The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer

by Brian Masters

  Driving along the highway at about five o’clock, he saw him. There, coming towards him on the opposite side of the road, was a hitch-hiker. He looked about nineteen years old, more or less coeval with Jeff himself, who had just turned eighteen the previous month. He wore jeans and tennis-shoes, but because of the heat he had left his shirt off. That was the most important, the most enticing detail. The boy’s chest was exposed, visible, perhaps touchable. He had shoulder-length brown hair and looked quite nice. His thumb was out, but nobody much passed on that stretch of the road. Jeff drove on, thinking. The fantasies reared up before him and inside him. Should he perhaps try? It all seemed to be orchestrated for him, set up. He had not seen a hitch-hiker before; he might not have noticed this one were his shirt covering him; the house was empty, so he could not be disturbed; he had a car for once; everything fell into place. It was obvious! The hitch-hiker had in a mysterious way been sent to him! The circumstances were too perfect for him to resist their message. Yet he felt very nervous.

  Jeff turned back and caught up with the hitch-hiker. He told him he wasn’t going anywhere much, but he was welcome to come back to the house and have a few beers and a joint. His folks were away, so they would be left alone. The young man accepted, and hopped in the car. He introduced himself as Steven Hicks, from Illinois. Sure, he would come back for a while. Jeff was thinking what he would do, playing through his mind the voyeuristic frisson of looking at this man’s body and caressing it – he was like a picture in one of those books, yet he was for real! The idea of conquest or seduction did not enter into his makeshift plans; that was not an idea which formed part of Jeff Dahmer’s imaginative furniture. It would have been better for all if it had, for conquest and seduction are relatively normal ambitions, achievable by most people without harmful effect. There then passed through his mind, once more, the drama of death and sole possession. This he tried to set aside, to banish, but it was a constant struggle.

  They drove to 4480 West Bath Road. Frisky was there to welcome Jeff home. The dog was quickly placated, and the boys went to Jeff’s room. He had some marijuana left over from a supply which Jeff Six had obtained, but Steven wasn’t too keen. He would have a beer, though. Jeff wanted to make a pass, but did not know how to. It soon became clear that Steven was not homosexual, and would resist any approach with a sexual motive. Steven said he had just celebrated his nineteenth birthday and was going to visit his girlfriend. That was blatant enough. Jeff wanted to ask him to undress, but didn’t dare. It was the first time he had ever had the chance to indulge his homosexual fancies, but he just could not do it. He was scared. He would be certain to be rejected, and then left with those dreadful, clinging thoughts, all by himself.

  All this talk of girlfriends and moving on and the future worked upon Dahmer like a creaking vice, edging upwards towards explosion and calamity. He had no future; he was moving on nowhere; he was doomed to sit in that house and poison himself with thinking. He needed to stop this, urgently, to grab hold of events and shape them to his will, to exercise some control for once and be himself, whatever that self was. He liked Steve’s company and lusted after Steve’s body; why should he be forever denied?

  After a couple of hours’ drinking and talking, Steven Hicks thanked Jeff and said he ought to be getting along before it got dark. The swell of frustration within Jeff 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.

  He went to the cellar and got an eight-inch-long barbell, without the weights on the end. When he came back upstairs, Steven was still sitting in the chair, with his back to the door. With a sudden surge of strength, Dahmer struck him on the head with the barbell. Steven responded, astonished. There was a quick scuffle, and Dahmer hit him a second time. Then Steven fell unconscious. Dahmer was swamped by a mixture of panic and excitement, fright and anticipation, his actions driven by a surge of feeling no longer accessible to reason. With the barbell, he strangled the limp body of Steven Hicks until no breath stirred.

  Once he had stopped panting, Dahmer carefully removed Steven’s clothing to reveal the beauty which had disturbed him. He ran his hands over the chest, caressed it, kissed it, then lay down beside the body. Finally, he stood above Steven’s corpse and masturbated on to it.

  Then it was that reality rushed in upon him. ‘I was out of my mind with fear that night,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know what to do. I had gone to such an extreme.’7 When darkness fell, he dragged the body outside and to the front yard, then into the crawlspace beneath the house, left it there, and went back indoors. He didn’t sleep. His heart pounded with panic at what he had done, and how he could undo it. He would have to cover up somehow. This kind of thing was impossible; people had bad dreams about murder and unwanted bodies and responsibility and discovery – anxiety dreams in other words – but this was for real. Nothing would suffice less than the total obliteration of evidence; the rest would wait.

  The next day he went out and bought a large knife. When he returned, he went straight to Steven’s body beneath the house. The so-called ‘crawlspace’ is almost exactly what the name implies, an area of unused space beneath the house, into which one may crawl. It is as if the house were on stilts and the space were between the stilts, and of course it is most common when the house has been built on sloping land. At 4480 West Bath Road, a man could stand upright in the open end of the crawlspace, which became lower as one went further in until the ground and the floor of the house met. There it was that Dahmer set about the dismemberment and disposal of Steven Hicks. He first cut off the arms and the legs, and then the head. In a cruel, pitiful echo of the experiments with road-kills, he slit open the belly to see what it looked like inside. (Only very much later would the true purpose and function of this operation be revealed as more than mere curiosity.) There was a great deal of blood, which soaked naturally into the earth. The various parts were then put into three triple-lined garbage bags, while the identity card and clothes belonging to Steven Hicks were burnt in the trash barrel behind the cliff, about fifty yards from the house. The garbage bags remained for the time being in the crawlspace.

  Dahmer spent the whole of the next day pondering. He felt frantic at what he had got himself into and terror at the thought of discovery. Shame was slow in coming. At length he decided that he would dump the remains in a ravine about ten miles away, late at night, when no one would see him. After a few beers to work up the courage, he put the bags on the back seat of the car and drove off. It was the middle of the night.

  At 3 a.m. a police car came up behind him and signalled him to stop. There was only one officer – he and Jeff were alone together on an empty country road. The officer called for ‘back-up’ and another car arrived on the scene shortly afterwards. Dahmer was told that he had been observed driving left of centre, in other words slightly to the wrong side of the road. Would he please get out? Jeff did as he was told, and was walked round behind the car to take some tests. He was asked to place his finger on his nose and to walk in a straight line, both of which tasks he accomplished to the officers’ satisfaction. (This was before the days of breathalysers.) The ordeal was not quite over yet, however. One of the policemen shone his flashlight on to the back seat of the car to reveal the large plastic bags. ‘What’s that smell?’ he asked. Jeff explained that it was household trash that he was taking to the city dump. Why so late? Because his parents were in the throes of a divorce and he could not sleep; he thought the drive would get things off his mind.

  The officers were prepared to accept this and did not investigate further. Had they done so, of course, the Dahmer odyssey would never have occurred, and there would have simply been one more murder case in the local press to shake one’s head over. Even so, as he himself has pointed out, it would have been too late for the family of that young hitch-hiker. Nobody reflected more upon this than the policeman who flagged Dahmer down; thirteen years later, it was, by coincidence, the same
man who was sent by the Ohio Police Department to Milwaukee to interview Dahmer. Police Officer Richard Munsey was now Lieutenant Munsey, and he was in deep shock when he looked up the record of that late-night offence and found that he was the one who had stopped Dahmer on the highway.

  Jeff was given a ticket for erratic driving and allowed to go home, having spent a total of about half an hour with the police officers. What he then did was disturbing and bizarre. He placed the bags back under the crawlspace, then opened them to find the head. He took it out and carried it upstairs to his bedroom. He placed the head on the floor and proceeded to masturbate in front of it, looking at it. It was his now, his companion and solace – this severed head – his fantasy become real, his own private stimulant, and as he stood there, moving his hand towards the artificial restoration of peace, a boy of eighteen in a solitary house in the quiet Ohio countryside took his first step towards madness.

  The following night Dahmer dragged out the bags containing the torso and limbs of Steven Hicks and stuffed them down a wide, deep drainage pipe in the back yard, covering them with earth. He could not think what else to do with them, and did not pause to wonder whether they would have to be retrieved one day, or whether their very existence was evidence of his crime. He could not think straight at all. He kept the head a little longer, but then that, too, badly decomposing, had to be shoved down, out of sight. If only he could push the whole ghastly episode out of mind as well, as effectively as this, he would. He drove to the Cuyahoga River and threw Steven’s necklace into the water, together with the knife he had used to cut him up. But he could not throw the memories into the water, could not discard the images in his head, could not throw away the fear which beset him all day long. He knew he was doomed. ‘That night in Ohio,’ he recalled, ‘that one impulsive night. Nothing’s been normal since then. It taints your whole life. After it happened I thought that I’d just try to live as normally as possible and bury it, but things like that don’t stay buried. I didn’t think it would, but it does, it taints your whole life.’8

  It is hardly to be wondered at that his struggle to erase the memory of what he had done, and to soften the shock he felt, was eventually defeated. It was to endure for another nine years, the image of Hicks surging before him at any moment, without warning, to be only partially assuaged by large doses of alcohol. In some measure there were two victims of that first incident, one of whom did not die. The memory of it retained the capacity to cause Jeff Dahmer distress long after his normal human responses to the death and destruction he caused had atrophied. He wept over it in the coming years, as he wept over none of the others. Remembering it with a psychiatrist in 1991, his voice faltered and silence fell. The doctor felt the need to remind him that ‘I won’t let you fall back into a hole’ as he watched the man recede into intolerable introspection. The most Dahmer managed to say, as he emerged from it, was so inadequate as to verge on bathos, and yet it was simple: ‘I’d rather be talking about anything else in the world than this,’ he said.9

  Retaining the religious habits of childhood, he occasionally prayed for forgiveness, and at the same time knew he was beyond such a gift. He recognised that his ‘perverted lust’ had caused the death of Hicks, and that this lust had grown on the fertile ground of moral inertia – ‘not caring about other people, not caring about myself’.

  In July of 1978, the day after his parents’ divorce became absolute and the day after his mother had finally fled to Wisconsin, Jeff Dahmer was fined $20 by the Traffic Court at Akron, Ohio, for having driven left of centre on 25 June at three in the morning. The last day Steven Hicks was seen alive (other than by his killer) was 18 June. His remains were not found for thirteen years.

  After Lionel and Shari had found Jeff in a state of confusion, living by himself with a dog and an empty refrigerator, they set about deciding his future. They tried to talk to him, to see what he wanted, but he was completely devoid of any ideas or ambitions. He seemed to have renounced life, which was, they thought, unutterably sad in one so young. All he wanted to do was drink. Every liquor bottle in the house had emptied to within an inch of the bottom, and Shari came home early from work one afternoon to find Jeff passed out on his bed, blind drunk after having consumed a whole fifth of Jack Daniels whiskey. He begged Shari not to tell his dad, and said he only drank because he was bored and had nothing to do. Lionel insisted Jeff should go to university, but he wasn’t very keen, so Shari made up her mind to take the bull by the horns and enrol him anyway. She was more dynamic than Lionel, more resolute, and she could see that this dreadful situation might simply drag on aimlessly with no positive outcome in sight. She took him shopping, bought him clothes, and within a couple of weeks she had him ready for college. She and Lionel drove him to Ohio State University.

  Jeff was installed in Ross House dormitory, Room 541, sharing with three room-mates – Craig Chweiger, Michael Prochaska and Jeffrey Gerderick. They all thought Dahmer was pretty weird, and he gave them good cause to form such an impression. In the first place, he spent most of his time lying on his back in the top bunk playing a Beatles album over and over again, and singing along with it, especially the track ‘I am the Walrus’. For no discernible reason (for he was apolitical then as now), he pinned a photograph of Vice-President Walter Mondale to the wall. More than anything, however, they were unnerved by his unremitting intake of hard liquor, such as to make his attendance at classes impossible. He simply could not get up in the morning. He would tape the lectures and then listen to them while he got drunk, getting through a couple of bottles of whiskey a day. He could not finance his alcohol dependency entirely out of the allowance sent by his father, which was naturally modest, so he found a way to supplement his funds by donating blood twice weekly at the university plasma centres. His fingernails had finally to be marked to prevent his giving blood more than once a week.

  His behaviour was erratic and unpredictable. The other three room-mates went out for a drink one evening, leaving Jeff behind as usual – he had no friends or even acquaintances of any kind while he was at Ohio State but appeared to live in limbo. When they returned they found all the furniture stacked up in one corner and pizza thrown all over the walls. No explanation was offered. Another time he had kicked the tiled wall of the bathroom and damaged it, for no apparent reason. He lost his keys, had his rented bicycle stolen, and finally was suspected of stealing a watch, a radio and $120 cash from the boys while they were at lectures, and of spending the money on drink and pawning the objects; in his notebook was written the address of a local pawnshop.

  Chweiger, Prochaska and Gerderick determined that they had had enough of Dahmer; he was a negative influence, caused nothing but trouble and cut himself off from them in every conceivable way. They petitioned to have him thrown out of their room, but were told that nothing could be done until the end of term, and they would have to put up with him. As it happened, the problem was solved for them, because Jeff’s grades for that first semester were so poor that everybody concerned – himself, the university and his father – agreed that the continuation of his college career would be fruitless. Despite having paid in advance for the second term, he would drop out at Christmas.

  With hindsight, it is not difficult to discern a fairly standard pattern of retreat from reality in this sorry few weeks at college. The dangerously escalating alcohol intake points to a desperate attempt to blot out thought, ever more frantic as it repeatedly fails to achieve its purpose. The inability to form a convivial relationship indicates disgust with oneself and distrust of one’s place in regard to other people – a confirmation, in other words, of the basic schizoid dilemma and its solution in total alienation from the rest. The expression of rage against a bathroom wall (which recalls Dahmer’s earlier primitive smashing of logs against tree trunks), though obviously insignificant in isolation, shows Dahmer in crisis as he fights to banish memory and guilt. As for the inexplicable behaviour of piling furniture in a corner, it is symptomatic, in the light of
what we now know, of a terrible inner need to drive out self-knowledge by any displacement activity which might occupy the mind; it is a form of lying to oneself. But none of it could work, and it is scarcely a surprise to find that during these weeks, when left alone with his drunken stupor in Room 541, Jeffrey Dahmer broke down and cried.

  Back in Bath, Ohio, he sought his oblivion again in marijuana and was frequently in the company of Jeff Six; the two of them were cautioned for driving over somebody’s front lawn. Once he borrowed his father’s car without permission and then proceeded to lose it – or couldn’t remember where he had left it. Lionel and Shari had to go out and hunt for their own car.

  There was only one solution to Jeff’s problems, it seemed – he would have to enlist in the army. His father took him to the recruiting office in Akron, Ohio, and he was accepted for a three-year enlistment with an initial posting to the Military Police School at Fort McClellan, Alabama.

  A couple of weeks later, on Christmas Eve, Lionel and Shari were married. Jeff did not attend the wedding. On 29 December, he left for Alabama.

  During the first four weeks of basic training no alcohol at all was permitted. This was precisely the sort of unarguable discipline that the Dahmers thought their errant boy needed. He was also overweight and placed on a strict diet for fast remedy – five hard-boiled eggs per day and a five-mile walk – which brought immediate results. Having the day packed with duties and activities allowed no time for cogitation, but when drinking was again permitted Jeff rushed into refuge with the bottle. He was regularly reprimanded for drunkenness, and once succeeded, to his chagrin, in getting the whole platoon punished for his insubordination, whereupon several of the men turned on him and gave him a severe beating. He was bloodied and his ear-drum was broken, causing him to suffer periodic attacks of ear-ache even ten years later. He was never popular or liked, and kept himself rigorously apart, but following the beating he took greater care not to be caught in a state of alcoholic paralysis.