Jeffrey Dahmer: A Serial Killer

A serial killer is someone who commits a series of murders, usually in a pattern, with no apparent motive. Jeffrey Dahmer, also known as “The Man Who Could Not Kill Enough” and one of America’s most infamous serial killers, is responsible for the murdering, dismembering, and eating of seventeen boys between the years of 1978 and 1991 (Wright and Hensley 78). A solid 100 percent of the adult and children that know Jeffrey Dahmer, identify him as a serial killer (Tithecott xi). Dahmer portrays thoughts of death and murder because of the actions he took during his thirteen year killing spree motivated by his social deficits and many mental illnesses. Jeffrey Dahmer was a white male born in 1960, who killed, mutilated, and sometimes ate seventeen
Dahmer’s mental illnesses included a combination of paraphilias, depression, substance dependence, Asperger’s Disorder, disordered personality, and social skills deficits (42). The mental illnesses that Dahmer is most associated with is cannibalism and necrophilia (42). Necrophilia is a sexual attraction to corpses, this is a rare disorder that has been known of since ancient times (Rosman and Resnick 153). Cannibalism is when one person eats another. In more recent times, and in Dahmer’s case, necrophilia has been highly associated with cannibalism (Rosman and Resnick 153). Dahmer’s mental illnesses are what is believed to have pushed him to commit serial murder. Jeffrey Dahmer, the killer of mostly blacks, and mostly gays, started his thirteen year murdering rampage by killing the first of his seventeen victims in 1978 (Wright and Hensley 78). As it was discovered many years later in his small apartment in Milwaukee, his gruesome behavior towards his first victim would be replicated many times over (78). Dahmer would lure his victims into his apartment, and when they were in his clutches he would go into bizarre rituals such as cannibalism and necrophilia (Tithecott
Hidden in Dahmer’s apartment, police found skulls, body parts preserved in formaldehyde or in the refrigerator, and a meticulously organized scrapbook of his dead victims (Strubel 44). Dahmer was later sent to prison after his insanity plea claiming that he had became “enamored, overwhelmed, caught up in the character in Exorcist III.” was rejected by the jury (Tithecott 9). Dahmer remained in prison until he was murdered by a fellow inmate, armed with a broom, in November 1994 (Berglund 17).
To conclude, Jeffrey Dahmer was a man with many mental illnesses and social deficits that made him into the killer responsible for the deaths of seventeen boys from 1978 to 1991 (Wright and Hensley 78). His murderous rampage lasted for many years before he was finally arrested in July of 1991, and taken to prison where he remained until his death in 1994 (Berglund 17). Although Dahmer died, the stories of his gruesome crimes lived on and made him one of the most infamous American killers we know