The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer

by Brian Masters

  That does present a difficulty, because one of the statements he made in confession was to the effect that he had not injured Konerak Sinthasomphone in any way before the arrival of the police, whereas we now know that he had by that time already drilled a hole through the boy’s skull. In line with this discrepancy is his claim to the police that all the drilling had been done post mortem as a way of emptying the corpse’s skull of brain matter, which he would scoop out with a spoon and pour down the sink. This does not accord with his later admission that the drilling was done while victims were alive in order to prevent their mustering the will to leave him, nor with the smallness of the holes themselves. The question would assume greater importance in a few days, when a court-appointed psychiatrist would assert that he believed the confession rather than its subsequent elaboration, i.e. he thought that Dahmer drilled holes after death.

  When Detective Murphy finished his evidence we were left with the impression of a defendant aware that he had done wrong, astonished that it had happened, anxious to make amends, and pervaded by an intense sense of loss each time he placed the remains of a young man in the garbage and watched him be carried away to extinction.

  At 2.15 in the afternoon the first lay witness was called. Tracy Edwards was already well known to a number of people in the room, for he had appeared on two nationwide T.V. chat shows and had become somewhat of a celebrity by virtue of his being the-one-who-escaped and brought Jeff Dahmer to justice. He did not say on television (nor, for that matter, would he in court) that he had flagged down the police on 23 July only in order to have handcuffs removed and not to report Dahmer (who would have gone undetected a little longer had the police officers possessed the right handcuff key). It was not in Mr Edwards’ interest to attract attention to himself. When he appeared on the chat show he was recognised by police in Mississippi as the man they wished to question with regard to the assault and battery of a thirteen-year-old girl, and was promptly arrested. (When Dahmer learnt this he made the rueful comment, ‘Well, God got two birds with one stone that night, didn’t He?’)

  Edwards was smartly dressed and dapper in court, like a sharp sporting promoter. His account of what happened on the evening of 22 July did not differ substantially from Dahmer’s. He insisted that the invitation was to pose for nude pictures only, and that there was no mention of intended homosexual activity. ‘He didn’t come across that way,’ he said. ‘He was just like a normal everyday person, friendly.’ It was as he came to the moment when Dahmer suddenly changed character that Edwards’ guileless, compelling description had spectators leaning forward; the whole room realised we were listening to a man with the unique experience of watching madness come and go before his eyes. ‘This guy’s so nice,’ he said, ‘and all of a sudden he’s pulling knives on me. What’s going on? He’s not the same person. His face structure and body structure are different. He’s a totally different guy.’

  Edwards had quickly intuited that he would need to keep his wits about him. ‘I tried to let him know I was his friend. He said he didn’t want people to leave him or abandon him.’ Watching the Exorcist film Dahmer began rocking back and forth and muttering. ‘I couldn’t understand what he was saying. The preacher in the film impressed him and he wanted to mimic him. He kept changing moods, was a different person from one moment to the next. He was transfixed by the movie.’ For one and a half minutes Dahmer lay with his head on Edwards’ chest, listening to his heart-beat, then when Edwards went to the bathroom and returned, ‘he reverted to the person I first met. He felt sorry for himself, had lost his job, and thought nobody cared about him. I wanted him to feel that I wasn’t going to leave, that I was his friend.’ Another abrupt change occurred when Dahmer said that he was going to have to kill him, and Edwards unbuttoned his shirt again to make the man feel more at ease. Mr Boyle asked whether these mood-changes appeared to be induced by alcohol. ‘No,’ said Edwards, ‘it was an inner mood, a person change. He began going out of himself.’ The description of what Frederic Wertham called ‘catathymic crisis’1 and the churchmen refer to as possession could hardly be more vivid.

  There had come a moment when Dahmer lost interest in the handcuffs which were dangling from Edwards’ wrist and withdrew into reverie. ‘It was like I wasn’t even there any more.’ Edwards took his chance, struck Dahmer, and escaped. What impression did the actions and conduct of the defendant make upon your mind? asked Boyle. ‘That he was a crazy guy.’

  In cross-examining Tracy Edwards, prosecuting counsel was anxious to discredit him and thereby dilute the powerful vision of derangement which his testimony had conjured. Much was made of his television appearances in an attempt to suggest that he had worked up his story for financial gain and was prone to exaggeration. The ploy was successful in one particular. Edwards had said that there were seven locks on Dahmer’s door. Mr McCann, prepared as ever, held up a photograph of the door which clearly showed there were only two. Edwards left the witness-box a nervous and chastened man, and proceeded to give a press conference in the Media Room flanked by his heavily protective lawyer, a thick arm round his shoulder.

  Mr Boyle wanted next to call Robert Ressler, an expert with the Behavioural Science Unit of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who had specialised in the study of ‘serial killers’ and written widely on the subject. Ressler’s experience was frequently called upon by overworked police forces struggling with conflicting clues in their hunt for a repetitive murderer. Combining evidence from the condition of bodies, the method of attack, the place, time, and frequency of murder, and a mass of other disparate detail, Ressler was able to construct a profile of the sort of man the police should be looking for, his age, appearance, character and even profession. Boyle would invite the expert to describe the kind of man who had committed such acts as Dahmer confessed to, and, perhaps, surreptitiously plant the idea that such a man was not quite what he appeared to be.

  Mr McCann rightly objected to such evidence being heard, on the grounds that it would be theoretic and irrelevant to the case in hand, and he questioned Ressler’s competence as an expert witness. The judge ruled in favour of Mr McCann because Ressler’s knowledge was not needed at the trial. You should not argue backwards from the defendant, who is identified, to the profile which might identify him; that at least was the import of his decision. The jury were out while these matters were being discussed, so they never knew what they were missing, but the press heard it all and brought Mr Ressler down to the Media Room for the obligatory press conference despite his disbarment. No one pointed out that he was essentially a statistician, a painstaking assembler of facts rather than a shrewd observer of people.

  Court recessed for the weekend and reconvened on Monday, 3 February, at 8.30 a.m., with the resumption of Detective Murphy’s testimony (he had been excused on Friday afternoon to appear in another court). For the first time we heard Dahmer’s own explanation for his crimes in a pungent phrase which the State’s counsel would use as chorus to his oratory throughout the coming weeks; they were the result of ‘my own warped selfish desire for self-gratification’, he told Murphy. We likewise heard his voice when he remembered the sickening experience of his schoolfriend’s running down dogs: ‘I never saw such a look of terror on an animal’s face as that beagle puppy.’ We heard panic (‘frantic attempt to undo what I’d got myself into’), loneliness (‘they always wanted to leave’), and regret (‘I wish I could turn back the years’), but there was a stark absence of full-blooded remorse. The confession was that of a man drained of the emotional juices, a man adrift.

  With a series of quick, short questions to the detective, Gerald Boyle elicited the information that none of the dead had been tortured, and that none were known to have been victims of murder until Dahmer confessed. Cross-examination was conducted by Carol White, a cool, dignified, rather aloof young lady with a deceptively gentle voice. She established that Detective Murphy had no reason to doubt anything that Mr Dahmer told him, then strayed into areas on which h
is opinion should not properly be sought. ‘Was Mr Dahmer ever out of touch with reality?’ ‘No, he wasn’t.’ ‘Did you feel he could make people believe anything he wanted?’ ‘Yes.’ Mr Boyle, surprisingly, raised no objection; relaxed and mischievous, he gave the impression that he had something up his sleeve which he would produce in his own good time. Meanwhile, he was not going to be ruffled by Carol White. Let her ask what she might. Only when she invited the detective to say whether he thought Dahmer was ‘out of control’ did Boyle object (sustained).

  The State then made a blatant lunge for jury support by producing portraits of each victim in the indictment and passing them to each juror in turn. It would not have been permitted in an English court, but Mr Boyle did not seem to mind (probably he knew well enough that the judge would not sustain him). The strategy had no legal point to it, for the victims’ identities were not in question, nor was it disputed that they died at the hands of the defendant. The only possible excuse was to remind jurors that real people were destroyed by this horror, and that they should not allow their concentration upon ideas to smother their human sympathy. With this in mind, the display of portraits was nicely timed to precede Mr Boyle’s first expert witness, who would necessarily be talking about ideas.

  Dr Fred Berlin came to the witness stand with impressive credentials. Director of the Sexual Disorders Clinic at Johns Hopkins University, he had seen over 2,000 individuals with deviant sexual desires and treated several hundred of them. He had worked at the famous Maudsley Hospital in London and was on the subcommittee which defined sexual disorders for the diagnostic manual D.S.M.-III-R. There could be no doubt that he was a specialist in the very field which would most likely illuminate Jeff Dahmer’s condition. For all that, however, Dr Berlin was little short of a disastrous witness. He looked unkempt, with a disorderly thatch of hair unparted and uncombed, a tie not properly knotted, a hand-knitted blue V-neck jumper under an ill-fitting jacket. One felt sure he would have been happier in a jogging suit. None of this would have mattered (and is, anyway, deeply unfair and irrelevant), could it have been put down to the professorial eccentricities of brilliance. But Dr Berlin also appeared frivolous, chuckled too often, was too pleased with himself, was pugilistic in manner, gabbled to the degree that his words could not always be caught, constantly scratched his eyebrow and nose, and perspired too readily. To the jury he might seem not only to lack gravitas, but stability as well.

  When Mr McCann questioned him on his record, he quickly established that Berlin was not board-certified in Forensic Psychiatry, and more damagingly yet, that he had never before in his life testified in a murder case on the question of criminal responsibility. Remorselessly, McCann attacked his competence, experience and qualifications, as well as the reputation of his much-lauded clinic at Johns Hopkins. Boyle objected once or twice, to be over-ruled by the judge and retire to his chair, lounging and quietly contemptuous. ‘I’ll just jump in when I think I should,’ he said. For his part, Dr Berlin was well aware that he was being insulted and was understandably rattled. Unfortunately, his displeasure came across as petulance.

  With Fred Berlin discredited before he even started, his evidence would have to be strong indeed to win back a wary jury. For the next few hours, Mr Boyle put to him questions which (rumour had it) Berlin had himself devised and given to the attorney in a certain order, the better to marshal his arguments in ascending sequence.

  He began by explaining the function of the two ‘prongs’ of the insanity defence, cognitive and volitional. The cognitive clause asked whether the defendant knew right from wrong, the volitional clause asked if he could manage his behaviour in accordance with such knowledge. It was Dr Berlin’s view that, ‘when left to his own resources, he cannot conform because he suffers from a mental disease’. And the name of that disease? ‘Paraphilia.’

  It was not a word likely to trip off everybody’s tongue. It was not a word much used even in medical circles until quite recently, having fallen into desuetude since its invention by I. S. Kraus at the beginning of the century. But it was a vast envelope of a word, into which could be packed all manner of peculiarities and aberrations of emotional desire, anything which seemed to be sexually eccentric, and it was therefore adopted by American category-shifters to be included in the famous D.S.M. ‘cookbook’ in 1980. Initially, as defined by Wilhelm Stekel in the 1920s, paraphilia was a perversion, the acting-out of sexual desires which were deviant from the norm. If parapathy meant neurosis (‘a mental state during which the distinction between reality and fantasy is temporarily lost. The patient hovers between reality and dream’2), then paraphilia was the ‘picture’ of this mental state, its expression in thought or deed.

  One characteristic of a paraphilia is its solitariness. It is essentially a cryptic form of masturbation and is indulged in fantasy to the exclusion of everything else. The imagination becomes hypnotised by one aspect of sexual desire, and cannot rid itself of the fixation in order to develop more free expressions. Freud said that it was the fate of all of us to have our mothers as objects of our first sexual fixation. We generally survive infantile imprisonment undamaged, but have to pass through many perilous stages before we can emerge into the sun of mutual love. Some of us get blocked along the way. The pederast, who can only be excited by children, is stuck in his own pubescence, so paralysed by the memory of innocent affections that he is unable to move forward. His impairment counts as a paraphilia, specifically named ‘paedophilia’, or the love of children. Another paraphilia is the desire to expose oneself in public (‘exhibitionism’), another the desire to rub one’s body against a stranger in a crowded place (‘frotteurism’), and there are dozens of others which fixate upon an object (‘fetishism’).

  The fetishist is essentially a specialist. He will be excited by a certain colour of hair, or style of dress, or perhaps merely a shoe. Adler called fetishism ‘fear of the sexual partner’, and it is certainly true that the fetishist contrives to render the sexual partner superfluous by achieving sexual gratification without him/her. There is a sense in which pornography is fetishistic, substituting the image for the real thing, and Jeffrey Dahmer’s fascination with chests, stomachs and intestines was an extreme example of fetishistic deputising which merits a definition of its own – ‘partialism’, or the desire for a part rather than the whole. The lust murderer has recently been given a special category under the awkward name ‘erotophonophilia’, coined by a leading sexologist in the field;3 the word was not mentioned at this trial.

  Even in this brief resume, it will be clear to the reader who has come this far that Dahmer could be assigned to several of these classifications, but the dominant one in his case, necrophilia, is regarded as so rare and clinically difficult that in D.S.M.-III-R it is unhelpfully tucked away in a sub-category, devoid of elaboration or definition, as a paraphilia ‘not otherwise specified’.

  Other characteristics of a paraphilia are its compulsive need to repeat and its irresistibility. ‘Every form of gratification requires repetition as well as enhancement’, wrote Stekel, and immature gratifications are more prone to repeat because they need to rediscover the euphoria of the first time, like an infantile regression. Stekel had no hesitation in defining paraphilia as a disease. He called it a ‘spiritual parasite which incapacitates its host for any other form of mental endeavour’.4 We have only to recall Dahmer’s words, when he spoke of the compulsion which would not leave him alone and occupied his every waking thought, to recognise the aptness of this dramatic description.

  We must revert to Dr Berlin’s evidence. He assured Mr Boyle that one does not excuse misbehaviour by calling it an illness, but in this case Dahmer’s affliction amounted to ‘a cancer of the mind’, ‘a broken mind’, and it was facile to suggest that he could simply stop thinking about it and it would go away. ‘We cannot always choose what to have on our minds,’ he said. Necrophilia does not arise from a voluntary decision; it was not a matter of waiving various options. Boyle asked what could hav
e caused it in the first place, and Dr Berlin was unable to give a satisfactory answer. ‘We have found no cause either biological or environmental,’ he said.

  This reply gave the unfortunate impression that Dr Berlin was happiest constructing a theory and then finding specimens to fit it; he had the effects before him, and found them sufficient proof of the condition. Mr Boyle tried hard to rescue his witness from the muddle he had got himself into (‘I guess I’m rambling a bit,’ Berlin said), and guided him to the conclusion which he needed to focus the jury’s attention, namely that willpower alone cannot control behaviour, and that ‘if necrophilia is not an impairment of the mind, I don’t know what is’. But Mr McCann had spotted the sophistry and was ready to expose it.

  In cross-examination, McCann sought first to ridicule the witness, to diminish his stature and thereby provoke his simmering irascibility. He told the jury what it knew already, that the witness was ‘extremely verbose’, and determined (by implication, to help them) that he would curtail this verbosity and limit Dr Berlin to short answers. His questions would try to make it clear that Berlin was not a man of experience.

  ‘How long did you talk [with Mr Dahmer] about family history?’

  ‘Fifteen minutes.’

  ‘From zero to age eighteen?’

  ‘I’m not writing a biography of him.’

  ‘What did you then talk about after family history?’

  ‘Personal history.’

  ‘How long did that take?’

  ‘Half an hour. My examination covered five hours in all, maybe six. I’m not trying to be evasive.’

  ‘The record indicates four hours and forty-five minutes. If you spent forty-five minutes talking about family history and personal history, that leaves four hours, so you spent fifteen minutes on each homicide.’

  This was demonstrably unfair, for the doctor was not a police officer bound by the rigours of investigation, and it was foolish to suppose that he could only examine a patient on strictly factual matters. This, however, was the inadequate level at which much of the trial was to be pitched, and the ‘cross’ of Dr Berlin easily confirmed his incompetence to the jury. McCann went on to ask the witness about the defendant’s fantasy life.