The child was duly immunised against polio and smallpox (his measles inoculation would wait until he was three), and had his first accident at only a few weeks, when he fell from his spider walker, skinning his hands and cutting his chin. Dr Spyres said he would bear a small scar, thus joining the majority of mankind who bear early souvenirs of wobbly progress. Jeff’s first smile was recorded at a few weeks, he first stood up unaided at six and a half months, and by the time he reached eight and a half months he was crawling and showing his first tooth. He was even spanked at nine months (‘two pats on bottom’) and given his first haircut. A party was given in his honour on his first birthday. All in all, it is the unremarkable advance of a pretty, healthy, normal baby, with every promise of a happy childhood ahead of him. He showed a precocious interest in animals, having a goldfish and pet turtle when only eighteen months old. Jeff was ‘so very gentle with the turtle’, wrote his mother, as he explored, like many a little boy, his relationship with another living creature. There would be many more to follow the turtle. On 25 November, 1961, it is recorded that Jeff walked alone for the very first time. ‘I had to chase him to put him to bed,’ wrote Joyce proudly.
Not everything was necessarily as it appeared, however. Joyce did not take well to breast-feeding. Keeping to the demanding schedule made her irritable and nervous, so she gave it up and bound her breasts. She and Lionel argued, and she flounced out of the house. Lionel found her lying in a field of tall grass in her nightgown, and Dr Spyres had to scold her for being so intractable and petulant.
Of course, it is true that thousands of mothers in the Western world decline to feed their offspring at the breast, and one ought not to give the event greater weight than it deserves, but it may be instructive to imagine the effect upon the child of such a sudden withdrawal of sustaining contact. Some children will take it in their stride and be comforted by the bottle. Others may feel the abrupt change in their tactile world as a kind of rejection or distance, which they are, obviously, too young to interpret. Thus do the rejection and distance become incorporated, absorbed, into their view of their own place in the world, and gradually presumed natural and deserved, or just ‘right’. The mother, too, may not reflect that by denying her breast to the infant she is placing self before benevolence. Jeff’s early emotional development is naturally not recorded, yet it is noticeable how often, as an adult, he has said that he is not good at coping with disappointment.
The young family moved back to Milwaukee when Lionel began reading for his Master’s degree in Analytical Chemistry at Marquette University. It was clearly a sensible move to be near campus, but it was Lionel’s convenience then, as later, which was addressed. Joyce had to accept it. Her response was to declare the neighbours, once again, irksome. Noise of any intensity distressed her out of all proportion, especially if it was made by other people. She seemed to take it as a personal affront. Lionel was constantly having to speak to other tenants in the building to ask them to keep down their domestic rattle, to protect his wife’s health, an approach which they naturally regarded as unwarranted interference. To make up to Lionel for the embarrassment, Joyce was a most fastidious housekeeper, making sure that everything was in place and pleasant. She did expect praise for the effort, however. She needed perpetual reassurance that she was, indeed, loved.
By the time Jeff was two years old he was talking. He called himself ‘Jeffy’ and held fingers up to indicate his age. He could say ‘potty’, ‘Up pease’, and ‘TV’, and within a few more months had memorised his first prayer. (Lionel was a committed and devout Lutheran.) The words of the prayer were, ‘Now lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. God bless everyone. Make Jeffy a good boy. Amen.’
In 1962 Lionel gained his M.Sc. degree and was accepted at Iowa State University to do postgraduate work towards a doctorate of philosophy. This involved another upheaval for the family, as they had to move again. They found a small house in Ames, Iowa, and took it. At first, it was almost entirely bare of furniture (the apartment in Milwaukee had been rented furnished), but Jeff didn’t seem to mind. He was ‘completely content in his bare room with doggie, muggsie, and his bed’, wrote Joyce; the references are to soft toys which Aunt Eunice, Lionel’s sister, had bought for him. There was also a brand new pet in Jiffy the Squirrel, who came to the window-sill looking for food, and did not run away. Mother and son were photographed pointing at Jiffy; this kind of nature-fun did not happen in urban Milwaukee, and the child was fascinated. Soon he was watching all kinds of small animals and insects to see what they would do.
When Jeff went to nursery school in Ames, he was, says his mother, very shy. This is a word she would have cause to use many times in the future. Because he was called ‘new boy’ all the time, he imagined that such was his adopted name in this strange surrounding. The teacher gave him a pet grey mouse, but this was insufficient to conquer his timidity, and he did not care for school in the slightest. It seemed he had difficulty relating to other boys, that he did not quite know how to belong; he was awkward, ill at ease. He had trouble getting his boots on and off, and the teacher would not help him. The frustration made him cry.
At the end of 1963, he was treated for an ear infection and mild pneumonia, and his parents were told that an eye would have to be kept on his hernia condition – an operation might become necessary. Meanwhile, there was a lovely Christmas, at which Lionel dressed up as Santa Claus to the intense delight of little Jeff, who touched his beard and tummy wonderingly. A few weeks afterwards, however, it was obvious that the hernia needed treatment, and the little boy was taken to hospital in a state of some apprehension. As it happened, it was necessary to perform a double hernia operation, which would be harsh enough for an adult and was quite terrifying to a four-year-old. Jeffrey remembers being in the hospital with several other children watching a programme called Bewitched; this was presumably before the operation. Surgery was performed on 19 March, 1964.
When he recovered from the anaesthetic, all he would be aware of was intense pain in the groin. Twenty-seven years later, he told Dr Judith Becker that the pain was so great he thought his genitals must have been cut off. Indeed, that is precisely how it would feel, and one wonders how much was explained to him. Apparently he asked his mother if he still had his private parts, although we do not know what she replied. In her diary, she noted that Jeff was ‘so good in hospital . . . [but] he really disliked the doctor after this ordeal’. Joyce spent as much time as she could with him. At night, he would say to her, ‘You can go home now, Mommy, I’ll sleep.’ The pain lasted for about a week. He never forgot it. One may well wonder, in view of the boy’s later disturbance and the florid nature of its manifestation, whether this operation was perhaps disproportionately significant in his life. The deep cut in a sensitive area, the exploration of his inside, the feeling that foreign hands were invading his privacy, would all find uncomfortable echoes at a later date. For a very long time, this would be the most intimate event of his life.
The boy was by no means friendless, but he remained curiously shy. Sometimes it broke Joyce’s heart to send him to school, looking so forlorn and frightened – he would sometimes cry. She moved him into Whittier School at the age of five, where he caught the daily school bus with a boy called Kent. After school and at weekends, together with other boys he explored the neighbourhood. It was a low-income area, with a long tunnel under the bridge which they liked to explore because it was dark and spooky. He had one black friend and one white, who lived across the railroad tracks; he had to walk under the tunnel to get to them. The houses were spread out, with large distances between them, and many of them were deserted and derelict, as if nobody wanted to live there any more. The temptation to be naughty with impunity by throwing bricks through the windows of empty houses, and then running for one’s life, was too much to resist, and one day the police came to the Dahmers’ door to complain that young Jeff was one of a gang of tearabouts. Lionel and Joyce were ashamed. They scolded him, an
d that was that. He was not thrashed.
‘When I was a little kid I was just like anybody else,’ he now says.1 He spent a lot of time playing in apple trees or on piles of coal, would come home filthy, covered in coal dust, and earn another scolding. On the outskirts of Ames, Iowa, was a research centre where all kinds of barnyard animals were kept for study, and Jeff would often spend time in there watching and staring. With hindsight he worked out that it was some kind of radiation testing place, but at the time it was just a magical world of living creatures. The men who worked there wore rubber gloves right up to their armpits, and he once saw a man with his arm right inside a cow’s rear end. Then one day he spotted a large, long deserted building, the steps of which were littered with dead mice and rats. Curiosity overcame him. ‘I walked up and wanted to see if the door was unlocked. I pushed the door open. I’ve never seen so many rats and mice running for the corners in my life. The whole floor was complete movement, it was just covered with them. I ran out of there pretty quick. They came out of the door, too.’2
In a crack in one of the deserted buildings Jeff found a hornets’ nest. He told a little black neighbourhood boy to put his hand in there and see what he found, there might be ladybugs. The boy obliged and was seriously stung, running home to tell his mother he had been bitten by ladybugs. ‘It was a rotten thing to do. That was when I was four or five, I think.’3 Still, his fascination with animals and insects grew unabated. Snakes, toads, crabs, turtles, fish, wild rabbits, and a kitten called Buff fed his curiosity and imagination. Once he was riding on a bicycle with his father through a parking lot on the research centre when they spotted what looked like a ball of dust. At least that’s what Lionel said it was. But Jeff knew better and looked closer – it was a baby nighthawk. They took it home and raised it. ‘It was almost like a pet. It would come back when you called it, eat out of your hand and stuff like that. We called him “Dusty”.’ The bird stayed until it was strong enough to fly, and then, said Joyce, ‘it responded to our whistle even after it was gone three days’.
At about the same time, Jeff found some bones under the house, in what is called the ‘crawlspace’, and thought them altogether astonishing. He called them his ‘fiddlesticks’, and played with them endlessly. When he held some of his animals, he could feel their ‘fiddlesticks’ inside, and wondered if they looked the same.
1966 was an important year for the whole family. In the first place, Joyce’s hypersensitivity, depression, and need for arguments were increasing. She would make a fuss over trivia in order to earn the pleasure of reconciliation with her husband. She began to take pills to calm herself down, and double the dosage when they failed to give her the peace she desired. There was even an occasion when she may have tried to commit suicide with an overdose of Seconal, but it is just as likely that she threw them down her throat without proper care. She then turned to Equanil three times a day. Joyce was progressively becoming a desperate woman, and her consumption of medicines would increase alarmingly over the next few years. She felt that Lionel was too wrapped up in his studies to notice how difficult life could be, or how nice she made the house for him. Lionel, to be fair, was ridiculously overworked, not only reading for his doctorate, but doing the shopping as well, since Joyce did not have a driving licence. He also did some of the housework when she was laid low with nervous exhaustion and pills. Jeff sometimes saw his father hit his mother when she was screaming and he felt she needed to be calmed, but never brutally and never with malice. The domestic scene was by no means unusual or malignant. Oddly, however, the teacher’s report from the school at Ames stated, without giving any evidence, that she thought Jeff felt neglected. Perhaps the rows were so absorbing of energy and concentrated on themselves that a third-party witness, especially a child, may have felt himself to be superfluous.
Joyce then found two solutions to her problems. (One has the impression that Joyce, the more vulnerable and brittle partner, usually had to work her own way out of depression and make decisions to which Lionel mildly assented, yet her personality was hardly sound enough to bear the consequences of decision-making.) First, she discovered the Church of Christ, and had both herself and her husband baptised in that faith. This, said Lionel, made their life together more equable. Second, she told Lionel that she wanted another child. Perhaps he weighed the alternatives, that the strain of extra responsibility might overwhelm her, that on the other hand the joy might replenish her spirit. Whatever the case, it was always easier to acquiesce, and Lionel wanted a quiet life. So they abandoned protection, and Joyce quickly found herself pregnant again.
At the same time, Lionel received his doctorate and began looking for a job. He found an appointment as research chemist with Pittsburgh Plate and Glass Company, but it was in Ohio, and the family would need to get up and go again. For Jeff, this meant giving up his pets, whom he knew he would not see again. The cat Buffy had to be sold. He told neither his mother nor his father what were his feelings about this, nor did he ever talk about them. Jeffrey Dahmer was becoming progressively more withdrawn, remote, private. The combined inheritance of his father’s aloofness and his mother’s morose sensitivity were beginning to cancel his own personality, to negate it, as it were, before its development was complete. Like his mother, he was dangerously self-centred; like his father, he was unnaturally reticent. He became silent and broody as a result.
For the moment, however, the anticipation of a new brother deflected Jeff’s absorption with himself. He was anxious it should be a boy, so that he could play with him, and, wrote Joyce to his grandparents, ‘he has very definite ideas about names’. Joyce would hold his head close to her stomach, that he might feel the baby, and Jeff would pat her tummy ‘so that the baby will know it has a brother’. Indeed, he appears to have been excited at the prospect of the birth, and thanked her fulsomely for being pregnant!
The Dahmers moved to Doylestown, Ohio, in October 1966, and her second child, a boy, was born on 18 December. It was Jeff, now six years old, who chose the name for his brother – David. Both before and after the birth, Joyce was laid low with depression, which somewhat undermined the joyfulness of the occasion, and Jeff noticed the gloom in the house. He had, however, a new interest in Frisky, a cheerful and playful dog which his parents got for him to compensate for the loss of the pets he left behind. ‘That was nice to have a companion like that,’ he recalled. ‘We’d go out and play in the fields, run around, she was a good dog to have.’ He was not jealous of his new brother in the smallest degree. Joyce feared he might be. ‘More adjusting for Jeff,’ she wrote, ‘but he loves Davy and is good to him. Frisky comes first in his heart, though. They really romp and play.’
The sojourn in Doylestown did not last long. Once again, Joyce said she could not stand the noise the neighbours made, and they would have to move. (It was a rural area, so the neighbours would have to be pretty loud to be heard at all.) She begged Lionel to get her more pills when she had run out, clutching his wrists and saying she could not survive without them. Worried and obedient, Lionel found a house for rent in Barberton, Ohio, and the family moved in a few months after having arrived in Doylestown. Fortunately, Jeff did not have to leave Frisky behind. The new neighbours (whom Joyce apparently accepted) built a dog house in the back yard for Frisky.
Jeff did not care for school in Barberton, and was not good at giving his trust to a whole new set of friends. There did take place, however, an incident which is of interest for several reasons. A number of boys were ‘horsing around’ and it was suggested, wholly in jest, that they should try and see what it was like to choke one another. This is a common enough game among infants, and offers them an opportunity for intimate tactile contact while avoiding the embarrassment of seeking affection. It is even, in its embryonic way, a sexual experience – the hands on the neck, the closeness of the breath, the feeling of danger and secrecy, the anticipation of rebuke – though never, of course, recognised as such by the infants. One little boy, whom Jeff regarded as
friendly, invited him to pretend to strangle him, and promised that he would not tell the teacher. So Jeff put his hands around the boy’s neck, and squeezed. The other boy went straight to the teacher and reported him, whereupon Jeff received ten whacks with a paddle on the backside. There is no suggestion, here or anywhere, that young Dahmer derived any more pleasure from the experience than as a schoolboy prank. What matters is the bestowal of trust, which is then rejected as non-serious or unworthy. Dahmer remembers that he felt ‘betrayed’.
A salient characteristic of the schizoid personality is the total inability to offer trust to anyone, for fear of its being misprized, scorned, or even received and accepted, for then the donor becomes vulnerable and exposed. It is already clear that the young Dahmer was showing signs which could be interpreted as schizoid. An understanding of trust develops slowly in the child from the first day of life, through trial and error, and enables him to realise his place in the world and his responsibilities towards it. Decline into a totally trust-free, isolated, schizoid state is rare, but its seeds are easily sown, and its crop can be devastating.
There was a teacher at school in Barberton whom Jeff liked. ‘I kind of got attached to her, so I thought I’d catch some tadpoles and give them to the teacher as a present. She said thank you and acted like she thought it was a great gift, so that made me happy.’ In school a day or two later, he couldn’t see them in class. ‘I wondered where the tadpoles had gone. She used to keep them on the window-ledge in the school, and then they were gone. I just figured she had taken them home or something.’ He then went to see a friend his own age who lived behind the house, and there, in the garage, were the tadpoles, in the very same container. He could hardly believe it. He felt betrayed again, then angry. He poured motor-oil into the container and killed all the tadpoles. ‘If she doesn’t want them, no one will have them,’ he thought. Again, it is not the obvious value of the incident which matters – the two boys were friends again within days and the tactless teacher was ignored – but its cumulative, secret, subterranean effect.
The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer Page 4
