The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer

by Brian Masters

  ‘Did he fantasise about murder?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Gosh, I don’t remember exactly. Early on, he had fantasies which included killing. Themes were what I was interested in, not details.’

  ‘Did you ask him how killing occurred in his fantasies?’ The District Attorney was pinning Dr Berlin down to admit that he did not in fact explore the meaning or even the content of the defendant’s fantasies, but accepted on simple trust everything Dahmer told him. It was an accusation which could well be applied to most of the psychiatrists on the case, on either side, but for Dr Berlin it was particularly galling, as he had spent less time than anyone with Dahmer and was being portrayed, successfully, as slovenly and unthorough.

  ‘It is ridiculous to think that you can do it in four and a half hours,’ said Mr McCann disdainfully. Visibly stung, Dr Berlin answered, ‘I don’t tell you how to do your job.’ We risked descending to a playground squabble. Berlin then admitted that he was ‘getting mad’, and manfully justified himself by pointing out that it was the quality of work which counted, not the amount of time spent on it. ‘My integrity is being questioned,’ he moaned. ‘No, doctor,’ came back Mr McCann, ‘your inexperience.’

  Knowing he had the embattled expert against the ropes, the District Attorney pushed home his advantage with relentless vigour. He said the witness had not ‘bothered’ to ask certain questions of the defendant, and therefore did not know enough to reach any worthwhile view of his state of mind. ‘Did he say he preferred live persons?’ ‘At times he said that.’ ‘What words did he use?’ Berlin could not answer this and attempted to evade. Several times Mr McCann invited the witness to consult his notes, and waited in triumphant silence for up to five minutes while Dr Berlin rustled his papers aimlessly. It soon became apparent that his notes amounted to a few pages on a jotting pad. McCann suggested that the doctor did not think he required more than this, because his conclusions were based upon his own ideas and not upon the evidence. His manifest discomfort was relieved only when the court recessed for the day.

  There was more of the same when McCann resumed his cross-examination the next morning. Dr Berlin’s tactic was now self-assertive, offering long discursive answers to questions designed to elicit simple facts. This was no more effective, for it confused the jury and made it seem as if the doctor was defensively displaying his knowledge. McCann cleverly allowed him to go on with it, before finishing by getting Berlin to admit that Dahmer was a liar.

  Gerald Boyle concentrated his brief ‘redirect’ examination of the witness on establishing the important point that one did not have to be ‘dumb or stupid’ in order to be mentally ill. In other words, Dahmer could be a manipulative liar and still be sick. Dr Berlin was then mercifully excused.

  Setting aside the shambles of his presentation and delivery, Dr Berlin had successfully conveyed the idea that the defendant had been prey to a compulsion the rest of us would find difficult to comprehend. There had been some altercation over the question as to whether necrophilia was a true compulsion or not. D.S.M.-III-R blandly excluded all paraphilic disorders from its definition of compulsion, on the grounds that their indulgence promoted pleasure, whereas a true compulsion was pointless.* A lot of this is semantic jigsaw-building, but there is a fine distinction which needs to be drawn between doing something for the relief of agonising (imaginary) symptoms (such as perpetual hand-washing) and doing something to repeat an experience which has become indispensable to one’s happiness (such as getting drunk). Both are compulsions. A compulsion does not have to be involuntary to be real. D.S.M.-III-R disagrees with this, and the District Attorney was concerned to underline its authority; otherwise, as he later told a news conference, anyone might claim a compulsion to excuse any kind of behaviour.

  * ‘Some activities, such as eating (e.g. eating disorders), sexual behaviour (e.g. paraphilias), gambling (e.g. pathological gambling), or drinking, when engaged in excessively, may be referred to as “compulsive”. However, the activities are not true compulsions because the person derives pleasure from the particular activity, and may wish to resist it only because of its secondary deleterious consequences.’ Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, American Psychiatric Association, p. 246.

  It should also be self-evident that compulsion must be against moral judgement or it is meaningless. If there is no moral realisation of the wrongfulness of one’s acts, then one does not need to be compelled to do them. One would act in a cretinous moral void. It is only because Dahmer appreciated the wrongfulness of his acts that the notion of compulsion enters into the argument. You are compelled against your better judgement, not in support of it. These matters would rise again in discussion with a prosecution witness the following week.

  Something else which this first expert witness disclosed gave cause for nagging disquiet. It was clear that he had taken Jeffrey Dahmer’s account of himself at face value, that he had not challenged him or looked behind his words. Of the seven psychiatrists who would give evidence, six of them would likewise accept the defendant’s own estimation of himself, and only one would introduce a note of scepticism. I talked with Dr George Palermo after the day’s proceedings. ‘I like Jeff Dahmer,’ he said, ‘but he is quite cunning. He uses his charm and the helplessness of his situation as weapons. He is establishing a view of himself which he imposes on his questioners. You have to be wary.’ Even if that were so, however, the very duplicity of Dahmer was a part of him which needed to be explored, not merely dismissed as a ‘weapon’. Dr Palermo’s scepticism was, I thought, excessive.

  Neither was ‘charm’ a quality which would immediately spring to mind when listing Dahmer’s attributes. He was too passive for that, too diffident; charm requires attack. On the other hand, his vulnerability was undeniable, and was felt, in this second week, throughout the courtroom. Spectators had ceased to regard him as a curiosity, and had gradually come to look upon him as human. Comments were made if he seemed tired or dishevelled. Even the victims’ families, who detested him, noticed when he hadn’t washed his hair or changed his suit. Shorn of the distorted dramas of his past, he looked distinctly fragile, even a trifle scared.

  He had some vestige of humour. One day he did not bother to shave and was being wheeled down the corridor when a woman passed, recognised him, widened her eyes, threw her hands up to her face, and screamed. Unperturbed, Dahmer told the guard, ‘I guess I should have shaved.’

  He rarely talked to his defending counsel, but sat compliantly between Wendy Patrickus and Ellen Ryan day after day, answering monosyllabically when either addressed him. These two young ladies in fact knew him very well by now. They had seen him on a regular basis for over six months and had shared the gradual revelation of his iniquity. They had talked to him longer and more often than anyone else. Miss Ryan, who had been abroad for a year before she was engaged to help with this case, first saw the photographs of butchered and dismembered bodies when she was in Dahmer’s company, and had to struggle hard to contain her revulsion. It was a terrible shock. She succeeded in banishing all reaction from her face, however, and recovered slowly, by herself.

  It took a long time for she and Miss Patrickus to gain Dahmer’s confidence, or rather his relaxed acceptance of them. At the beginning, he had behaved as someone totally unfamiliar with human contact. He did not know how to find it or deal with it, especially with two young women. He was docile, polite and accommodating, but in no way socially forthcoming. They felt that he was capable of friendship, and had never been offered it before. So they persevered, quite apart from the demands of the job, in getting him to relax without bullying. After six months they conceded that he was ‘a nice guy’, a long way from the manipulative dissembler portrayed by Dr Palermo. He would pay gratuitous, slightly embarrassed compliments, such as (to Miss Patrickus) ‘You look nice today’, or (to Miss Ryan) ‘That’s a snappy necklace you’re wearing.’ He was like a novice learning the social graces. Ellen and Wen
dy said it was ‘lovely to see him open out and relate’. For his part, Jeff Dahmer told them, ‘You know, you are the closest friends I have had in my entire life.’

  They helped prepare him for the visit to court of his father and stepmother. He was deeply anxious about their intended presence in court, and derived little comfort from the obvious moral support which their presence implied. Jeff knew they were aware of the broad outlines of his crimes and the strange obsessions they portrayed, but he was embarrassed that they should have to listen to the squalid details.

  In the event, they listened with admirable impassivity. Arriving through a private door, Lionel and Shari Dahmer sat in the back row on the public side, expressionless and intent. Unmolested by the press (who did not know where they were staying and never attempted to approach them in court), they neither wept nor evaded. A few feet away from the relations of the dead, they watched and listened in silent acknowledgement of their duty not to shirk the damage that had been wrought, and in loyalty not to abandon their son to this exposure of his life. Dr Dahmer appeared a shy, dignified man, whose pain was private but whose modest nobility showed. Mrs Dahmer looked like a big-hearted woman, warm and social, whose presence would be a comfort to anyone. Here, however, she was reticent and solemn, now and again slipping her hand into her husband’s as he faced an incredible ordeal.

  The second expert witness for the defence was Dr Judith Becker, professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at the University of Arizona, whose speciality was the evaluation and treatment of paraphiliacs, and whose profession involved the training of physicians to recognise a paraphilic disorder. Assistant District Attorney Carol White interrupted the rehearsal of Dr Becker’s impressive curriculum vitae to point out that, despite this, she had never before testified in a criminal case.

  After twitchy, arm-waving, energetic evidence from Fred Berlin, Judith Becker’s presence in the witness-box was like a cool, calming breeze. Pretty and elegant, with an utterly disarming smile, she combined grace with true professional acumen, was compassionate as well as thorough, decent as well as detailed. It was she who first explored Dahmer’s childhood, and offered to a fascinated court the stories of tadpoles drowned in motor-oil, of Frisky and the countryside. She presented an entirely new side of Jeff Dahmer, the man who cried tears of terror after the death of Steven Hicks, who was shy about sex and did not know how to meet people, and who fiercely protected his parents (‘It’s not Dad or Mom’s fault, it’s my fault.’).

  There were, however, two fresh elements in her evidence which positively demanded proper examination and were passed over. Dr Becker reported Jeff’s hernia operation, which we had not heard of before, and, on gentle questioning by Boyle, suspected that it might be significant. She went no further than that. She also told us about the game of annihilation called ‘Infinity Land’ without pursuing its possible import. We were left with it in limbo, a curiosity not to be tampered with. It is only now that these two aspects of Dahmer’s history have been considered, and one wonders if their significance might have had some weight with the jury in determining the state of Dahmer’s mind.

  Dr Becker repeatedly referred to the defendant as ‘Jeffrey’, a lapse for which in cross-examination she was chided by Carol White, who attempted to turn her transparent niceness and compassion against her by insinuating a lack of professional detachment. This took no account of the fact that Detective Murphy’s report of the confession is littered with references to ‘Jeff’, and nobody dared suggest he was getting too close to the murderer.

  Then there was the brief moment, referred to in an earlier chapter, when Judith Becker allowed us to see a little of the woman whose profession must needs expose her to the most distasteful tasks. When asked if she had seen enough of the photographs Dahmer had taken of his corpses, she replied simply, ‘I do not care to see any more.’

  The burden of Miss White’s cross-examination, which began on Wednesday morning, 5 February, was that, if Dahmer could behave lawfully on some occasions, then he should not be allowed to escape responsibility for those occasions when he behaved unlawfully. Citing the incidents involving Ernest Miller (murdered with a knife), Somsack Sinthasomphone (spared because Dahmer had to go to work), and Luis Pinet (attacked but reprieved because he was too strong), she repeatedly asked Dr Becker whether or not they showed that the defendant was able to conform his conduct to the requirements of law. It was an otiose line of questioning, because it skimmed the surface and seemed frightened to tackle the depths, and because it devised the ludicrous picture of Jeffrey Dahmer about to murder someone and stopping to reason with himself, ‘I had better not do this, I should be conforming my conduct to the requirements of law’. Those are the words with which the statute is framed, those were the words the jury would have to think about, and those were the words prosecuting counsel would chant until we all knew them by heart. It was insultingly simple-minded – a kind of reasoning by attrition – but the court had thus far demanded no higher level of intellectual debate.

  Besides which, the Pinet incident was possibly the most glaring illustration of Dahmer’s episodic inability to conform – three times within forty-eight hours. The Somsack offence, on the other hand, was altogether another matter; it seemed to demonstrate a mind functioning rationally with a view to self-preservation.

  Dr Carl Wahlstrom, a psychiatrist from Chicago, was the third and last expert witness for the defence. Quietly spoken and deferential, Wahlstrom appeared timid and unsure of himself. He gave so little impression of command that Mr McCann had an easy time diminishing his stature before the court. He had only been out of school a year! The man was a tyro! He had never published a paper on anything, nor addressed the American Psychiatric Association! McCann was misguided, as it happened, for Dr Wahlstrom’s report was the most painstaking and thorough of the lot, and if one could hear him (which required an irksome effort), one learnt more about Dahmer’s mind than from either of his preceding colleagues.

  Wahlstrom was the first to use the word ‘psychotic’ in his description of the defendant, an important step towards the identification of clinical madness. While there is much difficulty attendant upon the diagnosis of necrophilia, psychosis is universally accepted in medical circles as a severe mental disease. No wonder McCann was bent upon discrediting him.

  ‘Mr Dahmer is a thirty-one-year-old white male with a long history of serious mental illness which was essentially untreated,’ stated Wahlstrom. ‘His personality structure is extremely primitive’, and he has ‘bizarre delusional ideas’. This was a reference to his attempt to create a zombie who would remain his personal friend and possession. He had told Dr Wahlstrom, ‘If they had their own thought processes they might remember that they had to leave, or lived somewhere else’, a remark which, together with his intention to build a power-bestowing temple, led Wahlstrom to the conclusion that the defendant’s trouble was of psychotic proportions. The severity of his mental disease ‘requires continuous treatment’, he said.

  In preparing for his examination, Wahlstrom had studied a report by the elusive Dr Smail, who had been the first to meet Dahmer and had declared him fit to plead, but was not scheduled to give evidence. Smail had written that the results of one of the tests he had used indicated ‘the possibility of a major mental illness, either of the quality of a schizophrenic disorder or a major affective disorder’. This was the first time that anything of Smail’s opinion had been heard, and because he was otherwise silent on the matter, it carried considerable weight. It was therefore this very weight that Mr McCann sought to diffuse in cross-examination, and he went straight to the point. Had not Dr Wahlstrom omitted certain sections of Dr Smail’s report? Did not Smail decide that the defendant had a clear perception of reality, that he had a clear perception of conventional morality, that he was at all times competent? Wahlstrom had to admit that this was true, but he was too nervous a witness to repudiate the erroneous impression that one conclusion invalidated the other.

  While the Dis
trict Attorney went on to depict Dahmer as merely ‘a hunter’, the witness succeeded in holding on to his evaluation of the defendant, supporting it with references to his fascination with the colours of people’s insides, and his desire to have sex with the viscera. The impression left was of a man propelled headlong towards explosive dementia. I was reminded of Dr Crowley’s so far unquoted opinion; the reader will recall that Crowley had seen Dahmer during the last four weeks before his arrest, when corpses competed for space in his apartment. He had used two mild yet pregnant words to describe his condition: he was ‘disabled’ and ‘immobilised’.

  The defence rested its case on 5 February, and court recessed. We were not immediately to hear the prosecutor, however, for there were two more psychiatrists to be called, Doctors Palermo and Friedman, appointed by the court (that is, by Judge Gram) to offer an objective assessment of the defendant’s mental state. The implication that doctors engaged by the defence or prosecution were not to be relied upon was a dangerous one, and it went home very neatly. The jury was being told that these two men were independent and therefore trustworthy.

  On Thursday, 6 February, George Palermo took the stand. He looked as if he was used to it, that the courtroom was no hostile environment as far as he was concerned, and that he would get this over with nice and quickly. He was relaxed, urbane, smiling, often joking, slightly superior in manner, friendly and patient. Wearing his European sophistication as a natural mark of status, Dr Palermo resolved to impart his wisdom with as much clarity as he could muster. He was patently a nice man and an amusing companion who would make a splendid dinner-guest. He also had an illustrious career behind him, both in his native Italy and in the United States, as teacher and forensic psychiatrist. The jury were reassured by his combination of experience and jocularity.