A Father's Story

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He says very firmly that all this shoving the responsibility onto this person or that person or alcohol or drugs, it’s all bullshit. Instead of scrolling through your social media news feed, this is a much better way to spend your spare time in my opinion. It's one of those books you read and are honestly glad you don't have to ask the kind of questions he was forced to ask himself as a parent. Published in 1994, so this book does not grapple with Jeffery Dahmer's own death (killed in prison in late 1994). 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?

Jeff has always has a uncomfortable hold over me, I am fascinated by the human psyche and just how far the rabbit hole goes. Somsack Sinthasomphone had been an innocent victim, by law a child, and my son had purposely lured him to his new apartment, drugged, and then sexually abused him. A Father's Story is clearly Lionel Dahmer's attempt to understand his son's evolution into one of the world's most renowned serial killers with particular emphasis on his personal role.Often psychologists talk about serial killers and the "need for control" or the "fear of abandonment" — attributes which describe most of my friends and certainly my own self.

The fact that seemed hardest to understand was that we, ourselves, had done nothing to deserve such unwanted attention. I find it abominable that people can be so hateful to parents of murderers, especially parents like the Dahmer's who, like so many others, do what they believe is a good job raising their children and guiding them to be decent, law-abiding citizens. 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. In this deeply personal account, Lionel reflects on his son's troubled childhood and the shocking crimes he committed.

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 . The side effects of this horrible tragedy claimed many additional victims, including the families of all the young men who died. Initially, Dahmer recounts his son's normal, albeit solitary childhood, showing no foreshadowing of the horrors that were to come.