Social critic Mark Seltzer also argues a similar viewpoint. According to him, serial killing in the United States had supplanted an earlier, uniquely American cultural institution:
Serial murder and its representations have by now largely replaced the Western as the most popular genre-fiction of the body and of bodily violence in our culture. . . . The Western was really about serial killing all along.20
Even serial killers criticized the character of Lecter. Dennis Nilsen, convicted in the murder of twelve men in Britain, thought that Lecter was a fraudulent character and said, “He is shown as a potent figure, which is pure myth. It is his power and manipulation which please the public. But it’s not at all like that. My offenses arose from a feeling of inadequacy, not potency. I never had any power in my life.”21
* * *
—
From there it was but a short road to serial killer collectible murderabilia, trading cards, calendars, art, cookbooks, lunch boxes and action figures and the ultimate obscenity, Dexter, the good serial killer who serially kills bad serial killers.
I’ve lost count of how many radio and podcast interviews I have done where I am asked, “Who is your favorite serial killer?” or “If you were a serial killer, what kind would you be?” My response is usually, “The kind who eats podcast hosts who ask stupid questions.”
Jeffrey Dahmer, “The Milwaukee Cannibal,” Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1987–1991
In July 1991, as police in Gainesville and Shreveport were still piecing together the evidence in their cases, police in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, were removing the pieces of human remains from eleven victims found in Jeffrey Dahmer’s apartment.
Tracy Edwards, the victim who escaped Dahmer’s apartment on July 22 and flagged down a police car, was brought to the police station and recounted his story. Edwards stated that he had been hanging out with two other friends on the street when Dahmer approached them and invited them to come to his place to drink beer and keep him company. He offered one hundred dollars to any of them who would also pose for nude photos. Edward agreed to pose for the photos, but only if his two friends would accompany him to Dahmer’s place. The other two agreed but had an errand to run first. Edwards did not hear Dahmer give them a false address.
Upon entering Dahmer’s apartment, Edwards immediately noted the foul smell. Dahmer told him there were problems with the sewer pipes. Otherwise, Edwards did not notice anything unusual about the apartment or its decor. A large aquarium quietly gurgled as its filter pumped water to fish swimming inside. It was soothing. Dahmer offered Edwards an alcoholic drink that Edwards did not know was drugged. But he was not a big drinker and only sipped at it slowly. As they sat chatting, Edwards was growing anxious that his friends had not arrived while Dahmer was getting anxious that Edwards was not drinking enough to sedate him. When Edwards began to prepare to leave, Dahmer became agitated. Dahmer contrived to show Edwards the fish in his aquarium, and as his attention was drawn to the fish, Dahmer suddenly drew a pair of handcuffs from behind his back and snapped them around Edwards’s left wrist. Before he could close the other cuff around his right wrist, Edwards twisted his free arm out of the way. Dahmer produced a knife, which he held at Edwards’s side, warning him to do as he ordered or else he would kill him. Dahmer now led Edwards by his handcuffed left wrist into the bedroom. Edwards was immediately overwhelmed by a powerful smell of chemicals and decay emanating from a large blue plastic chemical drum in the corner of Dahmer’s bedroom.
Edwards played along with Dahmer, carefully trying not to provoke him. Dahmer sat down on the bed with Edwards and turned on the TV and VCR with the remote. The movie in the VCR had already been cued up to play. Dahmer told Edwards he wanted him to watch the movie with him very carefully. He liked it so much that he had spent one hundred dollars to purchase a videocassette copy of it.
It was The Exorcist III.* The same movie that apparently moved Danny Rolling.
As Edwards and Dahmer sat watching Gemini in The Exorcist III committing his serial murders, Dahmer appeared to be chanting to himself under his breath. He would enter and exit into what appeared to Edwards as a trance, especially around the scenes of demonic possession in the movie. After his arrest, Dahmer was asked by police about his fascination with The Exorcist III.
He stated he was unsure, but he knows that he felt a tremendous amount of guilt, because of his actions. He felt evil and thoroughly corrupted, body and soul, because of the horrible crimes he had committed against people. Every time he would try to overcome his feelings of wanting to kill and dismember people, they would haunt him and overcome him, almost like an addiction. He felt that he could not fight that feeling and wondered if in fact the devil had anything to do with his evil thoughts. Because of this he watched the movie Exorcist [III] almost on a weekly basis, for approximately 6 mos., and sometimes 2 and 3 times a week. In the movie he could tell that the devil was angry for being condemned and that he could relate with the devil, because he felt that his life on earth was condemned. He went on to state that the main character in the movie appeared to be driven by evil and that he could relate to this character as he felt that his life was driven by evil.22 [repetitive police prose “He stated that . . .” edited out]
At one point, Dahmer laid his head on Edwards’s chest and listened to his heartbeat. He then told Edwards he was going to eat his heart. Edwards kept a cool head, constantly trying to talk Dahmer down from his trancelike state. At Dahmer’s trial, Edwards described how Dahmer’s face appeared to physically transform into a demonic mask as he slipped in and out of these trances.
Eventually, Edwards gained enough of Dahmer’s trust to allow him to use the washroom without Dahmer holding the knife to his chest. As he left the washroom, Edwards sucker punched Dahmer, knocking him down, and dashed out the door of the apartment into the street where he managed to flag down the approaching police car.
The Dahmer Confessions
Once the police secured Dahmer’s apartment and brought him in, the confessions began . . . and went on for weeks. Dahmer occasionally forgot some of his victims’ names or the exact chronology, but he had a clear memory of most of the seventeen murders he had committed between his first murder in 1978 of Steven Mark Hicks in Ohio and his sixteen in Milwaukee from 1987 to 1991.
In his confessions, Dahmer appeared to be very self-aware as to what motivated him. According to the Milwaukee PD detectives’ interview notes:
He remembers his early family life as being one of extreme tension. Tension came from the relationship that existed at that time between his mother and his father. Although he was not physically or sexually abused and he did not witness any physical abuse from his parents, he stated that they were “constantly at each others throats” and arguing. His mother appeared to have some psychiatric problems and had in fact suffered a nervous breakdown at one time during his early childhood. She was on medication and had been seeing a doctor much of the time. He was advised by relatives that his mother suffered severe Post-Partum Depression after he was born, and he took that as an indication that he was at least partially the problem for his parents’ bad marital state.
He believes his mother became depressed after his birth and never quite fully recovered, and thereby he states he felt a certain amount of guilt in regard to the bad marriage of his parents.
When he was approximately 18-yoa [years of age] is when a divorce occurred between his mother and his father, and at this time his mother moved to Chippewa Falls, WI., and his father had been court ordered to stay out of the house and had moved to a motel which was several miles from the house. At this time his mother took his younger brother, who was approximately 6-years younger than him when she moved out and that he was left all alone at the house in Richfield, Ohio.
It was at this time when he started to have strong feelings of being left all alone, and that it was at this time that he remembers having strong desires of not wa
nting to have people leave him. He stated it was also at this time that he began hating to sleep alone at night.
He began having fantasies of killing people at the early age of 17 or 18. He states although these fantasies were fleeting, he feels that he had the fantasies to overcome the feelings he had of frustration, and emptiness which he felt were in his life. . . .
As a teenager of 15 or 16, he realized that he was a homosexual. He stated that he has never been interested in women, and he had no idea why he was a homosexual, but that he distinctly remembers that in high school, and during his teenage years, he became acutely aware of the fact that he was only attracted to men.
It was at this time that he began to have fantasies of killing human beings. He also began picking up animals which he had found on the road, which had been killed apparently by vehicles, and he would bring them home to his house, and he would use a knife in order to cut them up, and cut them open to see what was on the inside of them and what they looked like. Several of the animals that he cut up, he would completely strip down the flesh and meaty areas, and then use bleach and various other liquids which he found around his household, and experiment to see which ones would clean the bones the best.
He found a large dog that had been hit by a car and that he brought this dog home, cut it up, looked at its insides, completely cleaned it, and then soaked the bones in a bleach solution, and that he eventually planned to reconstruct the bones and mount the skeleton, much the way a taxidermist would do it. He stated, however, that he never got around to doing this.
During this time that he was cutting up animals, he would fantasize what it would be like to cut up a human being. He realized at this early age that his homosexual fantasies and his fantasies of killing and dismembering human beings were interlocked, and that he received gratification from these fantasies, and they occurred many times. Whenever he had fantasies of homosexual activity, he also had fantasies of killing and dismembering. He felt that the retrieving of road killed animals and the cutting of them up, satisfied his urges and his fantasies of killing and dismembering human beings. . . .
After leaving home in Bath, to join the Armed Forces, while in the Army, he was stationed in Germany. He believes the reason he did not kill or dismember anyone while he was serving his tour of duty in Germany, was because he enjoyed the structure of the Army. During the entire tour of duty, he lived on base and was in a dorm with three other men. Although he did not have any homosexual or heterosexual relationships while he was in Germany, or in the Army, he did satisfy his urge for sexual excitement by masturbation. He stated that he enjoyed the Army and wished that he could have finished his entire tour of duty; however, his abuse of alcohol made that impossible as the Army decided to let him go six months before his tour of duty was up.
After he moved to Milwaukee in 1981, the fantasies of killing people began to excite him and became more frequent. Regarding his victims, he states that he received physical pleasure from being with the victims when they were alive and he would have preferred that the victims remained alive; however, that it was better to have them with him dead than to have them leave. He states that when he felt when they were to leave, that is when he would decide to kill them.23
Killing for Company
Dahmer might have been inspired to offer that explanation by the accounts of Dennis Nilsen’s serial murders in England. Between 1978 and 1983, Nilsen killed twelve (perhaps fifteen) male victims in his apartment, keeping their bodies to have necrophilic sex with. After they began to decay, he would cut them up into little pieces and flush them down the toilet. Eventually, the severed body parts, hair and clumps of human fat blocked the pipes, and after plumbers found the human remains, police came calling at Nilsen’s door. Nilsen, like Dahmer, had severe alcohol problems, served in the military (although more successfully and longer than Dahmer) and was later a police constable in London. Nilsen stated that he was lonely and killed male victims to keep them near him. Brian Masters wrote a book on the Nilsen case appropriately titled Killing for Company, published in 1985. Perhaps Dahmer recognized himself in the book or learned from it.
Dahmer said after being discharged from the Army, his attempt to move to Florida was unsuccessful. He could not make ends meet and eventually was forced to move in with his paternal grandmother in a basement apartment of her house in West Allis, near Milwaukee. His grandmother always had a soft spot for him. Dahmer told detectives that while living with her:
He decided to make a concentrated effort to find some direction in his life. He constantly felt lonely and empty without direction, and that there was no meaning in life for him. His grandmother was a religious woman, a protestant, and a regular church goer and talked to him several times about religion and how it could turn his life around. He had continual fantasies again about homosexuality, and that along with the homosexual fantasies, came the urges to want to dominate, to kill, and to dismember other men. He stated that he constantly fought this urge by attending church with his grandmother, by reading the Bible, and by trying to live his life in an orderly fashion. “To walk the straight and narrow” are the words in which he used. He constantly had the interlocked feelings and fantasies of homosexual behavior, killing and dismembering and that they finally overcame him as he was finding it more and more impossible to continue with the lifestyle of “church going and right living” as he put it.24
It is frustrating that we don’t have Jeffrey Dahmer’s actual words in his initial interviews, only the paraphrasing of the detectives who interviewed him. When they write that “his homosexual fantasies and his fantasies of killing and dismembering human beings were interlocked,” was this Dahmer speaking, or is this how Milwaukee PD detectives interpreted his statements in the police culture of the time? See again my earlier references to David Schmid and Richard Tithecott: “For a heterosexual culture, the Dahmer case represents an opportunity to explain acts of savagery by referring to his putative homosexuality, to confuse homicidal with homosexual tendencies, confuse ‘sexual homicide’ with homo sex.”25
Of course, heterosexual serial killers also “interlock” their heterosexual fantasies with fantasies of murder, domination and rape. I don’t think there was homophobia at work in the Dahmer case so much as a police culture that disapproved of unbridled sexual behavior of any kind—and that applied not only to the perpetrators but to victims as well, who were seen as contributing to their own murders by their sexual promiscuity.
In Grandma’s House
Upon settling into his grandmother’s house, Dahmer was the dutiful grandson, tending to her yard and attending church with her. With his military medical training, he found work as a phlebotomist, drawing blood at a blood bank. He said he took home a vial of blood and drank from it, just out of curiosity, but that he did not like the taste and spat it out. He also toyed with satanism, purchasing Anton LaVey’s Satanic Bible, but found it wasn’t for him.
Dahmer lost his job at the blood bank after nine months, and his grandmother supported him while he sporadically took on casual jobs until he found steady work at the Ambrosia Chocolate factory as a mixer.
Dahmer accumulated an escalating number of encounters with police. In 1981, he was charged with disturbing the peace, resisting police and possession of an open container of alcohol in a Ramada Inn lobby. In 1982, he exposed himself to a crowd of women and children at the Wisconsin State Fair but was charged with only drunk and disorderly behavior. He was arrested for lewd and lascivious behavior after masturbating in front of two twelve-year-old boys in a park. The charges were reduced to disorderly conduct, and he was sentenced to one year of probation. In 1985, he was cautioned for making obscene gestures toward police officers, and in another incident he became belligerent when a bartender refused to further serve him. Nothing in the minor charges he accumulated hinted at the depth of depravity into which he would sink.
It was while living in Milwaukee in his grandmothe
r’s basement that Dahmer says he discovered gay bars and baths and began engaging frequently in casual sex. There were accounts after his arrest that Dahmer’s father reported that Jeffrey had been raped by a neighborhood boy when he was an adolescent. There is no evidence that this had occurred, and his father would later withdraw the allegation of rape. But there is this entry made by a detective in his interview notes with Dahmer:
I then informed him that we had just spoken with his father, and we had received information that he may have had a sexual experience when he was 14 or 15 years old with a person who lived across the street. Mr. DAHMER stated that this did occur, and this person and him had gotten undressed and did some body rubbing and kissing. . . . He stated he did not consider this a homosexual experience at the time, but stated, “But I guess it was.”
Other than this incident and the pickup of Hicks, his first murder victim, he does not appear to have had any actual sexual contact until his mid-twenties when he settled in Milwaukee. (Although there would later be accusations that he drugged and raped fellow soldiers while serving in the military, they were never proven.)
In 1985, Dahmer hid himself inside a department store after closing hours and stole a male mannequin, which he brought home. He told a forensic psychiatrist, “I just went through various sexual fantasies with it, pretending it was a real person, pretending that I was having sex with it, masturbating, and undressing it.”26 Dahmer’s grandmother was disturbed when she found the mannequin in Jeffrey’s bedroom and prevailed on him to get rid of it. He smashed it into little pieces with a hammer and put them into the trash, the way he soon would his human victims. Dahmer later commented, “It would have been better if I’d just stuck to the mannequins. Much, much better.”
American Serial Killers Page 39
