A Father's Story

by Lionel Dahmer

So that was what the police really told me in July of 1991. Not that my son was dead, but that something inside of him was dead, that part which should have made him think about the misery he was causing, and so draw back from causing it.

When I think of those moments now, I think of my wife's need for love and my inability to show it in a way that would have been meaningful to her. I showed love by working, by striving, by tending to her every physical need, by moving toward a future which I expected to share with her. That was not what she needed, of course, but it was all that I could give.

After a time, the bird took solid food, bread, and finally small bits of hamburger. It grew larger and larger, and we finally took it outside to release it. It was a bright spring day, and I can still remember how green everything looked. I cradled the bird in my cupped hand, lifted it into the air, then opened my hand and let it go. As it spread its wings and rose into the air, we, all of us— Joyce, Jeff, and myself—felt a wonderful delight. Jeff's eyes were wide and gleaming. It may have been the single, happiest moment of his life.

In a sense, his childhood no longer exists. Everything is now a part of what he did as a man. Because of that, I can no longer distinguish the ordinary from the forbidding—trivial events from ones loaded with foreboding. When he was four, and pointed to his belly button and asked what would happen if someone cut it out, was that merely an ordinary question from a child who had begun to explore his own body, or was it a sign of something morbid already growing in his mind?

I know now what my son must have felt at that moment. His father had rescued him from what had seemed a terrible fate, and perhaps, in his young mind, Jeff might have believed that I would always be able to see his peril and snatch him from it. But the part of Jeff that was most in danger was invisible to me. I could see only those aspects of his character that he chose to show, which resembled some of my own characteristics—the shyness, the general tone of acceptance, the tendency to withdraw from conflict. I suppose, like most fathers, I even took some comfort, perhaps even a bit of pride, in thinking that my son was a bit like me.

He never talked about the future, and I think now that he never believed that he actually had one.

In any event, he seemed completely unmotivated, at times almost inert, and I can only imagine that given the unspeakable visions and desires that had begun to overwhelm him at that time, he must have come to view himself as utterly outside the human community, outside all that was normal and acceptable, outside all that could be admitted to another human being. At least to himself, he was already a prisoner, already one of the condemned.

How could a teenage boy admit, perhaps even to himself, that the landscape of his developing inner life had become a slaughterhouse? A morgue?

And so, my son went elsewhere with his confusion and distress. He went where millions of others had gone before him, seeking solace or forgetfulness, as he must have been seeking it. He went to the bottle.

He packed his bag without excitement and with little thought. Inside the bag, there were none of those articles that one might expect of a young adult. Instead, he had packed a snake skin which he'd gotten at Boy Scout Camp, and two pictures of his dog. When I returned from the college that

The fact is, I had not been able to find a way either to punish or to correct Jeff. His face was a wall. His eyes were blank. At the time, I thought the alcohol had soaked his brain, drowning what was left of his personality. And yet, there was always a sense of something moving behind his eyes, a thought process that I couldn't reach somehow, as if his mind were locked in a closed chamber, listening only to itself.

It was as if we had agreed to speak only in half sentences, communicating only what it was safe to communicate, and never moving to penetrate the wall that had come to exist between us.

In the eyes of parents, I think, children always seem just a blink away from redemption. No matter to what depth we watch them sink, we believe they need only grasp the lifeline, and we can still pull them safely to shore. For many years, I had been just that naive, a father who'd grasped at every straw, believed every lie, extended one hand after another, and through it all, continued to believe that there was something salvageable in the wreckage of his son.

As to Jeff, himself, I still could not envision him in his murderousness. But neither did I make any effort whatsoever to do that. In fact, my mind almost never returned to that part of his life. Instead, when I thought of him at all, it was as a lively little boy, frozen in his innocence, safely positioned in the distant past.

Such conjectures lifted my mind into a state of unreal and dreamy suspension. I literally felt myself hanging above my life, above Jeff's life, above everything but the minute laboratory tasks I continued to pursue with a ferocious intensity.

But which truth? The truth that my son was a murderer? Or the truth that my life was tied to his, sinking in the same quicksand?

My mind was in a suspended, unreal state, a play of whirling, disconnected images. More than anything, I found myself replaying my son's life. I saw him again as an infant, then as a small child playing with his dog. I saw him as a young boy, riding his bicycle. I saw his eyes as we'd released the bird. I wanted to take him back to that early boyhood time, to freeze him there, so that he could never reach beyond the innocence and harmlessness of his childhood, never reach any of the people whose lives he had destroyed . . . never reach me.

“Maybe some day this will all be over," I told her. Her reply was gently direct “This will never be over, Lionel," she said.

I walked into the bedroom, lay down, and went to sleep. And so I did not even see the press conference. I preferred a brief oblivion, instead.

Once at the door, I turned back and looked at her. "Good night," I said. She offered a slight, but still confused, smile. "Sleep well, my dear son," she said just before I turned out the light. It did not seem possible that I ever would.

He showed no emotion when he caught sight of me. He did not smile or offer the slightest sense of welcome. "I guess I've really done it this time," was all he said. Then, once again, in what had become the refrain of a life lived as one long apology, he said, "I'm sorry."

"I don't know what to say," Jeff said finally. "I don't either." "I really screwed up this time." "Yes, you did." "I really blew it."

At that point, I believed that it was my son's madness that most powerfully and permanently separated us. He lived in a world behind his eyes. I could never enter that world. We would always be separated by the barrier of his mental illness. In a sense, I saw nothing but his insanity.

Certainly, Jeff had multiplied his tendencies and sexual perversions exponentially well beyond my understanding and of course far beyond my capacity to even entertain. Nonetheless, I could see their distant origins in myself, and slowly, over time, I began to see him truly as my son in far deeper ways than I had previously imagined.

The speed at which it had all come to an end was blinding, perhaps even a bit anticlimactic. Within an instant, it was over. A quick good-bye, and my son was gone.

It amazed him that a scientific theory that had been received as an unarguable scientific fact during all the years of his education might rest on questionable assumptions. It seemed to delight him that so thoroughly accepted an idea could be questioned, that nothing stood on truly solid ground.

Never had Jeff seemed more lost than in the things he had possessed.

When I think back on the interview I gave to Inside Edition so many months ago, I hear the interviewer's question once again: “Do you forgive your son?" Yes, I do. But should he forgive me?

Some may question why I grieve for someone who did what he did. Beyond the usual true responses that he was my son and I have all the loving memories of his very young days, I particularly grieve because for almost a year before he was murdered he had become someone who could have nothing in common with the person who committed the previous terrible acts.

All this was Mr. Ratcliff's way of gently saying that if Jeff's being saved stretches your concept of grace then that concept is smaller than the one described in the inspired scriptures.

Rather than Jeff's murder being any kind of justice, it is just another example of the failure of the criminal justice system.

Rather than glorying in Jeff's murder, I believe anyone who is really thinking should feel humiliated that this can be allowed to happen in a super maximum security prison like Wisconsin's Columbia Correctional Institution (CCI).