The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer

by Brian Masters

  So deeply-rooted is the conviction of diabolic power that it crops up unwittingly in ordinary conversation, as with the person whose conduct is so out of character that he exclaims in bewilderment, ‘I don’t know what possessed me’, the implication being that a malevolent force should take responsibility. And the common appellation for an unpleasant dream, a ‘nightmare’, is evidence of its persistence, the second syllable being derived from a word meaning ‘spirit’ or ‘elf’ (the second syllable of the French cauchemar is from the same source). Even the word ‘epilepsy’, from the Greek, shows how historically the victim of an attack was thought to be possessed, or ‘seized’ by the Devil. It is not therefore unusual that Jeffrey Dahmer should have attributed his attacks of murderousness, haltingly, to the work of a malevolent presence. The late Dr Brittain, in his pioneering study of 1970, showed how many murderers of this type speak of two opposing forces battling within them for possession of their soul, and there have been many since to confirm his observations.6

  There are two other extensions of this idea which will need to be addressed. In the first place, it is by now clear that Dahmer was an acutely depressive man, and one of the many signs of depressive illness is the tendency to identify demons as consuming the patient and stealing his will. The depressive often feels himself to be rubbed out, erased, cancelled. ‘In depressive disorders,’ writes Herschel Prins, ‘feelings of being controlled or influenced by evil or Satanic forces are not uncommon.’7 Furthermore, excessive alcohol intake may complicate a depressive illness and induce states of ‘possession’. It would have been enlightening, perhaps, had Dahmer’s trial lawyers investigated the potency of his depression, for which there was ample evidence, instead of concentrating on an illness which nobody could define.

  The other point, already touched upon, is the universality of the belief that sexual behaviour is especially the province of demonic influence, a belief tacitly shared even by those who point to the sexual appetite as beneficent. The declared aim of sexual enjoyment, ‘ecstasy’, is itself a Greek word meaning to stop being oneself, to go outside oneself and experience a change of personality. Thus the purpose of sex is to release that other, hidden, unfettered self which lurks within and craves expression. The sexual imagination is nearly always demonic, a fact amply attested by the wild, Dionysian images of pornography. It was only Dahmer’s sexual urges which ‘possessed’ him, while the rest of his behaviour, when not driven by this compulsion, remained innocuous. One of the most well known of American multiple murderers, Theodore Bundy, was a perfectly pleasant and reasonable man except when he felt himself slipping under exigent influences which consumed him and prevented him from ‘being himself’; at such times, he said, he was ‘despicable and inhuman’.8

  When Bundy was sentenced to death, he said something very strange to the court. ‘I cannot accept the sentence,’ he said, ‘because it is not a sentence to me . . . it is a sentence to someone else who is not standing here today.’9 He did not mean to imply that they had got the wrong man, but that the murderer was not in him at that moment, that the disruption he caused to Bundy’s personality was episodic. It would be difficult to find a more graphic depiction of the feeling of momentary diabolic possession than this, for the idea of it is merely an intellectual construction. St Augustine himself believed that evil was a separate power which operated independently of the man whose conduct it infected: ‘It is not we ourselves that sin, but some other nature (what, I know not) sins in us.’10 To live with the feeling that evilness is natural to the human species is a possibility that most people, and all religions, find intolerable.

  There are many murderers whose language and behaviour fit the pattern of momentary possession. Edward Paisnel was known as Uncle Ted by dozens of children on the Isle of Jersey and was a very popular Santa Claus. At the same time, he terrorised the islanders by a vicious series of murders until he was caught in 1971. Ed Gein in Wisconsin, whose murders were utterly conscienceless and brutal, was a likeable and reliable babysitter. Mack Edwards gave himself up in 1970 saying that the demon had left him; before that, he had been killing children for seventeen years. In these cases, and others, it is striking how often a seemingly kind and gentle man may suddenly be inhabited by an alien character, who lets chaos rip. One of the young men who escaped from Dennis Nilsen in 1982, because he was lucky enough to survive until Nilsen’s murderous phase had passed, said that before and after the attack the killer had been a ‘saint’.11 A similar incident occurred with Jeff Dahmer, as we shall see, when he refrained from killing Luis Pinet, and did not understand why. In the Tracy Edwards incident, hours before his arrest, we have a picture of Dahmer actually on the threshold of an alteration in personality, about to be ‘possessed’ if you like, as Edwards saw him on the edge of the bed ‘rocking and chanting’; the prosecution was understandably anxious to discredit this piece of evidence.

  Dr Hyatt Williams makes the point very clearly. ‘The most cruel and destructive behaviour,’ he writes, ‘can be perpetrated by a person at one time, while almost immediately before or after such conduct he can be kind and compassionate.’12 It seems that some kind of internal short circuit may occur to release that mode of behaviour which the individual finds uncontrollable, and therefore not really coming from him. Frederic Wertham called it a ‘catathymic crisis’,13 but we are at liberty to call it possession if we wish; it is only a difference in nomenclature, and the language of myth is more accessible than the language of doctors.

  The language of literature is also rather more vivid. Dualistic characters exist throughout world literature, and are particularly abundant in the work of Dostoevsky, witness Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment or Versilov in A Raw Youth, who says, ‘I am split mentally and horribly afraid of it. It is as if you have your own double standing next to you.’ James Hogg wrote an entire book on this precise theme, entitled The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, in which the protagonist, Robert Wringhim, meets a stranger under whose influence he commits a number of murders. He resembles him in feature and manner. It is only gradually that the reader comes to realise that the stranger may not be another person, but a personification of that part of Wringhim’s own self which cannot be acknowledged. It does not matter whether you call the stranger Dionysus, or the Devil, or Wringhim devoid of conscience, or Wringhim’s ‘dark side’, and the novel is so beautifully ambiguous that all four are simultaneously possible. Now, Jeff Dahmer has not claimed to have a ‘double’, but his words and evident bewilderment point to a similar conclusion. He cannot believe that the whole story is ‘real’, that he did all those things, although he knows he did and can describe his acts in detail and with chilling objectivity. The British so-called ‘Moors Murderer’, Ian Brady, is on record as believing that he was watching his mind and feeling detached from it at the same time.

  This division between the self that is wicked and murderous and the self which can catch a bus, eat a meal, do a job of work, would cause great travail in the courtroom when the question of Dahmer’s sanity was addressed. Suffice it to say for the moment that a murderer may be able to tell time accurately and draw inferences from the information, but he cannot fathom the springs of his deviant behaviour; if he could, then he would take charge of it. ‘I doubt if there’s any good in me,’ Dahmer once said.14 He drew Dr Judith Becker’s attention to a passage in St Paul’s Letter to the Romans, Book V: ‘What I do is not what I want to do, but what I detest . . . it is no longer I who perform the action, but sin that lodges in me. For I know that nothing good lodges in me . . . The good which I want to do, I fail to do; but what I do is the wrong which is against my will; and if what I do is against my will, clearly it is no longer I who am the agent, but sin that has its lodging in me.’ This is what should be understood by Dahmer’s frequent allusion to his ‘compulsion’.

  In the weeks following the death of Steven Tuomi, Dahmer continued to honour his appointments with Dr Rosen, while refusing to co-operate in any but the most
perfunctory manner. His panic subsided when nobody seemed to notice that Steven was gone, or to connect his disappearance with the Ambassador Hotel (where Dahmer had registered in his own name). The desires, correspondingly, mounted. In January of 1988 he took a twenty-three-year-old black man, Bobby Simpson, back to the house in West Allis. In the basement he drugged him and masturbated four times with him. But he went no further. Simpson had no idea just how fortunate he was.

  It was one in the morning on 17 January, 1988, when Dahmer left the 219 Club. At the bus-stop he noticed a young man in faded burgundy jeans with suspenders hanging loose, a sweater and a golfer’s cap. He was James Doxtator, a Native American, who had several times threatened to run away from home because he did not get along with his step-father, and who lusted after a Jaguar car which a neighbour promised to give him when he turned eighteen. He told his mother Debra that if he ever did leave home, he would keep in touch with her, but he did not say that he was going to the gay bars of South 2nd Street and enjoying male company. The man who approached him that night was very pleasant. Dahmer offered him $50 to come home and spend the night with him, which Jamie gladly accepted, and they took the bus out to West Allis, alighting at 57th and National. Dahmer says he was looking for ‘companionship’ and found the boy attractive; ‘he appealed to me’. The chances are, Jamie Doxtator was also looking for companionship, but of a different order.

  Mrs Dahmer was fast asleep upstairs. She never stirred during the night. The two men started in the sitting room, undressed each other, kissed and felt each other’s bodies. This went on for well over an hour, with Dahmer performing fellatio upon his willing partner. Then they went down to the basement; it is not clear why they should need to do this, unless Dahmer had already formed the intention of harming him. The possibility was hovering in his mind because he was enjoying Jamie’s body and wanted the pleasure to continue. At about 4 a.m. Jamie let slip that he would not be able to stay too late in the morning but would need to get back home. The threat of departure. The promise to abandon. The fact of leaving. Dahmer mixed a drink.

  The drink was a cocktail of Irish cream, coffee, and crushed sleeping pills. As the drug began to work, which took about half an hour, they kissed frequently. Then, in a tableau of painful poignancy, Jamie fell asleep on Dahmer’s lap, secure in the arms of his new friend. Dahmer held him for a long while, stroking his skin. His body was comforting and warm. Then he stretched him out on a sheet on the cellar floor. In his own bland and icy words, ‘I knew my grandma would be waking up and I still wanted him to stay with me so I strangled him.’15

  Jamie knew nothing of what was happening, as he had been deeply unconscious. Dahmer lay holding him a little longer until day was about to break; it was time to conceal the body in the fruit-closet. He went and had breakfast with his grandmother and waited for her to go off to church (it was Sunday morning). Then he went downstairs again to fetch the body. ‘I brought him up to the bedroom and pretended he was still alive.’ He kissed and caressed the body, and proceeded to penetrate it anally.

  Doxtator was returned to the cellar where he remained for another week. Dahmer was at work all that week, during the course of which he went down three times to lie with the corpse. After four or five days an odour began to drift up to the house, causing Mrs Dahmer to remark upon it. Jeff told her that the cat litter was smelling and he would see to it. The following Sunday, he disposed of the body in the same way that he had done with Tuomi, cutting off the head and flesh and breaking the bones with a sledge-hammer, and taking care to put newspaper at the little cellar window so as not to be observed. The blood was easily hosed down the drains. All except the head was placed in the trash for collection on Monday morning. Dahmer took sick leave from work that Monday, but kept his appointment with Dr Rosen. He boiled the head and bleached the skull, as before, and kept it for a further two weeks, imagining that, each time he took the skull out of the closet, he was still with the young man whose spirit had inhabited it.

  Dahmer intended to keep this skull indefinitely, for he had by now conceived the notion, albeit only in tentative form, that he would create some kind of temple at which the skull would be on show for his private, secret worship. By his own admission, the ‘compulsion’ was now ‘in full swing’ and he no longer had any thought of containing it. He would struggle only to find a way forward – to indulge, replenish and perpetuate the fantasy which had taken him over. But the skull again became too brittle and had to be destroyed. All trace of Jamie Doxtator disappeared, hostage to the febrile fantasies of a lost mind.

  Doxtator was a tall boy, at just under six feet almost the same height as Dahmer. He had a small moustache and looked sixteen or seventeen years old. In fact, he was only fourteen. Dahmer claimed he did not know where the pressure which drove him came from. Asked to describe it, he said it was ‘an incessant and never-ending desire to have someone at whatever cost, someone good looking, really nice looking, and it just filled my thoughts all day long, increasing in intensity throughout the years when I was living with Grandma. Very overpowering, just relentless.’16

  The next to fall victim to this suffocating greed, barely two months after Doxtator, was Richard Guerrero, aged twenty-three. The pattern was established. They met outside the Phoenix Bar at 2 a.m. on the morning of 27 March, 1988. Dahmer offered Richard $50 to spend the rest of the night with him, to which he agreed. They took a taxi to the Mai Kai Tavern and walked the two blocks from there to Grandma’s house. She was asleep. This time they went upstairs to Jeff’s bedroom and had ‘light sex’ together – the usual body-rubbing, kissing, and masturbation. About two hours later the decision to kill was made and the potion prepared. At this point another Dantesque image, at once hellish and pathetic, thrusts itself before our contemplation, for Dahmer strangled the sleeping Guerrero with his bare hands as he lay naked next to him, looking at him, and when the deed was done, threw his arms around the corpse and embraced it. From now on, this would be a constant theme, the act of killing as a grotesque distortion of the act of love. He did not enjoy the killing, but had to kill in order to love, in order to indulge the hideous parody of intimacy and cherishing which was the only kind of ‘love’ he knew how to show. He now had Richard all to himself for another few hours, and performed oral sex upon his corpse.

  Dahmer left it in bed while he had breakfast with Grandma, and took it to the basement when she went to church. Sunday being the only convenient day when he could dismember, and as he did not want to leave the body for a whole week, he was obliged to take Richard to pieces there and then, and place his remains in the garbage for collection Monday morning. He kept the skull for several months, having found a way to prevent its crumbling by diluting the bleach which he used.

  The following weekend brought Easter and another encounter for Jeff Dahmer which did not end tragically; it does, however, afford us a further glimpse into his mode of behaviour during the hours preceding an attack. Ronald Flowers, a handsome, broad black man of twenty-five, went to the 219 Club two or three times a week from his home in Racine, Wisconsin, an hour away. Friends had invited him down that Saturday, but he had declined as he was awaiting delivery of a water-bed. When the water-bed did not arrive, he drove himself to Milwaukee and met his friends (two men and a woman) inside the club. They all four left at the same time, the other three driving off in their own car. Flowers walked over to his 1978 Oldsmobile Regency, parked opposite, and could not start it. After three attempts, the battery went dead and he realised he was stranded. Outside the 219 Club is a much-used pay phone, generally with a queue of people waiting for it. Flowers tried some calls to get someone to rescue him, with no luck, and was about to surrender the cause as lost. It was then that Jeff Dahmer approached him.

  When the problem was explained to him, Dahmer invited Flowers to share a cab home with him, where they could retrieve Dahmer’s car, bring it back, and jump-start the faulty car. Jeff Dahmer, of course, had no car. Flowers had only drunk one rum and coke, as he h
ad intended to drive back to Racine, so his wits were about him. In the taxi he found it difficult to make easy conversation with his Good Samaritan; Dahmer averted his eye constantly, and spoke in gloomy negatives, about how he hated his work, how he did not get along with his family, and so on. Flowers quickly formed the impression he was a depressive and depressing character, even boring. Still, he did need to get his car working, and was not interested in sharing any other activity with this man.

  They alighted two blocks away from the house. Dahmer explained that this was to avoid waking his grandmother with headlights or slamming doors. Flowers noticed that there was no sign of a car outside the house, and grew suspicious. As they went in, a voice from upstairs said, ‘Is that you, Jeff?’ ‘Yes, Grandma,’ Dahmer said, ‘I’m just going to make myself a cup of coffee.’ The reply implied he was alone.

  Flowers’ anxiety was heightened by Dahmer’s demeanour and conduct in the kitchen. They sat at the kitchen table to have their coffee, but Dahmer was so nervous he was visibly shaking. Flowers was thinking how soon he would be able to get out of the house, and how to get back to his car, when he began to feel dizzy and sleepy and passed out. He woke up two days later in hospital, where he was told that he had been found unconscious in a field and brought to town by ambulance. There was no sign of drugs in his body, nor of any sexual assault, but his necklace, bracelet and $200 were missing. His brother collected him and he was discharged.