Research paper on jeffrey dahmer

Running head: SERIAL KILLER-JEFFREY DAHMER

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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 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 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 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 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 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 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).

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