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The symptoms of madness, of frenzy and mental
disease could not have been clearer, but they would give rise to much debate
when Dahmer came to trial.
As police officers collected the evidence, cataloguing and photographing the
exhibits before sending them to be stored for possible use in evidence, the
telephone in Dahmer's flat rang. It was Dr Lionel Dahmer PhD, his father,
wondering why he had not been able to reach Jeff for the past three days.
It fell to detective Michael Dubis to tell the bewildered man, who was calling
Pennsylvania, that he could expect a visit from police officers in the coming
day.
Lionel Dahmer was (and still is) an industrial chemist, working at his
laboratory in Pennsylvania five days a week and returning to his home near
Cleveland, Ohio at weekends. he and his second wife Shari would bear the
inconceivable burden over the coming months of coping with the knowledge that
their son and stepson was an apparently merciless killer. They were a
well-matched couple, he silent and deferential, quiet in voice and manner, she
warm and demonstrative, with a head of curly blond hair, bright red lips and a
broad smile. His passion, apart from chemistry, was tennis, hers horses.
Neither of them remotely prepared for the searching psychological examination
that they would have to undergo in order to aid in understanding the deranged
personality of Jeffrey. Lionel, as the father, would have to endure it,
Shari would give him the strength to do so. When Joyce Flint, Lionel's
first wife and Jeffrey's mother, was informed of the charges against her son,
she retreated behind her curtains at her new home in California. |
 |
[ Jeffrey Dahmer ]
In street clothes, rather than the orange prison garb worn at his
trial, Dahmer is escorted into court to hear the charges against him. At
the first hearing, he was indicted with four killings, but this would soon
increase to a total of 15. |
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The facts were cruel enough. Jeffrey Dahmer
had killed 17 men and faced 15 charges of murder. The first two, Steven
Hicks and Steven Tuomi, could not be included in the indictment, Hicks because
he was murdered in Ohio, outside the jurisdiction of the Wisconsin court, Tuomi
because there were no remains and no recollection of how he perished.
Dahmer faced the Hicks charge in Ohio, months after his televised Milwaukee
trial.
Although the first victim, Steven Hicks, had died as long ago as 1978, the 15
named victims had all died in the three and a half years between January 1988
and July 1991, seven in the last three months. Eleven of them were black
men. |
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[ Jeffrey Dahmer ]
The official police photographs revealed Dahmer as a tall, somewhat
pallid individual with sandy hair, but no major distinguishing features other
than his rather chilling lack of expression. |
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|
The police would later face censure over their
handling of the case, which was said to have racial overtones. In fact,
Jeffrey Dahmer himself has come to the notice of the police before on a number
of occasions, but without attracting and real suspicion.
To the embarrassment and consternation of the Milwaukee authorities, it
transpired that officers had once interviewed Dahmer when a dead body was lying
in the adjacent room. Worse still, they had frog marched one of his
victims off the street and delivered him back into the murderers arms. |
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[ The Search for Evidence ]
The painstaking
search for evidence extended all around the apartment building and would soon
broaden to take in Dahmer's former addresses as the extent of his killings
became known. |
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Nothing overly terrible happened to the infant
Jeffrey Dahmer which could account for his appalling disintegration into
repeated criminal homicide.
His parents were not impoverished, he did not grow up in a slum, he was no
beaten or abused or subjected to premature sexual interference.
Indeed, his father was a hardworking, professional man, in ever respect normal
and responsible, with a past unsullied by any peculiarity of conduct which might
have influenced his eldest son. His mother was neurotic and highly strung,
but in no way given to brutal treatment of her offspring, if anything, she
punished herself for her perceived shortcomings and unhappiness rather than
anyone else. |
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[ Jeffrey Dahmer ]
Pictured in the Revere High School yearbook, the seventeen year old
Jeffrey Dahmer appeared good looking and studious. In reality, he was and
apathetic student and a loner given to drinking bouts. He was only a year
away from his first killing. |
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The neglect of Jeffrey Dahmer was much more subtle
and insidious and so invisible that even a trained observer might have found it
virtually impossible to spot. It is also absolutely certain that neither
parent realised that any kind of neglect was occurring. Joyce Dahmer was
so overwhelmed by considerations of her own fragile health that she inevitably
made it clear that she came first and that every effort she be directed towards
keeping her content.
The first manifestation of this involved her giving up breast-feeding the infant
who had already become so used to feeding in this natural way. It also
involved her spending much of her time in bed, day as well as night, and leaving
Jeffrey to amuse himself in solitary pursuits. This had the effect of
making the infant feel that contact with him somehow was harmful to his mother,
and that he should keep away from her. By extension, he also kept away
from everyone else.
As for his father, Lionel, Jeffrey barely knew him at first, since he was away
for days on end. When he did reappear, it was to minister to his wife, to
lavish her with attention and remove burdens from her shoulders.
Inevitably, this further reinforced in the little boy's subconscious that it was
her wellbeing that mattered and his that was at best a secondary matter.
Gradually, he felt that to impinge his own personality or needs upon the family
would be to upset the delicate balance. So he stifled hem, and withdrew
into quiet rumination. He soon became unreachable.
At this point it might have been possible to see the dangers of his isolation,
and some primary school teachers did worry about it. Without being
clinically autistic, Jeffrey showed all the signs of chronic autism - the
inability to notice other people or respond to them, deadness in the eyes, lack
of any natural smile and apparent all conquering self sufficiency.
Whereas with a true autistic, these signs indicate a diagnoses of emotional
deprivation, in his case they were pointers to self protection and the
conviction that emotional contact was dangerous. He willfully rooted out
the emotional health with which he had been born, and took on many
characteristics of an autistic for fear that the consequences of allowing his
own personality to blossom might be deleterious. He took refuge in the
safety of anonymity and blankness.
Jeffrey's friendships were all superficial and heartless. On the few
occasions when his natural needs did surge up, they were met with disappointment
which he had always presumed was his lot and that confirmed he had been right to
keep himself distant from others. |
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[ Jeffrey Dahmer ]
Dahmer's drinking bouts were frequently carried to excess. An
inherited weakness, these joyless sessions often seemed to be Dahmer's way of
providing an escape from reality. |
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|
One such occasion was his rejection by the teacher
to whom he once gave some tadpoles. Similarly, his attachment to pets,
having begun as a natural search for affection, soon passed into a cold,
affectionless curiosity about the animal as a working machine. Only his
loyal pet dog was permitted to get close enough to be absolved from the general
enmity. No person ever got within a mile.
The teenage Jeffrey was a desiccated soul, uncommunicative to the point of
silence. Like others of his age, he did occasionally smoke marijuana in
company, but he would not relax as a result. Instead, he became weird and
began to chant, playing the fool in a manic manner. Unlike most such
manifestations, this was the opposite of a claim for attention, it was a warning
to keep away.
Consequently, nobody really touched him - he was almost literally untouchable.
He had a few superficial friends at Junior High School, but there is little
evidence in his growing years of a kiss, a cuddle, a warm embrace, an arm around
the shoulder, a lurch towards companionship, only a desultory, dry attempt at
masturbation with a neighbourhood boy. An arranged date for the senior
prom, the end of term party, was the one time he went out with a girl.
His brother, David, whose birth and presence in the family had no effect upon
Jeffrey whatever, as he was already by then disconnected, recalled that whenever
Jeffrey felt frustrated by their parents quarrels, he would disappear into the
woods and could be heard loudly hurling an axe at a tree trunk. Even his
anger was unshared. |
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[ Dahmer's First Date ]
When
Dahmer was 18 and in his graduation year, two schoolmates arranged a date for
the high school prom, the official school dance that everyone was expected to
attend. It was arranged that he would escort the 16 year old Bridget
Geiger, who was keen enough to go along with the idea, as she was attracted to
his boyish good looks - despite being concerned about Dahmer's reputation for
drinking. Dahmer was completely inexperienced with girls but as it was
unthinkable not to attend the dance, he, too, went along with the plan.
The date was a complete disaster When Dahmer picked Bridget up, he wasn't
wearing the compulsory formal jacket and was so painfully shy that he couldn't
even pin a buttonhole onto her dress. Once at the dance, he abandoned his
date and went out drinking. When he returned, he persuaded Bridget to
leave the dance and drove her home two hours before she was due back. |
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The break-up of his parents' marriage had an
unseen influence upon his character, not the normal one of resentment or
bitterness or misery, but the renewed conformation that emotional contacts were
to be avoided at all costs. A second influence was practical, in that it
left him alone in the house at the time of his most explosive vulnerability,
when the murderous impulses within him were reaching their apogee. In a
sense, his parents' separation directly led to the murder of Steven Hicks, not
because it upset him, but gave him the opportunity to indulge his fantasies
undisturbed. The murder would not have happened if he had not been left
alone in the house. Jeffrey Dahmer's obsession with dissecting of animal
corpses and playing with their bones coincided with his emergence into puberty.
The need for sexual arousal became fused with the solitary pleasure of opening
up a body. They were thereafter never severed in their subversive
influence upon his psyche.
Two other influences must be considered. Dahmer's relief in alcohol was
not only a smothering of unpleasant truth (for he was intelligent enough to
recognise his own condition), but an inherited flaw. His grandfather had
been an alcoholic, and there was some evidence that his mother's dependence on
drugs was a manifestation of the same weakness, she may even have been
overfilled with pills and other drugs when she was carrying him.
Secondly, Dahmer's hernia operation at the age of four was crucial. It was
his first tactile experience with another human being - it was an invasion, and
it was a loss of power. It is no coincidence that the lower abdomen was
the area of his most gloating fascination in life, and of his sexual
gratification in death. The intestine was his only intimacy.
That there persisted some tiny drop of human feeling behind this huge armour was
nonetheless demonstrated by a memory of how much he had hated joy-riding with a
schoolmate in his teens.
The friend enjoyed running over stray dogs in the road. he would spot them
slowly with his headlights and then make straight for them at high speed, once
hitting four in one evening. Jeff was a reluctant passenger. he
hated the useless cruelty. Recalling one occasion when the car struck a
puppy, Dahmer said that he could never forget the frightened look in the puppy's
eyes just before it went hurtling over the bonnet. He said it sickened
him. |
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[ Dahmer's Taste for Killing ]
Although he
never killed an animal, the young Jeffrey Dahmer was fascinated by their
corpses. In his teens, finding a large dog's corpse one day, he
dismembered it in the woods. He also impales its head on a stick, where it
was discovered and photographed by a shocked neighbour. |
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|
Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer was born at 4.34pm at the
Evangelical Deaconess Hospital in Milwaukee on 21st May 1960. His parents,
Lionel and Joyce, were overjoyed with their first-born, and especially taken
with his luminously blue eyes. Lionel was a student at Marquette
University, working towards his degree in chemistry, and Joyce (known as
'Rocky') was a teletype machine instructor.
It had not, however, been an easy pregnancy, as Joyce, greedy for attention and
pity, had ceaselessly complained about noise from neighbours and driven herself
into such a state of tension that her muscles tightened alarmingly and Lionel
was obliged to move her in with his mother in the small township of West Allis.
Carrying Jeffrey had made her ill.
This was forgotten for a time, as the young couple doted on their son, Joyce
started a baby scrapbook in which she recorded Jeffrey's first steps, his first
accident, his first tooth, his first haircut, even his first scolding ('two pats
on the bottom'). But the time he took up seemed both to exhaust her and to
excite her resentment. She withdrew from him, spending a great deal of
time in bed recovering from the increasing weakness. And though she had
initially breast-fed her son, she abruptly ceased to do so, binding her breasts
in a kind of defiance. In later life, Dahmer would admit that he never found it
easy to cope with rejection.
Nor was Lionel a demonstrative father. Already absent in his laboratory
for much of the time, when he was at home he did the errands for his ailing
wife, sprang only brief moments for his son.
When he was not quite four years old, Jeffrey was subjected to a double hernia
operation which was to have catastrophic long term effects upon his developing
personality. he seems to have felt pain and fear and recalled that nobody
explained to him what was happening, or why. So one of his first intimate
contacts with another human being, more tactile that anything he had experienced
with his separately self absorbing parents, involved the feeling that hands had
invaded the privacy of his own body. The experience marked his
subconscious for ever.
'When I was a little kid I was just like anybody else,' he said.
To some extent this was true, in that he climbed apple trees and messed about in
coal dust, coming home filthy. But he was painfully timid, hardly ever
spoke and had no close friends. These characteristics would carry on well
into adulthood, when his conversation was confined to monosyllabic responses and
the people he knew were those he said hello to in the street. |
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|
[ Joyce Dahmer ]
Dahmer's
mother Joyce doted on her shy young son. But his parents' marriage was not
a happy one. Neighbours reported that they used to bicker, which Joyce was
demanding and given to self-pity. In later years her poor health was
supported by a cocktail of drugs. |
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|
From a very early age, however, he
manifested an interest in animals. At 18 months he had a pet turtle, with
which, according to his mother's scrapbook, he was 'very gentle'. Then
there was a squirrel which used to visit the windowsill and later a stray
nighthawk chick which he reared at home.
However, his interest in these creatures was different from that of other
children, although nobody could possibly have noticed its significance.
Instead of holding the animal in his arms to feel its warmth and its pulse, to
exchange affection which can bind different species in mutual regard, Jeffrey
would run his fingers over the body to feel where the bones were. He
wanted to know how the creature 'worked', for him it was an object of curiosity
- but an object nonetheless. It was of no more value than a machine.
A second son, David, was born to the Dahmers when Jeffrey was six. The
event caused no dramatic upset in his life, which was already becoming so
self-sufficient and remote that nothing impinged upon it, and brothers never
came close. Moreover, while family members would later question whether
Jeffrey's character had been genetically in-built, his younger brother never
showed any signs of abnormal personality or behaviour.
Until then family had lived in apartments, but now they moved to Ohio, where
they had a house at 4480 West Bath Road, surrounded by open forest where Jeffrey
could lose himself for hours without causing concern. He does not seem to
have sought emotional commitments from anyone. He once made a tentative
approached to a favoured teacher by presenting her with some tadpoles he had
found, but when she gave them to another boy he was so shocked that he poisoned
them with motor-oil.
As he grew towards puberty, his sinking isolation was confirmed. An early
sexual experiment with another boy was arid and joyless. He was know to
grin or grunt, but never to laugh in a heartfelt, abandoned manner. It was
as if he did not know how to connect, as if the threads which tied him to the
rest of mankind had been snipped off, setting him adrift.
Nor did Dahmer appear to mind very much. But the quiet country life of
Ohio afforded him new opportunities to indulge his interests in animals as
machines. Wild animals and domestic strays would frequently fall victim to
passing motorists and be found dead by the roadside. They were known as
'road-kills', and included foxes, dogs and possums, which Jeffrey started to
bring home. It became plain that he was not so much interested in the
death as in his ownership of the corpse. |
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[ Steven Hicks ]
Nineteen year
old hitchhiker Steven Hicks became Dahmer's first victim in June 1978. He
was on his way home from a rock concert when Dahmer picked him up in his
father's battered Oldsmobile. Dahmer took the young man back to his family
home, while the rest of the family was absent.
The two boys drank beer and
talked. When Hicks said he had to leave, Dahmer pleaded for him to stay.
Hicks said he couldn't, so rather than let his new friend leave, Dahmer hit him
on the head with a dumb-bell and then strangled him. Dahmer was tried
separately for this killing after his Milwaukee trial. |
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|
Nobody could know that his desire to see inside
the animal was the incipient growth of a necrophile. Sometimes he kept the
bones in the crawlspace beneath the house. He called them his
'fiddlesticks', and when he drew pictures of men, he depicted them as spindly,
fleshless, bony creatures devoid of expression. Oddly, his dog Frisky was
a regular companion on Jeffrey's trips into the woods. he does not seem to
have been curious as to what Frisky looked like inside.
The jogger who regularly passed down West Bath Road was a different matter.
Jeffrey fantasized what it would be like to hold him, touch him, open him up and
possess him. One night he took a baseball bat and lay in wait for the
hapless jogger. He intended to stun him and render him senseless, so that
he could do as he wished with the unresisting body. But that day the man
did not pass, and Jeffrey retreated indoors with his fantasy, fuelled by
relentless masturbation.
Dahmer had been drinking from the age of 14, and by 17 was regularly inebriated.
His mother's father had been an alcoholic, so drinking may have been a genetic
predisposition. More likely, however, the growing and dangerous friction
between his parents drove him to seek forgetfulness.
No doubt wondering where on earth his son's isolation would lead, Lionel began
spending more time with him, teaching him tennis, going on hikes. But it
was too little too late. Joyce and Lionel had spent the last few years in
perpetual argument. She insisted he sleep alone in the den, and took
increasing refuge in pills and medication.
Jeffrey recalled how contemplating his parents' miserable existence made him
determined never to marry (not that he was mentally suited for marriage anyway).
Eventually, Lionel moved out. Then Joyce took off with David (who seems to
have taken the family squabbles more calmly) and drove into Wisconsin.
Now, at 17, Jeffrey was physically, as well as emotionally and mentally,
isolated.
After a few days there was little food in the fridge and most of the liquor had
been exhausted. Jeffrey had no car of his own. One day in June 1978,
he went to see his father in the motel where he was staying (there being a court
order forbidding him access to the marital home), and asked to borrow the car to
go to the movies.
Jeffrey did not go to the movies. He drove along the country roads until
he saw a hitch-hiker, bare-chested in the summer heat, and offered him a lift.
The hitchhiker was Steven Hicks, who at 19 was only a year older than Jeffrey.
Although he was on his way to visit his girlfriend, he agreed to go home with
Jeffrey for a beer and a smoke, but after a couple of hours' desultory
conversation he said he should be getting along before it got dark. Dahmer
disappeared to the cellar. When he came back he was carrying a dumb-bell,
and with this he hit Steven Hicks until he fell unconscious. Then he
strangled him till he was dead, placing his ear to the boy's stomach and
listening to the churning of the sacred intestines.
The body was later hauled out to the crawlspace. The following day Dahmer
dismembered the corpse and masturbated before the severed head. Putting
the various limbs in black plastic bags, he drove off in the middle of the
night, intending to dump them in the ravine, but was stopped by a police car for
driving down the centre of the road. The officer shone his torch over the
bags on the back seat, and accepted Dahmer's explanation that they were stuffed
with garbage.
Dahmer went home and forced the remains down a drainage pipe in the back yard,
covering them with earth. It was not until three years later that he
retrieved the remains, smashed the skeleton against rocks and scattered its
bones in the woods. |
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[ Forensic Evidence ]
Using
chemicals that would reveal the presence of blood stains or other human remains,
detectives conducted a thorough search of the West Bath Road house. Traces
of the killing of Steven Hicks were still evident after thirteen years. |
|
|
The key to an understanding of Jeffrey Dahmer's
peculiar crimes, as well as of the stunted personality which was their source
and their centre, lay in the chronic inability to form any kind of relationship
with another human being.
Mutual human contact, whether it be in friendship, in love, in sex, or even in
conversation, was denied to him, so that he was always a distant, passive
observer on the sidelines of life, rather than an active participant in the
midst of it.
This derived from a detached childhood where he had leant no to demand to be
involved. As a result, connectedness had been seen as threatening, to
others as well as to himself. He therefore had no emotional hold on
anyone, nor anyone on him. Although fond of his grandmother in West Allis,
she was simply a landlady who had happened to be a relative, the relationship
was not demonstrative. Jeffrey Dahmer was entirely and disastrously
detached, adrift - he felt that he was not a part of anything.
Dahmer's conversation demonstrated this characteristic in vivid fashion.
He was never know to initiate talk. He merely responded, and with as few
words as possible. He was monosyllabic, passionless and dull. He did
not express an opinion, still less a preference, and seemed to regard the
purpose of speech as a means of imparting necessary information not as the
route towards a shared experience of fun and discovery. He gave nothing
away, so that people felt more remote after talking to him than they had done
before, his talk contrived to push them away rather than draw them in. He
was, in a word, unknowable. |
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[ Dahmer Interview ]
In 1993 Dahmer
took part in a televised interview filmed in prison. Talking freely and
openly about his crimes, he expressed regret for the suffering he had caused,
but not horror. Above all, he still felt the compulsion to kill. |
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|
However, this strange, unsmiling, shut-in
personality did have sexual urges. Because he could not understand the
mutuality of sex, he considered the body of another as a prop in his private
fantasy, and the illusion was horribly shattered if the body had a voice,
expressed a desire of its own or, still worse, was able to refuse. Hence
Dahmer carried the self-protection of fetishism to its ultimate conclusion.
The pioneering psychologist Alfred Adler wrote that the fetishist is fearful of
other people. Being unable to risk contact with another, the fetishist
will concentrate on something less troublesome, like a pair of shoes, a
belt, even a handbag, and transfer attention to this object instead of to the
person. Objects are much safer - they are unlikely to look on with scorn
or make judgments.
A particular kind of fetishist is the partialist, who homes in not on an
extraneous object but on a part of the person engaged in sexual activity, and
objectifies that part, investing it with all the attention of the libido.
Common manifestations of this, and on the whole utterly harmless, are the
fetishes for hair or feet.
But Dahmer's partialism was sinister. It concentrated upon the interior
workings of the person as a machine. The object of his attention was the
gurgling intestine and sometimes the thumping of the heart. He drugged
people and sent them to sleep in order to reduce them to nothing more than
objects with a heart and stomach. It was only then that he was able
to masturbate to satisfaction.
Significantly, his preference was for no-hirsute men, whose hairless chests and
abdomens enabled him to come closer to the objects within. Steven Hicks
was spotted on the highway because his shirt was off and his chest was clean.
And the fact that most of his victims were black had no racist overtone
whatever, it was that black men were more likely to have hairless chests. |
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[ Dahmer's Shrine ]
Dahmer drew
this sketch for the psychiatrists who examined him before his trial.
Complete with furniture found in his apartment, it shows the 'shrine' that
Dahmer was in the process of constructing - a means of cherishing his
'collection'. |
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|
Dahmer had never experienced normal shared emotion
or sex with anyone. He had graduated in his attentions from motionless
pictures in pornographic magazines to a motionless shop window mannequin to
motionless sleeping men in a sauna bathhouse. His partners always had to
be inert.
Finally, he made them truly inert in death. His necrophilia arose from a
perversion of the desire to keep the loved object. It was different in
degree, though not in essence, from Romeo's jumping into Juliet's tomb and
clutching her corpse to his breast. In Dahmer's case, it was not the
corpse itself that he wanted to keep, so much as particular bits of it.
But the fear of absolute loss was the same.
It was the fear of loss which led him to the ghastly experiment in creating
zombies, objectifying people to such an extent that they would be his dolls, his
possessions, and would be denuded of all identity and volition of their own.
As one of the psychiatrists at his trial boldly pointed out, each death was a
disaster for Dahmer too, another failure, another loss, another confirmation of
his destitution.
It led him to the disgraceful remark, when there was nothing left of Eddie
Smith, that it seemed such a waste not even to have been able to retain his
skull. The implication that it would have been less of a waste to
decapitate him indicates the depth of Dahmer's emotional vacuity.
There was another aspect to his depravity which rested on power. He
misunderstood the connections between human beings as based entirely on control,
perhaps because he had himself lost control of his own body when undergoing
surgery at the age of four.
His behaviour towards corpses 25 years later was in some ways almost an echo of
this operation, with himself as the one in control. Even the table on
which Dahmer had photographed corpses before eviscerating them could have
resembled an operating table.
Moreover, with the exception of Ernest Miller, who was about to recover
consciousness and whose throat he thereupon sliced, Dahmer killed through
strangulation. There is no more obvious way to exercise control than this,
for the applied pressure of fingers can release and bestow life as well as it
can stifle it.
When he was arrested, Jeffrey Dahmer had managed to keep two complete skeletons
and 11 heads or skulls. In his eyes, he had not lost everything. |
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[ Forensic Evidence ]
When Dahmer
was in the army, much of his spare time was spent in solitary pursuits including
cross-country walks and target practice. But his chief hobby was drinking
- a habit that could easily be indulged because soldiers were able to buy
alcohol at half-price. |
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|
Lionel and Joyce Dahmer were divorced in late
1978. Lionel's new friend Shari Jordan, a lady of firm decisions, said
that Jeffrey could not continue living in his aimless manner and enrolled him at
Ohio State University in Columbus, where he was to have majored in Business
Studies.
His one term there was entirely unproductive, mainly because he drank most of
the time. Calling on his son without warning, Lionel Dahmer found his room
strewn with empty liquor bottles. A fellow student recalled seeing Jeffrey
one day lying in the street in a drunken stupor.
Dahmer sold his own blood to get money for more drink, and slept through
lectures. After a watch and $120 were stolen from the dormitory block
where Dahmer lived, he cam under suspicion of the theft. The police
questioned him, but no charges were brought. None of Dahmer's classmates
were surprised when his grades were too poor to allow him to continue at the
University after his first term. Of course, nobody knew that he was in the
grip of a terrible mental turmoil and was haunted by the image of Steven Hicks.
Lionel and Shari were married on Christmas Eve 1978. Jeffrey did not
attend the wedding. His father had insisted he enlist in the army, and on
29th December he left for his training in Alabama. By May of he following
year he had qualified as a medic, and was posted to Baumholder, West Germany,
where he spent almost two years at the Battalion Aid Station.
During all that time, nobody got to know him, although it was well established
that he was sexually untried. His colleagues called him 'the orphan'.
By the beginning of 1982 it was obvious that Dahmer's drunkenness was making him
unfit for service, and he was prematurely, albeit honourable, discharged.
'Some day you'll hear of me again', he told his fellow soldiers as he left.
Nothing was proved, but it was later suggested that while he was in Germany,
Dahmer may have been behind several unsolved murders.
He went back to Ohio, determined to wipe out the past and make a new beginning
somehow. (It was then that he destroyed the remains of Steven Hicks.) |
|
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[ The German Connection ]
Shortly after
Dahmer's arrest, the German police re-opened the files on a series of unsolved
murders. They already believed that a series of seven deaths between 1979
and 1981 were the work of one man, but had never identified the suspect.
Some of the victims had been strangled while others had been stabbed - but in
each case, the Killer had mutilated the bodies after death.
The evidence for Dahmer's
involvement in the case was purely circumstantial, mainly based on the fact that
all seven murders took place within a 50km (30 mile) radius of Dahmer's army
base, beginning when he was posted there, and ending before he left Germany.
Two factors suggest that whoever was behind the German killings, it was not
Dahmer. Firstly he had been extremely open with the police in admitting
his crimes in America, but made no mention of any murders committed while
stationed overseas.
Secondly, all but one of the Rhineland killer's victims had been women - the
exception being a 74 year old man - whereas Dahmer's known victims were young
men.
In most cases there was no clear motive and even known prostitute Erika
Handschuh (pictured above), had not been sexually assaulted. The one
murder where there was evidence of a sexual assault was in any case against
Dahmer's typical pattern. One victim - a black American (pictured above
left) - was unidentified.
Despite the efforts of the police, the murders remained unsolved, and the case
against Dahmer was unproven. |
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His father, deeply disappointed in him, told him he could take a room at his
grandmother's house in West Allis, in the suburbs of Milwaukee. He was to
live with her for the next six years, and it was there that his final
disintegration began.
There is evidence that old Mrs Dahmer was a good influence and that he made
strenuous efforts to conquer the demons which consumed him. He found a job
at the Ambrosia Chocolate Factory, where his attendance and record were good.
His grandmother had meals ready when he came home, but otherwise left him to his
own private life in the basement without interference or niggling enquiry.
He accompanied her regularly to church and began reading the Bible with
assiduity. It was as if he was seeking to be cleansed. Still he
remained friendless and without ambition or drive of any sort.
One day a man dropped a note in his lap at the local library, offering a sexual
encounter. Dahmer did not accept, but the experience shook him and made
him realise that his evil inner self was still latent. Perhaps it was even
visible to others? From that moment he drifted into compliance with his
demon, and gradually dropped resistance.
Still he hope to avoid a descent into the hell which he had already once
inhabited. He stole a store dummy after closing house, took it home and
lay with it, fondling and caressing the cool plastic in mock imitation of the
closeness which he knew other people experienced. His grandmother did not
like the object in her house, so he got rid of it.
Dahmer frequented gay bars, but hardly spoke to anyone. Then he adopted a
habit which, had a psychiatrist been alerted to it, would have triggered severe
alarm. He started going to sauna baths where casual encounters in rest
cubicles were not frowned upon. But he was not looking for sex.
Smuggling alcohol and sleeping pills in with him, he drugged his partners
unconscious, then lay undisturbed with their inert bodies for several hours,
listening to their stomachs and their heartbeats. They were so motionless
they might have been dead. But one man had to be taken to hospital,
complaints were made and Dahmer was banned from the bath-house. |
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The murderer attempted a new experiment.
Frustrated that the bones sometimes retained their moisture, he placed Eddie's
skull in the oven and turned the temperature up to 120 degrees. After a
while he heard loud popping noises. The skull was exploding, flakes of
bone hitting the sides of the oven, so he had to abandon the idea and acidify
what was left. Two of Eddie's sisters sat and listened at the trial to
this account, clutching snapshots of Eddie as if to keep evil at bay. |
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[
David Thomas ]
23 year old
Thomas had a girlfriend and a 3 year old daughter, but agreed to go back to
Dahmer's apartment in exchange for money. After drugging him, Dahmer
decided he didn't want sex, but killed him anyway, taking photos of his severed
head that would be used in identification. |
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Dahmer met 14 year old Konerak Sinthasomphone in
the Grand Avenue shopping centre on 27th May, two months before his eventual
arrest. It was the assault on Konerak's brother Somsack that had resulted
in Dahmer's arrest three years earlier.
Dahmer already had a dead body on his bedroom floor at the time, the result of a
murder three days previously. He offered Konerak (known to his friends as
'Khum" or 'Kolak') $50 to pose and, after some hesitation, the boy accepted.
They took a bus together down Wisconsin Avenue. At the flat, Dahmer took
some pictures then gave Konerak the usual spiked drink, at which point he passed
out. Then he subjected the boy to his latest experiment, already tried on
two earlier victims and due to be used upon all the coming ones. |
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[
Curtis Straughter ]
19 year old
Curtis Straughter was killed on 18th February 1991. He started to succumb
to Dahmer's drugged drink during oral sex. Dahmer then strangled him.
Having dismembered the body and photographed it, he kept the skull. |
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Jeffrey Dahmer's new idea was to find a way of
keeping people with him without having to kill them. To this end, he would
need to remove their will-power and volition, even their sense of identity, and
reduce them to zombies. He though he could do this by drilling a hole in
the back of the cranium and injection hydrochloric acid into the frontal lobes
of the brain. |
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[ Errol Lindsay ]
Errol Lindsay,
19, died on 7th April 1991, after accepting Dahmer's offer of money for posing.
Dahmer strangled him, had oral sex with the body and then dismembered it,
keeping the skull. |
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He therefore bored a hole into the unconscious
Konerak's skull, left him sleeping, and went out to get some beers.
He returned to find the naked boy in the street, surrounded by a knot of
worried, gesticulating women. Konerak could not explain what happened to
him, for the experiment on his head had made him unsteady, drowsy and incapable
of forming speech. He seemed desperate to get away, but no blood was
visible.
One of the women had telephoned the police, who arrived in their squad car just
as Dahmer was about to reclaim his captive. The women were agitated and
noisy, they seemed hysterical in comparison with Dahmer's cold calm, and their
concerns did not carry conviction with the white policemen. Dahmer
explained his friend was drunk, that he often behaved this way, and that he
would take care of him. The women protested that Konerak was under age,
but Dahmer insisted he was 20 and gave a false name for him with the excuse that
his identity papers were at a different address. They were, he said,
homosexual lovers. |
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[
Tony Hughes ]
On 24th May
1991, Dahmer murdered 31 year old Tony Hughes. He offered the man $50 to
pose for photographs, but he had to write the request down because Hughes was a
deaf mute. Dahmer kept the body lying around his apartment for several
days before beginning the process of dismembering and dissolving it in acid. |
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Boldly Dahmer gave his own correct name and showed
his employment card at Ambrosia. To the consternation of the ladies who
had tried to save Konerak from an uncertain danger, the policemen took the boy,
one by each arm, and marched him back to Dahmer's flat. He attempted one
last struggle. The officers went into the flat, but not to the bedroom
where Tony Hughes' bloated corpse was lying. As they left, one said,
'Well, you just take care of him.' Shortly after the door closed, Konerak
was strangled. |
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[ Konerak Sinthasomphone ]
Konerak
Sinthasomphone was the second of two brothers to encounter Dahmer. The son
of a Laotian refugee, he succumbed to Dahmer's offer of $50 cash to pose for
photographs.
Dahmer picked up Konerak in the
Grand Avenue shopping mall, a popular meeting place, rather than in one of the
gay bars that he had previously favoured.
Konerak was drugged and experimented upon before being strangled and
dismembered. |
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In the last weeks, Dahmer was dismissed from his
his job, given one week's notice to leave his flat, and ran out of money.
One might have expected him to clear the evidence with which his apartment was
littered, but he did the opposite. In utter abandon he went on prowling,
enticing, killing and dismembering, until there were two headless corpses in the
bathtub and one whole body on the bed. Still he was able to sleep amid
this human debris. |
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[ Jeremiah Weinberger ]
Dahmer also
found his next victim in Chicago in a gay club on Wells Street, 23 year old
Jeremiah Weinberger went to Milwaukee with Dahmer after friend named Ted Jones
advised him to accept. 'Sure, he looks ok,' said Jones. 'Who knows what
serial killers look like,' he ruefully observed to reporters later. |
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Jeremiah Weinberger, who like Dahmer and may have
been ready to stay with him, had hot water injected into his head instead of
acid and lingered alive for two days in that sorry condition. On six
occasions, Dahmer prepared meals with the flesh of a victim. Talking a few
weeks after his arrest, Jeffrey Dahmer said, 'Obviously my desires were
beastly.' |
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[ Matt Turner ]
Dahmer picked up 20 year old
Matt Turner at a Gay Pride Parade in Chicago on 30th June 1991. They
travelled back to Milwaukee, where Dahmer murdered the aspiring model. His
head was found in a plastic bag in Dahmer's freezer. |
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Jeffrey Dahmer waived his right to a first trial,
which would normally establish whether or not he killed anyone, because he never
sought to deny that people had died at his hands. So proceedings went
directly to the second trial to determine whether he was legally responsible for
those deaths.
Now lawyers would have to grapple with one of the fundamental mysteries of
humanity: does freedom of choice exist at all times, or are there any occasions
when people are the tools of a tyrannical, chaotic nature?
Did Dahmer suffer a hideous compulsion which he was powerless to control?
Or did he simply choose not to control it?
This is the essence of morality, and is
ultimately a philosophical problem, not a legal one. But the law has had
to find a way of defining it in order for justice to stand any chance of being
done. |
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[ Oliver Lacy ]
On 15th July Dahmer lost his
job at the chocolate factory. The same day he strangled 23 year old Oliver
Lacy at his apartment, sodomizing the body after death. |
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The origin of the insanity defence is the idea
that there can be an absence of free will. Lord Hale established the
principle in 1736 - 'where there is a total defect of the understanding, there
is no free act of the will'.
No civilized society holds a mad person, an idiot or an infant responsible for
their conduct. But juries are understandably reluctant to let wicked
people take advantage of the 'excuse' of madness. The debate as to what
constitutes madness has never been fully resolved.
In 1843 the secretary to the British Prime Minister was murdered by Daniel
McNaughten, who was then acquitted by reason of insanity. There was such a
public outcry that the House of Lords asked the judges to come up with a
workable definition of insanity once and for all. The result was the
McNaughten Rules, under which a criminal is not held responsible if he either
does not know the nature and quality of his acts, or does not know that they are
wrong. Every ruling since then has been a variation on this theme.
The McNaughten Rules remained on the statute book in England until 1957, and are
still the only yardstick of insanity in 16 of the 50 American states. |
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[ Joseph Bradehoft ]
25 year old Joseph Bradehoft
was Dahmer's final victim. Bradehoft, half Native American, was a married
man with two children who was planning to move to Milwaukee with his family in
search of work. Dahmer offered him some money to pose for photographs.
After engaging in oral sex, Bradehoft was killed. It was 19th July, just
three days before the serial killer's arrest. |
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Dahmer would probably not have met this definition
of insanity, for he knew what he was doing and that it was wrong. Perhaps
this is insufficient. If you 'know' that it is wrong to squeeze the life
out of somebody, but not see why it should matter, then you do not truly
understand the wrongness.
In 1962, the American Law Institute tried to take account of this in the Model
Penal Code: 'A person is not responsible [if] he lacks substantial capacity
either to appreciate the wrongfulness of his conduct or conform his conduct to
the requirements of the law.' This applied at the Dahmer trial, but the
jury had to decide the meaning of 'substantial' and 'appreciate'.
The prosecution and defence broadly agreed that there was something deeply wrong
with Jeffrey Dahmer. But the prosecution would claim that it did not
amount to a mental disease and did not rob him of free will, while the defence
insisted disease had made him into an automaton.
What neither could countenance, because the narrow legal definition would not
allow them to, was the possibility that one could perform sanely and
sequentially towards an insane purpose. |
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[ Defending Dahmer ]
Gerald Boyle, the lawyer who
defended Dahmer at his trial for multiple murder in 1992, had also been
responsible for the defence when Dahmer was charged with assault back in 1989.
At the earlier trial Boyle successfully argued that the attack on Somsack
Sinthasomphone was a one-off that would never happen again, and Judge William
Gardner rejected the prosecution's demand for a five year prison sentence,
imposing a probation order instead.
At the murder trial, because Dahmer had already confessed to the killings, Boyle
advised his client to plead guilty but insane. The jury would ultimately
reject the plea, finding Dahmer guilty on all counts. |
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Dahmer was capable of holding a job,
cooking a meal or catching a bus, he could also buy and fix locks to stop people
leaving his apartment, and a large drum in which to acidify their remains.
All this clearly demonstrated the cool, logical thinking of a sane man.
Everyone agreed that Dahmer suffered from various mental defects but, in the
end, the jury determined they were not substantial enough to render him insane.
But while Jeffrey Dahmer may have been legally sane, he was also as demented as
it was possible to be.
By declining to envisage this madness, the jury in fact declared that he was
simply evil, which is to avoid saying anything at all. As Dr Lionel Dahmer
said to Brian Masters, who had been present throughout the trial, 'They have
just told me that I sired the Devil'. |
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[ Lionel and Shari ]
Dahmer's father, Lionel and his second wife Shari sat in court throughout the
hearings. Although exonerated by the psychiatrists, Lionel was inevitably
deeply affected by his son's crimes.
After his arrest Dahmer's
natural parents and stepmother were inevitably left to search their memories for
where they might have gone wrong in his upbringing. 'Every parent should
realise that there, but for the grace of god, go I,' commented his stepmother
Shari.
But Dahmer himself told them they should not blame themselves, and that he hoped
to sit down and talk things through with them after the trial. Shari
Dahmer told reporters, 'Jeff has told me that nothing more could have been done
for him. He doesn't know why he did these terrible things. He told
me if he'd been caught after his first murder in 1978, it would have been a
blessing.' |
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For the prosecution, Dr Fred Fosdal pointed out
that Dahmer was odd, but not ill and that most of the young men had died
paradoxically because Dahmer had liked them. He agreed that Jeffrey Dahmer
was the most cooperative defendant he had encountered in 20 years, and was not
at all deceitful. Like most of his colleagues (five out of the six who had
taken the stand), he said that Dahmer suffered from a mental disease. But
only Becker and Friedman looked for the man behind the monster.
Becker had identified the child in him and Friedman had lamented the waste.
He had gone further, and come close to hinting at the profound sense of grief,
of loss, that Dahmer might have experienced with each death he caused.
Dahmer's crazy wish to prolong a relationship through murder had obviously been
doomed, and he had been left each time with the evidence of his total failure
and the confirmation of his complete isolation.
None of this would wash with the last expert witness, the celebrated Dr Park
Dietz, who had testified in the trial of John Hinckley III for the attempted
assassination of President Reagan, and was know to charge very high fees in
murder cases. Prim, icy, authoritative, he dealt with each court of murder
by addressing himself directly to the jury instead of to the person asking him
questions, and by telling them exactly what they should think.
This amounted to the fact that Jeffrey Dahmer knew what he was doing and allowed
nothing to stand in his way. He was conscious, able, responsible and
capable of careful planning at all times. There was no evidence of mental
disease. By the time he had reached the final two murders, Dahmer was
obviously out of control, Dietz conceded, but this was as the result of
excessive alcohol. Gerald Boyle asked the doctor whether this implied
that, had Dahmer stopped drinking, he would have stopped killing? Dietz
had no reply to this.
Three people who had crossed Dahmer's path and survived gave graphic evidence of
his method of seduction and his unnerving quietness. One of them Luis
Pinet, had actually returned to visit him a second time, even though on the
first occasion he had been assaulted and held captive. He confirmed what
both Tracy Edwards and police officers had told the court, namely the door of
Dahmer's apartment was festooned with locks and security devices, intended, as
it was now apparent, not so much to keep people out as to keep them in.
The jury went out on 14th February 1992, and reached their verdict the following
day. Jeffrey Dahmer was found guilty on each charge and sentenced to over
nine centuries in prison. Before sentence was passed the victims' families
were afforded the chance to address the judge and plead for revenge. One,
the mother of deaf-mute Tony Hughes, was proudly dignified in grief, and some of
his friends signed to celebrate his memory.
Then Dahmer himself addressed the court with a prepared speech of apology for
the pain that he had caused, and was permitted five minutes with his father and
stepmother before removed from public view forever. The television cameras
shut down as he was lead away.
Confined to cell 648 in the east wing of Columbia Correctional Institute,
prisoner 177252 Jeffrey Dahmer lived in some comfort. The single 2.5 x 3
metre cell contained a colour TV and radio-cassette player. he had a two
hour work detail each day, earning about £2 for cleaning the toilet block.
But despite being baptized a Christian in May 1994, Dahmer entertained the
thoughts of suicide and was treated with the antidepressant drug Prozac.
He had also been caught carrying a knife, which he claimed was for his own
protection. In July 1994 a fellow inmate, Cuban Osvoldo Durruthy, had
attempted to slash his throat with a razor blade embedded in the handle of a
toothbrush.
On the morning of 28th November 1994, Jeffrey Dahmer went to carry out his work
detail in the showers of the prison gym and was left for some 20 minutes during
which he was not under direct supervision. Dahmer was found by his guards,
lying in a blood spattered shower room suffering from extensive head wounds.
He had been severely beaten about the head with a broom handle and battered
against a wall. Despite being rushed to the nearby Devine Savior Hospital,
he was pronounced dead around an hour later. Jesse Anderson, a fellow
member of Dahmer's work detail, had also been attacked and killed.
Dahmer's assailant, fellow inmate, 25 year old Christopher Scarver, claimed that
he was the 'Son of God' and had been given divine orders to carry out the
murder. He had received a life sentence in 1992 for an execution sytle
killing and would not be due for parole until 2042. Scarver was charged
with both killings and referred for psychiatric tests. Various motives
were claimed by Scarver. One theory was that the killing was racially
motivated, despite Dahmer's own claims that it was coincidental that most of his
victims were black. |
