The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer

by Brian Masters

  The most pathetic postscript to the case was given by the victim himself, Somsack Sinthasomphone, and his father. The boy said that after he came out of the House of Correction Dahmer should be watched everywhere he went. The father told Somsack that if he had not been healthy and athletic he might have passed out in Dahmer’s apartment ‘or’, reflected the boy, ‘maybe he would have killed me’. What makes this sage and loving advice so unbearable is that, by the most cruel, capricious coincidence, Somsack’s brother met Jeff Dahmer two years later and died at his hands.

  By this time, no amount of advice to individuals or warnings from psychologists appeared able to stop Dahmer when in the grip of his ‘compulsion’. It is scarcely credible, but true, that in the intervening weeks between his conviction for sexual assault and the passing of sentence upon him, Dahmer had killed for the fifth time.

  Chapter Six

  The Nightmare

  Depressed by his conviction and convinced that his life was hardly worth living, Dahmer sank further into lassitude. He began to think of suicide, at the same time fully aware that he lacked the courage to do more than talk about it. He could see no way to correct an empty and destructive life. All he had was the ceaseless compulsion to be with somebody, some body, and alleviate his isolation for a few hours; he described the compulsion to Dr Becker as ‘painful’.

  On 20 March, 1989, he took a ten-day vacation from work which would stretch over the approaching Easter period. He moved out of his little apartment in preparation for his pending incarceration at the Work Release Center, and returned to his grandmother’s house at West Allis. Five days later, on Easter Saturday, the urge to prowl and capture a companion was once more upon him, so he went to his usual source, Richard’s Pharmacy, and replenished his supply of sleeping tablets. He regularly bought thirty tablets at a time, usually prescribed by Dr Carroll Ollson. This was his fourteenth such prescription.

  That evening Dahmer went out drinking at the bars. He barely spoke to anyone at all, and gave up any hope of a meeting. The yearning seemed to have worn off; he was resigned, even a little relieved. The final stop was a bar called La Cage (inspired by the uproarious French film La Cage aux Folles) on 2nd and National. Just before closing time, ‘I was walking towards the entrance, I wasn’t planning on meeting anyone or going out with anyone, and this nice-looking black guy starts talking to me, just out of the blue.’ This is the first occasion on which Dahmer has not picked up a victim, but has himself been picked up by one. It was to be a fateful initiative on the part of twenty-four-year-old half-caste Anthony Sears.

  Tony was indeed an attractive man, extrovert and friendly. He wore a V-neck sweater with a white T-shirt underneath, old faded blue jeans with holes at the knees, white tennis shoes, and drew his hair back in a small ponytail. He was not alone, but his white friend Jeff Connor was chatting to somebody else when Tony made his approach to the reserved and quiet stranger. Connor overheard him ask the man if he had any coke, to which he replied that he had some rum as well. ‘No,’ said Tony Sears, ‘I mean cocaine!’ Tony had recently fallen into the cocaine habit rather badly. Dahmer invited him to spend the night, and Tony eagerly agreed. He was, it must be said, very keen. Jeff Connor saw what was happening and volunteered to drive them wherever they needed to go. He heard Dahmer say that he was from Chicago and was on a visit to his grandmother in Milwaukee. They all three walked to the parking-lot and found Connor’s car; Connor got into the driving-seat, Dahmer and Sears sat behind.

  Dahmer asked him to drop them off at the corner of 57th and Lincoln and they would walk the rest of the way. On the journey, Sears unzipped Dahmer’s trousers and performed oral sex (fellatio) upon him, ‘which was a surprise. I didn’t think he was that anxious.’ Jeff Connor knew what was going on and did not want to interfere, but he nonetheless felt rather uneasy. He had what he called ‘bad vibrations’ about this person. When they arrived in West Allis, Dahmer got out first and waited across the street. This gave Connor an opportunity to express his misgivings to Tony and extract from him a promise that he would telephone as soon as he was ready, say in a couple of hours, so that Connor could return to collect him. It was already 3 a.m. when he drove away.

  The two men sat in the kitchen at 2357 South 57th Street for a while, then went up to bed. They kissed and lay one on top of the other in mutual enjoyment, Dahmer fellating Sears this time. He then asked him how long he could stay, could he stay tomorrow, could he come back? Tony, fatally, said he would have to leave soon and probably would not return. Dahmer went down to the kitchen and put together his concoction of coffee, Bailey’s Irish Cream and seven sleeping pills, and brought it to Tony Sears. Half an hour later, Sears was fast asleep. Dahmer again kissed him and lay as close as possible to him. And there, in the bed, he strangled him.

  Grandma woke up and prepared breakfast. This being Easter Sunday, she would be at church longer than usual, possibly four hours, and Jeff could be alone with his ‘friend’ without fear of disturbance. As soon as she left, he went upstairs again and got into bed, kissed him, felt him, and entered him. He did not have the leisure to stay all day like this, however, and soon began to think about disposal. He dragged the corpse into the upstairs bathroom and hauled it into the bathtub, thinking that the blood might drain more easily in the tub than in the cellar.

  What happened next is acutely distressing. Indeed, as this story unfolds it becomes ever more hard to bear and upsetting to think upon. Dahmer decapitated Anthony Sears and attempted to flay him. Then he stripped the flesh in the usual way, and cut off the genitals, which he placed in a separate bag with the head. He did this because ‘him I like especially well’, as an expression of affection, as a salute to the good time they had had together. He did not want to lose him, and, if he kept the genitals as well as the head, perhaps he wouldn’t! The bones were smashed and disposed of, but the keepsakes had to be carefully looked after. The next day, Dahmer called a taxidermist and asked advice on how to preserve animal remains in such a way as to keep the flesh as well as the skeleton. He was told to use acetone.

  At Ace Hardware he bought a 10-gallon plastic bucket with a tight-fitting lid, filled it with acetone, and left the head and genitals in this for one week on the floor of his bedroom closet. He also bought base make-up and painted the genitals with this in order to make them look more ‘real’. After a week the head was dry but still very life-like; on four occasions Jeff held it in one hand while he masturbated with the other, and could even mimic the action of having oral sex with it. In time, he would scalp it and use the pony-tailed scalp both for stimulation and as a remembrance. That Anthony Sears should have his life stolen at so young an age and to no purpose is in itself vicious and pitiful; that his remains should be thus used further offends one’s sense of respect; but that Dahmer’s mind should be so deranged as to find solace and comfort in such acts stuns comprehension.

  Jeff Connor was very concerned when Tony did not telephone early on Sunday morning. He suspected he might be in trouble and drove back to West Allis to look for him. He did not know, however, which house to enquire at. Another friend, Karolee Lodahl, reported Tony missing when she went to his apartment and found his pets had not been fed. She told the police that she suspected foul play because his life-style might expose him to danger. Other friends were interviewed, and Jeff Connor gave a detailed description of the man last seen with Tony. This was the first time in the course of Dahmer’s criminal progress that the police had a full account of a missing person and a suspected felony. With his accurate description on police files, it ought not to have been long before the person identified as ‘Jeff from Chicago’ was spotted somewhere. But Connor never saw him again, and the file lay dormant.

  Meanwhile, Dahmer was disappointed that the head which had kept so well for a week was beginning to shrivel and look mummified. He had taken it out of the acetone and placed it in a small metal trunk which he kept double-locked. When the time came for him to report to the House of Correction to s
erve his sentence, he realised that it would not be safe to leave all this at the house. And yet he could not bear to lose ‘Tony’ altogether. His solution was odd; he bought an oval Samsonite cosmetic case, put the head and genitals in this, and deposited it in his locker at the Ambrosia Chocolate Factory. The cosmetic case and its contents remained undiscovered in Dahmer’s locker for the next nine months while he was resident at the House of Correction.

  For Thanksgiving he was allowed a ten-hour pass to spend with his family. He could not face going to West Allis in view of his predicament and the embarrassment his conviction had caused, to himself as well as to the family, so he wandered the streets instead. None of the shopping malls were open, as would be expected, but the bars were. He drank first some beers, then went on to a very strong liquor called Yukon Jack, and ended up late at night talking to a white man, older than himself, at the 219 Club. The next thing he remembered was waking to find himself strung up above a bed in the stranger’s house, ‘hog-tied’ he called it, being spanked and violated with a candle. ‘I made enough noise, I was yelling loud enough, that he took me down.’1 Dahmer, for once the victimised, dressed and left as quickly as possible and was five hours’ late returning to the House of Correction. It was not until the next day that he was able to evacuate the candle.

  On 2 March, 1990, Dahmer was released from the prison three months prematurely, probably as a result of the letter he had written to Judge Gardner, mentioned earlier. It is also possible that Gary Parker, the agent from the Department of Health and Social Services with whom he had had several meetings, recommended curtailment of the sentence. Immediately his five years’ probation began, and he was assigned to Probation Officer Miss Donna Chester. At their very first interview, he told her that his problem was with drinking and that, as he had no friends at all, he drank alone. Within a month of his release he had consulted Dr Ollson and received a prescription for thirty sleeping tablets, to be augmented two weeks later by a further supply of sixty tablets. He had also been to his locker at Ambrosia Chocolate.

  The cosmetic case was intact. He took it home to his grandmother’s, where he was again living until he could find an apartment for himself, and opened it. The painted genitals had preserved fairly well, but the head had grown an unattractive mould, so he decided to boil it and deflesh it. First, however, ‘I took a knife and cut the scalp part off and peeled the flesh off the bone and kept the skull and the scalp.’ At least he would have the best part of Tony to remember him by. He would one day tell Dr Dietz, ‘If I could have kept him longer, all of him, I would have.’2

  Dahmer decided he must get an apartment of his own again, and devoted a whole day to the task of looking for one. He wanted a single bedroom, at low rent, close to work, close to the buslines, and by chance he stumbled upon the Oxford Apartments on North 25th Street. No. 213 was available at $300 a month, including everything except electricity, so he took it despite its location. ‘I was willing to take my chances in that neighbourhood,’ he said. ‘It was generally quiet, there wasn’t a lot of distraction or noise, a lot of privacy. It was nice enough for the price.’ The apartment came furnished with a bed, a dresser, a lounge chair, some endtables and lamps, a kitchen table and fridge. ‘It was big enough for me, the bathroom was clean, it had air conditioning, so it was good and liveable.’ He moved in on 14 May, 1990, taking among his personal luggage the skull, scalp and genitals.

  What he left unsaid was that North 25th Street was in one of the most insalubrious and dangerous parts of Milwaukee. The streets are faded and threatening, and sunk in hopelessness. Drug-related crime is there an almost daily event.

  Dahmer was almost the only white person in the block. That did not bother him, as he did not intend to have much to do with the neighbours. Most of his contact with them was restricted to a casual greeting. ‘One time the guy and his wife who lived across from me, they came over and asked to borrow $25 because he said they had some emergency, they had to get a bus to visit some sick relative, so I loaned him some money. Never got the money back, of course.’3 In consequence, they invited him in for a chat as a neighbourly thing to do, but the hospitality was not repeated or returned.

  The move to North 25th Street was the final step in Jeff Dahmer’s decline. It is not an exaggeration to say that the freedom which total privacy and easy accessibility afforded him was his passport to disintegration. At first he was discreet enough, turning up regularly for work and, for recreation, joining the Unicorn Bath Club in Chicago, which he is on record as having visited on ten separate occasions. No word was ever whispered of his having drugged anyone at this bathhouse, whereas at the previous establishment in Milwaukee he had become known as the guy who slipped mickeys into people’s drinks. Secretly at his apartment he spray-painted Sears’ skull with a granite paint he bought at a famous art store and placed it on show – another stage towards the acquisition of his ‘shrine’. His restraint, however, was fragile. His sixth victim died only five weeks after he moved into Apartment No. 213, and in the fourteen months that he lived there until his arrest in July, 1991, a total of twelve people were to fall prey to his fevered imagination. He was about to descend with frightening rapidity down one of his own spirals into Infinity Land.

  On 20 May, Dahmer ‘ran into’ Raymond Smith, a thirty-two-year-old black man also known as Ricky Beeks. Smith was, by his own admission, a hustler who engaged in sexual activity with men for money, although he was not himself homosexual. The reputation was sufficiently well known for him to have a nickname in addition to the two names he already bore – ‘Cash D’ – tattooed on his chest. He was three years older than Dahmer, but short, well-built, muscular. Dahmer spotted him wandering around at the 219 Tavern, offered him $50 to come home for sex, and they left by taxi. The taxi stopped on Wisconsin Avenue, Dahmer went to an all-night gas station for a couple of packets of cigarettes, and they got to the apartment by 3 a.m.

  Cash D made it pretty clear that he wasn’t going to be around long for $50. Dahmer asked him to stay the night, and was sharply told that that would cost a lot more. He said he would pay the extra in the morning, but instead went to the kitchen and prepared a drink with seven pills which he gave to Cash D. Within half an hour he was asleep and Dahmer strangled him on the floor.

  For the first time, he had a victim and an altar at once. Cash D was the first with whom Dahmer could experiment on the newly-acquired black table. He placed the corpse on the table in various positions which he found attractive, always posing it to look good, and rushed out the next day to buy a Polaroid camera at Black’s Photo on 125 West Wisconsin Avenue. He was, in a way, virtually creating his own pornography, as if the picture of beauty was more alluring than beauty itself. This is tantamount to saying that fantasy – solid, sculpted, manageable, unthreatening – has finally become more deeply important than reality. It is also more stimulating; whereas Dahmer had found it impossible to reach orgasm with the partners he met at the Unicorn Bathhouse in Chicago, he was able to stand over the dead body of Cash D and masturbate to ejaculation. The camera translated reality into fantasy, and the orgasm celebrated it. From this point, photography will assume an ever more significant role in Dahmer’s pathology, and we shall see how this aspect of his behaviour will gradually render him more clinically definable.

  There was very little tactile sex on this occasion, and no invasion of the body.

  Disposal, on the other hand, was necessarily more gruesome in a second-floor apartment than in a suburban house. He could not use a sledge-hammer or have free exclusive access to a trash container. The dissection took place in the bathroom, separating legs from pelvis at the joints, and boiling them in an eighty-gallon steel kettle in a solution of water and Soilex. Soilex is generally used by painters and decorators to remove wallpaper. The boiling went on for an hour, after which he poured off the water and rinsed the bones by hand in the kitchen sink, removing what flesh remained. He intended to keep the skeleton (and bought a freezer in Southridge the following
day for this purpose), but without connecting tissue it simply fell apart. To dispose of this, he bought a large trash container with a tight-fitting lid secured by handles which rise up from either side. In this he placed the bones of Cash D and some potent acid, and sealed it. ‘I waited a week or two and they had all turned to slush at that time, which I scooped out with a smaller trash thing and poured it into the toilet and flushed it down. It was just all slush, black slush.’4 He saved the skull of Cash D, spray-painted it and placed it alongside Tony Sears’.

  At the trial two years later it was suggested by Dr Dietz that this murder introduced a fresh motive. Dahmer killed Cash D because he was annoyed by his greed and felt threatened by him. I do not agree, and suspect that it is fruitless to look for rational motives in order to explain an irrational act. Most people, to be sure, would respond in this entirely explicable way, but it must by now be clear that Jeff Dahmer was not like most people and cannot be understood by the application of most people’s rules. He did not kill because Cash D wanted more money, but because he was transfixed by Cash D’s physique and wanted to keep him to himself. Madness has its own logic.

  A week or so later, Dahmer made a mistake which inadvertently saved a life. He brought a man back to Apartment 213 and prepared his customary drinks in two coffee cups. For some reason, perhaps because the man was wiser than his predecessors, the coffee cups were mixed up and Dahmer drank the drugged one, leaving the harmless one for his guest. When Dahmer woke up the next day he discovered that he was poorer by $300, some clothes and a watch. The man, not unnaturally, has never come forward, but Dahmer told his probation officer Donna Chester about it on 29 May and she noticed that he was ‘unkempt and upset’. Any temptation one may feel to see the funny side of this must be dispelled by the knowledge, as related to Dr Becker on 3 January, 1992, that Dahmer would certainly have strangled this individual had he not drunk the wrong cup of coffee.