A Father's Story

by Lionel Dahmer

I have always found it difficult to confront other people, and certainly, I felt unable to confront my downstairs neighbors about noises and odors that were well within normal range.

But when I tried to analyze her situation, I always reached a wall I couldn't climb. What could I possibly do about her past? How could I make up for it? What could Joyce do about it, other than finally put it behind her? In my view, the point was to forget whatever fear or cruelty she'd experienced as a child, and to concentrate on the future. It seemed simple to me, clear and uncomplicated. You either overcame difficulties, or you were crushed by them.

Predictably, our arguments became more heated, and at times, physical. On some occasions, when I would fight back vigorously, Joyce would seize a kitchen knife and make jabbing motions. In response, I would go into another room, or leave the house altogether.

He didn't care for any form of competition, and shunned games that involved physical contact. He didn't engage in scuffling or other forms of childhood wrestling. Instead, he preferred games whose rules were highly defined and nonconfrontational, games full of repetitious actions, particularly those that were generally based on themes of stalking and concealment, games like hide-and-seek, kick the can, and ghost in the graveyard.

I was never a great student. What others got quickly, took me much longer. I was a plodder, a plugger, a hard worker. For me, anything less than an all-out effort would mean failure. Others had flashes of creative brilliance, of sudden illumination, but I had only the power of my own will.

A strange fear had begun to creep into his personality, a dread of others that was combined with a general lack of self-confidence. It was as if he had come to expect that other people might harm him in some way, and so he wanted to stay clear of them.

Certainly, the prospect of going to school frightened and unnerved him. He had taken on the shyness that would later become a permanent aspect of his character. His posture had become more rigid, so that he stood very erect, as if at attention, his fingers pressed tightly against the sides of his legs.

He appeared nearly speechless, his features frozen. The little boy who'd once seemed so happy and self-assured had disappeared. He had been replaced by someone else, a different person, now deeply shy, distant, nearly uncommunicative.

He had been polite and had followed all her instructions, but he had given the impression of a profound unhappiness. He had not interacted with the other children. Although he had done the work assigned to him, he had done it without interest, merely as a task that had to be completed. He had not been able to engage in conversation with other children. He had not responded to their casual approaches, nor made any approaches of his own. On the playground, he'd kept to himself, merely pacing about the schoolyard, doing what she described as “nothing."

It was as if some element of my character yearned for complete predictability, for rigid structure. Change, whether good or bad, was something fearful to me, something to be avoided. Awkward and insecure, plagued by a grave sense of my own inadequacy, as a child I had conceived of the world as something hostile and suspicious, a place that sometimes confused me, and which, because of that, I had come to regard with a sense of grave uneasiness.

When children liked me, I did not know why. When they disliked me, I did not know why. Nor could I formulate a plan for winning their affection. I simply didn't know how things worked with other people. There seemed to be a certain randomness and unpredictability in their attitudes and actions. And try as I might, I couldn't find a way to make other people seem less strange and unknowable. Because of that, the social world seemed vague and threatening. And so, as a boy, I had approached it with a great lack of confidence, even dread.

In the photograph, there is not a hint that he was becoming so afraid of other people, so intimidated by their presence, that in order for him to have contact with them, they needed to be dead.

She was an assistant teacher, and I don't know the exact nature of their relationship, only that Jeff developed a certain fondness for her. Perhaps she had be-friended him in some small way. Perhaps she had tried to break through an isolation and sense of trouble that she could see better than either Joyce or I could. Perhaps it was no more than a smile or a touch that she had casually extended which had struck Jeff as something wonderful and delicious.

It was nothing more than a child's gift, a bowl of tadpoles which Jeff had caught in a stream in the field behind U. L. Light School, where Jeff, Frisky, and I regularly roamed and shot basketballs on Saturdays and sometimes after work. He gave them to her innocently, as an expression of his affection. Later, however, he found out that the teaching assistant had given these same tadpoles to Lee. In revenge, Jeff later sneaked into Lee's garage, found the bowl of tadpoles, and poured motor oil into their water, killing them.

Sometimes, when I think of Jeff at nine or ten, I wonder if he had begun to move toward some fantasy that came from nowhere and slowly began to take up permanent residence in his mind. In a psychiatric evaluation which I later read, my son claimed to have had his first sexual fantasies at around fourteen, but I saw changes in Jeff long before he reached that age, and it is hard for me to believe that dark notions, regardless of how vague and formless, were not already shaping in his mind.

He would strip the flesh from the bodies of these putrescent road kills and even mount a dog's head on a stake.

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

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.

But Jeff was beyond rebellion, and he had no convictions about anything. There were times when I would glimpse him alone in his room, or sitting in front of the television, and it would seem to me that he could not think at all.

She spotted a UFO at the intersection of Cleveland and Massillon, chased it at sixty miles an hour, and had the entire story written up in the Beacon Journal.

She could not have seen the other, more disturbing part of me, the part that was often oblivious, that was not very emotional, that had a strange numbness at its core.

Joyce and Dave had certainly left, but there were plenty of other people in the house, teenagers of Jeff's acquaintance, all of whom appeared somewhat disoriented and were moving about the house, touching things delicately, as if feeling for their textures.

In the family room, she found a round wooden coffee table upon which a pentagram had been drawn in chalk. She called me in to take a look. At the time, I was mystified, but later I learned that Jeff had conducted a séance, that he had been trying to contact the dead.

He had become that most artful of all deceivers, one who mixes falsehood with just a pinch of truth.

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.

I did what I had always done. I collapsed into a strange silence that was neither angry nor sullen nor sorrowful, but just a silence, a numbness, a terrible, inexpressible emptiness.

It was impossible to tell whom he felt sorry for, or what he felt sorry about. He could not even imitate regret, much less truly feel it. Remorse was beyond him, and he could probably sense it only as an emotion felt by people in another galaxy. He was beyond the call of a role, incapable of acting a part. His “Sorry” was a mummified remain, an artifact retained from that distant time when he'd still been able to sense, if only to imitate, a normal range of feeling.

His eyes no longer struck me merely as expressionless, but as utterly void, beyond the call of the most basic forms of sympathy and understanding, beyond even the capacity to ape such emotions. As he stood before me at that instant, my son, perhaps for the first time in his adult life, presented himself to me as he really was, destitute of feeling, his emotions shaved down to a bare minimum, a young man who was deeply, deeply ill, and for whom, in all likelihood, there was no way out.

No one can live like this, I repeated in my mind. And yet, in a sense, as I was increasingly to discover over the next few months, I, too, had lived like “this”: a man who found it hard to express his emotions; who focused on the minutiae of social life and often lost track of its overall design; who relied on others to direct his responses to life because he could not trust his own sense of the way it really worked—a man whose son was perhaps only the deeper, darker shadow of himself.

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.

But now, suddenly, I could see Jeff's insanity in everything about him. It was in his motionless face, in his dull eyes, in the hard rigidity of his body, in the way his arms did not sway back and forth when he walked, even in the expressionless way he muttered, "Sorry.”

But as I have since come to recognize, had it not been for his murderousness, had his insanity not finally emerged in the insanity of his crimes, I might never have seen it at all.

Until a great deal of information had come to me after he'd been arrested for molesting a child, it had not occurred to me that he was a homosexual, despite the fact that he had never had a date, that he'd taken a “friend" to the prom, that during all the years of his young adulthood, he had never expressed the slightest interest in a woman. It was a level of obliviousness, or perhaps denial, that was scarcely imaginable, and yet it was real. It was as if I had locked my son in a soundproof booth, then drawn the curtains so that I could neither hear nor see what he had become.

Pat Snyder, a former Ohio acquaintance, who knew nothing of our family and had met Jeff no more than three times, each time very briefly, accused Shari of being "the epitome of the evil stepmother," which was as deep and hurtful a lie as one human being has ever told about another.

"Nick" claimed that he had maintained an extended homosexual relationship with Jeff. It had begun at the end of June 1985, and had continued for the next two months. According to "Nick," Jeff had been a jealous lover, but not a violent one, and as the relationship had deepened, Jeff had finally revealed the darkest secret in his life, the fact that his father had "sexually abused him."

My son immediately filed a legal affidavit denying that I had ever sexually molested or abused him. He also denied that he had ever met “Nick.”

I was a strangely disassociated man, limited in my ability to respond with feeling to another's feeling, often confused by my own lack of responsiveness, and at times, even baffled by what I vaguely recognized as numb or empty or vaguely wounded spaces in my own nature, spaces that, under certain circumstances, might well have generated acts I was still afraid to face.

Despite the graphic quality of his confession, the long hours he'd already spent with various psychiatrists, the torturous and damning light he had shown into the darkest quarters of his life, he still appeared ashamed in the presence of his father.

Only then did I begin to realize that there were some areas of my son's mind— such as a feeling of a lack of control over many things in my life—which I had held within myself for years. 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.

While I had never dreamed of murder, I would often awake with a vague feeling that something seriously bad had happened, usually after an attack by a bully.

I would wake up suddenly with the frightening sense of foreboding. Once awakened, I would not be able to recall any of the details, but I remained convinced that something bad had happened.

The sensation would last for no more than a minute or so, but during that awful interval, when I would literally hang between fantasy and reality, I would be terrified. I would feel lost, as if everything had gone out of control. Hot flashes would sweep over me with such shattering force that even in adulthood, I would still be able to remember the terror that had seized me at those moments.

I had awakened in a panic that consciousness had soon ended. Jeff had awakened into a nightmare that would never end.

after Jeff had admitted not only all the other murders, but the whole, dreadful list of the other things he had done, he would continue to insist that he could recall nothing about the actual murder of Steven Tuomi.

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. It was a mania that had begun with fantasies of unmoving bodies and proceeded to his practice of drugging men in bathhouses, then on to murder, and finally, to cannibalism, by which practice Jeff had hoped to ensure that his victims would never leave him, that they would be part of him forever.

In my own life, I realized that I had had the same extreme fear of abandonment, a fear so deep that it generated a great deal of otherwise inexplicable behavior.

It began when I was a very young boy and my mother went into the hospital for an operation. During that time, my aunt and uncle came over to take care of me, but their presence did not relieve what I remember now as a profound sense of isolation and abandonment. My mood darkened, as my mother told me later, and remained in that darkness during all the time of her absence. During all of that extended period, according to my aunt and uncle, whose description was later relayed to my mother, I had cri...

I had relentlessly clung to a first marriage that was deeply wounded. I had clung to routines and habits of thought. To guide my behavior, I had clung to highly defined personal roles. It struck me that I had clung to all these things because they had given me a profound sense of permanence, of something I could "keep." Perhaps I had clung to my roles as father and son for the same reason, because they anchored both my mother and my sons to me, made it impossible for them to drift away. In a sense, I had devoted my life to finding strategies by which I could hold things forever and keep them permanently within my grasp.

was the sense of control that my own need for permanence and stability had generated in me, along with the accompanying dread of anything that I could not control.

More than anything, he seen himself "laying" with someone who was very still. He had not wanted to be constrained by the people who populated his fantasies. He had not wanted them to press their own sexual needs upon him. Instead, he had wanted to control them absolutely, and had been willing to use violence to gain that control.