The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer

by Brian Masters

  The court decreed that Mrs Dahmer should undergo a psychological evaluation in Akron, Ohio. Lionel sent the psychologist copious notes on her mental condition and the history of her addiction to medication, but he need not have bothered, for she was very agitated when talking with the doctor. He was informed about her nervous attacks and her stay as a mental in-patient, as well as her refusal to share the marital bed (she had told a neighbour that Lionel was ‘insatiable’). The psychologist noted that Joyce Dahmer suffered from ‘very severe emotional problems. She is constantly angry, frustrated and demanding in her interpersonal relationships. She insists on interpreting the motives of all those around her and seems to deny anyone’s right to discuss her own behaviour as it affects others.’ He also took note that she had recently ‘found’ herself by attending a women’s group at a Community Mental Health Center, and that, though Mr Dahmer was willing to seek further professional help for their marriage, she was not. Lionel seemed genuinely perplexed that Joyce should be so insistent on a divorce. More importantly, there was much discussion and worry over who, in the event, should have custody of David and where he would live, but no thought was ever given as to what should happen to Jeff, or where he would be expected to live.

  He was by now nearly eighteen, and perhaps old enough to look after himself, but it was significant that he was not consulted, and also that the Dahmers were so wrapped up in their squabble that they did not even notice how much their eldest son was now dangerously disconnected. ‘Maybe I started shutting down during the divorce proceedings,’ he said, disregarding for a moment that he had already withdrawn considerably before then. ‘It was my way of shutting out any painful thoughts, just taking an attitude of not caring or pretending not to care, to save myself the pain of what was going on with the divorce. Maybe it started then. That was effective, it worked.’5

  David was more overtly upset by the whole thing, being younger and less complex or introverted. Jeff’s response was characteristically solitary. He drank more and more, and nearly always alone. One of the teachers at Revere High School saw him sitting on the grass outside the parking lot, with a twelve-pack of beer in a brown paper bag. Three of the cans were already empty. The teacher, Mr Smesko, told Jeff that he really ought not to bring alcohol to school and that he would have to report the matter. Jeff told him that he was having ‘a lot of problems’ and that the guidance counsellor, Mr Kungle, knew all about it. The ‘problems’ were thought by both teachers to revolve around his parents’ divorce. They did not know that he was also struggling with dark thoughts in his head. Mr Smesko could not help noticing, not only that Jeff’s eyes were glossy and bloodshot, as one would expect him to observe, but also that the boy was ‘solemn and depressed’. It is not often that a teacher in the course of a routine reprimand should notice such a detail of mood.

  It is a wonder Jeff graduated at all. Failure, however, is not permitted in the United States if there is an acceptable way to disguise it, and in this case there was the general acknowledgement that he was an under-achiever; in other words, he would have passed with distinction had he really tried. Jeff was known to be an intelligent boy, capable of understanding propositions which might have been lost on other students – his I.Q. was 117. But equally, his perceptions were blunt and his involvement nil. Though he was capable of a greeting and some desultory small talk, his emotional isolation was impregnable. Thus was he slipped into graduation on very poor grades which ought, legitimately, to have failed him.

  The sequel to this was that he would participate in one of America’s hallowed traditions, the Senior High School Prom. The culmination of every high school career, the prom is a party, a dance, a celebration, an initiation, and above all a tacit translation into adulthood. Every boy must have a ‘date’, and every girl longs to be asked by the most exciting or glamorous boy in school, usually a sportsman. Dahmer was not a sportsman to any degree, but he would still have been quite a catch for his good looks, even if they were yet rather boyish. The drawbacks were his failure to make a mark, so that a girl would not have good reason to feel proud to be on his arm, and his well-known drunkenness. Apart from all of which, Jeff himself had never been on a date with a girl anywhere at all, and had never felt the desire to try. He was eighteen in May, and completely without experience. He did not particularly want to go to the prom, but he had to; this was not a tradition which allowed of choice – voluntary absence was unthinkable. It therefore fell to others to find a girl for Jeff Dahmer to invite.

  Two classmates, Mike Costlow and Lynn Soquel, came up with the answer. They approached a sixteen-year-old girl called Bridget Geiger and asked her if she would be willing to be Jeff’s date. Bridget did not know him personally, but she had heard of his reputation for excessive drinking and was wary. She said she would accept only if he promised not to drink alcohol, and the deal was struck.

  When Jeff turned up at her house, he was not wearing a tuxedo (dinner-suit), the sine qua non of the ritual, though she had made herself pretty with a long party dress. He was terribly nervous, shaking as he tried to pin a corsage on her dress, almost afraid of touching her skin. In the end, Mrs Geiger had to pin the corsage for her daughter. It was clear to everyone that this shy, blond young man was on his first date. They went to an expensive restaurant for dinner, then proceeded to the prom, held not at Revere High School but in Akron, Ohio. Jeff had been told that he must deliver Bridget home by 1 a.m. at the latest.

  The prom was little short of an embarrassing disaster for Bridget because Jeff disappeared shortly after they arrived. She felt stranded, shipwrecked by the boy’s bad manners, and very stupid. The truth was, he needed at all costs to escape the expectations and routines of the occasion. He was scared of being found wanting, as he knew he would be, and social graces were never part of his baggage. Bridget, forlornly, began looking for Mike and Lynn to beg a ride home with them, since she had been ‘stood up’ by her escort, but then Jeff suddenly reappeared, claiming that he had not eaten enough at dinner, had gone looking for a McDonald’s where he might find a cheeseburger, and got lost. He had been absent for most of the prom and had clearly been drinking. The four of them left together and stopped in at a bar in Bath before going home. Jeff dropped Bridget at home by 11 p.m., with two hours to spare. He shook her hand and wished her goodnight. If she expected a kiss, she expected in vain.

  Throughout this period of activity at Revere – the examinations, the graduation, the prom – preparations for the Dahmer divorce were under way. Jeff professed to be indifferent, shrugging his shoulders in dismissive fashion when Mike Costlow once asked him about it, but the whole business secretly undermined him. The upheaval at home had another, potentially more dangerous consequence. With Dad living in a motel, and Mom frequently running off to see relations in Wisconsin and taking David with her, Jeff was sometimes left to his own devices, and when that happened, his imagination festered. The moment when it might break out and become visible was fast approaching.

  On one occasion, the three prom companions – Mike, Lynn and Bridget – together with one or two others, assembled at the Dahmer house for a seance. Jeff claimed that the house was haunted and that the spirit of the previous owner could be summoned by concentration and will. It was all innocent nonsense, if rather spooky with the lights out. The feeling around the table in the dark was too much for Lynn, who screamed when something moved, and Bridget jumped up and said she was leaving. She looked immediately for a house with the lights on, but one of the others came out and drove her home, and that was the last she saw of Jeff Dahmer. The seance was busted soon afterwards when Dr Dahmer showed up unexpectedly and made them all leave.

  Another time Jeff Six was in the house and some jewellery went missing. Three rings and a bracelet, valued together at over a thousand dollars, were reported stolen in a police statement given by Lionel, after which Jeff was more or less forbidden to have any guests at all. He went out drinking with Mike and Jeff Six one evening, and when the boys dropped hi
m off at 4480 West Bath Road, Dr Dahmer came out of the house and remonstrated with him. ‘I told you not to hang around with those boys,’ he said. Later, the same two attempted to make contact with Jeff again, and were rebuffed at the door by Lionel, who told them they were a bad influence on his son and that Jeff did not want them around. Mike said he would rather hear that from Jeff himself, but his request was refused. The irony was that Jeff had been talking with the boys about his interest in the preservation and reconstruction of death by taxidermy, and they had noticed how weirdly intense he became on the subject. If there was any question of an influence being potentially malign, it emanated rather from him than from them.

  When Jeff had graduated, his mother invited the Dahmer grandparents for a celebration dinner, and a discussion about the future. It was a decent gesture, and the only time anyone seems to have given any thought to Jeff’s ultimate destination. Lionel pointed out that the divorce settlement would so deplete his resources that he could no longer afford to send Jeff to college, whereupon the grandparents offered to pay if Jeff would improve his grades. It was decided he should enrol at Ohio State University to start general courses in September. He was distressingly unenthusiastic.

  The divorce was heard in the Court of Common Pleas in July, 1978, and granted on the grounds of Lionel Dahmer’s ‘gross neglect of duty and extreme cruelty’ towards his wife. Joyce was granted custody of David despite Lionel’s evidence that she was not fit, an injustice which rankled with him for a long time. It has perhaps passed relatively unnoticed in this account so far that David was the recipient of his father’s deepest affection, the very opposite of the kind of disgruntled disappointment which characterised his attitude towards Jeff. The loss of David hurt him at the core. He was given ‘reasonable visitation rights’, but was subject to a restraining order preventing his showing up at the marital home without prior agreement. In return, the settlement specifically stated that ‘wife shall not remove said minor child to a permanent residence outside this Court’s jurisdiction without first obtaining permission of Husband or an order of the Court’. Joyce could not simply kidnap David whenever she felt like it.

  Lionel would have to pay Joyce, in addition to alimony of $400 a month, the sum of $23,500 for her share in 4480 West Bath Road, upon receipt of which she would vacate the house; otherwise she would stay there. She had the right to the 1968 Oldsmobile (she had eventually learnt to drive three years before), and Lionel would assign to her title in this car. He would keep the 1972 Ford which he drove. There then followed a huge list of furnishings which were to become the sole property of Joyce Dahmer – sofas, chairs, tables, curtains, beds, toaster, ping-pong table, stereo equipment, barbecue, and so on for two pages. The husband would retain the stove and refrigerator, as well as the curtains in the play room. It is a depressing document, of the kind which is drawn up probably hundreds of times a day throughout the Western world, and which purports to measure in objects and belongings the failure of a relationship.

  On 24 August Joyce loaded the car and took David with her to Wisconsin, in defiance of the court order. Her sister said she was frightened of Lionel and what he might do. She is also said to have begged Jeff to go with them, but he was paralysed by inertia. So she left, never to return, urging Jeff not to tell his father what she had done.

  Jeff was left alone in the house. There was half a gallon of milk in the fridge, but nothing else. Some of the food in the larder was two years old. The house was in a mess. There was no car in the garage. He was isolated, in the literal sense now as well as the emotional. It was some weeks before he was discovered by his father, who had no telephone at his motel and was restrained by order of the Court from visiting the house. He had no idea Joyce had left. As soon as he learnt the facts, he went to 4480 West Bath Road with his new friend, Shari Jordan, whom he had met a few months before at the Springside Racquet Club where she had taken tennis lessons. A big-hearted, big-bosomed lady of confidence and charm, she was devastated by the ‘horrible condition’ of the house and horrified that anyone could be left unsupervised in such a place. The refrigerator didn’t even work. Jeff looked like an orphan, disoriented and vague. He was obviously relieved when they said they would move in right away, and Shari set about tidying the place up.

  She had met Jeff and David a few months before, at the Ohio motel. Lionel had wanted to introduce the boys to his new friend. Shari had been struck by the wide disparity in personality between the brothers – while David was ‘charismatic’ and ‘extrovert’, Jeff was locked up, introverted, extremely polite and extremely quiet. ‘My heart went out to him,’ she said.

  That was in May. The discovery of his abandonment was in September. A combination of events and circumstances in the intervening period had contrived to place Jeff Dahmer in a vacuum of the most volatile kind. There was no school to attend, and the university term had not yet begun. There was no family life to offer trusted and familiar routines. There were no friends since the very few who wanted to see him had been banished. There were no hobbies, sports, activities of any sort to fill his day. The divorce of his parents was beyond recall – they were effectively separated and it was only a matter of formality for the Court to confirm what had already occurred. Even before she packed her car and left, Joyce absented herself frequently, taking David with her to visit her family in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, for a few days. On those occasions Jeff Dahmer was left entirely to himself, without occupation or ambition, and only his fantasies to feed his mind. What he most needed was a firm and solid structure to life, a network of recognition to keep him from wandering into Infinity Land, obligations and duties to hold him down. Even the exercise of going to school was a useful discipline. Now that all structures had evaporated and all ties been severed, his fragile hold on sanity was loosening.

  Nobody realised that he was held in the grip of a fantasy of daemonic proportions, or he would surely not have been deserted for a moment. When Lionel and Shari found him aimlessly standing in the middle of an empty house late that summer, they did not know, nor could they have known, that this appalling fantasy had at last exploded into the real world one night in June, and left him marked for life.

  Jeff had not forgotten the jogger. Now he had more opportunity than ever to think about him, to dwell upon him, to imagine a successful encounter with him. He masturbated when he thought about it, and after he reached satisfaction the thoughts would recede for a while. But not for long. They became more and more intrusive, more and more insistent. When he had been alone in the house for about a week, and found that these thoughts assailed him several times a day, he looked back to the jogger and beyond, and realised that, ever since he was fifteen years old, his fantasies had fixed upon a man who would lie still and be calm, and even, perhaps, be dead. Did other boys his age think about such things when they masturbated? Probably not; they thought about girls, or naked receptive women. If they thought about boys at all, then they were probably romping about and having sex accidentally, as part of ‘horsing around’. Did homosexual boys dream of sexual congress and love? He had no idea. He only knew that his fantasies involved less sex than exploration, less love than ownership. They sometimes even involved the killing of a man in order to keep him. That was absurd; he knew it. It was shameful, impossible, ridiculous. But it was also urgent – it pressed against his ribs and his groin, calling for release. And so he masturbated again, and the thoughts were temporarily sated.

  Perhaps it would be a hitch-hiker, he mused. A handsome guy with a nice chest whom he would see on the side of the road, invite back, and, well, who knows? He thought about this hitch-hiker for months, telling himself a story, leading towards a consummation of his choosing. But of course it never happened. It couldn’t, because it was just a fantasy. Besides, he didn’t have a car, and in that part of rural Ohio he had not once seen such a person walking along the road, not once since these thoughts began. It would be pointless looking for anybody. Things like that didn’t occur in reality, the
y were just day-dreams and reveries. Yet the thoughts continued, they came ‘like arrows, shooting into my mind from out of the blue’,6 and he would nurse them and nourish them once more. He had not read anything to instil such imaginings, nor received ideas from movies or books; they came into his head of their own accord, from nowhere, self-generated as far as he could tell. They may even not have come into his head at all, but been born there.

  It was a warm summer’s day in mid-June when Jeff decided to get out of the house for a while. He asked his father if he could borrow the blue Ford so that he could go to the cinema; he would drop Lionel off at the Ohio motel and return the car next day. Lionel agreed and Jeff left the motel in mid-afternoon.