Invited by Judge Gram to read out his findings, Dr Palermo went over much the same ground as his predecessors but reached startlingly different conclusions. Jeff had been picked on at school and had never defended himself, hence he had internalised his feelings of hostility. Quoting David Dahmer, he said Jeff had been ‘withdrawn, never smiling, doing things only when prompted by Mom or Dad, and when angry he would storm out of the house and go to the wooded back yard smashing wooden sticks against the trees’. Joyce Dahmer had likewise told Dr Palermo that her son had felt inadequate and inferior. These observations, allied to the young man’s chronic inability to form relationships and his frustrated desire to be close to another man, marched Dr Palermo to the conclusion that he was a ‘sexual sadist’. No one had yet suggested this. Dahmer’s murders were not to do with sex, said Palermo. ‘Aggressive, hostile tendencies led to his murderous behaviour. His sexual drives functioned as a channel through which destructive power was expressed.’ Had Dahmer himself corroborated this diagnosis? ‘It was not hate or love,’ he told the doctor, ‘lust would be a better word.’
‘Strange to say,’ added Palermo by way of an aside, ‘he’s not such a bad person.’ Dahmer appeared not to return the compliment. For the first time since the trial began, he scribbled a note declaring his irritation with the doctor, who had not, it seemed, paid any attention to what he had been saying in their interviews. What most annoyed him was Palermo’s assertion that he was afraid of going to prison because he might be attacked by black men.
Having finally told the court that Dahmer was legally sane at the time of each of the offences, Dr Palermo got ready to be questioned by Gerald Boyle. Ominously, Boyle said that he knew and respected Palermo (almost everyone in this case knew everyone else), and paused. Palermo was too confident to be intimidated. ‘I knew after four hours that he was not psychotic,’ he told Mr Boyle. ‘I expected to find a major psychiatric illness, and was shocked to find nothing of the sort.’ That, at least, was bold.
It was here that Mr Boyle revealed himself at his most subtle. Rather than attempt to undermine George Palermo, he encouraged him to luxuriate in his eminence; he humbly sought further guidance; and thus he persuaded the guileless witness to say some astonishing things. For a start, Palermo attached no importance to the confession. ‘Can we believe that Jeffrey Dahmer all of a sudden becomes 100 per cent truthful after his arrest?’ he asked. He did not believe that the drilling of skulls had taken place at all as Dahmer said; they were drilled after death (as Dahmer had at first claimed) to facilitate draining of the brain matter. He did not believe the stories of cannibalism; they were ‘unproven’ (which, of course, they would have to be). He did not credit the story of the temple. ‘He told me spontaneously as I was leaving. I have reason to believe it’s not true.’ He did not believe that Dahmer killed for companionship, but in order to silence a potential accuser; ‘He killed because when they woke up they would be angry with him.’ He denigrated the D.S.M.-III-R manual with haughty disdain as being no more than a guide-book for the uninitiated. Was there a better guide-book, asked Boyle? ‘Yes,’ smiled Palermo, ‘will-power.’
Not only was this a classic non sequitur of a reply, but it betrayed a complacency in the doctor which was beginning to look unattractive. He constantly argued with counsel, as a headmaster might reason with a recalcitrant boy, instead of simply answering questions. Judge Gram did not intervene to direct him. On the question of necrophilia, he steered himself into a muddle and denied there was any evidence for it. Where Berlin, Becker and Wahlstrom had found necrophilia, he had found sadism, and positively declared that Dahmer showed none of the symptoms of a necrophile, which was frankly risible. Finally, Dr Palermo offered his own version of what had been going on in Jeff Dahmer’s head. The murders were the result of ‘pent-up aggression within himself. He killed those men because he wanted to kill the source of his homosexual attraction to them. In killing them, he killed what he hated in himself.’
This was the kind of simplistic view which should have been discarded some thirty years before. The last time I encountered something like it was in a book no doubt familiar to Dr Palermo, published in 1964, in which A. Hyatt Williams wrote, ‘Certain elements of an intolerable internal situation are projected into a victim, the aim being to get rid of these elements into someone else: then to kill and destroy them in that person in order to prevent any re-entry of them into the self.’5 Palermo’s verdict was virtually a paraphrase of this fanciful logic.
Which is not to say that there is no evidence of suppressed aggression in Jeffrey Dahmer. His calm and monotone manner belies the volcano which may be raging within, and he is (consciously) quite unaware of its presence. Some of the murders clearly indicate the use of force, which must have its epicentre somewhere. Besides which, aggression and sex have ever been interlaced, sometimes with delightful, sometimes with disastrous effects. It is the man whose aggression has been thwarted who should be watched. Aggressiveness is essential to ambition, self-preservation, competition, self-affirmation. The weak man lacking in these initiatives (and it is by now obvious that Dahmer lacked each and every one of them to a remarkable degree) will leave his aggression to fester and pollute his nature. Then it might be that the only expression it has left is through dominant sex. Some of this was surely present in Dahmer’s pathology, but that is a long way from the shallow conclusion that he was trying to kill the homosexual in himself.
Michael McCann, taking over from Boyle, declined to ask the witness any questions, but rather delivered an oration which appeared to be a rehearsal for his closing argument. Again, the judge did not intervene.
Dr Samuel Friedman, who next gave evidence for the court, openly disagreed with his colleague on the question of motive. The murders, he said, were not meant to chastise the killer’s own homosexuality; they were an effort to continue a relationship. This made much more sense in the light of what we had heard. Dr Friedman, white haired, with a voice like a record playing at too slow a speed, spoke in such a low rumble that the microphone was not sensitive enough to pick out the articulations. He was a kindly man, eager to do well, but afraid of reaching provocative conclusions; he walked the safe road.
Friedman went out of his way to praise Jeff Dahmer as a man: ‘Amiable and pleasant to be with, courteous, with a sense of humour, conventionally handsome and charming in manner, he was, and still is, a bright young man.’ However, his insight into himself was ‘best described as zero’ and he more or less ‘pleaded’ for an explanation. He ‘felt helpless’. Dr Friedman spoke like a man who would have been proud, in normal circumstances, to have Dahmer as a grandson, and was moved to pity by the depths into which he had plunged. Several times he said he had been ‘impressed’ by the testimony of Dr Judith Becker, and was the first witness to express some faith in the possibility of redemption. ‘I hope,’ he said, ‘that something can be done to reconstruct this individual, who certainly has the assets of youth and intelligence.’
Nevertheless, Friedman’s habitual rigidity overcame him. He was reluctant to decriminalise illegal conduct or reduce the importance of free choice. He disapproved, for example, of survivors from the Vietnam War alleging post-traumatic stress syndrome as the reason for their descent into criminality, because he did not like making excuses for people who behave badly when they have the opportunity to behave well. (The effect of this digression was to invite the jury to ponder that an insanity verdict might somehow ‘let Dahmer off’, and it ought properly to have been interrupted by Judge Gram. It was not.) I suspect Friedman’s Jewishness might have influenced his opinion; to forgive Dahmer was tantamount to forgiving Hitler.
Gerald Boyle stood up to cross-examine, and invited the witness to agree with the point that it was possible to make elaborate logical plans and choices towards the achievement of an ultimately insane purpose. ‘Does not the ability to make decisions render a diagnosis of psychotic behaviour impossible?’ Alive to the danger of this line of argument, McCann objected, an
d was sustained. Rephrasing his question, Boyle first elicited Friedman’s agreement that the exercise of choices did not invalidate a diagnosis of mental illness, and secondly, crucially, he got him to admit that Jeffrey Dahmer’s personality disorder did in fact amount to a mental disease. It was not without some hint of triumph that Mr Boyle sat down.
Immediately, Mr McCann asked for the jury to be excused while he placed a motion before the court. ‘The defence is marching under the flag of a newly-created mental illness,’ he said, and asked Judge Gram to rule that Boyle should restrict himself to alleging mental illnesses which were recognised and not introduce mere personality disorders. Gram denied the motion, and the prosecution opened its case at 1.30 p.m. on Friday, 7 February.
The first witness was Dr Ollson, who confirmed that he had prescribed sleeping pills to Jeffrey Dahmer on seventeen occasions. (The judge asked Dahmer whether he minded the doctor breaking confidentiality to give evidence, and he said he didn’t – it was the first time his voice had been heard in court.) He was followed by Raymond Flowers, Luis Pinet and Somsack Sinthasomphone, each of whom had been assaulted by Dahmer to different degrees, telling the stories with which the reader is now familiar. The last two were identified only by initials, and all three were protected by the judge from being photographed or filmed.
The State called the police officer who had arrested Dahmer for indecent exposure, and his probation officer. To these as to the three previous witnesses several questions cropped up with noticeable regularity. They were each asked if Dahmer heard voices or had hallucinations, and whether they believed he was suffering from a mental illness such as would impair his capacity to conform. McCann was anxious to establish that the defendant appeared normal and stable, but as these were not expert witnesses, and could not be expected to assess his mental condition, the questions ought not to have been allowed. Mr Boyle did not object.
In order to expedite the case and avoid having to sequester the jury for too long, the court sat on Saturday, 8 February, to hear the State’s first expert, Dr Fred Fosdal from Madison, Wisconsin. He was awaited with some interest, for he had unhappily talked to a journalist before the trial had started and revealed that Dahmer had drilled heads to create ‘zombies’. Since the matter was then still sub judice, Fosdal could legitimately have been held in contempt of court, but freedom of the press in America has a habit of over-ruling any higher concern. Nonetheless, Dr Fosdal’s indiscretion caused him to suffer the biggest fit of nerves in his career. Despite his being a veteran testifier on responsibility issues, his level of confidence on that Saturday morning before court assembled was no more than a kitten’s. He paced and prowled, talked to anyone who would listen, spilled a cup of water down his suit, and would clearly have given anything to be anywhere else but in Milwaukee.
In the witness-box, Dr Fosdal appeared frightened to death. He could not stop touching things, fiddling with his tie, the microphone, his glasses, his suit, his glasses, the microphone again, while Mr McCann went through the list of his eminent appointments and achievements. It is customary then for opposing counsel to ask questions which might tend to suggest the witness was not all he was cracked up to be (as had happened with Berlin, Becker and Wahlstrom). It would be the perfect opportunity to make heavy sardonic reference to that indiscreet chat with the journalist. Poor Fosdal prepared himself for the onslaught, but he need not have worried. Gerald Boyle had no desire to exploit his discomfiture. In the most gentlemanly act of the proceedings, he said, ‘We’ve known each other for a long time. I have no objection to Dr Fosdal,’ and sat down.
Still the man could not relax. As he started to give evidence, he looked wooden, like a puppet placed in position. He tried to encourage relaxation by crossing his legs, and only looked more unnatural than ever. He sat back, felt it was wrong, sat forward, coughed. His throat was so dry with fear that he coughed at the beginning and end of every sentence, and poured endless cups of water to alleviate the condition. When he knocked one of these all over his papers, nearly drowning the witness-box, he exclaimed, ‘Oh shoot! That’s the second time I’ve done that this morning. I’m glad I didn’t say something else on interplanetary television.’ It was one of the only three laughs of the trial. Even Dahmer smiled.
The burden of Fosdal’s evidence was that Jeff Dahmer was odd, but not ill. Prompted by McCann (‘He will try to dehumanise Jeff as much as Jeff dehumanised his victims’, said a journalist sitting next to me), he depicted a man at once pathetic and cruel. Asked whether he regretted not having a steady lover, Dahmer had told him, ‘It might have been nice.’ ‘What would it have taken to stop you killing?’ ‘A permanent relationship.’ Fosdal painted a sorry picture of the bathhouses, stalked by lonely men looking for the brief comfort of a moment’s sex, and a harsh one of the defendant, utterly indifferent to the horror of pouring hot water into Weinberger’s head. There was no suggestion of sadism – the doctor accepted that killing was only a means to an end. It was he who told the court that Dahmer had to take a shower with two bodies in the bathtub (possibly decapitated), and he who revealed that Dahmer had prepared six meals with various body parts from his victims.
We were also permitted a glimpse of the twisted morality which moved him. He told Fosdal that his lust overpowered any normal moral choices, but at the same time he really liked Tony Sears and might have been able to form a relationship with him. He strangled him with his bare hands because ‘he was very special’, then spent the whole of one Monday emptying his skull. Many of these young men died because Jeff Dahmer liked them.
Dr Fosdal emphasised that Errol Lindsey and some subsequent victims were handcuffed. It is difficult to see why it should be necessary to handcuff an unconscious man, unless it be that the man might wake up and, manacled, fight for his life, an image too awful to contemplate. Equally possible is the use of handcuffs as an icon of symbolic control. Neither counsel sought to pursue the implications, though it might well have been in the State’s interest to do so.
Under gentle but perceptive questioning from Mr Boyle, Fosdal concurred that there was no malingering or deception on the part of Dahmer and that he appreciated the rapport between them. ‘He was about as co-operative a defendant as any I have met in twenty years.’ Totally at ease with his subject, and knowing full well where he was going, Mr Boyle asked if Dahmer was a necrophile.
‘Yes, but that is not his primary sexual preference.’
‘Dr Becker said he preferred people in a comatose state, knocked out. What’s that called?’
‘There’s no name for it.’ Boyle then went through the various categories listed in the book that ‘you folks’ use (D.S.M.-III-R), getting Fosdal to admit all the disorders which Dahmer did not have and by elimination leaving his obviously very real disorder unidentified. ‘I concede that he has a mental disease,’ the doctor eventually said, thereby joining Dr Friedman as a second ‘convert’. Out of six psychiatric experts so far heard, five had now agreed that there was indeed a mental disease present at the time of the killings. The disease did not, however, in Fosdal’s view interfere with his ability to conform. Well, said Boyle, what would interfere with it? Is there any paraphilic disorder which would qualify? Only if it were combined with another disease, said the doctor.
Boyle then asked the witness to consider the hypothesis of a necrophile who went to find corpses daily, obsessively, hundreds of times. Would it still be necessary to find another disorder, in addition to necrophilia, before such a man could be said to be ill and unable to control himself? Mr McCann jumped to his feet with an objection. This was hypothetical and inadmissible. Not so, said Boyle, quoting precedents which allowed hypothetical questions to an expert witness in order to help the jury. (What he was really appealing to was common sense, and that was precisely what McCann could not allow.) A decision seemed to perplex the judge, who had in previous days sustained and over-ruled objections on an apparently whimsical basis, and so he retired to chambers for conference with counsel.
McCann said the jury would be confused as to the issues if such a hypothetical question were allowed; it was irrelevant; Dahmer was accused of murder, not necrophilia. This argument put forward by McCann was, it must be said, either disingenuous or naive. Murder had already been admitted, and was not now an issue; insanity was the matter being tried and necrophilia was a legitimate consideration under this heading. Perhaps Judge Gram had not grasped this essential distinction, for he sustained the objection in the worst decision of the trial. It meant that Mr Boyle would have to proceed without analogy or illustration.
Boyle then turned to Dahmer’s proposed altar. Did that demonstrate delusional thinking? Not at all, it was unusual and bizarre, that’s all. Well, if it wasn’t delusional, what did the defendant hope to gain from it? A source of power. How come? Tell me, doctor, what does delusional mean? Is eating another person delusional? Dr Fosdal was getting more and more uncomfortable as he found himself defending one indefensible position after another, and either hedged or answered in jargon. Boyle chose this moment to spotlight Dahmer’s most peculiar ambition.
‘What about this desire to create a zombie? Do you consider that to be delusional thinking?’
‘No, it was a very practical and reasonable attempt to achieve his aim.’
‘Have you ever met a case of home-made lobotomy before?’
‘No, I think this is the first time internationally. Mr Dahmer is setting some precedents here.’
‘It couldn’t have worked, could it? You’re a doctor, you must know.’
‘It’s possible.’
‘Did you ask him how long he was going to keep the zombie? Do you believe he would have created a zombie and never killed again?’
The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer Page 27