Bodies in the Back Garden--True Stories of Brutal Murders Close to Home

by Cawthorne Nigel

  But Dahmer could not contain his compulsion to kill. While out on bail, he picked up handsome 26-year-old black bisexual Anthony Sears. Fearing that the police were watching his apartment, he took Sears back to his grandmother’s basement. They had sex, then Dahmer drugged him and dismembered his body. He disposed of Sears’s corpse in the rubbish, but boiled the flesh off the head so he could keep the skull as a souvenir.

  Back in court, the District Attorney pushed for five years’ imprisonment for his assault on Keison Sinthasomphone. Dahmer’s attorney argued that the attack was a one-off offence. His client was a homosexual and a heavy drinker, and needed psychiatric help, not punishment. Dahmer got five years’ probation and a year on a correction programme.

  It did not help. Dahmer was now set in his murderous ways. He picked up a young black stranger in a club and offered him money to pose for nude photographs. Back in Dahmer’s flat, the youth accepted a drink. It was drugged. Once he was unconsciousness, Dahmer strangled him, stripped him and performed oral sex with the corpse. Then he dismembered the body, again keeping the skull, which he painted grey.

  He picked up another notorious homosexual known as ‘the Sheikh’ and did the same to him – only this time he had oral sex before he drugged and strangled his victim.

  The next victim, a 15-year-old Hispanic, was luckier. Dahmer offered him $200 to pose nude. He undressed but Dahmer neglected to drug him before attacking him with a rubber mallet. Dahmer tried to strangle him, but he fought back. Eventually, Dahmer calmed down. The boy promised not to inform the police and Dahmer let him go, even calling him a taxi.

  The next day, when he went to hospital for treatment, the boy broke his promise and spoke to the police. But he begged them not to let his foster parents find out that he was a homosexual and the police dropped the matter altogether.

  The next time Dahmer picked up a victim, a few weeks later, he craved more than his usual fare of sex, murder and grisly dismemberment. He decided to keep the skeleton and bleached it with acid. He dissolved most of the flesh in the acid, but kept the biceps intact in the fridge.

  When neighbours began to complain of the smell of putrefying flesh coming from his flat, Dahmer apologised. He said that the fridge was broken and he was waiting to get it fixed.

  Dahmer’s next victim, 23-year-old David Thomas, was not gay. He had a girlfriend and a three-year-old daughter, but accepted Dahmer’s offer to come back to his apartment for money. After drugging him, Dahmer realised that he did not really fancy his latest pickup anyway. But fearing that Thomas might make trouble when he woke up, he killed him. This time he took more pleasure in the dismemberment, photographing it step by step.

  Seventeen-year-old aspiring model Curtis Straughter was engaged in oral sex with Dahmer when the sleeping potion took effect. Dahmer strangled him and, again, photographed the dismemberment. Once again, his skull was kept as a trophy.

  Nineteen-year-old Errol Lindsey’s murder proceeded along exactly the same lines. Dahmer offered him money to pose for nude photographs, then drugged, strangled and dismembered him. The grisly process was photographed and his skull was added to Dahmer’s collection.

  Thirty-one-year-old deaf mute, Tony Hughes, also accepted $50 to pose nude. But by this time, Dahmer had become so blasé about the whole procedure that he kept Hughes’s body in his bedroom for several days before he cut it up.

  Dahmer’s next victim was Keison Sinthasomphone’s older brother, 14-year-old Konerak. Again, things went badly wrong. Dahmer drugged the boy, stripped him and raped him but then, instead of strangling him, Dahmer went out to buy some beer. On his way back to the apartment, Dahmer saw Konerak out on the street. He was naked, bleeding and talking to two black girls. When Dahmer grabbed him, the girls hung on to him. One of them had called the police and two patrol cars arrived.

  The police wanted to know what all the trouble was about; Dahmer said that he and Konerak had had a lover’s tiff. He managed to convince them that 14-year-old Konerak was really 19 and, back at his apartment, he showed them Polaroids of Konerak in his underwear which seemed to back up his story that they were lovers. The police did not realise that the pictures had been taken earlier that day, while Konerak was drugged.

  Throughout all this, Konerak sat passively on the sofa, thinking his ordeal was over. In fact, it had only just begun. The police accepted Dahmer’s story and left. Konerak was strangled immediately and then dismembered. The three policemen involved were later dismissed.

  Dahmer attended Gay Pride Day in Chicago and, on the way back, picked up another would-be model, Matt Turner. Back at Dahmer’s apartment, he was also strangled and dismembered.

  When Dahmer picked up 23-year-old Jeremiah Weinberger in a gay club, Weinberger asked his former room-mate whether he should go with Dahmer. The room-mate said, ‘Sure, he looks OK.’

  Dahmer seems to have liked Weinberger. They spent the whole of the next day together having sex. Then Weinberger looked at the clock and said it was time to go – whereupon Dahmer said he should stay for just one more drink. His head ended up in the freezer, next to Matt Turner’s.

  When Dahmer lost his job, he knew only one thing would make him feel better. He picked up a 24-year-old black man called Oliver Lacy, took him back to his apartment, strangled him and sodomised his dead body.

  Four days later, 25-year-old Joseph Bradeholt – who was married with two children – accepted Dahmer’s offer of money for nude photographs and, according to Dahmer, willingly joined in oral sex with him. His dismembered torso was left to soak in a dustbin filled with acid.

  By the time Dahmer had killed 17 men, all in much the same way, he was getting so casual that it was inevitable that he would get caught. On 22 June 1991, he met Tracy Edwards, a young black man who had just arrived from Mississippi. He was with a number of friends. Dahmer invited them all back to his apartment for a party. He and Edwards would go ahead in a taxi and organise some beer; the others would follow later. Edwards went along with this plan. What he did not know was that Dahmer had given his friends the wrong address.

  Edwards did not like Dahmer’s apartment – it smelt funny. There was a fish tank, where Dahmer kept some Siamese fighting fish. Dahmer told lurid tales about the fish fighting to the death and Edwards glanced nervously at the clock as he sipped his cold beer.

  When the beer was finished, Dahmer gave Edwards a rum-and-Coke; it was drugged. Edwards became drowsy. Dahmer put his arms around him and whispered about going to bed. Instantly, Edwards was wide awake. It was all a mistake. He had to be going, he said.

  Before he knew it, he was handcuffed and Dahmer was poking a butcher’s knife in his chest, ordering him to get undressed. Edwards realised the seriousness of his situation. He knew he had to humour the man and make him relax. Slowly, he unbuttoned his shirt.

  Dahmer suggested that they go through into the bedroom and escorted Edwards there at knifepoint. The room was decorated with Polaroid pictures of young men posing naked. There were other pictures of dismembered bodies and chunks of meat. The smell in the room was sickening. The putrid aroma seemed to be coming from a plastic dustbin under the window. Edwards could guess the rest.

  Dahmer wanted to watch a video with his captive friend. They sat on the bed and watched The Exorcist. The gruesome film made Dahmer relax and Edwards desperately thought of ways to escape.

  The film over, Dahmer said that if Edwards did not comply with his requests, he would cut out his heart and eat it. Then he told Edwards to strip so that he could photograph him nude. As Dahmer reached for the camera, Edwards seized his opportunity. He punched him in the side of the head. As Dahmer went down, Edwards kicked him in the stomach and ran for the door.

  Dahmer caught up with him and offered to unlock the handcuffs, but Edwards ignored him. He wrenched open the door and ran for his life.

  Halfway down 25th Street, Edwards spotted a police car. He ran over to it yelling for help. In the car, he explained to the officer that a maniac had tried to kill h
im and he directed them back to Dahmer’s apartment.

  The door was answered by a well-groomed white man who seemed calm and composed. The police began to have second thoughts about the story Edwards had told them – until they noticed the strange smell.

  Dahmer admitted that he had threatened Edwards. He looked contrite and explained that he had just lost his job and had been drinking. But when the police asked for the key to the handcuffs, he refused to hand it over and grew violent. The policemen pushed him back into the flat and, in moments, had him face down on the floor. They read him his rights. Then they began looking around the flat. One of them opened the fridge door.

  ‘Oh my God,’ he said, ‘there’s a goddamn head in here.’

  Dahmer began to scream like an animal. The police rushed out to get some shackles. Then they began their search of the apartment in earnest.

  The refrigerator contained meat, including a human heart, in plastic bags. There were three human heads in the freezer. A filing cabinet contained grotesque photographs, three human skulls and a collection of bones. Two more skulls were found in a pot on the stove. Another pot contained male genital organs and severed hands and there were the remains of three male torsos in the dustbin in the bedroom.

  In the precinct, Dahmer seemed almost relieved that his murder spree was over. He made a detailed confession and admitted that he had now reached the stage where he was cooking and eating his victims’ bodies.

  He also admitted to killing a teenage hitch-hiker when he was 18. When he was shown a missing-persons picture of Steven Hicks, he identified him as the person he had killed. The back garden at West Bath Road was dug up while officers sprayed Luminol mist into the crawl space. Thirteen years after the event, an eerie green handprint glowed on the cinder block wall and an outline of a pool of green – dried blood – glowed in the shadows.

  A 25-man team raked the soil in the back garden, inch by inch, searching for bone fragments. The remains of Steven Hicks were unearthed and collected. The police dug down 2in−6in into the rocky soil, sifting the earth to yield more fragments. After a week, they had inventoried 593 individual items including bone fragments, pieces of two incisors, a fragment of a molar, finger bones and other shards.

  They were then pieced painstakingly together by anthropologist C Owen Lovejoy, famed for his reconstruction of ‘Lucy’, thought to be an early ancestor of humans. It was important to establish that only one victim’s bones had been scattered in the backyard.

  The Summit County Coroner William A Cox was also on the case. A forensic pathologist, he had been head of pathology at the Westover Air Force Base Hospital in Massachusetts. Later, he studied at the Smithsonian Institute and the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, where military specialists were trained to identify the battlefield dead from the smallest fragment.

  ‘Everything we do is to make a scientific determination,’ said Cox. ‘But at the same time, you keep in the back of your mind that this was once a living, breathing human being. There are people out there who loved him. The family has asked for the remains to be returned back to them. And we’re going to do that, so they can pay their last respects.’

  Fortunately, the Hicks family had saved some of their son’s hair. With this, it was possible to make a genetic match to the remains.

  Dahmer’s cannibalism and his necrophilia were the cornerstones of his insanity plea. But the District Attorney pointed out to the jury that if Dahmer were found insane and sent to a mental hospital, his case would be reviewed in two years and, if he was then found to be sane, he could be out on the streets again. The jury found Jeffrey Dahmer guilty of the 15 murders he was charged with and he was given 15 life sentences, or 957 years in prison. The state of Wisconsin had no death penalty, but he still faced execution. He still had to be tried for the murder that took place in his parents’ home in Ohio, which did have the death penalty. He was later sentenced to life imprisonment there, too. However, after serving two years in the state penitentiary, he was murdered by another inmate.

  5

  BACK OF THE BOARDING HOUSE

  In November 1988, Detective John Cabrera visited the boarding house at 1426 F Street in Sacramento, California, with a team of investigators. They were looking for 51-year-old Alvaro ‘Bert’ Montoya, a schizophrenic with learning difficulties. He had been a tenant there and his social worker had reported him missing.

  The two-storey weatherboard Victorian house stood in a quiet, tree-lined street in what had once been an upmarket area of the state capital. The old governor’s mansion was only two blocks away. But the neighbourhood had seen better times; most of the once-desirable family homes had been boarded up or were used as cheap flop houses.

  The owner of 1426, Mrs Dorothea Puente, rented out rooms to the elderly and infirm. The pale-blue house was known to give off a putrid odour that the 59-year-old boarding-house mistress blamed on the sewer getting backed up or, on other occasions, dead rats rotting under the floorboards or the fish emulsion she used to fertilise the back garden. To hide the smell, she sprayed her parlour with a lemon-scented air-freshener. She also dumped gallons of bleach and bags of lime in the back garden.

  As Detective Cabrera approached the house, he noticed that it was already strung with Christmas lights although it was only 11 November. Otherwise, behind its black iron fence and lace curtains, the place looked shabby, but genteel.

  Cabrera knocked on the front door and asked Puente whether he could have a look around. She told him to go ahead. The place was full of porcelain dolls, doilies, vases and other knick-knacks an old lady might collect.

  In the backyard, he discovered that the soil in one corner had recently been disturbed. The police team had brought spades and shovels with them and returned to their cars to get them. They began digging and quickly came across what Cabrera said looked like ‘shreds of cloth and beef jerky’. Further progress was hindered by what appeared to be the root of a tree. When they could not shift it, Cabrera climbed down into the hole.

  ‘I wrapped my hand around it, braced my feet and started pulling,’ Cabrera told the Sacramento Bee. ‘I pulled so hard that it broke loose, and when I pulled it up, I could see the joint. It was a bone … at that time, I was airborne and out of the hole.’

  Puente came out of the house to see what the commotion was about. When she was told that they had found what appeared to be human remains, she appeared shocked and slapped the sides of her face with her palms. Next, they unearthed a shoe with a foot still in it.

  The following morning, a team of forensic anthropologists, officials from the coroner’s office and a crew with a mechanical digger arrived. They completed the excavation of the body the police officers had partially unearthed the day before. It was little more than a skeleton and belonged to a small white-haired female.

  A crowd of onlookers gathered outside the black iron fence and small boys climbed the trees to get a better view. There was a party atmosphere until a second body was found. As it was carried out to the coroner’s wagon, the crowd fell silent.

  Further work was hampered by a concrete slab. As workmen took a drill to it, Mrs Puente appeared. She was wearing a bright red overcoat, purple pumps and was carrying a pink umbrella. She asked Cabrera whether she was under arrest. When he said no, she asked if she could go and have a cup of coffee in the Clarion Hotel nearby. He then escorted her through the crowd of reporters who had now turned up, before returning to the excavation.

  Three more bodies were found under the concrete slab and there was another one under the gazebo. Four hours had passed before anyone noticed that Mrs Puente had not returned.

  In all, seven bodies were found in Puente’s back garden. Alvaro Montoya, who had argued in Spanish with the voices inside his head and called Puente ‘Mama’, was found under a newly planted apricot tree.

  Fifty-five-year-old alcoholic Benjamin Fink was found dressed in striped boxer shorts. Shortly before he had disappeared in April 1988, Puente told another boarder that she wa
s going to ‘take Ben upstairs and make him feel better’.

  Sixty-two-year-old James Gallop had survived a heart attack and surgery to remove a brain tumour – but wasn’t so resilient during his stay on F Street. He was last seen in July 1987 when he told his doctor that he was moving to 1426.

  Sixty-four-year-old Native American Dorothy Miller had a drinking problem and liked to recite poems about heartbreak. She was found with her arms taped to her chest with duct tape. The last time her social worker saw her, she was sitting on the front porch, smoking a cigarette.

  Vera Faye Martin was also 64; she had moved in in October 1987. Her wristwatch was still ticking when she was dug up.

  Seventy-eight-year-old Betty Palmer was found in a sleeveless white nightgown below a statue of St Francis of Assisi, a few feet from the sidewalk. Her head, hands and lower legs were missing.

  Leona Carpenter was also 78; she had been discharged from the hospital to Puente’s care in February 1987, before disappearing a few weeks later. Buried near the back fence, it had been her leg bone that Detective Cabrera had mistaken for a tree root.

  The bodies were all in an advanced state of decay. Their internal organs had fused together in a single leather mass. Police clerk Joy Underwood, who had been sent to the morgue one night to label evidence, was so distressed by the state of the bodies that she vomited every time she saw a news report about the case and began to shower compulsively.

  ‘I still have the taste of death in my mouth,’ she told Associated Press six months later. ‘I can’t eat vegetables grown in the ground because they have dirt around them, like the people dug up in Puente’s yard – and I’m a vegetarian.’

  Police searched in the boarding house and found a note. Against the first initial of each victim, Puente had written the amount she got from fraudulently cashing their Social Security and disability cheques. According to the Sacramento Bee, she was making $5,000 a month from the dead tenants in the back garden. She was also making a good income from her living tenants. They were paying $350 a month for a private room and two hot meals a day. Breakfast was at 6.30am sharp and consisted of eggs, bacon and pancakes. There was a second big meal at 3.30pm. Lateness was not tolerated; if residents missed either meal, they went hungry. They were not allowed near the kitchen at other hours, nor were they allowed to touch the tele-phone or the mail.