When Jeffrey was eight years old, he and his family moved to the small town of Bath Township, Ohio. Since Jeffrey didn’t have any friends there, he would spend most of his time in the woods behind their house. There he would mutilate and decapitate small animals, mostly dogs, cats, and squirrels. His parents worried but figured it was just a boy thing.

When Jeffrey started high school, everybody tried to keep their distance from him. They thought he was kind of strange because of the way he would talk and because he had a very short temper. After a while he learned that if he could drink with the best of them, he would fit in. He knew that if he would act different, such as creating a scene in a public place, people would watch him and he would be getting attention. Soon after, he became very dependent on alcohol and drank heavily every day. Jeffrey would like to trace around bodies with chalk on the class room floor. When he started doing this, his classmates knew that he was a little more than just odd. Jeffrey was an average student, he had some weak subjects but he also was very good in others. On June 1978, Jeffrey graduated from Revere High School.

Jeffrey was very racist and once said that if he could kill all blacks he would. It is unknown what made him so racist, although much of his family was. It was later found out that Jeffrey never killed a white man or boy. He also never killed a woman or girl. He would later kill African Americans, Mexicans, and Laotions.