by Colin Wilson
At the police station, Dahmer seemed glad that it was all over, and admitted that he was a cannibal and had been obsessed by dissection ever since he was a teenager, and had enjoyed stripping birds and small animals of their flesh to preserve their skeletons. And later, the same morbid obsession with dead things had led him to kill human beings.
He was eighteen, he explained, when he committed his first murder—when his parents were away, he had picked up a nineteen-year-old hitchhiker, Stephen Hicks, who sexually attracted him, and they sat in Dahmer’s home drinking beer and smoking pot. When Hicks said he had to go, Dahmer became oddly hysterical—he obviously found it worrying to be left alone—and struck Hicks on the head with a dumbbell. Then he undressed him and masturbated on the corpse. After dark he buried the body in the crawl space under the house, but later transferred it to a remote spot. He was almost caught when police stopped him for driving over the central line, but fortunately—for him—they failed to notice the parcels in the rear.
Unlike the majority of serial killers, who for the most part are from working-class backgrounds, Dahmer came from a comfortable middle-class home. But his parents quarreled constantly. He obviously suffered from a deep sense of insecurity and inferiority, partly because they seemed to prefer his younger brother, Dave.
After his first murder, Dahmer joined the army, but was discharged for drunkenness. He had always been a heavy drinker, obviously finding it an escape from reality. He moved in with his grandmother in West Allis, near Milwaukee, and took a job in a chocolate factory. He had recognized his homosexuality in his early teens, and his strange inner compulsions meant that he preferred to be alone, rather than trying to join the gay community. But in Milwaukee, where he was known as a monosyllabic loner, he was banned from a gay bar for slipping knockout drugs into drinks.
In 1986, when he was in his mid-twenties, he was arrested for exposing himself to two boys, and placed on probation. In September of the following year, he committed his second murder, going to a hotel room with a man named Stephen Tuomi, and apparently having normal sex with him before they fell asleep. In the middle of the night, Dahmer strangled Tuomi—he claimed that he had no memory of the murder, but simply woke up and found himself in bed with the body.
The murder certainly seems to have been unpremeditated. Dahmer had to go out and purchase a large suitcase, in which he succeeded in taking the body back to the basement of his grandmother’s house. There he dismembered it, and then left it out in garbage bags for collection. This was typical of the fifteen murders that followed between January 1988 and July 1991. He would pick up a young male, usually black, and invite him home—either to his grandmother’s or, after she had asked him to leave, to his own apartment on North Twenty-fourth Street. There the victim was rendered unconscious with a strong dose of a knockout drug in his alcohol, and undressed and strangled. Dahmer then dismembered the body, and disposed of it in garbage bags—although he also stored some of it in his refrigerator for cooking and eating.
Dahmer had already come close to being caught in September 1988, when he had picked up a thirteen-year-old Laotian boy named Keison Sinthasomphone and raped him in his apartment, after giving him drugged coffee. But the boy had succeeded in staggering out into the street and back to his home. The police were notified, and Dahmer was charged with second-degree sexual assault and sentenced to a year in a correction program, which allowed him to continue working in the chocolate factory.
Yet three years later, on May 26, 1991, Dahmer was able to pick up the younger brother of his earlier victim, Conerak Sinthasomphone, in the same shopping mall where he later picked up Tracy Edwards. Conerak was also given drugged coffee, and then stripped and raped. But when Dahmer went out to buy beer, the naked boy succeeded in escaping from the apartment, and stood talking to two black teenage girls, begging for help. Dahmer tried to grab the boy, but the girls clung on to him, and one of them succeeded in ringing the police. Two squad cars arrived shortly, but when Dahmer explained plausibly that the young man was his lover and that this was merely a lover’s quarrel, the police escorted Conerak back to Dahmer’s apartment and left him there to be murdered and dismembered. When this was finally revealed after Dahmer’s arrest, it caused a scandal that shook the Milwaukee Police Department.
In March 1990, Dahmer was released from the correctional center in which he was serving his sentence for the earlier rape. By that time he had already killed five times. On March 13, 1990, he moved into the Oxford Apartments, and during the next eighteen months killed twelve more victims, the last two in just over two weeks, between July 5 and July 22, 1991, the day of his arrest.
Dahmer had almost been caught after his second murder, that of Eddie Smith, on June 14, 1990. He had invited a fifteen-year-old Hispanic youth back to his apartment, but, for some reason, decided to try to knock him unconscious with a rubber mallet instead of the usual drugged drink. The youth fought back, and managed to reach the door. Dahmer let him go after making him promise not to tell the police. The young man broke his promise, but when he begged the police not to let his foster parents know that he was gay, they decided to do nothing about it. So once more, Dahmer managed to escape to kill again.
In the summer of 1991, the revelations about the apartment full of corpses filled the front pages week after week, and made worldwide headlines. In January 1992, Dahmer appeared in court charged with fifteen murders. He made no attempt at defense, and was sentenced to fifteen terms of life imprisonment. Asked how he felt about being in prison, he remarked: “I couldn’t find any meaning for my life when I was out there. I’m sure as hell not going to find it in here.”
Robert Ressler happened to be in Milwaukee lecturing at a university at the time of Dahmer’s arrest, and was asked if he would testify for the defense, who had decided on an insanity plea. His own feeling was that although Dahmer was not entirely innocent, the odd mixture of “organization” and “disorganization” in his crimes made it arguable that he was not entirely sane. This is why he went twice to interview Dahmer in prison. The result shed some interesting light on Dahmer and his motivation. One of the most interesting comments entered the conversation almost by accident. He asks Dahmer if he ever committed violence in his early years, to which the reply was no, but there was violence against him, and he went on to tell how, on his way home from school he was approached by three seniors, and had a feeling that they were hostile. “Sure enough, one of them just took out a billy club and whacked me on the back of the head.” Ressler does not pursue this. But when, a few moments later, he asks when Dahmer became interested in dissecting animals, Dahmer says that it was at the age of sixteen, after he had been hit on the head. It started in a biology class, when they were dissecting a baby pig.
Since so many serial killers have received skull injuries, it is inevitable to wonder if the beginning of his obsession with death and corpses was the blow on the head. By coincidence it was also the end. Dahmer was murdered in a Wisconsin jail on November 28, 1994; he was struck on the head with an iron bar by a fellow convict called Christopher Scarver, who explained that he believed he was the Son of God.
In the 1990s, I became involved in correspondence with the “Gainesville Ripper,” Danny Rolling, who, when he was in jail, had become engaged to Gerard Schaefer’s one-time fiancée Sondra London, now a well-known crime writer. He had written to her from Florida State Prison, where he was serving time for an attempted robbery of a supermarket store in Ocala, Florida.
It was not until January of the following year that the police had administered a blood test. Rolling’s DNA revealed that he was the man who had been involved in the sex murder of four young women on the campus of the University of Florida at Gainesville in the previous August. The crimes had caused such fear that half the students had gone home.
Sondra and Rolling entered into correspondence, and by Christmas 1992 had decided that they were in love. Finally, she was allowed to visit him, and the meeting confirmed their feelings. There
was, she told me, an instant and powerful physical attraction. Soon after this they announced their engagement.
This announcement, in February 1993, was featured in some newspapers next to a story claiming that he had confessed to the Gainesville murders to a fellow inmate, Robert Fieldmore Lewis.
Rolling looked an unlikely serial killer, thirty-eight years old, tall, good-looking, and articulate, a talented artist and guitar player, who looked more like a schoolteacher in his horn-rimmed glasses. But in due course he confessed to the Gainesville murders, and eventually, to three more.
Through Sondra, I came to write an introduction to Rolling’s autobiography, The Making of a Serial Killer, which is how I came to exchange a few letters with him. He told me that had no doubt that he had been possessed by some demonic force when he committed the murders. It sounds like the typical excuse made by a killer; yet after studying the case, I came close to believing him.
Rolling was born in 1954 in Shreveport, Louisiana, the son of a police sergeant who had been a war hero. Unfortunately, James Rolling was also another of Van Vogt’s Right Men. Such men, as already noted, are usually family tyrants. Rolling senior seems to have had no love for his son, and lost no opportunity of telling him he was stupid and worthless.
Rolling also went into the military, but just before he was scheduled to go to Vietnam, was caught with drugs and discharged. He was dismayed, for he had been enjoying military life. His father was furious and disgusted with him. But Danny then had a religious conversion, and married a fellow member of the Pentecostal Church. Unfortunately, he was unable to get rid of a habit he had acquired in childhood of peering through windows at women undressing. When he was caught, the marriage began to disintegrate.
On the day he was served his divorce papers, he committed his first sex attack, breaking into a house and raping a young woman who was alone. He felt so remorseful that the next morning he made his way back to her house to apologize—then saw two grim, powerfully built men come out, and changed his mind. But soon after that he committed his first armed robbery. And it was not long before he was serving his first jail term.
The brutality and violence of prison life in the South shocked him. Blacks and whites hated one another and often killed one another. He was nearly gang-raped in the shower by a group of blacks.
Free once more, he now experienced a compulsion to commit rape. He admits in his book that what he enjoyed was the surrender of the terrified girl, the sense of power; it was balm to his bruised ego. Another period in jail only confirmed his self-image as a desperate criminal.
Back in his hometown in 1989, he began peeping through the window of a pretty model named Julie Grissom. One day, after missing work for three days in a row, he was fired from his job in a restaurant. He reacted just as he had reacted years earlier to his divorce papers. On November 1989, he crept into the backyard of the Grissom household, where he had formerly played Peeping Tom. Undeterred by the fact that there were three people in the house—Julie Grissom’s father and her eight-year-old nephew—he burst in and tied up all three at gunpoint with duct tape. Then he stabbed to death the boy and the elder man, dragged Julie into the bathroom and raped her against the sink, forcing her to say, “Fuck my pussy, daddy.” After making her climb in the bath so he could wash out her vagina with a hosepipe, he stabbed her to death. He left after taking $200.
By now he was convinced that he had two “demons,” one a robber and rapist called “Ennad,” and the other a killer called “Gemini.”
A violent quarrel with his father ended with James Rolling trying to shoot him, and with Danny shooting his father and leaving him for dead. In fact, James Rolling survived, minus one eye. Rolling committed more armed robberies and rapes, and then traveled to Gainesville, where he bought a tent and pitched it in the woods.
There were more voyeuristic activities—on some occasions he stripped naked while he peeped. On August 24, 1990, he broke into an apartment shared by two seventeen-year-olds, Christina Powell and Sonja Larson, who were both asleep. He stabbed Sonja to death in her bed. Then he went downstairs and woke up Christina on the sofa, and at gunpoint taped her hands. After raping her he stabbed her to death, making her lie on her face while he did it. He left both bodies positioned for maximum shock value.
Two evenings later he broke into the apartment of eighteen-year-old Christa Hoyt (on whom he had been spying), and waited for her to return home. When she did, he overpowered her, and raped and stabbed her to death, also disemboweling her and cutting off her head. When police arrived on the scene, they were horrified to find her headless body seated on the edge of her bed, her severed nipples beside her.
Two days later, Rollings broke into an apartment shared by two students, Tracy Paules and Manuel Taboada, both twenty-three. The latter was stabbed as he lay asleep. Tracy Paules heard sounds of struggle and came to see what was happening. Rolling chased her to her bedroom, tied her up and raped her, afterwards stabbing her to death as she lay facedown.
The murders caused widespread panic; thousands of students left campus for Labor Day weekend; only seven hundred returned. By then Rolling had already moved south, living by burglary and armed robbery.
On August 27, 1990, a bare-chested, ski-masked bandit robbed the First Union Bank a half mile down the road from Hoyt’s apartment. Two witnesses later recognized Rolling from the muscle-definition of his chest.
On September 7, driving a Ford Mustang taken after his last burglary, Rolling stopped in Ocala, Florida, and walked into the crowded Winn-Dixie supermarket at midday. He strolled up to the location manager, Randy Wilson, pointed a .38 at his head and demanded the money from the cash drawer. Then he called to the girls to empty their registers.
Rolling asked: “Where’s the safe?”
“In my office.”
“Let’s go.” They went up two steps into the office.
Meanwhile, the store’s bookkeeper, who was returning from an errand, was notified at the entrance that the store was being robbed. She ran into the dry cleaner next door. “Can I use your phone? We’re being robbed.”
As Rolling left the store with a bag of money, the manager followed him, and watched him turn into the back lot behind the store. A crowd of shoppers pointed. “He went that way.” By now a police car had arrived and Wilson directed them.
When Rolling reached his stolen car, the police were right behind him. The high-speed chase that followed ended when Rolling wrecked the car. He fled into a nearby building, through to the back, and into the parking lot. The police were there waiting for him. He ignored their order to freeze, and ran on. Finally, a tackle brought him down, and moments later he was in a squad car. Behind, in his stolen car, was the $4,700 he had taken. Within an hour he was behind bars.
It was in Florida State Prison that he met Robert Lewis, who had written a screenplay. When Danny asked him who was the Sondra London mentioned on the title page, Lewis explained that she was his editor. Danny, who felt that he too could become a writer, to while away the long years behind bars, asked for her address, and wrote to her.
In his hometown of Shreveport, authorities had noted the similarity between the murder of the Julie Grissom family and the Gainesville murders. Now the FBI’s VICAP came into operation, detailing the similarities.
In January 1991, Rolling was asked for a blood sample. The result revealed that the Gainesville Ripper and the killer of the Grissom family were the same person. Tried for the Gainesville murders in 1994, he was given five death sentences.
And why am I prepared to take seriously his claim of being “possessed” by a demonic entity?
In The Making of a Serial Killer, Rolling tells how he tried to enter the apartment of Christina Powell and Sonja Larson and found the door locked. He claims that he then prayed to “Gemini,” his demon, and that when he tried the door again, it was unlocked. And in a letter to me he described how, in his cell, a kind of gray gargoyle had leapt onto his chest, held him down with its claws, and thrust
its tongue down his throat. All this may, of course, be invention. Or it may be that Rolling really believes what he says. I am inclined to think that he does.
After thirty years studying the paranormal, I have slowly come to accept that “possession” can actually occur, and that it is not a fantasy dreamed up by the feeble-minded and the sex-starved.
But whether Rolling was possessed by some unpleasant paranormal entity is perhaps beside the point. As in the case of Ted Bundy, Rolling’s life typifies the development of a sex killer: the childhood voyeurism culminating in his first rape (which was committed in a state of rage at the prospect of divorce); the murder of the Grissoms, again committed in a state of anger and defiance; and then the orgy of rape and murder at Gainesville. It seems clear that, as in the case of Ted Bundy, rape and murder proved addictive. In a sense, Rolling was possessed—by his craving to violate and kill.
15
Sex Crime—The Beginnings
The Jack the Ripper murders, which took place in the East End of London in the autumn of 1888, are generally acknowledged to be the first sex murders in our modern sense of the term. But a century before that date, London was also the scene of the first crimes that we would regard as sexually abnormal—the series of knife attacks on women by a man who became known as the “London Monster.”
