The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer

by Brian Masters

  Jeff’s next complaint addressed the issue of money. Why should he have to pay for these sessions, which he didn’t want anyway, if they were ordered by the court? Surely the court should be responsible. Then he regressed into gloom again, leading Dr Rosen to the plaintive reflection, ‘Talking to him was like pulling teeth.’ She invited him to choose a topic, and he refused. He wanted her to give up. She noticed that his anger was brittle and that he had to take hold of himself to control it. He was ‘a tightly-wound individual who maintains rigid control’. Gradually, Jeff was a little more ready to speak about the past, and through this Dr Rosen learnt what a traumatic event the divorce had been. She did not know, of course, why it was so traumatic – being so closely associated in time and place with the death of Steven Hicks; Dahmer’s response when his parents’ divorce was mentioned often collided with his hidden response to the reminder of Steven, whose fate was contemporaneous with it.

  Dr Rosen tried to talk about the indecent exposure which had brought Jeff to her desk, and he became very angry with her, accusing her of collusion with the legal system. ‘When angry he becomes almost delusional in his paranoid beliefs,’ she wrote, adding, ‘These seemed genuine.’ On the other hand, she remarked several times that he was always nicely dressed, clean and neat, which may well have been signals of a subconscious effort to please her. Not unnaturally, she preferred to note his utter refusal to discuss anything probing or private. He would give nothing of himself, and the therapy grew more and more pointless. She wondered why he maintained such an unskilled job at the chocolate factory when he was clearly above average intelligence and could have stretched himself towards a greater endeavour, but her annoyance at his infectious morosity prevented her from seeking an explanation without his assistance.

  It was at this point that Dahmer began the behaviour which was referred to in court. He kept appointments in obedience to the court order, but refused to speak for the whole fifty-minute session, turning his chair away from the therapist. ‘He continues to show [up] conscientiously but I don’t know why,’ she wrote. His capacity to avoid contact was clearly exasperating. At a session before Christmas, however, he did talk about the presents he had bought for his grandmother, then clammed up again when Dr Rosen sought to probe the relationship. He told her he would rather spend time in jail than in psychotherapy, especially with her! Nor would he discuss his problems with alcohol.

  The sessions came to an end without any worthwhile insights being achieved. If any conclusion was possible, it was that the patient regarded introspection as such a threat that he would go to any length to avoid it; why it should be that he was so terrified of revelation was not a question that was directly addressed.

  In addition to the therapy, Dahmer was sent for a psychological evaluation at the Clinical Psychology Department of the University of Wisconsin, the first of several evaluations which were to bestride the last few years of his career. He was more forthcoming with the clinician, Kathy Boese, than with the therapist, although he did tell her some straightforward lies, such as that he had had a girlfriend in high school, had slept with a prostitute in Germany and had resorted to the services of prostitutes since then. About his father Lionel he revealed something of his assessment, though not of his feelings; these could only be conjectured. He said that his father was always too busy to spend much time with him and that he was autocratic to the point of being bossy. He did not keep in touch with the family on a regular basis because he did not like writing letters and anyway, ‘there’s not a whole lot to tell’. It was perfectly clear to the clinician that Dahmer had no friends at all and was, furthermore, destitute of interests or hobbies. She noticed that his patience was short, in so far as he shuffled his feet a lot and tapped his fingers on the table; only a constant supply of cigarettes kept his irritation in check.

  In the tests to which he was subjected, his tolerance of frustration was evidently low and his concentration brief. Despite this, his ‘exceptional performance in the use of language and abstractions’ indicated that he was potentially far more capable and intelligent than his lethargic display suggested. Dahmer was introverted and isolated. The test which was designed to illustrate underlying emotions drew from him ‘exceptionally slow’ responses ‘extraordinarily few in number and abnormally restricted in regard to affect’. His attitude towards the offence for which he had been referred to the clinic was angry. ‘He resents being told what to do by others and is easily disappointed and hurt.’ Most interesting was the unexplained reference to his fantasies: ‘His own goals for himself in this world, for what he hopes to achieve, are not congruent with reality.’11

  It is somewhat unnerving now to realise that the therapy sessions with Dr Rosen embraced the period when Dahmer’s struggle with himself finally exploded. One of their meetings took place on 16 November, 1987. Four days later Jeffrey Dahmer met Steven Tuomi.

  Steven came from Ontonagan, a little town in Michigan, and was working at Schuster’s Family Restaurant on East Wells Street, just behind the Milwaukee Athletic Club. An unpretentious place serving hamburgers and hot dogs, in England it would be called a working-man’s cafe and in the United States it is a diner. I frequently had a quick snack there myself. In 1987 it was called George Webb’s Restaurant, and Steven had taken a job there as cook in September working third shift, from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. On his job application sheet, in answer to the question how long did he intend to keep the job, he had written, ‘I have no limitation’. On 21 November he had a night off and went to the South 2nd Street bars.

  At closing time men crowded the pavement outside the 219 Club, making assignations or just getting a ride home. Jeff Dahmer was among them. He spotted the sandy-haired Steven, twenty-five years old but youthful and engaging, and fell into conversation with him. Steven had no plans and nowhere much to go, so he willingly accepted Jeff’s invitation to accompany him to his room at the Ambassador Hotel. Indeed, he was keen, for he rather liked the strong, masculine look of Dahmer and his air of nonchalance; he did not need persuading. Had Steven been aware of the opinions of both Dr Rosen and the Clinical Psychology Department of the University of Wisconsin, he would not have gone anywhere with Jeff Dahmer, whatever the enticement.

  For Kathy Boese had concluded her report with a startling prediction. Dahmer, she said, ‘could become a psychopathic deviate (sociopath) with schizoid tendencies. His deviant behaviour will at least continue in some form if not be exacerbated . . . Without some type of intervention which is supportive, his defences will probably be inadequate and he could gravitate toward further substance abuse with possible subsequent increased masochism or sadistic tendencies and behaviours.’

  Evelyn Rosen’s prognosis was more colloquial and consequently even more alarming. With her own emphasis, she wrote in her notes, ‘[There is] no doubt at this time that he is a Schizoid Personality Disorder who may show marked paranoid tendencies. He is definitely SPOOKY!’

  Jeff and Steven took a taxi to the Ambassador Hotel in the early hours of the morning.

  Chapter Five

  The Collapse

  When Jeff Dahmer woke up the following morning, he was lying on top of Steven Tuomi. He immediately saw that the man was dead. His head hung over the edge of the bed and there was blood coming from the corner of his mouth. Worse than that, Dahmer could feel the man’s ribs beneath him, as if he was holding the bones. Tuomi’s chest had been beaten in, was severely bruised and partly exposed. He then looked at his own arms and hands; they, too, were black and blue with bruises. He realised that, once again, they were the arms and hands of a murderer.

  ‘I felt complete shock,’ he recalls. ‘Just couldn’t believe it. Shock, horror, panic, I just couldn’t believe it happened again after all those years when I’d done nothing like this.’ He had a terrible hangover, but fought himself to his feet to ponder what could have occurred. First, he dragged the body to the closet and shut it in, out of sight. Then he spent the next five hours pacing up and down the hotel room,
smoking cigarettes non-stop, ‘wondering what to do, how to handle the situation’.

  Try as he might, he could remember nothing of the death. He knew that they had gone up to the room the night before, had drunk lots of rum and coke. He also knew that he had doctored Steven’s drink with the sleeping pills he had prepared in advance, in case he met someone at the 219 Club who might come back with him. But he was sure he had had no intention of harming anyone. They had undressed and gone to bed, masturbated each other, kissed and cuddled with mutual consent before the sleeping pills worked. After Steven passed out, he had continued to stroke and enjoy his body. At some point he had fallen asleep as well. His mind recorded nothing more until the awesome sight which greeted him that morning.

  ‘It’s almost like I temporarily lost control of myself,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what was going through my mind. I have no memory of it. I tried to dredge it up, but I have no memory of it whatsoever.’ They had been drinking rum, but where was the bottle? It was missing. That might mean that he had taken it out and left the door open, that somebody might have peered inside, it might mean anything. He searched everywhere for the bottle. Had he thrown it out of the window? ‘I looked down, went down to the sidewalk under the window, I don’t know what I did with it. Sometime during the night I must have taken the bottle and put it somewhere. I never did find out what happened to it. That scared the hell out of me, haunted me for a long time.’

  If he could not remember when he killed Steven, it was evident from the bruises how he had done it. But why? It was put to him years later that to beat a man to death suggested an access of rage. ‘You’re right, you’re right,’ he said. ‘I can’t side-step that. That shocked me in the morning. Where that rage came from or why that happened, I don’t know. I was not conscious of it. Why I had the rage, why I took it out on him, I don’t know. I must have pounded awful hard, because the rib-cage had broken, I could feel the bone. Everything went blank on me.’1

  There is another possibility, less obvious than rage but, in this case perhaps, more persuasive. It is also more demonic. We already know that Dahmer was hypnotised by the heart-beat and body sounds, that his fascination was with the chest, upon which he liked to lay his head. Is it conceivable that, blinded by alcohol and madness, he dug his fists into the sleeping man’s breast in order to get inside him, to achieve that which, in his deranged mind, was the ultimate intimacy? There are easier ways to kill a man through anger than to attempt to tear his heart out.

  At about 1 p.m. he went out to the Grand Avenue Mall and bought a large suitcase at Woolworth’s. It was more like a trunk, with wheels, the largest he could find. When he returned to the hotel, he booked the room for another night and went upstairs with the case. Late that night, he stuffed Steven’s body into it, secured it, and lugged it down to street-level where he called a cab. The taxi-driver helped him put the suitcase in the boot, and then drove him to his grandmother’s house at West Allis. His grandmother was asleep. Dahmer placed the suitcase in the fruit-cellar and went to bed.

  The family was due to congregate at Catherine Dahmer’s for Thanksgiving five days later, thus obliging Jeff to leave Tuomi’s body in the fruit-cellar for a week. How it was possible for him to join in the festivities, to get through a normal day, and to go to Ambrosia Chocolate at night, it is difficult to imagine. He took sick leave from work on Monday and Tuesday, but reported for duty as usual on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

  By the weekend his relations had left the house and he addressed himself to the task of disposal. ‘I hated to have to do it at all,’ he said. Dismemberment was unpleasant and messy, but it was the only practical option open to him. The weekend was ‘anxiety-ridden’, as he put it. With a knife which he had bought for the purpose, he removed the head and slit open the belly, then cut the flesh from the body into pieces small enough to handle, dropping them into plastic garbage-bags. On the floor of the fruit-cellar he lay an old sheet and wrapped the bones in it before smashing them with a sledge-hammer; the sheet was used to prevent splinters and fragments from flying all over the basement. The entire undertaking took about two hours to complete. Early on Monday morning he placed the bags with their burden into the trash for collection.

  Meanwhile, Dahmer kept the head for a further two weeks, hidden in a blanket on the top shelf of his closet. He boiled it in Soilex and bleach in order to retain the skull, which he then looked at when masturbating. But the bleach had rendered the skull too brittle, so it, too, was eventually smashed and thrown away. No charges were ever brought against him for the murder of Steven Tuomi; nothing of him remained, and there was insufficient evidence to support an indictment.

  Notice for eviction was served on Steven by his landlords, alleging non-payment of one month’s rent in the amount of $240. The letter was delivered the day after he was last seen alive.

  The Ambassador Hotel was the point of no return for Jeffrey Dahmer. Until then, he had succeeded in suppressing what he knew to be unholy thoughts and desires and limiting himself to enjoying the pseudo-death of a drugged partner. But now, after a murder which was neither intended nor recalled, he felt powerless to resist, as if the floodgates had finally burst open. He gave up the struggle. From now on he would not fight the urge, but embrace it, go along with it, accept it as a friend.

  The notions of compulsion, addiction, obsession, begin to shape his view of himself as compliant collaborator with an evil force. ‘One thing I know for sure,’ he said. ‘It was a definite compulsion because I couldn’t quit. I tried, but after the Ambassador, I couldn’t quit. It would be nice if someone could give me an answer on a silver platter as to why I did all this and what caused it, because I can’t come up with an answer.’2 The hunt for the perfect prop, the fantastical become real, would henceforth pervade his every thought and grip him with such intensity as to banish all interfering concepts of morality or safety. ‘By that time my moral conscience was so shot, so totally corrupted, that that was my main focus of life. These were my fantasies. That’s what happens when you think you don’t have to be accountable to anyone. You think you can hide your activities, and never have to account for them. It can lead to anything then, which it did.’3

  Bewilderment on the one hand, acceptance of personal responsibility on the other, the two quotations above would eventually be the twin pivots upon which Dahmer’s trial would swing. It is essential to our understanding of the case that they should not be seen as contradictory, for a man can retain a perfectly clear idea of what is right and good and still be compelled to do what is wrong and bad. It is the nature and the source of that compulsion, as well as its depth, which need to be examined, and it does not help simply to deny it. Psychiatrists talk about a ‘personality disorder’, which supposes a pre-existing order that has been sent off course; doctors refer to a ‘chemical imbalance’, which likewise postulates a balance knocked awry. Coming from a religious family, and having spent two years wrestling with the evil that he saw within him, it was natural that Dahmer’s understanding of his dilemma should express itself in terms of diabolic possession. The Devil is seen as the agent of the imbalance or disorder, the creator of chaos and moral anarchy. ‘Am I just an extremely evil person or is it some sort of satanic influence, or what?’ he wondered. ‘I have no idea. I have no idea at all. Do you? Is it possible to be influenced by spirit beings? I know that sounds like an easy way to cop out and say that I couldn’t help myself, but from all that the Bible says, there are forces that have a direct or indirect influence on people’s behaviour.’4

  From this moment, Dahmer began to welcome the intrusive thoughts, no matter where they came from. ‘The Bible calls him Satan. I suppose it’s possible because it sure seems like some of the thoughts aren’t my own, they just come blasting into my head.’ They grew stronger and more urgent, and steadily gained momentum; it was as if his life were being guided by malignancy. ‘These thoughts are very powerful, very destructive, and they do not leave. They’re not the kind of thoughts you c
an just shake your head and they’re gone. They do not leave.’ The episode at the Ambassador Hotel unleashed forces which could no longer be contained. ‘After the fear and the terror of what I’d done had left, which took about a month or two, I started it all over again. From then on it was a craving, a hunger, I don’t know how to describe it, a compulsion, and I just kept doing it, doing it and doing it, whenever the opportunity presented itself.’5

  Dahmer had earlier referred to his ‘dark side’, and it was this part of himself which henceforth dominated. The concept of a dark component in human nature ascends almost to the beginning of thought, when mankind first contemplated his capacity for wrongdoing and ruminated on its source. Unwilling to see themselves as inherently bad, men have consistently sought to lay the blame for badness outside their own volition, and the notion of possession by evil spirits is pre-Christian in origin. Examples abound in early Jewish history as related in the Old Testament as well as in many primitive peoples, and the idea enjoyed notorious resurgence in the Middle Ages. In 1484, Pope Innocent III declared as unassailable fact the existence of lecherous demons. Even today, mischievous spirits are held to account for headaches or bad temper in some peasant societies.

  It has already been noted that the idea of the demon was originally a tutelary spirit who accompanied one through life, watching over mortals with sage advice, since they were not capable of understanding the spirit world by themselves. (The modern ‘guru’ is a variation on the theme.) These beings were not exclusively evil at all, but influential for both good and bad. It is only with the advent of Christianity that the idea of a supernatural being devoted to promoting the bad gets established. The unitary origin of good and bad influences is supported even etymologically, the words ‘God’ and ‘Devil’ being ultimately from the same source. When the ideas became separated, the Devil was initially the obedient servant of God, who happened to be allotted the less agreeable duties among the angels. Christianity effected the complete division of the two concepts, making the Devil responsible only for evil influence, while God was credited with the healthier aspects of human nature.