Jeffrey Dahmer’s father revealed in an upcoming special that he was given a couple of opportunities to stop his son’s murderous rampage.
Lionel Dahmer — who is appearing in a three-day “Dr. Phil” special set to air Tuesday — said that there were two instances where he could have put an end to things, according to clips obtained by TMZ.
The 86-year-old said that he once stumbled across the wooden box that contained the head of Anthony Sears, who was murdered by Dahmer in 1989. At the time, Jeffrey was staying with Lionel’s mother, who resented him keeping X-rated materials in the Wisconsin house.
“Several occasions my mother had complained about seeing some pornography around,” recalled Lionel Dahmer.
“So when I made the visit to Milwaukee, I saw this box in the closet in his room and I said ‘I’m going to open it’ and I started going down to the basement to get a tool to open up the box.”
Dahmer said his son “kept complaining” that he couldn’t have any privacy.
“I said, ‘I’m going to open it anyway,’ find out what’s in here,” he added, noting he thought it was merely pornography at the time.
“He convinced me to just wait. ‘Wait until tomorrow dad,’ he said, ‘and I’ll open it for you then but just don’t do anything now, I don’t want to disturb grandma,’” explained Dahmer.
According to the elder Dahmer, the next morning when he opened the box, it was filled with porn magazines.
After he was convicted, Jeffrey Dahmer confessed to keeping mutilated body parts in that same box during an MSNBC interview alongside his dad.
“I had a box in my bedroom closet and it contained the mummified head and genitals of a young man I met in one of the bars down in Milwaukee,” he said at the time.
“In a way, I’m glad, in a way I’m not glad that I didn’t press it,” Lionel told Dr. Phil, “because if I had opened that box and found what was in there, I think I would have lost it.”
Dahmer later confronted his incarcerated son about the incident.
“I said, “What would you have done Jeff if I had opened it,” said Dahmer, to which his son casually replied that the “jig would have been up.”
“I could have… more lives could’ve been saved,” lamented Lionel Dahmer.
According to Dahmer, his son’s sexual fetishes began to develop at an early age.
“I thought at some point between 12 and 14, coming out of puberty, his sexual engine was in high drive and he was touching the insides of this animal and he sort of got hardwired neurally into connecting sexual pleasure with this type of activity,” said Lionel Dahmer.
“Entrails, insides, bodies, that’s the way I thought about it after thinking about it for a while.”
Dahmer also said that he and his son bonded over taxidermy.
“At first I couldn’t fathom how he got there, we’re all on a continuum, we all do bad things, we all sin,” said Dahmer.
“He was at the extreme of this continuum, I couldn’t at first understand how he could have done those things. I was concentrating on getting him into a psychiatric hospital. I didn’t ask him that specifically.”
The “Dr. Phil” special will feature several family members of the victims who have bashed the recent Ryan Murphy Netflix show starring Evan Peters, saying that it “retraumatized them.”