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Would serial killer Dahmer have been an evangelist?

Mon Dec 11, 2006 7:39 AM ET

By Michael Conlon, Religion Writer
 

CHICAGO, Dec 11 (Reuters Life!) - He murdered 17 young men and boys in a sexually driven orgy of necrophilia and cannibalism. Then, in prison, Jeffrey Dahmer found God.

Now the minister who presided over his jailhouse baptism and conversion says Dahmer's 1994 beating death at the hands of a fellow inmate while serving multiple life sentences cut short a faith-spreading mission Dahmer would have carried to others behind bars had he lived.

"He was growing (in faith) and he would have been a great influence on other inmates. He would have had a tremendous impact," said the Rev. Roy Ratcliff, a Church of Christ minister who baptized Dahmer in a prison whirlpool tub in May 1994.

The baptism took place about five months before Dahmer and another inmate were killed at the Columbia Correctional Institution in Wisconsin by a third prisoner who clubbed them to death while they were on a bathroom cleaning detail.

Ratcliff, who has recounted his months with Dahmer in a newly released book, "Dark Journey, Deep Grace" (Leafwood Publishers), says the 34-year-old serial killer who killed 17 people between 1978 and 1991 was not the target of the kind of hate frequently aimed in prison at sex offenders.

"I asked him and he said he got along fine," Ratcliff said in an interview.

DID NOT FEEL THREATENED

"He didn't see himself as being hated by other inmates the way he was hated in the world."

The man who did kill Dahmer, Christopher Scarver, was a convicted murder and diagnosed psychopath who later said God had told him to carry our Dahmer's slaying.

Asked if Dahmer, who was stone-faced and seemed devoid of empathy at his trial, had ever cried or shown deep emotion in his presence, Ratcliff said that while he never saw tears, Dahmer was not stone cold.

"I saw emotion, how he felt about his mother and father, anger toward a lawyer representing his victims' families. But we didn't spend a lot of time talking about his crimes," Ratcliff said.

"We were focusing mainly on how to live a Christian life. There were times when he laughed, or was depressed. At the trial he was basically an object of hatred. He probably had to be quiet ... I think he was being defensive."

Asked why he waited so long to record his experiences with Dahmer, Ratcliff said his duties as pastor of Mandrake Road Church of Christ in Madison, Wisconsin, and his prison ministry which now involves seven inmates had kept him too busy.

"A number of people were urging me strongly (to write it) but I was resisting it at first. An awful lot of people felt very strongly that it needed to be told ... as a story of faith that could reach across lines," he said, adding that the book took seven years to write.

Ratcliff did not initiate his encounter with Dahmer. It was Dahmer who inquired about baptism after completing a Bible correspondence course in the mail from a woman in Virginia. Ratcliff, as one of the closer ministers to the prison, was asked by a fellow clergyman to contact him.

In the end, Ratcliff said, Dahmer changed him.

"It introduced me to prison ministry and to look at people in prison ministry in a very different way. I see them as real people with real concerns. It has helped me be more gracious and compassionate ," he said.

The book, Ratcliff said, shows people that "if God can reach Jeffrey Dahmer, God can reach you too. It is primarily a book of hope."