Man is unique among the species in being sometimes driven by impulses to kill for no social or biological gain, but simply out of passion. Dahmer has frequently used the word ‘lust’ with reference to his offences. The ethologist Niko Tinbergen ruminated on this ultimate mystery. ‘Man is the only species that is a mass murderer,’ he wrote, ‘the only misfit in his own society. Why should this be so?’ This is obviously not a question that can be answered in a court of law, nor is it one, really, which the psychiatrist’s definitions can cope with. It is primarily a philosophical question, and, as such, capable of contemplation, if not resolution, by all of us.
Erich Fromm has convincingly listed man’s needs as an object of devotion, an ability to relate, a desire for unity and rootedness, the wish to be effective, and the need for stimulation. Every one of these needs may be answered in a positive or a negative way. The object of devotion may be God, love, and truth; or it may be diverted into veneration of perverse idols. The need for relatedness may be satisfied by kindness and altruism; or by dependence and destructiveness. One may find rootedness and unity in brotherly co-operation and mystical experience; or one may find it in drunkenness, drug addiction, and depersonalisation.7 In each case, Jeffrey Dahmer took the negative route.
Which raises another, perplexing issue which will be explored in its proper place. There is no doubt that Dahmer knew the difference between right and wrong – he was not a moral idiot. Much was made in court of his exercise of choices, of the contention that he had potential alternatives and repeatedly elected to embrace the wrong ones. Moral confusion is one of the salient characteristics of this kind of murderer. If Dahmer were an amoral man, his case would not merit investigation, for one cannot learn from a page on which nothing is writ. The fact that he is a moral man who has disastrously chosen to do immoral things makes him like the rest of us, albeit an extreme example. The difference between him and us is one of degree, not of kind. It is a disconcerting fact that the murderer often has an internal moral system which he is driven to obey; ‘his ethical goal is individual, personal, and remains unseen by those around him and by himself also’.8 Or even more provocatively, in the words of Melanie Klein, ‘Love is not absent in the criminal, but it is hidden and buried in such a way that nothing but analysis can bring it to light.’9 To find the key which unlocks that internal moral system and reveals that mysterious ethical goal is the purpose of an enquiry such as this.
Jeffrey Dahmer’s motives and behaviour were certainly bizarre in the extreme, but they are not beyond the reach of comprehension. They are distinguishable from our own motives and behaviour by their severity, by their intensity, by their florid and outrageous expression, not by their essential nature. They represent one of the furthest and most lamentable extensions of human possibility, yet they are still pitifully human. Colin Wilson has devoted a large part of his career to the elucidation of this very point. ‘The study of murder,’ he writes, ‘is not the study of abnormal human nature; it is the study of human nature stained by an act that makes it visible on the microscopic slide.’10 This concept of human nature stained is one which we must strive to keep before us as we walk with Dahmer deeper into his personal hell, for there will be times when his actions stretch belief. Every human being has dark, shameful, nasty impulses – the combined inheritance of the species. They spring from Dionysian* urges of drama, destruction and anarchy, and they have to be kept in check by the structures of civilisation, including religion and morality. That these savage irrational urges are ever-present is undeniable; so, too, is it obvious that they are mercifully constrained by self-regulation. In Dahmer’s case, the constraints failed, the inhibitions collapsed, and Dionysus broke loose.
* Apollo and Dionysus represent antitheses in Greek mythology, and hence in human life. Originally the god of agriculture, Apollo had care of the fruits of the earth and the lower animals, then by extension of the higher animal, man himself, with especial regard to the passage of youth into manhood. He was additionally the god of prophecy, which was more often conveyed in song, thus in time the god of music and the arts generally.
Dionysus was the god of vegetation and fruitfulness, and of wine in particular. He is known in Ancient Rome as Bacchus. Dionysian festivals were characterised by orgies and excessive licence, even extending to eating the raw flesh of a just-sacrificed animal.
Hence, though both Apollo and Dionysus may be said to symbolise the fruitfulness of human character, they draw their fruit from opposing sources. Apollo, always depicted as the epitome of physical beauty and moral purity (the finest statue of him is the Apollo Belvedere in the Vatican), represents the best that human endeavour may achieve through control, order, discipline, restraint, the mastery over oneself and the plastic world. Mozart, Bach, Michelangelo, Nash, are typically Apollonian figures. On the other hand, Dionysus shows what human character may do when left to itself, unbridled, unrestrained, spontaneous and free. Raw music and passionate poetry are the province of Dionysus, and the theatre, where emotion is given bold expression, is his home. Apollo is classical undamaged beauty; Dionysus is wild, instinctive, and dangerous.
We abnegate something of our responsibility if we refuse to acknowledge Dionysus when we see him. For it is a refusal to recognise ourselves. Sitting in his cell as he awaited trial in 1983, Dennis Nilsen, who murdered fifteen men, wrote this:
I am always surprised and truly amazed that anyone can be attracted by the macabre. The population at large is neither ‘ordinary’ or ‘normal’. They seem to be bound together by a collective ignorance of themselves and what they are. They have, every one of them, got their deep dark thoughts with many a skeleton rattling in their secret cupboards. Their fascination with ‘types’ (rare types) like myself plagues them with the mystery of why and how a living person can actually do things which may be only those dark images and acts secretly within them. I believe they can identify with these ‘dark images and acts’ and loathe anything which reminds them of this dark side of themselves. The usual reaction is a flood of popular self-righteous condemnation but a willingness to, with friends and acquaintances, talk over and over again the appropriate bits of the case.11
All of which might appear to be no more than the self-serving excuses of a trapped criminal, but he makes nonetheless a valid point, and one that Dahmer has unwittingly echoed. Knowing nothing of Nilsen or his case, Dahmer in his confession made frequent reference to the consequences of having been in touch with the ‘dark side’ of himself, and has also commented on his astonishment that his arrest should attract so much unwanted and unthinking attention. Certainly, in Milwaukee in August of 1991 and February of 1992, there was scarcely any other topic of conversation in the coffee rooms and the bars. Most of the conversation was, however, grossly uninformed. The psychological distancing that fell like a suffocating blanket over the whole city was almost palpable. It made the attribution of hideous characteristics so much easier! The less you actually know about Jeff Dahmer, the better able you are to suppose him the unique embodiment of evil.
There was also a reluctance, long before the trial took place, to ‘allow’ him the refuge of insanity. Because he did not claim to hear voices or have hallucinations, did not fall into convulsions, walk into walls, or pounce upon strangers, because, in fact, he seemed perfectly ordinary, it was assumed that he was perfectly sane also. Dahmer’s transparent blandness of manner and evident lack of ‘mad’ characteristics were undoubted handicaps in the effort made on his behalf to have his life and personality explored. He looked too good to be true. His very normalcy was insulting. Why, he could have been a footballer or a lawyer or an insurance agent! People were not prepared to imagine that insanity might be invisible. R. D. Laing once famously threw the cat among the pigeons by suggesting that the apparently sane were more dangerous than the obviously psychotic. ‘When I certify someone insane,’ he said, ‘I am not equivocating when I write that he is of unsound mind, may be dangerous to himself and others, and requires care and att
ention in a mental hospital. However, at the same time, I am also aware that, in my opinion, there are other people who are regarded as sane, whose minds are as radically unsound, who may be equally or more dangerous to themselves and others and whom society does not regard as psychotic and fit persons to be in a madhouse.’12 Something like this idea, that Dahmer, while not psychotic, was clearly mad, would eventually become a central feature of the defence strategy at his trial, and one could almost watch the jury resist it. Even some of the psychiatrists called to give expert testimony steadfastly and stubbornly held to the view that he was sane.
What are the implications of such a view? Jeffrey Dahmer took a shower while there were two dead bodies in the bathtub, and he was sane. He drilled holes in the heads of living people to make them his unresisting companions, and he was sane. He ate a bicep which he had fried in a skillet, tenderised and sprinkled with sauce, and he was sane. For hours he lay with corpses, hugging them, cherishing them, and he was sane. He kept eleven assorted heads and skulls, and two complete skeletons, for eventual use in a home-made temple, and he was sane. The trouble was, in addition to all this, he was polite, diffident, deferential, obliging, just the sort of young man one could imagine weeding his grandmother’s garden. That level of imagination is safe; it does not threaten one’s equilibrium. To permit the imagination to travel further and visualise the hell in which Jeffrey Dahmer lived was to invite a loathsome infection. And so, despite his examination by detectives, psychologists, forensic psychiatrists, counsel, judge and jury, he was left to dwell in the private, unfathomable world in which he had always been, isolated and untouchable. To him it was genuinely a matter of indifference whether he went to prison or to a mental asylum for the rest of his life. The prison which he had been carrying around with him for years was just as fierce, just as daunting. Apartment 213 had for some years been a prison of vicious memories and visible horrors. He lived surrounded by human debris, slept among it, ate his meals beside it. ‘It’s just a nightmare, let’s put it that way,’ he said. ‘It’s been a nightmare for a long time, even before I was caught . . . for years now, obviously my mind has been filled with gruesome, horrible thoughts and ideas . . . a nightmare.’13
Dahmer waived his right to have a lawyer present during his interrogation by the police. He said he wanted to get it all off his chest, to hide nothing. Lionel Dahmer hired Gerald Boyle to represent his son, largely because Boyle already knew him, having represented him on an earlier charge in 1988. Besides, Boyle had a reputation for handling juries on a personal level in the courtroom, contriving to make them feel he was one of them, a simple guy doing a difficult job. His closing arguments were famous for their rhetorical flourish, their emotional gutsy appeal, and their common sense. Opposing him would be the District Attorney, Michael McCann, a kindly, compassionate man who felt the burden of his duty to represent the community and give expression to their outrage. He was thorough in preparation, remorseless in presentation, and only appeared unforgiving. The two men had known each other for many years, having both run for the office of District Attorney in 1968; McCann had held the post ever since.
Boyle immediately asked Dr Kenneth Smail to evaluate Dahmer and give an opinion as to his fitness to plead. Smail declared that he was fit. McCann’s team, working with the detectives, set about assembling every possible detail of Dahmer’s offences and character. Boyle’s team concentrated on his sexual and homicidal history, to construct the portrait of a man thought to be criminally insane. Neither needed to know much about him, beyond and beneath the circumstances of his crimes. Besides which, it was said, there was not much to know. Jeff was a dull man, he had not done much, had achieved less, had little to say. His story, apart from the crimes, was devoid of event. And yet it could not be so. There would have to be some germ of his pathology, some seed out of which this poisonous tree grew. His behaviour with the men he met, and later with the men he killed, was so unusual it would need to be the product of some trauma, perhaps buried out of the reach of his conscious mind. According to one view, our sexual behaviour is the symbolic repetition of our earliest tactile being in the world, ‘the ritualistic acting out of vanished realities’.14 Dahmer’s sex was so rich in symbolism and ritual, so distorted by them in fact, that it was simply impossible it should derive from nowhere, that it should emerge or evolve by accident. The ‘vanished realities’ must be somewhere in his past, perhaps only dimly perceived and faintly graspable, but there.
Jeff Dahmer would not agree. As far as he is concerned, there is nothing to discover but boredom and despair. ‘I couldn’t find any meaning for my life when I was out there. I’m sure as hell not going to find it in here.’ Should his story be told? He could see little point in it. ‘This is the grand finale of a life poorly spent and the end result is just overwhelmingly depressing . . . it’s just a sick, pathetic, wretched, miserable life story, that’s all it is. How it can help anyone, I’ve no idea.’15
Chapter Two
The Child
Shortly after Lionel Herbert Dahmer and Annette Joyce Flint were married on 22 August, 1959, there were indications that this would not be an easy alliance. They began to argue and bicker almost immediately. One evening in the New Year, when the snow lay knee-deep on the ground and the icy winds from Lake Michigan sliced unhindered through the wide streets of Milwaukee, almost cutting off one’s ears, Joyce walked out of the marital home, with no boots on, and went four blocks to a park. She sat shivering on a bench until Lionel came to fetch her and thereby demonstrate his love and consideration. Joyce was already pregnant at the time.*
* References to Joyce Dahmer’s state of mind and character are, for the most part, derived from a deposition in Lionel Dahmer’s handwriting, prior to the couple’s divorce proceedings in 1978. The author requested an interview with Joyce Dahmer for the purposes of balance, but was refused.
Like many families in the beer capital of America, both Lionel and Joyce had German ancestry. Lionel’s father’s family had emigrated from Germany in the nineteenth century, but his mother had been born Catherine Hughes, from Wales. Which part of Germany or which part of Wales his forebears inhabited, Lionel no longer knew. Joyce’s parentage was Flint and Kundberg, another German name. Apart from the German blood, the newlyweds had virtually nothing else in common.
Lionel was a quiet, reserved, undemonstrative young man, studious and austere. He was studying for his Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry at Marquette University, and was twenty-three years old. Joyce (or ‘Rocky’ as she preferred to be known) was just a few months older, and had been a telephone operator who had recently advanced herself by gaining a position as a teletype machine instructor. In stark contrast with her husband, she was blatantly emotional. Whereas Lionel analysed, pondered and judged, Joyce recognised truth only through feeling, and no amount of reasoned argument could dislodge her from convictions immediately reached. Both were, in different ways, self-centred people – Lionel devoted to his career and his study, with a tendency not to notice emotional fragility, Joyce dedicated to impinging her needs upon the world and having account taken of them. One could hardly imagine a finer recipe for incompatibility.
Joyce had a long training in self-pity, for which she could not be held to blame. She often said how helpless and lonely she had felt as a child, without really understanding why. She knew the emotion of abandonment very early, and only later realised that her father had appeared to be indifferent to her because he was corrupted by his illness. He was a severe alcoholic, a fact which might become significant in the story we have to tell, in so far as alcohol dependence may be hereditary. Mr Flint’s drinking deflected his attention from normal family affections; his grandson’s drinking would one day so suffocate his inhibitions that he became a murderer.
Joyce was now determined never to suffer neglect, and the only way she knew how was to demand unremitting regard, and to assess others by their level of response. It was as if she might no longer exist if she ceased to be the f
ocus of someone else’s eyes and ears. It was a strain for which Lionel was not adequately prepared, nor personally disposed. He, too, had a temper when roused, but he held that it should be kept in check, as a potential enemy, not brought constantly into play as an ally.
For his part Lionel was so ‘married’ to his work that he spent more time in laboratories than at home, and could not help but appear neglectful to a vulnerable young wife.
Joyce became pregnant within days of their marriage, and paid a severe price for the burdens which pregnancy brought. She spent almost the whole of February and March 1960 in bed with nausea and was obliged to give up her job. Her muscles tightened so badly that the couple’s physician, Dr Dean Spyres, had to give her an injection to make her relax. She complained bitterly about the noise from neighbours – the sound of anyone else’s pots and pans was literally intolerable to her. At his wit’s end, and naturally anxious, Lionel decided to quit the apartment for the sake of his wife’s health, and they moved in with Catherine Dahmer at West Allis in March, when Joyce was seven months into her pregnancy. It is perhaps not fanciful to see in this behaviour some unconscious resentment at having to share attention with an unborn foetus; it is certainly true that Jeffrey Dahmer’s mother was rendered ill by having to carry him.
The baby was born at the Evangelical Deaconess Hospital in Milwaukee at 4.34 p.m. on 21 May, 1960. Weighing 6 pounds and 15 ounces, he was 18½ inches long, with auburn hair and luminously blue eyes. (It should be said that both parents were remarkably handsome people.) Lionel and Joyce were entranced by him, their life together momentarily joyous as a result. Joyce began a baby scrapbook in which his every twitch and turn were lovingly recorded, remarking that the baby ‘scared us by having correctional casts on his legs from birth till four months’, but all was fine. He would only need 1⅛ inch lifts on his shoes up to about the age of six. Otherwise, he was absolutely perfect. They named him Jeffrey Lionel.
The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer Page 3