How Jeffrey Dahmer Almost Got Away With Murder
5. Nobody Suspected Him Because Nobody Knew Him
The photo itself proves just how much of an outcast Dahmer was in his adolescence. He was so unpopular that even the school faculty were wiping his face from existence; not just because his behaviours grew more and more irrational as the clock turned - turning up to school heavily inebriated at a young age - but because he was actively trying to fit in by jumping into the photograph.
Ironically, almost as if mirroring the tragic reality of Dahmer's life from incubation to culmination, he simply just didn't fit into the frame - no matter where he went, no matter what he tried, and no matter who he tried to be.
The fact that there was not so much as even a slither of Dahmer recorded photographically or historically within the context of what should have been the happiest years of his life, speaks volumes of just how indistinctively unwanted he was. Neither his parents nor the school wanted to be associated with the young Dahmer. If we were talking about a nicer human being, he may even be worth feeling sorry for.
Former classmate and proprietor of the photograph, Mike Krukal, had this to say on Discovery's Jeffrey Dahmer: Mind of a Monster:
"It's one of the first things I thought about when I heard he was arrested for some reason. I just remembered this strange photograph that is so haunting today to look at and know that this person, right dead centre in the middle, is Jeffrey Dahmer."