A Father's Story

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Riveting and soul-wrenching, this unprecedented memoir is the confession of a father who must "confront the saddest truth a human can know-that his child has somehow crossed the line that separates 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.

Richard Tithecott suggests that the stories we tell and the images we conjure of serial killers—real and fictional—reveal as much about mainstream culture and its values, desires, and anxieties as they do about the killers themselves. The Phoenix would like to thank the Assistance League of Los Altos for their valuable donation to keep our newspaper running. Lionel, devastated by the crimes committed by Jeffrey, sought therapy and counseling to cope with the unimaginable reality he faced.

They heard the power saw buzzing in the dead of night but neighbors never imagined the horrors happening right next door. He remarried and had another son, David Dahmer, who has chosen to distance himself from his infamous half-brother's legacy. Born on July 29, 1936, in West Allis, Wisconsin, Lionel Dahmer spent most of his life in peaceful obscurity.

After Jeffrey was arrested in 1989 for second-degree sexual assault, Lionel wrote the judge in the case and begged him to intervene. Though Lionel was absent for much of Jeffrey’s childhood while pursuing his doctorate degree, he made a concerted effort to bond with his firstborn son. Ralf-Finn Hestoft/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images Lionel Dahmer and his second wife, Shari, during Jeffrey Dahmer’s 1992 murder trial. He was a cannibalistic American serial killer and rapist who was sentenced to 15 consecutive life sentences for the murder of 15 men and boys. I wasn’t told what these other mothers and fathers were told, that their sons were dead at the hands of a murderer,” Lionel later recounted in his book.For Jeffrey Dahmer — who gruesomely killed 17 young men and boys between 1978 and 1991 — that family was his father, Lionel Dahmer, and his mother, Joyce. Of Men and Monsters examines the serial killer as an American cultural icon, one that both attracts and repels. As a scientist, [I] wonder if [the] potential for great evil … resides deep in the blood that some of us … may pass on to our children at birth,” Lionel wrote in A Father’s Story. Many of the clips in the documentary are from interviews that were conducted to gain evidence after he was imprisoned.