SERIAL KILLER: DAHMER-MOTIVE OR EXCUSE

JEFFREY DAHMER murdered then sexually molested, mutilated and/or cannibalized 17 young men and boys. WHY?
Look at what he did.
He murdered his first victim right after he graduated from high school in 1978. He picked up a hitchhiker, took him to his parent’s house, drank beer with him and had sex with him. When the hitchhiker tried to leave, he killed him, bludgeoning him to death with a barbell. To hide the crime, he dismembered the body, dumped the pieces in plastic bags, and buried them in a wooded area behind his parent’s house. About three years later, right after he was unceremoniously discharged from the army for drunkenness, he went back to his parents and dug up the decomposing body parts. Not finished with the mutilation, he beat the body into tiny pieces with a hammer and scattered them through the wooded area in which they had been buried. Apparently, he had not yet turned into a necrophile or cannibal.
He began killing again about 1987. At first he had sex with his victims before he murdered them. Later, he waited until they were dead.
He lured these 16 young men and boys to his apartment, promising them alcohol or sex, offering them money to appear in nude photographs or just plain companionship. Promising anything that would get them there. Once a victim was in his apartment, he slipped sleeping pills into the beer he served them, and when they fell asleep, he strangled them. He had sex with their corpses.
He dismembered his first four victims and disposed of them in the garbage. He took pictures of the rest of his victims both before he killed them and after. He kept their skulls for souvenirs or trophies. He told police he kept the skeleton of his eighth victim and ate some of him. He dissolved the bodies of his other victims in a huge barrel filled with acid.
He was a monster.
An excuse might have been his severe alcoholism. But, what sense does that make? How many thousands of alcoholics never kill anybody?
The first symptom of Dahmer’s compulsion for murder revealed itself when he was a child. He started killing his pets and other small animals. See my articles “Growing a Serial Killer” and “Marine Killing Puppy Reveals Something More Deadly.”
The motive most often suggested as to why Dahmer so brutally murdered and destroyed his victims is lust. Sexual gratification. He was a dangerous sexual predator. But, was that his motive?
His childhood murders of small animals might well have begun before he was sexually active, their murder more a natural act for him, than a sexual lust. There is also no evidence or suggestion that when he served in the army for two years he committed any murders. In the army, in a barracks at least part of the time, he would have been in close contact with hundreds of tantalizing young men. If he was compelled to murder for sexual gratification, why not then?
In my thriller DESTINY’S DAMNED, the serial killer is a compulsive murderer. He’s been killing for many lifetimes and is damned. As he begins each life there is no forgiveness, no starting over. He carries his evil acts with him into each reincarnation. As the numbers mount, his evil compounds. He lives in a hell already, and he cannot turn back. He is compelled to murder from the day he is born.
Dahmer was a compulsive killer who must have lived in his own hell. If he got sexual pleasure out of murder, why not stop at that? He had to shame his victims by having sex with their corpses and eating them. He then had to destroy them, to pound them into little pieces and scatter them, to cut them up and throw them in the garbage, to eat part of them, or to annihilate them with acid.
What if he didn’t get any sexual gratification at all? What if that’s why he went so far, because he was incapable of getting gratification from anything? What if he put his victims through hell because he wanted them to share his hell? Maybe he wanted to be better than them by winning, by exercising the power of life and death over them, to punish them for not giving him the pleasure he so desperately needed. Maybe he, too, was pure evil, destined to kill from the moment he was born.

For background on Dahmer see:
• www.murdersdatabase.co.uk; “Jeffrey Dahmer.”
•The Biography Channel; “Heidnik And Dahmer: Great Crimes And Trials;” http://www.thebiographychannel.co.uk/biography_story/489:346/1/Jeffrey_Dahmer.htm.

© Shawna Ryan
Author: thrillers DESTINY'S DAMNED & SATAN'S SCAT
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