The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer
Page 16
Dahmer was not only attending regular meetings with Donna Chester; he was also required by the terms of his probation to participate in group therapy sessions at DePaul Hospital. It will hardly surprise the reader to learn that he was a recalcitrant patient, entirely unable to respond to the kind of treatment which involves blatant and unselfconscious revelation to a group of people one has never met. His counsellor, Patti Antony, was beside herself with frustration at his lack of involvement. The orientation session was due to take place on 22 May, barely thirty-six hours after he had killed Cash D. He telephoned to delay his initiation by one day. ‘He introduced himself to the group and was attentive,’ reported Miss Antony. ‘He did not share any personal issues.’ The next month ‘he appeared very uncomfortable in talking about his mother’, and in July, ‘Patient needs to get in touch with his feelings involving the sexual assault and is resistant in talking about the incident.’ Miss Antony would not know that Jeff Dahmer had not been ‘in touch’ with his feelings for many years.
It was also observed as the months went by that he was less and less concerned about personal hygiene. The man whose neatness had made an impression in 1986 was slipping into lethargy: ‘He admits he just doesn’t feel the energy to clean himself or his clothes.’ A Dr Krembs was asked to make yet another psychological evaluation. Having noticed that Dahmer was ‘very isolated, no friends, hobbies, interests, whole life is dull, sterile, monomaniacally directed, which is excellent breeding ground for depression’, the doctor diagnosed a ‘mixed personality disorder associated with depressed mood’. He was further of the opinion that a ‘major relapse is just a matter of time’.
When Dahmer was discharged at the beginning of December, Patti Antony summarised his lack of progress. He had not studied his sobriety plan booklet, nor written to his father in fulfilment of an assignment given to him. He had told her that he did not intend to go to Alcoholics Anonymous or attend a Serenity Club ‘because he felt there was no purpose in any of these and did not see any purpose in socialising either’. Her conclusion was that he suffered from ‘alcohol dependency syndrome, continuous’. In fact, during these eight months of hopeless therapy at DePaul Hospital, Dahmer’s secret life had been expanding into yet more bizarre experiments.
On Saturday, 23 June, four weeks after the death of Cash D, there took place in Milwaukee a Gay Pride Parade which was especially well attended and light-hearted. It was a fine summer’s day to lift morale, and the mood was aptly defiant in view of the residual intolerance which ever rumbled beneath the surface in that town. One who would never miss such an occasion was Eddie Smith, a twenty-seven-year-old black man with ambitions for the stage and a yearning desire to shine, to break out and be something. The only gay member of a large family (with nine brothers and four sisters), Eddie knew he was different in more than just his sexuality. A graduate of Brookfield Central High School, he had learnt to compensate for dyslexia by quick verbal responses, wit and a rich vocabulary. He was also very amusing.
Eddie stood out from the crowd in two distinctive ways: he wore an Arab headband to disguise his premature baldness, from which he earned the nickname ‘The Sheik’; and nearly all his many friends were white. He lived with a white man for several months, and would sometimes travel to the east coast of America with the crowd. Still, he had no place of his own. When at a loss for shelter, he would sometimes curl up on his sister’s sofa. The members of this large brood were close, and constantly in touch.
Unfortunately, Eddie’s talents fell short of his ambitions. He had wanted to join the Milwaukee Ballet (and sometimes told people he was an ex-dancer), but did not make it. He tried his luck as a female impersonator on the night-club scene, but that, too, was not a distinguished success. He continued to wear light facial make-up and mascara. Eddie had mentioned during that summer that he had met a movie producer who was going to promote him. Whether this was invention on his part, or he had imagined that Jeff Dahmer could be such a person, it is not entirely clear.
Eddie’s friend Ted Frankforth saw him talking to Dahmer at the 219 Club in May, went over to join them and was introduced. They shook hands, and in the confusion of social banter he quickly lost sight of them again. Another witness claims to have seen them together in Juneau Park. Over the next two months Eddie made frequent reference to the ‘movie producer’, and one might conjecture that Dahmer had proposed taking some pictures and that Eddie had fondly exaggerated the significance of this. Unusually, Dahmer did not on that occasion pursue the idea. Eddie told the barman, ‘he’s cute’.
He introduced his brother Henry to Dahmer in a local (not gay) bar. ‘I didn’t believe he was capable of putting together a portfolio,’ said Henry. ‘He was not flamboyant enough to be a producer. Too quiet and introverted. No style.’
Eddie Smith’s search for the good life led him into two dangerous cul-de-sacs. He was inclined to be promiscuous, smoked a great deal of marijuana and inhaled ‘poppers’, a liquid nitrite much used for heightened sexual excitement or for abandoned dancing at the night-clubs. He was, secondly, far too trusting a character. His personality was so infectiously light and effervescent that he made friends easily and improved the atmosphere wherever he went; he added spice and enjoyment to the company, and was a well-built and attractive man despite a protruding collar-bone. It is impossible to know whether his dreams might one day have been realised in some degree, but he certainly deserved better than he got.
The Sheik’s future collided with Jeff Dahmer in the early hours of Sunday, 24 June, at the Phoenix Bar. Dahmer need not have offered him money to come home – he was willing enough without it. The rest is now familiar, and the reader will be spared relentless repetition of these increasingly tragic events. Once more, Dahmer took a number of photographs of the corpse, ritualising drama and turning life and death into a graspable object – in fact draining them of any meaning beyond the necrophilic fantasy. The result did not please him, and he destroyed the photographs by cutting them into small pieces. Dahmer hoped to find a better way of preserving the skeleton and skull. The former he placed in his new freezer for a few months; it would not dry out properly, stubbornly retaining moisture, and was ultimately acidified. For the latter he devised a new solution. He turned the oven up to 120 degrees and put Eddie’s skull in it for an hour, thinking thus to dry it more efficiently. After a while he heard loud popping noises. The skull was in the process of exploding, flakes of bone grotesquely flying out to hit the sides of the oven. The plan was abandoned and the skull later acidified.
Dahmer told police officers in 1991 that he felt ‘rotten’ about the destruction of Eddie Smith because he had kept nothing of him and his death had been a true waste. Implicit in this remark is the assumption that, had he been able to save a skull or a penis, death would not have been wasteful. There is no better indicator than this of Dahmer’s total moral degeneration and his irretrievable distance from reality. His alienation has deteriorated to such an extent that he is literally in a world of his own, unmarked by feeling or sanity. It is hard to believe that a man’s isolation could go much deeper.
In the ensuing months, Eddie’s brother Henry stood outside the 219 Club and the Phoenix Tavern, showing pictures of his brother to anyone who cared to look, asking if they had seen him or had any idea what might have happened to him. At the trial in February, 1992, his sister Theresa one day came and sat next to me and showed me those same pictures. She carried them in her wallet, as we might carry holiday snapshots of husband, wife or children, and share them with inquisitive strangers. Eddie was past any help that I could offer, but Theresa wanted me to see them nevertheless, Eddie smiling, laughing, lounging, being alive. I don’t think I ever knew a moment so poignant or distressing in the whole trial, nor one which more vividly conveyed the stark tragedy of it all. A few feet away from us in the courtroom sat Jeff Dahmer. Theresa detested what he had done, but before the end of the trial she was coming to the view that he was insane, and this helped her not to hate.
During the two weeks which followed this murder, Dahmer had a meeting with his probation officer, a group therapy session at DePaul, and a meeting with his counsellor there. He spent Saturday at the Unicom Club in Chicago, and the following Friday, which was his next available time off work, he met Luis Pinet. The encounter with this young man is curious indeed, and potentially very instructive. Dahmer had seen him often before at the 219 Club, where he worked clearing glasses and sweeping floors, and had reasonably assumed that he was of legal age; in fact, he was fifteen and the job was part-time. They had never spoken before. On 6 July, Dahmer saw him at the Phoenix late at night, no doubt after the 219 had closed, and approached him with an offer of $200 if he would come back home, pose for some nude pictures and have some sex. Why so much? ‘I thought it would take that much to peak his interest,’ he says. They went to the apartment in a taxi, had their photo session and some ‘light sex’, and fell asleep in bed together. It was the first time since Tuomi that a partner had willingly stayed the night with Jeff Dahmer, albeit probably as a result of excessive drinking. The next morning they agreed to repeat the experience, and Luis said he would meet Jeff at twelve o’clock.
Dahmer had decided that he would kill the boy and keep him, but he had run out of sleeping pills and could not at that moment afford a further prescription. He would have to render him unconscious some other way. He first went to the army surplus store and bought a rubber mallet, then at noon went for his rendezvous. ‘He didn’t show up, so I thought he was just kidding, he’s not going to meet me.’ This was Pinet’s second escape. That night, Dahmer was back at the bars where by chance he bumped into him again outside the Phoenix. Pinet explained the misunderstanding; he had assumed the arrangement was to meet at twelve midnight, not twelve noon, and he did not intend to back out of it at all. So they went to Dahmer’s apartment for a second night. While Pinet was posing for photographs, lying face down on the bed, Dahmer struck him a blow with the mallet on the back of the neck.
‘Obviously he got upset about that,’ says Dahmer, laconically. Not upset enough, it seems, for after an argument and explanation to the effect that Dahmer was afraid he was going to take the $200 and leave without giving fair exchange, which Pinet accepted, he went out without the money and slammed the door behind him. That was his third escape. Ten minutes later, he was knocking at the door again. Dahmer asked him in. He said he needed a little money to catch a bus home, and would Dahmer let him have a couple of dollars. Dahmer says he was feeling panic creeping on at this stage, either because he would lose the boy again, or because the boy might report the incident; perhaps a little of both. He therefore grabbed him from behind and they fought on the floor for some minutes, with Dahmer’s hands around his neck. ‘I guess I intended on strangling him, but he was too strong.’ He was also fully conscious, an advantage not given to any of the victims who had died. ‘Let’s talk,’ said Dahmer, upon which they ceased wrestling and sat on the edge of the bed, calming down and discussing the attack. Astonishingly, while they were thus poring over the night’s events, Dahmer persuaded Pinet to have his hands tied behind his back. He quietly wriggled free of the ligature and made to depart again, at which point Dahmer showed him the knife which he used for cutting flesh, without, of course, revealing its function. They continued talking until seven in the morning, when Pinet promised that he would not tell anyone what had happened. They then walked to the bus-stop together and Dahmer paid for his taxi home. On his fourth escape from he knew not what, he was at last free.
‘I just didn’t have the ability to do him any harm,’ says Dahmer. ‘Why, I don’t know.’5 The obvious answer was that he was sober and the victim was awake, but a more subtle explanation suggests itself. The length of time that the two were acquainted is significant. After the first night they spent together, Pinet was quite willing to return to him for more, and happily made an assignation which he kept. There was, then, no need for Dahmer to kill him in order to retain him, and any normal person would have seen this as the possibility of a continuing relationship, freely engaged in by both partners without coercion. But Dahmer was incapable of such ‘normal’ reasoning because the partner was not at that stage a person to him at all, but a putative object, a ‘thing’ to stimulate his fantasy. During the course of their night-long discussion, the object gradually took on being, the fantasy dissolved, and Dahmer found himself face to face with a human being. He told the police that as he began to sober up he got to know Luis on a more personal level, which is true as far as it goes. What it means is that Dahmer was rescued (and the boy saved) by the gradual intrusion of reality to conquer and dispel the unreality of dream. However one may interpret the alteration, it is beyond doubt that the Jeff Dahmer who bade goodbye to the boy at the bus-stop was no longer the Jeff Dahmer who had wanted, hours before, to kill him.
By another terrible irony, Luis Pinet did inform the police, and a False Imprisonment complaint was filed. He told them three different stories, however, each apparently more crazy than the others, and the police simply did not believe him. He could easily have led them to Dahmer’s apartment, as he had found it by himself the night before, and they would certainly have found incriminating evidence had they searched it. One loses count of how many times Jeff Dahmer might have been stopped if events had taken a slightly different turn.
Months later, Luis Pinet saw Dahmer at the Grand Avenue Mall and initiated a conversation with him. They exchanged pleasantries with no display of resentment or grudge. His next encounter was in the courtroom, when he gave evidence against him at the trial.
Dahmer had an appointment with Donna Chester the day after his all-night talk with Pinet. He spoke openly of suicide and frankly conceded that he was homosexual, although he did not know why. He told her that his sexual tensions were relieved by regular masturbation. On the page, it looks like a timid admission indeed, hardly worthy of remark, but it was a signal step for this locked man to share any inch of his problems with prying professionals. The theme of suicide would crop up with increasing frequency in the coming months, parallel with his frenetic embrace of murder. Miss Chester will note his decline into slovenliness and his acute depression, and she will conclude that he is a chronic complainer with a negative attitude. A salient characteristic she will discern is the constant inability to manage finances. Jeff never has enough money, is always in debt, always over-spending. She thinks he is a compulsive buyer and hints at the possible psychological implications of such a condition: yawning emptiness must be filled by ever-diminishing treats.
The truth was, he owed $2,000 in various doctors’ and hospital bills, including $1,000 to DePaul Hospital for therapy ordered by the court. His weekly pay-check amounted to $275, out of which he paid $115 for rent and utilities. The rest went on food, drink and pornography.
Perhaps a probation officer should not be expected to explore the psyche of his or her charges; their function is to be vigilant for delinquency, not probing for explanation. Donna Chester did not therefore address herself to the question why the very idea of a relationship with another human being, of either sex, was entirely inconceivable to Jeff Dahmer. Perhaps he would not allow her to. She was face to face with a man whose intangible threads connecting him with his fellows had all been severed, a man alone and alien, who watched other people form bonds and did not know how it was done; whose counterfeit version of bonding was to drug a person senseless and hold him; whose only intimate relationship was with a corpse, because he knew no other way.
All the Dahmers assembled at the house in West Allis for Thanksgiving in November, 1990 – Shari and Lionel from Ohio, David from Cincinnati, Jeff from Milwaukee. He told Donna Chester that he was not look
ing forward to it because he felt ashamed of his life-style and knew he had nothing to contribute towards the levity of a family gathering. All he did, he said, was to go to work for twelve hours, come home, and go to work again. He sometimes visited the bathhouse in Chicago, packed tight with other men seeking touch without connection, and wandered the streets. Or there were the bars. There was desolation in each five-second pause when he said, ‘I did my drinking alone, and bar-hopping alone . . . no one . . . no one.’6
Generally, he was home from work by 8 a.m., would make a little breakfast and turn on the television. That’s when an abusive and childish chat-show by Geraldo appears, and Jeff loathed the host’s strategy of trying to make his guests feel bad about themselves. ‘He just wants them to feel as guilty and as lousy as possible. The guy is such a prick.’7 He would then try to sleep a little, and go out for lunch to the Grand Avenue Mall more often than not. There are a number of self-service restaurants in this two-block-long covered shopping arcade – French, Chinese, American – to suit every taste. He was particularly fond of McDonald’s and a chicken-and-chips establishment on the first floor called Apricot Annie’s. He would turn up there in the early afternoon and always go to his favourite stool at the bar; if the stool was occupied, he would walk around until it became vacant rather than take another one. He liked the coffee best at the French Cafe.