Jeffrey Dahmer was convicted of killing 17 boys and men and may have murdered many more, but criminologist Amanda Howard says he doesn’t even make it onto her top 100 of the world’s worst serial killers.
“I have a database of 5,400 serial killers and what he did ranks quite low,” she tells Woman’s Day.
“There are some serial killers out there who did far worse to their victims.”
His name might not be known if not for the hit 1991 movie The Silence Of The Lambs, which brought to life a fictional serial-killing cannibal called Dr Hannibal Lecter. It was released in the same year Dahmer was finally apprehended.
“You have to think of the climate when Dahmer was arrested in 1991,” she says.
“Silence Of The Lambs had just come out, and there was this theory that there were all these Hannibal Lecters out there, and then we had this cannibal who gets arrested because there is meat in his fridge. Dahmer became known as the real-life Hannibal Lecter.”
CULT FOLLOWING
Despite shocking scenes in the popular Netflix drama series Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, showing the blond-haired killer making a sandwich out of one of his victims, Amanda says he wasn’t strictly a cannibal.
“He did not eat his victims. He attempted to consume a piece of one victim’s bicep. The “body parts kept in his fridge and freezer were planned to be made into parts of the shrine he had designed,” she says.
“The scene in the series where he makes a sandwich for his neighbour is pure fiction. He had a couple of bites of one piece of flesh but he wasn’t killing these people for food. He had the meat in front of him, and thought, why not?”
The Netflix series, which is now the second most-watched show ever on the streaming service, shows just how fascinated the world – and Australia – is with serial killers.
“Dahmer, Charles Manson [who had his cult followers kill nine people, including actress Sharon Tate in 1969] and Ted Bundy [who confessed to 30 murders between 1974 and 1978] are so entrenched in pop culture that we all know their names and crimes,” says Amanda.
SERIAL KILLER RECIPES
The criminologist and author, who also has letters from Manson, has spent her life trying to get inside the heads of serial killers by writing to them and studying them, always using a pseudonym to protect herself and her family from their deranged groupies.
Amanda says the letter she received from Dahmer, which reads like one between friends, is tame compared to others she received from serial killers – one sent her letters with recipes, including her as the main ingredient.
In it, he even asked Amanda if she could get him subscriptions to US celebrity magazines and thanked her for sending him $10. Amanda, who never gifts her serial killers anything, sent it because it came from another serial killer and she didn’t want to keep it.
Dahmer’s letters and others from some of the world’s most notorious serial killers were featured in Amanda’s travelling Memento Mori Death Museum that toured around the country from 2022 to 2024.
