Hicks, eighteen years old, hitchhiking home from a concert.

Bataille helps us understand the logic of what Jeffrey did — the philosophical structure of the impulse, the deep human need it expressed in its most catastrophic form. He does not, and cannot, make it acceptable. The theory illuminates. It does not absolve.

Why This Matters

The reason to read Jeffrey Dahmer through Bataille is not to aestheticise what he did or to find it philosophically elegant. It is because the alternative — treating Jeffrey as simply monstrous, as categorically other, as something outside the human — is both intellectually dishonest and, ultimately, more dangerous.

Bataille wrote at the beginning of Erotism: “The human spirit is prey to the most astounding impulses. Man goes constantly in fear of himself. His erotic urges terrify him.” He was not writing about serial killers. He was writing about everyone. The impulses Jeffrey enacted at their most extreme — the desire for fusion, the longing for continuity, the relationship between desire and death, the terrible pull of the forbidden — are not alien to human nature. They are human nature, at its edges, in its darkest expression.

Jeffrey himself said it: “I don’t think there was something that happened that made me like this. Because this was always just how I was.” He was not describing a monster. He was describing a person whose inner life had taken a particular shape — one that Bataille’s philosophy, for all its difficulty and discomfort, helps us see more clearly than almost any other framework available to us.

Understanding that is not forgiveness for what was done. But it is the beginning of the kind of comprehension that might, one day, mean that someone like Jeffrey — someone carrying that particular configuration of need and isolation and desire — finds a different path before the irreversible moment arrives.

That seems worth understanding.

Sources: Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality (City Lights Books, 1986, translated Mary Dalwood); Jeffrey Dahmer, Inside Edition interview (1993); Jeffrey Dahmer, Dateline NBC interview with Stone Phillips (1994); Roy Ratcliff, Dark Journey Deep Grace (2011); Brian Masters, The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer (1993).

Read George Bataille here:
Bataille_Georges_Erotism_Death_and_SensualityDownload

TRUECRIME REALLY CAUSING DAMAGE? THE SILENT IMPACT OF SOCIAL MEDIA


Ever noticed how we’re all caught up in the whirlwind of true crime stories? The intrigue, the suspense—it’s like we’re all amateur detectives piecing together mysteries. But, let me spill the beans on something even more mysterious, and way more dangerous: the silent chaos brewing right under our thumbs. Yep, you guessed it—social media. While everyone’s pointing fingers at the creators of true crime content, there’s a bigger game being played behind the scenes. Let’s unravel the true villain—social media—and how it’s messing with us in ways we never imagined.

Not Just About True Crime:
Before we dive into the real deal, let’s hit pause on the true crime binge. It’s gripping, no doubt, but it’s a mere side act in the grand circus of social media. True, those who create true crime content might raise eyebrows, but there’s a far more sinister puppeteer pulling the strings—the platforms that fuel our obsession and dictate our emotions.

Feeling the Numb:
Imagine this: scrolling, tapping, liking, sharing—our fingers dance on screens, but our hearts stay put. Social media’s incessant stream of information has a knack for numbing our emotions. It’s like a digital drug that leaves us emotionally distant, all while we’re bombarded with a cocktail of viral trends, heartwarming videos, and heart-wrenching stories. It’s a curious paradox: we’re more connected than ever, yet the real connections seem to fade away.

Impact on Us and the Young’uns:
Now, let’s talk about the real victims—the generations growing up in the era of endless selfies and retweets. Social media is their playground, but it’s a playground with virtual swings and pixelated playmates. Real conversations? They’re fading into the background, replaced by emojis and abbreviations. It’s like teaching them to spell with emojis before they even learn their ABCs.

The Blind Spot:
Picture this: amidst all the buzz about true crime and the glossy filters of the social media world, there’s a blind spot we’re all missing. A blind spot that’s growing into a chasm. It’s the erosion of empathy and genuine human connection. As we scroll past posts and stories, we’re losing touch with the depth of emotions that make us human. The real story isn’t just about the content; it’s about the feelings we’re leaving behind.

Shake Up and Wake Up:
Time for a wake-up call, dear readers! It’s time to shift the spotlight from the superficial to the substantial. Let’s put down the magnifying glasses we use for true crime stories and focus on what really matters—the way we’re letting social media reshape our lives. We need to be the detectives of our own digital journey, sifting through the feeds mindfully and leading by example for the younger generation.

Wrap It Up in a GIF:
So, in a world of true crime fascination and endless social media feeds, the real crime isn’t just the content creators—it’s the way we’re letting these platforms alter our emotional landscape. Let’s be the heroes who flip the script, steering our focus towards the genuine connections and feelings that truly matter. 🕵️‍♂️🌐