The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer

by Brian Masters

  Back home, Ronald Flowers noticed two things: there were strange bruise marks either side of his neck, about two inches round, and his underpants were inside out.

  He made complaint that Dahmer had drugged him and stolen his property, and police officers interviewed the suspect on 5 April after Flowers had shown them the house. Dahmer denied the allegations, claiming that Flowers had drunk too much and that he had helped him get to the bus-stop the next morning. There was no proving either way, and charges were never brought. But it is interesting to speculate what might have happened. Catherine Dahmer stated that her grandson had made a bed up for his friend in the basement and that she had seen them leave the house together on Sunday. It may well be that Flowers was put on a bus, got off somewhere and wandered into a field, still under the effect of the crushed tablets he had been made to swallow. More crucially, why did Dahmer not kill him?

  Various reasons were adduced at the trial, all of which pointed convincingly to the murderer’s cunning and calculation. Ronald Flowers was too strong, too masculine, to have been summarily despatched; there might have been a struggle, some noise, Grandma might have woken up. Even if she hadn’t, she was already a witness, for she had heard them come in and divined that Jeff’s guest was to stay the night. And yet, there were the marks on Flowers’ neck, indicating that Dahmer had probably attempted to go through the motions of strangling him. Is it possible that he ‘snapped out’ of his murderousness in time to prevent himself going through with the kill? Probably not. One is bound to admit that it is much more likely he realised the risks and desisted. The marks on Flowers’ neck conjure an image of Dahmer wishing he could keep Flowers and holding his hands on him, knowing he couldn’t, struggling to control the surging desire, and succeeding. It would be one of the most potent images against him at his trial.

  He doubtless was able to keep Ronald Flowers long enough to explore his body, which would account for his underwear being put on the wrong way round.

  Three months later, Flowers was again in the 219 Club, where he recognised Jeff Dahmer by his singularly grubby Hush Puppy shoes. He went up to him and asked if he remembered him. Dahmer said he did not, but invited him to come for a coffee anyway. ‘You know who the fuck I am,’ shouted Flowers, who was about to attack him until his companions dissuaded him. Outside the club, he again saw Dahmer getting into a taxi with another black man about to join him. ‘Don’t go with him,’ screamed Flowers, ‘he’s fucking crazy.’ On hearing this, the stranger withdrew and, presumably, is unaware how close he might have come to a brush with madness.

  It was largely the result of the incident with Ronald Flowers that the family decided it was time for Jeff to move out of his grandmother’s and find a place of his own. The old lady was tired of his drinking and uneasy about his ‘guests’. ‘There was pressure from my grandma and dad and my aunt Eunice. I guess you could say I was sort of eased out.’ A family conference was held, bringing Eunice, Lionel’s sister, up from Greendale some ten miles from Milwaukee. ‘Word had gotten around about my late-night activities, drinking, going to the bars, and so they thought it would be better to finally just move out.’17 Another decision reached that day was that Jeff should seek some help for his excessive drinking. Accordingly, Lionel took his son to the Family Services on West Highland Avenue on 26 April and presented him to Dr Michael Bleadorn to be treated for alcoholism. Unfortunately, the course only lasted four sessions, and it had anyway to compete for influence with a new obsession of Jeff’s which evolved at the same time. He had bought a video of the movie Return of the Jedi, in which the emperor is all-powerful and possesses ultimate control over mortals. He was watching it several times a week, and became so entranced by it, so identified with the character of the emperor, that he bought yellow-tinted contact lenses in the vain hope that they might lend him some of that power, and wore them when he went to the bars. It might ordinarily have been a mild eccentricity, but with Dahmer it was a further sinister indication of his descent into unreason.

  To match this development, in the summer of 1988 he bought a long black table and two statues of griffins. He still nurtured the idea of his own temple, and these were steps towards its realisation: the black table would be the altar, and the griffins, mythological creatures with the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a lion, would be its protection.

  In June, Dahmer took the lease of a small apartment at 808 North 24th Street, and stocked up on his supply of sleeping pills, still regularly prescribed by Dr Carroll Ollson. He took the skull of Richard Guerrero with him to the new apartment.

  Dahmer’s surface existence continued to be unremarkable and utterly undisturbed by these subterranean fissures. His work at the Ambrosia Chocolate Factory was satisfactory, if not intellectually demanding. As a mixer he was required to measure out powdered sugar into four giant drums, each with a capacity of eleven thousand pounds, and operate machinery to start the mixture working. He would then cut open the cocoa-bags and add the contents of these manually into the mixers, pour in the soybean treacle (‘It looks like maple syrup but tastes like motor-oil’), and finally add vegetable oil. The whole lot coalesced into a thick paste, at which point he would turn the mixer off and signal to workers on the floor below, who opened a hole in the bottom of the mixer and the paste would drop out in big blobs; this went on through other processes to become powder, thinner paste, and finally chocolate. ‘A lot of heavy lifting there, a lot of bags to cut open, but it wasn’t a bad job.’18 Soon after he had started, he experienced pain in his knees and various other joints, which the rheumatologist ascribed to lifting heavy weights, but it passed quite quickly.

  For the first four years, Dahmer gave no cause for complaint. Not only was he commended for the quality of his work, but he was found to be ‘resourceful, alert to opportunities for improvement’, which comes as something of a surprise, ‘always congenial and co-operative’, ‘neat and clean’. His report at the end of 1986 was lyrical: ‘Jeff is consistently improving and is proving to be an asset to the mixing department.’ The following year he was ‘willing to learn’, was ‘rarely absent and rarely tardy’, though it was observed that he required motivation and guidance; his concentration was beginning to wane. It was not until the last year that chronic absenteeism proved his undoing. But by then his sanity had irrevocably cracked.

  He was always quiet and unsociable, normal and pleasant when spoken to, but unlikely to seek the company of his fellow-workers. Another mixer thought he appeared to be under stress at times, while Timothy Mills noticed he had a tendency to fall asleep on the job. He was always reading books about animals and fish when not actually mixing. Tim McNamer corroborated the impression that Dahmer would fall asleep on occasions, and Dahmer himself admits that he never did get the sleep he needed, because there were often things to be done during the day when he should have been resting. The night shift is a punishing routine in any job.

  There was only one man he spoke to regularly in the mornings, before punching out and going home, a man whom he bumped into at one of the bars by chance, whereupon they both realised they shared an interest in the homosexual scene. Otherwise, nobody at Ambrosia knew that Dahmer was homosexual, nor would have suspected it, because he was so intensely private.

  His professional life, such as it was, went on thus placidly until September of 1988, when he found himself suddenly placed under arrest.

  It was 3.30 in the afternoon on Monday, 26 September. A student at the Milwaukee School of the Arts, Somsack Sinthasomphone, felt the presence of a man walking behind him on North 25th Street. The son of a large Laotian family, refugees from political turmoil in South-East Asia eight years before, Somsack had been rapidly Americanised and, unlike his father, spoke English fluently. The man stopped Somsack and initiated a conversation. He said he had just acquired a new camera and wanted to try it out. He had been asking other people in the street if they would pose for him for $50 an hour, but nobody had taken him up on the offer, which he thought wa
s odd; you’d think someone would want to make an easy $50 just to help him out! Would he like to try? It wouldn’t take long.

  Somsack was wily enough to ask if he would need to strip or pose with his clothes on. Dahmer said it really didn’t matter. Was it for a company or for himself? Just a new hobby, said Dahmer. So the boy said he would come. ‘I thought he was nice and just wanted to try out his new camera,’ he later said. They walked the one block to 24th Street.

  Once in the apartment, Dahmer produced a Polaroid camera and began to prepare his poses. He told Somsack to take his shirt off, but the boy resisted, whereupon he assured him it would make a better picture and pulled the shirt up over his head, revealing his chest, clean, beautifully shaped and disastrously appealing to Jeff Dahmer. ‘You have a nice body,’ he said. ‘Lie on the bed with your hands behind your head.’ The boy obliged and was photographed. They went to the kitchen where Dahmer made a cup of coffee which they shared, Somsack drinking most of it at Dahmer’s instigation, while he gingerly sipped. Back in the living room, Somsack pulled his shirt up again, and the photographer suggested he open the top button of his trousers and pull the zipper down. He did this, but pulled the zipper down only halfway, whereupon Dahmer pulled it right down, lowered his underpants and attempted to handle him. Somsack stopped this. The whole thing was getting out of hand and he felt this man to be strangely threatening, intense. ‘You know I want more from you than a picture,’ the man said.

  At this point Somsack declared that it was time for him to go. ‘Do me a favour before you leave,’ said Dahmer. ‘Come and sit beside me.’ That seemed innocuous enough, so the boy sat beside him for a few minutes. Dahmer then made a weird and worrying request. ‘I want to hear your stomach,’ he said, and, placing his head on the boy’s abdomen, he began to kiss and lick him from the navel to the groin. ‘I really felt scared and sick,’ the boy related. He jumped up, grabbed his school satchel and made for the door. ‘Wait! Don’t forget your $50,’ said Dahmer, ‘and don’t tell anyone, O.K.?’ Somsack fled the apartment and went straight home, but started to feel oddly tired and disoriented along the way. By the time he got to the house, he could barely stand. Two hours later, his father was unable to wake him and immediately realised there was something seriously wrong. He took him to the Good Samaritan Hospital, where he was diagnosed as suffering from the effects of a drug overdose. The police were summoned.

  Somsack Sinthasomphone was detained at the hospital for about three hours, from 7.30 to 10.30 p.m., and told the police officers who came to interview him exactly what had happened. He took them to 24th Street and pointed out the apartment. It did not take long for them to identify the tenant and his place of work, and they went straight to Ambrosia Chocolate to confront the suspect and make an arrest for Second Degree Sexual Assault and Enticing a Child for Immoral Purposes. Handcuffs were placed on him there and then. Dahmer was more horrified by the embarrassment of public exposure than by the nature of the charges; his privacy was now irretrievably compromised, and everyone at work would know that he was homosexual.

  Jeff Dahmer was taken to jail, where he spent the next six days in a fever of anxiety. The police searched his apartment and carefully removed the Polaroid camera, the bottle of Bailey’s Irish Cream, two photographs of Somsack, some male nude magazines and some sleeping pills. What they did not find, and what drove Dahmer into much terrorised apprehension, was the skull of Richard Guerrero.

  Thus passed the second occasion on which the police might have discovered Dahmer’s crimes before they escalated into demented catastrophe, the first being when flashlights were shone upon the bags containing Steven Hicks in the back of his car in 1978. One must not chastise the police for this; we would soon complain if they always assumed the worst and behaved without any sensitivity at all. It is nonetheless worthy of remark, as there will be several other moments of uncanny propinquity or near-misses before Dahmer’s course is finally stopped. He was so preoccupied by the skull that he forgot to tell his employers that he was in jail, and lost several days’ leave in consequence.

  Another result of the affair was a visit from Lionel, who was confronted for the first time with the fact of his son’s homosexuality. Jeff recalls the meeting in his characteristically anodyne manner: ‘He asked me if I was gay and I told him yes, and he accepted it fairly well. He didn’t get upset or anything about it. He just acted surprised and wondered why I’d never told him before and I said I didn’t tell him because I was embarrassed.’19 There was probably a little more to it than that, as Lionel was not disposed to be tolerant on such a matter and still felt that perversity was condemned by God. There was no doubt that he thought Jeff should be helped, and that he would do what he could to promote that help, but there can equally have been no doubt that Jeff felt the undercurrent of paternal disapproval.

  The sequence of psychological evaluations which then followed, before Dahmer’s appearance in court, are little short of astonishing in their prescience and the urgency of their warning. When taken in conjunction with the reports of 1986, they constitute the plainest possible signal of alarm. With Dr Charles Lodi, Dahmer was unusually frank, telling him that he was in ‘significant psychological distress’, that he was ‘anxious, tense and depressed’, and that he harboured ‘deep feelings of alienation’. I hope it is not too fanciful to see in these words a request for further exploration – the much-derided ‘cry for help’. There were very few occasions when Dahmer’s iron self-protection could be pierced, but this meeting with Dr Lodi was, I think, one of them. He certainly did not have the courage to turn himself in entirely of his own accord.

  Lodi opined that the patient was a ‘very psychologically problemed man’, and darkly concluded, ‘There is no question that Mr Dahmer is in need of long-term psychological treatment.’

  This is the first time that we meet Attorney Gerald Boyle, hired by Lionel Dahmer to defend his son against the pending charges. It was Boyle who sought the opinion of Dr Lodi, which he then forwarded to Probation Officer Gloria Anderson. She in turn commissioned a second opinion from Dr Norman Goldfarb, whose report is, if anything, even more cautionary. The interview took place two months after that with Dr Lodi, and in the interim Dahmer had sloughed off that tentative hint of co-operation he had shown before. Now he was ‘resistant and evasive’, showing irritation, anger, agitation, and answering in monosyllables. Despite this, his voice was utterly devoid of emotional shading or life, and Goldfarb noted that he was ‘suspicious of the motives of others’ – a classic schizoid trait. He thought Dahmer was impulsive, unlikely to tolerate frustration or delay of self-gratification, dismayed by his lack of accomplishment, manipulative and self-centred. It was curious that there was not a single person whom he could call a friend.

  It was clear that Dahmer was able to function without arousing suspicion, but he ‘would not show others the depth, severity or extent of his pathology’, and in consequence ‘others may not take his behaviours as seriously as they should’. In conclusion, Dr Goldfarb declared Dahmer to be ‘a seriously disturbed young man’ with a mixed personality disorder; ‘the pressure he perceives seems to be increasing’ and ‘he must be considered impulsive and dangerous’.

  Gloria Anderson appended her own recommendations for the court’s attention, pointing to the mental problems which Joyce Dahmer had suffered and the alcoholism of her father. She continued: ‘There has been much emotional instability in this family and . . . much confusion and isolation among family members. Jeff grew up in an atmosphere clouded by turmoil, mental health problems, unhappiness, confusion, and rejection, which had led to a breakdown in the family structure.’ She further quoted Dr Evelyn Rosen’s view that Dahmer had a ‘schizoid personality with paranoid features’, and added a dire prognostication: ‘Jeff is not psychotic, but not much is needed to push him, and alcohol serves this purpose.’

  Jeffrey Dahmer appeared before Judge William Gardner at the Safety Building in Milwaukee on 30 January, 1989, and pleaded no contest t
o the charge of Second Degree Sexual Assault. He claimed the administration of the drug was accidental, that he had not noticed a residue in the cup he had himself used earlier. He also said he was shocked to discover the plaintiff was only thirteen years old. A verdict of guilty was returned, the judge reserving sentencing until a later date to allow himself time to consider the psychological reports. Three months later, Dahmer was given one year in the House of Correction, and, consecutively, five years’ probation. Upon application from Attorney Boyle, Judge Gardner subsequently signed an order for work release, permitting Dahmer to continue with his job at Ambrosia Chocolate six days a week and report back to the House of Correction for his accommodation.

  Two important letters were written as a sequel to this episode in Dahmer’s life. The first was from Jeff himself, some time into his sentence, writing to Judge Gardner. ‘Sir, I have always believed that a man should be willing to assume responsibility for the mistakes that he makes in life. What I did was deplorable. The world has enough misery in it without my adding more to it.’ He requested a modification of sentence.

  Knowing what he knew, this display of contrition is either monumentally cynical, or pathologically disconnected from reality. He now says he did not write the letter anyway. It was written by another prisoner who was keen on helping people, a man of about forty-five or fifty who Jeff thought was serving time for armed robbery. It was ‘basically his letter with my signature on it. No, I didn’t write a word of that.’20 He did, however, copy it out in his own hand.21

  The second letter, also to Judge Gardner, is from Dr Lionel Dahmer, expressing his concern that the court had ordered no follow-up treatment for his son. He had only discovered about the therapy with Dr Rosen, he said, after the sessions were well advanced, and was dismayed to be told that she was not a specialist in treating alcohol-related problems. Every time his son had been in trouble, it had been due to alcohol. In the circumstances, wrote Lionel, ‘I have tremendous reservations regarding Jeff’s chances when he hits the streets.’ He concluded with the request that Jeff not be told he had written, presumably because he did not want him to realise he was urging more psychotherapy, and a touching imprecation: ‘I sincerely hope that you might intervene in some way to help my son whom I love very much and for whom I want a better life . . . This may be,’ he said, ‘our last chance.’22