Dahmer's Not Dead

by Edward Lee

  The man was terrifying to look at. He was nearly as tall sitting down as Helen was standing up. A perfect model of prison fitness: fists the size of ham hocks, batlike forearms, pecs, shoulders and back that could’ve qualified him for a body-building contest. Helen saw little sense in the penal policy which allowed inmates to turn themselves into musclemen. This made them all the more dangerous not only on the cellblock but when they got out. Thick veins atop biceps the size of apples flicked like earthworms when he leaned forward.

  “I’se am the million-year-old Son’a God,” he informed her. An eerie, fluttering aspect seemed trapped behind the homey, street-bred voice; each word seemed to slip down Helen’s back.

  “If you’re the Son of God, then why don’t you break out of those chains?”

  “Sames reason Jesus didn’t take hisseff down off dah cross at Calvary. Not cool, ya know.”

  “Hmm, interesting.” Helen kept her face blank, looking at him. Even when she closed her eyes for a moment, an afterimage of his crisply dark face lingered behind her lids. “But why should I believe you’re the Son of God?”

  “Ain’t gotta no ways,” Rosser replied. “‘Thou wouldst not listen ta dah voice’a their father.’ ‘They’se are a perverse generation, them children in whom there is no faith.’“

  This was unique, even invigorating—Bible scripture being quoted in street dialect. Helen vaguely remembered the latter quote from an old theology class, from Deuteronomy. She tried to bait him. “That was from Psalms, wasn’t it?”

  “Doots-ter-onomy,” he said.

  Helen nodded. So much for that. “Jeffrey Dahmer was into religion, wasn’t he? I mean, after he’d been at the prison for a while?”

  Beautiful white teeth gleamed through the smile. “Jeffreys Dahmer were a mymidon’a the Devil. That why I killed him. Gods tole me that ‘Ye are holy whosoever vanquish evil.’“

  “But aren’t you evil too, Mr. Rosser?” Helen piqued. “You murdered a Conservation Corp worker in cold blood, shot him in the head.”

  “Shee-it. That weren’t me. That were the machination’a the Devil. I’se been persecuted by the state, just like Jesus were persecuted by Rome and the Jews. I’se am the million-year-old Son’a God, ma’am. I’se walked the field of blood. I’se trod the plains of Troy and Knossos and Nineveh.”

  “Oh, really? And Nineveh was the capital of what ancient country, Mr. Rosser?”

  “A holy land. God, He say he’d destroy Nineveh for its sin, but then He change his mind ’cos they got their act straight.”

  The answer to Helen’s question was Assyria, though she had to commend Rosser for his knowledge of Biblical history. God, according to the Bible, had indeed condemned the city of Nineveh, but retracted His promise of destruction once the population sought faith. The most famous contradiction in Bible prophesy.

  “All right,” she went on, “you killed Jeffrey Dahmer because he was in league with the Devil—”

  “He were a myrmidon.”

  Helen didn’t exactly know what the word meant, but she didn’t say it. “Fine,” she said instead. “Then why did you attack Vander too? Was he also a…myrmidon of the Devil.”

  “No, he were but a vassal.”

  “Word is, Mr. Rosser, you killed Dahmer because his victims were mostly black. You did it for popular status on the cellblock. And the same goes for Vander. He’s in intensive care, by the way, really bad shape. You tried to kill him too, because he was a Nazi, and he murdered his wife but told the police it was a black man.”

  “‘Lying lips are an abomination’a the Lord.’“ He paused to look at her more closely, his fervent eyes the color of burnt nuts. “Whys are you here?”

  “I wanted to meet you, Mr. Rosser. You’re an interesting man, I must say. But there’s a rumor I wanted to ask you about. They say that you may have been assisted, that certain detention officers arranged for you to be in the prison rec unit with Dahmer and Vander, and they looked the other way so you could do the job. Can you verify that, Mr. Rosser? You have nothing to lose in telling me. It would help me to know this.”

  Rosser’s blaring white smile never waned. “‘Thou shalt not…bear, false witness…against thy neighbor.’ I’se did it, juss me. No ones else.”

  “All right, Mr. Rosser, I believe you. But I also believe you’re what we call a Ganser. You’re faking delusions to try to get transferred into a mental hospital.”

  “Believe what you like,” Rosser said. “‘Thou shalt not put any other God aboves me.’“ The smile beamed; Rosser’s head inclined. “Earliers, you ax me why don’t I break these chains if I’se really the Son’a God.”

  “Yes,” Helen acknowledged.

  “Watch.”

  Rosser stood up. The small psych cell seemed to shrink in his rising; Helen felt like a dwarf before this 6’3” killing machine. Rosser’s stout arms snapped upward, strained the cuffs connected to the waistchain. Suddenly he was sweating, the skin of his well-developed arms and shoulders like veneered black marble. His biceps shimmied…

  Don’t wet yourself, Helen. It doesn’t matter how strong he is. That’s tempered steel. He can’t possibly break it—

  snap!

  His cuffed hands broke the waistchain link. Then, after another few moments of more exertion—

  snap!

  The link joining the cuffs broke too.

  Helen stared at him. She’d had to turn over her service weapon before coming onto the unit. All she had to defend herself with was…her purse.

  Rosser smiled. “These hands”—he raised them up—”coulds kill you, right now.”

  Then he sat back down.

  It was all Helen could do not to call out for the orderlies. Hold your ground, hold your ground. “Well, Mr. Rosser, in that case, thank you for not killing me. It’s been nice talking to you.”

  “Haves a good day.”

  Helen, stiff-backed and suppressing her terror, left the psych cell. Somehow, she knew she could feel Rosser’s arcane, bright smile following her out. “Just for your info,” she said to the orderlies, “that walking meat-rack in there just broke out of his cuffs.” The orderlies’ faces blanched, and they rushed in. Helen let herself be escorted off the wing by the security super.

  “They do that sometimes,” he said. “Brains all messed up, gives them incredible strength. You know, like the old wive’s tale of the skinny woman lifting a car up off her husband.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with that guy’s brain.”

  The guard shrugged. “That’s what a lot of the docs say, say he’s faking it.”

  “He is, and he’s doing a good job. I’ll bet anything he winds up in a cushy state psych ward.”

  The guard took Helen back off the wing, to the recept desk, then took her Beretta .25 out of the locker and gave it back to her.

  “I hear Vander’s in ICU,” she said. “How do I get there? I need to talk to him too.”

  The guard’s brows popped. “Good luck talking to him. Didn’t you hear? Vander died today. Hematoma.”

  Shit, Helen thought.

  ««—»»

  She remembered Sallee’s words, as she was leaving the hospital for the frigid parking lot. I’m an ostrich… She’d deliberately left via the basement, where the morgue was.

  Where Tom was.

  I’ve got to try to fix things up, she thought.

  She stood in front of the door. She paid no mind to the security guard at the sign-in desk.

  “Can I help you, ma’am?”

  “Uh, uh, no,” she said.

  One last glance through the chicken-wire glass showed her Tom milling about inside.

  Helen lost her nerve and left the building.

  — | — | —

  CHAPTER TEN

  Helen spent the next day interviewing one correctional staff face after another, until the faces all seemed to blur together. Of Dahmer, they all related similar if not identical versions of his makeup. Introverted, docile, full of remorse. And complet
ely ingenuous.

  “Was he suicidal?” Helen asked the prison’s psychologist, an unenlivened if not dull woman named Bernice Willet.

  “Not actively,” the demure, dark-skinned woman replied. A mane of coal-black hair draped her shoulders over a nougat cashmere sweater. “He did have an active death wish, though.”

  “To what degree of detail?”

  There was a hint of an accent Helen couldn’t place. “He believed that he deserved to die for his crimes.”

  So did the rest of the world, Helen thought.

  “But guilt reversions such as this are quite common,” Willet continued, “among incarcerated serial-killers. The uncommon thing about Jeffrey was the absolute certainly with which he believed he was going to die.”

  “You’re saying he predicted his own death?”

  “In a sense, yes. Jeffrey was well aware that quite a few inmates wanted to kill him. This was well-known throughout the center’s inmate population, that someone, eventually, was going to get to him. This is the only aspect of Jeffrey that can be likened to a suicidal tendency. It was a passive one. He knew he was a marked man, yet he went out of his way to qualify for a domiciliary transfer from protective custody to the general prison block.”

  This was interesting. He knew someone was going to get him eventually, Helen paused to think. Could he have…

  “How vengeful was he?”

  “Vengeful? Jeffrey?” The psychologist nearly smiled. “He wasn’t vengeful or aggressive at all. If anything, he was close to narcoleptic.”

  Helen tried to focus. What was she thinking? “How smart was he, then, how creative?”

  “That’s two completely different questions, Captain. Jeffrey had a higher than average IQ, but he scored very poorly on all the creative assembly batteries. The TAT, the Weschler Revised Adult Intuition Scale, the Bender Visual-Motor Gestalt Test—Jeffrey scored shockingly low on them all.”

  “Maybe he did it on purpose,” Helen considered.

  “No, no, what you don’t understand is that these tests can’t be faked. Even if an inmate wrote down deliberately contradictory answers, the score scales would pick that up at once.” Willet took a moment to assess Helen’s questions. “Why do you ask, though?”

  “I want to know if Dahmer was possibly devious enough to fake his docility.”

  “No,” Willet responded. “Ask anyone who knew him. But that’s a strange suspicion, I must say. Why would Jeffrey wish to fake something like that?”

  I wonder, Helen thought.

  ««—»»

  “…so I’d like to know what you think about that, Father,” Helen was asking her next interviewee, Father Thomas Alexander, the prison chaplain. This was the man who’d performed the famous “baptism” of Dahmer, in the prison’s whirlpool. “The word is you were Dahmer’s only real friend and confidant.”

  “Well that’s true,” the religious man answered. “I was his confessor.” Alexander seemed slightly stiffened behind his industrial gray desk, as though he had a back problem. Salt and pepper hair, a lean face that seemed weathered more by sarcasm than by age. Helen couldn’t quite say why, but there was something about the man that caused an immediate dislike.

  “I need to know about Dahmer’s visitors and correspondents,” Helen was next asking. A bumper sticker adhered to the front of the desk read CHRIST ROCKS! And another: THE POWER OF JESUS IS INFINITE. Helen noticed this at the same instant a power fluctuation briefly dimmed the office lights. Too bad Jesus doesn’t run Madison Gas & Electric.

  “Power flux,” Alexander observed. “For some reason we get them all the time, anywhere on the prison’s east sector. And in response to your questions, Jeffrey was a Level Five inmate. It’s a federal categorization scale, only goes up to Seven, Seven being the most critical, One being the least. The average inmate is a One.”

  “So as a Five,” Helen speculated, “Dahmer was deemed significantly more dangerous than most inmates?”

  “Yes and no,” the priest answered. But that fuddled Helen. Was he a priest? Or a reverend, or a minister? She wasn’t sure. But he went on, “Dangerous isn’t a word I would use to describe Jeffrey, in spite of the crimes he committed.”

  Helen made an assenting nod. “Ms. Willet just got done telling me he was introverted, even docile.”

  “Exactly. But he got the Level Five tag due to the nature of his crimes. It’s based on committed acts, not personality makeup, a bad rap for Jeffrey actually.”

  Helen had a hard time commiserating. Poor Jeffrey. The big, bad government slaps him with a sensitive prison status.

  “But getting back to what you were asking,” Alexander said, “as a Level Five inmate, Jeffrey was allowed no outside visitors other than direct blood relatives unless otherwise authorized by the Director’s office. His mother was the only one who ever came to see him, and the only exceptions I’m aware of were a few news interviewers.”

  “Which the Director authorized?”

  “Yes, but this was very rare. Two, three times. The only reason Dipetro allowed it, I suspect, was because he knew Jeffrey would speak positively of the center.”

  Dipetro. The prison’s warden. A mover and shaker who liked to play hardball was what Helen had heard, and who was bucking to run the state’s department of public safety come the next election. “All right,” she said, “so Dahmer had no visitors other than his mother. What about correspondents?”

  “That’s where the criteria is even more unjust,” Alexander told her, “based on the Level Five tag. Jeffrey was not allowed to send or receive mail. Period.”

  Helen squinted. “Why?”

  The minister shrugged, made a denigrating turn of his mouth. “I haven’t a clue. It’s unconstitutional if you ask me.”

  “So is murdering and cannibalizing seventeen people,” Helen couldn’t resist saying.

  “For one thing, you’ve been listening to too much right-wing press. Jeffrey didn’t cannibalize all of his victims,” Alexander defended.

  “All right. But even if he only cannibalized one of them, why are you so quick to defend him?”

  “Because the defenseless need defenders.”

  “Defenseless?” Helen wanted to laugh. “He premeditatedly drugged and murdered innocent young men to pursue a sexual dementia.”

  A frown drew deep lines into Alexander’s face. “On the outside, true, Jeffrey fell sway to the relegations of evil. But God forgave him of all that. And it’s inexcusable for persons such as yourself to maintain this right-wing, Pat Buchanan, lynch mob mentality.”

  Now it was all obvious; the boil had been popped. “I maintain no such thing,” Helen responded, “I’m merely—”

  “You’re merely acting like everyone else. No pity at all for the pitiable. It wasn’t Jeffrey’s fault that he became what he became. It was society’s. It was our fault.”

  Helen didn’t buy that at all, but she saw little point in debating it. The reverend’s liberal sentiments could not be assailed. “We’re getting off track, Father. I didn’t come here to argue with you.” Then she remembered her own track.

  Mail. Correspondence… Letters.

  “I need to know why Dahmer wasn’t allowed to send and receive mail.”

  ““Ask Oc-Ther,” he said, “after, of course, you relieve yourself from my office. The door’s right over there.”

  Helen rose from her seat, secured her purse. “You’re petulant and obnoxious, Father Alexander. But have a good day anyway.”

  ««—»»

  “Groupies,” Wayne Edwards answered her question with the single word.

  “Groupies?” Helen stretched the word. But Sallee had made a similar mention now that she thought of it.

  Edwards was the Center’s Chief of Occupational Therapy, an attractive man with long dark hair and a beard, and a darker voice. He wore an open flannel shirt with a black t-shirt beneath. Oddly, behind him, hung a Doctorate in Economics. He smoked Marlboros, which caused a rare pang in Helen’s memory. Christ,
that cigarette looks good, she thought. But what did he mean about groupies?

  “Could you be more specific, please?”

  Edwards tapped an ash in a stone tray. “There are a lot of whacks out there, Ms. Closs. Screwed up, obsessive, even pathological. They’re searching for some kind of identity but they’re too maladjusted to find it. It’s the same as rock stars, movie stars, writers, professional athletes—they all have groupies.”

  “I still don’t get the significance of—”

  “Serial killers have groupies too, lots of them. Pen pals, obsessive fans, like that. We call it ‘remote obsessional codependency,’ and it’s quite a bit more apparent than you would think. Those guidelines from the Bureau of Prisons recommend that any inmate labeled Five or above be barred from all out-of-house correspondence. That’s the only reason Dahmer got the tag: because he was so famous. Here at Columbus County Detent, we follow those guidelines, which I think is a good idea. A lot of prisons don’t. They don’t have to unless they’re a federal prison institution. Jolliette’s a great example, and so is Jessup and Fredricksburg and Lorton, and dozen’s of other local detention centers. They don’t like the federal government telling them what to do, so they’ll ignore any BOP recs. Gacy and Speck, for example, both Level Five convicts at Jolliette, were allowed to correspond with anyone they wanted to. Any letter mailed to them were delivered to them. And any letters outgoing were processed. Big mistake. A lot of these centers believe that the BOP mail restrictions are an infringement of a convict’s rights.”

  Helen tried to figure. “In other words, the regs are a good idea because they prevent an inmate from influencing, and possibly inciting, these ‘killer groupies’ on the outside?”

  “Well, sure, that’s part of the reason,” Edwards agreed. “Remote obsessional codependents are mentally unstable to begin with. A lot of these nuts will regard a particular killer as something like a god. But another reason is simple good taste. It doesn’t make a prison system look good when a killer’s letters wind up on the street. Look at what happened with Gacy. Now that he’s dead, his letters have a street value of over a hundred dollars each to collectors. Bundy’s letters go for three or four, and Manson… Anything with his signature on it can cop up to a thousand dollars. Can you imagine what a letter signed by Jeffrey Dahmer would be worth to some groupie or collector?”