A Father's Story

by Lionel Dahmer

This part is alive in most people, at least to some degree. True, everyone is selfish at times. Everyone is vain and egocentric to some extent. But in most people, there is a line that this part commands us not to cross. It tells us that we can go only so far in the way we treat other people, only so far in the way we damage them. It may be that this "part” is no more than a chemical trace or a configuration of brain cells. We call it "conscience," "being human," or "having a heart."

It was once nothing more than a rather sweet memory of my little boy, but now it has the foretaste of his doom, and comes to me, as it often does, on the thin edge of a chill.

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

The city appeared on the point of explosion, and as I watched the tension build in Milwaukee, it seemed inconceivable to me that anything so enormous could have been generated by my son. My mind recalled only a young man who was passive and more or less nondescript, a failure at almost everything he'd ever tried, a mixer in a chocolate factory, a job that placed him barely above a menial laborer. Now he was not only famous, but the catalyst for a thousand different reactions.

This dread of people leaving him had been at the root of more than one of Jeff's murders. In general, Jeff had simply wanted to "keep" people permanently, to hold them fixedly within his grasp. He had wanted to make them literally a part of him, a permanent part, utterly inseparable from himself.

I now realize that the need for control and permanence, as well as introversion, were traits that I shared with Jeff. Tragically, Jeff took these traits to extraordinary, twisted, and horrific extremes.