The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer

by Brian Masters

  He would go home by bus, or occasionally by cab. One taxi-driver recalled that Dahmer had invited him in for a beer, but he declined because he could not drink on the job.

  At last, Jeff Dahmer found an innocent interest he could indulge. He bought a 30-gallon aquarium from The Fish Factory at West Oklahoma Avenue, some tropical fish and some books on the subject. He used the black table, destined to be his altar, as a pedestal for the fish tank, and spent time and care on setting it all up properly. ‘It was nice, with African cichlids and tiger barbs in it and live plants, it was a beautifully kept fish tank, very clean . . . I used to like to just sit there and watch them swim around, basically. I used to enjoy the planning of the set-up, the filtration, read about how to keep the nitrate and ammonia down to safe levels and just the whole spectrum of fish-keeping interested me.’ He would wander around the fish-store, fascinated by the shapes and colours of rare specimens, and in recollection it was only when talking about fish (or press misrepresentation of his case) that his voice became animated. ‘I once saw some puffer fish in the store,’ he relates. ‘It’s a round fish, and the only ones I ever saw with both eyes in front, like a person’s eyes, and they would come right up to the front of the glass and their eyes would be crystal blue, like a person’s, real cute.’

  He developed a great enthusiasm for trigger fish as well. After his arrest, he would look back with nostalgia on this last attempt to do something ordinary, normal, harmless. ‘It’s a fun hobby,’ he said. ‘I really enjoyed that fish tank. It’s something I really miss.’8 Dahmer did not say so, but there is an inescapable serenity in an aquarium which contrasts dramatically with the tumult still raging in his own weird world. That tumult erupted once more at the beginning of September in front of the bookstore on North 27th Street, where he met Ernest Miller from Chicago.

  It is as well to point out here, perhaps, that by no means all the people Dahmer approached accepted his enticement of money for sex. Police amassed over a dozen instances of individuals who were propositioned by him and declined, a few of them more than once.* They each have reason to thank Providence for their strength of character. But Ernest Miller said yes.

  * Vincent McHenry, Robert J. Pettis in the Grand Avenue Mall, both in October; Perry Woolsay in November; Allen Matthews in January at the 219 Club; Leonardo Rodriguez in the Grand Avenue Mall in February; Douglas Jackson in April, McHenry again in April; Reginald Ball in May, Matthews again in May.

  Dahmer was about to enter the bookstore at about 3 a.m., after the bars had closed, when he spotted Miller standing outside – black, twenty-three years old and well built, wearing a yellow sweatshirt with striped sleeves, and white tennis shoes. He offered $50, and they walked the two blocks to the apartment. Dahmer lay on top of him, hearing the sounds and ticks and beats pulsating beneath him. He listened, entranced, placed his ear and lips to the stomach, then went down to find the phallus. ‘That’ll cost you extra,’ said Miller. Dahmer got up and went to the kitchen to make his potion, gave it to Miller who fell asleep about half an hour later.

  Dahmer was immensely proud of his acquisition. For the rest of the night he fingered him, fondled him, gazed upon him. He walked around the room, drinking beer, occasionally glancing at him, then went into the kitchen and returned at leisure to find him still lying there, a perfect body, all his. He touched the sleeping form, withdrew for another beer, came back and touched it again. He masturbated himself in such a way as to have his hand touching Miller’s body at the same time, as if it were participating in the act. There was just one thing wrong. He had only been able to give him two sleeping pills as he had run out, and the body might very well stir soon and want to wake up. It was too late to strangle him without a fight. How could he devise a way to keep him there?

  His solution was effective, but catastrophic, and for him quite novel. He drank some more alcohol to smother fear and residual inhibition, then with the knife he used for dissection he neatly severed Miller’s jugular vein. He avers that he knew this would be painless and quick, that Miller would not suffer, and with the medical knowledge acquired in army days he would certainly know exactly where to inflict a mortal wound. ‘It took him maybe about a minute before he died.’ Blood gushed out on to the bed and walls and carpet.

  Worse was to follow. Having hauled the body on to his black table (the aquarium was not yet in place at this point), he took about twenty photographs of it in various positions and once more caressed it adoringly. Next he put it in the bathtub and began the process of dismemberment. Once he had severed the head he kissed it and talked to it, apologising for having had to do this, ‘but I couldn’t think of any other way’. He took more pictures of the decapitated body at various stages of dissection, and of the head itself, which he placed in the fridge. In the coming days he would take it out from time to time and masturbate before it. For the final photograph he pushed the eyelids up to obtain a more life-like image (the fact that the eyes were closed must mean, one hopes, that Miller did not regain consciousness before he died).

  Meanwhile, Dahmer had completed dismemberment in the bathtub. The method is best described in his own words: ‘I separated the joints, the arm joints, the leg joints, and had to do two boilings. I think I used four boxes of Soilex for each one, put in the upper portion of the body and boiled that for about two hours and then the lower portion for another two hours. The Soilex removes all the flesh, turns it into a jelly-like substance and it just rinses off. Then I laid the clean bones in a light bleach solution, left them there for a day and spread them out on either newspaper or cloth and let them dry for about a week in the bedroom.’9 He stored parts of the legs, arms, heart, kidney and liver in various bags in the freezer for later use.

  Dahmer had formed the intention of using the complete skeleton to adorn one end of his shrine, and went so far as to try reassembling it, once he had disposed of all remaining flesh, with glue. This proved to be too laborious a task, so he placed the skeleton in the bottom drawer of his cabinet in the bedroom until another day. Once he had removed flesh from the head, he spray-painted it and coated it with enamel. ‘I had three of them by that time that I wanted to keep, so when they were dried I glued the teeth in to make sure they were fastened.’ These three skulls were on display, and looked fake enough to remain on display even when subsequent victims were present. Their final resting-place was in the top drawer of the cabinet.

  Meanwhile, they were surprised at the Joe Hall Dance Studio in Chicago when Ernest Miller did not show up for his first session on Tuesday; he had been granted free admission.

  For the first time we now come upon a disturbing innovation, when Dahmer ate some of the flesh he had saved. We shall leave until later a discussion of the significance of this behaviour, which increased as the months went by, since it is inadequate to ascribe it to sheer curiosity and it does bear an interpretation which fits a coherent scheme of his pathology. Nor does it help to specify exactly which portions were eaten, although such details were to be given in open court. The reader will perhaps allow me, from this point onwards, to be generally less precise concerning the fate which befell the remains of each individual. Most of what has been said so far was revealed in court, even to the baking of Eddie Smith’s skull, but some of the more lurid details were not then known, and the families of those who died have borne more than enough without having to learn of post-mortem indignities. I shall therefore describe Dahmer’s actions without, for the most part, indicating which victim was the object of them.

  David Thomas, twenty-two years old, died in the early hours of 24 September, 1990. Curtis Straughter, nearly eighteen, died on 17 February, 1991. He was waiting at a bus-stop near Marquette University when Dahmer spotted him, jumped off the bus and approached him. Errol Lindsey was nineteen years old when he died on 7 April, and Tony Hughes, who was killed on 24 May, was thirty-one. All were black, and two were heterosexual but co-operative. Tony Hughes was especially to be pitied as he was deaf and dumb, and thereby deprived
of the ability even to protest to his assailant. Hughes, who was homosexual, met Dahmer at the 219 Club and asked three of his friends, two girls and a man, to give them a ride back to where Dahmer lived. He and Dahmer sat in the back seat writing notes to each other. Tony wanted to bring the whole company in for drinks at the apartment, but Dahmer indicated that he was inviting Tony by himself. Tony then relayed this information to his friends in sign language, and they understood the situation well enough. He did not seem at all afraid of Dahmer.

  Tony Hughes was never seen again, but his presence was strongly felt in the courtroom less than a year later when his mute friends turned up to demonstrate solidarity in grief. Most impressive of all was his mother, an elegant, trim, quiet and dignified lady in mourning. She was there every day, unsmiling and unconquerable, yielding neither to bitterness nor rage, in silent celebration of the closeness she and Tony had enjoyed in life. I never spoke to Mrs Hughes, but I felt the strength of her commitment.

  These unfortunate men came across Jeff Dahmer’s path at the point where he was beyond repair. He told Dr Judith Becker that his ‘moral compass had been shot’ and that he lived only for the weekends. He had begun watching the movie Exorcist II, which cost him $90, on a regular basis, as soon as he came home from work, both before going to the bars and with his victims on returning from the bars. He was, he said, thoroughly corrupt and evil by this time. Perhaps the tiniest chink of light still danced upon his soul from time to time; there was an occasion when he took home a man and had light sexual contact with him, kissing and masturbating, and the man left next day in the normal way. Why? He says that when he sobered up he realised he did not like him as much as he had thought. On the other hand, one might be permitted to hope there was more to it than that; there is no evidence either way.

  As his disorder deepened, so did Dahmer’s peculiar experimentation escalate. He bought a pair of handcuffs to heighten the fantasy of power and control, and Curtis Straughter actually fell asleep with them on. He also bought a black leather strap as a tool for strangulation, thinking it would be quicker than the manual method; one of the four was murdered this way with a bag over his head. Another was killed because he was going to wake up soon and would be angry. With all of them, however, Dahmer fell into a cuddle immediately after death, holding them close and placing their arms around him to simulate the intimacy of embrace.

  With one of them, he decided he wanted to keep the entire skin. This he effected with a small, sharp paring knife, making first an incision at the back of the neck, slicing up to the crown, and then pulling the skin on either side of the incision. It was like skinning a chicken one was about to cook, he said. The outer layer peeled away from the muscle tissue if handled with care and the whole operation took about two hours. Dahmer told the police exactly how he did it; the bland account in the confession, narrated with formal third-person detachment, is at least precise. The skin ‘would completely pull right off the skull of the individual. He related that the only time he needed to do any real cutting would be around the facial features, that being the eyes, nose, lips and mouth. He related that the entire skull portion of the skin came off in one complete piece and while it was off it actually looked somewhat like a mask you can buy at a party store.’10

  Dahmer placed the skin of the entire body in a solution of cold water and salt, hoping to preserve it intact for his shrine. But after three weeks it was obvious that it would not work, as the skin was disintegrating. Reluctantly, he broke it into pieces by hand and flushed it all down the lavatory.

  Meanwhile, he lay the flayed body on a plastic sheet on the bedroom floor and photographed it. He does not appear to have been repulsed; on the contrary, to him it was an object of beauty.

  In the first chapter of this book we learnt how police officers, alerted by Tracy Edwards, found photographs of bodies in various stages of dismemberment in the drawer of Jeffrey Dahmer’s chest and suddenly recognised that they were genuine and original. It is time now to see how those photographs were taken and what was their purpose.

  There is a head-and-shoulders picture, with the subject’s arms folded behind his head, which could resemble any ordinary snapshot were it not for the obvious fact of his death, and it was taken for much the same motive as an ordinary portrait. ‘I just wanted to get a good picture of his face so I could remember how he looked,’ said Dahmer. Most of the others, however, do not admit of so mundane a purpose.

  Those taken before dismemberment were positioned on the black table in order to show off either the chest or the belly. While they are all stretched out, some have the chest thrust forward, and Dahmer has been to some trouble to arrange the pose in this manner. One has the head at the bottom of the picture, the chest spread out at the centre and ends at the top of the picture with the pubic hair. The legs hang down from the table out of range of the camera, as if they were useless appendages to the thing of beauty. He was thinking, ‘How nice he looked, how I wish I could have kept him another way’. After these kinds of poses, he would ejaculate on to the chest as a kind of morbid signature before dragging the corpse to the bathroom.

  Those taken in the bathtub have likewise been carefully positioned. One has the victim draped over the edge of the bath, his head and arms hanging outside, the arms stretched above his head, and the lower part of the torso sitting cross-legged in the tub. This, too, accentuates the chest area, Dahmer’s primary source of fetishistic excitement. On another picture, the mouth of the victim is open; Dahmer says he opened the mouth himself so that he could place his penis into it.

  It is when one comes to the second area of sexual interest – the belly that he had listened to while the victim was alive – that dismemberment begins. There is a photograph of a man who has been opened up, with a cut from the neck right down to the groin, revealing all the internal organs. When asked why he should do this, Dahmer said, ‘I wanted to see what someone looked like inside.’11 That turned out to be a disingenuous reply, for he subsequently revealed that he would plunge his hands into the intestines and feel them, occasionally still warm to the touch. If there was room, he would get an erection and lower himself on to the open body to have intercourse with the viscera, placing his penis literally within the body and ejaculating among its organs. When it was too cramped in the bathroom to do this, he might pull the intestines out and rub them on his penis, using them as a masturbatory aid. Every time he wanted to take a picture, he had to stop and wash his hands.

  These photographs were kept in order to be used as a stimulant at a later date. Others, however, seem to serve no purpose other than talismanic. There is a picture taken in the kitchen sink of a man’s head, resting on ice, with a pair of hands, palms upward and fingers spread, at either side of the neck. A bottle of washing-up liquid stands incongruously on the side of the sink. Dahmer says he used the sink because the blood would drain away more easily (indicating that this was a pose manufactured shortly after decapitation), but he is unable to explain why he should arrange them in this grotesque manner. Similarly, another side view of the head, displayed with hands alongside and severed genitals below, including pubic region, has been taken with the pieces on a towel. They seem to be totems or icons of a kind, weird salutations to a sinister god dredged from Dahmer’s own imagination.

  A photograph of a headless torso in the bathtub has the skin pulled back to reveal the rib-cage, and the fingers of the hands are sticking up. ‘I don’t know how that happened,’ said Dahmer. ‘I didn’t position them like that or anything. After the wrists were cut, the tendons must have pushed both top fingers out.’ In the light of this, it is decidedly superfluous of him to admit, ‘My desires were bestial, obviously.’12 Another day, he said, ‘I think my emotions were pretty well seared at that time, as far as any decent emotions,’ and he clearly felt discomfort in recollection. ‘I always feel a little uneasy talking about this,’ he said. ‘No matter how many times I go through it, it’s just as sickening every time I do.’13 It is interesting that he
should use such a word, denoting awareness of the effect such scenes may have upon normally constituted people. The fact remains that he did not feel sick while he was doing it, was not repulsed by activity that would cause many people to faint.

  The best commentary on these dreadful pictures was given inadvertently in the courtroom by Judith Becker. Asked whether she had viewed a selection large enough for her to form an opinion, she paused before answering, then said simply and quietly, ‘I do not care to see any more.’

  ‘True, it didn’t satisfy whatever craving I had,’ said Dahmer, ‘or I would have stopped doing it. Things just went from bad to worse.’ In a photograph of a semi-dismembered corpse one can see another body lying in the tub behind; they had begun to pile up.

  Once the picture-taking had been exhausted, Dahmer set about final disposal. Having first removed the internal organs, ‘I noticed that all the blood tends to collect in the chest area, so I drained that off. You just lift the torso part up and it drains out, down the bathtub drain. Then you slice up the liver into smaller pieces, it’s quite large. You start cutting off the flesh, in the leg area or the arm area and just work your way down. Then when I was saving the heads I’d cut the neck bone, sever the head.’ This would eventually be placed in a saucepan of water. The eyeballs just boiled away, he said; the flesh took longer to dislodge. He used a dessert spoon to scoop out the brain material so as to be left with a perfect unblemished skull.

  The inevitable consequence of these activities was a very strong smell which, from time to time, pervaded the apartment building and brought dozens of complaints upon the head of the building’s manager, Sopa Princewill, who used No. 102 as his office. It was difficult at first to locate the source of the smell, and there was a suspicion that somebody in the building might have died and lain undiscovered. The police interviewed every tenant, and getting no answer from No. 205 they kicked the door down. To no avail; the tenant was not dead but in jail. In Dahmer’s bathtub, meanwhile, lay half a torso. On another occasion the police called to find the tenant of No. 308 had been strangled, and again interviewed everyone in the block. It was the people who lived opposite Jeff Dahmer who were finally convinced that the odours emanated from No. 213, and Mr Princewill confronted Dahmer with the complaint. He said that his freezer had malfunctioned and some meat had been spoiled. Mr Princewill inspected the freezer, saw some ordinary supermarket bags on top, but did not investigate below where the unorthodox contents lay hidden. The freezer was full, he remembers. Dahmer’s explanation was accepted, especially as he was contrite about the embarrassment he had caused.