Father of Milwaukee serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, Lionel, dies at 87

The father of the most infamous serial killer in Milwaukee history has died.

Lionel Dahmer, the father of Jeffrey Dahmer, was 87 years old and died in hospice care in Medina County, Ohio, on Tuesday.

He was, of course, thrown into the national spotlight after police discovered his son's gruesome crimes in Milwaukee in 1991.

It was revealed in a September Fox Nation series that Lionel recorded many of his conversations with Jeffrey while he was incarcerated.

"I had weird thoughts too in my childhood" Lionel said to Jeffrey. "You're just like me, Jeff. Amazing all the times that I should have been caught I never was. Nothing. Absolutely nothing is too great not to be forgiven."

Lionel's love for his son was unconditional. He told the Akron Beacon Journal in 1991 that the murders didn't square with the polite boy he remembered as a child. Jeffrey "was not born a monster," he said.

“How could anyone be polite and kind and pretty normal otherwise and yet do these things unless they are extremely troubled and insane?"

Lionel was born on July 29, 1936, in West Allis. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from the University of Wisconsin in 1959, the same year he married Joyce Flint. The couple had son Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer on May 21, 1960.

Lionel earned a Master of Science degree from Marquette University in 1962 and a doctorate in chemistry from Iowa State in 1966. The family moved to Ohio and bought a home in 1968 in Bath Township. Lionel worked as a chemist for PPG Industries.

Shortly after, Lionel moved to a hotel after suing Joyce for divorce, alleging gross neglect. His estranged wife moved to Wisconsin with their younger son, leaving Jeffrey alone in the Bath home in the summer of 1978. Jeffrey picked up hitchhiker Steven M. Hicks, 18, of Coventry Township, and killed him in the Dahmer residence June 18 of that year.

After the Dahmer divorce was finalized July 20, 1978, Lionel married Jeffrey’s stepmother, Shari, and moved to Granger Township in Ohio.

Jeffrey's mother, Joyce, died on Nov. 27, 2000, in Fresno, California. She told the Journal Sentinel in 1995 that she often struggled with her son's crimes and she attempted suicide. She died of breast cancer in 2000. She was 64.

Lionel’s second wife, Shari, died Jan. 13, 2023, at a nursing home in Medina County at age 81.

When Jeffrey Dahmer was sentenced to five years of probation in 1989 for molesting a child, Lionel asked the judge to maximize the sentence and get Jeffrey treatment. “This may be our last chance to institute something effective,” he wrote.

After Jeffrey was charged with murder in 1991, he admitted to killing 17 young men and boys, beginning with Hicks in 1978.

Lionel visited his son in prison every month after his conviction. He wrote about Jeffrey in the 1994 book “A Father’s Story,” acknowledging that he had operated on “a level of obliviousness, or perhaps denial, that was scarcely imaginable” during his son’s life.

An inmate beat Jeffrey to death Nov. 28, 1994, while serving life sentences in the Columbia Correctional Institution in Wisconsin. He was 34.

The Dahmer family was back in the spotlight last year after Netflix released "Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story." The series came with rave reviews and racked up lots of awards. Some of the victim's families have spoken out saying the series glorified the killer.

Mark J. Price of the Akron Beacon Journal contributed to this report.

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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Father of Milwaukee serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, Lionel, dies at 87