Jeffrey Dahmer’s father Lionel dead at age 87
Notorious serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer’s father has died in hospice care in Ohio at the age of 87.
Lionel Dahmer passed away from unknown causes while under care in Medina County, Ohio, the local health department confirmed to The Post Tuesday.
The exact date of his death is unknown.
Lionel, a chemical analyst, said he always stuck by his son, despite Dahmer — dubbed the Milwaukee Cannibal — killing 17 people.
He told Oprah in 1994: “I still love my son. I’ll always stick by him – I always have.”
His death comes almost a year after his wife Shari died on Jan. 13 at a nursing home in Seville — roughly 25 miles outside of Akron.
The father-of-two was a regular visitor to see his son in prison until he was beaten to death with a metal bar by fellow prisoner Christopher Scarver in 1994, less than a years after he was convicted on his heinous crimes.
Lionel’s caretaker told The Sun in 2022 the elderly man still got “pissed” every time Scarver’s name got brought up.
“He is still very angry about it,” Jeb, his caretaker said at the time. “As far as I know, and the last I talked to Lionel, he believes the guards looked the other way and let it happen.”
Lionel had divorced Dahmer’s mother, Joyce Flint, in 1978 when Jeffrey was around 18 and his brother David was 12.
He wrote a book “A Father’s Story” which told how he had brought up Dahmer from his perspective and tried to examine what made him commit the crimes he did. He admitted to being aware of his sons heavy drinking, aimless nature and fascination with dead animals.
He also said he had made many attempts to get through to him and encourage him to live an normal life, but could find little reason for why he became a murderer in his account.
“At first, I couldn’t fathom how he turned out to be this far down the continuum. I mean, we’re all on a continuum, we all do bad things, we all sin,” Lionel told Dr. Phil in an interview which wasn’t aired until 2022.
“He was at the extreme of the continuum. I couldn’t at first understand how he could have done those things.”
Despite living a private life, Lionel couldn’t escape his son’s name, especially after Netflix dropped a series on the murders.
Deranged fans would show up at his door, acting “hostile and aggressive” and one woman even left her underwear on his lawn.
“Anything Dahmer-related blows up. It seems like every time a movie or series comes out, that’s when a lot of the crazy starts happening with the fanboys and the fan girls,” Jeb told the outlet.
Lionel had also considered suing the major streaming platform for glamorizing his son’s crimes in a dramatic series and for not contacting his son’s legal team to get access to tape recordings used in a documentary.
