Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Destructive Hostility: The Jeffrey Dahmer Case: A Psychiatric And Forensic Study Of A Serial Killer, Jeffrey Jentzen, George Palermo, L. Thomas Johnson, Khang-Cheng Ho, K. Alan Stormo, John Teggatz

School of Dentistry Faculty Research and Publications

We were involved as forensic experts in the case of the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. We discuss the scene and victim autopsy findings, with a brief consideration of the basic emotion of hostility. These findings support the thesis that at the basis of this serial killer's behavior were primary unconscious feelings of hate that he had channeled into a sadistic programmed destruction of 17 young men. The interview of the serial killer, the photographic scene documentation, and the autopsy findings stress the ambivalent homosexuality of the killer, his sexual sadism, his obsessive fetishism, and his possible cannibalism and necrophilia.