He would spend time exploring woods and, as with other future serial killers, feeling that he just did not ‘belong anywhere’, being worthless (Davis, 1991; Masters, 1993). Signs of overwhelming loneliness were evident by the time that he attended junior high school, and the only solution was to withdraw still further from the outside world into one of private fantasy. There was, however, some early sexual experience, when Jeffrey was 13 years of age and with a boy of age 10 years (Masters, 1993). The other boy had taken the initiative and persuaded Jeffrey to undress, whereupon they kissed and caressed. However, fear of being caught caused them to cease this activity.
Jeffrey discovered some fascinating but lonely pastimes in the forests: chopping down tree branches and dissection of the bodies of animals that he found dead (Masters, 1993). It was noted at his trial that an awakening sexuality appeared on the scene at the same time as his engagement with dissection. This raised the question of whether there could have been an early fusion between the brain processes underlying these two aspects. There was also the potent memory of his earlier operation in the groin area, which might have triggered an attribution of ‘salience’ to this bodily region and its surgical investigation.3
Classmates recall Jeffrey being mocked and bullied in school and his reluctance to hit back. He went through a phase of craving recognition, something that was earned by performing clowning antics in public. Towards the end of his junior high school days, Jeffrey discovered alcohol as a soothing balm for his troubled mind, regularly getting drunk, excessive intake being something he was destined never to quit.
By age 17, Jeffrey was performing masturbation on occasions more than three times a day (Masters, 1993). This was accompanied by looking at magazines showing naked men, with a focus of attention upon their chests. The masturbation presumably reinforced a developmental course wherein he became particularly attracted to the single physical feature of the chest area. Jeffrey also developed a fascination with the thought of peering inside the bodies of men and he recalled his own hernia operation, presumably revisiting his trauma.
Jeffrey observed a jogger going past his house each day. The jogger’s body was of the kind Jeffrey wished to touch but how could he make the necessary contact? To ask would be to invite rejection and violate the need for total control. In his imagination, Jeffrey fantasized about knocking the man unconscious, dragging him into the woods and there lying with him, kissing but with the man blissfully unaware. One day, he waited for his prey by the side of the road armed with a baseball bat. For the first and almost only time in this tragic saga, fate was on the side of the intended victim; the jogger failed to materialize and Jeffrey called off the plan.
With his parents’ separation and divorce, Jeffrey was left alone in the house for days on end with no outside contact and only his bizarre fantasies for company. He masturbated over thoughts of the jogger, which gave him some very short-term satiation. However, over the longer term it would appear that the masturbation strengthened the power of salient erotic thoughts, those of a still and totally submissive, even dead, body.
These thoughts became more pressing and involved picking up a hitchhiker. Turning fantasy into reality and borrowing his father’s car, Jeffrey, now aged 18, went out looking for a victim and soon found one: a young man with chest exposed, just like the scenes within his fantasy. Though not homosexual, the boy agreed to go back to Jeffrey’s home to spend some time together. After a few drinks, the boy said that he would now need to leave, a lethal decision, it being the trigger for the reaction that Masters (1993) describes as follows (p. 52):
The swell of frustration within Jeffrey Dahmer rose until it filled his nostrils and pressed at his temples. He was not going to leave. He couldn’t leave. He wouldn’t let him leave.
Jeffrey proceeded to knock out and then strangle the young man, whereupon he kissed the body and masturbated over it. Later he disposed of most of the young man’s remains, keeping the head as a token and as an object of masturbation (a fetish), a possession that was his alone. Presumably, it served as a trophy, a token that at least there was one area in life in which he excelled. Photographs, which Jeffrey then and subsequently took of the bodies, would, it appears, have served a similar role. At age 22, Dahmer was arrested for exhibitionism, behaviour that was to be repeated subsequently (Masters, 1993).
Dahmer found a job in Milwaukee, where he was sexually propositioned by a man and invited to the public toilets, though, presumably through fear of capture or performance failure, he did not pursue this (Masters, 1993). However, after priming by this encounter, his sexual urges increased in intensity and the frequency of masturbation increased correspondingly up to twelve times a day, though even this was inadequate. He sought out bookshops that specialized in homosexual pornography and had anonymous sexual contact in darkened booths showing gay films. Dahmer stole a male mannequin from a shop, took it home and used it as a prop for fantasy and masturbation.
In 1985, at age 25, Dahmer discovered Milwaukee’s bathhouses, where he was initiated into conventional and some unconventional homosexual activities (Masters, 1993). However, his desire for an entirely passive partner exceeded the boundaries of even this permissive environment. So, he devised a brutally effective solution, quite literally so: a concoction of alcohol and crushed sleeping pills, which he smuggled in and gave to unsuspecting partners. Thereby, for up to eight hours locked in a cubicle, he had a passive partner with whom he could realize the contents of his fantasies, accompanied by masturbation. He would lie with his head on the man’s body listening to the heart beat and sound of the stomach, a form of fetish, an erotic focus on just a part of the body.
Alas, escalation set in, so that even the ‘pseudo corpse’ of a drugged partner was inadequate to match ‘perfectionist’ desires, and he wanted sex with a real corpse. Fantasy became reality: Dahmer’s behaviour escalated to murder followed by sex with the body and eating body parts. Consuming body parts was a form of sexual excitement that brought a bizarre affiliation between killer and victim. With a dead body as a partner, banished were the fears of ridicule, performance failure, humiliation or abandonment, since here was the attainment of the ultimate goal of perfect control (Davis, 1991).
Unusually for a serial killer, nine years elapsed between his first and second killings, which suggests the exertion of considerable inhibition even in the face of strong temptation. After these nine years, he reported feeling hopeless in the face of the temptation (Masters, 1993, p. 87): ‘I couldn’t quit.’ Masters (1993, p. 93) writes: ‘The hunt for the perfect prop, the fantastical become real, would henceforth pervade his every thought and grip him with such intensity as to banish all interfering concepts of morality or safety.’ The hunt might not have entirely banished such inhibitions – he reported experiencing fear after a killing (Davis, 1991). However, in the competition for the control of cognition and behaviour, once the desire kicked in strongly such restraining factors were clearly inadequate. If Dahmer were like a number of other serial killers, he might well have entertained compassionate thoughts at times and have acted upon them, until in the grip of his particular brand of sexual desire (Masters, 1993).
Dahmer described the sexual thoughts as coming into his head from nowhere (a ‘compulsion’; Masters, 1993), which would give them features in common with obsessive compulsive disorder. However, a distinction emerges when we consider his use of the expression ‘a craving, a hunger’ to describe the immediate consequence of the thought’s arrival, which is unlike the aversive quality of OCD.
Towards the end, Dahmer exhibited the familiar phenomenon of escalation: the killings became more frequent (Davis, 1991; Hickey, 2010). This was also the case with Ted Bundy (Sewell, 1985), suggesting the effect of one or more underlying processes: a gradually waning level of satiety (‘catharsis’ value), a failure to meet expectation or increasingly strong reinforcement.
Jeffrey Dahmer seems to exemplify perfectly the following developmental trajectory. The parents were not av
ailable to offer adequate reinforcement for any emerging conventional social behaviour (Nichols, 2006). His actual early social experiences were such as to lead to a failure to establish a generalized internal working model that involved an expectation of positive attainment in dealing with others. His model of the other individual’s perception of him was that of worthlessness. Hence, his emerging sexuality could not attach itself to any expectation of success in establishing a relationship. Rather, he resorted to a world of fantasy, in which he was in control by having sex with unconscious or dead men.
It is sometimes said that sexually linked serial killers are not really motivated by lust but rather by the need for control and domination. However, this divides the world in an illogical way. Of course Dahmer wanted control but, according to his own testimony, he experienced ‘ungovernable lust’ (Nichols, 2006). I would see a coalescence of the need for control, lust and a desire for attachment in Dahmer’s motivation.
Dennis Nilsen
A few years before Dahmer’s killings, a strikingly similar case emerged in London: Dennis Nilsen (Masters, 1985). Nilsen killed fifteen young men. Like Dahmer, Nilsen was intelligent and highly articulate. He confessed fully and graphically to his crimes.
As a child, he was, in his own words, ‘a wanderer at odds with his fellows’ (Masters, 1985, p. 41) and living in a world of the imagination. The young boy formed a unique bond with his grandfather, a sailor. It would be hard to overstate the importance of this for the psychological development of Dennis. The grandfather’s departures to sea were heart-breaking for the child, since they heralded days to be spent within a meaningless social vacuum, but the grandfather’s returns, when he would invariably go first to find Dennis, were uniquely joyous.
One day, when Dennis was not yet 6, he waited in vain for his grandfather; tragically the grandfather had died in his boat. Dennis was later invited to peer into his grandfather’s coffin, being told that his grandfather was sleeping. In retrospect, Dennis reported being massively traumatized, as he could not resolve the issue of life and death. It only slowly dawned on him that his soul mate would probably never be coming back. Dennis retreated even further into his self-imposed isolation. He felt alienated from the family, jealous towards his mother’s new husband and did not develop trusting bonds. Receiving corporal punishment in school for his poor performance hardly helped.
While still a boy, he was part of a search party for a missing man and was present when the body was found. Dennis reported (Masters, 1985, p. 59):
He reminded me of my grandfather, and the images were fixed in my mind…I could never comprehend the reality of death.
Masters (1985) suggests that, at this stage, images of death and love were beginning to converge in his mind. Dennis developed a crush on a boy in his school but the boy was perceived to be of a higher social class and Dennis feared to approach him. The next crush was on a boy used as an illustration in a book. Dennis explored sexually the sleeping body of his brother. By the time that he left school, sexual arousal had been triggered under three conditions which had the feature in common that (Masters, 1985, p. 60): ‘safety from rejection was ensured; with a distant idol, with an inanimate drawing, and with a sleeping body’.
After leaving school he had a traffic accident in which he sustained a blow to the head. One can speculate whether this was of any consequence to his later killings. He had some homosexual experience and developed a particular technique of sexual arousal: lying still and viewing his own naked body in a mirror but without seeing his head. In this way, he could imagine it to be another individual but one who was dead.
When 27 years old, his eyes fell upon an 18-year-old man and Nilsen reported (Masters, 1985, p. 76):
As he walked in the door he had the effect upon me of an electric shock.
Subsequently, they were to share a number of activities, including film-making. Nilsen reported it to be ‘a source of extreme pain’ (Masters, 1985, p. 77) when they were parted for any reason. In their film-making, it was particularly the scenes where the young man was lying still and seemingly playing dead that Nilsen found most attractive. When finally circumstances caused them to part, Nilsen was profoundly depressed.
Finding himself in London, Nilsen frequented gay bars and was involved in endless casual sexual encounters, which he found unsatisfying; indeed, they were even soul-destroying in the frustration of repeatedly being abandoned. However, solace and, as he put it, ‘sexual feasts’ were found by viewing his own body in a mirror. From an unconscious body, his fantasy evolved into a dead body with memories of the image of his dead grandfather. The dead body was fantasized to play a role in various scenarios in which actors in the fantasy found it arousing and their trigger to masturbation. In 1978, at age 33, he committed his first murder by strangling a young man lying in his bed. In a state of sexual arousal, Nilsen explored the body and masturbated onto it. He then proceeded to dispose of the body. Subsequently, there was a series of further murders associated with necrophiliac sex.
Nilsen said that he felt intense guilt following his capture. He reported that when he ventured out it was not with the intention of killing but rather to find a relationship. He reported that in death the victims looked like his last viewing of his dead grandfather, which (Masters, 1985, p. 189): ‘brought me a bitter sweetness and a temporary peace and fulfilment’. On being asked by the police to recall the incidents, Nilsen reported (Masters, 1985, p. 144):
“I seem to have not participated in them, merely stood by and watched them happen – enacted by two other players – like a central cinema”.
This suggests an altered state of consciousness, described by the term ‘dissociation’.
Masters (1985, p. 295) poses the question:’ Why does the word ‘love’ persistently strike a chord which releases the word ‘death’ in Nilsen’s sentences?’ In summary, Nilsen’s biography is chillingly like Dahmer’s. In each case, excessive alcohol might have caused brain damage in regions that would normally offer restraint, as well as temporarily lifting inhibitions. Each individual craved intimate company that was denied them. A difference would seem to be that Nilsen had an early experience of a real image of death on which he imprinted and with which his emerging sexuality fused. Dahmer generated his own imagery.
General points
A study of some infamous cases points to the necessity to take a broad perspective. The role of biology is implicated in consideration of epilepsy and possible brain damage by traumatic accident (Sounes, 1995) and/or the toxic effect of drugs such as alcohol upon those brain processes that would normally restrain behaviour.
Consider the kind of societal variables that permit this behaviour to arise and why, in the form exemplified here, it is a modern phenomenon (Haggerty, 2009). The killings typically take place in large urban centres such as London, Los Angeles, Milwaukee and Seattle. Even in those pre-Internet days, pornography to cater for every taste was readily available. In such places, people often don’t even know who their next-door neighbour is, quite apart from what might constitute his night-time sexual proclivities. The victims were strangers to the killers, while the killers were often strangers to their environment themselves. The notion of a stranger is particularly evident in today’s society. In medieval Europe, a person might go for a life-time without ever meeting a stranger. With the exception of the case of Ramirez, the victims tended to be the easiest targets, the disadvantaged and dispossessed: drug-addicted sex workers, the homeless, those living in the poor parts of town and ethnic minorities. Ramirez and Ridgeway would have found life very difficult without a car and highways.
In some cases, the kind of discourse assimilated from society served to provide background props. This is exemplified by the ultimate feminist nightmare, the Hillside Stranglers, who were violent pimps, contemptuous of women, even while seeking them out for sex. In such paired killers there can doubtless be a bond of solidarity established by their shared attitudes, bravado and planning of operations, as well as each
holding a secret about the other (Sounes, 1995).
Looking at the sources of reinforcement for serial killers, these would appear to be multiple. Reinforcement deriving from the satiation of sexuality and (in most cases) anger would be the most obvious, combined with that which derives from ‘successful’ completion of an action. Another source of reinforcement for those such as Ramirez, Ridgeway and the Hillside Stranglers, where bodies were discovered periodically, would seem to be the media attention that was brought into their homes (Haggerty, 2009; O’Brien, 1985). Kenneth Bianchi, one of the Hillside Stranglers, even requested that the police take him on a conducted tour of the murder sites. Serial killers often collect news cuttings of features describing their activities (Rule, 1983, 2006). This again points to a factor that makes such serial killing a predominantly modern phenomenon. Some serial killers became almost overnight celebrities with fame before and after capture. A number basked in the dubious glory of being able to mislead and taunt the police (Rule, 2006; Wenzl et al., 2008). Given that in most cases they regarded themselves previously as non-entities, it is not altogether surprising that they revelled in fame afterwards. One can only imagine what a mention in the evening news would do for dopamine transmission and incentive salience, thereby helping to keep motivation alive and bridge the gap until the next killing. Press cuttings would serve a similar role. Dennis Rader, wrote (Wenzl et al., 2008, p. 65):
How Sexual Desire Works- The Enigmatic Urge Page 51
