It is also to Krafft-Ebing that we owe another insight – that there is a corollary between defloration of a virgin and the sex-murderer’s cutting of the flesh, both actions of piercing, stabbing and entering. One might also suggest that in the most orthodox love-making there is a desire on the part of the man not merely to enjoy sensual pleasure but to thrust as far into his mate as he can possibly reach; the act is mimicked by a habit of some homosexual men called ‘fist-fucking’, in which the arm is pushed deep into the partner’s rectum. The point of these reflections is to emphasise that the grim aberrations of a man like Dahmer are not all that different in kind from a spectrum of behaviour from so-called normal to extremely eccentric. Dahmer’s acts, however abhorrent, place him within the scope of human experience, and his wrestling with control only exaggerates similar preoccupations faced by many of us who are not regarded as dangerous.
That Dahmer should become dangerous while the majority of people (including those who have bizarre fantasies) remain harmless needs some explanation. Clearly, his emotions and his psyche did not proceed to maturity in the expected way; their development was arrested by some event or other of cataclysmic importance. This event would be likely to have taken place at the time when he was very young, when mother and infant were still one unit, allied against the world, and the infant’s dependence was total. As Melanie Klein has shown, the infant goes through a phase when his psychic peace is extremely fragile and any loss suffered is acutely felt and likely to reverberate long into the future. Is it possible to discern any such crucial loss suffered by the young Jeff Dahmer?
I believe his double hernia operation at the age of four changed the course of his life. It is well documented that children under six suffer significantly more from the trauma of surgery than their elder siblings, because their understanding of what is happening to them and its possible effect upon their bodies is severely limited. The infant is striving towards independence, towards the ability to exist in his own right without constant maternal nourishment, and he is enjoying his first tentative steps towards control of his own destiny; there are things he can do, of his own volition, which will achieve a desired effect. What then happens in hospital, a place to which he has never been before and which he does not choose to go to now? Suddenly, his embryonic autonomy is shattered by a rude invasion; his little powers of decision are roughly withdrawn and he becomes an object in the hands of strangers. His ability to maintain control is undermined, disregarded, even perhaps cancelled. He experiences ‘loss of control, autonomy, and competence’.7 And he does not know why.
Not knowing why, he will wonder and invent. His capacity to handle his emotional reactions to trauma and threat when alone is still very insecure, and his understanding of this, his body, how it works and what one may do with it, is tiny. ‘His knowledge of his own physiology and anatomy is meagre and is confused with weird speculations about the inside of his body.’8 Jeff Dahmer’s own imaginings about the insides of people’s bodies began with his hernia operation and the intrusion into his. The atmosphere in hospital cannot help but be terrifying, because it is so unfamiliar. Add to this the anxieties of parents and the proddings of strange men, the feeling that something dreadful, unknown and unspoken, is about to happen, and the imperative that in the face of all this he must be passive and compliant, and the child is overwhelmed. ‘He has fantasies of what did happen to him which are far in excess of the actual facts,’ writes a learned paediatrician, and he is further convinced that ‘the injury will continue to increase and make him entirely different from anyone else in the world’. Both these observations seem to apply with peculiar accuracy to the case of Jeff Dahmer. And there is a third, slightly chilling in its prophetic implications: ‘He may abreact the fear by playing that he is performing the operation on another child.’9 The memory of the fear and fantasies which preceded the operation may then be repressed, with the result that unconscious recollections begin to infect the growing child’s perceptions of the world and of people, and every new experience assumes the threat of a repetition of the old. This is a heavily buried reaction, of course; one would not suggest that Dahmer thought everyone he met was a surgeon in disguise, but, never wanting to see or be touched by that surgeon again, he would presume that everyone was implicitly dangerous – his responses would be deeply coloured by the experience. ‘Emotional shock may not express itself openly for some time . . . Just as physical shock may result in death, so emotional shock may result in a lifetime of unhappiness.’
It is often very difficult to see the connections between an adult’s unusual behaviour and the surgery he endured as a child, but in Dahmer’s case the avenue from cause to effect is strikingly clear. The history of a four-year-old who was given a meatotomy (to widen the urethral opening) without anaesthetic shows some parallels.10 His play thereafter was to do with cutting people up, and cutting off his own face, hands, and penis, all clearly derived from the fear of castration which the operation had engendered. Jeff Dahmer’s operation involved opening his abdomen with fairly deep incisions, feeling his insides, exploring within him, at a time when his ability to count upon his mother, with her own insecurities and nervousness, was already in jeopardy. He asked her afterwards whether his penis had been removed (so he told Dr Becker), and the post-operative pain would feel exactly as if it had. The fear of castration is not only, or even mainly, sexual, and here we must come to the most telling inference. When Dahmer was cut open by the surgeon, in his own mind he lost control of his own body once and for all, and his crimes in adulthood were a belated attempt to reassert himself and regain control. They expressed a desperate wish to reclaim that power which, unconsciously, he thought the surgeon’s knife had removed.
Hence the importance of control in his vocabulary, and its significance as the leitmotif of his trial. Control was something lost in infancy and never recovered. With his victims, he at last placed himself in a position where he could control not only what happened to them, but what happened to their bodies. At last, he was the surgeon and they the passive child on the table. He could handle their intestines as his had been handled, cut them in the same place as he had been cut, restore to himself that autonomy of which he had been robbed, by stealing theirs. The tactile intimacy of the operation had at the same time mingled the feeling of sexual privilege with that of corporal invasion, which is why he chose to regain control and restore his stolen potency not with enemies, not through hatred, but with a loved object. The combination was disastrous.
Now do we begin to see the subconscious significance of Dahmer’s black table, which was to form the centrepiece of his temple or shrine. In a sense it was his altar, and we shall later investigate the possible meanings of this as a ritual symbol. But for the moment it must have another dimension. Why did he buy a table, and not something lower or smaller or more ornate, as one might expect an altar to be? And what did he use the table for? It was on the table that he draped the naked corpses of his victims, on the table that he photographed their chests, abdomens and genitals, on the table that he sometimes made the first incision before dismemberment in the bathtub. What else, then, is Dahmer’s black table but the memory of that hospital operating table upon which he had been summarily emasculated in the most intimate manner?
It need hardly be said that one does not wish to argue from the particular to the general and fall into the absurdity of suggesting that every child who has a double hernia operation is bound to grow into a necrophile. Conversely, that the development is not universally true does not invalidate its truth in a particular instance; this, I think, is one such.
That, at least, is the case for predetermination. It will be objected that a theoretic view of mental history like this entirely absolves Dahmer from any responsibility for his conduct and is thereby unacceptable. We all have Original Sin, it is said, and are cluttered with flaws. We may choose whether or not to indulge those flaws or deny them, to acquiesce or resist. Dahmer’s own story indicates that he did resist
for a while, thus supporting the thesis that he, like the rest of us, was daily presented with choices which he was able to evaluate and act upon. By this reckoning, he was not driven by an irresistible unconscious urge to control, but made decisions either to avoid desires which he knew to be depraved, or to give in to them. Every one of us has to make such choices, admittedly of a less devastating nature than his, and take the consequences for them. His freedom to choose right or wrong was inviolate, despite the peculiar nature of his problem. He had the will, he had the power, he had the potential to do good. He killed because he decided to kill. So it would be fiercely and repeatedly argued in court by District Attorney E. Michael McCann.
There is one thing seriously wrong with this point of view. While it is possible to make decisions which are in every obvious sense voluntary and logical, they may be made in order to achieve an end which is in itself involuntary (‘driven’) and illogical. Put another way, one may make sane sequential moves towards an insane and inconsequential purpose. The point was scarcely addressed at all in court. Had Jeffrey Dahmer killed to assuage hatred of blacks or homosexuals, he would have succeeded, in so far as his hatred would have been assuaged. Had he killed to revenge himself upon some person who had insulted him, he would have succeeded, in so far as he would have been avenged. Had he killed for financial gain, he would have succeeded, in so far as the robbery would have improved his finances. These would all have been decisions freely made to achieve a discernibly possible end. But if he killed to make a friend, if he killed to own a body, if he killed to compensate for infantile surgery, if he killed to create a zombie, if he killed to invest a private shrine with power, he would have failed in each regard, for none of these aims is attainable by such means. Hence his decision to kill is the result of magical or delusional thinking, and though the decision itself might be free, the thinking is imprisoned in madness.
Lawyers will have nothing to do with such dialectics, which they consider suspect. They are reluctant to accept that free will can be diverted by anything less than a severe and easily recognisable illness. Doctors, on the other hand, are equally reluctant to admit that freedom of choice can escape from the restraints of biochemical make-up or psychological influence. Doctors say we are how we are made; lawyers say we are what we do. It is an existential debate, incapable of resolution, which is why lawyers and psychiatrists, speaking different languages, always collide in a court of law. They range on either side of the argument with which we began, prompted by a reflection of Dahmer’s, namely the degree of control exercised by him or over him. It is germane to the even more passionate argument, as to whether Dahmer was sane (in control) or insane (controlled) at the time of the murders, and it is no wonder that the legal interpretation of insanity has gone through so many hoops in its desire to pin the criminal to his acts and deprive him of excuses.
Contrary to the view sustained by popular prejudice, a working insanity defence helps ensure that the majority of defendants are held accountable under the law. In clarifying the rare grounds for exemption from the principle of criminal responsibility, the principle is itself thereby strengthened. The concept of absence of free will is the origin of the insanity defence. It is a mark of civilised life that a mad person (like an infant or an idiot) should not be held responsible for his conduct. Lord Hale established the principle in 1736 – ‘where there is a total defect of the understanding, there is no free act of the will’ – and Alan Dershowitz, professor at Harvard Law School and fearless defender of the apparently indefensible, has put it succinctly thus: ‘It is a deeply entrenched human feeling that those who are grossly disturbed – whether they are called “madmen”, “lunatics”, “insane” or “mentally ill” – should not be punished like ordinary criminals.’11
One has only to ponder the alternative, that a lunatic should be hanged by the neck until dead or locked up in a concrete cell for his lifetime, to see how repellent it is to common humanity. So, when the defence of insanity is called, the jury will be asked not to consider what the defendant did, but what kind of man he is.
Historically, they have always found this difficult on emotional grounds, and have sometimes reached strange conclusions. At the trial of sixty-five-year-old Albert Fish in 1935, the jury heard overwhelming evidence of mental derangement, including his habit of eating his own excrement and driving needles into his scrotum which he left there to rust. He killed a little girl, made her arm into a stew and ate it. The defence attorney pleaded insanity, but the jury would countenance no such thing and found him guilty without mitigation. He was executed in 1936. Richard Chase, the Sacramento man who mixed viscera in a blender and ate the stomachs of dogs and pigs before he started to attack people, was (alarmingly) declared sane by two court-appointed psychiatrists; the jury were relieved to be able to find such a monster guilty of first-degree murder rather than have to admit that he was one of the maddest people the courts had ever come across.
There are occasions when one is bound to feel sympathy for jurors who are asked to deliberate upon unspeakable acts. A twenty-six-year-old Londoner called John Bowden killed Donald Ryan in 1982 by striking him on the head with a machete, then dropping him still conscious into a bath of scalding water, where he fainted; he carried Ryan into a bedroom and proceeded to cut off his arms and legs with an electric carving-knife while he was alive. And so it went on. The photographic evidence was so unpalatable that the trial had to be adjourned when four jurors fell ill. In such circumstances, it is little wonder that they are loath to resort to the psychiatric ‘excuse’.
There is an additional danger against which jurors must arm themselves – that a defendant may successfully plead insanity by pretence. It almost happened in the case of the so-called ‘Hillside Strangler’, Kenneth Bianchi, who convinced psychiatrists for months on end that he was mad, only to be revealed as a fraud at the last minute. In passing sentence, Judge George commented, ‘Mr Bianchi had faked memory loss; he had faked hypnosis; and he had faked multiple personalities. This action by Mr Bianchi caused confusion and delay in the proceedings. In this, Mr Bianchi was unwittingly aided and abetted by most of the psychiatrists who naively swallowed Mr Bianchi’s story hook, line and sinker, almost confounding the criminal justice system.’12
In the last analysis, society must rely upon the common sense of the jury, who are the ultimate arbiters of what the community will allow. In this, they may override instructions and advice from the judge in their zeal to represent the ordinary unsophisticated conscience. There is, however, yet another danger in this, for the easiest and most convincing argument to common sense is that of res ipsa loquitur (‘the thing speaks for itself’), which holds that a man who commits disgusting acts must be insane, otherwise he would not commit them. This is a circular argument, and fallacious, for the conclusion is implicit in the premise. On such roller-coaster logic, any conviction for murder would be rendered almost impossible. As Jack Levin neatly put it, one must not ‘confuse what is sick with what is sickening’.13
The jury also has the right to return a mixed verdict, a possibility which is of particular interest in relation to the Dahmer case. In Hamilton, Ohio, James Ruppert was charged with eleven homicides. He was found guilty of aggravated murder in regard to the deaths of his mother and brother, but not guilty by reason of insanity in regard to the other nine slayings of his sister-in-law, nieces and nephews. They were all killed by shooting. The reasoning behind this suggests that Ruppert became mad after the first two murders. The reader has learnt enough of Jeff Dahmer’s offences and their dizzy escalation in June and July of 1991 to appreciate the virtues of such a mixed verdict. The expectation was that, as the evolution of his mental condition was tracked by the evidence, he might be found guilty on the first ten or twelve counts, and insane on the remainder. Ruppert’s crimes were all committed on the same day (Easter Sunday, 1975), whereas Dahmer’s extended over a period of years, offering a much more convincing case for gradual or creeping insanity.
J
urors at the Dahmer trial would need to be given a working understanding of some definitions, if only to know which to discard, but they were in the event offered very little in the way of guidance. Nobody mentioned the word ‘psychopath’, though an appreciation of its meaning and import was crucial to their deliberations upon what might constitute an ‘abnormal condition of the mind’. The first definition of the term was given by Sir David Henderson, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Edinburgh, in his Psychopathic States (1957), and debated by the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment, whose report led to the Homicide Act of 1957 in England. In Killing for Company I avoided using the word because it seemed to me to apply to any criminal whose motives were inaccessible, and to describe a deed, not a condition. No one could recognise a psychopath before he committed a psychopathic act, which implied the ridiculous corollary that he was not psychopathic until his condition sought expression. The Royal Commission took account of the psychopath’s visible ‘normality’ by specifically excluding such a condition from its understanding of mental disease. An abnormality manifested only by repeated criminal or otherwise antisocial conduct would not constitute a mental disease. Psychopathy is, the report stated, ‘a statistical abnormality; that is to say, the psychopath differs from a normal person only quantitatively or in degree, not qualitatively; and the diagnosis of psychopathic personality does not carry with it any explanation of the causes of the abnormality’. In other words, to explain a psychopath only by his acts is to fall into the res ipsa loquitur fallacy.
The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer Page 22