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Jeffrey Dahmer’s father talks regret, and the disturbing signs his son was a serial killer

November 17, 2022 | | Print Article

Jeffrey Dahmer’s father sat down with Dr. Phil almost 20 years ago, reflecting on how he had missed opportunities to find out what his monstrous son had done during his serial killing spree where he raped, murdered, and ate 17 young men in Wisconsin and Ohio.

Dahmer’s gruesome kills took place between 1978 and 1991. He was convicted in 1992 and was murdered in prison just two years later.

(Video Credit: Dr. Phil/YouTube)

Netflix recently released a series called “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” depicting how close Dahmer was with his father.

Dr. Phil aired a three-day special on the killer called, “In The Presence of Evil: Face to Face with Jeffrey Dahmer” this week that shows his interview with Lionel Dahmer and his stepmother, Shari in the 1990s. It purports to tell the “real story” of the psychotic killer.

Dahmer’s father speculated that his son morphed into a sexual predator and serial killer as an adolescent. He commented that when the younger Dahmer was emerging from puberty, he started to develop a “strange association” between roadkill and his sexual urges.

(Video Credit: Netflix/YouTube)

“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,” Lionel Dahmer, now 86, contended.

Jeffrey was fascinated with taxidermy as a young child. Father and son bonded over dissecting dead animals together.

During the interview, the father recounted an incident where his son kept him from opening a wooden box that contained the severed head of Anthony Sears, 26, who was murdered in 1989.

(Video Credit: Dr. Phil/YouTube)

Jeffrey Dahmer was living with his grandmother after leaving the Army.

His father commented in a clip obtained by TMZ, “Several occasions my mother had complained about seeing some pornography around. So when I made the visit to Milwaukee, I saw this box in the closet in his room and I said ‘I’m going to open it’ and I started going down to the basement to get a tool to open up the box.”

“He kept complaining that he couldn’t even have one foot square of property to do with what he wants and I said ‘I’m gonna open it up anyway, find out what’s in here’ because I thought it was something related to pornography. He convinced me to ‘wait until tomorrow dad and I’ll open it for you then but just don’t do anything now, I don’t want to disturb grandma,” Dahmer Sr. recalled.

“She was in a nearby room and she heard all this commotion I was going through with Jeff. In a way I’m glad, in a way I’m not glad that I didn’t press it, because if I had opened that box and found what was in there, I think I would have lost it,” he continued.

“The next day he opened it and said ‘you see, this is what it was,’ and it was pornographic magazines,” Lionel remarked.

Following that incident and Jeffrey Dahmer being outed as a serial killer, his father confronted him on the matter.

“I said ‘what would you have done Jeff if I had opened it?’ and he said something like, ‘the jig would have been up,’ something non-emotional, non-committal. I could have… more lives could’ve been saved,” Lionel Dahmer sadly commented.

“At first I couldn’t fathom how he got there, we’re all on a continuum, we all do bad things, we all sin. He was at the extreme of this continuum, I couldn’t at first understand how he could have done those things. I was concentrating on getting him into a psychiatric hospital,” the father claimed.

He told his son, “Jeffrey you’ve got to find out how on earth you could have done these things.”

The first Dr. Phil episode focused on Rita Isbell, who was the sister of victim Erroll Lindsey, 19. He was murdered by Dahmer in 1991.

Lindsey was evidently lured to Dahmer’s apartment to pose for nude photos but was butchered instead. He woke up while the killer was drilling a hole into his skull, before pouring acid into the opening. The psychopath then strangled him.

Dr. Phil also aired an episode that spoke with Dahmer’s former Army roommate, Billy who claimed he drugged and raped him when they served in Germany.

The families of Dahmer’s victims are all upset over the Netflix series and feel traumatized by it. Dahmer’s monstrous deeds live on and are being sensationalized once again for profit it would seem.

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