Serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer’s father, Lionel, dies at 87

Lionel Dahmer, the father of infamous serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, died Tuesday in hospice care in Medina County. He was 87.

Unexpectedly thrown into the national spotlight after his son’s gruesome crimes were discovered in 1991, Lionel continued to love his son unconditionally.

“How could anyone be polite and kind and pretty normal otherwise and yet do these things unless they are extremely troubled and insane?” Lionel told the Beacon Journal at the time.

The murders didn’t square with the polite boy he remembered as a child. Jeffrey “was not born a monster,” Lionel said.

Lionel, the son of Herbert and Catherine Dahmer, was born July 29, 1936, in West Allis, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee.

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 welcomed their 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 on West Bath Road in Bath Township. Lionel worked as a chemist for PPG Industries.

The Dahmer marriage was turbulent. 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.

The Revere High School graduate 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 Medina County.

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.

“He was a person who was basically kind but deeply, deeply troubled by something, and he has been for a long time,” Lionel told the Beacon Journal in 1991.

The elder Dahmer 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.

Jeffrey’s mother, Joyce, died of breast cancer Nov. 27, 2000, in Fresno, California, at age 64. Lionel’s second wife, Shari, died Jan. 13, 2023, at a nursing home in Medina County at age 81.

The Dahmer name remains infamous more than 30 years after Jeffrey’s arrest. Netflix released a hit series this year about the serial killer.

“I don’t think I’ll ever come to terms with it,” Lionel told “Inside Edition” in 1992. “Nothing will ever be the same again. We will go on with life … but part of our minds can never forget this nightmare.”

Mark J. Price can be reached at mprice@thebeaconjournal.com

This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Jeffrey Dahmer’s father, Lionel, dies at 87 in Medina County