Jeffrey Dahmer was born on May 21, 1960 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Even as a child, Dahmer had necrophilia impulses, collected dead animals, and impaled the heads of animals he killed on stakes in his yard (Jeffrey Dahmer, 2009). Abandoned by his mother after having been molested by a neighbor, Dahmer's childhood was one of rejection and feelings of loss. He lived with his father and stepmother and was abandoned again by these parents after he graduated from high school. He killed his first victim, a young hitchhiker named Stephen Hicks, when he was 18 years old, but did not kill again for nine more years (Jeffrey Dahmer, 2009). Overall, Dahmer was responsible for killing 17 people over a period of 14 years. In February 1992, Dahmer was sentenced to 15 consecutive life sentences for a total of 936 years. However, while in prison, he was murdered by another inmate at the Columbia Correctional Institute in Portage, Wisconsin (Mathews & Springen, 1992).
Analysts who have studied Dahmer's case, including David Nichols (20006), assert that Dahmer is representative of a typical serial killer who finds excitement in the act of killing and brutalizing his victims. Having experienced abandonment and betrayal and victimization, Dahmer adopted a modus operandi and personae characterized by a strong external locus of control, excessive and superstitious fears regarding being revealed as a homosexual, fascination with gay pornographic films and extremely violent videos and texts, and great caution in the use of condoms when engaging with his victims or with their corpses (Nichols, 2006).
Dahmer secured his apartment with alarm systems and extra locks. Dahmer completed the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) after his arrest and the results indicated that he was sane, was conscious of the difference between right and wrong, capable of dissimulation, and generally maladjusted. Nichols (2006) says that the MMPI rev...