The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer

by Brian Masters

  ‘When your mind is in the gutter and it stays in the gutter, it never gets out of the gutter until something changes it,’ continued Boyle. ‘He was desolately lonely. His will-power was gone. He was so impaired that he could not stop. He was a runaway train on a track of madness, picking up steam all the time, on and on and on, and it was only going to stop when he hit a concrete barrier or hit another train. And he hit it, thanks be to God, when Tracy Edwards got the hell out of that room.

  ‘You know what happened. He threw in the towel. He just became helpless in his own mind. And I submit to you that at some juncture along this killing spree one would have to be blinded not to accept the fact that he was so out of control that he couldn’t conform his conduct any more. No human being on the face of the earth could do anything worse than what he did. Nobody could be more reprehensible than this man, if he’s sane. Nobody. The devil would be in a tie. But if he’s sick – but if he’s sick – then he isn’t the devil.’

  It was a powerful performance, and one which, at last, sought to humanise Jeff Dahmer and lift him out of the morass of mystification into which three weeks of theorising had pitched him. There was a feeling in court that Boyle had achieved his purposes, (a) to foster at least some measure of identification, and (b) to advance the notion that Dahmer was insane by the end. Just one count of insanity would suffice.

  When Michael McCann rose to give his closing argument (limited by Judge Gram, as Boyle’s had been, to two hours), he knew what he was up against, for he asked the jury not to confuse the defendant with his lawyer. ‘There is a killer in this courtroom,’ he said, contemptuously jabbing his finger at Dahmer. ‘He seeks to escape responsibility for crimes to which he has already pled guilty.’ Most of the experts had missed the obvious, McCann maintained, which was that you kill because you are hostile, angry, full of resentment or frustration or hatred. Dr Palermo said Dahmer was hiding all this. Don’t let him hide it from you.

  ‘I want to tell you who I identify with,’ he said. Holding up portraits of each of the victims one by one, Mr McCann paraded them before the jury with a mounting litany of imprecations. ‘Don’t forget Steven Tuomi, who died at the Ambassador Hotel with the defendant. Don’t forget Doxtator, age fifteen, picked up by the defendant. Don’t forget Richard Guerrero, who died at the defendant’s hands,’ and so on through the list. ‘Don’t forget Ernest Miller, who was stabbed to death by the defendant because he was becoming conscious . . . don’t forget Curtis Straughter, strangled to death by the defendant . . . don’t forget Jeremiah Weinberger, who struggled for life for a day and a half before he died at the hands of the defendant.’

  It was an emotionally draining experience, particularly when McCann brought home exactly what murder involves. With jerking hand movements and a vicious grimace he simulated pulling a leather strap around somebody’s neck. He forced the jury to look at the defendant, telling them that men had been ‘strangled by those hands you see on the table’. He countered the argument that Dahmer had been kind in putting victims to sleep before killing them. His voice broken with passion, and almost weeping, he said, ‘Please don’t drug me, please give me a chance to defend myself, let me fight for my life at least.’ Lastly, in a gesture that was almost disgusting, he told jurors, ‘It takes five minutes to strangle a man to death. Try it in the jury room. Go try it.’

  People died merely in order to afford Dahmer a couple of days of sexual pleasure. That was the price of his not trying to control himself. ‘Your life, your life, your life, for my sexual satisfaction.’ McCann finished with his own plea to common sense, expressed in triste dignity. ‘Don’t be fooled by him,’ he said. ‘He fooled the police in Bath, Ohio. He fooled the West Allis Police. He fooled the Milwaukee Police. He’s fooled a lot of people, including the court who gave him probation for sexual assault. Please, please, don’t let this murderous killer fool you.’

  Gerald Boyle had the last word in a brief rebuttal, during which he invited jurors to imagine themselves parents of such a man as Jeff Dahmer. His actual father was sitting at the back. With this unsettling thought, case number F912542, State of Wisconsin vs. Jeffrey L. Dahmer, closed.

  Judge Gram read out all fifteen counts, in a parody of liturgical practice and intonation. It sounded like an entombment. He then gave instructions to the jury, reminding them that the closing arguments of the attorneys should not be considered as evidence. Four instructions with especial relevance to this case stood out, viz:

  You are not bound by medical labels, definitions or conclusions as to what is or is not a mental disease.

  You should not find that a person is suffering from a mental disease merely because he may have committed a criminal act, or because of the unnaturalness or enormity of such act, or because a motive for such act may be lacking.

  Mental disease is an abnormal condition of the mind which substantially affects mental or emotional processes.

  An abnormality manifested only by repeated criminal or otherwise antisocial conduct does not constitute a mental disease.

  The last of these was included on an erroneous understanding of the statute framed in 1965, and ought properly to have been expanded. As is pointed out in Chapter Eight, the clause relating to ‘repeated criminal or otherwise antisocial conduct’ was intended to exclude psychopathic offenders from the definition of abnormality, but there was no defence of psychopathic disorder in this case. The clause was therefore wrongly included in the instructions in such a way as to invite inference that repeated paraphilic conduct could not constitute a mental disease, whereas there was no reason in law why it should not, since it manifestly affected mental or emotional processes. The mistake posited a serious possibility of misdirection, but we do not know whether members of the jury paid heed to it or not.

  The jury went out on Friday, 14 February, and were expected to deliberate over the weekend. In the event, we received word on Saturday morning that they had already reached a verdict. The court was hastily convened and the jury marched in to take their seats at 4.10 p.m. The foreman handed over fifteen slips of paper, one for each count in the indictment, and Judge Gram proceeded to read out the answers to two questions posed on that paper. The first was, did the defendant suffer from a mental disease? Only if the answer to that question was affirmative would the second question need to be addressed.

  On the first count, the verdict was that Jeffrey L. Dahmer did not suffer from a mental disease. Two jurors signified their dissent. The atmosphere in the packed courtroom was tense and hushed as the judge turned the page over and read out the decision on the second count. It was identical, with the same two dissenters. So it continued for the following three counts. When it came to the death of Eddie Smith in Count 5, his sister Theresa let out a cry of relief and sobbed. Count 10 related to the death of Tony Hughes, and returned a similar verdict. Mrs Hughes lowered her head and wept quietly. Would there be any variation before the end? At the last count, when the same verdict was read out with regard to the murder of Joseph Bradehoft, there came a whoosh of joy from the public seats and victims’ families embraced one another. Dahmer, meanwhile, looked progressively more shrunken with each blow. By the end, his isolation from the rest of the community was complete.

  Lionel and Shari Dahmer sat stony-faced in their usual seats at the back. Immediately following the last verdict, they left. Lionel came to me one minute later, a shaken man. ‘It just doesn’t make sense,’ he mumbled. ‘It just doesn’t make sense.’ The sense that the verdicts implied was that Dr Dahmer had sired a monster.

  Judge Gram publicly thanked the media co-ordinator, Dan Patrinos, the court clerk and stenographer, Vicky and Mary (‘How long have you worked here, Mary? Twelve years?’). It uncomfortably resembled the Academy Awards ceremony, and recalled a moment some days before when he had, in faulty German, wished one of the jurors a happy birthday. The judge concluded the day’s work with a panegyric to Milwaukee. ‘We have a system of justice which cannot be beat anywhere in this country.’ Sent
encing was postponed until Monday, 17 February.

  On Monday morning we were exposed to another American ritual, at once moving and barbaric. The defendant, now the convict, was dressed in orange prison uniform for his last appearance before the world, and a relation of each man he had murdered was invited to address the court in his presence, to bruit his or her grief and anger. The purpose of this distasteful exercise seems to be to influence the judge before he passes sentence, to defy him to be lenient in the face of so much sorrow. To this extent, the practice is an interference with justice as well as a display of pain, and it is surprising that it should be tolerated.

  The rough mediaeval spectacle provided some touching moments. ‘Eddie Smith tried to be Jeffrey Dahmer’s friend,’ said his brother, ‘and as a result he lost his life.’ Looking straight at Dahmer, a relation of Ernest Miller said, ‘You took his life like a thief in the night.’ Mrs Shirley Hughes was unbearably dignified. ‘Is it a thrill to you to know I can’t fight back?’ she asked her son’s killer. ‘The whole world will know just how ugly a person you are.’ Recalling her lost son, Mrs Hughes held up two fingers and one thumb to make the deaf-mute sign for ‘I love you’. Curtis Straughter’s grandmother told Dahmer, ‘You almost destroyed me. But I refuse to let you. I will carry on.’ Richard Guerrero’s sister called him ‘diablo puro’, and David Thomas’ mother, ‘a sneaking conniving person’; she burst into tears and had to be led away. When the sister of Errol Lindsey, in hysterics, rushed across the courtroom in an attempt to hurl all her hatred at Dahmer in full view of the world’s television, bailiffs restrained her and protected him in a weird reversal of roles. It was then that Judge Gram put an end to this hurtful charade.

  Gerald Boyle announced that Dahmer himself wished to address the court. The statement he made, in part fashioned by his defence, in part a genuine reflection of what he felt, was listened to in silence. ‘Your honour, it is over now,’ he said. ‘I feel so bad for what I did to those poor families, and I understand their rightful hate . . . I take all the blame for what I did . . . I have hurt my mother and father and stepmother. I love them all so very much. I hope that they will find the same peace that I am looking for. Mr Boyle’s associates, Wendy and Ellen, have been wonderful to me, helping me through this worst of all times.’ He thanked Boyle for taking on the case and for helping to search for answers. ‘In closing, I just want to say that I hope God has forgiven me. I know society will never be able to forgive me. I know the families of the victims will never be able to forgive me. I promise I will pray each day to ask their forgiveness when the hurt goes away, if ever. I have seen their tears and if I could give my life right now to bring their loved ones back, I would do it. I am so very sorry.’

  Dahmer resumed his seat to await his sentence. There was just one more unexpected diversion. Judge Gram took it upon himself to tell us all what he thought the killer’s motive had been. The information was both gratuitous and revealing. In the judge’s view, Dahmer had hated himself for being homosexual and had destroyed what he saw of himself in others. It was the view expressed by Dr Palermo (and no one else), a view thought by some to be facile and superficial.

  On the first two counts, Jeffrey L. Dahmer was sentenced to life imprisonment plus ten years, to run consecutively. The remaining thirteen counts carried a sentence of life imprisonment with no eligibility for parole before seventy years, also to run consecutively. This meant the prisoner would have in theory to serve a minimum of over nine hundred years.

  Lionel and Shari Dahmer requested a ten-minute private meeting with their son before he was led away, which Gram granted in judge’s chambers. They hugged and held one another. Dahmer was straightway taken to the Correctional Institute at Portage in upstate Wisconsin, where the following day the director received nearly two hundred enquiries from authors and mental health experts wishing to interview him. In the coming days he was to receive good wishes from strangers all over the world.

  And what, ultimately, had this odyssey taught us, the spectators? There was opportunity enough for probing deep into the human psyche, but perhaps a court of law was not the most appropriate place to do it. The disciplines of legal procedure prevented anyone from straying beyond the obvious, and even the psychiatrists, court-appointed or not, found themselves bound by these restrictions. It was indeed a pity, for the art of psychiatric enquiry would have been the one avenue towards an understanding of those facets of Dahmer’s conduct which were hidden even from him, had it been permitted to explore them. Being confined to definitions of sanity and evaluations of criminal responsibility, the psychiatrists were hampered by their collusion with the legal process. Yet the clues were there, in the allegations of cannibalism (or necrophagy - the eating of human flesh), and in Dahmer’s oft-repeated and usually dismissed intention to create a shrine adorned with the remains of people he had killed. For here we discover a primitive spirituality with roots in the very beginnings of human society.

  Psychology and its practical offspring psychiatry, far from debunking religiosity, confirms man as an essentially spiritual being. The aspect of Jeffrey Dahmer which lay untouched by his trial was his embryonic mysticism.

  When discussing cannibalism, it is important to remember we are discussing a human activity, one of the age-old practices of humankind which have been successfully stifled by civilisation. To describe a man who eats men as ‘bestial’ or ‘inhuman’ is to state the exact opposite of the truth, for few other species have pursued the practice as long or as systematically as we have. As Morris Carstairs provocatively put it, ‘If the abjuring of cannibalism is taken as a criterion of cultural advancement, then mankind is surpassed by many animal species in whom a repugnance against cannibalism is innate and does not have to be learned.’1

  That there is a primal urge which lurks at the heart of the human mind is demonstrated by the unconscious echoes of infantile play. Parents indulge their children at an early stage by getting down on all fours and pretending to be animals about to gobble them up. The child gleefully retaliates with accompanying exclamations of ‘I’m a wolf’ or ‘I’m a lion’. It never seems odd to parents that their little ones should show affection by promising to devour them, for they instinctively recognise that the child’s notions of eating and loving are inextricably bound together. It is the initial ‘oral’ phase of sexuality which is here dramatised, when love and power are transmitted through the mouth.2 Moreover, the infantile phase is never entirely forgotten, but carried through into adult life in terms of endearment (‘I love you so much I could eat you up’), and in such quasi-cannibalistic sexual practices as the love-bite and oral sex. The adult who prefers oral sex above other sexual experiences indicates an infantile need for nourishment, a wish to recreate the moment of being mothered. (It may well suppose a lack of such mothering in infancy, but that is another matter; the point here is not why the need is manifested, but how.)

  The horror provoked by undisguised cannibalism was well illustrated in the film of Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer, when Sebastian Venable (Montgomery Clift) is pursued and surrounded by a group of menacing adolescents on the beach. They bring him to the ground, overwhelm him, and as his arm thrusts out from beneath the scrum, you realise that they are eating him alive. The elemental nature of the scene is conveyed by a fierce unrelenting sun, the featureless stare on the boys’ faces, a disturbing sound-track of rhythmic tribal metallic beats, and above all in the narration by the incredulous eye-witness (Elizabeth Taylor in the best performance of her career). Mingled with disgust we are aware of an unspoken and barely apprehended (Unbewussten) fascination with the possibility of it, and that fascination is the faint ripple of the involuntary memory of mankind.

  We owe debts to different disciplines for our modern perceptions of what goes on beneath the surface of our mind. Jung famously studied the cross-breeding of mythology and psychology, recognising myth as the theatre of the unconscious, and Frazer traced the history of spiritual feeling in human societies.
Cults and rituals have flourished among our species for up to half a million years, the most primitive of them being designed to placate or protect the spirits which inhabited everything in the empirical world. More developed spirituality involved the belief that one could ingest the character and attributes of a respected foe by eating parts of him, and as full-blown religions evolved, so did the idea that one could become spiritual oneself by literally eating the godhead.

  Cannibalism is forbidden in civilised societies under such a strict taboo that, as we have seen, it is only tolerated in the pretence of child-play. But it has not always been so, and is still not so in some societies which differ from our own. Examples abound. The Basuto tribesmen cut out the heart of a slain enemy and ate it immediately, thinking thereby to inherit his valour. Some of the tribes of South America ate the hearts of invading Spaniards, and the Sioux Indians used to reduce the hearts of their conquerors to powder and swallow it. Some head-hunting tribes eat or suck out the brains, and the Zulus used to think that by eating the forehead and eyebrow of their enemy they could acquire the ability to look unflinchingly in the face of adversity. If a New Zealand warrior killed a chieftain, he would gouge out the eyes and swallow them, believing thereby to pass the soul of the chief into his own body.3

  Jeffrey Dahmer let slip one relevant remark in his conversation with Judith Becker. ‘Maybe I was born too late,’ he said. ‘Maybe I was an Aztec.’ Dahmer mentioned this after relating how he had scalped Anthony Sears, but the reference has another significance. Aztec priests were known to extract the living heart. Explaining his cannibal habit, Dahmer said, ‘I suppose in an odd way it made me feel as if they were even more a part of me.’4