I was Jeffrey Dahmer’s neighbour – we would find cats impaled on trees, dog heads on spikes & he dissolved bones in acid

HORRIFIED neighbours of Jeffrey Dahmer said the killer's fascination with the dead and rotting chillingly began at an early age.

Locals who shared a neighbourhood with the boy who grew up into a callous murderer told how cats would be found impaled on trees and dog heads on spikes just yards from his home.

The family moved from Wisconsin to Ohio when Dahmer was just a child - and soon after pets began to disappear from their gardens.

According to the kids who lived on his street, he developed an "intense interest" in dead animals from a young age - starting off with insects and then "road kill".

Never in their wildest dreams did they imagine that sick obsession would spiral to humans.

Dahmer would disturbingly chop up animals and keep them in a series of jars in what he called a "hut" at the back of his family's home.

He and his pals would walk the country roads of Bath Township on the hunt for chipmunks, hogs and other critters that had been run over.

One neighbour told Arizona Republic in 1991: "He would collect these animals, dismembers them, separate them by body parts and put them in jars.

"The hut had tons and tons of jars of animals and pieces of animals. And he seemed to be fascinated by the decomposition."

In Dahmer's time on the block, numerous reports were made of cats and dogs disappearing.

Around the time Dahmer was 15, his neighbour Jim Klippel made a grisly discovery just 300 yards from his home.

He told how he and his girlfriend found a dog's head impaled on a stick, with its carcass - skinned and gutted - nailed to a tree.

Klippel told the paper: "About 100 yards away, there had been a large fire and 13 little fires around it.

"It looked so much like a cult worship that it scared us to death."

Eric Tyson, who grew up across the street from Dahmer, revealed similar horrors.

He said the sicko had an animal burial ground to the side of his home, with graves and little crosses.

Tyson added: "A number of neighbours recalled seeing animals, like frogs and cats, impaled or staked to trees."

Dahmer's own family were aware of his abnormal passion, and his dad Lionel told how he was "oddly thrilled" by the sound of animal bones dropping into a bucket when helping to clear under their home.

At just ten years old, he asked his dad over dinner what would happen if chicken bones were dropped in bleach.

His bizarre obsession with animals didn't stop after his teenage years, however.

In his early 20s, he moved in with his paternal grandmother in Milwaukee.

He stayed there for several years, until she one day complained about a foul smell coming from the garage to her son.

'THIS IS WEIRD'

Dahmer confessed: "I just had too much time on my hands and I just wanted to see what chemicals would decompose the chicken I bought."

His dad replied: "God, Jeff, this is strange. This is weird."

Dahmer used his twisted methods on his victims, chopping them up and even pouring acid onto their brains after drilling holes into their skulls.

He  and boys from 1978 to 1991.

Dahmer would cut most of his victims up and store body parts in his freezer as sick trophies, in a grim reflection of what he did with animals, even eating bits of flesh to fulfil his depraved urges.

He would lure his victims - almost all of them from ethnic minority or LGBT communities - back to his apartment, often offering to pay them in return for nude photographs.

Once there, he would drug their drinks before carrying out his evil acts.

He later told the court how once drugged, he would drill a tiny hole into some of his victims' skulls "just enough to open a passageway to the brain".

Dahmer said he would then inject their brains with hydrochloric acid to induce a "zombie-like state".