The Creepy Father-Son Activity That Jeffrey Dahmer Shared With His Dad

Part of raising a child is spending time with them, especially when they are younger. It can be things like reading a book to them or singing songs while they rest. As they get older though, that can expand to bringing them into your own hobby, if they are interested in participating. Most of the time ... almost all of the time, it can help shape the child into a well-rounded person. This hobby, which tends to be innocent, can even turn into a career — like a son who played a lot of backyard catch becoming a professional baseball player. 

These parent-child activities typically do not wind up with the child becoming a compulsive murderer, like Jeffrey Dahmer. You may have heard of the guy. "The Milwaukee Monster" committed his crimes between 1978 and 1991, and liked to eat his victims (per Scena Criminis). After being convicted and spending some time in prison, Dahmer was ultimately killed by another inmate in 1994, per Biography. 

How did his childhood shape him? Well, Jeffrey Dahmer and his father, Lionel, shared a hobby that would turn off a lot of people. But it was something that the father of the man who would turn into one of history's worst serial killers did as part of his job. 

While Jeffrey Dahmer had multiple reasons for going down the path that he did, he incorporated one aspect from this hobby with his father: He bleached the bones of his victims, per History Daily. This started with him spending time with Lionel Dahmer and bleaching the bones of rodents that they found under their home. The elder Dahmer was not a sadistic person, though. This was part of his job as a research chemist and he thought it a good idea to have young Jeffrey help — partly as an attempt to make up for his regular absences from the family home due to his spending long hours at work. 

Jeffrey would take the rodent bones and put them in a pail. Since the bones would make noise in the pail, he used it as a rattle. Over the years, starting from when he was 13, he started developing homicidal urges, via A&E. That included his torturing animals and he eventually turned his sights on human prey, which ended in both cannibalism and necrophilia. The arresting officers found things like skulls and decapitated heads in the freezer. There was a large barrel with body parts and corrosive chemicals in them. This was where he was putting the lessons that his dad taught him to use — though his father didn't want them used like that.