One of his workmates, Richard Burton, was driving with a friend when he saw him standing on a street corner and gave him a ride. Dahmer said he wanted to get out of Wisconsin and go to Florida. Burton wished him luck, and he got out. To his friend, Burton said he thought Jeff had ‘lost it all’ – no job, no friends. A little later he spotted him again talking to a black man at a bus-stop.
On 21 July, after dismembering the body of Joseph Bradehoft, he was wandering around the Grand Avenue Mall where, in two separate incidents, he propositioned Hispanic men with the invitation to earn money by posing for pictures and watching videos. They were Joseph Rosa and Ricardo Ortiz. Both refused.
The events of 22 July depict a mind at once unfocused, listless, and delirious, unhinged. Dahmer got up late, in the midst of his human debris, and went out for a beer. Sopa Princewill accosts him in the corridor with a 40-ounce bottle, and warns him that he may not last until his lease runs out at the end of the month – he may be evicted sooner because his place smelt so awful. He listens, but does not react in any noticeable manner. He goes downtown and is walking along 3rd Street near Wells Street at 2 p.m. when he sees a black man sitting on a sidewalk bench. This is twenty-year-old Ormell Holmes. He asks Holmes if he wants to earn $50. What do I have to do for that? asks Holmes. Pose for pictures and drink some rum. Holmes indicates that he is not interested in that kind of thing, and Dahmer moves on. He approaches another man in the same street, with the same result.
He now goes to his favourite haunt, the Grand Avenue Mall, and has some fast food. He is seen there at 3.30 talking to a man on one of the benches. A little later, he asks a sixteen-year-old black boy called Anderson to come home with him and watch movies, and his offer is again declined. At 4.30 Dennis Campbell, who works at Milwaukee’s famous German restaurant, Karl Ratzch’s, is in the Mall with his girlfriend Julie Weyer, and goes to the men’s room on the first floor. Having urinated, he is drying his hands on a wall dryer when the door opens and a scruffy white man with several days’ growth of beard walks in and stands behind him, then moves beside him. There is no long preparatory choreography. The white man says straight out, ‘Do you want to make fifty dollars real quick?’ ‘Doing what?’ says Campbell. ‘Come to my apartment and watch videos.’ ‘I don’t think so,’ says Campbell, and the man, whom he thought ‘weird, creepy and very unusual’, says, ‘O.K.’ He told Julie about it afterwards and she laughed.
He has a quick pizza and some beers and half an hour later is by one of the side entrances when he sees three men together, one of whom has spoken to him twice before in the preceding weeks, just to ask for a cigarette. This is Tracy Edwards, who has been in Milwaukee only since early June, having previously lived with his mother in Mississippi. He has many old friends here though, as he once lived in Milwaukee for four years. The two people with him are Jeff Stevens and Carl Gilliam. Dahmer falls into conversation with them, tells them he is ‘real bored’, and offers them $100 each if they will come to his house and keep him company. (He is at this stage virtually penniless.) One of them asks if there is sex involved, and Dahmer says he just wants to handcuff somebody. They agree to walk with him to a liquor store on 7th Street, a few blocks up Wisconsin Avenue, and the four men are outside the store before 6 p.m. Dahmer walks in, leaving the other three on the sidewalk. Tracy’s twin brother, Terrance Edwards, who is with his girlfriend at a bar across the road, comes to greet them, and they tell him of this odd guy who will pay them just to have a good time. Terrance strongly advises against it. Dahmer comes out, there is some more talk, whereupon Stevens and Gilliam wander off to find their own ladies. Dahmer and Tracy get in a cab outside the Greyhound Bus Station. It is too late for Terrance to stop his brother, but he manages to catch up with Carl. Dahmer has told them that he lives at the Ambassador Hotel.
Terrance and Carl walk to the Ambassador with the intention of intercepting Tracy and stopping him from doing anything foolhardy. On arrival, they wait for one and a half hours before giving up. They now have no idea where Tracy could be, and are seriously worried.
Tracy is in 213 of the Oxford Apartments on 25th Street, with an eerily threatening man who seems only half aware of where he is and what he is doing. He had to disengage alarm systems to get into the apartment, which emitted a foul odour amid a weird ambiance, despite being fairly neat and clean. On the floor were four large cartons of muriatic acid, which Dahmer said he used for cleaning bricks. Tracy is already sorry he has got himself into this mess, but if he keeps his wits about him he may be able to get out of it. He must keep the man talking. Dahmer says he remembers they talked about gay bars in Chicago, and he recalls showing him the knife, but after that everything went ‘fuzzy’. Edwards says Dahmer clapped a handcuff on him while his back was turned as he looked at the fish tank. ‘What’s happening?’ he said. Dahmer said he was only joking, and he would get the keys to the handcuffs which were in the bedroom. They walked into the bedroom, where the video of Exorcist II was playing, as if planned, and Tracy noticed a big blue drum in the corner and posters of naked men on the walls. ‘I won’t hurt you if you let me handcuff you and take some pictures,’ said Dahmer. ‘You have to be nude.’
Tracy realised he was dealing with a volatile character, one moment conciliatory, one moment menacing, sometimes cold and determined, sometimes vacant and pathetic. Edwards made sure that he kept his two hands far apart all the time, so that it would not be easy to handcuff him totally, and kept Dahmer talking about it. Why did he want to use handcuffs? ‘I’ll be in control,’ Dahmer said. Then the knife was brandished.
Tracy said he would let him take the pictures if only he would put the knife away. He would go into the bathroom and undress. To show he intended compliance, he took his shirt off, not knowing that this – the exposed chest – was the trigger which sealed the fate of Steven Hicks thirteen years before, which made him tear into Steven Tuomi’s ribs in 1987, and which had led to the death of fifteen more men since. Fortunately for him, Dahmer had fallen so far off the edge of sanity that his sense of the present was fragmentary and defective. He told Tracy that he was very beautiful. He appeared suddenly relaxed and ‘laid back’. He sat on the edge of the bed watching Exorcist II as if in a trance, rocking and chanting the while. The alterations in his personality and behaviour were sudden and extreme. When he lay his head on Tracy’s chest and listened to his heart, Tracy finally knew he was in the company of a mad man.
There was some manoeuvring, during which Tracy contrived to push the knife under the bed and make his way into the living room while Dahmer was at the fridge looking for a beer. He told Dahmer to trust him, and that he would do what he wanted as soon as he took the handcuff off. Dahmer said he would find the key, and went to the bedroom, whereupon Tracy made a dash for the front door. Dahmer caught up in time to grab his arm and plead with him to come back in. Tracy Edwards fled.
The rest is now history, as police officers Rauth and Mueller were flagged down by Tracy Edwards who subsequently led them to Dahmer’s apartment and its terrible secrets. For the first time since Luis Pinet, Dahmer had a man in his den with no sleeping pills with which to paralyse him. What could he have thought he was doing? The pattern was broken, shattered. He did not seem to care any more. He made only a half-hearted attempt to retain Tracy Edwards, and even when the police came to the door, he did not refuse them entry. He did not prevent the police officer from going into the bedroom, knowing what he would find there. It was only when he was arrested that Jeff Dahmer awoke from his reverie and was rudely hauled back into the real world.
‘Something stronger than my conscious will made it happen,’ Dahmer says. ‘I think some higher power got good and fed-up with my activity and decided to put an end to it. I don’t really think there are any coincidences. The way it ended and whether the close calls were warnings to me or what, I don’t know. If they were, I sure didn’t heed them.’16
‘If I hadn’t been caught or lost my job, I’d still be doing it, I’m quite sure of that. I went on doing
it and doing it and doing it, in spite of the anxiety and the lack of lasting satisfaction.’
On 22 July he was not drunk (by his own standards), he did not black out, but his conduct was so loose and haphazard that capture was, at last, practically inevitable. ‘How arrogant and stupid of me to think that I could do something like this and just go about my life normally as if nothing had ever happened. They say you reap what you sow, well, it’s true, you do, eventually . . . I’ve always wondered, from the time that I committed that first horrid mistake, sin, with Hicks, whether this was sort of predestined and there was no way I could have changed it.
‘I wonder just how much predestination controls a person’s life and just how much control they have over themselves.’17
Chapter Eight
The Question of Control
The query posed by Jeffrey Dahmer at the end of the previous chapter goes to the very heart of the debate about criminal responsibility and the exercise of free will. Put starkly, there is no free will in nature, and the concept of freedom of choice, the basis for every moral edifice and all notions of conscience, is man-made and man-imposed. Morality is the civilising influence which mankind has erected to shield himself from the appalling vacuum of chaotic nature, where blunt caprice prevails. The question is whether Dahmer’s acts are the product of tyrannical nature, and therefore unmanageable by him, or the issue of choices freely made by a man who has rejected the moral constraints of his fellows. If the former, then his behaviour is not subject to his control; if the latter, then control is its very essence. Whichever the case, control is the key-word which will dominate proceedings at the trial, and it is a word which is also a major preoccupation of Dahmer’s thought and conversation.
Control systems, whether we call them morality or behaviour modification, have evolved with the development of mankind into an organised social being, and we can see their origin in the ‘displacement activity’ of other creatures as they find a way out of the anarchy of individualism into a method of group responsibility. The work of ethologists, Tinbergen and Lorenz in particular, has been crucial in this regard. They observed that geese, for example, go through a ritual of neck swaying and hissing rather than enter into a destructive combat, and that male sticklebacks, when in dispute, stab furiously at the sand to direct their frustrations onto it rather than at each other. These are embryonic and successful attempts at a control system or ‘morality’, designed to ensure the greater good of the community at the expense of freedom of the individual. Seen from this point of view, Dahmer’s control systems were severely impaired, unless we assume he deliberately turned away from them to revert to the brute selfishness of untamed elemental nature.
The control system of moral choice obviously belongs to the conscious part of the self; the uncontrolled Dionysian expression of pre-moral urges equally obviously belongs to the subconscious self. Freud called the subconscious das Unbewusste, which literally means ‘the unapprehended’. It follows that what cannot be apprehended by the consciousness cannot be controlled by it. The idea of negation is also foreign to the unconscious – it has no truck with the word ‘no’. Conscious morality says ‘thou shalt not’, forbidding all manner of acts which are not conducive to social ease and interaction. The unconscious says ‘thou shalt’, in order to obey a deeper imperative. I am not suggesting that Dahmer was in some way ‘unconscious’ at the time of the murders, but that the motive force which led him to them rose from the deep untouchable recesses of das Unbewusste.
All of which is a restatement in different terms of the opening proposition as to whether free will can be said to operate, in any profound sense, in a case such as this. We are experimenting with language in the hope of grasping the essential dilemma at the core, and merely finding different ways of saying the same thing. Does one control, or is one controlled? Are we active agents, or passive twigs? Can we ever understand the tangled motives which entwine the roots of what we do, or are they buried beyond sight, condemning us to behave robotically in their service? These are philosophical questions beyond the walls of psychiatry (which deals with the results of aberration, not the theory of volition), and way beyond the scope of a court of law. Lawyers habitually make a distinction between the irresistible impulse and the impulse not resisted, but the whole question of control is far subtler than that, having to do with the feeling of fundamental compulsion, not momentary impulse.
When there is conflict between deep-seated compulsion and residual moral resistance (between being controlled and controlling), the murderer often resorts to alcohol as an ally, releasing the former and annihilating the latter. This applies to Jeff Dahmer as it did to Dennis Nilsen and to dozens of others. Sometimes the murderer is engaged in a Herculean struggle to resist the compulsion, as with Theodore Bundy, who gave the impression of being master of himself and of all he surveyed; privately, he recognised the dark urgings which consumed him and he tried to keep off the streets when he felt them rising, so that no woman would stray into his ken. The compulsion grew, and ‘Bundy felt himself slipping under its control again and again’.1 In the end, he found himself committing the most heinous acts in obedience to a self which raged unreined inside him. Ian Brady provocatively called this the ‘higher’ self – the fact of its tyranny remains. He has said that it cannot be resisted, that one is compelled to do its bidding because the ‘higher self’ is incomparably stronger than the mind.
Now listen to Jeffrey Dahmer. ‘I was completely swept along with my own compulsion,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how else to put it. It didn’t satisfy me completely so maybe I was thinking another one [murder] will. Maybe this one will, and the numbers started growing and growing and just got out of control, as you can see. I got to the point where I lost my job because of it.’2 The paradox is that Dahmer sought to control his world and the individuals who blundered into it, but was all the time controlled by it. The propensity to murder lurks, incessantly, insatiably, in his bowels. Then, when its hunger gasps and reaches out, ‘it breaks loose from its moorings, takes charge of the individual who formerly had some hold over it, and goes on to murder itself, like a powerless rider of a runaway horse’.3 To talk of free will in such circumstances is an absurdity. One might as well try to fall upwards.
It has been possible in Dahmer’s case to observe the birth of this monster within, its gradual poisoning of the psyche, the incipient attempt to contain it, and the desperate internal struggle with it after the murder of Steven Hicks in 1978. It is worth insisting on this, for a gap of nine years between the first killing and the second is extremely unusual. In all other similar cases, once the obstacle of the first one has been conquered, the need to repeat is overwhelming, and subsequent murders come rapidly in its wake. The very fact that Jeff Dahmer held his murderousness in check for nine years testifies to the intensity of his fight to control and not be controlled. After the death of Steven Tuomi in 1987, which he did not expect and does not remember, his struggle was lost. He says himself that his morality was shot, that he gave up trying to resist, that he surrendered to the monster. It was easier to go on than go back. Like Macbeth, he was ‘in blood Stepp’d in so far, that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o’er’.4
This notion of control is so slippery that its subtleties threaten to confuse. Though the murderer is, in this sense, a victim of his master, he does unconsciously collude with him, for murderousness is in some cases a personal safety-valve which may prevent something ‘worse’ from occurring, such as utter disintegration of the psyche. ‘What the world sees is the figures whom he destroys but not the invisible figure whom he protects . . . His ethical goal is individual, personal and remains unseen by those around him and by himself also.’5 In his inner torment, the murderer must sacrifice others to save himself, and in that respect the idea of control shifts from the passive to the active. Being himself controlled by a nameless, mysterious power that he did not understand was, to Jeff Dahmer, frightening. His response was to exercise cont
rol over his victims, in other words to grab the initiative. Time and again we have heard him say that what he most wanted, in his ‘empty’ life, was to be in control of something, and only when he was alone with his prey did he experience that feeling of being ‘on top’. This is another paradox, for his way of countering the intolerable helplessness of being controlled is to impose that same helplessness upon his victims. It is a straight transference, a kind of retaliation.
Speaking of the British psychopath Patrick Mackay, Dr James Stewart said, ‘Patrick might be excited by the knowledge that someone was at his mercy, and . . . in such a situation he would probably be incapable of restraining himself.’6 In this context, it is also important to note that strangulation as a method of killing offers a more tantalising opportunity for control than any other, the victim being wholly at the mercy of the amount of pressure the murderer chooses to exert. It may take five minutes to squeeze the life out of someone, but that time can be prolonged by the diminution of pressure and its gradual reimposition. In such a circumstance, the murderer is in total control of life and death – he can grant life to his victim as well as despatch him into the afterworld. Dennis Nilsen did precisely this with Carl Stottor, whom he nearly killed and then reprieved, leaving Stottor confused as to whether he was his executioner or saviour. Dahmer seems to have exercised similar power with Luis Pinet. While he has been consistent in admitting that control was his aim, he has never said that he enjoyed the act of killing, and the image with which he has left us is that of a lover choking his unconscious mate before wrapping him in his arms. He did let slip, however, that one victim was not fully unconscious and had to be subdued, which might indicate a pleasure in the act of slow strangulation which he is still unwilling to concede. Only Dahmer will ever know the entire truth behind this.
Nor is it inappropriate to be reminded how deeply embedded in our history is the acceptance of this notion that the loved one should be controlled and subdued. Krafft-Ebing pointed out that in prehistory a couple’s first copulation came about as the direct reward for pursuit and overcoming (as it still does with other animals), and to this day cartoons crudely depict the caveman as clubbing his mate and dragging her to his lair. We retain an echo of this ancient rite in the modern Christian marriage, when the bridegroom-predator picks up his ‘conquest’ and carries her off to his domain.
The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer Page 21