The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer

by Brian Masters

  It was also during this period of basic training that he received word his dog Frisky had died of a stroke in the house. ‘She was twelve years old,’ he recollected. ‘No, I didn’t cry. I loved her, she was a great dog, but no, I didn’t have any strong emotions.’ He hadn’t cried since ‘I was in college that day, thinking about Hicks. I was drinking and in a weepy sort of mood, and I cried about that.’10

  On 11 May, 1979, Dahmer was sent to the Army Hospital School in San Antonio, Texas, where he followed a six-week course in medicine and emerged a qualified medic. It was entirely fitting that his bent should be towards the scientific discipline, his father being a chemist by profession, and it was the first time in his life he had succeeded in settling down to a sustained course of study and seeing it through. Unfortunately, he learnt much at medical school which he was to use in years to come for purposes other than the preservation of life.

  His training complete, Dahmer was assigned to Number 2/68 Armour Division, Second Battalion, stationed in Baumholder, West Germany, and when he arrived there in June, 1979, he duly joined the squad at the Battalion Aid Station.

  Considering that he was to spend nearly two years in Germany, it is remarkable that so little is known about his life there or the impression he made. Perhaps the very paucity of information is itself evidence of his almost total withdrawal from the society of his fellows. He naturally saw people every day, ate at base with them, went to restaurants with them, chatted with them in a desultory way, but he made no effort to know anyone, still less be known by anyone, and so his privacy was respected. He is remembered, once again, as a loner, very quiet and moody, evidently sunk in perpetual depression. It also became obvious very soon that he was sexually innocent.

  Some of the men, taken aback by the absence of a girlfriend back home and astonished by his admission that he had never kissed a girl, determined that they would assist him in losing his virginity. So a whole group of them took him to Annabella’s House, a well-known brothel in Vogelway, and two soldiers who were Dahmer’s own age dragged him into the brothel and introduced him to a girl there. They then split up and lost sight of one another. It later transpired that Dahmer had sneaked out of the house without doing anything, which they ascribed to shyness until he told them that he had never wanted to go there in the first place and did not ‘need’ any girl. One of the older men privately thought he might be homosexual, not because of the brothel incident, nor any overt feminine attributes, but because ‘he always seemed like he was hiding something’. It was an astute observation, and a telling one.

  Dahmer had no sexual adventures of any kind while he was in Germany. He claims an older sergeant propositioned him, and he declined. One of his colleagues remarked that he ‘looked like a little kid in a man’s body’. He discovered the homosexual bookshops which abound in Frankfurt, and bought some pornography to serve as aids to masturbation. He did feel frustrated, as he came to realise how most men of his age had experienced some kind of full sexual congress, but since it was other men who excited him, and he knew this to be an inadmissible vice, he vented his frustrations in solitary onanism. Only he knew to what dangerous extremes his sexual urges might lead if they involved anyone else. For the time being at least, Dahmer condemned himself to further isolation because it was the only safe course.

  Some of his other pleasures were likewise pursued alone. He liked to walk in the countryside and see what he might come across. ‘I remember seeing a family of wild boars going down a hillside a long distance away. They were so big at first I thought they were boulders rolling down the hill. It was snowy out, it was white, but it was a family of wild boars. They get four to six hundred pounds, solid muscle, covered with dark brown hair. Very ill-tempered, they’ll tear you apart, but boy, can they run. They can run up to thirty miles an hour.’11

  He enjoyed shooting, too, and at one point considered turning it into a hobby when he eventually left the army. Target practice was something to look forward to, and he soon found he had accumulated a lot of useful knowledge about different types of gun. ‘I fired M-60s in the army, those are the guns that sit on top of the tanks. Those things will go through three inches of solid steel. And I fired 45s.’

  Nevertheless, it was the availability of cheap liquor which provided Jeff with his most lasting hobby – getting drunk. Soldiers were able to obtain liquor at half-price, a convenience of which Dahmer took full advantage. On at least one occasion, the liquor either summoned up memories of Steven Hicks, or failed to subdue them, and he gave way to a fit of sobbing. It is important to stop and imagine what he was crying for, however. Remorse for what had happened to Hicks had by now utterly given way to self-pity for the burden he had inflicted upon himself by the murder.

  For Thanksgiving in November, 1979, Carlos Cruz and his wife invited some of the younger soldiers to share the traditional celebration dinner at their home. (Cruz was serving in the same squad at the Battalion Aid Station.) Among them was Dahmer and a soldier named Preston Davis. While they were having dinner, the snow began to fall heavily outside, and Cruz suggested that it would be wiser for them all to stay the night. For some reason or other, Dahmer and Davis fell into an argument, and Davis told him to get the hell back to Baumholder. Jeff decided that was exactly what he would do, and he quietly walked out of the door into the snow at 10.30 p.m. Baumholder was about eight miles distant, around a mountain, and it was freezing cold. When Cruz realised what had occurred he went out to search for about fifteen minutes, but was driven indoors by the cold to get heavier clothes. He went outside and looked for another half an hour before he finally gave up, assuming Jeff had found a taxi to take him to Baumholder.

  Four hours later Jeff was back at the door. Davis called out ‘Here’s the orphan!’, and they all welcomed him back inside. He appeared confused, vague, his mind elsewhere. He had also lost his glasses. His jacket was not especially cold to the touch, as they might have expected, nor was he as affected as a man who had been four hours in sub-zero temperatures ought to be. Cruz took him to the kitchen, where he washed his hands energetically. Cruz thought he noticed signs of blood on his clothing. Jeff then sat down and stared at the kitchen table. He told Cruz that he could not remember where he had been nor what he had been doing, but he assumed it must have been ‘something bad’. Could he have tried to damage himself with his own spectacles? He was considered ‘weird’ enough to be a suicide case, that much is certain. More likely, he had found a hole somewhere and just sat there, thinking. Thoughts would not leave him alone, they would permit no peace; they continued to oppress, relentlessly. A few days later Cruz invited Jeff to say what was bothering him, but he could not articulate it, or would not. He did, however, make an interesting and pertinent remark. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘sometimes the best thing for the soul is to confess.’

  Instead of confessing, Dahmer went on smothering the self within him to keep it under control, or drowning it in alcohol. At such times, he seemed stupid and vacuous; it was only, said his colleagues, when you engaged him in conversation that you realised how intelligent he really was, but then few attempted this, and those who did were not rewarded. Eventually, the alcohol got the better of him, and he found himself drinking on duty as well as off. After several reprimands, punishments and disciplinary reports, and when it became obvious that his abuse interfered with his ability and desire to obey orders, Jeffrey Dahmer was dismissed from the service six months before his expected release date. It was an honourable discharge, but a premature one nonetheless.

  On 24 March, 1981, Dahmer was sent to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, for debriefing, and given a voucher to travel to any destination of his choosing in the United States. He did not relish returning to the cold climate of Ohio, so he flew direct to Florida, where he imagined the permanent sun and warmth would be a cheerful influence, and the proximity of the ocean a calming one. His parents did not know he had left the army until one day his trunk and personal effects, including correspondence from the governmen
t, arrived at 4480 West Bath Road. It was in this trunk, much later, that David Dahmer found the German pornographic magazines which gave him the first clue as to his brother’s sexuality. Jeff had put them in the trunk and sent them off to Ohio, rather than take them with him to Florida, in an attempt to start out on a fresh road. From this point in his life we see an increasingly urgent need to escape the past and take a new direction, any direction, so long as it is away from himself.

  At Miami Beach he took a room at a motel and found a job at the Sunshine Subs, a local sandwich bar half a mile down the road. Here he worked seven days a week and spent all his earnings on drink. Florida did not turn out to be the panacea he had hoped for; it was a struggle making ends meet, and the job was hardly very challenging or diverting. He made no attempt to find the homosexual areas of town, nor to meet anyone for sexual purposes. Even casual friendships eluded him, except for one unlikely instance. During the six months that he spent in Miami, Dahmer struck up an acquaintance with another worker at the Sunshine Subs, an English girl called Julie. It was the only female friend he was ever to have, until after his arrest in 1991. Julie was working illegally, since she had only a visitor’s visa to the United States, and she wanted very much to legitimise her position. She and Jeff talked about the problem, and she went so far as to ask him if he would marry her to make her a U.S. citizen. He was not keen on the idea, to say the least, and though he liked Julie, he discouraged her interest in him.

  When he ran out of money and could no longer afford the motel room, Dahmer took his few belongings and camped out on the beach. He would go there straight from work and fall asleep beneath the stars. It was not an ideal situation, and he soon reached the conclusion that life like this would lead nowhere. He had been reduced to homelessness and penury in a very short time, all as part of his plan to escape from himself, and even that had not worked. The thoughts were still insistently there; they haunted him, tormented him when he least expected them. There was, he thought, only one way finally to conquer them, and that was to rid them of their nourishment. There must be nothing left to think about.

  He telephoned his father, who sent him the fare from Florida to Ohio, and in September he arrived back home to the house he had known since the age of eight. It was a house of memories – of one in particular that had to be exorcised. While his father and Shari were at work, he dug down in the drainage pipe where he had stuffed the bags containing the remains of Steven Hicks three years before and uncovered them. He hauled the bags into the woods beyond, atop a small cliff, and opened them. The flesh had rotted off, but the bones were there, permanent timeless reminders of what he once called ‘a horrid mistake’ and now referred to as his ‘sin’. He took them out and smashed them, one after the other, with a large rock, until they had been reduced to splinters. The skull he smashed too, pulverising it; ‘I had to,’ he said, edging towards apology. He had to demolish not only the evidence, but the images which buffeted and bruised inside his head, taunting him. With his bare hands, he picked up the fragments of bone which had been Steven Hicks’ head, and scattered them wide in the woods.

  Chapter Four

  The Struggle

  The prodigal son was not entirely welcome in Bath, Ohio. Lionel had grown accustomed to the equable style of his second marriage. Shari had a job of her own to go to, instead of being confined to the house as Joyce had been, and they looked forward to meeting each other in the evenings. It was a peaceful, unmolested life. There had, it is true, been a lodger for a brief period – a young man whom Shari wanted to help and who returned the favour by keeping the yard clean – but otherwise the domestic scene was firmly à deux. A lumbering, unemployed and uncommunicative twenty-one-year-old was not the ideal house-mate.

  This is not to say that the Dahmers did not worry about Jeff and try to help him think about his next step in life. They were sure, however, that whatever that step was, it should be away from the nest. Lionel was disappointed that his son seemed to lurch from one spoilt opportunity to another and was beginning to wonder what on earth could be done with him; if even the army had failed to contain him, or fire him with enthusiasm, it was unlikely anything else could. Jeff was the very picture of accidie – indolent and torpid if left to himself, passive and acquiescent to the suggestions of others.

  He recognised his failings and tried to correct them. He was, after all, pleased to be home, and asked his father to give him things to do so he could keep himself busy. For instance, he insulated the crawlspace underneath the house. Julie, the English girl, telephoned from Miami a few times to see how he was getting on.

  Only two weeks after his arrival, Jeff was arrested at the Ramada Inn for being drunk and abusive. He had been asked to leave the Maxwell lounge of the hotel because he was drinking straight from a bottle of vodka. He had refused and been escorted outside, where he continued to drink at the front door. Two employees told him that it was illegal to drink even there, and when he again declined to move, the police were called and he was taken to Akron Correctional Facility and incarcerated. He would not answer questions and swore at the officers. The charge against him was disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, but it went no further than a municipal citation. Still, it did not bode well for life in Bath. Eventually, Lionel and Shari decided he should go and stay with his grandmother in West Allis, Wisconsin, for a while, to sort out his future. Catherine Dahmer was getting old and feeling lonely and she could do with some company as well as help in the garden. In return for the performance of some household chores, Jeff would have room and board. As usual, it was not an idea to excite him, but Lionel and Shari insisted that he take the chance. Thus it was that in December he moved to West Allis, to the house where Lionel himself had grown up and lived until his first marriage.

  It did not take Jeff long to realise that he liked the arrangement and he elected to stay. There then followed six years of apparent stability and concealed turmoil. 2357 South 57th Street was a cosy little house, with the advantage of a quiet neighbourhood, yet within easy reach of downtown Milwaukee. Jeff was very fond of his grandmother. Characteristically, when asked directly if he loved her, he replied, ‘Yup, she’s lived in that house a long time,’ which is a rather bold evasion. The response epitomises the difficulty he experiences in making emotional contact. He knew perfectly well that his grandmother was lovable, and said so, but could not bring himself to say that he loved her, because he did not think himself capable of love; to use the word subjectively would be presumptuous, even insulting. So he avoided it.

  This is what he says about Catherine Dahmer: ‘I guess she’s what you could call a perfect grandmother, very kind, goes to church every Sunday, easy to get along with, very supportive, loving, just a very sweet lady.’1 She took the old-fashioned view that people will behave decently if you treat them decently, and her religious principles sustained her goodness of heart. Mrs Dahmer could have been a splendid example to and influence upon Jeff, had he been able to share life with her much earlier, but now it was too late. He appreciated her qualities well enough, and was beyond imbibing them.

  Their days together were marked with simplicity. ‘I’d shovel the walks and mow the lawn, help her with the flowerbed, and she’d cook the meals, so we helped each other out a lot.’ After eating, they would watch television together. There was only one prohibition she enforced. In the army Jeff had become seriously addicted to cigarettes, and was now smoking a pack a day. ‘I’d always have to smoke outside,’ he said. ‘She couldn’t stand cigarette smoke in the house. I didn’t blame her at all so I did my smoking outside.’

  Dahmer was hired by the Milwaukee Blood Plasma Center as a phlebotomist soon after his move to Wisconsin. The job involved drawing blood from volunteers, at which he was adept enough, having learnt the technique as part of his work in the army medical aid station. But he did not care for it, and regarded it merely as a way to earn a simple penny. Before that, he had been relying on his grandmother’s generosity.

  In Jan
uary, he bought a gun from a Milwaukee store, a .357 snubbed-nose Magnum with a black rubber-grip handle and a silver body, weighing about a pound and a half. It was a very powerful gun, but he used it only for target practice, another habit bequeathed by the army. ‘Once my dad and grandma got wind that I had that, they didn’t think it was a good idea, so my dad took it away and ended up selling it down in Ohio.’ In fact, there was a large family conference to decide what to do about the wretched gun; it made his grandmother nervous to think it was in the house at all, so they confronted Jeff with the situation, and he consented with no hesitation to hand it over to his father. He had kept it for about six months.

  There were other things he was doing secretly which Grandma might also have deemed ‘not a good idea’. He had secured a copy of Anton LaVey’s Satanic Bible which he pored over in his room while she said her prayers to a more benign God. Even more peculiar was an experiment he conducted at work. Taking so much blood from people in the course of his job, he found himself wondering what it might taste like and what effect it might have upon him. He concealed a vial of blood in his pocket and took it to the roof of the Plasma Center, where he proceeded to drink it. He did not like it and spat it out. Why, one must ask, try in the first place? Dahmer contends that it was mere curiosity which impelled him, but, in the light of what subsequently occurred, perhaps other streams of unconscious desire were motivating his conduct.

  These were the first stirrings of an interest in what Dahmer mistakenly referred to as Satanism: it was to develop progressively over the years and work towards a startling dénouement. It was a personal quest, a diffuse and stumbling attempt to establish contact with those turbulent, dark and unanswerable exigencies of primitive Nature, recognised by the pagans before civilisation tamed them by denying them. But they are never entirely denied, and they display themselves in disguised form throughout history, for they pre-date history and infuse the acts and thoughts of men with involuntary notions they barely apprehend. Art and law and society seek to keep them under control; religions unwittingly perpetuate their power. The essence of these elemental forces is their necessity and irresistibility; they are not contingent, but constant and immutable. They cannot change, or be fought against, for they represent the endless cycle of the earth and its doings, its infinite progression and regression, surge and swell, movement towards no other end than self-regeneration.