A Father's Story

by Lionel Dahmer

Book Overview

Raising a Serial Killer

Father's Search for Answers

In July of 1991 the country was shocked by the unfathomable crimes of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. But no one was more shocked than his parents. In A Father's Story, the reader is witness to the incremental unraveling of a parent's image of their child, and the "thousand different reactions" that follow. In his attempt to understand the nature of his son's psychosis,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1635615631
• ISBN13: 9781635615630
• Release Date: May 2021
• Publisher: Echo Point Books & Media, LLC
• Length: 268 Pages
• Weight: 0.66 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.0" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Good book but overpriced...

You can purchase this book elsewhere for less than half of what they're charging here. $55 is outrageous.

Great read

I love reading true crime books and I felt this one was interesting because it’s from the father of a serial killers point of view. You really feel for the dad.

Glad I purchased it

It’s a collector’s item for sure and I’m happy with my purchase. It is worth the money because this book is hard to come by.

Candid, introspective, one-of-a-kind

Lionel Dahmer's memoir is the story of the dark journey of a father who was faced with the grisly reality of one of America's most notorious serial murder, mutilation, rape, necrophilia, and cannibalism cases. Lionel was a father who had to grapple not with losing his son to these unspeakable horrors, but with the fact that his son was the perpetrator. As a father, Lionel was asked if he could forgive his son, but before he could determine that, he had to forgive himself. The book presents Lionel's struggle with guilt, bewilderment, anger, and personal chaos during his son's life and in the aftermath of his arrest. The memoir stands alone in its straightforward prose, introspection, and complete lack of blame shifting. Lionel provides broads stroke of details of the crimes, focusing more on the individuals than on the headline-grabbing depravity of Jeffrey Dahmer's deviance. Throughout Jeffrey's youth, and during the trial, Lionel grappled with his own responsibility for his son's social maladjustment. He identified with his son's need for control, extreme fear of abandonment, and general solitary nature. Lionel even contrasts Jeffrey's zombie experiments with his own hypnosis-control experiments in childhood. After Jeffrey's arrest, Lionel never wanted him to go free, but he did hope and work for psychiatric treatment for the son he was never able to save. Lionel, I applaud you condor and introspection. You've written a book that will no doubt provide comfort to many parents of difficult children, and will help frame many of the "why?" questions felt by Americans with regards to your son's crimes.

great

I really admire Lional Dahmer to come forth and share his feelings about something that is so unbelievable to understand. He proves to be a brave man and strong condsidering what he and the other families went through....I really admire and respect him for sharing his own thoughts and feelings, a son that he will never understand.....he still was his father, put in an uncomfortable situation no one could ever understand........

In his own Words

Lionel Dahmer expresses to you, the reader, his struggle through a life's reality. He shares with us his pain, and his now tainted memories of a boy who grew up to become a man...a man who could not escape his demons. Of all the Jeff Dahmer books I have read, this is the most sincere, and gratifing one of them all. Lionel explains his desperation on trying to save his son from the vile unseen, and eventually coming to terms with who and what Jeff was. Lionel admits to his own darker emotions and to the truth that the love a parent has for their child has no limits. By the grace of God, Lionel

Written with taste

This book strips the glamorous notoriety off Dahmer. I realized how much of a sad, pathetic, expulsive life he led. Nowhere in this book does it attach the "intriguing" stigma that is so often seen in other true crime books. This book kills that stigma.

An extremely relevant book

This book no doubt disappointed the tabloid readers who expected prurient revelations of sex and violence. It is a very serious and overwhelmingly sad book about a good man who fathered a monstrous criminal and about his efforts to understand how that came to happen. It is one of the most disturbing and important books I have read about the experience of fatherhood, and the moral and psychological issues that it raises are difficult and vastly important. It is an unsensational and unsentimental but tragically moving book written with modesty and intelligence, and it does not deserve the kind of readership that it got.