

That evening, Derf spots Jeffrey walking home alone, with blood on his fingernails. Unbeknownst to Lionel, Joyce leaves Ohio to live with relatives in Wisconsin, taking Dave with her and leaving Jeffrey completely alone. At graduation, Lionel hands Jeffrey the keys to the family Volkswagen Beetle which he would later use to commit his first murder. After the trip, Jeffrey makes some attempts to stay connected to his friends such as bringing a date to the prom, but ultimately drifts away from them. Jeffrey's father moves out while Jeffrey is away on the field trip. Matthews with a baseball bat, but never goes through with attacking him. The following night, Jeffrey fantasizes about having sex with Dr.

When Jeffrey returns home, he retires to his room and masturbates to the incident. Matthews becomes uncomfortable during the hernia exam when he notices that Jeffrey has an erection. Jeffrey fakes a cold so that he can get an appointment with him, and he can examine Jeffrey naked. Matthews, the physician of one of Derf's friends. The jogger with whom Jeffrey is obsessed turns out to be Dr. To cope, Jeffrey turns to drinking heavily, and begins killing animals himself. Meanwhile, Joyce starts relapsing into chronic mental illness, leading to increasingly bitter fights between her and Lionel. Derf and his friends form the "Dahmer Fan Club," using Jeffrey for a variety of pranks such as sneaking him in every club yearbook photo, and conning their way to a meeting with then Vice President Walter Mondale during a school field trip to Washington, D.C. Jeffrey inspires Derf to draw him in various situations drawings that would later be incorporated into Derf's graphic novel My Friend Dahmer.

During school, Jeffrey imitates the speech and gestures of his mother's interior decorator (who has cerebral palsy), clears his backpack, and makes loud noises, catching the attention of aspiring artist John "Derf" Backderf and his friends. In 1978, Lionel trashes Jeffrey's collection of bones and orders him to make friends at school. This hobby is initiated by his obsessive interest in how animals are "fitted together". For a hobby, Jeffrey collects dead animals that he dissolves to the bones using chemicals provided by his father, who is a chemist. Jeffrey develops an obsession with a male jogger whom he sees every day from his school bus. In 1974, Jeffrey Dahmer was a high school freshman living in Bath, Ohio, with his parents, Lionel and Joyce, and his younger brother Dave.
