Olivia: The most notorious serial killer of the 20th century wasn't driven by a desire to inflict pain. According to one controversial biography, he was driven by a desperate, pathological loneliness. And that idea is somehow even more terrifying. Jackson: Whoa, hold on. Loneliness? We're talking about Jeffrey Dahmer. The man whose name is synonymous with pure horror. You’re telling me the motive wasn't hate or sadism, but a twisted need for company? Olivia: That's the central, unsettling argument in Brian Masters' 1993 book, The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer. It reframes the entire narrative we think we know. Jackson: And Masters is a big name in this world, right? He wrote that acclaimed book on Dennis Nilsen. He’s not just some sensationalist true-crime writer churning out cheap thrills. Olivia: Exactly. He's a serious biographer with a background in literature and philosophy, which is why this book is less a 'whodunit' and more a 'why-dunit.' It's deeply psychological, and honestly, it's been polarizing readers for decades for that very reason. It tries to understand, not just condemn. Jackson: I can already see why that would be controversial. Okay, I’m hooked. Where does an attempt to understand someone like Dahmer even begin?

Olivia: Well, Masters starts right at the beginning, in what looked like a normal 1960s suburban home. And he unearths these small, disturbing stories that, in hindsight, look like tiny cracks in the foundation of a personality. For instance, there’s the tadpole incident. Jackson: The tadpole incident? That sounds almost… innocent. Olivia: It’s anything but. As a young boy, Jeff caught some tadpoles and gave them as a gift to a teacher he liked. A few days later, he saw them in a friend's garage. He felt betrayed—that the teacher had just given them away. So he went into the garage, poured motor oil into the jar, and killed them all. His thinking was, "If she doesn't want them, no one will have them." Jackson: Wow. Okay, that’s… chilling. That’s not just a kid being cruel. That’s possessiveness. It’s a destructive, all-or-nothing logic. It’s this terrifying idea of total ownership. Olivia: Precisely. It’s a miniature version of the pattern that would define his later crimes. But Masters goes further, proposing a more controversial theory for the origin of Dahmer's psychological issues. He points to a double hernia operation Jeff had when he was just four years old. Jackson: A hernia operation? Wait, you’re telling me a routine childhood surgery is being linked to… all of this? That feels like a huge leap. Readers have called him out on that, right? It sounds a bit like psychobabble. Olivia: It's by far the most criticized part of the book, and you’re right to be skeptical. Masters presents it as a potential psychological seed, not a direct cause. His theory is that for a four-year-old, the experience was profoundly traumatic—a violation, an invasion of his body by strangers, a total loss of control. He argues this event may have planted a deep-seated fear of abandonment and a morbid curiosity about what’s inside a body. Jackson: I can see the argument, but it still feels speculative. It’s almost too neat an explanation. Olivia: I agree it's speculative, and Masters doesn't claim it as definitive proof. But what's undeniable is the pattern of withdrawal and extreme isolation that followed throughout his childhood and adolescence. He was described as a ghost in his own family, emotionally vacant. He started drinking heavily in high school, and his inner world became dominated by fantasies—fantasies of controlling another person completely, of having a partner who would never, ever leave him. Jackson: And that’s the key, isn’t it? The fantasy wasn’t about torture. It was about possession. He didn't want to hurt them; he wanted to keep them. Permanently. Olivia: Exactly. He wanted to bypass the messiness of human relationships—the risk of rejection, of being abandoned—and go straight to total, unconditional possession. And that's a fantasy that, for him, couldn't remain a fantasy forever.

Jackson: So this isolated kid grows up, and the fantasies… they don't stay fantasies, do they? There’s a point where the thought becomes an act. Olivia: That point came in June 1978, just after he graduated high school. He picked up a hitchhiker named Steven Hicks. He brought him back to his empty house, and when Hicks wanted to leave, Dahmer panicked. He couldn't bear the thought of being left alone again. So he struck him with a barbell and strangled him. It was his first murder. Jackson: And did he feel remorse? Or was it a release? Olivia: According to Masters, it was both. Dahmer himself later said, "Nothing’s been normal since then. It taints your whole life." The act horrified him, but it also crossed a threshold. He now knew he was capable of making his fantasies real. This is where the book dives into this central, chilling paradox of control. Jackson: What do you mean, a paradox of control? He seemed to be the ultimate control freak. Olivia: On one hand, yes. His entire method was about achieving total control over his victims. He would drug them to make them passive, compliant. He engaged in necrophilia because a corpse couldn't reject him, couldn't leave him. He was trying to engineer a situation of absolute power. But on the other hand, he described himself as being completely out of control, driven by a "definite compulsion" that he felt powerless to stop. Jackson: That’s the classic "irresistible impulse" versus "impulse not resisted" debate. Was he a runaway train, or was he a man who just decided to let go of the brakes? Olivia: And that's where the title of the book, The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer, becomes so deeply meaningful. The police found his apartment filled with human remains—skulls he’d painted, skeletons he’d preserved. He was building a shrine. Jackson: And that's where the 'shrine' comes in, right? If you can't control your own mind, you try to control the world around you. He was literally building a monument to his own powerlessness. It’s like his own twisted form of world-building, like a video game designer, but with real people. Olivia: That's a perfect analogy. The shrine was his ultimate solution to the paradox. It was his way of keeping his "companions" with him forever, of creating a permanent, controllable reality to replace the one he couldn't cope with. It was a physical manifestation of his pathological loneliness and his failure to connect with living human beings. It was his sanctuary, built from the remnants of his destruction. Jackson: It's just so hard to wrap your head around. The logic is so warped, yet in the context of his mind, it almost makes a terrifying kind of sense.

Olivia: This all culminates in the trial, where the legal system has to answer an impossible question: was this man evil, or was he insane? Jackson: Which is the question everyone asks. How could someone who does these things not be insane? Olivia: That was the core of the defense's argument. In Wisconsin, the legal standard for insanity isn't just about having a mental illness. You have to prove that because of a "mental disease or defect," the person lacked the "substantial capacity" to appreciate the wrongfulness of their actions or to "conform his conduct to the requirements of the law." Jackson: That second part seems key. "Conform his conduct." The defense was basically saying his compulsion was that runaway train. He couldn't stop it. Olivia: Exactly. They brought in psychiatric experts who testified about his paraphilias, his schizoid personality disorder, arguing that these constituted a mental disease that crippled his self-control. But the prosecution painted a very different picture. They showed the jury a man who was meticulous, calculating, and deceptive. Jackson: He had to be, to get away with it for so long. Olivia: Right. He covered his tracks. He lied to police. He managed to hold down a job for years. The prosecution argued that this wasn't a man swept away by an uncontrollable storm; this was a man who was carefully planning and executing his desires. He knew it was wrong, and he did it anyway. He chose not to resist the impulse. Jackson: So the jury is presented with these two completely opposite portraits. The sick man versus the evil man. Olivia: And they had to decide. After listening to all the horrific testimony—the details of the dismemberment, the cannibalism, the attempts to create "zombies" by drilling into his victims' heads—the jury came back with a verdict. They found him sane. Jackson: Wow. So the jury's decision to find him sane is… profound. It means they looked at all of this—the cannibalism, the shrine, everything—and said, "You chose this." That's a heavy verdict, not just for him, but for how we think about human nature. It rejects the easy out of just calling him a monster from another planet. It says he was a man who made choices. Olivia: It forces us to confront the idea that someone can understand the difference between right and wrong, and still choose to do the most profoundly wrong things imaginable. That evil isn't necessarily the absence of reason, but a deliberate rejection of it.

Jackson: So, after all this, what’s the big takeaway from Masters' book? It feels like it leaves you with more questions than answers. Olivia: I think that’s the point. Masters' book forces us to sit with that discomfort. It doesn't offer a simple diagnosis or a neat moral. It suggests that the most monstrous acts might not come from a place of supernatural evil, but from a recognizable human emotion—loneliness—that has been twisted by pathology and isolation into something unrecognizable. The horror isn't that he's an alien; it's that he's human. Jackson: And it leaves you with the question: where is the line? At what point does a "sick man" become an "evil man"? The book doesn't give an easy answer, and maybe there isn't one. The jury drew their line, but it’s a line each of us probably draws in a slightly different place. Olivia: It’s a deeply challenging read, and it really makes you think about the darkest potentials of the human psyche. We'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Where do you fall on the line between sickness and evil? Let us know what you think. Jackson: This is Aibrary, signing off.