by Ray Black
In October 1991, a woman was seen in the passenger seat of his car, her hands behind her, shouting and seemingly attempting to break the windscreen with her feet. The woman, thirty-seven-year-old prostitute Brenda Thompson, was never seen again. A few days later another prostitute, Reginia ‘Gina’ Moore, also disappeared.
In December of the same year, McDuff and a friend, serial alcoholic Alva Hank Worley, were out looking for drugs when they spotted Colleen Reed, an attractive twenty-eight-year-old accountant, alone at a car wash. McDuff grabbed hold of her and pushed her into his car. The police were called when witnesses heard screams, but McDuff and Worley had gone by the time they arrived.
They drove her out of town, taking turns raping her as they drove north along Interstate 35 towards a site near Lake Belton, continuing with their attacks when they arrived. Then McDuff tied her hands behind her back, raped her on the bonnet of the car, beat her and tortured her sexually with lit cigarettes. He then struck her hard, according to Worley, certainly breaking some of her bones and possibly killing her. He dropped Worley and disposed of the body.
By this time he was working at a supermarket in Waco. He took a shine to a woman who worked there, Melissa Northrup, telling friends that he wanted to rob the store and ‘take’ the girl. On March 1, he did just that. When his car was found near the store and the girl’s was discovered in a wooded area in Dallas County, police launched an investigation. Witnesses said that McDuff had been in the area and near the site of Melissa’s kidnapping. Her body was found by a fisherman a month later in a gravel pit close to where her car had been abandoned. She had been tied up and strangled. She was two months pregnant.
Around this time, the body of another prostitute was found. She had last been seen in February on the Texas State University campus, looking for McDuff’s dorm room.
By now, though, McDuff was working as a garbageman in Kansas City. On May 1, 1992, he made it onto America’s Most Wanted list and within a day, one of his work colleagues had contacted the police to tell them where he was. He was arrested.
He was tried first for the murder of Melissa Northrup and, trying to defend himself, created a very bad impression in court. He was unable to provide an alibi for the night of the murder and was sentenced to death.
He then stood trial for the murder of Colleen Reed, even though no body had been found. His behaviour was even worse during this trial, partly because the judge was black and McDuff was a racist bigot. He was convicted and given a second death sentence on the basis of Worley’s testimony and the fact that five of Reed’s hairs that found in his car.
To this day, no one really knows how many women Kenneth McDuff actually killed and a body discovered near Rosebud in October 2006 is suspected to be another of his victims.
By the time he was sentenced, McDuff was dying anyway. He had been diagnosed with hepatitis C and cirrhosis. When interviewed on death row, he said nonchalantly: ‘I consider myself dead. I’m just waiting to be buried.’
The McDuff case launched a torrent of soul-searching about the Texas prison system, the third largest criminal justice system in the United States. There was an outbreak of prison construction, and parole reforms were introduced that were collectively known as the ‘McDuff Rules’ to prevent anyone ever being able to do again what McDuff did.
On November 17, 1998, just after 6.00 p.m., Kenneth Alan McDuff was put to death by lethal injection in Huntsville prison. Thirty-two years too late, most people said.
Jeffrey Dahmer
The night of July 22, 1991 was an oppressively hot one in Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s largest city. Sweat dripped from the two police officers as they sat in their patrol car around the area near Marquette University at around midnight. Suddenly, they spied a short black man wearing what looked like a pair of handcuffs. The cuffs suggested he might have escaped from police arrest and they apprehended him. When questioned, however, Tracy Edwards started to tell them about a ‘weird dude’ who had invited him up to his apartment, put the handcuffs on him and threatened him with a knife.
It sounded to the officers like a lovers’ tiff, but they decided to investigate just the same and knocked on the door of apartment 213 in the Oxford Apartments at 924 North 25th Street. The door was opened by a well-groomed, good-looking thirty-one-year-old man with blond hair.
The blond man seemed very calm and rational and his apartment looked reasonably tidy. However, a strange smell pervaded the place. Without any fuss, he said he would go and get the key to the handcuffs which was in the bedroom. Edwards warned the officers that the knife he had been threatened with was also in there. So one of the officers went to check, but, on his way, saw that there were photographs lying around showing dismembered bodies and skulls in a refrigerator. He shouted back to his colleague to cuff the blond man and arrest him. The blond struggled and screamed as the other cop tried to put the cuffs on him, but the officer quickly managed to subdue him.
The first officer at this point decided to have a look in the fridge but when he opened the door he froze in horror. A pair of eyes stared out at him from a disembodied head. ‘There’s a fucking head in the refrigerator,’ he screamed.
The freezer contained a further three heads, wrapped tidily in plastic bags. In the closet in the bedroom he found a stockpot containing decomposed hands and a penis. On the shelf above were two skulls. There were male genitalia preserved in formaldehyde and a range of chemicals – ethyl alcohol, chloroform and more formaldehyde.
There were also photographs in a filing cabinet, taken as the victims died as well as afterwards. A man’s head was shown in one, lying in the sink; another depicted a victim cut neatly open from neck to groin; others showed victims still alive, in erotic and bondage poises.
Jeffrey Dahmer was born in Milwaukee in May 1960, to Joyce and Lionel Dahmer. The family later moved to Iowa, where Lionel was working on his Ph.D. at Iowa State University, and then on to Akron, Ohio.
At first, Jeffrey was an ordinary, happy little boy. At the age of six, however, he had surgery for a double hernia and his father believes he was never the same again. ‘He seemed smaller, somehow more vulnerable . . . he grew more inward, sitting quietly for long periods, hardly stirring, his face oddly motionless,’ he later wrote. And it did not get better as Jeff grew older and became tense and extremely shy. At his trial it was revealed that, as a child, he would collect dead animals and strip the flesh from them, on one occasion mounting a dog’s head on a stake.
In his late teenage years, as others began to carve out notions of what they were going to do with their lives, Jeff seemed completely unmotivated. Instead of thinking about girls and a future career, he was locked into a gruesome fantasy world that featured death and dismemberment. By now he was drinking a lot and was considered a loner and an alcoholic by classmates.
When Jeff was almost eighteen his parents got divorced, Lionel remarrying a few months later. It was around this time that Dahmer committed his first murder, killing Steven Hicks, an eighteen-year-old hitch-hiker. He invited Hicks back to his house, and killed him by hitting him over the head with a barbell because he ‘didn’t want him to leave.’ He cut up his body and buried it in the woods behind his house.
Jeff enrolled for Ohio State University in 1978, but his drinking got in the way of his studies and he dropped out after just one term. His father had now had enough of this strangely morose and monosyllabic son of his and gave him a stark choice; either he got a job or joined the army. There was no way he was getting a job, so Lionel drove him to the army recruiting office in January 1979.
Again, however, Dahmer’s drinking made life impossible and, after being stationed in Germany for a couple of years, he was discharged early for drunkenness, moving in with his grandmother back in Milwaukee and getting a job.
A string of offences followed – drunkenness, disorderly conduct and then indecent exposure and, in 1989, child molesting; he was reported to have masturbated in front of two boys. He persuaded the judge that he had
, in fact, just been urinating and was put on probation for a year.
His father wrote later that his son had become ‘a liar, an alcoholic, a thief, an exhibitionist, a molester of children. I could not imagine how he had become such a ruined soul . . . There was something missing in Jeff . . . We call it a ‘conscience’ . . . that had either died or had never been alive in the first place.’
Dahmer had, by this time, already killed his second victim, Steven Toumi, in a hotel room in September that year. He had picked him up in a gay bar and the two went to a hotel to drink and have sex. When he woke up next morning, Dahmer found Tuomi dead. He stuffed his body into a large suitcase, took it to the basement of his grandmother’s house, had sex with it and masturbated over it before dismembering it and disposing of it in the rubbish.
His third victim was fourteen-year-old Native American, Jamie Doxtator and the fourth was Richard Guerro in March, 1988.
His grandmother began to object to the noise and partying in Dahmer’s room in the basement and so he moved into his own apartment in September 1988. Next day he picked up a thirteen-year-old Laotian boy called Sinthasomphone, who agreed to pose for photographs for fifty dollars. By grim coincidence, he was the older brother of a boy Dahmer would kill in 1991.
But he did not kill Sinthasomphone, and when the boy returned home, his parents realised he had been drugged. The cops picked up Dahmer on charges of sexual exploitation of a child and second-degree sexual assault. He pleaded guilty, claiming he thought the boy was older.
However, even as he awaited sentencing, he struck again, killing Anthony Sears, a handsome black model. Dahmer boiled the skull to remove the skin and painted it grey. He still had it when he was arrested.
In court, Dahmer put on the kind of manipulative performance only a psychopath can and he escaped the prison sentence being demanded by the prosecution, receiving five years’ probation. He was also ordered to spend a year in the House of Correction under ‘work release’, which meant he went to work during the day and returned to jail at night. In spite of a letter from Dahmer’s father, pleading with the judge not to release him without treatment, he was released after just ten months and went to live with his grandmother, before moving into his rooms in the Oxford Apartments in May, 1990.
Exactly a year later, a naked fourteen-year-old Laotian, Konerak Sinthasomphone, was found wandering on the streets of the Milwaukee neighbourhood in which Dahmer’s flat was located. He talked to a couple of women, but was largely incoherent, having already been drugged by Dahmer. The police were called and took the boy back to Dahmer’s flat to investigate. Dahmer told them, however, that Konerak was his nineteen-year-old boyfriend and that they had had a drunken argument. The police handed the boy over to Dahmer, noting a strange smell in the apartment. Dahmer killed Konerak a few hours later.
From September 1987, to July 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer killed sixteen men, the majority of them black. Their ages ranged from fourteen to thirty-one and they all had high-risk lifestyles.
The killing process was always the same. He picked his victim up at a gay bar, lured him back to the basement to pose for photographs, usually in return for payment, and then he would offer him a drugged drink, strangle him, masturbate on the body or even have sex with it. He would then cut the corpse up and get rid of it. He would take photographs throughout and would also sometimes boil the skull to remove the flesh and then paint it grey to look like plastic, keeping it and other body parts as mementos. He began experimenting with various chemical methods and acids to dispose of the flesh and bones which would be poured down a drain or flushed away in the toilet. He often preserved the genitals in formaldehyde.
He told police that he also ate some of the flesh of his victims, claiming that by doing so they would come alive in him again. He experimented with seasoning and meat tenderisers. Eating human meat gave him an erection, he said, and his fridge contained strips of human flesh.
Before they died, he sometimes tried to perform a kind of lobotomy on his victims. After drugging them, he would drill a hole in their skulls and inject muriatic acid into their brains. He was trying to create a functioning zombie-like creature that he could exercise ultimate control over and control, after all, was really what it was all about. Needless to say, most died during this procedure, but one apparently survived for a few days.
On January 29, 1992, the jury was selected for Dahmer’s trial. He was indicted on seventeen charges of murder, later reduced to fifteen, to which he pleaded guilty, against the advice of his legal team, but claiming insanity. His counsel had to pursue the argument that only a person who was insane could have committed Dahmer’s crimes. The prosecution, on the other hand, had to prove that he was legally insane, an evil psychopath who murdered his victims in cold blood and with malice aforethought.
Security in the courthouse was unlike that for any trial in Milwaukee’s history. A sniffer dog was brought in to search for bombs and everyone entering the courtroom was searched and checked with a metal detector. A barrier, eight feet high, made of steel and bullet-proof glass was erected around the place where Dahmer would sit, to protect him from the public.
The jury deliberated for five hours before deciding that Jeffrey Dahmer should go to prison and not hospital. He was found sane and guilty on all fifteen charges.
On the day of his sentencing, he read out a statement, an apology of a kind. ‘Your Honor, it is now over. This has never been a case of trying to get free. I didn’t ever want freedom. Frankly, I wanted death for myself. This was a case to tell the world that I did what I did, but not for reasons of hate. I hated no one. I knew I was sick or evil or both. Now I believe I was sick. The doctors have told me about my sickness, and now I have some peace. I know how much harm I have caused . . . Thank God there will be no more harm that I can do. I believe that only the Lord Jesus Christ can save me from my sins...I ask for no consideration.’
He got none. He was given fifteen life sentences, a total of 957 years in prison.
They sent him to the Columbia Correctional Institute in Portage, Wisconsin where, for his own safety, he was kept apart from the general prison population. The segregation was not entirely successful, however, as he was attacked by a razor-wielding Cuban one day while leaving the prison chapel. His wounds, however, were superficial.
On the whole, though, he was a model prisoner, becoming a born-again Christian and gradually persuading the prison authorities to allow him more contact with other inmates. This proved costly for him.
One day he was paired with two other dangerous inmates on a work detail. One was Jesse Anderson, a white man who had murdered his wife and blamed it on a black man. The other was Christopher Scarver, a black schizophrenic doing time for first-degree murder, who suffered from delusions that he was God. It was a volatile combination, Scarver being partnered with one man, Dahmer, who had killed so many black men, and another, Anderson, who had tried to finger a black man for a murder he had committed.
On the morning of November 28, 1994, the guard left the three men to get on with their work. He came back twenty minutes later to find Dahmer and Anderson lying in pools of blood. Dahmer’s skull had been smashed in with a broom handle and he was pronounced dead at eleven minutes past nine in an ambulance on the way to hospital.
Copyright
© 2011 Omnipress Limited
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This 2011 edition published by Canary Press,
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ISBN: 978-1-907795-41-1
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