Lionel Dahmer, who worried about raising a serial killer, dies at 87

Lionel Dahmer, the father of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer and author of a moving memoir about his son’s childhood, died on December 5 in Medina, Ohio. He was 87.

His death in a hospice was confirmed by Jeb Muller, one of his caregivers. Mr. Dahmer had suffered a series of heart attacks in recent years and his health deteriorated after the death of his wife, Shari Dahmer, in January, Mr. Muller said.

Lionel Dahmer was a little-known, personally reserved industrial chemist before the Dahmer name became one of the most infamous in the country, thanks to his son.

In 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer confessed that he had murdered and raped seventeen young men and boys over the past thirteen years. He drugged men’s drinks, strangled them, masturbated on their corpses, cut them up with a circular saw and lined up their skulls in his apartment. He ate some of their body parts.

The entertainment industry has discovered that its macabre story sells. Among other television and film projects, Netflix released the miniseries “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” last year, which has surpassed one billion hours of viewing time.

Biographical accounts of Jeffrey’s life focus on the violation of essential human taboos: satisfying desires at the outer limits of evil. Jurors at his trial engaged in tortured deliberation before concluding that he was sane and therefore eligible for a life sentence. He was sentenced to 15 life sentences.

Lionel’s life, as described in his 1994 memoir, “A Father’s Story,” offered an indirect insight into that depravity — not the thing itself, but a rational mind struggling to make sense of it.

Lionel tried “to look not only into his son’s soul, but into his own,” wrote British author Will Self in The New York Times Book Review. “The sense of someone constitutionally ill-equipped for any kind of introspection in search of abject realization is poignant.”

Mr. Dahmer described himself in his book as “almost entirely analytic” — a chemist, comforted by the scientific predictability of his work, whose emotional life resembled a “broad, level plain.”

Yet he wrote vividly about the eeriness of seeing Jeffrey’s face, so much like his own, staring at him from the front page of a newspaper, and about revisiting old memories.

“When I remember him in his childhood, I am overcome with a sense of helpless fear,” Mr. Dahmer wrote. “I dwell on the small, pink hands, and in my mind I see them growing bigger and darker as I think of all they will do later, of how stained they will become with the blood of others.”

Lionel Herbert Dahmer was born on July 29, 1936 in the suburbs of Milwaukee, where he grew up. His mother, Catherine (Hughes) Dahmer, taught elementary school history, and his father, Herbert, taught elementary school math while working a second job as a hairdresser.

After attending the University of Wisconsin, he became a graduate student in chemistry, earning a master’s degree in the subject from Marquette University and, in 1966, a Ph.D. from Iowa State University.

He married Joyce Flint, a telephone operator who had recently become a teletypewriter instructor, in 1959.

She became pregnant a few days after the wedding. The next few months were something of a bad omen.

Joyce Dahmer suffered from seizures and emotional attacks. Her legs were locked in place, she was shaking, her jaw pulled to the right and became frighteningly stiff, and she was foaming at the mouth. Sometimes the episodes only ended when a doctor injected her with barbiturates and morphine. She took as many as 26 pills a day.

Mr. Dahmer responded by withdrawing from his work and spending almost all his time in his chemistry laboratory.

When the couple saw each other, they fought bitterly.

Jeffrey’s birth in 1960 brought a period of happiness. But the Dahmers never got past the distrust and alienation that had already arisen. During fights, Ms. Dahmer sometimes grabbed a kitchen knife and made jabbing motions. She once left the house in her nightgown, walked a few blocks, went into a field of tall grass and lay down.

They divorced in the summer of 1978. Mr. Dahmer married Shari Jordan at the end of the year.

Mr. Dahmer described Jeffrey as bubbly and likable in his childhood. When Mr. Dahmer came home from work, the boy would jump into his arms.

He noticed Jeffrey began to withdraw after a hernia caused a bulge in his scrotum, leading to surgery. After the birth of the couple’s second child, David, Jeffrey adopted an attitude of passivity to hide his emotions, his father wrote.

For years, Mr. Dahmer, busy in his laboratory, saw no reason to become more involved in Jeffrey’s life. He was aware that his son was intensely and problematically clumsy; but he remembered feeling that way when he was young. Mr. Dahmer had a good feeling, he wrote, that Jeffrey’s problems could also be seen as indications that father and son were alike.

It wasn’t until years later that he learned that Jeffrey had become an alcoholic as a teenager, when the family lived in Bath, a suburb of Akron. Jeffrey spent his free time wandering around looking for animal remains to bury in his own private cemetery. He stripped the meat from the bones of a roadkill. He mounted the head of a dog on a pole.

Looking back on his son’s childhood, Mr. Dahmer realized that Jeffrey had become completely isolated. And that, Mr. Dahmer thought, was the source of his son’s necrophilia.

“He became so afraid of other people, so intimidated by their presence, that in order to have contact with them he had to be dead,” Mr. Dahmer wrote.

Jeffrey Dahmer was murdered in a Wisconsin prison in 1994.

Mr. Dahmer is survived by a sister, Eunice Roberts; his son David; and two grandchildren. For the past few decades, he and his second wife had lived in Seville, a small town in northern Ohio just outside Medina.

In September, Fox News’ streaming service Fox Nation released its own Dahmer miniseries, “My Son Jeffrey,” which included family films and recorded conversations between Lionel and Jeffrey from visits Lionel made to Jeffrey in prison.

Mr Muller said Mr Dahmer was not involved in the recent TV projects about his son. A few years ago, a flood in Mr. Dahmer’s basement led him to ask Mr. Muller to throw away or burn artifacts from Jeffrey’s life, including a set of Jeffrey’s cutlery, an old safe and records of his prison commissary’s purchases .

Lionel made sure to throw away one thing himself.

He took a box to a field on the property around his home, opened it and took out an urn that had been sent to him by the prison where Jeffrey had been housed. He then took a bag from the urn and waved it. Jeffrey’s ashes poured out. He said out loud that he hoped Jeffrey would find a resting place.