The Jeffrey Dahmer National Honor Society photo originates from a high school yearbook. The photo shows Dahmer, who was a member of the National Honor Society, posing with other members of the organization. The photo was taken in 1978, the year before Dahmer began his killing spree.
The photo gained notoriety after Dahmer’s arrest in 1991 when it was widely circulated in the media. The photo became known as the “class clown” photo, due to Dahmer’s expression in the picture. Many people found the photo disturbingly ironic, given Dahmer’s later crimes.
The photo continues to be an object of fascination and horror for many people. It is often cited as an example of how even seemingly normal people can turn out to be monsters.
Social media is currently flooded with images of Jeffrey Dahmer and his school’s National Honor Society. The Revere High School student’s image was obscured in one of them, but he could clearly be seen standing with other students in another.
In a sequence from the docu-series, Dahmer was shown appearing to slide into his National Honor Society high school yearbook photo. Viewers were forced to question if the notorious murderer was really a top student in order to belong to the elite society.
Former classmate Mike Krukal asserted that cannibalistic murderer Jeffrey Dahmer was a prankster in high school in the Investigation Discovery documentary Jeffrey Dahmer: Mind of a Monster. He said:
“In our senior year, they took photographs of all the groups… and Jeff Dahmer got in group photos that he was not a member of the group. I think the funniest one is the National Honor Society, which is supposed to be the brightest kids, right? And definitely in our senior year, Jeff Dahmer was not in that group academically, but he’s in this photograph, and I believe it’s because the president of the group had him blacked out. So, in all the yearbooks there’s a body without a head.”
According to Catherine Purcell and Bruce A. Arrigo’s book The Psychology of Lust Murder: Paraphilia, Sexual Killing, and Serial Homicide, Dahmer was a high school joker who faked epileptic episodes and drew chalk outlines of bodies purely for attention.
Such practical jokes were akin to the National Honors Society photobomb. Similarly, former classmate Martha Schmidt described to The New York Times in a similar manner:
“It was a very Jeff thing to do. It was part of his trying to be unconventional and to mock everything around him. I think he very consciously chose the honor society because I think in some ways he was laughing at himself and us.”
Dahmer continued to play pranks in high school, and he continued to play similar pranks in prison as well. He allegedly cut food into shapes that resembled dismembered limbs before soaking it in ketchup.
The New York Times further said that Dahmer’s propensity for mischief eventually earned him the moniker “Don’t Do a Dahmer.” Dr. Park Dietz, a forensic psychiatrist, provided an explanation for this behavior in 1991, stating that the killer engaged in such behavior to demonstrate a “feeling of fearlessness” and a craving for thrills that places a high value on illegal risk-taking.
After being arrested in July 1991 for the repeated killings and mutilations of 17 men and boys, a jury decided to give Jeffrey Dahmer 15 consecutive life sentences.
However, Dahmer was killed at the age of 54 by fellow prisoner Christopher Scarver two years after his incarceration.
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