It is not known when exactly Jeffrey Dahmer became obsessed with bones and organs, but several incidents when he was a child might explain how this fascination went from innocent to deadly:
- When he was four, Dahmer underwent a hernia operation that lasted several hours. When he awoke, his father was shocked to hear his son say the doctors had “cut off my private parts”, and the painkillers they gave him werent working. For months afterwards Jeffrey would awake in the night with pain in his groin area, and maintained to his father that the doctors had castrated him during surgery.
- When Dahmer was around six, he found his father cleaning out skunk bones from under the house. Lionel explained he had poisoned the animals with homemade bait, and even encouraged his son to handle the bones and listen to the noises they made when clattered together. Jeffrey was mesmerized by the bones and stole a few for his own use, quickly building up a collection of animal bones.
- Once when out fishing with Lionel, the pair caught a live fish and Lionel demanded Jeffrey kill and gut it himself. Dahmer later recalled that he “felt all funny” when he cut open the fish and touched its still-warm organs.
- By age twelve, Jeffrey had become proficient at collecting roadkill and dead animals, often dissecting them in the woods behind his house. Instead of discouraging the habit, Lionel Dahmer would show Jeffrey the proper techniques for preserving flesh and even gave him access to embalming chemicals so Jeffrey could keep his ‘pets’ (as he called them) in jars.