The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer

by Brian Masters

  In the hallway stood a closet in which were found, together with bedding, some chemicals (formaldehyde, ether, chloroform), and two bleached skulls on a shelf. On the floor at the back of the closet was a large aluminium kettle containing two human hands, obviously from the same person because they matched, and human genitals including penis, testicles and the pubic hair region. The bedroom was seen to have a single bed with a mattress stained with blood, as well as some blood on the walls and pillow-case. The large knife to which Tracy Edwards had alerted the police officers was still lying beneath the bed, while on top was a Polaroid camera. Next to the bed was a metal filing-cabinet. When this was opened it revealed, in the top drawer, three human skulls lying on a black towel. The police officers noted that they had been painted green with black flecks, but the Medical Examiner reported that they were painted and glazed to ‘a dark gray marble-like texture’, and that the towel upon which they rested was dark blue. The bottom drawer of this cabinet contained a complete human skeleton, and in front of it were two paper bags: one held the dried remains of a human scalp, and the other a second set of genitals, also dried and mummified.

  On the floor next to the chest of drawers was a box with a Styrofoam lid, in which were two more skulls, and in the far corner was the 57-gallon blue plastic drum with a tight-fitting black lid, removed by a private contractor hired by the Fire Department’s Hazardous Materials Unit. This was later discovered to contain three human torsos in various stages of dismemberment and decomposition. In the chest of drawers which Rolf Mueller had found open when he first went into the bedroom were original photographs of a particularly repellent nature. When they were counted, it was found there were seventy-four of them.

  The decor of Jeffrey Dahmer’s life was labelled, catalogued and carted away with the most painstaking care. A photo album, a black ceramic coffee cup, an empty can of Budweiser beer, an empty bottle of Paramount rum, an empty paper lunch-bag lying on the occasional table by the couch in the living room – the fragile, dumb debris of ordinary life jostled with the curious and the sinister. A one-gallon jug of Clorox bleach was no longer as innocent as it might have been, and a bottle of ‘Odorsorb’ suggested long battles with unnaturally polluted air. Incense sticks had probably served a similar purpose. There were fifty envelopes from Woolworth’s, a tube of acne lotion, a shaving kit, an Oral-B toothbrush, the lease form for the rental of Apartment 213, a library card bearing the name of Jeff Dahmer, a pair of men’s black nylon shorts. The business card of Lionel Dahmer, Ph.D., was the first indication that the suspect had a family, while various identity cards littered on the kitchen floor, the bedroom floor, and in drawers, poignantly gave names to some of the heads and limbs that had once been people. An identity card in the name of Oliver Lacy, a Wisconsin driver’s licence in the name of Tony Hughes, and an Illinois driver’s licence in the name of Joseph Bradehoft supplied the initial clues in the investigation, and since Oliver Lacy’s I.D. bore a photograph and was the first positive identification, the entire homicide file would be listed under his name. It was Lacy’s head which lay in the box in the refrigerator, his heart which was in the bag, his skeleton which was in the freezer.

  A few items held significance which would not be revealed until much later. One large hypodermic needle appeared mysterious, and a contact lens cleaning kit quite innocuous, but they had both played a role in the wild distracted turmoil of Dahmer’s life. So had two plastic gargoyle figurines recovered from the living room, and chemical-resistant gloves next to gallons of muriatic acid and six boxes of Soilex cleaner. The purpose of the three-eighth inch drill and one-sixteenth inch drill bits was yet unclear, although the claw hammer and handsaw gave rise to no such doubts. And still, in crazy juxtaposition to this grim inventory were items suggestive of decency and goodness. A King James Version Bible, for example, audio cassettes on Creation Science and the Bible, and other tapes entitled The Genesis Flood and The Bible, Science, and the Age of the Earth. There were further audio tapes explaining Numerology and the Divine Triangle, and a learning kit, in tapes and books, in Latin. Finally, there were four books on the care of fish and aquariums, and a beautifully kept aquarium itself, clean and wholesome, full of living plants and daintily exotic fish.2

  While all this was being sifted, searched and photographed by police officers, Jeff Dahmer’s telephone rang. Detective Michael Dubis answered it. On the line was Jeff’s father, Lionel Dahmer, calling from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he worked. He had been trying to reach his son for a couple of days without success. Was anything wrong? Detective Dubis assured Dr Dahmer that his son was alive and well, and uninjured. He forebore to disclose why he and his colleagues were in the apartment, but said that somebody from the Criminal Investigation Bureau would be in touch with Dr Dahmer later in the day. The father had always feared his son’s feeble hold on life and reality might collapse; he had been in trouble with the police before, for indecent exposure and indecent assault on a minor, and Dr Dahmer had pleaded with the authorities to make sure he was treated. So it looked as if something else had happened, Jeff had blown it again! Not in his most disease-induced dreams could the mild and shy industrial chemist have imagined just how much Jeff had ‘blown it’.

  Nor, indeed, could anyone have suspected that the police had been to Apartment 213 at 924 North 25th Street on three previous occasions, at least once while a dead body had been lying in the adjacent room. Even more alarming, that they had delivered one of the victims into Dahmer’s arms. But this is to anticipate. There are more than an ordinary number of coincidences, ironies, and uncomfortable surprises in this astonishing story, and they must await their place. For the moment, it was surprise enough that there appeared to be an enormous gulf which separated Jeff Dahmer the man from the appalling deeds which he was now rapidly and openly admitting. Detective Dennis Murphy took over the major part of listening to Dahmer’s confession on 23 July, and their talks together lasted a total of sixty hours.

  Murphy is a solid and reliable man, unexcitable, sensible and decent, and he soon formed a useful rapport with the suspect which enabled them both to relax in the midst of these tales of madness. He liked Dahmer. He appreciated his frankness, his lack of guile, and his shame. They were both private and undemonstrative. Though Dahmer gave no outward show of emotion, though he spoke in a flat monotone which made him seem callously indifferent to the damage he had wrought, Detective Murphy sensed that it was the inability to express emotion rather than the crude denial of it which lay at the root of Dahmer’s seemingly offensive blandness. It took him three days to be able to talk without averting his eyes. The detective fell quite naturally into the habit of calling his interlocutor ‘Jeff’, as did several of the psychiatrists who were later to interview him (and for which one of them was chided in court). As will become clear, it is one of the characteristics of a certain kind of aberrant mental condition that it must smother emotion until it withers. Dennis Nilsen, another murderer convicted of crimes startlingly similar to those with which Dahmer was charged, ruminated on his own fate: ‘Nature makes no provision for emotional death,’ he wrote.3

  Over the next two weeks, Dahmer looked at scores of photographs of missing persons in an effort to identify the people who died at his hands. For Detective Murphy, it was an essential job, part of the task for which he had been trained. For Dahmer, it became a frantic personal quest for a scrap of self-esteem. He would not rest, could not sleep, until the last one had his name restored. Why was it so important that he find these people again? It was ‘to relieve the minds of the parents’, he said. ‘I mean, it’s a small, very small thing, but I don’t know what else I could do. At least I can do that.’ He did not want the parents of missing young men to wonder and gnaw at their hearts for years to come, if he could at least tell them what happened, ‘because I created this horror and it only makes sense that I do everything to put an end to it, a complete end to it.’4 Detectives Murphy and Kennedy deliberately included among the photographs some of yo
ung men whom they knew to be alive, in an attempt to test Dahmer’s veracity. He never once hesitated over the picture of somebody he had never met, and all the identifications were secured with his help. Indeed, some of them would never have been identified without him; apart from dental records matching to the skulls of some, Jeff Dahmer was virtually the investigation’s only source.

  Jeffrey L. Dahmer killed seventeen people. The first two did not give rise to charges against him, one because he was murdered in Ohio, therefore without the jurisdiction of the State of Wisconsin, the second because there was no evidence – no human remains and no memory of what had occurred, merely an identification from a photograph. On 25 July, 1991, just two days after his arrest, Dahmer was charged with four counts of first-degree intentional homicide, and held on bail of $1 million. On 6 August, he faced eight more murder counts and bail was raised to $5 million. On 22 August, the three last murder charges were brought against him, making a total of fifteen. In the Criminal Complaint they were listed as two counts of first-degree murder and thirteen counts of first-degree intentional homicide, but the distinction is merely one of language; they are the same offence, the Wisconsin Statutes having changed the nomenclature before the date of the third murder.

  Here, then, are the bald facts of the indictment:

  1. Late at night on 17 January, 1988, Jeff Dahmer met a young man called James Doxtator, and murdered him at his grandmother’s house in West Allis. Doxtator’s mother reported him missing on 18 January, 1988.

  2. About two months later, on 27 March, 1988, Jeff Dahmer encountered Richard Guerrero, aged twenty-three, and killed him at his grandmother’s house. His father, Pablo Guerrero, reported him missing to the Milwaukee Police Department on 29 March and placed announcements in the local press with his son’s picture. He heard nothing.

  3. A year later, at closing time on 25 March, 1989, Jeff Dahmer met two men outside a bar called La Cage, a white man by the name of Jeffrey Connor, and a twenty-four-year-old black man named Anthony Sears. It was Sears who made the approach. Connor drove them both to the corner of 56th Street and Lincoln, in West Allis, and from there Sears and Dahmer walked to Catherine Dahmer’s house, where Dahmer murdered him. His skull, scalp and genitals were discovered in Dahmer’s apartment at the time of his arrest over two years later.

  4. On 20 May, 1990, Dahmer met a thirty-three-year-old black man called Raymond Smith and drugged and strangled him at his apartment. One of the painted skulls found upon Dahmer’s arrest was identified as Smith’s.

  5. On 24 June, 1990, Dahmer met a twenty-seven-year-old black man, Edward Smith, at the Phoenix Bar. They went to Dahmer’s apartment by taxi, had oral sex together, then Smith was drugged and strangled. No remains of Edward Smith were ever found.

  6. Outside a homosexual bookstore on North 27th Street at the beginning of September, 1990, Dahmer fell into conversation with a twenty-three-year-old black man from Chicago – Ernest Miller. Miller consented to accompany Dahmer to his apartment, where he was killed. His skull was painted and his entire skeleton kept for future use. Both were discovered on the day of Dahmer’s arrest.

  7. Three weeks later, Dahmer met David Thomas, a twenty-two-year-old black man, and killed him at his apartment. The following day David Thomas was taken to pieces and photographed in the process. No remains were ever found. He was reported missing by his girlfriend on 24 September, and identified by his sister from photographs Dahmer had taken during dismemberment.

  8. At 4 p.m. on 17 February, 1991, Dahmer met a seventeen-year-old black man, Curtis Straughter, and murdered him by strangulation with a leather strap. He was then dismembered. Dahmer kept his skull, hands and genitals and photographed them. They were in his apartment when he was arrested. Straughter had been reported missing by his grandmother, and his skull was identified from dental records.

  9. On 7 April, 1991, a black man not long past his nineteenth birthday, Errol Lindsey, spoke to Jeffrey Dahmer at 27th Street near the homosexual bookstore, and went with him to his apartment. Lindsey was drugged and strangled. Dahmer flayed the body and kept the skin for some weeks. The skull was discovered at the time of his arrest, enabling identification through dental records.

  10. Tony Hughes was a year older than Dahmer. He was black, and he was deaf and dumb. They met at the 219 Club on 24 May, and communicated by writing, although Hughes could also lip-read. The mute was drugged, strangled, and left to lie on the bedroom floor for three days. His identity was established by one of the skulls and dental records.

  11. Dahmer met Konerak Sinthasomphone, the fourteen-year-old son of Laotian immigrants, outside a shopping centre known as the Grand Avenue Mall on 27 May, and offered him money to go home. Konerak accepted, and posed for two photographs in his underwear, before being drugged and murdered.

  12. A month went by before Dahmer murdered again. On 30 June he went to the Gay Pride Parade in Chicago and met a twenty-year-old black man, Matt Turner, at the bus station afterwards. He invited Turner to come to Milwaukee. They travelled by Greyhound bus, then took a taxi to the apartment, where Dahmer strangled him. Turner’s head was found in the freezer, his internal organs were stuck to the freezer floor, and his torso was inside the blue drum in the bedroom.

  13. One week later, again in Chicago, Dahmer met Jeremiah Weinberger, a twenty-three-year-old Puerto Rican with Jewish blood, at Carol’s Gay Bar. They went by bus to Milwaukee, and then by taxi to the apartment. Weinberger was reported missing the following day, 6 July, but he was still alive and staying with Dahmer. It was not until the third day that Dahmer slew him. The improbable details of their two days together were not revealed until the trial. Weinberger’s head was in the freezer, his torso in the big blue drum with Turner’s.

  14. On 15 July, Dahmer met Oliver Lacy, under whose name the murder investigation was filed, on 27th Street. Lacy was black and twenty-four years old. Dahmer drugged and strangled him. He took various photographs of his victim before and after decapitation. His head and skeleton were found in the freezer, his heart in the refrigerator.

  15. It was four days later, on 19 July, that Dahmer encountered a white man called Joseph Bradehoft from Greenville, Illinois. Bradehoft was drugged and strangled. He was left on the bed, covered in a sheet, for two days. When Dahmer was arrested three days later, Bradehoft’s head was sitting in the freezer, his torso was lying in the 57-gallon blue drum, along with Turner’s and Weinberger’s.

  The day before Jeff Dahmer jumped off the bus to entice Joseph Bradehoft to his apartment, he had seen and spoken to Tracy Edwards, the man who would bring about his downfall. He saw him again on 20 July, the day following Bradehoft’s death. It was two days later that Edwards agreed to go home with Dahmer and thereby unleash the dramatic events which led to the revelations of that night, detailed above. An account of precisely how the meeting took place, why it took place, and what ensued from it, belongs to a later stage in this narrative, as we attempt to understand to what state and condition Jeff Dahmer had by then descended. As his defence counsel was to emphasise, Edwards is a crucial witness, for he alone is able to relate what Dahmer was like as he prepared to kill (although there are others, as we shall see, who spent time with the man and lived). It is for this reason that he was brought to Milwaukee to give evidence, and that he was so brutally cross-examined by counsel for the prosecution.

  If the grotesque and deplorable fate of those fifteen men has been reduced to cold summary in the pages above, it is for a reason. There is much more to say about them, and it will be said. There is also much more to tell concerning the cruel indignities to which they were subjected, both before and after death, and it will be told. But these are matters which excite feelings of horror and revulsion, and such feelings are a poor basis on which to found judgement and careful appraisal of the implications. The question of Dahmer’s responsibility for what he did rested upon how far he was able to control his behaviour. The prosecution would assert that he was at all times in complete control of himself
and his surroundings, that he was, in short, a selfish and callous killer. The defence would agree that he was selfish, but would hold that there was nothing he could do about it, because he was in the grip of a relentless devouring compulsion. There is support for both points of view in the summaries given above. In the first place, it is clear that Dahmer chose his victims carefully and that he planned their destruction with cunning precision – the evidence for deliberation and premeditation. On the other hand, it is equally clear that the incidents multiplied in frequency until they were treading upon one another’s heels in a frenzy of unfocused caprice – the evidence for compulsion. To determine which carries the greater weight, the reader must needs persevere with this catalogue of unspeakable deeds, and at the same time strive to think and feel what Dahmer might have been thinking and feeling in order to be driven to such depravity. In other words, behind the monster he must seek the man.

  I realise, of course, that this is a dangerous undertaking, and there are many who will take refuge in any manner of evasions rather than face it. Far more comfortable it is to point a finger and declare a devil than to call upon one’s own imagination to search into Jeffrey Dahmer’s world. This is because one’s imagination is a reflection of oneself, and even to admit that one may know Dahmer’s world is to acknowledge his similarity to ourselves, instead of happily harping upon his difference. How else are we to understand except by teasing out these nuggets of recognition? The reader must have something of the therapist who ‘draws on his own psychotic possibilities’, or he will flounder in the reassuring soup of ‘objectivity’.5 It is fear which lies behind this timidity, the fear of looking at a part of the human condition which is not only frightening, but shared. As Colin Wilson has neatly put it, ‘Our interest in murder is a form of stirring in our sleep.’6