“Can't go around making excuses, blaming other people or other things. So I alone am the one who is responsible for what's happened. The only motive that there ever was, was to completely control a person a person I found physically attractive.
And keep them with me as long as possible, even if it meant just keeping a part of them. ” – Jeffrey Dahmer Above was one of Dahmer’s statements in his last television interview before his death in November 1994.The man was a murderer, someone who made painted his name in the collection of world’s finest serial killers. What is interesting is that he was doing this out of his compulsion and sexual needs but what is scary is that he was a man who acts completely “normal. ” Dahmer’s case was indeed interesting that I had personally chosen to make a reaction paper out of it.
As I have not been contented of the case study in Robert Meyer’s book, this case made me search supplements such as documentaries, interview recordings and photographs over the internet.This was perhaps because I wanted to know Dahmer, his life, how he looks like, his behavior, how he felt during and after the crime, what brought him to engage in such actions and how his parents responded to all these events as it was fairly obvious how the world condemned him. Let me tell you how Dahmer looked like. He looked unfortunately good looking and too much normal. He wore glasses, had this fine nose, fair eyes, thick lips and had this growing beard making him look very manly in his trial days.
During his last interview, he had this big, protruding belly, perhaps the result of his long term alcoholic consumption.I say he was too normal to be a killer. He did not have the fiery eyes, the sadistic smile, the unkempt hair; he did not talk angrily, was not stammering or even nervous. He was intelligent, was good at speaker and maybe good at manipulating people.
All these qualities became one of his tools to have kept his killing spree on fire for 13 years. It was puzzling what made him fantasize lying beside a dead body to achieve sexual satisfaction. Dahmer’s life was very typical.It was typical because he grew in a good family.
Lionel, Dahmer’s father, mentioned in an interview that they have particularly paid attention to him while he was growing. They promoted interaction when they felt that their son was starting to isolate himself, they observed him to be a bit withdrawn so they bought him a dog and it was also a fact that his dad sent him to college when he observed that Dahmer was acting awkwardly not knowing that this was because he killed his first victim. The separation of Dahmer’s parents is an aggravating factor in his first victim when he was 18 years old but it was not even the reason on why he started to abnormally fantasize about these dead men.It was one of my observations since he mentioned in one of his interviews that these fantasies started when he was 13 or 14 years old.
At this age, no conflicts in his family, in school or with friends were reported, or if there was with his family, both his parents emphasized that Dahmer has not even witnessed them fighting or shouting at each other. It has been a trend that killers come from violent or abusive families, but Dahmer did not have that kind of background. It is then frustrating not to know the reason for such outrage.My further readings state that maybe it was because of a psychological trauma with the family moving from one place to another and from his hernia surgery. But those reasons are something that would be hard to be agreed on. First of all, the timeline of events were not congruent to that of the consequence and because Dahmer confessed that he is not even aware of why he did such act.
He did not even express certain distress over some childhood or teenage events. Perhaps Freud would have a hard time solving this psychiatric phenomenon. This man was not even enjoying the killing, he said so in his interview, but he enjoyed the dismemberment.Accordingly, he felt sexual pleasure when he did it. Who knows if he’s lying when he stated in his interview that he was not lucid while he strangled his first victim and cannot even recall how he killed the second one? Thinking he was all evil, he continued his immoral acts.
There was then this question in one of the documentaries if he was “Born to Kill. ” Can a person be actually be destined to be a killer? I don’t think so for it was his choice to pursue it. It has been a struggle to suppress those desires while he was growing and he was doing well and yet he let it slip out of him.The point here is that he “allowed” it to occupy him so much that he had killed more and more, thus, he decided to kill and he was indeed not born to be one. I view it as a vice, a very addictive one. Like gambling that you fashion your life to sustain it, it was also what Dahmer did.
He shaped his environment to fit his lifestyle. He was addicted to that sexual pleasure and was actually attached to it that he tried to find ways to keep his victims with him forever such as storing them in his apartment, turning them into zombies and even eating parts of them.He even bought a meat tenderizer since he was having difficulty in chewing the biceps and the thigh muscles. He also added vegetables when he cooked parts of his victims. It can be perceived that as he was continually achieving sexual satisfaction, he was also losing his logic and reasoning. How would someone turn into a zombie when you inject acid in their brain? This appealed to me as a very desperate act to keep these dead men not only beside him but even within him, forever.
It was very insane and I guess he just allowed himself to lose his mind.He lost control and only felt it with the rituals he did with his poor victims. As soon as Dahmer was arrested, the world reacted violently against it. Who would not be disgusted by his acts? Then imagine how his parents must have reacted to these.
They were present during the trial where confessions were made in which Dahmer narrated every step of his act. It would be a natural reaction for the parents to blame themselves for what their son has been doing. But I see the latter actions of Dahmer’s parents were very opportunistic.Yes, both have been subjected to various interviews, humiliated, questioned and blamed; and yet both also wrote their own book about their son during the height of the Dahmer’s fame. They wrote here aspects of them which might have been caused their son to be that way.
Many see it as a selfless act, but I see it as trying to turn things around and pull attention to themselves. Imagine, the father admitted to have been fantasizing too about killing someone before and to have been obsessed with fire while his mother to have been utterly depressed after Dahmer was born.They have been subjected to television interviews and their names written in country newspapers. They had the media’s attention even the people’s sympathy.
It might have been selfless to put the blame on themselves, but would it have undone Dahmer’s actions or even be a reason to absolve him of his criminal offenses? It did not even pave the way to build up a basis to Dahmer’s actions! It was useless. It was just to continue the circulation of the issue, a way to gain the country’s attention and of course to earn money which could have been a lot for who wouldn’t be buy something so intriguing.Of course all these things were happening while their son was trying to recover in jail, attempted to be killed by some of his inmates. During the trial of the case, Dahmer has been found guilty as soon as his plead to insanity was not proven.
Other than the fact that psychosexual disorders do not actually affect cognition, I also believe that it was a big factor for him being guilty is that a strong basis for his actions was not established in the court. Doing a crime without a possible moral reason would always be a crime in the eyes of the jury and of every person witnessing your defense.Mutilation has always not been moral, ever since rights for human life has been established; of course cannibalism and necrophilia too. Dahmer has these series of unfortunate behavior and thinking that obviously made him guilty from the start of the story. I embarked on this case trying to understand Dahmer’s way of thinking, for understanding his personality would perhaps help me rationalize his actions and give him a bit of sympathy. Unfortunately, understanding him was impossible and so is forgiving him for his crimes.
But the restraint he had shown during his teen years, how he has been trying to fight off these fantasies and how he tried so hard to be a normal person especially at school was something I probably noticed as a positive nature of him. In one of the documentaries, his grade school and some high school classmates would describe him as their class clown, a very common way to hide fears, sorrow and other lonely emotions. He also obviously knew that his mind was pushing him to do things that are not right and so he tried to suppress it.Of all the serial killers too, where could you find someone who is so calm, tells his crimes in detail, admits to it and keeps the blame to himself, perhaps because he has no one else to blame. It was very evident how he tried to keep the people judging his parents in his quotation above.
Undeniably, Dahmer still deserves thanks for being so open about his condition so that professionals and even commoners can have a better understanding of psychosexual disorders.Much as it was frustrating that the primordial reason for such behavior was not pointed out, it was also challenging to try to find it as I was writing this paper. In continuous pursuit of treatment to psychiatric disorders, I believe that the causes of such should be constantly studied too since it can be a valuable tool to the patient’s treatment. Dahmer’s story has been scary, gruesome, cruel and undeniably outrageous but it teaches us a lesson to be careful to the people around us. They might act normal but they can actually do the most abnormal things on human history.
This is not to scare anyone but it can be true.On a lighter note, it means we should choose people to trust because this world turned out to be full of fools, opportunists and masked personas too. In closing, I have been on the brink of emotions continually mixing up with another as I learned as much of Dahmer’s case, and yet it has been a good learning experience. More than the wide scale fame and the glory of people who leeched from it, I believe Dahmer’s story should be a source of learning and not to something to be scorned to be source of contempt. For they say, to avoid repeating history, one should learn from it.
