I had thought all you needed to know about Jeffrey Dahmer was in 
 1)	The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer by Brian Masters 
 2)	A Father's Story by Lionel Dahmer 
 3)	The Stone Phillips interview with Mr and Mrs Dahmer and Jeffrey available on youtube 
 But now comes this peculiar addition, a graphic novel about the author's friendship (kind of) with JD during his high school years at Eastview Junior High School in Bath, Ohio. This was the kind of friendship where a group of guys fairly low down in the social hierarchy adopt a mascot even lower down and more despised than they are. Jeffrey was the freak they adopted. What made him a freak at the age of 15 and 16? 
 He threw fake epileptic fits and mimicked the slurred speech and spastic tics of someone with cerebral palsy 
 He would do this in the cafeteria or in the corridors in order to entertain his classmates, who otherwise entirely ignored him. 
 Looking back on it know, knowing what we know, it seems incomprehensible that Dahmer could get away with such bizarre behavior. But it's not as if he was the only freak at school. 
 Backderf develops his argument very carefully and convincingly - Jeffrey Dahmer fairly quickly went completely insane when he was a teenager and there was no adult intervention, because in those days, adults did not take any notice of kids. They would see right through them. The parents were involved in their own bitter fighting, which ended in a very nasty divorce. The teachers (some of whom were young stoners like the students) either turned a blind eye or were oblivious to Jeff's weird behavior and also the fact that he was mostly drunk at school (he had no problem getting hold of alcohol). 
 So when Jeff was 18 the father left the house, then the mother left with the younger brother, and Jeff was all alone. No friends now, having left high school. Father moved back to the house in a couple of months. As the devil makes work for idle hands, that's when Jeff killed his first young male, who was a hitch-hiker, on 15 June 1978. 
 Backderf illustrates an incident which happened three days later, when Jeff was trying to dispose of the corpse. The cops stopped Jeff in the middle of the night while he had bags containing the remains in the back of the car smelling to high heaven. Instead of taking a look at the offending items, and making a grisly discovery, the cops gave Jeff a sobriety test and a citation for drifting over the centre line. Just imagine, they could have saved the lives of Jeff's next sixteen victims, but again, the adults of Bath, Ohio weren't paying any kind of attention. 
 This subject is extremely lurid but My Friend Dahmer is sober and thoughtful. At the heart of the story is the problem that you really never do know what's happening with your son, your friend, your brother, your husband, your colleague, your boss, your father, your sister, your mother, your partner. As the Chiffons sang in May 1965, when Jeff was 5 years old 
 Nobody knows what's going on in my mind but me