Running head: SERIAL KILLER-JEFFREY DAHMER 1 SERIAL KILLER-JEFFREY DAHMER Serial Killer-Jeffrey Dahmer Shanee’ Ellington Liberty University 25 April 2019 Serial murderer – an introduction The crime of manslaughter has been known for a long time, to be specifically the early 1600’s but the initial case of a serial murderer was in the year 1888, named, Jack the Ripper, who killed and mutilated five prostitutes in the East London. Field experts have stated that at any time, the United States has around 50 active serial murderers, owing to the fact that arroba the year multiple homicides have occurred. Now the question arises, who is a serial killer? A person possessing a specific emotional drive to kill mercilessly is termed as a serial murderer. These murders, killings, manslaughters, or homicides are generally done in a different way that distinguishes one serial murderer from another. The killer often has a sign that they are distinguished with. Serial murderers are kept in the page as being mass- slayers. The only difference being that serial murderers do not naturally kill the way mass murderers/ slayers do, i.e. mass slayers don’t leave breaks in committing the merciless murders. On the other hand, serial murderers tend to have a distinct feature that reflects the fact that they are murderers with a psychotic overdrive (Ellens, 2011). Jeffrey Dahmer Nearly 25 years ago, one of America’s most infamous serial murderers, Jeffrey Dahmer, a paedophile, and a cannibal, was confronted, attacked and mercilessly slayed while cleaning the bathroom of a prison. His span of crime ranged from June 18, 1978 till July 19, 1991. Jeffrey Dahmer, also known as Milwaukee Cannibal or the Milwaukee Monster, was an American serial murderer and a sex criminal who brutally raped and then killed 17 men and boys between the years 1978 to 1991. Several of those later homicides consisted of preservation of several body parts of the victims, necrophilia and cannibalism. Though he was initially diagnosed with several mental diseases like borderline personality disorder, a psychotic disorder, and schizotypal personality disorder, Dahmer was found to be legitimately stable at his probation. He was sentenced for fifteen terms of life custody on February 15, 1992 for the fifteen of the sixteen homicides that he had committed in Wisconsin. Later, he was condemned to a sixteenth term of life custody for an additional slaughter in 1978 in Ohio. Dahmer was crushed to death by Christopher Scarver On November 28th, 1994 at the Columbia Correctional Institution (Martens, 2011). Jeffery’s move into criminality- early years It is reported by witnesses that as an infant, Dahmer was deprived of attention and love that a child expects from his parents. It is also reported that his mother was identified as a stressed, covetous, and argumentative lady who often quarrelled with her husband and their neighbours. As Dahmer entered the first grade, his mother .

1. Running head: SERIAL KILLER-JEFFREY DAHMER
1
SERIAL KILLER-JEFFREY DAHMER
Serial Killer-Jeffrey Dahmer
Shanee’ Ellington
Liberty University
25 April 2019
Serial murderer – an introduction

2. The crime of manslaughter has been known for a long time, to
be specifically the early 1600’s but the initial case of a serial
murderer was in the year 1888, named, Jack the Ripper, who
killed and mutilated five prostitutes in the East London. Field
experts have stated that at any time, the United States has
around 50 active serial murderers, owing to the fact that arroba
the year multiple homicides have occurred. Now the question
arises, who is a serial killer?
A person possessing a specific emotional drive to kill
mercilessly is termed as a serial murderer. These murders,
killings, manslaughters, or homicides are generally done in a
different way that distinguishes one serial murderer from
another. The killer often has a sign that they are distinguished
with. Serial murderers are kept in the page as being mass-
slayers. The only difference being that serial murderers do not
naturally kill the way mass murderers/ slayers do, i.e. mass
slayers don’t leave breaks in committing the merciless murders.
On the other hand, serial murderers tend to have a distinct
feature that reflects the fact that they are murderers with a
psychotic overdrive (Ellens, 2011).
Jeffrey Dahmer
Nearly 25 years ago, one of America’s most infamous serial
murderers, Jeffrey Dahmer, a paedophile, and a cannibal, was
confronted, attacked and mercilessly slayed while cleaning the
bathroom of a prison. His span of crime ranged from June 18,
1978 till July 19, 1991.
Jeffrey Dahmer, also known as Milwaukee Cannibal or
the Milwaukee Monster, was an American serial murderer and a
sex criminal who brutally raped and then killed 17 men and
boys between the years 1978 to 1991. Several of those later
homicides consisted of preservation of several body parts of the
victims, necrophilia and cannibalism. Though he was initially
diagnosed with several mental diseases like borderline
personality disorder, a psychotic disorder, and schizotypal
personality disorder, Dahmer was found to be
legitimately stable at his probation.

3. He was sentenced for fifteen terms of life custody on February
15, 1992 for the fifteen of the sixteen homicides that he had
committed in Wisconsin. Later, he was condemned to a
sixteenth term of life custody for an additional slaughter in
1978 in Ohio. Dahmer was crushed to death by Christopher
Scarver On November 28th, 1994 at the Columbia Correctional
Institution (Martens, 2011).
Jeffery’s move into criminality- early years
It is reported by witnesses that as an infant, Dahmer was
deprived of attention and love that a child expects from his
parents. It is also reported that his mother was identified as a
stressed, covetous, and argumentative lady who often quarrelled
with her husband and their neighbours. As Dahmer entered the
first grade, his mother was repeatedly ill, and had driven herself
into a state of nervousness over inconsequential issues. On one
such overstressed day, she tried to commit suicide with an
Equanil pills overdose. This resulted in neither of the parent
devoting much time to their son, which in turn made him
surrender to loneliness from a very small age. Dahmer, who was
initially an active and contented child, turned into a quiet and
timid child after his hernia operation and owing to the stressed
environment at house (Backderf, 2012).
Years later, after his freshman year at Revere High School
began, Jeffery Dahmer was regarded as an outcast by
classmates. He never tried to mix in with others. His friends
were distraught by the fact that he savoured both beer and hard
alcohol, which he carefully sneaked into school by hiding it into
the coating of his army jacket, at the mere age of fourteen
years. Once, a classmate caught him drinking gin and when
enquired, Dahmer shamelessly answered it was his medicine
that he needed to survive. He realised that he was a homosexual
after hitting puberty. At a later age, he began to imagine about
controlling and overpowering a totally submissive male
companion. These imaginations slowly took the form of
compulsion and aggression which was later depicted in his
crimes. Later when he turned 16 years old, he attained a fantasy

4. of raping an unconscious body. One morning he planned to rape
the unconscious body of a male jogger he had a major crush on.
For this purpose, he kept waiting in the bushes with a baseball
bat, but that particular day, the jogger didn't arrive. He gave up
that plan later, confessing later that it was the first time he felt
like attacking someone for sexual assault. In the later years,
Dahmer, was regarded as the class clown, for he kept
entertaining the class with his pranks and harmless jokes. He
performed these jokes to attract other classmates and harness
their attention towards him. These pranks came to be knowing
as the "Doing the Dahmer." Unfortunately, these pranks turned
into an addictive habit that led to the death of many around him.
In the later years, several psychologists and psychiatrists, who
studied Dahmer’s life, believed that it was his rough childhood
and distracted parents that made him insensitive to the feeling
of others around him. The aggression he showcased later was
the result of his aloof behaviour in his teenage years (Centi,
2013).
The Killing spree
The first murder that Dahmer committed was in 1978 at the
mere age of 18, just three weeks after his graduation. His
parents had just gotten divorced and he was having a tough time
dealing with it. Jeffrey Dahmer had invited a youth named
Hicks into his house, for a healthy conversation over drinks and
later bludgeoned him pitilessly with a 10 lb dumbbell when the
latter wanted to leave. In the trial, Dahmer recalled, when Hicks
fell unconscious, the former strangled him to death and then
masturbated in front of the dead body. He later dismembered
Hicks' body and hid the remainders in a deep pit in his
backyard. Few weeks later, he took out the bones and the flesh
from the pit, and also melted the flesh in hydrochloric acid
before flushing the chemical remnant down the toilet. He also
broke the bones into small granules and scattered them in his
garden. Four years later, On August 7, 1982, at Wisconsin State
Fair Park, he exposed himself to twenty-five women and
children for which he was fined fifty dollars plus the court cost

5. incurred. Such indecencies were a game for him. He once said,
"I trained myself to view people as objects of pleasure instead
of people". This is a proof of how he had become an animal, a
beast who killed his victims for fun and pleasure (Barry, 2009).
In June 1986, he began visiting a bathhouse for fulfilling his
sexual assaults, where he spiked his friends drink with sleeping
pills and ended up raping their unconscious bodies. After
committing Mistakes after mistakes, he was thrown out of the
bathhouse once and for all. Few days later, he read about the
funeral of an eighteen-year-old boy, and planned to dig the
grave to take the body home. This plan of his got ruined when
the soil of the grave was found to be too hard to be dug. In the
month of August in the year 1986 he was taken into custody for
masturbating in front of two minors near the Kinnikinic river.
After being sentenced to a probation of one-year, Dahmer
pleaded not guilty, claiming that he was just urinating in the
area when the minor witnessed the indecent incident. Months
later, on November 20, 1987 he killed a man named Tuomi
having no memory of doing it. He remembered inviting the man
to his house for raping his unconscious body, but woke up in the
morning with the dead body of the same man beneath him and
blood oozing out of the latter's body. He carefully dissected the
entire body of Tuomi, and in two houses, disposed them in the
trash. For two weeks following the murder of Tuomi, Dahmer
kept the former's skull with himself, using it as a stimulus to
masturbate. After two weeks, he boiled the skull in the chemical
named Soilex to further retain the skull. After the brutal murder
of Tuomi, Dahmer consistently sought more victims who'll fall
prey to his charms, lead them to his pad, and either drugged
them or killed them with an overdose of sleeping pills. He then
raped them and mutilated their body parts. His victims included
a fourteen-year-old native American male prostitute named
Doxtator and a twenty-two-year-old bisexual named Richard
(Beryhill, 2013).
Arrest
In the year 1991, Dahmer offered $100 to three men in return

6. for posing for nudes in his apartment. Of the three men, a
thirty-two-year old man, Tracy Edwards, agreed to the offer.
Once in the apartment, Edwards was handcuffed and spanked.
When he tried to retaliate, Dahmer informed him that he desired
to eat his heart. Edwards was aghast with the psychotic man's
advances. He noticed a foul smell coming from the entire
apartment and huge boxes of hydrochloric acids on the floor. He
found the atmosphere alarming and realised that Dahmer was
either a mad man or a dangerous killer. Edwards excused
himself to go to the bathroom and when he came back and found
Dahmer busy, he punched him hard and ran off out of the house,
in spite of his naked state. He found two policemen and
accompanied them back to Dahmer's apartment. Initially
Dahmer was calm at the officer's visit, but later he went
aggressive and tried to attack them. Fortunately, he was
overpowered and pinned to the wall by them. The criminal
investigation bureau conducted a detailed search of the
apartment the next day, and found four skulls in Dahmer's
kitchen. Along with this, seventy four polaroid pictures of
dismembered victims, were found. The trial of Jeffrey Dahmer
started on January 30th, 1992, which lasted for two weeks. On
15th February, 1992 the court continued to hear the judgement,
in which Dahmer was ruled to be well-balanced and not
suffering from a psychological illness at the time of each of the
fifteen murders. After being sentenced, Dahmer was moved to
the Columbia Correctional Institution in Wisconsin (Thomassen,
2016).
Dahmer and Christianity
It was the year 1994, when Ratcliffe, the Wisconsin minister of
the Mandrake Road Church of Christ in Madison, received a
message that a prisoner wanted to be baptized. The prisoner was
Dahmer. Everyone was startled. After performing the baptism,
Ratcliffe commended meeting for a weekly one hour meet with
Dahmer. He often enquired about the sincerity of his Baptism
and his Christian life. This went on for seven months before

7. Dahmer was killed (Usborne, 2013).
An old Methodist hymn says,
He breaks the power of cancelled sin,
he sets the prisoner free;
his blood can make the foulest clean;
his blood availed for me.”
The Christian Worldview believes that the Almighty desires to
save his offspring so desperately that he spilled his blood for
making even “the foulest blood clean.” After all these years,
after his death was rejoiced by all, many Christians still believe
that if Jeffrey Dahmer sincerely accepted the mercy offered by
Divinity, then currently, he is residing with Jesus Christ. This
view has been open to debate through the years as many don’t
believe it (Leong, 2013).
Mr. Ratcliff reportedly said that, Dahmer often spoke of being
the nastiest of criminals. Before he was attacked and killed, he
was seeking mercy. Mr Ratcliff wrote a detailed account of his
meeting with Dahmer in a short book which came to be known
as, “Dark Journey, Deep Grace,” The book sold poorly as there
are many who still loathed Dahmer, and didn’t think of any
reason to read a book which talked about his transformation into
a repenting man (Schildcrout, 2014).
CONCLUSION
Jeffrey Dahmer was a serial murderer who killed and raped,
indulging in cannibalism throughout his life. He regarded
people as commodities he can play with and kill. Some people
might believe that deserved a more merciless death than the
quick death he got, but if the Christianity worldview is taken
into consideration, Dahmer may have been forgiven for his sins
after attaining baptism. In Romans 10:9, The Bible says, "That
if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt
believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead,
thou shalt be saved." This literally means that even though a
person has confessed with his words, it doesn’t mean that he has
confessed his sins to the Christ with sincerity (Aggrawal, 2016).
Christianity worldview believes that Jesus forgives all when

8. sincere clemency is asked for and a person repents for his
actions. If Mr Ratcliff is believed, Dahmer had indeed been
suffering with repentance, and guilt, in his last days, right
before his murder. He wanted peace and asked forgiveness with
sincerity. But the heinous crimes he committed can’t be
forgotten (Collis, 2017).
References
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Aspects”. CRC Press.
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