‘Absolutely. That would have been the solution of his problem. Absolutely.’
With this breathtaking answer the psychiatrist was manoeuvred into the position of appearing almost as mad and delusional as the defendant. Zombies are thought in some primitive societies to be corpses reanimated by a magician or witch-doctor and thereafter kept as slaves. The belief has frequently been noted in Haiti, for example, and some studies have attempted to discover whence it derives. It may, astonishingly enough, be realisable by the controlled use of poison, and those identified as zombies may look and behave like distracted creatures because their brains have been damaged. A poison containing tetrodotoxin is administered to the victim, who falls into a cataleptic state, fully paralysed yet aware of what is happening and unable to show it. He is declared dead and is buried. Very soon afterwards, he is exhumed and resuscitated by another hallucinogenic drug, which leaves him in a trance-like and obedient condition.6
By this account, Dahmer’s dream was not theoretically out of the question. Even more amazingly, the poison used by the zombie-makers is found most prevalently in certain species of the puffer fish, which Dahmer liked above all others. (His delighted description of a puffer fish at the pet shop is in an earlier chapter.) Could Dahmer have known this? Nobody thought to ask him. It is more than likely just another curious coincidence. But Dr Fosdal was not speaking of theory; he was talking of practicality, and seriously supposed that Dahmer might have been able to create a zombie to solve all his problems. Would he have clothed him and fed him? Would he have taken him out for walks? Would he have kept him, ageing, forever? Dr Fosdal did not think far enough to ponder such possibilities.
Having established that Fosdal testified about thirty times a year, scarcely ever for the defence, Boyle concluded by accusing him of having tried to get the defendant to diagnose himself so as to defeat the argument for necrophilia. The doctor’s nervous cough returned, and he was released.
With only one star witness yet to appear, several ideas and impressions hovered unexpressed over the courtroom. One was that psychiatrists could assert no monopoly over what constituted insanity. Six of them had had their say, and we were yet not much wiser. Without proclaiming what he was up to, Gerald Boyle was busy sowing the seeds of doubt by suggesting that the definition of insanity did not belong by inviolable right to doctors. He was trying to return the problem to the community (i.e. the jury), the ultimate arbiters of what is acceptable to their fellow citizens.
Secondly, almost nobody (Boyle included) had attempted to fathom what it might be like to be Jeffrey Dahmer. To Dr Berlin he was a theory personified, to Dr Wahlstrom a case history, to Dr Palermo a criminal, to Dr Fosdal a threat. Only Becker and Friedman had looked for the man. Judith Becker had identified the child in him, and Sam Friedman had lamented the waste. Paradoxically, it was the rumbling inaudible Friedman who had come closest to hinting at the profound sense of grief, of loss, that Dahmer might have experienced with every death he caused. His crazy wish to prolong a relationship through murder was obviously doomed, and he was left each time with the evidence of his failure and the confirmation of his isolation. He constantly used the word ‘loss’ when talking about the aftermath of killing, but nobody had picked it up.
While the psychiatrists needed him for their examination (and most of them appear to have written down everything he said without bothering to ask why he said it), Dahmer also needed the psychiatrists. They were listening to him, they paid attention to him, they noticed him. His talks with them were surrogate relationships, finite both in time and commitment, but better than nothing.
The last abiding impression was that no ‘expert’ witness dared admit to uncertainty. If only one of them had said ‘I don’t know’, it would have been a powerful pointer to the complexity of human behaviour and would have put the jury at ease, given them comfort in their quandary. They might have thought it was all right not to know, that if the experts could entertain doubts, then their own confusions were not reprehensible.
Everyone had been waiting for the big man from California, Dr Park Dietz, who had testified in the trial of Hinckley for the attempted assassination of President Reagan, and came heralded by an august reputation. We had, however, to wait a day, as Dr Dietz did not wish to make the journey to Milwaukee on his birthday, and the prosecution filled in with several lay witnesses. Two of Dahmer’s superiors at the Ambrosia Chocolate Factory were called, plus the manager of the Unicorn Bath Club in Chicago, policemen who had arrested him for offences prior to 1991, the man who cleaned his carpet, and the manager of the Oxford Apartments, Sopa Princewill. The only surprising nugget of information came from this latter, who testified that he was so impressed by Jeff Dahmer that he had once thought of going into real-estate business with him.
Whispers had been circulating for days in the media room that Park Dietz had recorded hours of interviews with Dahmer on videotape, and intended to show them in court. With the jury out, Mr Boyle argued fiercely that such an unprecedented strategy would undermine the defence’s prerogative to decide whether the defendant should himself give evidence – it would effectively make him a witness against his wishes. Mr McCann’s view was that it would offer the jury a chance to observe the man’s intelligence after the defence had contrived to have him sit in court ‘like a dolt’. Judge Gram disallowed the showing of the videotapes; given that the entire proceedings were already being televised ‘gavel to gavel’, it was the wisest ruling of the trial.
Dr Park Dietz made his appearance in the witness-box on Wednesday, 12 February. It was immediately apparent why he was saved until the last, for there was about him an aura of unassailable proficiency. He was alert, meticulous, fastidious, precise, patiently prepared to suffer the task of explaining difficult concepts to the untutored. Like a reluctantly cynical professor, he had learnt that you have to speak slowly if people are to grasp your meaning, and you have to use simple words. To this end, Dr Dietz gave his evidence as if he were dictating to a shorthand typist, and paused between each sentence to make sure the jury had absorbed its significance. He was also the only witness blatantly to face the jury when delivering his answers, instead of looking at the person who had asked him the question. The jury was his audience, and it was to them that he determined to deliver his lecture.
Dr Dietz gave the impression that he was the one man in the country who could solve their dilemma, for he had dealt with extreme kinds of behaviour all his professional life and trained other psychiatrists in the field. He was now a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, but had been at Harvard and Virginia before that, had studied law as well as psychiatry and was uniquely competent in marrying the two. He appeared, however, as a cold scientist, a linesman on the periphery of life rather than a scrummer at the heart of it. The New Yorker once tartly described him as ‘prim’.
Michael McCann hardly needed to ask him any questions. All that was required of the District Attorney was to push the train and watch it roll. It was strange to see McCann rendered superfluous, like a schoolboy given a walk-on part. Obviously, Dietz had told him what the prompt cues were, and he had only to read them out.
From the first Dr Dietz made clear that he would have no truck with subtle interpretations: ‘Dahmer went to great lengths to be alone with his victim,’ he said, ‘and to have no witnesses.’ One might have thought that was too obvious to merit a ponderous statement; after all, no murderer wants an audience. But to Dr Dietz it was an essential piece of information. He went on to list all the ingredients of premeditation (killing only at weekends, preparing pills in advance) to indicate that Dahmer was not an impulsive murderer, but a calculating one who had to pump himself into the mood with alcohol because the act of murder was distasteful to him. ‘If he had a compulsion to kill, he would not have had to drink alcohol. He had to drink alcohol to overcome his inhibition, to do the crime which he would rather not do.’
The witness then went on to explain exactly what was meant by the d
readed word ‘paraphilia’, in terms so beguilingly simple that one almost felt grateful to him. A paraphilia was ‘a titbit of normal courtship behaviour’, in so far as we all like to gaze upon our loved one, telephone her, rub against her, show off to her; the paraphilic distortions of these normal activities were voyeurism, telephonic scatalogia (i.e. obscene calls), frotteurism, and exhibitionism. Such exaggerations of normal activity were not tolerated by our society, and were therefore categorised as paraphilic disorders. The defendant suffered from three of them – necrophilia, frotteurism, and partialism.
Conceding that the acquisition of a paraphilia was not a matter of choice (‘we cannot choose what we find sexy’), Dietz insisted that a man so disordered could still choose whether or not to give in to his paraphilic urges. ‘Most paraphiles never act on their paraphilia in a criminal way. The paraphile is as free as any other human being to choose whether to commit a crime to gratify his wishes. Paraphilia provides no more than the motive for what a person would like to do. If you say paraphiles are compelled, then you have to say we are all compelled to want what we want.’ This was a disarming view, disarmingly well put. But it was seriously out of key with informed opinion among experts in sexology, a point upon which Dietz was not sufficiently challenged. John Money has written about the ‘paraphilic fugue state’, which is a flight from the normal to the altered state of consciousness during which ‘a person may engage in activities that appear to be purposeful and voluntary, whereas they are actually robotic and involuntary’. These fugue states are episodic or paroxysmal (much like an epileptic attack) and have nothing whatever to do with choice. Dahmer called them his ‘moods’ or his ‘dark side’, when he was acting on automatic pilot (until the night of 22 July, 1991, when the machinery short-circuited). Dr Money goes further than this. Paraphilias are, he says, a brain disease ‘brought into being by faulty functioning of the brain’s own chemistry’.7 None of this was mentioned by Dr Dietz, nor was it brought to his attention.
The witness proceeded to tell us to what lengths Dahmer had gone in his attempts to make a person stay with him, including the possibility of freeze-drying an entire body. He told us, too, something we had not yet heard, that Jeff had thought of putting an electric wire through a hole in a live man’s head and plugging the other end into the socket to see if an electric charge might keep him going. Dietz related this solemnly, with a straight face. Anyone who dared suggest it was the manifestation of a deranged mind would, one felt, have been stared into silence.
Two more insights were vouchsafed us before the doctor got down to the real business of his testimony – to instruct the jury. Jeff was not a sadist in his view; ‘he did not torture and took steps to prevent suffering’. And why did he masturbate while holding a severed head in his hand? ‘It facilitated the fantasy of the entire person, the fantasy of the living person to whom the head had belonged, which cut out awareness that the rest of the body was missing and the head was severed.’ Again, the voice was level, the demeanour unflustered.
For the next several hours, Dr Dietz went through every one of the fifteen counts of homicide with a view to deciding in each case whether Dahmer knew right from wrong at the time of the offence and whether his actions betrayed a capacity to conform to the law if he had wanted to. It was a shameless exercise in jury-control, for these were precisely the two questions the jury would have to answer in the privacy of their room when all the evidence had been heard. Dietz in effect appointed himself their foreman, as he could not trust them to reach the right decision without him, and the questions he asked himself were those of a law enforcement officer, not a detached psychiatric examiner.
He took some extraordinary leaps in his determination to force the evidence towards the proper conclusion. To take just one example, Dr Dietz affirmed that Dahmer met Matt Turner in Chicago and brought him home to Milwaukee; the fact that he did not kill him in Chicago indicated that he was making plans and was not acting on impulse, he said. Dietz took no account of the obvious – that Dahmer had no apartment in Chicago. They went to Milwaukee because that’s where he lived. Similarly, by drilling holes in Konerak’s skull, said the doctor, Dahmer was not a mad scientist making zombies, he actually was trying to make zombies, and was therefore sane. Dietz’s incorrigible obtuseness was familiar to those who had heard him testify before. In the Hinckley trial, he had asserted that the defendant’s goal of impressing film-star Jodie Foster by attempting to assassinate President Reagan was not delusional; it ‘was indeed reasonable because he accomplished it’. Did this mean that Miss Foster was impressed? Or did it mean that Dietz had surrendered to the logic of the lunatic?
By the end of the day, as the witness came to consider the last two homicides, even he had to concede that Dahmer was hardly in a state to conform his conduct to law by then. But he ascribed this to alcohol intoxication, not to any mental disease.
On Thursday, 13 February, Mr McCann continued his questioning of Dr Dietz on a surprisingly defensive note. (I now saw the value of the press conference at the end of each day. The questions thrown by journalists were a barometer of doubts being circulated, which could be pocketed and refuted in evidence on the morrow. Nobody appeared to be embarrassed by this flagrant piece of show-business.) He concentrated on establishing two points. Dietz had been prefacing many of his remarks with the phrase, ‘Mr Dahmer endorsed the concept to me that . . .’, which suggested the doctor had made up his mind first and secured the defendant’s concurrence second. It was important now to show that there was nothing wrong with leading questions. Dr Dietz assured us that they were the best technique he knew. That was at least honest; it was a technique which made it easier to believe everything you were told (‘Lui beve tutto,’ muttered the sceptical Dr Palermo).
McCann’s second concern was to rid the jury of any idea that Jeff’s projected temple, decorated with his human skulls, was in any way indicative of madness. It was not a delusional idea, insisted Dietz, because Jeff did not really believe he would gain powers from the shrine, but only suspected that he might get in touch with some spiritual force or other. In other words, the shrine was an example of superstitious belief, not delusional thinking, and in that regard perfectly acceptable.
Dietz’s conclusion was that Dahmer’s abnormality of mind did not substantially affect his mental or emotional processes. Anybody who had stayed the course thus far did not require a textbook to see that this flew entirely clear of any impartial view of the evidence. That his abnormality did not constitute a mental disease under Wisconsin law might inevitably be true; that it did not affect his emotional processes was nonsense.
When Gerald Boyle rose to cross-examine Dr Dietz, he was noticeably angry, but inadequately prepared. He had not read all Dietz’s papers and pronouncements and was ill-equipped to spar with him on semantics. He did, however, pose one very important question which threw into doubt the crux of Dr Dietz’s argument. If, as the doctor maintained, Dahmer’s alcoholism was alone responsible for his incapacity to control his behaviour in the last month before his arrest, and there was no mental disease which contributed to it, would he have gone on killing had he stopped drinking alcohol before he met Tracy Edwards? Dietz paused for a long time as he weighed the implications, and could offer no satisfactory response. Everyone in court by this time knew that Dahmer would have gone on murdering had he not been stopped. If it was not a mental disease that was driving him, what on earth was it?
That evening, when Dr Dietz had finished his testimony, Jeff Dahmer was reflective. ‘Maybe he’s right,’ he said. ‘Maybe I could have stopped it all somehow.’ Not one person at the trial had suggested how.
Chapter Ten
The Shrine
The closing arguments in an American trial are traditionally moments of theatrical grandiloquence, when the two attorneys move on from evidence as to fact and indulge in a frank appeal to the emotions. Implicitly, they tell the jury that it is not exclusively through the use of the intellect that they may reach tru
th; that there is another route, through feeling, intuition, and empathy, a route which may be just as valuable. You have heard all the evidence and will have to weigh in your minds the importance of facts presented to you, they say. Now forget the facts for a moment and listen to the promptings of your heart.
In consequence, attorneys may rise to passionate Ciceronian oratory in their bid to sway, seduce, persuade a jury to look further than its collective nose. It was during the closing argument that Clarence Darrow, probably the finest American defence attorney of the twentieth century, reached peaks of eloquence and entered the legal annals with a number of historical verdicts. The closing argument threatens the speaker with a naked moment, too, because a confected passion is transparent, and a spurious appeal boomerangs. Only the genuine article will work. In the Dahmer trial, we were given two prime examples of the genre, Gerald Boyle moved by pity for the frailties of mankind and the extraordinary damage done to one man’s emotions, Michael McCann horrified by the wickedness perpetrated by that same man and the danger of his going unpunished.
With the burden of proof upon him, it was Boyle who was the first to speak. Facing the jury at a lectern, he asked them sombrely for their undivided attention. ‘I serve three roles,’ he said. ‘I am an officer of the court, an advocate for my client, and a help to you in reaching a decision.’ Then, with an imperceptible shift on to their side, he said, ‘This will be the most important decision in many of our lives. We have all taken oaths to see that the ends of justice are done, and none of us is going to violate that.’
Of the two matters they would need to consider, the first was already established, since nearly all the doctors agreed there was mental disease; the only matter left for them to resolve was the issue of conformity. Boyle then launched into a truly terrible portrayal of misery and alienation, subtly inviting members of the jury to place themselves in Jeffrey Dahmer’s shoes, and confiding with them that he, Boyle, was as bewildered by it all as they were. ‘How would you like at age fifteen to wake up and have fantasies about making love to dead bodies? What kind of person would wish that on any human being? Who do you tell it to? Do you tell it to your father? Do you tell it to your mother? To your best friend? I don’t know how this paraphilic business works, but none of us can possibly have gotten anywhere near to the fantasy level that this kid was at, at fourteen or fifteen years of age. I would not be Dahmer for one day.
The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer Page 28