Dahmer knew she was going to be away at church much longer than usual.
When she got up to make breakfast, Dahmer joined his grandmother at the table, and after he saw her leave for church, he returned for another lovemaking session with Sears’s corpse, which was still mildly warm. (After death, a corpse loses 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit [0.83 degrees centigrade] every hour, but the body was under the bedcovers.) When he was finished, Dahmer carried the body into the bathroom and began butchering it in the tub, draining the blood, disarticulating and dismembering the limbs, flaying the flesh from the bones and cutting it all down into manageable morsels to put into garbage bags, separate from the bones, which were going to be later crushed and broken with his grandma’s sledgehammer.
Dahmer severed the head and the genitals and tossed them into a separate plastic bag.
Sears was Dahmer’s fifth victim since 1978, but he was the first whose body parts Dahmer would harvest and keep with him. This might have been Dahmer’s first true necro-love. Dahmer said, “Him I like especially well.” Sears was going to be his forever; at least his head and genitals were. The problem was how to preserve the flesh from decaying.
The next morning, Dahmer called the helpful folks at Ace Hardware for advice on how best to preserve flesh with bone for taxidermy. With acetone, he was told. Dahmer purchased a ten-gallon plastic drum with a sealable lid, dropped the head and genitals into it, filled it with acetone and put the sealed drum in the back of his bedroom closet for a week.
When he opened and drained the drum, the head and genitals were preserved in their fleshy self. For extra life, Dahmer used makeup to powder and paint some flesh color back into the body parts. He would copulate with the head and hold and stroke it as he masturbated. But after a few weeks, the skin around the head started to shrink and slip. Dahmer was scheduled to start serving nights in prison detention, and he worried about leaving the head in his grandmother’s house. He put it and the genitals into a cosmetic case and stored it in his locker at the chocolate factory. After his release from night detention, Dahmer recovered the case from his locker but discovered that the head was beginning to mold. Before Dahmer Soilaxed the decayed flesh from the skull, he scalped the skull around the ponytail that Sears had sported and kept it as a sacred totem of his eternal love. Police would find Sears’s skull and genitals in Dahmer’s black filing cabinet in his bedroom. He later told a psychiatrist, “If I could have kept him longer, all of him, I would have.” True love hath no bounds.
“It Was Just All Slush, Black Slush”
After he completed his sentence, his grandmother fed up with the chemical smells, on May 14, 1990, Dahmer moved into the Oxford Apartments, bringing Sears’s skull and painted genitals with him. Having killed five men, now secure in his own private abattoir, in the next fourteen months Dahmer would murder and mutilate twelve more victims in an escalating bloodbath.
On May 20, 1990, Dahmer lured thirty-two-year-old sex worker Raymond Smith, nicknamed Cash-D, to his apartment, drugged and strangled him in the usual way. Smith was the first of several victims that Dahmer would cannibalize. The police interview memo laconically reads, “Jeff DAHMER went on to relate that he had originally told us that he had only eaten a bicep of one of his victims. He related that there were other times in which he had eaten part of the victim. The first time was the person he identified as CASH D (Raymond SMITH—Victim #5 [in Milwaukee]). He related that he eat [sic] this victim’s heart. He related that it tasted kind of spongy.”35
Dahmer had recently bought a black table that he intended to convert into an altar to his victims, which he planned to decorate with their body parts. (Later, he would put his aquarium on it.) He bought a Polaroid camera, which he now used to capture images of his victims in various poses and states of dismemberment. In his account of the Dahmer case, Brian Masters writes:
He was, in a way, virtually creating his own pornography, as if the picture of beauty was more alluring than beauty itself. This is tantamount to saying that fantasy—solid, sculpted, manageable, unthreatening—has finally become more deeply important than reality. It is also more stimulating; whereas Dahmer had found it impossible to reach orgasm with the partners he met at the Unicorn Bathhouse in Chicago, he was able to stand over the dead body of Cash D and masturbate to ejaculation. The camera translated reality into fantasy, and the orgasm celebrated it.36
This time, Dahmer did something new with the victim’s skull after boiling off the flesh. At an art supply store, Dahmer purchased some enamel simulated granite spray paint in order to give the skulls an artificial look, in case someone saw them. Police found three such painted skulls in his apartment and indeed at first thought they were plastic decorative prop skulls. Dahmer told police “he wanted to keep the skulls of his victims, because to him the skull represented the true essence of his victims. He states that he felt by at least keeping the heads, the death of his victims would not be a total loss, because the heads would be with him.”37
Dahmer had wanted to preserve some of Smith’s body parts, and the next day he bought a freezer to preserve them in. He decapitated and dismembered Smith’s body in the bathtub. The parts he did not want to keep, he boiled for an hour in a huge steel kettle in a water and Soilax solution. Afterward, he scraped the remains of the soft boiled flesh from the bones in the kitchen sink. He couldn’t sledgehammer the bones in his apartment the way he did in his grandmother’s house. He bought a trash container with a sealable lid and put the bones into it with a solution of acid. Dahmer said, “I waited a week or two and they had all turned to slush at that time, which I scooped out with a smaller trash thing and poured it into the toilet and flushed it down. It was just all slush, black slush.”
Again, I wonder whether Dahmer had read about Nilsen and how the raw fat from body parts he flushed down the toilet blocked the pipes and eventually led to his arrest. Reducing them in acid to a flushable sludge would be a solution to that problem.
“It Tasted Like Beef or a Filet Mignon”
Dahmer lurched his way through his next eleven murders from May 1990 until his arrest in July 1991. On June 14, 1990, he murdered twenty-seven-year-old Edward Warren Smith, but Dahmer overbaked his skull while drying it in an oven and had to throw it out. No traces of Eddie Smith’s body were found.
On September 2, Dahmer met another victim he found himself in awe of, a twenty-two-year-old dance student, Ernest Marquez Miller. Dahmer fell for the dancer’s tightly corded muscular physique. Miller agreed to go back to Dahmer’s apartment for fifty dollars. Dahmer drugged Miller into unconsciousness and then sexually assaulted him. But Dahmer was running out of money for pills and had only two to slip into Miller’s drink. (Unable to afford a refill of sleeping pills, Dahmer attempted to render a victim unconscious with a blow from a rubber mallet, but it did not work. The victim left enraged but alive.) Dahmer played with Miller’s body as if he were a sex doll, but he became concerned that he would not be able to control the muscular youth if he awoke. Using his Army medic’s training, Dahmer carefully located Miller’s carotid artery at his neck and slit it open with a paring knife, showering his bed and wall with arterial blood. Dahmer said he could never properly clean the blood off the wall and mattress. A year later, police would note the smears of dried blood on the wall behind Dahmer’s bed and his mattress still saturated with crusty, dry gore.
Dahmer posed Miller’s body in various positions and shot multiple Polaroid pictures as he dismembered and decapitated his corpse in the bathtub. According to the Milwaukee PD interview memorandum, “He related that this was a person he really liked. He indicated that he had filleted his heart and had kept it in the freezer and also kept his bicep. He indicated that he had eaten the thigh muscle of this subject, but it was so tough he could hardly chew it. He then purchased a meat tenderizer and used it on the bicep. He stated that it tasted like beef or a filet mignon.”
On September 24, 1990, Dahmer killed t
wenty-two-year-old David Courtney Thomas. Dahmer would later say he wasn’t “his type,” but just the same, he took Polaroid photos of his corpse as he dismembered it. He didn’t like Thomas, and police found no trace of his remains in Dahmer’s collection of victims he liked.
On February 18, 1991, Dahmer lured seventeen-year-old Curtis Durrell Straughter to his apartment. Dahmer now incorporated handcuffs into his fantasy play, despite the fact that his unconscious victims did not need to be restrained. He also changed the way in which he killed. Previously, Dahmer had strangled his victims with his hands, but now he acquired a leather strap with which he would kill until the strap became so soaked in saliva, vomit and blood that he had to throw it away.
He harvested Straughter’s skull, his severed hands and his genitals, which police found in his apartment.
“Drilling Technique”
Having now killed an even ten victims, Dahmer perhaps was again having moral qualms; or perhaps they were simply practical concerns. He began to seek a way to keep his loves without killing them. On April 7, 1991, Dahmer for the first time attempted what he called his “drilling technique.” He lured nineteen-year-old Errol Lindsey to his place and as usual drugged him into unconsciousness. Then he drilled a small hole in Lindsey’s skull using a power drill with sixteenth-inch and three-eighth-inch bits and injected hydrochloric acid into his brain with a giant turkey baster he purchased at Lechters Kitchen Supply. The purpose was to transform Lindsey into a sex zombie. Dahmer explained, “I didn’t want to keep killing people and have nothing left but the skull.”
It did not work. When Lindsey regained consciousness, he complained of a headache. Dahmer drugged him again and strangled him. Dahmer decided he would skin Lindsey’s severed head. According to the police notes:
DAHMER related that the skin of the human being was easily detached; he states much the way you would detach skin from a chicken which you are planning to cook. After the initial incision, he could pull on the skin and it would pull off the muscle tissue of the body easily. The only time it was difficult was when he was pulling the skin off around the joints and at this time he would use a small paring knife to carefully cut the skin around the joint portion of the body. Regarding the fact that the skin was completely taken off the head of the subject, DAHMER related that he would start an incision in the lower portion of the back of the neck and slice up to the top (or crown of the head). At this time he could pull on either side of the skin from the incision and it would completely pull right off the skull of the individual. The only time he needed to do any real cutting would be around the facial features, that being the eyes, nose, lips and mouth. The entire skull portion of the skin came off in one complete piece and while it was off it actually looked somewhat like a mask you can buy at a party store. He kept the skin and the mask-like facial features of this subject and planned to treat them with a solution he made up of salt and borax. He soaked them in a salt, borax and water solution for several weeks and then planned to take them out and dry them to preserve them. He wanted to keep the skin and the mask-like portion of the individual’s head, however he underestimated the powerful mixture, of borax and salt. After several weeks in the solution, the skin turned to a mushy-like substance and was unable to be kept and it had to be thrown out.38
Lindsey’s painted skull was found in Dahmer’s apartment.
* * *
—
Dahmer had clearly gone off the dark deep end, somewhere between the Stone Age and Ed Gein’s cornholed madness. In the last two months, Dahmer went into a killing machinelike frenzy in which he killed six victims, the last three of which he would kill over fourteen days in July.
On May 24, Dahmer lured thirty-one-year-old Anthony Hughes, a deaf-mute. Dahmer and Hughes wrote notes to each other as Dahmer persuaded him to return to his apartment for fifty dollars. Friends of Hughes drove the two to Dahmer’s apartment as they exchanged notes in the back of the car. After Dahmer drugged and killed Hughes, he kept his body in his bedroom for days without dismembering it.
Just when you think this narrative can’t get any more twisted than it already is, it takes another sick turn. Hughes was still lying dead in Dahmer’s bedroom when he brought his next victim home to the apartment.
“I Can’t Do Anything About Somebody’s Sexual Preferences in Life”
On May 27, three days after killing Hughes, Dahmer completely by coincidence encountered fourteen-year-old Konerak Sinthasomphone. This was the younger brother of the Laotian refugee Somsack Sinthasomphone, who survived Dahmer’s assault. Konerak agreed to pose for photographs at Dahmer’s apartment. The two returned to the apartment, and Konerak posed on the couch, unaware that there was a three-day-old dead body in the bedroom. Konerak downed the drugged drink and lost consciousness as Dahmer sexually assaulted him. Then Dahmer drilled a hole into Konerak’s cranium three-quarters of the way to the rear of his skull, slanted forward. The intention was to access behind the frontal lobe, but Dahmer did not quite get the cerebral anatomy. He then inserted the turkey baster about two inches deep into the skull and injected Konerak’s head with hydrochloric acid. Konerak slept through the entire “procedure.”
With Konerak unconscious, Dahmer now waited for him to regain consciousness, hopefully in a compliant zombie state. Dahmer discovered he was out of beer and decided that Konerak would be out for a while longer and left to go get a beer at a local bar. Konerak in the meantime awoke in a daze with a brain full of hydrochloric acid and stumbled out naked into the street, babbling incoherently.
Three young black women saw Konerak and called the police. One of the women had recognized him because they picked dew worms together and she was sure he was a minor. Unfortunately, in her call to 911, she described him as a “young man.”
Before the police arrived, Dahmer returned from his beer run and saw Konerak sitting on the curb with the three women hovering around him protectively. Dahmer tried to take Konerak back to his apartment, but the women stopped him.
What exactly happened next is a matter of dispute. The women claimed that Konerak had a stream of blood running down his leg from his rectum. Dahmer later claimed he’d only had oral sex with Konerak at this point. Nobody noticed beneath his long hair the hole that Dahmer had drilled in his head. A police patrol car and a fire truck arrived at the scene and wrapped Konerak in a blanket.
The two police officers responding to the call interviewed Dahmer, who presented his Ambrosia Chocolate work ID and assured them that the man was his twenty-year-old boyfriend and had drunk too much and they had quarreled. He gave them a false name for Konerak. As the women insisted that Konerak was obviously a child, they were brusquely warned off by the officers to go home and not to interfere in their investigation.
Later, detectives would say of Dahmer:
He was extremely nervous during the time of the questioning by police, he put on a very calm attitude and felt he was able to convince the police that it was a lovers’ problem between two homosexuals. He related that due to the fact that he was able to convince all these people, in positions of authority, his parents and neighbors who questioned him regarding his activities, it gave him a feeling that he could get away with his crimes. He felt that he had the ability to make people see a phase of him that only he wished them to see and that this encouraged him to continue on with his crimes, feeling that he would never be caught.39
The two officers now escorted Dahmer and the incoherent Konerak back to Dahmer’s apartment, where they saw Konerak’s clothing neatly folded on the couch. Dahmer showed them the Polaroids he shot of Konerak willingly posing for him and assured them he was an adult and they were in an intimate relationship. Konerak sat passively on Dahmer’s couch in a stupor. All this while Hughes’s body lay dead on the bedroom floor and the apartment smelled of decaying body parts. One of the officers peeked through the door into the dark bedroom but did not go in or see anything.
Th
e officers told Dahmer to take good care of Konerak and left. As they drove off they radioed the dispatcher, chuckling, “The intoxicated Asian naked male was returned to his sober boyfriend and we’re 10-8. . . . My partner’s going to get deloused at the station.”40
The aunt of one of the three women who called the police followed up later that night with the dispatcher, who patched her through directly to the police officers who had responded to the call. The 911 transcript was later released:
WOMAN: What happened? I mean my daughter and my niece witnessed what was going on. Was anything done about the situation? Do you need the names or information or anything from them?
OFFICER: No, not at all.
WOMAN: You don’t?
OFFICER: No, it was an intoxicated boyfriend of another boyfriend.
WOMAN: Well how old was this child?
OFFICER: It wasn’t a child. It was an adult.
WOMAN: Are you sure?
OFFICER: Yep.
WOMAN: Are you positive? Because this child doesn’t even speak English. My daughter had, you know, dealt with him before, seen him on the street, you know, catching earthworms.
OFFICER: Yeah, no, no, he’s—it’s all taken care of, ma’am.
WOMAN: Are you sure?
OFFICER: Ma’am, I can’t make it any more clear. It’s all taken care of. He’s with his boyfriend in his boyfriend’s apartment, where he’s got his belongings also. I mean, that’s where it’s released.
WOMAN: But I mean isn’t this, I mean what if he’s a child and not an adult. I mean are you positive this is an adult?
American Serial Killers Page 41
