Jeffrey Dahmer’s glasses have become synonymous with his likeness. The large metal-rimmed aviator-style specs bring his image to mind to most anyone who knows who he is.

Although Dahmer had worn glasses for a substantial part of his life, he chose not to wear them in the courtroom. His stepmom, Shari Dahmer, explained, "He's not wearing glasses so that he can't see people. He panics." Dahmer also spoke about keeping them off while on trial: “I felt uncomfortable looking anyone in the face. I didn’t want to see anyone’s face clearly. It helped me disassociate myself from what was happening.”

Dahmer only wore his glasses once during his court proceedings - when he received 15 consecutive life sentences to be served in prison. The death penalty was not an option for Dahmer, as it had been abolished in the state of Wisconsin many years earlier. "Frankly, I wanted death for myself," Dahmer had stated.

Dahmer is not the sole example of a serial killer who wore distinctive glasses. Dennis Rader and Ed Kemper also sported unique aviator-style eyewear. However, this can be attributed to the prevailing fashion of the time. Many killers, including Dahmer, were active in the 1970s and '80s when aviator glasses were particularly trendy.

When the arresting officers searched Dahmer’s apartment, they found a tray with two human hearts, as well as two plastic bags in the freezer containing a human heart that Dahmer said he was planning on eating at a later time.

He also liked to put his head on his victims’ chests and listen to their heartbeat.

Dahmer's father, Lionel, was a Marquette University chemistry student and later a research chemist.

Officers have remarked that they were overpowered by the stench of Dahmer's fly-infested apartment.

Three weeks after graduating high school, Dahmer committed his first murder. The victim was an 18 year old hitchhiker - who had also just graduated himself.

Dahmer picked up the young man, told him that they could hang out and drink alcohol, and brought him back to his house. When his victim decided he was ready to leave, Dahmer bludgeoned him in the back of his head with a dumbbell to render him unconscious. He then strangled him, dismembered his body with a carving knife, removed the flesh off the bones, and smashed them with a sledgehammer, spreading the pieces all over his backyard afterward.

In 1989, while Dahmer was living at his grandmother's home in West Allis, Wisconsin, his dad came to visit. While there, his dad noticed the one-foot square metal and wood box and wondered what was in it.

Dahmer's father is quoted as saying: “‘Jeff, open it up. I just want to see what's in there,’ We got into a bit of an argument because he wouldn't open it up, and I said, ‘Jeff, open it up or I'm going to just take it down into the basement and get a screwdriver or something and open it up.’ He got angry, very visibly agitated. Not fathoming what could be in that box, I said, ‘Okay, open it up tomorrow then, and then let's get rid of it.’”

The box contained the mummified head and genitals of one of Dahmer's victims, a gay man who he found "exceptionally attractive." This man was also the first victim of whom Dahmer permanently kept the body parts. After killing the young man, Dahmer placed the body in his grandmother's bathtub, decapitated, and attempted to flay the corpse. He stripped the flesh from the body and pulverized the bones. He preserved the head and genitalia in acetone and placed them in the wooden box.

On July 22, 1991, Dahmer met a 32-year-old man and told him that he was an amatuer photographer looking to hire subjects to pose for him. Upon entering the apartment, the man noticed a putrid smell, and saw boxes of hydrochloric acid on the floor. Dahmer claimed he used the solution to clean bricks.

Dahmer called the man over to his fish tank in the living room to distract his gaze, and to handcuff the man’s hands together. He only managed to get the cuff around one wrist before his victim pulled away. He told Dahmer he would only let his photos be taken if Dahmer put the cuffs away. Adding to the man's fear, Dahmer pulled out a knife, rested his head against his chest, and told him he was going to eat his heart.

The man realized that Dahmer was serious, and concocted a plan to stay alive. Using all the charm he could muster, he told Dahmer that they were buddies and he wasn’t going anywhere. Seizing a moment of distraction, the man punched Dahmer in the face and booked it out of the apartment. The man ran towards two Milwaukee police officers, telling them that a “freak” kidnapped and handcuffed him, threatened him with a knife and told him he wanted to eat his heart. He asked if they had a key to get the one cuff of him, but their brand of key didn't work, so they followed the man back to Dahmer’s apartment.

Upon arrival, Dahmer did not seem bothered by Edwards’ claims and simply directed the officers to a handcuff key on his bedside dresser. There, they found the key, and Dahmer’s grusome collection of polaroid photos of dismembered bodies. They pinned Dahmer to the floor, arrested him, and called for back up.

While living in his hometown of Bath, Ohio, Dahmer became obsessed with a male jogger that he would see taking a similar route near his home. His obsession kept building, and attempted to put his fantasies in to action. Dahmer got a baseball bat, and hid by the side of the road, waiting for the jogger to come by on his normal route. He planned to bludgeon the jogger, drag him into the woods, and have his way with the body. He was yearning to make his first kill.

Luckily for this particular man, Dahmer never got the chance. The jogger never came by, and Dahmer didn't make a second attempt to get him.

Dahmer had fantasies of keepiing some of his victims alive, but in a submissive 'zombie' state, essentially rendering them a sex slave.

On April 7, 1991, Dahmer lured a 19-year-old man to his apartment, where he drugged him, drilled a hole into his skull, and poured hydrochloric acid inside, intending to cause permanent brain damage to enact his plan. When the victim woke up with a severe headache, Dahmer grew agitated, strangling and decapitating him. He kept the head and attempted to preserve the skin with salt and cold water, but the experiment did not meet Dahmer's standards, leading him to eventually dispose of the skin.

On July 5th, 1991, Dahmer lured a 23-year-old victim to his apartment, drugged him, and drilled a hole in his skull. He twice injected boiling water into the victim's brain, inducing a coma from which he succumbed two days later.

Dahmer used jars to preserve his victims, whether it be their entire head, hands, penis, or other body parts.

In January of 1979, Dahmer joined the U.S. Army after failing to finish college, and received training as a medical specialist in San Antonio, Texas. He was subsequently stationed in Baumholder, West Germany. During his service from 1979 to 1981, Dahmer worked as a combat medic and was accused of sexually assaulting two fellow soldiers. The first victim alleged that Dahmer drugged and raped him once, while the second, who shared living quarters with Dahmer, claimed to have been subjected to repeated sexual assaults.

Dahmer's struggles with alcoholism persisted during his time in West Germany. In 1981, due to being deemed unfit for military duty, Dahmer received an honorable discharge after only two years.

Officers discovered around 80 Polaroid images of Dahmer's victims in Dahmer's bedroom drawer and the subject matter was horrifying. Dahmer took photos of his victims – naked and bloody, posed in suggestive and tortured positions, and dismembered. They also depict Dahmer engaging in sex acts with the dead bodies, as well as photos of his victims at various stages of the murder process - enabling him to relive the experience when he viewed them afterwards. There have been reported to be 84 Polaroids in all.

Dahmer remarked that he took photos of his victims because he “wanted to keep them as mementos to keep him company.”

When they officers found the photos and immediately handcuffed Dahmer, he uttered, “For what I did, I should be dead.”

Dahmer would dispose of his victims’ flesh by liqufing it - dissolving it in chemicals - to the point it could be poured down a toilet or a sink.

He had a particular fascination with his victims' heads. They were often boiled until the flesh came off (which he said took about an hour per head), preserved with a mixture of the laundry detergent Soilex, water and bleach, and then finally painted to resemble a head made of plastic.

Eating organs and muscles such as their hearts, livers, and biceps became a part of his ritual. Alcoholwas his drink of choice during his whole process.

Dahmer was employed at Ambrosia Chocolate Co. in 1985 where he worked the night shift for a reported $8.75 an hour. Ultimately, Dahmer was fired from his job at the chocolate factory in 1991 for constantly missing shifts.

At the time of his arrest, Dahmer had torsos dissolving in an industrial drum filled with acid, human remains stored in the freezer, two complete skeletons, bleached skulls in his closet, to name a few. And Dahmer had plans for these remains.

He told police that if he had six more months before his arrest, they would have found his elaborate man-made altar, complete with the skulls and bones he was currently treating. He had planned to include a black leather chair, where Dahmer could sit and “feel at home.”

“The eating of the heart and the arm muscle - it was a way of making me feel that they were a part of me. At first, it was just curiosity. And then it became compulsive,” Dahmer said in an interview.

Dahmer lived in number 213, at the Oxford Apartments complex, at 924 North 25th Street in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, from May 1990 to July 1991.

Dahmer gifted one of his grade school teachers a tadpole, as he was trying hard to fit in. However, he soon found out that the teacher ended up giving it away to another student.

Dahmer became incensed, and went over to the student’s house, where he found the tadpole in an aquarium. In a fit of rage, he exacted his revenge.

He removed the tadpole, poured gasoline on it, and set it on fire.

From the time he was a child, Dahmer was obsessed with animal bones, He asked his father what would happen if bones were placed in bleach. This was an interest his chemist father - Lionel Dahmer - encouraged, believing that it was a curiousity purely based on science. He his son how to clean and preserve animal bones using bleach.

This soon became a father-son activity - bleaching the connective tissue and hair off mouse, rat, and rodent corpses when they found these animals who’d perished under their house.

Dahmer was enthralled by the sound the bones made, and called them his "fiddlesticks." He occasionally searched beneath and around the family home for additional bones, and explored the bodies of live animals to discover where their bones were located. Eventually, only a pail full of bones would remain. “It was like a personalized rattle,” says Wahlstrom. “The family would call them his fiddlesticks.”

One of Dahmer's family homes had a small hut a short walk from the house where he began collecting large insects and the skeletons of small animals. Some of these remains, such as chipmunks and squirrels, were preserved in jars of formaldehyde and kept within the hut.

All this eventually played an integral role in Dahmer’s later crimes as an adult, in which he transferred these cleaning and preserving methods to human bones and skulls.

Dahmer used two powerful insomnia medications to render his victims incapacitated: Halcion (which contains a sedative drug called triazolam) and Temazepam. These were his sleeping medications that he was prescribed while working the graveyard shift at the chocolate factory.

Dahmer frequently crushed the sedative and placed the resulting powder into a glass before departing from his apartment in pursuit of potential victims, ensuring that the beverage would be prepared upon his return with them.

Once the victim was asleep, Dahmer would begin his sexually deviant behavior, and essentially, killing, dismembering, and consuming their flesh and organs.

The blue 57-gallon drum found in Jeffery Dahmer’s apartment was filled with an acid solution, and contained two full skeletons, a mummified scalp, two severed penises, severed hands and three dismembered torsos. A hazmat crew had to be called in to remove it, and the world watched as it was carried down the apartment stairs on national news.

Dahmer's fridge was a horror show. For starters, it contained a human heart and a portion of an arm muscle. There was a box of baking soda (which was supposedly placed there to hide the smell, but it did nothing to quell the overwhelming stench), along with a recently decapitated human head of a Black man. A responding officer stated:

“When I looked into the refrigerator, it was a clean and empty refrigerator except for an open box of Arm & Hammer soda in the back and this box in the middle containing this freshly severed, bloodless, human head,” he said. “It was a black male with his eyes and mouth open with an expression of almost excitement or surprise so when I saw it, I can say that I had been a police officer for many years and seen some horrendous things ... But I can tell you that the sight was so weird that everything in my whole being told me, ‘man you need to get the hell out of here.’”

In the freezer, police found three heads wrapped in plastic. It was later reported that the humans parts came from 11 different people.

Dahmer had an unhealthy relationship with alcohol as early as adolescence. His classmates remember how he would sneak beer, wine, and all sorts of hard liquor into school, even hiding bottles in his locker.

After high school, he headed to Ohio State University with dreams of a business degree. But his drinking problem and dismal grades got him expelled after just one semester.

Dahmer needed alcohol to carry out his horrific acts because he didn't want to face the reality of what he was doing. In his own twisted words, booze was just a tool for him. This revelation led the families of his victims to try and sue Budweiser, arguing that their advertising contributed to his alcoholism, which fueled his crimes.

Dahmer's father, Lionel, has described a fishing trip, where his son was enthralled by the gutted fish, and kept looking at its insides with too keen a curiosity.

In 1988, Dahmer was serving a year in a work-release program for drugging and molesting a 13-year-old boy. The prison gave Dahmer a day pass to celebrate Thanksgiving with his family.

After dinner, Dahmer went to a few gay bars. He ended up at the 219 Club - one of his frequent haunts - where he spent some time talking and drinking with another patron. Dahmer went back to the man's apartment, where he blacked out from drinking too much. When he woke up the next morning, he was hogtied, and suspended by hooks and ropes from the ceiling. He started to feel the man anally raping him with a candle. Dahmer demanded to be let go, and unlike Dahmer himself, the man showed him mercy and released him.