Two Milwaukee police officers knew they were going to experience something different when, on July 22, 1991, a guy who was already in handcuffs alerted them late at night and claimed he had just almost escaped murder.

However, nothing could have prepared them for what they found when they arrived at the offender's residence—a two-story flat on North 25th Street.

The residence of cannibal and murderer Jeffrey Dahmer, 31.

Inside, they discovered a macabre scene that included photographs of murder victims in various states of dismemberment, a 57-gallon barrel filled with several headless torsos and other body parts that were slowly decaying with the help of corrosive chemicals, and seven skulls and four decapitated heads stuffed into a refrigerator.

He was removing flesh from the bone with bleach. just as his father had taught him when he was a small child.

Carl Wahlstrom, a forensic psychiatrist who tested, questioned, and testified as an expert witness for Dahmer during his trial, says as much.

Wahlstrom claims that when he and his father discovered dead rodents beneath their home, they "bleached the connective tissue and the hair" off the carcasses.

Before long, there would be nothing but a pail full of bones. Wahlstrom describes it as "like a personalized rattle." They were referred to as his fiddlesticks by the family.

However, the peculiar pastime was initially pursued out of scientific curiosity rather than a love of gore. Lionel Dahmer, the father of Dahmer, worked as a research chemist. The whitening of the bones was an application of specialist knowledge.

Following his capture, Jeffrey Dahmer admitted to investigators that he had sex with the corpses of his victims and consumed their organs, confessing to 17 murders (of which he was found guilty for 16).

However, murderers such as Dahmer do not appear fully developed every day. They mature and assume their positions as murderers.

Dahmer did not have an easy childhood. Joyce Dahmer, his mother, attempted suicide and battled depression. His father wasn't around much because he was working on his doctorate. When Jeffrey's brother, David Dahmer, arrived, the five-year-old Jeffrey was bitter toward him because he saw him as a rival for their parents' limited time. After moving about a lot when Jeffrey was six or eight years old, his family eventually settled in Bath, Ohio, where he remained until he completed high school.

During those formative years, Joyce and David frequently got into arguments. Their relationship ended in a contentious divorce that featured accusations of "extreme cruelty and gross neglect of duty."

None of that material pertains to Dahmer's killing spree, claims Louis Schlesinger, a psychology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and an authority on serial sexual murder.

Schlesinger claims that "many people have conflicts with their brothers and sisters." "Being hospitalized for your mother's suicide attempt is not a pleasant experience, but it doesn't make you a serial killer."

Schlesinger does concede, however, that certain childhood and teenage behaviors do correspond with the emergence of a serial sexual murderer; these behaviors begin with an obsessive, sadistic vision and the will to carry it out.

Schlesinger clarifies, "You don't just do something like Dahmer did one day." "In the mind, it all starts."

Wahlstrom claims that Dahmer had an "off the charts" libido and frequent thoughts about harming people, namely killing guys and having sex with their bodies, while he was a young adolescent.

Wahlstrom claims Dahmer told him that it occupied roughly two-thirds of his day. Dahmer attempted to bring his fantasies of being a murderer to reality when he was 13 years old. He had been enamored with a male jogger in Bath, Ohio, and had gone to hide there one day with a baseball bat in the hopes of killing him for the first time. However, Dahmer informed Wahlstrom that the man had not gone jogging that day, and he proceeded.

Wahlstrom describes him as "a very disturbed kid and adolescent." "He felt extremely cut off from everyone around him."

Animal abuse has a high correlation with serial sexual murder as well. Schlesinger remarks, "That's evident in his case," pointing out that Dahmer had impaled a dog's skull on a stick in the forest behind his home when he was a youngster.

However, Wahlstrom found that Dahmer's most startling incident regarding animal abuse was from elementary school.

"He had obtained this tadpole and presented it to his instructor, and the instructor ultimately gave it to a different child," claims Wahlstrom.

Dahmer went to the student's house out of rage over what he perceived as a slight, where he found the tadpole in an aquarium and exacted revenge.

Wahlstrom claims, "He put some gasoline on it and lit it on fire." "If you want to call that torturing animals, then I tortured animals," he remarked to me.

Although animal abuse is frequently a factor in serial sexual murder, Schlesinger claims that the murderer's own history of abuse as a child is the strongest correlation. Wahlstrom claims that Dahmer vehemently refuted this claim.

Wahlstrom says, "He said he had very loving parents." And it was entirely inaccurate to hold his parents responsible for these problems.

Wahlstrom said he heard nothing to refute the allegation of a relatively quiet family home while interviewing Dahmer's friends and relatives for the killer's psychiatric examination (which he submitted to the defense).

Wahlstrom claims that, despite his mother's mental health problems, he believes she was a devoted mother. Wahlstrom says, "She had the one-year baby book, with locks of his hair and lots of pictures." "His parents appeared to be within a wide range of normal."