The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer

by Brian Masters

  I do not suggest that Dahmer made any intellectual enquiry into such matters, but that he, unknowingly, was fumbling for an understanding of them. Since he could not perceive himself within the accepted norms, categories and assimilations of civilisation, perhaps he might find some glimmer of recognition and explanation in the chaos of primitive night. He was searching for his daemons*, that is his personal guardians, through the unlit world of urge and response. The tight spirals he had drawn as a child were summonses to that remorseless swirling and circling of inescapable Infinity, where, dimly, he felt he belonged. The wish to look upon Satan was a demand for identity, the hope that a mirror might be thrust before him. The drinking of blood was an unconscious initiation into that world of the earth and its deep, prehuman spirituality. He did not like it. He spat it out. It was not his way. But he would find other ways in the future, and gradually grope towards an expression of coupling with the underworld which was all his own.

  * Christianity misuses the word demon to indicate a dweller of Hell, an evil spirit. The Greek daemons were spirits from a nether world, both good and evil, who helped one to understand and interpret the mysterious. Socrates talked of his daemon as his ‘guardian’ spirit.

  Dahmer was fired after ten months for poor performance. As he did not like the work and it was poorly paid, he hardly minded losing the job. With his grandmother, he went to Bath, Ohio, to spend Thanksgiving of 1982 with Lionel and Shari. It was a happy time, and the start of a new resolve on Jeff’s part, the desire to ‘walk the straight and narrow’, as he put it, with the help of his saintly grandmother. A couple of months before he was fired from the Milwaukee Plasma Center he had once more fallen into trouble with the police. At the Wisconsin State Fair on 7 August, 1982, he was arrested and charged with Disorderly Conduct. The offence was more precisely that of urinating in public, but the police officer who made the arrest did not mention urination. He ‘observed the defendant with his pants pulled down and his penis exposed leaning against the planter on the south side of the Coliseum in which 25 people were present including women and children’.2 He was convicted on 19 August and fined. This was the first instance of Dahmer’s exhibitionism to be recorded; the frequency of such behaviour would escalate at a later point, and its meaning become clearer. For the moment, Jeff was conscious of the shame he threatened to bring upon his grandmother (he had instead given the address in Bath, Ohio, as his residence when he was arrested), and he determined to turn over a new leaf.

  As soon as they returned to West Allis, Mrs Dahmer and her grandson began spending more time together. They went to church together and read the Bible. Jeff immersed himself in the Bible while he was alone, too, in a conscious attempt to wrestle with the blackness within him and purge it. For a long period he appeared to succeed, which was all the more remarkable for his being out of work, subsisting on unemployment benefit. These were precisely the loose unstructured conditions which had proved his undoing in the past. This time, however, with the example of his grandmother and the support of the Church, he gradually came to terms with a placid life uncontaminated by his primal urges. ‘I was reading the Bible then, trying to get my life straightened around, and I’d give some money to the street people sometimes, or send it in to different missionaries.’3 By being charitable and kind, he hoped to eradicate his sinfulness or at least smother it. The memory of Steven Hicks faded and no longer lunged tormentingly at him in the middle of the day. He also managed to control his habits of masturbation and limit himself to one time per week. He felt it was wrong and had to be reduced; by rubbing himself against the bed instead of using his hand, he was able to convince himself that he was not really indulging in self-abuse. He also felt guilty about the imaginings in his head which accompanied this pseudo-masturbation, because they were always homosexual and the Bible taught that homosexuality was sinful. He succeeded in repressing them and was pleased with himself.

  This ‘good’ period of about two years, unsullied by any incidents or longings, would be cited by both sides in the murder trial of 1992 as evidence in support of their case. It proved either that Jeff Dahmer was able to control his conduct when he wanted to, and was therefore in charge of his life; or that he was engaged in an almighty struggle which he eventually lost to powers greater than himself. Both points of view have merit, and the conflict between them which was manufactured by legal and psychiatric semantics was largely contrived – they are not mutually exclusive. One way to measure a man’s morality is by the degree of effort he invests in the struggle against immorality; the repeated sinner may well have repeatedly tried to resist sin.

  It was also during these years that Jeff visited his mother for the last time, spending Christmas of 1983 with her and David. He had not seen her since the divorce of 1978, and would not speak to her again until the year before his arrest on murder charges.

  On 14 January, 1985, Dahmer started work as a mixer at the Ambrosia Chocolate Factory in Milwaukee. It was a humble position requiring no great skill that could not be learnt in a day, but it was something at last, and it enabled him to be more responsible and give his grandmother a reasonable rent – $300 a month. He worked the third shift, from 11 p.m. until 7 a.m. six nights a week from Sunday to Friday. Life was pretty dull and empty, but at least it was not stalked by ghosts. Until one hapless, ordinary day when everything suddenly went wrong.

  Jeff Dahmer was sitting in the West Allis Public Library reading a book when a stranger passed and dropped a note in his lap. He unfolded and read the note. It said, ‘Meet me in the second-level bathroom. I’ll give you a blow job.’ He could scarcely believe it. There was no build-up, no preparation, he was completely taken by surprise. Though he was now twenty-five years old, he was still sexually untried, totally without experience except for the one surrogate occasion with the corpse of Steven Hicks. He thought he had at last rid himself of that terrible memory, and with it the fantasies and urges for homosexual activity. He felt he was cleaner, redeemed. Now, in that single moment in the library, the insidious thoughts clawed back into his mind again. He re-read the note. He had never been propositioned before. He did not obey the command to go to the bathroom and never saw the man. ‘It’s going to take more than that to make me stumble,’ he said to himself. Yet the incident made him think that he was being manoeuvred, ‘set up’, and his resistance began gradually to erode.

  He found himself giving way to masturbation more and more frequently, as the fantasies he summoned were less and less effective. As Stekel pointed out, fantasies do not have the desired effect the second time round, because the true goal has been replaced by a fictitious one; gratification is therefore only possible through exhaustion. ‘Most of these cases go to excess in masturbation and often succumb to onanism twelve times a day,’ he wrote.4 Dahmer’s daily average was about four times. He told psychiatrists that his urges became stronger and stronger until, some two months after the library incident, his control broke down.

  It was now that he knew he had to find someone, a man he could lie with. But he did not know how to start. He was so naive that he was afraid to approach anyone and still more apprehensive about the sexual or emotional demands which might be made of him if he did. He did not want to get ‘involved’, hoped only that he might find a sexual partner for a casual encounter. His attendance at church slackened, much to his grandmother’s chagrin, and he started drinking again.

  The first step was to discover where to go. In a gay newspaper he found the addresses of bookshops which specialised in homosexual pornography, and sought them out. He bought a great deal of material, but still felt furtive and guilty about it. Then he found that there was a manner in which he could make anonymous contact without risk or threat to his privacy. A number of these stores, in Europe as well as America, have coin-operated video booths where a man may watch a few minutes of a sex film until the money runs out, and prolong his enjoyment of it by putting in more coins. They are meant to be used by one person at a time, but it does happen i
n some, where security is lax, that the door to the booth is left ajar. There are also sometimes so-called ‘back rooms’, where a group of men may assemble in total secrecy. They are pitch-black or very gloomy, enabling contact only by touch, and thereby permitting the release of sexual urges in an utterly anonymous setting. No word is spoken. Eye-contact is impossible, and personality therefore does not intrude. The concepts of love and friendship are entirely banished from such a place. It was in this environment that Dahmer had his first tentative experience.

  He also took once more to exposing himself in public places on about six occasions when he was not apprehended. Krafft-Ebing was of the opinion that this kind of activity is at root sadistic, because it seeks to offend other people’s sense of modesty by forcing them to witness something they have not chosen to witness, which is a form of cruelty.5 In Dahmer’s case it is more likely to have been the result of timidity, of the conflict between desire for sexual relief and fear of emotional commitment. Exhibitionism was, for him at least, a fruitless and arid kind of being with somebody at a safe remove. He did not consider the feelings or susceptibilities of the people who were made props in this experiment; to him they were already as objects. Before long, this would involve him in his first court appearance, and the second opportunity of stopping him before his deviance again became dangerous.

  Another activity he indulged on at least one occasion was frotteurism, the pressing of one’s groin against an unsuspecting and unconsenting partner in a crowded place. This, too, derives from a wish for sensuality without involvement, and is an expression more of fear than temerity; it can always be explained away as an accident. It may also be felt by the perpetrator to be, like rubbing oneself against the bed, less ‘dirty’ than real sex, because it is tentative, ‘only pretending’, does not imply overt complicity of the mind. Frotteurism is a manifestation of guilty feeling, indicating in Dahmer’s case that the guidance of the Church still lingered. He would shortly find a way of doing this without having to explain anything at all.

  It is possible already to spot the development of Jeff Dahmer’s obsession. I have already pointed out that many a pubescent boy desires, first and foremost, a partner who will lie still and allow herself to be touched and fondled, and that the fantasy is eventually superseded by a maturer desire for mutuality; it comes as confidence grows. With Jeffrey Dahmer, it never did come; he was stuck in the early adolescent phase of seeing sex as nothing more than self-gratification, and the object of sexual desire as, ergo, an object. He did not want to be with a person who would move, be energetic, express desires of his own, perhaps surprise him and demand too much of him. His ideal was a person who would lie down and permit himself to be stroked and admired, and finally used merely as an aid to masturbation. Such people are not easy to find.

  His first step on this road occurred one day in 1984 when he was walking through Southridge and his eye fell upon a male mannequin in the shop window of the Boston Store. It immediately struck him that he would like to have the model at home. One evening he concealed himself in the store until after closing time. ‘At about eleven o’clock at night, when everyone was gone and the store was locked up from the outside, I went out and undressed the mannequin and I had a big sleeping-bag cover. I put it in that, zipped it up and carried it out of the store, which was a pretty dangerous thing to do. I never thought of them maybe having security cameras or being locked in the store, but I walked out with it and took it back home. I ended up getting a taxi and brought it back and kept it with me a couple of weeks. I just went through various sexual fantasies with it, pretending it was a real person, pretending that I was having sex with it, masturbating, and undressing it.’6 The behaviour seems less odd when one considers how many shops devoted to sexual aids sell a great number of inflatable dolls which men use to extend onanistic activity; nor the number of times men in art museums, thinking themselves alone, are seen by hidden cameras to run their hands over the bodies of statues. But it is no less pathetic for that.

  Dahmer’s idea of ‘having sex’ with the mannequin did not, of course, involve simulated penetration. That was not his purpose. But it was still unsatisfactory and barren. When his grandmother questioned him about the model, he made some excuse about having bought it, then got rid of it when he saw that she was anxious. He smashed it up and threw it in the trash. ‘It would have been better if I’d just stuck to the mannequins,’ he said. ‘Much, much better.’

  The same year, his brother David came to visit with his grandmother and stayed two nights. He was now eighteen, and Jeff twenty-four. They were obliged to share a bed. Jeff, as he put it, ‘felt the urges and everything to be with someone’, and there, next to him, was the very thing, a prostrate body, asleep, unconscious, available for exploration. Jeff attempted to touch his brother. ‘He didn’t go for that at all, that’s for sure. He told me so in the morning,’ he said. Jeff made a suitable apology, and the incident was never repeated. He felt both embarrassed and disappointed, and also, obscurely, that his brother had rejected something that was an essential part of him. But it would be wrong to imply that this bothered him unduly. It had been another experiment with passivity, no more.

  Later, in 1985, he discovered the bathhouses, and a more satisfactory method to ensure passivity. The homosexual bathhouses were a cultural phenomenon of the 1960s and 1970s, superseding the more discreet Turkish baths which existed before. They were usually clubs, with coffee-bars and television lounge, sauna bath and pool, and later, jacuzzis and whirlpools. The hub of the place, however, was upstairs, where lines of cubicles containing a simple bed and a shelf or bedside table allowed people to parade themselves for sex and make sudden assignations by entering a cubicle and closing the door. Some of these clubs were rudimentary and sordid, but others were bright, cheerful and popular. Early in her career Bette Midler performed in one such establishment in New York, singing to gentlemen with towels girding their loins as they rested from their labours.

  Dahmer found the bathhouse to be a relaxing place, and sometimes a strange one. It attracted people with the most unusual fetishes, for the virtue of anonymity in an environment which accepts deviance is the freedom to express peculiar desires without fear of inviting shock. There was one man whom he encountered there who liked nothing better than to suck people’s feet. He apparently had no teeth: Dahmer lay back and enjoyed it.

  For the most part, however, the men he met required more strenuous exercise to satisfy their needs, and he was put off by all that energy. Twice he was subjected to anal intercourse, which he did not like, and sometimes he would play the active part in the sexual act, which he liked rather better. But what he most wanted was for the man to keep still.

  ‘I trained myself to view people as objects of potential pleasure instead of people,’ he said, ‘instead of seeing them as complete human beings. Sounds callous and it is, but that’s what I did.’7 To which one ought to add, so did the other members of the club. It is the function of such a place to encourage sex for its own sake, and the bathhouses are therefore lamentable breeding-grounds for selfishness, just as brothels encourage the insensitive trait in heterosexual men. Visited but seldom, they can serve a purpose; frequented at the expense of all other sexual activity, they must damage the soul. ‘I looked at it as an experience of taking,’ said Dahmer. ‘There wasn’t any mutual giving, not in my mind anyway. I was always quite selfish.’

  The earliest record of a prescription issued to Jeffrey Dahmer for sleeping pills is 6 June, 1986. The doctor was Rodolfo Suaverdez of West Lincoln Avenue, Milwaukee, and he was to issue two further prescriptions in the following month before his patient moved over to Dr Carroll Ollson of South 90th Street. To both medics Dahmer told the same story: he needed help in getting to sleep as he was working night shift and could not adjust his body to such unnatural hours. Both times he was lying. The sleeping pills were his latest experiment. He took them with him to the bathhouses together with liquor which he smuggled in, to give to his tempora
ry partner in the privacy of their cubicle. The man would pass out within half an hour and subsequently oblige Dahmer by lying in an unconscious condition for up to eight hours, leaving him free to exploit his fancies. If he woke up too soon, Jeff would increase the dosage next time, until he reached an average of five pills per ‘partner’. A number of young men were subjected to this treatment without any harm coming to them, a fact we know not just from Dahmer’s own account, but from testimony of people who remember being with him.

  Nineteen-year-old Richard Burger who was up from Texas when he met Dahmer at the bathclub on Wisconsin Avenue at 7th Street was drugged by him. He made no complaint. Kevin Byrne had sexual contact with Dahmer three times at the club, and in subsequent months saw him frequently at bars, when they would greet each other. Byrne said he was a very quiet man, and remembered hearing him once say that he shaved his body because he liked a smooth hairless chest. About eight other men were drugged, and made mild complaint to the management, but no action was taken until an oriental man went into such a deep sleep that he had to be taken to hospital and did not revive for two days. It was said that he spent over a week in the hospital. At this point the management decided enough was enough and revoked Jeff’s membership. They did not, however, inform the police. Naturally, it was important to the owner that such an establishment should be as little noticed by the authorities as possible.