A Father's Story

On July 23, 1991, Milwaukee chemist Lionel Dahmer discovered - along with the rest of the world - that his son Jeffrey was a murderer who, over a period of many years, had carried out some of the most ghastly crimes ever committed. As the trial progressed, and the crimes of his son were graphically detailed, Lionel began to place himself in the dock beside his son. In the torturous weeks following Jeff's conviction, he continued his descent towards that harrowing point at which the line of his own life inevitably intersected with his son's. This book is not the story of Jeffrey Dahmer at all, but of a father who, by slow degrees, came to realize the saddest truth any parent may ever know: that following some unknowable process, his child had somewhere crossed the line that divides the human from the monstrous. It is both a touching family memoir and a haunting memoir - the account of a man who never relented in his effort to fathom the deepest quarters of his son's afflictions, even as they pointed to his own. It is a document on the nature of fatherhood, the origins of madness, and the role of kinship in the legacy of evil.