The principal family treat at this time was to go out for a drive on Sundays. Mostly, this was to pacify Joyce, who would otherwise be stuck in the house without respite, but the boys enjoyed it as well. On one such drive they went to Bath, Ohio, and by chance saw a house for sale, which Joyce fell in love with on sight. They had to have it! So Lionel borrowed money from the bank and they bought 4480 West Bath Road and took up residence in 1968. It was their third move in two years, and their sixth address since marriage. Joyce was thrilled. Jeff, too, was delighted, because he could take Frisky with him, and there were woods around and a pond. He thought it was a great place to live. Here, at last, was somewhere they could stay and build a stable future. It was to remain their home for ten years, until the marriage finally foundered and Jeffrey’s descent into uncharted waters was under way.
The Bath Road house was enchantment itself after the various makeshift homes the family had recently occupied. It was truly rural, surrounded by nature and air and peace. It was also large, representing a significant step up the social scale for the Dahmers. There was every prospect of happiness and stability in such an idyllic spot. Lionel built a chicken coop so that they could raise chickens and have their own supply of fresh eggs. Jeff participated in this adventure, and also helped raise sheep, rabbits and ducks on the land around the house. Frisky roamed the woods and brought home a dead woodchuck. Joyce went about making the house as pleasant and charming as it could be.
Jeff seemed to take to country life quite eagerly, as long as not much was expected of him. He went to the Lehrs’ house nearby to take sled rides with their son Steven, a year younger than himself, and once took over Steve’s newspaper delivery round when he went on holiday. He was not interested in applying for a round himself, however. Lionel was becoming anxious that his son appeared rarely to be interested in anything, save solitary pursuits which were secret and inviolate. There were times when Jeff was in a world of his own. Lionel knew that he would have to take the initiative, one day, to shake the boy out of this apparent lethargy. Possibly, he left it too late; he ought to have spent time with him long before.
At Eastview Junior High School Jeff made a number of friends on a superficial level, and played cornet in the school band for a while. He habitually sat at the lunch table with Bill Henry, Greg Rogerson, and David Borsvold, but was regarded by the others as slightly odd, ‘a smart kid, but really bizarre’, or simply ‘nice, quiet, reserved’. He did not fit readily into a gang or group, did not appear to enjoy group activity very much. ‘I was never one to go out and voluntarily play football and baseball or anything like that,’ he recalled. ‘Group sports just didn’t interest me.’ With David Borsvold, however, he found an interest they could share. Both boys were fascinated with geology and pre-history. They collected rocks and sought out pictures of dinosaurs. Not even Jeff realised, then, that the drawings of dinosaur skeletons and bones answered to something deep in his psyche which other boys could not share and would never suspect. David and Jeff visited often, riding their bikes to each other’s houses. They competed in preparing projects for the Science Fair, David concentrating on dinosaurs and Jeff on the various kinds of moulds and fungus he found in the woods on his property. During the Science Fair week, the display case was proudly shown in the hallway.
After a while, Jeff felt he knew David well enough to bring him into part of his private little world. In his solitary moments, which were frequent, he had dreamt up a game involving stick men and spirals. The stick men were spindly figures who would be annihilated if they came too close to one another, as each boy manipulated his little army. The spirals were tightly drawn, intensely imagined symbols of descent, whose ultimate destination was a black hole. He called the game ‘Infinity Land’. He was about nine years old at the time, and must not be credited with any major concept, but it is alarming that he should have used such a name for this childish exercise, and with hindsight it is possible to discern signs of which he was entirely unaware. The stick men were fleshless; they were not conceived with the full contours of people, but with the bare essence of bone. Their danger lay in closeness; any contact resulted in oblivion, suggesting that intimacy was the ultimate disaster and the severest risk. The oblivion was represented by the black hole of infinity, an abject, featureless, hopeless nothingness, which, perhaps, the infant already saw when he gazed into himself. Or perhaps he saw it as the danger facing anyone who got near him.
All of which is, of necessity, fanciful, for we cannot know whence the boy dredged this curious game; we can only conjecture, and must do so. The drawings clearly betray an airless personality, suffocating and introverted, positively trapped. Dahmer fantasised about Infinity Land for years, enjoying it by himself, telling nobody. Later, he shared it only with David, who joined innocently in a game which was preparing for the destruction of a personality. David was the first person ever to enter into Dahmer’s fantasy life, albeit merely at the edge. He was also the last to do so voluntarily.
One evening the four Dahmers had chicken for dinner. They usually ate together as a family, whatever tensions may have been hovering in the air. Jeff asked his Dad what would happen if they were to take the chicken bones that were left over and put them in bleach. Lionel Dahmer thought this was commendable scientific curiosity, and it made him happy to see Jeff show initiative. He prepared a pan and placed the chicken bones in bleach, while Jeff watched, silently, unblinking. He was then ten years old.
At around this time, in 1970, Joyce Dahmer’s fragile health collapsed. She had been steadily increasing her consumption of drugs, taking eight Equanil per day, as well as laxatives and sleeping pills. Her body began to shake uncontrollably. It was difficult to tell why she should be so unhappy as to want to blot herself out all the time. Lionel was not as attentive as some men, but then neither was he a philanderer. ‘It just didn’t seem like the parents really liked each other too much,’ recalled Jeff. ‘It made me feel on edge, unsure of the solidity of the family. I decided early on I wasn’t ever going to get married ‘cause I never wanted to go through anything like that.’
It was by no means all black. They used to go on hikes together, putting notches on a staff to indicate how many miles they had walked; and they would drive to nurseries to buy plants for the garden. But behind it all was the threat of tension, and the certainty that Joyce would not be able to cope with it. ‘When she was on the medication, which seemed like years to me, most of the time she’d be too tired to do anything . . . she just seemed to be in bed most of the time we were in Bath.’ David Dahmer confirms that the atmosphere in the house was bad, and that a good deal of shouting and hurling of objects occurred. The children, however, were never attacked. They simply observed and waited. Eventually, Joyce was taken to hospital, where she spent a month in a mental ward. This was followed by twenty-two sessions of psychotherapy over a period of a further month. The ingestion of pills, however, did not significantly abate.
Jeff’s response was classic. He blamed himself for his mother’s illness. He had known for as long as he could remember that she had been depressed following his birth, and that he had therefore caused the illness. He also must have caused every relapse. He could not articulate his pain, for fear of tipping his mother over the edge again. He had to keep himself to himself, say little and do less, to protect her, to keep a little calm in the house. The more she saw of him the worse it would be for her. His brother David said, ‘[Jeff] never learned to be open with his feelings of frustration . . . he went out to the forest by himself and cut down trees for firewood.’ They could hear him slamming against tree trunks from inside the house. It sounded like vented anger (and would so be interpreted by one of the psychiatrists at Dahmer’s trial), but it was more likely the solace of utter isolation. Jeff quite simply felt he did not belong, and that if he were to belong he would only do harm.
This early sense of alienation is a common feature of many men who become compulsive murderers. Joseph Kallinger, whose case was exhausti
vely studied by Flora Rheta Schreiber in The Shoemaker, said, ‘I had a lack of feeling that I was a part of anybody – or that anybody was a part of me.’4 The notorious torturer Leonard Lake, arrested in San Francisco in 1985, similarly felt himself to be outside of life, watching. (He committed suicide while in custody.) So did the boastful ‘serial killer’ Henry Lee Lucas, arrested in Texas in 1983, whose mother was psychiatrically impaired. They all felt in some way adrift, disconnected from the universe inhabited by everyone else, all those people who belong together and who are bonded. They are apart and alone. They live in an emotional no-man’s-land. Jeff Dahmer, bashing trees in the forest with only the echo to accompany him, was on his way towards the same dead end.
The strange character of Meursault in Albert Camus’ novel L’Etranger is a literary echo. This short but compelling story became the almost sacred text of a generation devoted to the notion of the ‘absurd’ and one’s duty to do battle with it, but from our point of view it is the alienation of the central character which illuminates. Meursault kills a man on the beach in Algeria for no particular reason; he is bored, and the man was there. He is indifferent to his arrest and trial, almost like an impartial spectator. He also hardly notices his mother’s funeral; it demands as much of his attention as the need for a cigarette. It is not that Meursault is callous and cruel, simply that he does not fit. He cannot respond as other people do, either morally or emotionally, because his moral and emotional development has been blocked. He doesn’t care because he can’t care – he is separate from the world of affection and regard.
To be part of that world, the child must feel that his existence is beneficent, productive of good. If it is not, then he should withdraw. Jeff Dahmer withdrew and soon afterwards began to indulge private fantasies which festered and destroyed both himself and those who came too close to him. It is virtually impossible to exaggerate the dangers of this kind of withdrawal (unless, of course, it promotes the creative isolation of the artist, who is, in this respect, the antithetical twin of the murderer). If the child grows into a man who cannot relate in any obvious way, he will find an aberrant way to relate, through cruelty, or sadism, or control, or ultimately through destruction. Complete isolation, that of having no effect whatever, becomes in the end unbearable.5
An anonymous patient articulates the problem in this way: ‘I’ve been sort of dead in a way. I cut myself off from other people and became shut up in myself. And I can see that you become dead in a way when you do this. You have to live in the world with other people. If you don’t something dies inside.’6 And this is Dahmer’s own reflection: ‘I don’t even know if I have the capacity for normal emotions or not because I haven’t cried for a long time. You just stifle them for so long that maybe you lose them, partially at least. I don’t know.’7
The fact that Jeff had not been troublesome or demanding as an infant ought not to earn surprise. Most babies are troublesome and demanding – it is their way of finding their impact upon others and the limits to their exploitation of it. It is simply a manifestation of being alive. The child who does not ask for attention, whether or not because he has learnt not to expect it, betrays an inner deadness which can be mistaken for goodness and sweetness of character. Now, Jeffrey Dahmer is adamant that no blame should attach to his parents for what he did, even indirectly. He is fierce in their defence, and has told everyone who has dealt with him that the fault for his crimes lies entirely and solely with him. In a way, he still holds himself responsible for his mother’s instability, and wants at all costs to protect her from interference. There is, it is true, no overt instance of ill-treatment in the family history, and it must be said clearly that nobody supposes one to be hidden. But who knows how the young Jeff Dahmer felt about his role with a self-absorbed mother and distant, busy father? Certainly not he. The intensity of the inner resistance against full self-knowledge is unfathomable.
Nevertheless, it was becoming increasingly obvious by the time he was eleven or twelve that his withdrawal ought to be reversed. Lionel tried everything to engage his attention, awake his energy. He taught him tennis, and played many a match with him. But Jeff’s heart was not in the game, and schoolfriends gained the impression that he was ‘pushed’ into it. He joined the Scouts for a short period, a reluctant recruit. ‘I didn’t want to join Boy Scouts, but my folks figured it would be good to get me interested in something,’ he said. They sent him off to a ranch, where Scouts go backpacking in the wilderness for two weeks. ‘We had to tie up the food between two trees so the bears wouldn’t get it.’ All of which sounds exciting and enticing, but Jeff behaved for the most part as if he was not there. His apathy extended even to self-expression. ‘It was very hard to get anything out of him,’ said his brother David, who also remembered Jeff talking in a level monotone from an early age. Lionel had the impression that Jeff was distressed to see the lambs they had reared go off to slaughter, but it could only be an impression. ‘Jeff never showed much emotion outside.’ The boy had already entered his self-made prison.
Once there, he proceeded gradually to cement the ramparts and make his refuge impregnable. He continued passively to acquiesce in his father’s attempts to enliven him, but saw little purpose in them. As for his mother, she appeared to have ‘switched off’ and was cherishing her own separate refuge in sedatives. Sometimes, when Jeff came home from school at the end of the day, his mother was still in bed, and it looked as if she had not stirred since morning. The threads which bound mother and son, never very strong, had virtually worn away to nothing. They inhabited the same house, ate at the same table, but kept their own counsel. About Joyce, there was an air of desperation, almost panic, in dealing with the manifold little crises of daily life; about Jeff, an awesome air of secretiveness.
As he entered puberty, Jeff Dahmer was not especially curious or anxious about the changes in his emotional responses, probably because they were muted. Whereas most boys would hurl themselves into the expression of these new feelings by way of a passionate friendship or dramatic display of loyalty, Dahmer sat on the edge of the experience, bewildered and untouched. There was no ‘best friend’ to link arms with, share sniggers, or be proud of being seen with. He was already, perhaps, beyond reach.
With one neighbourhood boy, Eric Tyson, he did have some desultory physical exploration. At ten, Eric was three years younger than Jeff, but somewhat precocious in his appetites. Significantly, it was Eric who took the initiative, and Jeff who merely acquiesced. They had often been together, fishing and hiking, and they had a treehouse or fortress to which they sometimes repaired. It was there that Eric suggested they undress. The two boys touched and kissed and caressed, but went no further. They met here on three or four occasions, until the fear of discovery made them desist. As far as pubescent adventures go, it was a pretty mild one. Dahmer’s emotions were never engaged, though he did find that he was interested in seeing Eric’s body; it was surely the object, not the person, which caught his enthusiasm.
Everybody noticed a change in him between Junior High School at Eastview, and Senior High at Revere. To begin with, he put on some weight, and it was not immediately evident why this should be so. What was not known until later is that Jeff, from about the age of fourteen according to his brother, had started drinking. Whether he peered into himself and was alarmed by what he saw, it would be idle to speculate now; he certainly does not remember. Or whether it was the creeping isolation which he knew was too profound to be remedied and yet recognised was unusual. Apathy appeared to overwhelm him, and alcohol was its only antidote. Friends in high school noticed that he was not socially accepted. He was one of the ‘class clowns’ who would make a fool of himself, apparently in an effort to gain attention. One of his pranks was to bleat like a sheep in class and upset the equilibrium of discipline. Or he would fake an epileptic fit, or trip over an invisible object, or spit out his food and pretend to be sick. In a store, he would ‘act retarded’, knock items off the counter, and generally make an embarr
assing scene. This is the kind of behaviour one might expect of an insecure young man in despair over his lack of contact with his fellows, imploring them for some notice and attention. In Dahmer’s case it is rather more worrying. He has given up on the idea of contact and already secreted himself from the world. The new character he now displays to the world, that of the unpredictable prankster, is an invention manufactured the better to conceal and submerge his real self beyond detection.
The friendship with David Borsvold had come to an abrupt end the previous year on the intervention of Mrs Borsvold, who thought Jeff to be a dangerous companion for her son. The excuse given, apparently, was that some homosexual attachment might evolve, but since there was little evidence for such a suspicion, it is more likely Dahmer’s oddness and separateness alarmed her. His friendship with Bill Henry was also superficial rather than committed. The school librarian and one or two of the teachers observed his lack of social adhesion, and were concerned.
At home, in solitude, he discovered the solace of masturbation, and indulged himself on a daily basis. There is no evidence that it was as yet accompanied by any particular fantasies.
Schoolwork suffered under attacks from apathy, alcohol and acting the fool, and his grades plummeted. He was obviously a bright and intelligent boy, which made his determined failures harder to excuse. Lionel and Joyce hired a private tutor in an attempt to bring him up to scratch, but the effort was not rewarded. It seemed that Jeff was slipping away on his own piece of driftwood.
The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer Page 5