The smell did not entirely evaporate, however. Some prospective tenants were being shown Apartment 313, directly above Dahmer’s (there were three storeys to the block), when an apologetic Mr Princewill had to give up and abandon the inspection because the smells coming from below were too nauseating. Once more, he confronted Dahmer, and was told that the fish tank had gone wrong and some of the fish had died. Dahmer, apparently trying to be helpful, directed Princewill towards a grey barrel in the hall closet. When Princewill opened it, the odour was so overpowering that it brought tears to his eyes and threw him back. He was very angry. ‘This must go,’ he told Dahmer emphatically. The next day he noticed that the offensive barrel had been dumped in the large trash dispenser, and felt satisfied. The third time Princewill spoke to Dahmer about smells occurred the day after Tony Hughes died, and two days before the attack upon his next victim. Hughes’ body was lying on the bedroom floor at the time.
The smell of decomposition can be alleviated by immediate post-mortem disposal, but Dahmer was by this time so careless and slipshod that he would often leave a body two or three days before beginning dismemberment. When a body is first opened after such a delay, the bowels surge out, pushed by gases, and the smell is indescribably awful. One is bound to wonder how Dahmer was able to live within that permanently polluted air, how he slept with the smell in his nostrils, ate with the odour of putrefaction hovering around him. Unless he was so deranged as actually to like it – sheer indifference is impossible to conceive. And still he went on taking pictures of it all; there are some of the body whose bowels had fallen out, as described above, which implies that the photographer was working in conditions of unspeakable foulness.
Why? Because the taking of photographs is an inherent part of the compulsion itself. It was strong enough to banish the smells, render them impotent and unable to interfere. We recall that police officers found seventy-four Polaroid pictures in Dahmer’s drawer, which does not take into account the scores he had taken and subsequently destroyed. This was not a hobby, it was an imperative – pressing, impatient, ineluctable. Dahmer was by no means the first to photograph his victims. Bittaker and Norris in California in 1979 took pictures of the girls they raped and killed to capture their terror on celluloid. The Moors murderers of the 1960s, Brady and Hindley, did much the same. Leonard Lake, arrested in 1985, had an underground film studio and made his own pornographic videos of victims. The point is, the camera completes the objectification of the victim, destroys the last vestige of his individuality, robs him of his independent being. Just as murder creates a compliant corpse, so the photography of that corpse demonstrates total ownership and control – it is a step further in the same direction. The person, once threateningly alive, now exists only in so far as the photographer allows him to exist through images of his creating. It is the translation of life into death, of sentience into petrification, of will into object, the dissolution of all into one triumphant thing - the photograph.
Erich Fromm has analysed what he calls the necrophilous character, which may show itself in seemingly innocuous acts. Men who feel more tender towards their cars than their wives are demonstrating the dangers of inanimation (literally, soullessness). They wash it lovingly, even when they could afford to pay someone else to do it, they may give it a nickname, they caress it and gaze at it.14 The car has become, in such cases, almost a love-object, which does not, unlike a love-subject, occasionally refuse one’s attentions. The murderer is doing precisely the same in turning his love-object into a still image, turning love (aliveness, mutuality) into pornography (passivity, self-gratification). With his camera, he conceptualises and conquers that which was once a free being, and in this way uses the camera as a kind of weapon or instrument of control. The camera is a thing which records things, framing them, solidifying them.
It is important to recognise that the camera does not enhance, it reduces (in so far as the person photographed is now no more than an image), and it insultingly proclaims ownership, too. It has become a substitute for involvement, and, in that regard, Dahmer’s photography of his corpses, his dismemberment, his trophies, is a loud signal of the condition which afflicts him – necrophilia.
Chapter Seven
The Frenzy
Necrophilia is not against the law, in so far as there is no statute which proscribes it. Legislators have presumably thought it so rare or inconceivable that it was not worth forbidding, rather like Queen Victoria, who, refusing to believe that lesbianism was possible, struck all reference to it from the bill Parliament had put before her for royal signature in 1885; in consequence, male homosexuals were made criminals per se while female homosexuals, protected by ignorance, could behave as they chose. Likewise, our understanding of necrophilia is so limited that Jeffrey Dahmer could only be tried for murder, which he did not deny, while the real clue to his conduct was given muddled attention because it did not constitute an offence.
The Greek words nekros (corpse) and philia (love, liking, friendship) combine to make a condition loosely translated as ‘love of the dead’. It covers a variety of forms and has been the subject of many attempts at definition. One instance of it is a refusal to accept the fact of death, as Romeo displayed so dramatically when he leapt into Juliet’s tomb and held her body to his breast. In this case, ‘love of the dead’ is a desperate extension of mourning and is not unknown to history. According to Herodotus, Periander continued to have intercourse with his wife after her death, and another story has King Herod sleeping with the corpse of his for seven years. Similarly, in parts of central Europe until the seventeenth century it was permissible for a man to consummate his marriage by sexual intercourse even if his bride had died before her wedding-day. This is clearly not the branch of necrophilia with which we have to deal here.
The more perverse necrophile does not so much deny death as embrace it. Far from grieving over a lost love, he celebrates a new-found one, for he cannot love, or at least go through the physical manifestations of love, unless his partner is dead. This is to put the case at its most extreme, for the desire to behave in a necrophilic manner is far more widespread than most people care to admit. There are brothels in Paris wherein the whore will obligingly make herself up to look corpse-like and lie in a coffin waiting to be ravaged; such places do not want for customers. Less overt is the man who asks his wife to ‘play dead’ and keep quiet while he performs the act of love without her assistance; I know some happily married women who are pleased to gratify their spouses in this way and simply be ‘taken’. I have already had cause to point out that one of the first sexual fantasies that occurs to the pubescent boy is that of a girl who will simply lie there and let him explore her body; mutuality in sex comes at the next stage, once his confidence has been established. In this sense, non-active necrophilia is a kind of arrested development, a child-like fear of the dangers of sharing, and as such is not in itself harmful. We have been able to follow Dahmer through these early stages, from the fantasy of the jogger through the stealing of a mannequin to the drugging of partners, each a step in the escalation towards full-blown homicidal necrophilia. True, it had already exploded once when he was eighteen and been kept at bay for nine years, but for the purposes of description these pseudo-replacements en route towards disaster retain their validity.
Dennis Nilsen made himself up to look like a corpse long before he killed anybody. He wrote that he must be in love with his own dead body, and the thought frightened him. Other men masturbate in graveyards or habitually watch funerals. Some seek employment in a morgue to be near the stillness of death. In ancient Egypt so many embalmers were caught abusing female corpses entrusted to them that the job was passed to women. We would be astonished how many people today are able to satisfy their unusual needs without arousing suspicion or committing any crime. A medical student, with quite legitimate access to skeletons, is on record as having frequently taken a skeleton to bed with him, cuddled it and kissed it.1 The fact that there are so few necrophiles who
progress into homicide, accounts for the paucity of clinical evidence which might clarify the condition. Rosman and Resnick’s study found only fourteen instances of necrophilic homicide from which they could usefully extract data. In comparison, there were twenty-one cases of people who had used an already dead body for sexual pleasure (a category to which they gave the unfortunate name ‘regular’ necrophilia).
There is yet another category, necrophagy, which we shall have to examine separately in its place. Necrophagy is the consumption of dead human flesh, an even rarer manifestation of the disease and one which erupts at the final stages of its evolution.
Part of the difficulty in understanding this kind of aberration is the assumption that it is unique or without precedent. It was an assumption widely held in Milwaukee, even within the courtroom, during Dahmer’s trial, and shared by Dahmer himself. He had not read about the subject, nor was he interested in it as an area of study or a blueprint for emulation. He once asked Dr Becker whether there was anyone in the world like him, or was he the only one. There are, alas, only too many examples of people who have committed acts of which Dahmer’s are merely an echo. It might help to place matters in perspective if we consider some of them.
Andrew Bichel, born about 1770 in Bavaria, killed young girls and handled their intestines before cutting them in half. He admitted to feeling ‘excitement’ as he opened the bodies up. Sergeant Bertrand, a twenty-seven-year-old soldier in the 74th Regiment, dug up the corpses of young women in 1848 in Paris and tore out their entrails. Sometimes he hacked off their limbs or achieved congress with them. Interestingly, he appears to have been a chronic masturbator in adolescence, indulging up to seven times a day, a characteristic we have already noted as precursory to serious deviance in adult life. Jack the Ripper is the most notorious case of the Victorian period, whose activities again indicate a fascination with viscera – his mutilation of the prostitutes he attacked was ferocious; Peter Sutcliffe was thus appropriately dubbed the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ in 1978, because his purpose was not merely murder but degradation of the victim’s internal organs. Easier to grasp, perhaps, is the case of John Christie in London in March, 1953. His address, 10 Rillington Place, remains almost as famous today as Buckingham Palace. The bodies of three women were found in a secret cupboard behind wallpaper, another under the floorboards, two more in the garden. An ineffective and quiet man, Christie would lure women to his home and get them drunk, then kill them in order to possess them sexually; he could do it no other way. Other points of comparison with Dahmer are that Christie would frequently masturbate on to a corpse, and that his compulsion grew in intensity with the years, to the point where his last three murders were committed by a man gone berserk and quite incapable of worrying about the possibility of detection.
Peter Kürten terrified Düsseldorf in the 1920s with his loathsome needs, and killed men, women and children alike for the purpose of sexual gratification. If no victim presented himself and the urge was great, he would turn to animals instead, and once killed a swan and drank its blood. One of his victims was hastily buried by him, and later dug up and violated both vaginally and anally. When he was arrested, his neighbours and workmates were convinced a mistake had been made, for the Peter they knew was quiet and well behaved at all times. The most uncomfortable comparison is that of Ed Gein, arrested in Plainfield, Wisconsin, in 1957, and presumed largely forgotten by local inhabitants until Dahmer’s arrest. They did not appreciate the reminder, for they considered that Gein, another polite and self-effacing man, had brought shame upon the State. In the woodshed of his house was the naked, headless body of a woman hanging upside down from a meat-hook and opened up down the front. The head and intestines were discovered in a box, the heart on a plate in the dining-room. The skins from ten human heads were preserved, and another skin taken from the upper torso of a woman was rolled up on the floor. There was even a belt fashioned from nipples and a chair upholstered in human skin. Incidentally, Ed Gein was found to be insane, but was never released from custody for the rest of his life, a fact worth bearing in mind when Jeff Dahmer’s ultimate destination was decided.
On the other hand, Edmund Kemper, who shot his grandparents dead when he was fifteen, was released from a maximum security hospital four years later and launched upon a particularly hideous murder spree. He, too, would retain the heads of victims for masturbatory purposes, but probably his most vivid and awful act was, having killed and decapitated his mother, to tear out her larynx and throw it into the garbage so that she would not scream and yell at him any more! In 1935, Albert Fish was tried for murder, but it was his necrophilia which drew attention to him. His victims were children, and the body of one little girl was used to make stew. He was found sane and executed in 1936.
There is more, and worse. Dr J. Paul de River has made a study of some of the more outlandish cases, including one of a morgue attendant whose necrophilia was so pronounced that he performed hideous acts upon the corpses in his care.2 And the most unpleasant case known to me is that of Richard Chase, the so-called ‘Vampire of Sacramento’, whose madness was so intense that he placed the viscera of pigs and rabbits in a blender and mixed them to eat. His treatment of his victims challenges description. The point I am making is that Jeff Dahmer’s behaviour, awful though it be, is not without precedent, nor is it the most nauseating manifestation of necrophilia on record. But it is one whose development it is possible to trace, with some effort and not a little conjecture, and whose roots might thereby be uncovered. Dahmer does not stand alone; he is part of a long gallery of human beings whose emotions have been distressingly diverted towards a love of the dead.
It is for this reason that Dahmer’s insistence that he did not enjoy killing should be given due credence. Murder was not the point of the act, but its avenue. Many necrophiles kill for the subsequent pleasure of dismemberment, what von Hentig called lebendige Zusammenhange (to tear apart ‘living structures’).3 Dennis Nilsen maintained that in his case dismemberment was merely functional (in an all-too-graphic remark he referred to it as ‘the dirty platter after the feast’), and Dahmer initially claimed that he, too, derived no pleasure from the activity. It is likely, however, that this was his last defence, the final twitching of a moribund morality, as he subsequently admitted that he would pause during dissection to gaze upon his work. I still think it is true that his primary aim was to achieve a desired object, not to destroy it; the destruction was his way of keeping something of the body whose company and solace he had sought.
Fromm attempted a catalogue of characteristics which together might define a necrophilous personality, a list much criticised by professionals because of its reliance upon speculation and imaginative insight. It is still pertinent for us to consider this list and see how it might be applied to Jeff Dahmer. The habit of breaking matchsticks in half must not be taken too seriously, or it might condemn half the population to morbidity. There are other points which carry more conviction. For instance, the conversation of a necrophile is bland, without intonation or colour. ‘He remains stiff, cold, aloof; his presentation of the subject is pedantic and lifeless. On the other hand the opposite character type, the life-loving person, may talk of an experience that in itself is not particularly interesting, but there is life in the way he presents it; he is stimulating; that is why one listens with interest and pleasure. The necrophilous person is a wet blanket and a joy killer in a group; he is boring rather than animating; he deadens everything and makes people feel tired, in contrast to the biophilous person who makes people feel more alive.’4 It is beyond question that Dahmer’s conversation lacks liveliness.
It is also true that Dahmer lacks the capacity for free, joyous laughter. He essays a smile, or a smirk, but there is an absence of mobility or expression in his face, as if the smile is appended to something which it does not fit. His substitute for laughter is a kind of single guttural grunt, again tentative and ‘killed’ at its inception. His complexion is pallid and sallow. All these are cha
racteristics advanced by Fromm as typically necrophilous.
When he comes to childhood signals which may presage a necrophilous future, we recognise some discordant and contradictory echoes. The biophilous child is interested in toys which represent life and enhance his enjoyment of it – such as dolls and pets – whereas the necrophilous infant only responds to mechanical things, dead structures. At a very early stage Jeff Dahmer had his share of life-enhancing activities, with his little pets and cuddly toys to take to bed, but they gave way after a certain age to the fascination with the way objects function. His favourite toy was a set of Styrofoam building blocks, and we have already seen how his interest in animals degenerated into an obsession with how they worked, what was their structure and form. The skeleton, heart, liver, lungs, were all objects to him which could be put together, like a jigsaw puzzle, to make an animal. All children rightly learn from the mechanical approach to life and ultimately combine it with the spiritual and emotional to gain a composite understanding. The adult Dahmer never really emerged from his childhood thing-making fog.
The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer Page 18