Dahmer Myths Debunked #1

Since exploding into the world’s media in the summer of ’91, Jeffrey Dahmer has remained a prominent figure in true crime and pop culture.

The Dahmer story has inspired books, movies, documentaries and discussions of various calibre and credibility. It’s therefore not surprising that, in the midst of objective fact and subjective opinion, many myths about Dahmer and his case have made their way into the conversations surrounding him.

This ongoing series will attempt to arbitrarily debunk some of those myths – be they unfounded claims, unsourced images, sketchy relics, or more brazen lies.

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Snow Bong Photo

Room 507

Bloody Mattress Photo

Fake Shrine Drawing

Tattoo Quote

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Snow Bong Photo

Circulating the net since February 2013 – when u/caribouj submitted it to Reddit’s r/trees forum (‘the go-to subreddit for anything and everything cannabis’!) – this black-and-white photo depicts a blond, bespectacled young man packing the bowl of a large bong made of snow.

Its original caption claimed Caribouj had “found this picture of Jeffrey Dahmer…”

The resemblance to a young Dahmer is passing enough that the image has been routinely shared on Facebook, Twitter and various other platforms – with multiple people convinced of its killer subject.

It even made an appearance in Fox’s 2023 series, My Son Jeffrey: The Dahmer Family Tapes:

Dahmer’s admittance to regularly smoking weed as a teenager – along with his high school habit of pulling pranks – fits the image of Jeff the Playful Stoner, yet the picture isn’t actually of Dahmer.

In 2008, it was published on Flickr by photographer Robert Lyle with the caption:

“Chi-Phi fraternity, University of… um…Minnesota.

A snow bong sculpted by Scott Burgeson. The wide angle lens distorts the subject. The… um… ’sculpture’ was about 8 feet tall.”

Lyle also noted that it had been taken in 1982.

Presumably, connoisseur Caribouj later came across the bong in his search for weed content, appreciated the image and thought the lesser-known student looked enough like Dahmer that it made for a funny caption.

Really, Dahmer had spent only one term at university when he briefly attended Ohio State in 1978.

His time at college was solitary and Dahmer spent much of it in the limbo of a drunken haze, tormented by his murder of hitchhiker, Steven Hicks, earlier that year.

Dahmer’s roommates recalled him as “pretty weird” and were alarmed by his excessive alcohol intake. After several instances of his turbulent behaviour – including kicking in the tiles of the bathroom wall, inexplicably covering the dorm walls with pizza, and being suspected of stealing $120 – Dahmer’s roommates petitioned (unsuccessfully) to have him moved.¹

Ohio State also clarified that Dahmer was not officially listed as a member of any uni organisation, so his participation in friendly fraternal activities – like building great big snow bongs – would’ve been highly unlikely. 

Additionally, no further information about its source or the uploader’s relationship with a young Jeff was ever published alongside the photo when it was claiming to be a ‘Dahmer’ pic.

A general rule when determining if questionable images of Dahmer are, in fact, of Dahmer is: if a photo can’t be traced back to a credible source or hasn’t appeared as a part of a professionally researched production, then it’s not him. 

Although the Fox documentary is proof that even big-budget companies can drop the ball on occasion.

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Room 507

On November 20th, 1987, Dahmer murdered 25-year-old Steven Tuomi at Milwaukee’s Ambassador Hotel.

Over the years, the hotel’s Room 507 has become synonymous with the site of Steven’s death – despite no evidence linking Dahmer to the room:

• Formal check-in records weren’t kept by the Ambassador prior to 1995, so police were unable to pinpoint the exact scene of the crime

• There’s no mention of Room 507 in any of the core, traditionally published books on Dahmer² or in contemporary news coverage
  
  
• While Dahmer admitted he’d used his own name to check into the hotel whenever he utilised it as a hookup spot³, this was only to dispel the notion that he might’ve operated under an alias.Dahmer never mentioned 507 specifically and it’s not noted in his police confession, interviews, psychiatric reports, or any of his private correspondance.

Hypothetically, even if Room 507 was the room Dahmer had used that night, the Ambassador under went a major rennovation in 2005 which completely transformed it from the hotel he’d once inhabited.

Guest rooms were stripped and gutted, bathrooms were redecorated, drywall and old ceilings were removed, and the lobby’s carpet was pulled up and replaced by its underlying marble floor.

^{Source: ‘ambassadorhotelmke’ on IG}

While there were 189 guest rooms during Dahmer’s time there, today the Ambassador has 132 after many of the old rooms were combined into larger, more luxurious suites.

Room numbers were also reassigned, so what was labeled 507 in the 80s is not 507 today.

Really, the myth of Room 507 was a result of internal gossip shared online, then dramatised by another third party.

The first mention of Dahmer and Room 507 came via Tumblr on August 5th, 2014 – when a 24-year-old true crime enthusiast named Cody posted a picture of himself outside its door with the caption:

“Okay, guys. This is room 507 at the Ambassador Hotel. This is the room where Jeffrey Dahmer committed his second of 17 murders on September 15th (sic), 1987. Love it.“

^{The first ever mention of Room 507 online.
As posted on Tumblr in August 2014 by an excited true crime fan4}

Years later, Cody explained the source of his story:

“I was down in the [hotel] lobby chatting with the staff [and] they called down a maintenance guy to answer some questions for me… He had worked for Rick Wiegand as a maintenance man on various properties of Rick’s since the 90s. Rick Wiegand was the owner of the hotel at the time. Since 1995, I think.

Well, this maintenance man explained to me that, in the mid-2000s, the hotel went through massive renovations, so none of the original rooms exist in the original format... He kind of explained how the rooms are staggered and more open now [and] the entire floor plan was remodeled.

The rooms numbers apparently had changed multiple times since 1987 as well, and there are no guest records available or on file that pre-date 1995...

I just remember the dude telling me, ‘right where we’re standing is the general vicinity of where the original door [of the crime scene] was’ and the door right next to us was 507. So, from then on, I just called it 507.

In retrospect, I should’ve touched on that in my original post!”

– Cody, the original source of the Room 507 myth

After gaining a number of likes and reblogs from the true crime community, Cody’s post was taken at face value by several other Tumblr users – even encouraging one of them to head to Room 507 themselves as part of their own Dahmer-themed trip.

In May 2016, an account called ‘Jeffreydahmersmyspace’ posted about their night in Room 507, complete with all sorts of over-the-top spooky detail:

^{Highlights from the first account of paranormal activity in Room 507, as posted on Tumblr by the (since deactivated) ‘Jeffreydahmersmyspace’}

Their claim that drunk strangers were outside the door discussing ‘the dark history of Room 507’ and how ‘that’s the room where Jeffrey Dahmer killed some guy!’ would require those strangers to have also seen Cody’s original post (where he branded the room nearest the “general vicinity” as the murder room), coincidentally spoken to the same maintenance man he did before independently making the same assumption that the closest room must be the one, or – most likely – simply have been a figment of imagination in line with Tumblr’s often fake or exaggerated ‘quirky’ posts. Which also calls into question the rest of the account given by ‘Jeffreydahmersmyspace’ (if their “laughing for a good 20 minutes” wasn’t enough evidence of exaggeration).

As Cody’s maintenance man had only worked at the hotel since the mid-90s anyway (long after room numbers were changed and no Dahmer-related records were available for cross-checking), Cody acknowledged the need to research such claims before blindly believing them “like a bad game of telephone.”

“The Room 507 lore is honestly just a myth that people ran with,” he added. “Me included, but I was young and excited.”

Nevertheless, ‘Jeffreydahmersmyspace’ post gained traction and, from there, Room 507 spread to the wider internet. Especially when larger Dahmer accounts and ‘Ghost Hunting’ articles began to perpetuate the story:

^{Multiple unsubstantiated sources cite Room 507 as the room Dahmer and Steve Tuomi inhabited that fateful night. Some visitors report “bad vibes” and strange occurrences, while many others experience no such thing.}

These days the myth is so persistent, some staff will hospitably humour guests who request to stay in ‘the Dahmer room’. However, others are more wary of it.

“There are relatives of the victims still in the area,” said a spokesperson for the hotel, “and it is not an event that we feel should be glorified in any way.”

Ultimately, the precise location of Steven’s death will never be known.

A more detailed investigation into the origin and fallacy of the Room 507 myth (including further insight from Cody and a source at the Ambassador) can be found here

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Bloody Mattress Photo

When presenting the crime scene that was Dahmer’s apartment, the following image is sometimes included:

A bloodied white mattress being carried down the stairs of the alleged Oxford Apartments by a Black man in a green hazmat suit.

The US Sun even included it in a 2022 article about Glenda Cleveland; however, the photo is actually a still from the 2007 movie Cleaner, starring Samuel L. Jackson as the eponymous crime scene cleaner inadvertently drawn into a murder cover-up.

At the time of his arrest, Dahmer had a green-and-blue floral print mattress, not a white one.

Compared to the gore of the movie mattress, the stain left after the murder of 22-year-old Ernest Miller was much smaller and had darkened through oxidation.

Officials in smart law enforcement attire and yellow hazmat suits carried this evidence down the back entrance stairs to the Oxford Apartments, which also bears no resemblance to the brown bricked backdrop of the white-mattress image:

While movies often rely on spectacle, in reality police and cleanup crews go out of their way to conceal visible gore when removing items.

In the interests of public order, to prevent biohazard exposure, and to preserve the dignity of the deceased, Dahmer’s own blood-soaked mattress would never have been carried out in plain view. Or by one of Hollywood’s biggest stars.

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Fake Shrine Drawing

Dahmer’s plans for a shrine to himself consisted of a black table adjorned with human skulls, flanked by two full skeletons and lit by blue florescent light.

There he intended to sit and absorb the power he believed would aid him financially and socially while preserving a keepsake of his victims and governing complete control over his private domain.

“I was trying to get in contact with the spirits,” Dahmer said. “If [I’d been arrested] six months later, that’s what [police] would have found.”

To help explain this idea, Dahmer drew three diagrams of his shrine:

• One for assistant attorney Wendy Patrickus on November 14th, 1991
• One for psychiatrist Dr. Smail on November 18th, 1991
• One for psychiatrist Dr. Becker on January 3rd, 1992

All of which have long been featured in books, documentaries and news coverage from the trial.

A few years ago, a fourth shrine drawing began to occassionally pop-up within certain ‘murderabilia’ circles:

It was also recently announced that it would be featured in a European serial killer exhibition.

Several Dahmer researchers immediately clocked that it was fake based on the messiness of ‘Dahmer’s’ signature, the discrepant handwriting, the inconsistently spaced and sized lettering, overall sloppiness, and the fact that only the three aforementioned altar diagrams had been made by Dahmer.

^{(F)ake shrine signature and examples of (D)ahmer’s real one + example of Dahmer’s simple print compared to more stylised letters on the fake}

Other details also indicate its inauthenticity, such as:

• A lack of date (often omitted when a forger’s knowledge of the subject isn’t sharp enough to risk committing to a verifiable timeline)
  
  
• No labelling of skulls, blue curtains or the Dionysian wall plaque (so important to Dahmer’s vision that he marked each of them on his other sketches)
  
  
• The reductive use of the word ‘lamps’ to undermine Dahmer’s very specific need for “blue globe lights.”

In fact, it had been created in an attempt to forge the version Dahmer had drawn for Wendy Patrickus after a friend of the lawyer tried to broker it.

In 2019, ‘Lucy’⁵ used social media to gauge the interest of any prospective buyers. She uploaded an image of herself holding the drawing Dahmer had made for Patrickus on a yellow legal pad and, a little while later, a collector made a post implying they’d purchased it for the $10,000 asking price:

Another member of the community, suspicious of the collector’s claim, reached out to Lucy to confirm whether the sale had actually gone through – only to be told it had not.

“That same guy is messaging me about buying it right now!” Lucy replied. “What kind of scam is this?!”

To maintain the facade, the ‘buyer’ later documented the arrival of their new ‘shrine’ drawing – which clearly wasn’t even on the same coloured paper as Patrickus’:

Since then, the fake shrine has managed to change hands several times – with each owner either not knowing, or simply not caring, about its origin.

Patrickus has since sold her shrine drawing elsewhere and, at the time of writing⁶, neither Becker nor Smail are known to have parted with theirs.

UPDATE (Nov. ’25): More info about the fake ‘Shrine’ drawing, and other fakes courtesy of its creator, can be found here

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Tattoo Quote

According to social media – and Etsy in all its classy Cricut glory – Dahmer was once quoted as saying:

“I ate someone with a tattoo once. The ink made the meat taste like sh*t.”

It’s marketable advice for printing on t-shirts and tattoo parlour posters – even though Dahmer never really said it.

The original quote about Dahmer disliking the taste of tattooed skin came from a meme:

After it was first uploaded in January 2019⁷, the joke was paraphrased a few weeks later by Twitter user @50_Shades_of_Tre:

A popular tweet (with over 5,000 retweets and 21,000 likes at the time of research⁸) and a widely-shared meme, the quote was then pulled out of context and occasionally branded as a legitimate Dahmer quote – with some people insisting they’d heard him say it in documentaries or interviews.

But even if it couldn’t be traced back to its memey roots, it doesn’t track that Dahmer would’ve said such a thing anyway, given his motive and manner.

Embarrassment sometimes made him cagey about certain details of his cannibalism⁹, but Dahmer eventually admitted to consuming parts of three victims¹⁰ – only one of whom, 32-year-old Raymond Smith, had a tattoo: the nickname Cash-D inked onto his chest. Dahmer admitted Raymond had been the first person he cannibalised when he’d eaten part of the man’s heart.

As tattoo ink is embedded in the dermis (the shallow middle layer of skin), it doesn’t reach the muscle, fat, or organs beneath – and such parts remain unflavored by tattoos.

Furthermore, Dahmer did not eat people because he relished and craved the taste of human flesh. His consumption was symbolic: rooted in a desire to feel like his victims were a part of him, and to try and absorb some of their most desirable traits. Former FBI agent Rober Ressler said cannibalism made Dahmer feel “more powerful” and like it would give him “more potential to enter another level of existence.”

It’s also worth noting that Dahmer was extremely polite during his interviews and that, after talking to him for nearly 10 hours, Ressler described Dahmer as candid, co-operative and soft-spoken. “He never used a cuss word,” Ressler said. “[He was] much nicer than myself.”

Referring to such a profound aspect of his crimes in such a crude and crass way would’ve therefore been extremely unlike Dahmer who – though he jokingly posted a note advertising a Cannibals Anonymous meeting while in prison – never spoke derogatorily about his victims.

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Sources:

• ‘Cleaner (2007 film)’ on Wikipedia
• Cleaner – Official Trailer on YouTube
• My Son Jeffrey: The Dahmer Family Tapes (2023 documentary)
• ‘Is This Jeffrey Dahmer Next to an Ice Bong?’ at Snopes.com
• Robert Lyle on Flickr
• The Fitz MKE
• The Ambassador and Cody
• Dearly Departed Tours
• The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer by Brian Masters (1993), I Have Lived in the Monster by Robert Ressler and Tom Shachtman (1998)
• Stories & Ink
• Ohio State
• Larry King interview with Lionel and Shari Dahmer (2004)
• Case documents

Footnotes:

1. The problem resolved itself when Dahmer dropped out before the second semester ↩︎
2. Though some self-published books (written after the myth came to fruition) may have erroneously included it ↩︎
3. Dahmer said he’d made use of the Ambassador and another hotel in the area about 15 times in total; seven or eight times each ↩︎
4. Blog name and potentially identifiable info redacted for privacy. Though Cody was content to use his first name for the sake of a bit more transparency ↩︎
5. Not their real name ↩︎
6. August 2025 ↩︎
7. Source: TinEye ↩︎
8. August 2024. Upon trying to get more recent figures, it seems Tre’s account has since been deleted ↩︎
9. Also indicative that such a particularly brash admission would be extremely out of character for him ↩︎
10. Though it’s one of the most infamous aspects of the case, Lionel Dahmer later told Larry King that his son’s foray into anthropophagy was “a very, very small part. Very much overblown by the media.” ↩︎