A Father's Story

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And to a lesser extent, we are get a sense of the victims and their families, but very rarely do we ever hear from the family members of the killers and what they must go through as they are often turned into pariahs for what their children/siblings did.

That saying I do not condone ANYTHING he did, but as humans we do have a a little bit of a sick undercurrent, slowing down at accident scenes, a interest in our own demise! Overall Thoughts: Reading a memoir or biography without pictures is like having a cookbook without pictures of the recipe. It was absolutely a sad read, and left me feeling for everyone involved in Dahmer’s murders, but I’m glad I’ve read it.This is a very difficult meditation on blame and a dignified, moving and quite riveting exercise in soul-baring and self-laceration by a stoic harshly condemning his own stoicism and trying with his scientist’s rationalism to be even-handed whilst facing the hardest question : how did this human being, your son – who you were entrusted with - go so wrong? Perhaps the only thing more idiosyncratic than the crimes Jeffrey Dahmer committed is this curious analysis by his father, which is more autobiography than criminology or portraiture.

Many books have been written about this serial killer but only his father can give an internal insight on the killer before he became infamous. She distanced herself from Jeffrey from his beginning as a baby by not nursing him, to the end of her mothering of him at age eighteen by abandoning him to live alone in their home.The strongest statement in the book is Dahmer's denial of an allegation made by a former male lover of Jeffrey's that he sexually abused his son as a teenager. Dust Jackets are not guaranteed and when still present, they will have various degrees of tear and damage.

The parents of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were in the same dilemma – they suspected, they worried, they confronted, they accepted explanations they shouldn’t have, what could they do? 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? I vaguely knew that the whole affair was wrapped up in sexuality somehow, but remember mostly the mechanics of its concealment—notably, Dahmer’s freezer, ultimately impounded by police, as seen on television. The father describes Jeffrey as feeling lonely and that's why he would murder people and then want to be close to them because he felt like if he didn't that they would leave him. When he stood trial in the early 1990’s I was fairly young, and I remember equating him with Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart”… in that, a murdered body was carefully dismembered and hidden away in a home.Maybe it's because secretly I am a sicko who wants to know more about the minds of serial killers and their families. The book does give some insight into what may have caused Jeffrey Dahmer to become the killer the world know him as. Dahmer and his wife Shari received support from Theresa Smith, sister of victim Eddie Smith, who is mentioned in the acknowledgments. She left him her car and he promptly picked up hitchhiker Steve Hicks and murdered him and cut him up.