Lionel Dahmer, father of a notorious serial killer who tried to answer the question ‘Why?’ – obituary
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Lionel Dahmer, who has died aged 87, was the father of the notorious serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer and author of a memoir in which he sought, without much success, to understand why his son’s mind was invaded by demons and whether he was in some way to blame for creating a monster.
Jeffrey Dahmer, the older of Lionel’s two sons, was arrested in July 1991 and confessed to killing 17 young men and boys in Wisconsin and Ohio between 1978 and 1991, having sex with some of the corpses, mutilating – and even eating – some of them and preserving parts as trophies. Convicted in 1992 and handed 15 consecutive life sentences, he was beaten to death by a fellow inmate in prison in 1994 aged 34.
Thrown into the media spotlight after his son’s crimes were discovered, Lionel Dahmer visited him regularly in prison until he was killed. “I still love my son. I’ll always stick by him – I always have,” he told Oprah in 1994.
A Father’s Story, published shortly after his son’s death, portrayed a family not so different from many other white middle-class American families, and a son who, as a young child, seemed little different from other boys in Bath Township, Ohio. Apart from an interest in dead animals and taxidermy, young “Jeff”, his father insisted, was a “polite, kind and pretty normal” child who rode a bicycle, fished and was the class “clown” at school.
The Dahmers were not perfect. Both father and son preferred their own company; Lionel’s marriage to Jeffrey’s mother Joyce, who suffered from poor mental health, was unhappy – but arguments were not generally violent. Though they were not demonstratively affectionate, Jeffrey’s parents did not beat, molest or abandon him. Lionel, a research chemist, sometimes took his son to work with him and had him help with household chores.
Casting around for the one factor to explain the unexplainable, Lionel Dahmer castigated himself for not spending more time with his son when he was adolescent and suggested that his “analytical” scientist’s mind might have left him ill-equipped to provide the emotional support he needed. Otherwise, was it the breakup of his marriage to Joyce when Jeffrey was in his teens? The prescription drugs Joyce took during the pregnancy? The alcoholism that began when Jeff was a teenager?
“There was no screaming in the night, no rambling speech, no moments of catatonic blankness,” Lionel wrote despairingly. “If he had done any of these things, then I might have sensed how deeply he was moving into his madness, and sensing that, I might not only have saved him somehow, but all the others he destroyed as well,” he wrote. Instead: “I saw only a quiet little boy.”
When a detective arrived at Lionel’s home in 1991 and said he was investigating a homicide, Lionel immediately assumed Jeffrey was the victim. It was only then that he learnt the horrific truth.
Reviewers of his book were left as baffled as the author. Lionel Dahmer was not a bad father; children far more neglected than Jeffrey do not in general go on to become serial killers. And that made Lionel’s story all the more disturbing.
Lionel Herbert Dahmer was born to Herbert Dahmer, a maths teacher, and Catherine, née Hughes, on July 29 1936, in West Allis, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee. He took a degree in chemistry at the University of Wisconsin and in 1959 married Joyce Flint. Their son Jeffrey was born in 1960 followed, six years later, by another son.
In his memoir, Lionel looked for portents for his son’s problems in his own life. As a child, he recalled, he once lured a young girl up to his room and hypnotised her; as a teenager he sent away for chemicals and made bombs, even exploding one in a hallway at his high school, and in his late teens he had nightmares about killing people.
Lionel went on to take an MSc from Marquette University in 1962 and a doctorate from Iowa State in 1966. In 1968 the family moved to Bath Township where Lionel worked as a research chemist for PPG Industries.
In 1978 Lionel’s marriage to Joyce ended. Joyce moved to Wisconsin with their younger son, leaving 18-year-old Jeffrey in Lionel’s care. The same year, Lionel married for a second time, to Shari Jordan.
By this time Jeffrey had murdered his first victim. On June 18 1978, while his father was absent, he had picked up a hitchhiker, 18-year-old Steven Hicks, killed him, dissected the body in the basement and buried the remains in the back yard. Several weeks later, he unearthed the remains, dissolved the flesh in acid before flushing the solution down the lavatory and crushing the bones which he scattered in woodland.
In 1981, after Jeffrey had dropped out of college and been discharged from the army owing to alcohol abuse, Lionel sent his 21-year-old son to live in West Allis, Wisconsin with his grandmother, to whom Jeffrey had once been close, hoping that her influence might persuade him to change his ways. He remained there until 1990; three of his victims were murdered at his grandmother’s home.
While Lionel Dahmer was not an uncaring or abusive father he does seem to have been remarkably unobservant. Working long hours in the laboratory, he never seems to have realised that Jeffrey was an alcoholic at high school; nor did it occur to him that he might be homosexual.
On one occasion, finding a heavy wooden box at the West Allis house, Lionel, thinking it might contain pornographic materials, tried to insist Jeffrey open it. They had a row, but it was only later, in a phone call from prison, that Jeffrey told his father the box had contained “the mummified head and genitals of the last victim at the West Allis location”.
While he clearly never considered his son capable of murder, Lionel can not have been unaware of his propensity for sexual violence. In 1989, when Jeffrey was sentenced to five years probation for molesting a child, Lionel asked the judge to get Jeffrey treatment. “This may be our last chance to institute something effective,” he wrote.
But nothing ever explained why Jeffrey Dahmer grew up into a monster.
Jeffrey’s mother, Joyce, died in 2000. Lionel’s second wife, Shari, died in January this year. His other son survives him.
Lionel Dahmer, born July 29 1936, died December 5 2023
