The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer

by Brian Masters

  There was a small hut next to the Bath Road house where Jeff could be utterly alone. Eric Tyson occasionally looked for him there and noticed a number of skeletons of small animals – chipmunks, squirrels, birds – obviously looked after with care. There was also a moth collection, and jars of formaldehyde containing preserved insects. (Some of these jars were kept in Jeff’s bedroom.) Beside the hut was a small graveyard dedicated to the burial of animals, with small crosses and real animal skulls hanging from the crosses. David Dahmer knew about the animal graveyard and thought his brother was ‘doing a good service’ by burying dead creatures. Once, Jeff wanted to show him what he was learning in biology and produced a dead mole. He proceeded to cut the mole open and remove the heart and liver which he then put in formaldehyde. On another occasion he had helped dissect a baby pig in biology class and prevailed upon the teacher to let him take the head home. Alone in the garage, he removed the skin and flesh and kept the skull of this pig.

  Nobody suspected anything sinister in these activities. On the contrary, they appeared at last to indicate a proper interest in something, which could be nurtured and encouraged. Curiosity was a sign of some spark of life in the boy, and there were many others of his age whose curiosity led ultimately to intellectual enquiry. If his future lay in applied biology, that would be no bad thing. Lionel Dahmer was actually grateful that there should be one subject at school which gripped his son, for the boy’s grades in everything else were lamentable, and he was beside himself as to how to pressure him into improving his performance. This might be the answer. But Jeff’s interest in dead animals was beginning to proceed beyond mere curiosity into a kind of hypnotic fascination. He was starting to look out for ‘road-kills’, animals which had collided with cars on the wide country highways, and bring them home. He did this several times over the next two years, cutting them open down the front to see what they looked like inside.

  Jeffrey Dahmer never killed an animal himself. It is frequently the case that people who grow into multiple murderers have evolved from sadistic children, and cruelty to animals in childhood is a common characteristic shared among them. Dahmer’s case is different in this regard as in most others. He displayed no cruelty, and was not interested in watching an animal suffer or react to pain. His experiments were always with corpses. The boy who is cruel towards a living animal is testing his power to hurt and be effective, to relate to another creature, with torture rather than tenderness to be sure, but relate nevertheless. Incipient sadism is therefore relatively easy to spot. Dahmer was not aroused by the infliction of pain upon a living creature, but entirely by the cold, mechanical dissection of a dead one. Even sadism, though brutal and selfish, is an expression of life, and the sadist looks for response from a sentient being – it is the soul which quickens his interest and which he seeks to hurt. Jeff Dahmer was not excited by the soul or the senses, but by the mechanics – he wanted to see how an animal works. He might even, having taken it apart, try to reconstruct it. This obsession with the machine of life in preference to life itself is typical of the necrophile.

  The road-kills included dogs, foxes, an opossum. Once he carried home the corpse of a very large dog, something like a St Bernard, left it in the yard or the woods just beyond and waited for the flesh to rot off, then collected the bones and bleached them. He intended to put them together again, but never got around to it. The corpse of another dog was destined to be known all over America many years later. Jeff found it and took it home, then ‘I wanted to see what the insides looked like, so I cut it open’.8 He later stuck the dog’s skull on a pole in the woods, as some kind of tentative ritualistic gesture, barely understood, and left it to the elements. Not long afterwards, some neighbours, Jim Klippel with his girlfriend and his little four-year-old brother, were hiking in the woods when they came upon the grisly spectacle. Klippel saw that the dog’s body was hanging from the broken branch of a pine tree; it had been completely gutted, its intestines draped around the tree. A little apart was the head impaled on a stick. They were sorely shaken by the sight, as well they might be. But Klippel told his friend, Clark Secard, who went into the woods the next day with a camera and photographed it; this was the picture which would be published in the nation’s press when Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested sixteen years afterwards.

  Throughout this period of experimentation, he remained loyal to his own dog Frisky, who was now eight years old. It never once occurred to him to harm Frisky, nor indeed to examine the corpse of any dog that he knew personally. There was an occasion when Frisky was playing with the neighbour’s dog. ‘It stood about as tall as this table, short fur, looked like a Doberman, real friendly dog. My dog was chasing it into the street and this car came by and both dogs were together, right next to each other, and that car slammed into the big dog and just missed mine by that much. Boy, did I feel lucky.’9 Jeff reported the accident to the neighbours who owned the dog, but he did not yearn to dissect it in any way.

  When he was sixteen, Jeff grew even further apart from his colleagues at school. Bill Henry, Greg Rogerson, they all gradually fell by the wayside. It was, of course, Jeff’s own fault that this happened. He was more and more morose, sullen, uncommunicative; and more and more drunk. Schoolboys are quite impressed by the occasional display of alcoholic excess as a badge of adulthood, but constant drunkenness, though they would scarcely admit it, frightens them. Jeff Dahmer’s frequent stupors made them feel insecure in his presence, and they avoided him. All except one. It was now that he made a new friend in somebody as keen to blot out the present as he was. Jeff Six was also sixteen and was one of Revere High School’s suppliers of marijuana. He met Dahmer during the lunch period one day and offered him a smoke. From then on they would drink and smoke together every day, drinking ‘until our noses would get numb’ as Jeff Six put it, and smoking pot to transport themselves into giggly indifference. This new friendship suited Dahmer well enough, because it involved neither emotional commitment nor contact with the real world. The dope and the alcohol were a passport to unreflective bliss, and the school work came virtually to a halt.

  Jeff Six had one habit of which Dahmer did not approve. He loved to drive fast, and ‘his big thrill was to find a dog that was walking in the road and speed up real fast and hit it. It just amazed me. In one day he went through four dogs. How many dogs just walked into the road in front of him . . . he’d speed up real fast and just tick them off. The last one was this little puppy that walked into the road and I remember it was horrible, he speeded up real fast and the dog just went flipping over the top of the hood and I looked back and I could see it running off with this terrified look in its face. I don’t know how badly hurt it was, but pretty badly. That just sickened me. I told him to take me back and let me out.’10

  He never forgot the reproachful eyes of that frightened puppy. The eyes are the harbingers of guilt, for they force an impromptu, involuntary recognition of the life they reflect. Dr Hyatt Williams in London once treated a murderer who was haunted by the memory of a wounded turtle-dove that he had drowned to put it out of its misery, but which had looked at him with surprised, uncomprehending eyes before he completed the task.11 The fact that Jeff Dahmer remembered the eyes of that wounded dog almost permits one to place the last moment when he could have been saved from the collapse of his psyche, for that was the moment when a flicker of responsive sentiment still stirred within him, and was brought to flame by one little tragedy. Thereafter it weakened and dwindled until it was finally extinguished. One of his victims in 1991 died with his eyes open, but then it was far too late for the reproach in them to register; Dahmer merely noted it was peculiar, because all the others had their eyes closed.

  The relationship with Jeff Six was entirely restricted to the sharing of drugs. At the age of seventeen, Dahmer was still sexually untried and emotionally barren. His tentative exploration of Eric Tyson’s body had been four years earlier, and in the interim he had formed no intimate relationships nor attempted any sexual con
quest; nor, for that matter, had anyone shown sexual interest in him. Girls did not appear to notice him, although he was attractive enough, with his shock of blond hair. The affections between his parents were now completely dead, and had been so more or less since Joyce had made Lionel sleep alone in the den. Matters had deteriorated to such an extent that they only responded to each other by verbal abuse. ‘Our hearts grew hard to the situation,’ said David Dahmer, then eleven years old. Just how hard his brother’s had become he could not have suspected.

  There was a school visit to an anatomical museum in Cleveland which may have had an influence upon at least one pupil which far exceeded the intentions of the teachers. Jeff Dahmer gazed at the horizontal sections of the human body, revealing how everything was placed inside, how it all worked, and was transfixed with wonder. It was akin to his own experiments with road-kills, those moments when he had been close, so close to the most secret and personal part of another creature, the inside of him, the source and well of his very being, the engine which made the clock tick. Now he could see those intimate parts of a human’s inside as well, there in the museum, visible to all, but only truly seen by him. The rest probably did not realise how important such a moment could be, they did not appreciate it. They had not travelled down this road, so how could they know? Jeff absorbed the sights before him.

  At the same time, the frequency of his masturbation had been growing steadily, until it sometimes exceeded three times a day. Such is not remarkable for many a seventeen-year-old, burdened with a greedy libido which must be satisfied somehow. But most have by then found ways to explore the sexual mysteries with another; those who are left to their own devices are a fertile breeding-ground for fantasy. Jeff Dahmer had discovered that there were magazines devoted to the display of naked males, and he managed to procure some. These he used as masturbatory aids, gazing at the pictures which aroused him most, usually photographs of muscular torsos and hairless chests. The chest and the abdomen were the areas whereon he fixed his eyes as he masturbated, and the fantasy of one day holding a chest like that, being with it, possessing it, took shape in his mind. It was not the person to whom the body belonged that mattered – indeed, that might be an intrusion, a complication – but the qualities of the body itself. He did not imagine an intimate relationship with a lover, but an intimate relationship with an admirable and beautiful thing. Jeff Dahmer was in fact the pornographer’s dream, for he was by this time almost bereft of sentiment.

  His fantasy was merely an extension, logical but barren, of a common notion among adolescents unsure of their ability to attract or satisfy a partner. How many boys nurse fantasies of having a girl who would be willing to just lie there and allow him to do what he likes, to explore her body, to touch and investigate, while she does not complain or demand anything further. It is part of the learning process. The fantasy subsides with maturity, as the pleasures of mutual sex are discovered. But it is unlikely to mature if the interest is restricted to the body and is indifferent to the person who inhabits it.

  Parallel with this was Jeff Dahmer’s other fantasy, of looking into and knowing the interior of a body. The two fantasies had not yet fused; he did not think of the insides of the men whose photographs he contemplated while masturbating. The necrophilic fascination was as yet untied to sexual gratification. But the two objects of his imaginative fancies occurred at the same period of his teenage years, and though they would run separately through his head, not concurrently, the possibility of the one eventually feeding and intensifying the other was already in place. Other memories jostled with his imagination – the recollection of that most intimate moment of his life, when the surgeon’s hands had groped inside his bowels to repair the hernia, and the intense ruminative concentration of his Infinity Land fancy, with its promise of absolute inviolate privacy, a secret world all his own.

  There had been a jogger who regularly passed in front of the Dahmer residence at 4480 West Bath Road. Jeff eyed him daily. The man had the sort of healthy impressive physique which he wanted to touch, but how on earth could he contrive a meeting? And even if he did, what would he do next? He could hardly invite the man, a stranger, to lie down and let him fondle his body. It would not, could not work. He did not want to have to ask, anyway, he wanted to have the man entirely in his command, an unresisting object for his veneration. He wanted, in fact, to capture him. There was only one way he could think of doing it. He would somehow have to attack the man and knock him unconscious. Then he would drag him into the woods and lie with him there, next to him, on top of him. He would be able to kiss him without the man ever knowing. One day he took a baseball bat and waited at the side of the road for the jogger to pass. He was ready to put the plan into action. Providence worked in favour of the stranger, for on that particular day he did not pass, and the troubled boy returned to the house with his baseball bat and his fantasies. But he did not forget.

  Chapter Three

  The Fantasies

  ‘I don’t know why it started. I don’t have any definite answers on that myself. If I knew the true, real reasons why all this started, before it ever did, I wouldn’t probably have done any of it.’1

  The simplest answer is to suppose that the dissolution of Dahmer’s personality and the crimes which emerged from the rubble were caused by reckless, selfish indulgence of a fantasy life which ought to have been kept in check. But this is hopelessly to beg the question, for fantasy is not the source of the problem but the instrument by which the problem is tamed, at least for the time being. One is bound to look beyond. Dahmer could not have known what he calls the ‘true, real reasons’ because they antedated the fantasies which evolved in order to neutralise and contain them. If we follow the evolution of these fantasies into ever more florid and bizarre notions, we must hope that we may peer backwards by degrees and gradually peel away the layers which protect the injured psyche at the centre. There is no quick route; it meanders and buckles and occasionally meets a dead end. But by dint of building up a picture, however incomplete its form and evanescent its focus, the mystery might dissolve.

  In the first place, it is important to establish that there is nothing wrong with fantasy per se. In the infant, it is a useful prop and nourishment, to be discarded as reality becomes more enticing and rewarding. In the adult, it is the source of imagination and poetry, of artistic creation and outlandish endeavours. There is a celebrated remark by Goya which encapsulates the dilemma at the heart of this book. ‘Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters,’ he wrote. ‘United with her, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels.’2 In Dahmer’s case, it is quite clear that the fantasies did not march with reason, but collided with her. They ultimately became more real, more cherished, more important than reality itself.

  Fantasy is the realm of Dionysus, the god of energy, frenzy, freedom and chaos. He liberates the restricted self, allows it to escape from constraint and conformity and to abandon order. That is why he is the god of the drama, of make-believe and pretence. Actors get ‘out of themselves’ for a living, and fantasists for release, but they are engaged in the same enterprise and are disciples of the same god. Dionysus is also the god of sex and display, of uncontrollable urges and undeclared desires. He transcends the real, and he is very much the god who infected the head of Jeff Dahmer. Dahmer’s sexual deviation, already in his mind in mid-adolescence, was a product of Dionysian imagination, born of frustrated discontent and the need to create a better scenario for himself, one in which he would fit.

  Most fantasies are so peculiar and unfulfillable that they are never admitted, and perish with their hosts in the grave. ‘It is well for society,’ wrote Wilhelm Stekel, ‘that we do not know all the fantasies which accompany, consciously or half-consciously, or unconsciously, every erotic indulgence.’3 Stekel further pointed out that if we did know them, we would be amazed. It is the tragedy of this story that we do know them and we are amazed. Dahmer’s imagination is laid bare for all to see
and poke at, and the people with whom he nourished it paid the price with their lives.

  Sexual fantasy promotes masturbation and is generally satisfied by it. To that extent, masturbation is not merely forgivable, but blameless. It is a necessary safety-valve without which society might be awash with unspeakable energies suddenly released. As long as the pulse of the energy remains within the fantasy life, it is omnipotent and free; everything will happen as the masturbator wants it to, unfettered and unleashed, without the irritating intrusive contingencies of real life. But because there is omnipotence in fantasy, and restriction in reality, the two must be kept rigorously apart; they must not be allowed to spill over the one into the other. Reality poisons the spring of fantasy, whereas fantasy, when it erupts into the real world, brings destruction in its wake.

  There is also a sense in which, by a grim paradox, the freedom inherent in fantasy creates its own prison, for it denies the rich variety of the real world and substitutes the barren, unrealisable narrowness of a single-minded obsession. The man with a secret fantasy life is not to be envied, nor is Dionysus necessarily to be adored. ‘The mind is so trapped in frustration that it is like a tiny room with no windows.’4 By the time he was seventeen, Jeff Dahmer was securely locked inside this tiny room, and for the safety of all he should have remained there. He was rather like his mother, trapped by the addiction of self-absorption and helpless at coping with the prying demands of reality. There is, after all, something inescapably selfish about fantasy life. It knows nothing of sharing, of mutually exchanging pleasures. Jeff Dahmer did not think about giving the jogger a good time – he thought of the jogger only as furniture in his private drama.

  1978 was destined in every way to be a bad year for him. 4480 West Bath Road was stifling with discord and ill-will, and Lionel Dahmer remembered the period as ‘a mostly depressing and abnormal existence’. Not long before Christmas, he and Joyce had decided to sue for divorce. In the course of the previous year they had attempted to save the marriage by attending sessions with a professional counsellor, but had failed. The final straw came when Joyce had gone out of state in September to attend her father’s funeral and, while there, enjoyed an affair with somebody else. They both then decided on divorce, and told Jeff and David about it, declaring that they wished to keep it an amicable arrangement. But Lionel seems to have changed his mind, doubtless smarting at the humiliation of infidelity, and the acrimony resumed. Joyce received a registered letter from a lawyer telling her she had one week to move out of the house. They fought often, threatened each other in full view of the boys. Lionel told his sons that their mother was crazy, whereupon she fought hard to control herself and remain calm in order to prove him wrong, and this in turn exasperated him to shouting pitch. Finally it was decided that Lionel would be the one to leave the marital home, so he packed a suitcase and moved to the Ohio Motel at 2248 North Cleveland Massillon Road, about ten miles away.