S2E1: Jeffrey Dahmer

Welcome to Season 2 of Killer Astrology!  The season starts with a detailed look into the life, crimes, and astrology of "The Milwaukee Monster": Jeffrey Dahmer. 

This episode may be upsetting for some listeners, so listener discretion is advised.

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Visit the Killer Astrology website for reference information on previous episodes or to schedule an astrology reading with the host.
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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction & Current Astrology
• 3:10 Background Story
• 24:44 Astrological Analysis

Transcript

Hi Everyone, welcome back to Season 2 of Killer Astrology.  I’m your host, Laura, and I’m so glad to be back.  I took a break between season 1 and season 2, and it was only a week.  But I have to tell you it felt like forever.  I really missed even just a week that I wasn't recording, so I'm really excited to be back in action and we have a pretty cool season ahead of us.  

We have a whole new lineup of different killers and criminals, and we'll have some people joining us as guests on a couple of episodes this season.  In a couple of episodes, we will also be covering missing persons cases, which is new.  Also new is that I'm going to start each episode with a very brief overview of what's going on in the sky right now.  

2020 has been a crazy year not just in the physical world in society but also in the Stars.  Everything’s reflected there.  And we're not in the clear yet.  Right now, October 18th, we're in Mercury retrograde, which, even if you don't know a lot about astrology, you probably heard of before.  This is because Mercury retrograde isn’t known as an easy time.  It can somewhat be kind of hectic or chaotic because it can bring unexpected events, weather it’s issues with your car, strange dreams, trouble with technology,  trouble communicating...lots of different things can happen when Mercury is retrograde, and that's because the planet is closer to the Earth and wires can kind of get crossed.  

Right now, Mercury is retrograde in Scorpio, which is a water sign.  It’s emotional, and you might be noticing things happening with either emotions or with water.  For example this is the perfect combination of Technology transportation and water: I was driving the other day and it was raining out.  And all of a sudden there was just water pouring into my car into the vents into the speakers because there's a leak in my windshield.  This is classic Mercury retrograde.  Last cycle I got a flat tire, this cycle my windshield is leaking.  Even though it may seem otherwise,  Mercury retrograde isn't meant to create chaos, although I can be a side effect, like having hidden problems that you've been ignoring come to the surface...or if you haven't been ignoring them, maybe you just haven't been aware of them. 

Mercury is about communication, yes.  It's also about awareness, and so sometimes things will pop up out of the blue because you just need to deal with them.  So be on the lookout for strange unexpected things happening, but know that they're not the end of the world, and if things come up, you can get to the root of the problem and change it.  

All right now we'll move on to our episode.  

This first episode of season 2, we're starting out with a pretty heavy hitting case. That of Jeffrey Dahmer. He's also known as the Milwaukee Monster and  “The Cannibal of Milwaukee”...two descriptive names that he very much earned during his 13 years of activity.  Between 1978 and 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer killed 17 men in increasingly heartless ways, and over time began keeping biological tokens that satisfied his morbid curiosity and likely made him feel less alone [kept him company, served as company].  This is a twisted story of loneliness, lust, and injustice.  If you don’t know much about Jeffrey Dahmer, be forewarned that this is a disturbing story, so listen at your own risk.

Jeffrey was the first born son to his mother, Joyce, and his father, Lionel in May of 1960 in Wisconsin.  If you hear Jeffrey talk about his early life, he himself says that his childhood was pretty standard.  By his own account, he was never abused, molested, or mistreated in any way, and yet he turned out to be a monster of epic proportions.  There had to be something in his childhood that affected him so, but what was it?

His father Lionel was a chemist with a doctorate degree who made a comfortable living.  His mother was a teletype machine operator, according to wikipedia.  The family on a large property with ample space for Jeffrey and his younger brother to run around.  By all accounts, it seems a standard life on the surface, and maybe there wasn’t abuse of any kind, but there was emotional discomfort.  Jeffrey’s mom suffered from what seems like pretty severe mental illness including depression and what sounds like obsessive compulsive disorder.  She was taking upwards of 25 medications during her pregnancy with Jeffrey and after he was born, went through a significant period of emotional distress.  She was paranoid about having anyone touch Jeffrey as she feared the spread of germs, and she herself avoided touching him except for necessary chores like changing his diaper.  Although this doesn’t qualify as abuse, it certainly can have an impact on a child who needs love and affection and isn’t getting those needs fulfilled.

When Jeffrey was around 6 years old, his family moved to Ohio and he was placed in a new school where he had to make new friends.  Just about a year later, his parents had another baby and the little attention he was receiving from his mother was reduced, as her attention was divided between the two kids.  He also witnessed the regular arguing between his parents who were constantly at each others’ throats.  Even with these challenges in his early childhood, it wasn’t until a little later that he started to show signs of being troubled.

Even though he was shy, Jeffrey had a couple of friends in elementary and middle school, but that changed when he became a teenager.  When he got to high school, he started acting bizarre.  It’s cited that he would make animal noises in the middle of class and would dressed in strange outfits.  I guess you can say he was also somewhat of a prankster...when he was in high school he snuck into a couple of yearbook photos that he didn’t belong in, and his fellow students wound up blacking him out of the pictures, which in hindsight is pretty creepy.

So why this change?  Well, by the time he got to high school, Jeffrey was coming to terms with the fact that he was gay.  This a difficult predicament as it was clear that being gay was not okay and he felt he had to suppress his sexuality.  To do that, he started drinking...and not just a few here and there.  Jeffrey was bringing scotch to school, keeping it in his locker or his car and drinking it in class. He actually was caught drinking a couple of times by classmates or students, but no one really did anything about it.  And the theme of “nobody did anything about it” truly became an enabling factor to his growing violent tendencies. 

As is common with many killers, the violence started with animals.  Or--violence might not actually be the best word.  Curiosity is better.  Jeffrey used to collect dead animals and inspect them, cutting them open and studying their insides.  Because he was a bit rebellious, this didn’t end with inspection:  He actually once brought a dead dog to a neighbor’s house and impaled on a pole

As, a teenager is father, who was chemist remember, actually taught him how to separate bones from the muscle tissue using bleach, not knowing that he would wind up using a similar method to break down the bodies of his victims later on.  

At the age of 15, Jeffrey started having violent fantasies about other men.  It started with a jogger who ran daily down his street.  He started thinking about kidnapping this jogger and raping him, and he actually set a plan to do it.  He prepared himself to wait for the jogger, but on that day he didn’t show up.  And Jeffrey missed his chance.   You may think of this as the universe saying, “hey, you have a chance to turn things around, become someone better”, but, as we know Jeffrey flat out ignored that sign.

A few years later, he allowed his fantasies to take over.  He was fully in the throes of alcoholism at this point, had just finished high school, and his parents had just divorced.  It was kind of the perfect situation for him because he was left alone in his house for the summer, and that’s when he killed his first victim, Steven Hicks.  Steven was looking for someone to take him to a concert, and in an unfortunate series of events was picked up by none other than Jeffrey Dahmer, who took him home and drank with him for a while.  When Steven declared that he should be going, Jeffrey hit him over the head with a metal bar, and he was dead immediately. Jeffrey claimed that he didn’t plan on killing Steven that night, but he was overcome with a desire to keep him around, a way to avoid being lonely for the night.  With Steven dead in his home, a drunk Jeffrey Dahmer laid next to him for the night before ultimately placing his remains in a garbage bag and driving him to the dump.

Remember I said that “No one did anything” was a theme in this story?  Well, as Jeffrey was on the way to the dump, he was pulled over by an officer who shined a flashlight into his vehicle and saw the trash bag in the back of he car.  Jeffrey quickly came up with a story about his parents being away and needing to take care of the trash, and he got away with a ticket.

Shortly after this first murder, Jeffrey’s dad moved back home with Jeffrey and, noticing that he was lost in a sea of alcohol abuse and aimlessness, he encouraged him to enroll in college.  But Jeffrey didn’t find any sense of motivation and drank himself into failing his classes.  He came home a college drop out and was encouraged by his father to join the army.  He did so, and was stationed in Germany for a little over a year.  After his trial and incarceration, two of his roommates from the army revealed that while in the service, Jeffrey raped them while drunk.  At the time, neither of the officers came forward, but Jeffrey was still discharged from the service: for drinking.  When he returned to the states, his dad sent him to live with his grandmother in Milwaukee.

I guess you can classify Jeffrey’s grandmother as a traditional midwestern woman with old school values.  She believed that Jeffrey’s sexuality could be changed, and suggested that he put his faith in the church to convert his sexual preferences.  It didn’t work, obviously, and probably could be one of the factors that fueled a resurgence in Jeffrey’s violent urges.  It wasn’t long before Jeffrey got in trouble for indecent exposure, a crime for which he was fined a total of 50 dollars and some additional court fees.  

It wasn’t long before Jeffrey was frequenting bath houses, which were popular locals for the gay community at the time.  There, he began drugging victims and sexually assaulting them while they were knocked out.  It wasn’t long before he was found out for accidentally causing overdoses, but he wasn’t stopped.  Although Milwaukee was relatively progressive at the time, the gay community still had quite a contentious relationship with the police, who ignored their needs.  For this reason, his victims didn’t report the crimes.  

Still, Jeffrey was forced to change his ways after the overdoses, and he started picking up men, and even boys, at the local mall. I should mention that these lesser offenses were all during a 9 year period during which time Jeffrey was trying to suppress his urges to kill.  One way he did this was by searching obituaries in the local paper, attending funerals, and looking at the pictures of the dead or looking into open caskets to determine whether he found the dead men attractive.  On two occasions, he headed to the cemetery after the funeral and attempted to dig up the graves of those men so he could spend time with their dead bodies, but he found the ground too frozen and was unsuccessful.  I find this incredibly relieving although it really doesn’t make up for the fact that Jeff acted on this desire to begin with.  His lack of success actually led him to an idea that he probably should have thought up in the beginning.  A Because he was unsuccessful in exhuming his bodies, he stole a mannequin from a store after hours, brought it home, and spent time with the plastic corpse for as long as he could before his grandmother found it and threw it out.  So, naturally he moved on to other options.  It wasn’t long before he went back to killing.  It started...or restarted in September of 1987 when Jeffrey awoke in a hotel room next to the beaten body of 24-year old Steven Tuomi. He claims to have been so drunk that he doesn’t remember killing him.  Still, he was able to cover his tracks by shoving the body in a suitcase and bringing it home to his grandmother’s house where he proceed to dismember it and then dispose of it in the trash.  The next month, Jeffrey killed Jaime Doxtator, and then in Richard Guerrero in March of 1988.  

He was, of course, still living with his grandmother, who apparently knew that something strange was going on, but didn’t realize the extent.  She shared her concerns with Jeffrey’s father, who asked Jeff what was happening.  He told his father that he was inspecting road kill like he did in his childhood, and his father essentially told him to cut it out.  But ultimately Jeffrey’s behavior got him kicked out of his grandma's house and he went to live in his own apartment.

In the late 80s, Jeffrey began searching for new victims in a different way.  He would offer his victims money if they would join him for a photo shoot.  Then, he would drug them, sexually assault them, and kill them in the morning when they tried to leave.  He assaulted a 13 year old boy, but for some reason decided not to kill him.  Jeffrey let him leave after assaulting him, and his family went to the police. Although the victim’s family wrote a letter to the judge pleading for a harsh sentence, Jeffrey wasn’t put in Jail.  He wound up serving just 10 months of a 1 year sentence of work leave. You see, Jeffrey had also written a letter to the judge stating that he felt remorse for his crime and that it would “never happen again”.  Jeffrey’s victim was Laotian, and Jeffrey was white, and I think it’s safe to say that his privilege swayed the court in his favor.  This would prove to be a terrible mistake.

About 6 months after his assault, while he was serving his work leave, Jeffrey committed another murder.  In March of 1989 while serving his sentence, he killed Anthony Sears, who he picked up at a mall.  He lured him home and strangled him, then dismembered his body, cutting off his head.  As if that weren’t enough, Jeffrey put the head in a case and carried it around with him as he went about his day.  He even brought it to work with him to his job at a Milwaukee chocolate factory, and no one suspected a thing.  His next victim, Earnest Miller, met a similar fate: Jeffrey killed him and removed his heart and biceps.  He put them in the freezer, stuffed the skeleton in a filing cabinet, and went on with his life, presenting as a normal man to his colleagues, neighbors, and even his future victims, at least at first.  

Jeffrey went on to kill other victims and defile their bodies.  His next victim was Eddie Smith in July of 1990, followed by Ricky Beets that same month.  In September, he killed Earnest Miller and David Thomas.  At the start of the next year, Jeffrey killed 17-year old Curtis Straughter in 1991, followed by Eroll Lindsey in April of that year, Tony Hughes and Konerak Sinthasomphone in May.  The story of Konerak Sinthasomphone is particularly heartbreaking.

When he first began killing with more frequency, Jeffrey was saving body parts in his freezer and cooking and eating the flesh.  But he also kept momentos from his victims like bones and skills.  He had a shrine of these objects in his apartment, along with pictures of his victims in compromised positions that he kept in a dresser drawer.  But by the time the 90s rolled around, Jeffrey’s fantasies had morphed into truly disgusting desires: to turn his victims into zombies before he killed them.  To do this, he would drug his victims, drill holes in their skills, and pour acid or boiling water into their brains.  It’s hard to believe that this happened in real life...I think I’m only managing to say it out loud because I’m pretending it’s just a story.  But it happened.  And Konerak Sinthasomphone almost got away.  

On the night that Jeffrey lured his victim to his apartment and began his...experiment...Konerak managed to escape.  Naked and with a head injury, he ran into the street and in a mess of blood and slurred speech, asked the women he met on the street for help.  They managed to wave down the police, but Jeffrey caught up to the group and lied to the cops that Konerak was his boyfriend who was very, very drunk.  He said he would take him back inside to help him recover and keep him out of trouble.  The police believed this story, and disregarded the pleads of the women on the street who recognized that the boy was underage and hurt.  These women happened to be black and on the streets of a black neighborhood, and the cops completely disregarded their concerns.  Yet again, Jeffrey’s word as a white man were held with more weight than more honest people who were disregarded because of their race.  It would have been a very simple act for the police to ask for some kind of ID, to escort Jeffrey and his victim back to the apartment to look around.  But they didn’t bother.  

In a horrifying and nauseating turn of events, Konerak Sinthasomphone was actually the brother of that 13 year old boy that Jeffery was convicted of assaulting back in 1987.  Had Jeffrey received a harsher sentence for that crime, this tragedy may never have happened at all, and could have saved his family from unimaginable pain.

We know that Konerak was not Jeffrey’s first or last victim of this horrifying form of torture. His killings didn’t stop in the beginning of 1991.  Following this string of brutal killings, there was also Matt Turner in June, then Jerimiah Weinburger, Oliver Lacy, and Joseph Bradeholt in July of that same year.  As he started killing more and more Frequently, Jeffrey found himself at a point where he couldn’t dispose of the bodies fast enough.  He was luring some of his victims to his apartment while there was another body in the bathtub, waiting to be disposed of.  

It wasn’t long before the smell of death seeped out of Jeffrey’s apartment and into the hallways of his apartment building.  Residents were complaining of the stench, and Jeffrey’s landlord threatened him with eviction.  But he was discovered before he could get kicked out.

On July 22nd, 1991, Jeffrey invited Tracey Edwards to his apartment and asked if he could handcuff him and then take sexual pictures.  He put a cuff on one of his wrists, and then asked Tracey to lay on his stomach.  Tracey declined, saying that he had to go to the bathroom.  A drunk Jeffrey agreed to let him go, but Tracey ran out of the apartment and into the street, when he asked police to help him remove the handcuffs.  Police couldn’t open them, so they escorted Tracey back to Jeffrey’s apartment to ask for the key.  They walked into the bedroom and in an open dresser drawer saw pictures of Jeffrey’s previous victims, many of them dead and brutally dismembered.  They immediately arrested Jeffrey, finally putting an end to his reign of terror.  

Jeffrey went to trial on January 13th of 1992 and was seeking a plea of insanity, even though he had confessed to all of his crimes in a 6 hour interview with police.  He didn’t get his verdict of insanity and on February 15th was charged with the murders of 15 of his victims.  Then, he was sent to Ohio, where he stood trial for the murder of his first victim. Steven Hicks.  He was never tried for Steven Tuomi’s murder, since there was no evidence in the case and Jeffrey couldn’t confess.  

At the end of the whole affair, Jeffrey Dahmer was sentenced to 936 years in hail and began his sentence at the Colombia Correctional Institution in Ohio.  He only served about 2 years in jail before he was beaten to death by another inmate on November 18th, 1994.  I guess we can say that he got at least a piece of the Karma that was coming to him.

We can’t know exactly what happened to Jeffrey Dahmer.  We can only draw conclusions about his life and his character from the facts we know.  One of those facts is his astrology.  Before I get further into details, I want to remind you that if you’re new to astrology, you can go to my website and click on “what is astrology” in the menu.  There you’ll find a brief overview of all the signs and the main planets and how they affect us.  You can also listen to Season 1 Episode 12 where I give a description of the planets’ influences.  If you find this overwhelming, don’t worry.  I’ll be starting a Patreon account in December where I’ll give some astrology lessons and you can dive deeper into the science. 

ASTROLOGY

Jeffrey Dahmer was born on May 21st, 1960 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin at 4:34PM.  His sun is in Gemini, his moon is in Aries, and has a Libra ascendant.  I looked up Jeffrey’s chart on a whim one day a long time ago and was totally blown away.  He was actually my muse for this entire project...had I never looked up his chart, I probably wouldn’t be doing this.

Anyway, the first element that struck me in his chart was part of his big three: his Aries moon, which sits exactly on his descendant line.  

The moon tells a lot about someone’s sense of security, as well as how they handle their emotions and how they seek out healing and safety.  It also gives clues into someone’s relationship with their mother.  We know that his relationship with his mother was strained in his childhood: she avoided making physical contact with him and was dealing, at least for the beginning of his life, with serious mental health issues. This is illustrated by a trine aspect between Jeffrey’s Aries moon and Uranus, a relationship that can indicate some detachment between mother and child.

With his Aries moon exactly on the descendant line, which governs relationships with other people, Jeffrey had a strong need for the attention and affection that he wasn’t getting as a young child, and this could be a fundamental contributor to how he turned out.

The other two pieces of his big three are very, very important here, as they generally are. We’ll start with his sun.  

Jeffrey’s sun is in Gemini at 0 degrees.  Each sign takes up 30 degrees of the Zodiac, and the most critical of those degrees are 0 and 29.  Planets in these degrees are essentially stronger, for better or worse. Obviously, in this case, it was for worse.  But why?

Well, if we had to boil Gemini down to one quality, it would be curiosity.  Geminis are fueled by taking in new information and learning through observation.  For Jeffrey, his curiosity was even stronger than that of other geminis, and it allowed him to choose that curiosity over compassion.  We saw this first as a child scooping roadkill up off the street.  He didn’t have even a moment of mourning for those animals who had met an unfortunate fate. He was just interested in breaking them down into pieces to see what they were all about without an ounce of squeamishness.

Now, we know Jeffrey’s curiosity went beyond just learning how bodies, animal or human, worked.  He learned as a young age that he desired to exert some level of control over his victims, keeping animal bones around him as a kid and eventually keeping...and consuming...pieces of his victims.  We can attribute at least part of this to the makeup of Jeffrey’s 8th house.

Jeffrey’s 8th house contains Venus, which is in Taurus, the sun, which is in Gemini, and Nercury, which is also in Gemini.  

Before we go further, I should probably give a brief introduction to the houses in astrology.  Houses are kind of like the different rooms of your life. There are 12 of them, and in each of those 12 houses, you play out different life themes.  The 8th house is where we play out the theme of joint relationships and power.

His Venus placement here is very important, since Venus is the ruler of his chart and it is also placed in taurus.  Essentially, this placement means that Jeffrey was living with a LOT of venusian energy.  The keyword for that energy here is desire. Jeffrey was fueled by desire in the house that rules power, control, and possession.  

Of course, those themes aren’t always destructive to the extent that they are in Jeffrey’s story.  There are a couple of things in his chart we can tie to these traits, but I’ll discuss the one I think is most important.  

The themes of the 8th house are directly influenced by the 2nd house, which is where we secure our values and sense of self worth.  Naturally, the 2nd house is ruled by Venus, meaning that we learn to find the things we desire within ourselves.  Jeffrey’s chart was essentially reversed.  Instead of having the energy of desiring himself and finding comfort and stability through his second house, Jeffrey was set up to find those traits through his unions with other people.  Now that’s not inherently bad or destructive or wrong.  For most people, having a chart like this is workable.  But that wasn’t so for Jeffrey.  This is where nurture comes in.

We know that Jeffrey was taught that his fundamental state of being as a gay man was not okay, and that gave him unstable center of gravity.  Taking astrology into consideration or not, we know that on a psychological level, being secure in who you are as a human being is of the utmost importance to being able to function at your highest capacity.  Jeffrey didn’t have this security.  He had the opposite: a hatred for his natural desires.  This created Instability in his second house.  The second and eighth house in astrology are very connected.  Just like you need to have a stable sense of self to create a satisfying life, you need a solid grounding in the second house to have a functional eighth house.  A secure second house is usually matched by a healthy eighth house, where people use their knowledge of themselves to make smart decisions in their relationships with other people.  Unfortunately the reverse is also true.  Uncertainty in the second house is often played out through dysfunctional eight house themes.  

The moral of this story is that because Jeffrey was taught that his natural desires were wrong, he tried to control them and failed miserably (because again, that’s not possible).  So, because he couldn’t control himself, he sought to control others.  It turned out that controlling others was much easier to do.  Because Jeffrey’s unemotional sun was in the 8th house, he was able to look at his controlling actions objectively, rather than getting swept away by emotion or guilt.  In an interview with Nancy Glass in the two-part documentary series “Dahmer on Dahmer”, Jeffrey talks about how he depersonalized his victims, turning each of them into, quote, “An object for pleasure instead of a human being,” which “seems to make it easier to do things you shouldn’t.” End quote. It’s the combination of that intense lust or desire with that Gemini ability to see any situation from an objective lens that interacted to create this unemotional but highly motivated killer.

Although the second house and eighth house are important for finding ourselves and joining forces with others, second house isn’t the only place where we gain a sense of who we are.  A lot of our personality is actually formed in the first house, which is where we find our ascendant.  Planets in the first house are extremely important, again, for better or for worse.  Jeffrey had Neptune placed here, which is not the easiest of placements.  Neptune is surrounded by fantasy and illusion, themes that run rampant in this story, and it is also tied to addiction, because along with fantasy and illusion tends to come the desire to escape reality.  Although Jeffrey’s Gemini sun made him intelligent with an ability to look at the world objectively, this was muddled when he took a hard look at himself, his own personality.  It was kind of like being in a lifelong existential crisis which he tried to cure with alcohol: escape.  His tendency to seek escape through alcohol and fantasies often fueled his destructive tendencies, which is reflected in his chart through relationships to Pluto, the planet of power and destruction, and his sun and mercury in the eighth house.

Interestingly, on the day that he killed his first victim, Steven Hicks, Jeffrey’s Pluto was afflicted by a conjunction with transiting mars.  He also had Uranus in his first house.  These were just two factors on this fateful day that brought him on his path toward destruction.  To put it plainly: mars, the planet of drive and assertion, was fueling Jeffrey’s impulse toward possession and destruction.  Uranus in the first house brought a sudden shift to his position in the world, shifting his position in the world from troubled teenager to twisted killer in a moment of impulse.

Jeffrey Dahmer’s story is a startling interaction between the forces of human nature and the implications of the conditioning of society.  Jeffrey is to blame for the decisions he made and the terror he caused.  But other factors like bigotry and racism are not invisible here.  The effects of those issues are real, and as a society it is our job to ensure that they stop contributing even in small ways to stories like this one.

Thank you for joining me for the start of Season 2 of Killer Astrology.  I’ll be back for our next episode next week.  Until then, remember: people may lie, but the stars never do.  

Also, if you’re not yet following the podcast on social media, please join the Killer Astrology network.  Find me on facebook.com/killerastrology, on instagram @killerastrologypodcast, and on twitter @killerastropod.  I’m also open for astrology readings, which you can book on killerastrologypodcast.com/services.  On the website, you will also find birth charts for all the criminals covered on the show by viewing the blog.  One more thing before you go: if you have a minute, please consider leaving a 5-star rating on your podcast platform. It really helps!

Thanks again for your support, and I’ll see you next week!