American Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  OFFICER: Ma’am, like I explained to you, it’s all taken care of. It’s as positive as I can be. I can’t do anything about somebody’s sexual preferences in life.

  WOMAN: Well no, I’m not saying anything about that, but it appeared to be a child. This is my concern.

  OFFICER: No, he’s not.

  WOMAN: He’s not a child?

  OFFICER: No, he’s not. OK? It’s a boyfriend-boyfriend thing and he’s got belongings at the house where he came from. He’s got pictures of himself and his boyfriend, and so forth.

  WOMAN: Oh, I see.

  OFFICER: OK?

  WOMAN: OK, I’m just, you know, it appears to have been a child, that was my concern.

  OFFICER: I understand. No, he’s not.41

  The optics of this encounter are obviously not great for the Milwaukee PD. In their defense, they claimed that there was no “probable cause” at the time to search Dahmer’s bedroom without a warrant and that out of respect to the gay community, police were responding to the incident as a “domestic dispute” as they would with a heterosexual couple. They claimed no particular racial discrimination against the black women who reported Dahmer, a white man, nor discrimination against the Laotian Konerak, other than claiming that it was difficult for them to estimate the age of a young Asian male. The “delousing” comment was said to be par for the course, that police officers frequently have to delouse themselves after having physical contact with street people. While that might be true, the officer did not actually go in for delousing. It was apparently a wisecrack. The bottom line is that the police officers did not make the time to confirm Konerak’s identity or age and handed the fourteen-year-old boy back into the hands of a serial killer. Nor did they radio in Dahmer’s name for a criminal record check, which would have revealed the recent sexual assault and enticement of a child convictions—and that the victim was Konerak’s brother. Not only could they have saved Konerak, but four more victims would not have been murdered had Dahmer been apprehended that night.

  As soon as the police left his apartment, Dahmer injected another syringe full of acid into Konerak’s head, but instead of making him more compliant, it killed him. Dahmer proceeded to dismember and “process” Konerak’s and Hughes’s bodies, taking a day off from work at Ambrosia Chocolate. Police found Konerak’s head preserved in the freezer, while Hughes’s boiled skull was found in the filing cabinet.

  After this close encounter with the police, Dahmer paused for a month.

  * * *

  —

  On June 30, Dahmer attended the Gay Pride Parade in Chicago, where he met twenty-year-old Matt Cleveland Turner. He persuaded Turner to return with him to Milwaukee. He drugged and strangled Turner and dismembered and decapitated him, putting some of his remains into the freezer.

  On July 5, Dahmer returned to Chicago, where he encountered in a gay bar twenty-three-year-old art school student Jeremiah B. Weinberger, a half–Puerto Rican, half-Jewish man. Weinberger actually liked Dahmer and readily agreed to return with him to Milwaukee. They made out on the one-and-a-half-hour bus ride from Chicago. But by now, Dahmer was oblivious to whether his victims wanted to leave or not. He was keeping them all. After drugging Weinberger, he drilled a hole into his cranium, but instead of acid, he injected boiling water in an attempt to “cook off” his free will. At first it seemed to work. Dahmer said, “He woke up at the end of the day, the next morning, and he was sort of groggy and everything. He talked, it was like he was dazed and I thought I would be able to keep him that way.” Dahmer said there was no bleeding or effusion from the hole drilled into his cranium. “He was walking around, going to the bathroom, but I had to go to work the second night, at the end of the second day, and he was still walking around so I gave him another dose of pills and another shot of boiling water in the same hole.”

  When Dahmer came home from work, he found Weinberger was dead. He took photographs as he decapitated Weinberger and put his head into the freezer. He then filled the bathtub with cold water and bleach and put Weinberger’s headless torso into the water, where it soaked for a week. Dahmer continued showering next to the torso floating at his feet.

  “He Stated That He Ate Only the People That He Really Liked”

  On July 12, with his freezer jammed with heads and body parts and a torso floating in the bathtub, Dahmer purchased the fifty-seven-gallon plastic chemical drum, which he rolled into his bedroom. He brewed and brined three torsos and other remains in a chemical concoction, a process he’d been mastering since he was a ten-year-old collecting roadkill.

  Dahmer’s life was beginning to unravel beyond the gravitational pull of his ability to appear entirely harmless.

  And yet what does he do? He kills two more.

  On July 15, Dahmer encountered another big love. Twenty-four-year-old Oliver Joseph Lacy was a bodybuilder and had that perfect body that Dahmer lusted for. Dahmer lured him to his apartment with the photo-posing gambit. He promised to pay Lacy more if he’d let him rub and massage his body. He eventually drugged him and strangled him with the leather strap. Then he butchered Lacy and ate parts of him, wrapping other parts in plastic bags and putting them in the freezer for later.

  According to the police interview notes:

  He states that the victim, whose right bicep he had eaten, was one that he cared for and the individual had big biceps. He stated that he put Crisco on the bicep, softened it up with a meat tenderizer, and then fried it in a skillet. He states he also saved this individual’s heart in the freezer, and a portion of an arm from the black male that he had met at a bookstore about one year ago. He states he did intend to consume these parts. . . .

  We asked him if he had eaten the body parts, just plain. He stated that he would use salt, pepper and A-1 Steak sauce on them. He stated that the reason he ate these parts was because he was curious but then it was because he wanted to make them a part of him. He stated that this way he could keep these people with him. He stated that he ate only the people that he really liked and wanted them to be a part of him or with him all the time. . . .

  We asked him why he had not informed us of eating the various body parts when he first stated that he only ate the bicep. He stated that he did not want to talk about it, because it was not very appealing and he did not want us to think less of him.42

  Dahmer was so engrossed in butchering and eating Lacy that he never made it to work that day.

  Again.

  Ambrosia Chocolate suspended him for absenteeism, pending a final decision.

  The next day, July 18, Dahmer went to see his probation officer to complain about everything going wrong in his life. She sent him to see a doctor, who prescribed antidepressants. Dahmer was contemplating suicide. Building management was getting complaints about the foul odors emanating from Dahmer’s apartment, and he was warned that he would be evicted before the end of July. Where was he to go with his cache of heads, torsos and severed penises?

  Dahmer was only thirty-one, but he had traveled an old man’s measure of madness. His unraveling secret life was finally bankrupted in those two ways that Hemingway had described how bankruptcy happens: gradually and then suddenly.

  I can do no better than Brian Masters in describing the end:

  The scene at Apartment 213 in that week from 12 to 19 July was more lurid than Giotto’s vision of hell on the wall of the Scrovegni chapel in Padua, which depicts devils munching on the intestines of the fallen. When Oliver Lacy was being massaged in one room, the headless body of Jeremiah Weinberger was floating in a bath of cold water and bleach next door. Dahmer was obliged to take a shower with two corpses in the tub. He took one photograph of Matt Turner in a standing position after death, because rigor mortis had set in and he was able to position the body properly. Other pictures show a headless Oliver Lacy hanging by a strap from the bar of the shower curtain, and the same mutilated corpse, also with
the rib-cage exposed, lying on top of the decapitated body of Weinberger. Both heads were separately preserved in the fridge and freezer, along with two others. A bag containing internal organs was stuck to the bottom of the freezer. Hearts were in the fridge, and a whole bicep, large enough to cover a plate, had been fried and eaten. The drum in the bedroom contained the remains of three people.43

  On July 19, Ambrosia Chocolate formally fired Dahmer. It was the end. Later that same day, Dahmer picked up Joseph Arthur Bradehoft, a twenty-five-year-old father of three kids from Minnesota trying to eke out a living in Milwaukee. He accepted Dahmer’s offer to pose for photographs back at his apartment. Dahmer strangled him and kept his corpse in bed with him, sleeping and cuddling with it for two days. It was extra hot that July, and the air-conditioning did not work well in his bedroom. Dahmer woke up on the morning of July 21 and pulled back the blanket to find Bradehoft’s head crawling with maggots. Dahmer decapitated him in the bathtub and scraped the maggots off into the toilet. He put the decaying head into the freezer compartment, where police would later find it. His dismembered torso was put into the blue chemical drum with the other two torsos and severed heads.

  Serial killer Dennis Nilsen later commented on Dahmer’s final frenzy of killing, “Each one seemed to be its own last time.” Nilsen argues that the term “serial killer” is inaccurate because it implies an intention to repeat. “You might as well call Elizabeth Taylor a serial bride,” he wrote.44

  Three days later, Dahmer brought Tracy Edwards to his apartment, and after Edwards escaped into the street with handcuffs dangling off one wrist, it was over for Dahmer—his secret life bankrupted that very night—with police trooping through his charnel house of an apartment.

  The Last Serial Killer?

  Dahmer pleaded guilty to fifteen counts of murder in Wisconsin in January 1992. The only outstanding courtroom matter was whether Dahmer was sane. The hearings were covered on TV “gavel-to-gavel,” the biggest crime story in Wisconsin since Ed Gein, the biggest story in the United States since . . . well, since them all, since Albert DeSalvo, Ed Kemper, Juan Corona, Ted Bundy, David Berkowitz, John Wayne Gacy, Arthur Shawcross, Richard Ramirez and Henry Lee Lucas. What we did not know was that Jeffrey Dahmer would be the last of that generation of serial killers as viral celebrities.

  By now we were familiar enough with the serial killer insanity hearing to know that the frontiers of grotesque horror were not the measure of insanity. Dahmer was crazy, perhaps, but not insane. He was aware of what he was doing at all times. In February, Dahmer was sentenced to life in prison for fifteen murders. In May, he pleaded guilty in Ohio to the 1978 murder of Steve Hicks.

  In a strange way, Dahmer was a pitiful sight. He did not show the arrogance of Bundy or the unrepentant gall of Gacy, nor did he spin excuses in the way Shawcross did. He appeared to be apologetic and remorseful. Although the victims’ families were devastated by what Dahmer had done, somehow he lacked a veneer of evil, in almost the same way old Ed Gein seemed to be beyond evil. There was something tragic and sad about Dahmer, like one of those medieval lost-love werewolves. Dahmer was a strange brew of horror and pity; Derf Backderf captured perfectly his pathos in his graphic nonfiction book My Friend Dahmer. Dahmer just wanted somebody to be with him forever. What bride doesn’t dream the same?

  In the world of serial homicide, it was hard to imagine anything worse than the extreme depravity of the Dahmer case. Where was there left to go? As hard as it would be for anyone to top Dahmer’s depravity, those of us who paid attention to this kind of thing stood poised just the same for the next serial killer to come.

  In January 1992, as Dahmer was making his courtroom appearances, forty-one-year-old William Lester Suff, a mild-mannered warehouse clerk in Riverside County, California, was arrested and accused of raping, torturing, stabbing and strangling twenty-two women between 1989 and 1991. Some of Suff’s victims were drug-addicted sex workers, whose bodies Suff would pose in obscene positions by dumpsters in fast-food parking lots; he allegedly severed the breast of one of his victims and served it at the Riverside County Employee Chili Cookoff. Suff delivered furniture to the police task force assigned to investigate his series of murders and often posed as a police officer.

  Then in Long Island on June 28, 1993, a New York State trooper saw a Mazda pickup truck missing a rear license plate and tried to pull it over. The vehicle sped away, and during the high-speed chase the driver lost control and crashed it into a pole. As the troopers approached the vehicle, they could smell the distinct odor of death wafting from the truck’s covered rear bed. The driver, thirty-four-year-old landscaper Joel Rifkin, was unhurt. When troopers pulled him out from the truck, they noticed he had a layer of Vicks VapoRub smeared under his nose. When they lifted the blue plastic tarpaulin in the rear, they uncovered the decaying corpse of twenty-two-year-old sex worker Tiffany Bresciani. The smear of VapoRub was a trick Rifkin saw in The Silence of the Lambs, which portrayed FBI agents smearing it under their noses when attending the autopsy of a decayed corpse.

  Rifkin matter-of-factly told the officer, “She was a prostitute. I picked her up on Allen Street in Manhattan. I had sex with her, then things went bad and I strangled her. Do you think I need a lawyer?” This routine traffic stop would uncover the murders of seventeen women at Rifkin’s hands.

  The trials of Suff and of Rifkin would be some time in coming, and press and true-crime writers went into standby mode for the next big serial killer story. But it was slow in arriving with all the usual pretrial preparation and maneuvering.

  In the case of Joel Rifkin, New York prosecutors prepared to try him in separate cases, victim by victim, which was disappointing to the media. Single murder trials lacked the drama of the checkerboard of victims’ faces that accompanied serial murder trials. This was when the Internet was dawning and network television news divisions were being put under the supervision of television entertainment executives. And serial killers had certainly been “entertaining.” In 1994, newspaper columnist Dave Rossie lamented:

  It’s no secret that newspapers and television are locked in a struggle for the hearts and minds of the American public. . . . New Age journalism as practiced by the Daily News, reads like what might happen if one of those TV shows such as “Hard Copy” or “Current Affair” decided to put out a newspaper. . . . Recently, the News ran a two-part piece on alleged serial killer Joel Rifkin, who has been transformed by the News into “Joel the Ripper Rifkin.” God knows what the News will call him if and when he’s convicted.45

  In May 1994, Rifkin was convicted in the murder of Bresciani, his last victim, in what was supposed to be the first of the slayings to come to trial.

  Then came June 17, 1994.

  PFFFFFFFFFFFT.

  Somebody suddenly changed the channel.

  Ninety-five million people that day were transfixed by a live image on their television screens of a white Ford Bronco slowly driving down the Santa Ana Freeway trailed by a phalanx of police cars.

  Everything and everybody turned to the O. J. Simpson case.

  By the time Joel Rifkin stood his next trial and Lester Suff went on trial in Riverside, old-school serial killers like them were yesterday’s monsters, tired old news. Has-beens. Their trials were barely noted in the press. The 1995 O. J. Simpson trial media circus turned us on to a new source for our true-crime thrill-kill fix-of-the-month: celebrity defendants. O. J. would be followed by Robert Blake, Snoop Dogg, Phil Spector, Ray Lewis, Michael Skakel, and Lillo Brancato Jr.

  After O. J., the only thing that brought Jeffrey Dahmer’s name back into the news briefly was his murder in prison on November 28, 1994. The epidemic era of celebrity serial killers had run its course. The Golden Age of Serial Murders, as Harold Schechter had tongue in cheek coined the era, was over. Thank God.

  Jeffrey Dahmer became the last of the celebrity “epidemic” generation of serial killers, just in time, because Go
d only knows what could have been worse than Dahmer.

  After Jeffrey Dahmer, there were still many serial killers to come, 669 of them in the 1990s, which was still a lot but a 13 percent decline since the 1980s. They had names like John Eric Armstrong, Anthony Balaam, Lucious Boyd, Robert Eugene Brashers, Rory Enrique Conde, Andre Crawford, Richard Evonitz, Wayne Adam Ford, Alfred Gaynor, Hubert Geralds, Orville Lynn Majors, Glen Edward Rogers, Paul Runge, Heriberto Seda, Robert Shulman, Jack Owen Spillman, Henry Louis Wallace, and Nathaniel White. If you haven’t heard of them, you are not the only one. Some didn’t even have monikers. The few that came to prominence—like Keith Jesperson, “the Happy Face Killer,” and David Parker Ray, “the Toy Box Killer”—were few and far between, and they were “B-listers” just the same.*

  “Real” celebrity defendants like Snoop Dogg and Robert Blake now outclassed them, even if they were acquitted. The emergent Internet and a plethora of cable TV channels fragmented the former collective gathering of Americans around a single horror story. The horrors were now packaged into different morsels for different tastes on different channels and media platforms, and serial killers began to lose that monopoly on monstrosity they once held. Once video could be streamed over the Internet, the fragmentation was complete.

  EPILOGUE

  The Post-Epidemic Era 2000–2020

  The next big-news serial killer after Jeffrey Dahmer was the Green River Killer, fifty-two-year-old Gary Ridgway, who was arrested on November 30, 2001, after his DNA was successfully linked to some of his victims. Ridgway wasn’t a new serial killer per se—he had begun killing in 1982 but apparently “retired” in 1998. For nearly two decades as the Green River Killer he had the legendary status of unidentified serial killers like the Zodiac and BTK, perhaps even Jack the Ripper.