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Trial of American Serial Killer Jeffrey Dahmer

Jeffrey Dahmer’s father Lionel reflected on his sons childhood and the missed opportunities he had to uncover his killing spree in an interview with Dr. Phil that was recently released.

Dahmer’s murder spree took place between 1978 and 1991. During this period he murdered and cannibalized 17 young men in Wisconsin and Ohio. He was convicted in 1992 and was murdered in prison just two years later.

Dahmer’s close bond with his father was portrayed in controversial Netflix series Monster – with Dr Phil airing three-day special, In The Presence of Evil: Face to Face with Jeffrey Dahmer this week, which aims to tell the ‘real story’ of the killer and delve into what made him a monster.

Lionel speculated that his son morphed into a sexual predator and serial killer as an adolescent. He commented that when Jeffrey was emerging from puberty, he started to develop a strange fascination with dead animals.

“I thought at some point between 12 and 14, coming out of puberty, his sexual engine was in high drive and he was touching the insides of this animal and he sort of got hardwired neurally into connecting the sexual pleasure with this type of activity, entrails, insides, bodies, that’s the way I thought about it after thinking about it for a while,” said Lionel Dahmer.

Although Lionel claimed to have had friends who told him they’d “done the same sort of thing with” animal carcasses, he admitted that it “would have been a red flag.”