Woman Visits Jeffrey Dahmer's 'Scary' Childhood Home Where He First Killed

A woman visited Jeffrey Dahmer's childhood home in Ohio, where the serial killer murdered his first victim in 1978.

Maddie Mattila shared a clip to her TikTok account, @maddie.mattila, as she traveled to the property, located in Bath Township, Akron.

"Scary af," she said in the caption, as she filmed the exterior of the three-bedroom, three-bathroom house.

"When you live 30 minutes away from the Dahmer house," the on-screen text says. The clip, shared on Sunday, amassed more than 8 million views.

Mattila told Newsweek: "I decided to visit because I knew the house was close to me and I've always been interested in true crime. I always wanted to take the trip out and after seeing the new Netflix documentary I decided to do it.

"The house was a lot larger than I imagined from the outside and it was pretty set back into the trees. It had a nice landscape and was surrounded by many beautiful homes. The roads were very windy and had lots of hills."

The recent Netflix series, Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Series, has again sparked interest in one of America's most notorious murderers.

Dahmer is responsible for the rape and murder of 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991, engaging in cannibalism and necrophilia. While he preserved parts of his victims as mementos.

Katherine Ramsland, professor of forensic psychology at DeSales University and author of Confession of a Serial Killer, explained the intrigue surrounding serial killers.

She told Newsweek: "The fascination of places where famous killers have been is partly about the puzzle of a twisted mind. We want to understand.

"Extreme behavior is difficult to fathom, especially the cold-blooded kind. Women, especially, are attuned to motives and to victim predicaments."

She said recently true crime has become a "cultural obsession."

Ramsland continued: "There's an emotional payoff that's become a collective pursuit. People want to share it, so they post videos of themselves at murder sites.

"People linger outside the Amityville Horror house where Roy Defeo shot his family, the home in Ohio where Jeffrey Dahmer killed his first victim, and the former boarding house where kindly Dorothy Puente murdered men for their welfare checks.

"These sites are about more than just getting close to the raw thrill of murder; they can also humanize the victims and encourage us to imagine their plight."

A Zillow listing reveals the 2,170-square-foot home is set on a 1.92-acre lot, and is estimated to be worth $370,200. The home is where Dahmer murdered his first victim, Steven Mark Hicks.

According to reports, the 18-year-old Dahmer spotted Hicks hitchhiking to a rock concert. He was lured back to the home, where the teen was said to be staying alone at the time, with the promise of alcohol.

There, Dahmer bludgeoned the 19-year-old with a dumbbell, before strangling him.

A New York Times article, from 1991, went into further detail, saying: "Mr. Dahmer said he then dragged Mr. Hicks's body into the crawl space, dismembered it and put the pieces into garbage bags, which he buried in a shallow grave in the backyard.

"Fearing discovery, he said, he later dug up the bags, shattered the bones with a sledgehammer and scattered the pieces in a circle over a wooded ravine behind his house."

The article revealed Hicks' remains were later discovered by authorities after Dahmer was arrested.

It continued: "Officials said they found pieces of skull, ribs and vertebrae that might belong to Steven M. Hicks, a 19-year-old Coventry Township man who disappeared on June 18, 1978.

"The officials also said they found a "substantial quantity of blood" and a bloody handprint in the crawl space under Mr. Dahmer's former home in this small town northwest of Akron."

Dahmer killed most of his victims at his Milwaukee apartment, on North 25th Street, which was torn down the year after he was captured, in 1992.

But the Ohio home, built in 1952, remains standing. Dahmer lived at his grandmother's house, in West Allis, Wisconsin, and killed several of his victims here. That property is still standing, as is the Ambassador Hotel, in Milwaukee, the location of another murder.

Dahmer's parents reportedly purchased the house in 1968, and it was eventually bought by musician Chris Butler in 2005.

In an interview with Observer, a year after My Friend Dahmer was released in 2017, Butler revealed he would sometimes get interested parties coming by, just as the recent Netflix is inspiring people to do once more.

"We respectfully say it's a private residence, you're welcome to take pictures from the road... same with news crews.

"We have to let them shoot from the road, I can't stop that. I try to manage the interest, shall we say," Butler said. He added it "goes along with the territory."

Butler, a member of 1980s band The Waitresses, put the home up for sale in 2012 for $329,000, but later took it off the market, before relisting it in 2014, for $295,000, before once again withdrawing it from the market, according to Zillow figures.

He allowed the home to be transformed back into its 1970s-era décor, for filming of scenes from the 2017 movie.

Butler also spoke about the house's notoriety in the Observer interview, revealing the original door to the crawl space was still intact.

"The crawl space is definitely creepy, though. Apparently it lit up like Christmas when they sprayed that luminol stuff on the walls," he said.

And he himself looked for bones in the yard, until he read detectives "basically put every piece of dirt through a sieve."

Dahmer, who extensively photographed the dismemberment process of his victims, was killed in prison in 1994.

When police entered his apartment in Milwaukee, it was reported they found several severed heads in the fridge.

Newsweek contacted Butler for comment.