Three Fakes: ‘Dahmer’ Pieces to Watch Out For

^{NOTE: I wasn’t planning on covering any more ‘murderabilia’ stuff for quite some time. However, in light of a recent listing, I thought the following was worth addressing in the hopes that no one gets ripped off.}

Prior to the vast cache of artifacts sold by Cult Collectibles between 2022 and 2024, the Milwaukee Cannibal was considered the White Whale of the ‘murderabilia’ world.

Dahmer pieces were often harder to come by, and only a handful of dealers had obtained multiple letters sent from the killer to his various pen pals. This combination of rarity + notoriety meant a high value piece of dark history – and created an incentive to procure such pieces or duplicitously produce them from scratch.

As a result, many sketchy Dahmer ‘cut-autographs’ have been floating around over the years, along with several questionable handtracings, letters, envelopes, and drawings. Some of which have been sold for thousands of dollars, ended up in museums, or been treated as a legitimate part of the Dahmer narrative in online discussions.

While there are many examples of such fakes, this article examines the red flags waving from three of the most brazen, and the type of source they can all be traced back to.

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🚩 Shrine Drawing
🚩 Apartment Drawing
_{(and a note on handwriting discrepencies)}
🚩 Handtracing
🚩 Questionable Sources

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Shrine Drawing

Among the earlier fakes is a drawing attempting to replicate the original altar diagram Dahmer made for defence attorney Wendy Patrickus:

Dahmer’s plans for a shrine to himself had 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.

He’d explained this idea to Patrickus and psychiatrists Dr. Smail and Dr. Becker, drawing a diagram for each:

The fact that only these three shrine diagrams had ever been produced by Dahmer (as long publicised in books, documentaries and contemporary press coverage), would be evidence enough that a fourth hadn’t materialised decades later.

However, other red flags include:

🚩Handwriting that doesn’t match Dahmer’s writing

🚩 Signature that doesn’t match Dahmer’s signature

🚩Inconsistently spaced and sized lettering (reflecting hesitation and the lack of natural writing rhythm characteristic of forgeries)

🚩 Lack of detail compared to Dahmer’s ‘official’ shrine drawings. Including:

• A lack of date¹ (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 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.”

🚩Artificially ‘aged’ effect (crumpled paper, ragged punched holes) not typical of Dahmer’s real shrine drawings, which were carefully filed and preserved by their recipients.²

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Apartment Drawing

Another drawing attributed to Dahmer has also recently materialised, claiming to be a plan of Apartment 213 drawn by the killer and retrieved from court files:

Exhibiting a similar lack of detail as the Shrine drawing (particularly when skulls had been hidden in Dahmer’s closet, a filing cabinet contained human bones, a kettle contained servered hands and genitals, and his beloved fish tank stood against the living room backwall), other red flags include:

🚩 Handwriting that doesn’t match Dahmer’s writing

🚩 Numerous questions regarding context. Like:

• Why would Dahmer have needed to produce a diagram of his apartment when it had been visited and well documented by police, press, crime scene photographers, defence attorney Patrickus, testifying survivor Tracy Edwards, psychiatrist Dr. Dietz, and numerous others who had seen and described it?
  
  
• If this was produced by Dahmer in court, why wasn’t it written on a yellow legal pad or in a binded notebook similar to that which Dahmer wrote in during the trial?

• If it were produced for one of Dahmer’s psychiatrists prior to the trial, why was it not clearly marked as being part of Dr. X’s examination reports, et. al?
  
  
• Why would Dahmer have produced an apartment diagram with no valuable information on it?
  
  The location of the barrel and freezer were already common knowledge, all human remains had been found within hours of Dahmer’s arrest, and Apartment 213 was so confined a space that he couldn’t have hidden any more bodies in there than that which were initially recovered. Diagrams of perp residences are functional and drawn to help police find lingering remains or enhance a description of their M.O, not just to show the layout of their home.
  
  
• If not for law enforcement, lawyers or psychiatrists, why else would Dahmer have drawn it? He wasn’t sentimental about the Oxford Apartments and took no pleasure in reliving his crimes. Creating an ‘apartment diagram’ just to create one would therefore be out of character.

🚩 January 17³, 1992

Whether the implication is that this was a drawing made while Dahmer was in court, or that it was drawn for one of the psychiatrists assessing him prior to trial, its date doesn’t align with any known court appearances or meetings with doctors.

COURT APPEARANCES:

• Dahmer’s first court appearance was July 25, 1991. Other murder charges were added to his wrap sheet between then and August ’91
• Dahmer’s initial plea of insanity was on Sept 10, 1991
• Jury selection took place Jan 27, 1992
• Trial ran from Jan 30 – Feb 17, 1992

PSYCHIATRIST MEETINGS:

Dahmer spoke to…

• Dr. Smail between August 1991 and January 10, 1992
• Dr. Palermo between October 14, 1991 and Jan 4, 1992
• Dr. Fosdal between October 16, 1991 and Jan 9, 1992
• Dr. Berlin on Nov 12, 1991
• Dr. Friedman between Nov 16, 1991 and Jan 4, 1992
• Dr. Wahlstrom on Dec 26 – 27, 1991 and Jan 1, 1992
• Dr. Becker on Jan 2 – 3, 1992
• Dr. Dietz on Jan 6 – 8, 1992

One former LEO consulted on the apartment plan added that, while it would be reasonable to think Dahmer might have produced a similar drawing during his confession if an MPD officer needed a crime-scene sketch, such a document wouldn’t be dated so long after the arrest and initial investigative reports, which had concluded by August 1991.

“If [its creator] tries to tie the drawing to that arrest, the date still would not make sense,” they said.

A Note on Handwriting Discrepencies ✒️🍥

When backed into a corner, some may try to argue that “handwriting can look different sometimes!” as a way of explaining discrepancies between a genuine writing sample and a sketchy one.

While someone’s handwriting can differ on any given day due to one of several variables (haste, mood, writing equipment, injury, etc), such discrepancies tend to be limited and fall within a predictable range. Genuine handwriting – despite such fluctuations – still maintains consistent characteristics that create an overall sense of uniformity, and its appearance will still be recognisably ‘them’.

This is particularly true with Dahmer, whose cursive and print were pretty consistent, even when he admitted to writing with hand cramps, or when he was tired or depressed.

Other killers have been cited as examples of indivduals whose writing often looked wildly unrecognisable, particularly Charles Manson⁴ and Ed Gein. However, as most people would tend to agree that Manson and Gein were not exactly Mr. and Mr. Lucidity at the best of times (particularly Manson, whose extremely volatile mental state tracks with writing that would be all over the place), such examples should be taken with a pinch of salt when discussing more relatively stable and coherent individuals like Dahmer.

Additionally, when combined with other red flags (like questionable context), any variants that could perhaps be explained away more easily on their own become part of a larger, much harder-to-excuse pattern.

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Handtracing

In response to the large volume of mail and donations he recieved, Dahmer occasionally sent tracings of his hand as a token of gratitude.

As with letters, envelopes and signatures, these too have been faked over the years – with one example being the left-hand tracing addressed to an unknown ‘Dan’:

🚩 Handwriting doesn’t match Dahmer’s writing

🚩 Finger details don’t match the details on other Dahmer handtracings

In fact, all three pieces can be traced back to the same individual.

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Questionable Sources

In 2019, a friend of Wendy Patrickus attempted to broker the shrine drawing Dahmer had done for the attorney 28 years earlier.

Using social media to gauge the interest of any prospective buyers, ‘Lucy’⁵ uploaded a photo of themselves holding the diagram, and shortly after, a collector made a post of their own alluding to having purchased the drawing for its $10,000 asking price:

Suspicious of the persons claim, another collector reached out to Lucy to check if the drawing had really sold, only to be told that it hadn’t.

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

Despite not having purchased the drawing, the first collector later made another post announcing the arrival of their new shrine piece (which wasn’t even on the same yellow paper as Patrickus’) displayed alongside a forged handtracing:

In November 2025, the same collector popped up with the apartment diagram, claiming it had been part of Dahmer’s genuine court files – some of which were legitimately in their posession:

It was strange that this plan was only just now emerging from a cache which had been routinely photographed and shared for years, and it displayed the same characteristics as the shrine and handtracing:

When attempting to mimic Dahmer’s handwriting, forgers will inadvertently always include some kind of discrepancies – which stand out even more across multiple documents. If a set of suspicious pieces show more similarities to each other than to authentic samples of the purported writer, it strongly suggests artificial replication rather than any natural variation.

Frustratingly, the posession of genuine collectibles automatically creates a ‘halo effect’ for some counterfitters, whose reputation is harder to immediately discredit when they do indeed own impressive items.

Nevertheless, mixing real pieces to try and legitimise fakes is a tactic that has been used for decades – including in 1994, when one Illinoisan dealer claimed to own the key used by Dahmer at the Ambassador hotel on the night of his second murder, despite there never being any record of the room Dahmer used:

One could easily own a rare Dahmer piece and it wouldn’t stop them from attempting to forge another if they wanted additional clout, or money without parting with real relics.

Other reasons genuine, even reknowned, collectors may moonlight as forgers include:

🌑 Wanting to inflate their status within the community

🌑 Wanting more attention than their genuine items can give them. Many people own Dahmer letters, but one-off, rarer ‘grails’ (like court or psychiatric documents) have real stopping power.

🌑 Feeling threatened by other collectors or researchers, and needing to top someone elses content or collectibles.

🌑 Milking their own cash cow when genuine items (even within their own collection) are limited. Someone who has one real letter might think: “I could make five more and sell them for a few grand each” – especially if they already have a trusting client base. Owning a real item may also provide a tempting blueprint for a forgery when it’s easier to try to copy, trace and mimic Dahmer’s handwriting if using a direct guide.

🌑 Operating on a sense of invincibility. Owning real items can become a way to try and gaslight critics, and relies on the fact that many people assume that if someone has genuine pieces, everything they post must be legit.

🌑 Narcissism and identity building. In some niches, being The Person with the Best Pieces™️ can become a staple of someone’s personality, particularly when constantly validated by others. Even if they have real items, they might want even more prestige.

🌑 They enjoy fooling others. Some people get a sadistic or troll-like kick from seeing if they can decieve people – particularly in a space where myths spread easily and authenticity can seem hard to verify on account of Dahmer himself being too dead to question, and many living-people involved with the case often being difficult to get a reply from. Some buyers are eager to believe any ‘rare’ bit of info or opportunities to buy an previously ‘unseen’ piece – even if it may seem too good to be true. For some forgers, there’s a sense of power in manipulating part of the narrative, sitting back and watching it spread.

🌑 Thinking they can outsmart everyone (until they can’t). If no one has called them out before, been too intimidated to stand up to someone with a loyal following, or because fakes have previously (and easily) slipped past people who only know Dahmer in broad strokes, there’s no reason for them to stop. Most ‘murderabilia’ collectors don’t just solely focus on Dahmer, and may miss minutia that a more Dahmer-specific researcher will pick up on.

Even honest collectors and dealers have fallen foul of fakes before. Some items have been wrongly assumed to have come from Dahmer when they actually belonged to his father or displayed the writing of a correspondent, rather than his own, so each piece should be judged on its own merit, regardless of the owner’s wider collection.

When it was pointed out that the handwriting in the apartment diagram wasn’t Dahmer’s, the seller became hostile and deleted the listing shortly after.

^{The seller of the ‘apartment plan’ upon being told that its writing did not belong to Dahmer.
Always be wary when a seller cannot discuss provenance calmly and professionally}

Whether ‘Dahmer’s apartment plan’ will reemerge has yet to be seen, though if it does, every Dahmer collector should plan to stay the hell away from it.

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Sources:

• Case files

Header image includes excerpt from Dahmer’s letter to lawyer Thomas Jacobson

Special thanks to Steve G.

Footnotes:

1. While not necessarily indicative of forgery on its own (there is at least one known instance of Dahmer writing an undated letter during his first weeks in prison, when his sense of time was likely disrupted), when combined with other red flags, the absence of a date adds further uncertainty and further confirms the forger’s lack of attention to detail / deeper knowledge of the subject ↩︎
2. Dahmer forgers sometimes attempt to ‘age’ their pieces to make them look historically worn – similarly to how a child might stain a piece of paper with tea and have its parents singe the edges to make an ‘ancient treasure map’. Genuine Dahmer documents, however, seldom show much deterioration and are usually in pretty good condition on account of the value ascribed to them by their preserving owners, or after being filed away professionally. While one tattered correspondence can be found here, this is rare ↩︎
3. Perhaps not unintentionally, the date on the apartment plan is difficult to read, but the openness of the second digit after 1 most likely suggests a 7 or 2 in the same style as the 92 date. Obscuring a date is another way to avoid committing to a verifiable timeline ↩︎
4. Though Manson was technically not a killer himself, his signature, letters and artwork still fall under the branch of ‘murderabilia’ ↩︎
5. Not their real name ↩︎