MY KILLER PENPAL

WHAT DID JEFFREY DAHMER SAY IN HIS LETTERS TO THIS AUSTRALIAN CRIMINOLOGIST?

Jeffrey Dahmer was convicted of killing 17 boys and men, and may have murdered many more, but criminologist Amanda Howard says he doesn’t even make it onto her top 100 of the world’s worst serial killers. “I have a database of 5400 serial killers and what he did ranks quite low,” she recently told Woman’s Day magazine. “There are some serial killers out there who did far worse to their victims.”

His name might not be known if not for the hit 1991 movie, The Silence of the Lambs, which brought to life a fictional serial-killing cannibal called Dr Hannibal Lecter. It was released in the same year Dahmer was finally apprehended. “You have to think of the climate when Dahmer was arrested in 1991,” she says. “Silence of the Lambs had just come out, and there was this theory that there were all these Hannibal Lecters out there, and then we had this cannibal who gets arrested because there is meat in his fridge. Dahmer became known as the real-life Hannibal Lecter.”