There was another dream which involved the police digging up some bones and attempting to incriminate him in suspected foul play when he was completely innocent and ignorant of the bones’ presence. This may not even have been a dream relating to his criminal activities, though surely inspired by them; it was a common anxiety dream of impotence in the face of unblinking power, and it was hardly surprising that Dahmer should have his night invaded by such dreams as the date of his trial and ignominy approached. Perfectly guiltless people have this kind of nightmare. One night he dreamt of an old man in a dark cape who came floating up from the pond at the house in Bath, Ohio, accusing him of stealing plywood which he was sawing. He put the saw down and left. Was this the grim reaper? Or Jeff Dahmer’s conscience? Or merely a troubled and turbulent mind?
‘I should have got a college degree and gone into real estate and got myself an aquarium, that’s what I should have done.’
The hours of talking to policemen and psychiatrists had at least exorcised, to some extent, the evil which had seemed to propel him for so long. He had never before talked at such length about himself and the interviews provided some of that connectedness he had always lacked. ‘I still have the guilt, I’ll probably never get rid of that, but yes, I’m free of the compulsion and the driving need to do it.’ What remained was the depression, all the greater for being born of belated self-knowledge. ‘I don’t think I’m capable of creating anything,’ he said. ‘I think the only thing I’m capable of is destroying . . . I’m sick and tired of being destructive. What worth is life if you can’t be helpful to someone?’18
Chapter Nine
The Trial
The Safety Building on West State Street in Milwaukee is a scruffy, discouraging edifice of bleak corridors built as a featureless square surrounding the county jail at its hub. In every hallway sit several forlorn figures, sleepy and distracted and nearly always black, waiting for something to happen or someone to notice them. One looks in vain for a coffee bar, a splash of colour, or a winning smile. It is a grim place for grim business.
On the fifth floor, unexpectedly found behind a simple door down the hallway, is the courtroom of Judge Laurence Gram. It would be familiar to anyone who has seen cinema or T.V. representations of American trials – the Judge’s Bench against the back wall, a witness-box to his left and bailiff to his right, flags proudly decked behind him. Facing him in the well of the court are two unpretentious tables, as plain as one might find in a dentist’s waiting-room, where the prosecution and defence teams sit in comfortable swivel-chairs. Among the defence personnel is, of course, the defendant himself.
It is one of the glories of the American system as opposed to the English that the defendant is visibly and not just theoretically treated as an innocent man until the jury should decide otherwise. Instead of being isolated high in a dock flanked by two policemen, the very architecture of the room proclaiming his apartness, here he is seated with decorum and propriety next to other free men charged with presenting his case to the court. Though Jeffrey Dahmer’s crimes would be loudly condemned by both sides, Jeffrey Dahmer himself would throughout the proceedings be treated with courtesy, his right to be consulted held in solid respect.
To the right of the courtroom are the jury benches, and behind the counsel tables, again facing the judge, are public seats. At this point, however, Judge Gram’s court differed sharply from other courts, for between the public and the rest of the room was erected an eight-foot-high steel and Lexan wall, effectively cutting the room in half. Specially built for Dahmer’s trial, the see-through wall was meant to protect the defendant from potential anger in the community, but its consequence was to exclude the public from participation in what should be a democratic process. They would be reduced to the status of voyeurs, gawping guiltily across a divide, unable to hear what was going on and watching a mute ritual as if on a faulty television set.
That was, perhaps, the hidden purpose of this ugly construction, for reality is, in America, only acceptable when seen at one remove, filmed and made to resemble the Hollywood style as closely as possible. In tacit confirmation, there was a robot camera, and still and video cameras placed beyond the forbidding wall inside the court, so that the T.V. eye had freer access to due process of law than mere people. It was a not very subtle admission that the ethics and values of television counted for more than the principle of accountability to the local community, and, further, that the trial would be splendid entertainment.
Secluded behind the partition were twenty-three seats for newspaper reporters, to be shared on a rotating basis between about 150 individuals representing scores of ‘media’ organisations; thirty-two seats open to the public on first-come first-served basis; and the greater number of forty seats reserved for family relations of the young men who died.
Born in West Allis, Laurence Gram was sixty years old when the Dahmer trial came his way, and he had been a judge for nearly twenty years. A silver-haired, avuncular, jolly man, he looked as if he would be more at ease reading fairy-tales to his grandchildren than presiding over a searching analysis of soul. There would be occasions during the following three weeks when Judge Gram’s endearing geniality seemed sadly incongruous. The Dahmer case deserved rigorous attention to philosophic and legal niceties and promised to raise questions which would reverberate down the years. Judge Gram’s courtroom was not an adequate theatre for bold ambitions of this sort; it was essentially parochial.
The District Attorney, Michael McCann, had held this important post for nearly a quarter of a century, since his early thirties. Both he and his opponent in this case, Gerald Boyle, were Catholic, but they had rather different views about sin. McCann, a graduate of the University of Detroit and Georgetown University Law School, with a Master’s in Law from Harvard, was a deeply moral man whose passionate advocacy reflected his outrage and did not have to be contrived. He personally took one or two ‘high-profile’ cases a year, but otherwise kept to his desk and would be clearly uncomfortable dealing with sexual deviance. Murder he understood perfectly well, human frailty distressed him.
Gerald Boyle, for the defence, was an entirely different animal. Against McCann’s austerity he personified ebullience and cheerfulness, with a warm, friendly manner and a habit of making the jury feel that he was one of them, learning with them rather than teaching them. His faith was more Christian than Catholic, and imbued with a profound sense of natural justice. Graduated from Loyola University in Chicago and Marquette University Law School, Boyle’s weapons were common sense and kindness, but he had little patience with the fine distinctions of argument and had a distaste for preparation. Whereas McCann relied upon meticulous groundwork, Boyle looked for swelling inspiration.
McCann’s assistants were Carol White and Greg O’Meara, while Boyle was supported by Wendy Patrickus and Ellen Ryan. Both men, however, were to take the lion’s share of their briefs’ questioning and cross-examination, leaving minor witnesses to their respective teams.
Although judge, counsel and jury did not see them for the most part, a prominent role on the periphery was played by the small army of mothers, brothers and sisters who turned up to occupy ‘victim family’ seats. I have already referred to the unforced dignity of Mrs Hughes and the touching confidence of Theresa Smith, but there were many others, daily pinned against the wall in the hallway with microphones thrust under their noses and cameras zooming into their misery. They did not seem to mind.
Jostling for attention were the professional protesters whose sole purpose in life is to hold a placard aloft and chant its message. One of these was well known in Milwaukee for demonstrating against everything under the sun as a more or less full-time occupation. For the opening day of the trial, his slogan was ‘Milwaukee Government Supports Dahmer’s Gay Life Style’, above quotes from Galatians and Leviticus and the bald assertion that government officials had publicly issued proclamations in favour of lesbianism, homosexuality and sodomy. The exhibition was frivolous and childish,
as was the press attention it attracted.
In their defence, it must be said that the press, being over-represented as well as undernourished, were obliged to resort to interviewing one another in the long empty days of jury selection, and would have filmed a cockroach had it been anywhere near West 25th Street. Their frenetic activity was barely contained in a room three floors below the court, a jumbled mess of cameras, cables, computers, microphones, telephones, people, sandwiches and noise. The room buzzed with the energy of ambition, and that sense of urgency which is a journalist’s lifeblood. It was odd that so much of the world’s press should congregate for this trial, as there was unlikely to be drama or surprise in a series of dry psychiatric reports. Perhaps there would be an outburst from the defendant, or even an appearance in the witness-box. There might be an unexpected witness, since the State was rumoured to have fifty-one potential witnesses lined up before proceedings began. If all else failed, the two counsel would descend to the Media Room at the end of each day’s evidence to tell the reporters how well they had presented their cases.
The trial was scheduled to begin at 8.30 a.m. on Monday, 27 January, 1992. It did not start on time. There was first a delay caused by the bomb-sniffing police dog, Blitz, assigned to check the courtroom for explosives, then difficulties in transporting prospective jurors across town. For two hours the public and press benches faced an empty room; some incipient friendships formed.
When the defendant finally walked in, necks craned to peer at him. Pressmen asked each other what they thought of him, and victims’ families looked on with a sullen hatred mingled with curiosity. The charges were well known by now. What about the man himself? The shock registered by Dahmer’s ordinariness was palpable. He wore an open-neck shirt and brown jacket, walked straight to his chair, looked either straight ahead or down at the table, and showed no signs of self-importance or diabolic character. He might almost have been a spectator at the play rather than its principal actor. In the five months since his arrest, prison diet and inactivity had combined to put on weight, so that his jacket looked as if it might tear at any moment. What nobody realised was that he had been taken to the courtroom strapped and handcuffed to a wheelchair and released only at the last minute, nor that he had purposefully left his glasses outside so that he could not see what was going on or who might be looking at him.
Prospective jurors were marched in and sat around the edge of the court while the judge addressed them. The publicity which had preceded the trial and promised to attend it would make it necessary that the jury be sequestered for a period likely to exceed two weeks. Anyone who anticipated that this might prove an intolerable burden was invited to say so. Out of seventy men and women called, twenty-five gave reasons why they could not serve, from one who claimed that he wouldn’t have the stomach for it, to a woman plaintively declaring that, ‘I’ve got to feed the birds. There’s no one else to do it, and they’ll starve.’ Judge Gram excused them.
Mr Boyle and Mr McCann then questioned those who remained, first generally and then individually in judge’s chambers, in a process known as voir dire. The purpose was apparently to learn in advance what each juror felt and thought about the charges, so that either counsel could disbar him if he threatened to have thoughts which they might find prejudicial or inconvenient. Mr Boyle was anxious to discover their attitude towards psychiatry, the defendant’s right to remain silent, homosexuality, and ‘the phantom fear that Mr Dahmer will ever be free in society’. Mr McCann’s concern was that they should not be seduced into thinking that the enormity of the offences must itself be indicative of mental illness, and that they would follow the judge’s instructions even if they did not agree with the law as it stood in relation to such offences.
Both speeches were eloquent and persuasive, Boyle’s particularly in his imprecation to jurors to deliver a fair and impartial verdict without fear or favour. But the outcome of this procedure meant that, instead of having a random collection of men and women bound by civic duty to serve, McCann and Boyle contrived to have sworn in an unrepresentative team vetted by them both. The system even allowed them to strike off potential jurors without offering any reason. After three days, they had pared the numbers down to the requisite twelve (among whom there was one black man) plus two alternates. But what they had, in place of a jury, was a joint committee.
* * *
On Thursday, 30 January, the trial finally began, with Gerald Boyle’s stark opening statement promising a journey into Hell. Counsel is not permitted, in the opening statement, to argue his case or attempt to convince the jury. His function is to tell the story, to give them a basic narrative of events which will be corroborated and elaborated later by the evidence to be set before them. Boyle warned that he would hold nothing back, that he would equip the jury with all they needed to reach a decision. Dahmer himself, he said, would not give evidence, but he would speak through his confession, which would be read in every detail by police officers. ‘You will have to listen.’ Having established that this was not a case about homosexuality, nor about race (‘Mr Dahmer’s obsession was to body form, not colour’), Boyle proceeded to rehearse, in broad terms, the history of his client from puberty onwards, with reference to the jogger, to the pig’s head and to the gruesome defilement of Steven Hicks. At this point, the pained hush in the room caused Boyle to interrupt his story with an apology. ‘This is a sad commentary,’ he said. ‘I take no delight in telling you this. I grieve for the family. I tell you these things because I must, because you have to know.’
Mr Boyle traced the haunted four years which followed the murder of Hicks, and identified the incident in West Allis library as the ‘critical moment in Jeffrey Dahmer’s life’, when his ‘control fell apart’. He did not shirk the unpleasant images of Dahmer using severed heads as sexual stimulants, and introduced the worrying theme of cannibalism. ‘He took them from life through dying, into death, through death, and back into life again – they became alive again in him.’ In fact, the cannibalistic aspect of his conduct was a fairly late development, and not applicable to all the victims. Mr Boyle drew attention to the cannibalism, but neither he nor any of the witnesses expatiated upon this primitive conduct, which, as we shall see, holds one of the clues to his derangement.
Boyle appeared to be defensive as he reached the end of his peroration. He asked not to be blamed for taking the case on, that it was his duty so to do, and that his defending Mr Dahmer should not be interpreted as in any sense exculpatory. On the other hand, he was determined the case should be properly aired. ‘I make no excuses for my representation of this young man,’ he said, and finished on a note which aptly summarised the defence’s position: ‘This was not an evil man, this was a sick man.’ There were few in court, at this point, who would disagree.
It then fell to Mr McCann to address the jury with his opening statement, from which emerged, as one would expect, a quite different portrait of Jeffrey Dahmer. The defendant was characterised by a total ‘want of candour’, he ‘always undertook to deceive’. Quoting from Dahmer’s conversation with the prosecution’s expert Dr Dietz, he established that, after 23 November, 1987, and the unexplained death of Steven Tuomi, he gave in to his desires and did what he pleased. ‘I, too, have struggled with sexual impulses,’ confessed Mr McCann, inviting us to see the defendant as nothing more than a degenerate hedonist. McCann also insisted upon those words which he would wish the jury constantly to bear in mind – ‘control’, ‘decision’, ‘preparation’, ‘deceit’, ‘cunning’ – words designed to draw the portrait of an evil man rather than a sick man.
Thus were two conflicting accounts of Jeffrey Dahmer presented to the jury in the same day, and as yet nobody could be sure which was the more accurate. Judge Gram then read out the criminal complaint, State of Wisconsin versus Jeffrey L. Dahmer, a litany of fifteen homicides which piled up to form an apparently insuperable mountain. Mr Boyle’s task, not to deny the murders but to explain them, was daunting indeed. Mr McCann, on w
hom no burden of proof rested, need only repeat them. Dahmer himself sat quietly and vacantly, rocking slightly, occasionally scratching his forehead, not looking left or right. He was, to say the least, enigmatic.
The first witness to be called for the defence was Detective Kennedy, who started to read the 178-page confession which Dahmer began on the morning of 23 July, 1991. It proved to be a terrifying document, but the reading of it would assist the defence case in two respects – first, to underline the sheer awfulness of Dahmer’s conduct and suggest, by implication, that this could in no measure be the confession of an ordinary criminal; and second, to emphasise his willingness to co-operate, his compliance and total absence of obstruction. In the course of this reading, a third Jeffrey Dahmer emerged before the court, not the evil man, nor the sick man, but the lonely man. ‘He had no company himself,’ said Detective Kennedy, ‘and these individuals would keep him company.’
Detective Murphy replaced his colleague in the witness-box as he had in the interview room, and told the court in remorseless detail everything that Dahmer had said in a series of meetings stretching to sixty hours. The fact that Dahmer did not need to be persuaded to talk, but usually asked for a meeting with the detective, was brought home to an increasingly bemused jury just before court recessed for the day.
On 31 January, Murphy continued with his evidence by admitting that he had, in showing photographs of missing persons to the defendant, purposefully included some of those individuals who were alive and well, to see if he was inventing incidents and identifying people at random. He came to the conclusion that Dahmer was utterly truthful and could be trusted to remain so.
The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer Page 24