The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer

by Brian Masters

  Quite so. But it might have been helpful had he and his colleagues realised just how potentially sinister was this man who drugged people in order to have them stay with him. There can be little more obvious clue to a necrophilic character than this, the comatose state being only at one remove from the dead state. On the other hand, most people would be more likely to dismiss such a connective leap as preposterous.

  Having lost the benefit of the bathhouse, Jeff substituted a cheap room at the Ambassador Hotel, and on another six occasions took men back there and drugged them. The crucial circumstance, both at the bathhouse and at the hotel, is not so much that he drugged his partners, as how he behaved to them afterwards. Having robbed them of the opportunity for ‘heavy’ sex, he would then lie next to them and imagine that they belonged to him. Whereas he had difficulty in achieving an erection while they were awake, once they slept his capacity for tumescence was totally restored, and he would masturbate three or four times during the long encounter. At other times he would fondle them and enjoy their proximity. He was in control, with nothing to disturb him and no necessity to rush or feel pressure to perform. After a few hours, he, too, would fall asleep next to the prostrate body, sometimes holding it. Most peculiar of all, he would spend a great deal of time lying with his head on the man’s chest, listening to his heart-beat, or on the man’s stomach, listening to the sounds of his body. If he could fall asleep in that position, he was at his most content, for the man’s insides, his internal organs, the most secret parts of him, would belong to him too.

  A young man named William Blair came perilously close to Jeff Dahmer’s dream-world during the summer of 1986. They knew each other from the bathhouse, where they had had sex on three or four occasions. There had been no arrangement to meet, they had merely bumped into each other by chance and spent some time together. There was no affection between them – their tenderness was functional, invented for the occasion. One day Blair saw Dahmer on the corner of 7th and Wisconsin and they exchanged greetings. Jeff told him that he occasionally rented a room at the Ambassador for a night, and he was just going there now; would Blair join him? The young man accepted, and they went to the hotel together. Blair took a room himself, whether for propriety or comfort it is hard to say, but first went to Dahmer’s room for a drink. He has no memory of what happened next, for he woke up the following morning, lying naked on the bed in his own room, having lost several hours of his life. Jeff told him that he had carried him to his own room in the middle of the night, but he told him nothing more. How he might have used Blair’s sleeping body to furnish the decor of his own disturbed vision was not revealed. William Blair subsequently saw Dahmer a number of times at Milwaukee’s gay bars and saluted him in a friendly manner, but never spent time alone with him again.

  The bars were Jeff’s new haunt. There are several in town within walking distance of one another, three virtually adjacent on South 2nd Street. The 219 Club is a bright, cheerful, good-natured place, ‘gay’ in the proper sense of the word and therefore potentially as attractive to heterosexual men and women who enjoy night-clubs as to homosexual men seeking to congregate in a convivial enemy-free atmosphere. The large dance-floor is lit by colourful laser-beams and the music is loud. At weekends the 219 is packed, ‘wall-to-wall people’ in Dahmer’s words, and the overspill might go next door to ‘C’est La Vie’ or to the corner bar, the Phoenix, where there is no dance-floor and conversation is rather easier. None of them is squalid in any degree, but rather pleasant and agreeable. Jeff was a regular customer at the Phoenix and the 219. He enjoyed ‘the excitement of being around people that I didn’t know and the chance of meeting some nice-looking guy, the same thing that led me to the bathclubs, the excitement and anticipation of meeting a stranger in the night . . .’ And yet, he did not appear to make any effort to socialise. At the Phoenix, he always took the same stool at the bar, drank and smoked alone, did not respond in a lively fashion when the barman tried to engage him in conversation. He was polite and very well-mannered, and somehow distant. He did occasionally fall into conversation with black customers, it was noted, but otherwise kept himself to himself. He rarely smiled.

  Apart from the odd night at the Ambassador he was still living with his grandmother in West Allis, and adjusting himself to the revolution in his habits since he abandoned the guidance of religious teaching. Catherine Dahmer did not like her grandson to come home so late; it was not, in her view, seemly in a Christian to appear so nonchalant about the decencies of life. Jeff was beyond fighting with her on this; he was twenty-six and thirsty for experience. His formerly repressed libido was now given some expression, and hypersexuality took the place of self-discipline. He bought more and more pornography and masturbated to excess. In this he resembled many another man whose personality does not disintegrate into murderousness. For Dahmer was straining with tensions which could not be satisfied owing to their fantastical nature. He was still trying to keep the lid on, to find ways of dealing with his needs which were acceptable, and he thought he was succeeding. He did not realise that he was doing so only at the price of mental equilibrium.

  As his fantasies grew ever more elaborate, commensurate with their dwindling power to arouse, so his desire to turn people into objects intensified. To objectify is to control, to demystify, to possess, to drain the living juice from a person and render him malleable. Certainly Jeffrey Dahmer’s imagination was encouraged by the pornographic images with which he fed it. The images were themselves objects, flat things on a page; the mannequin was an object, a three-dimensional thing on the floor; the bodies of drugged companions were objects, breathing things of heart-beat and intestinal music. There was but one step to progress to the richest thing of all, a depersonalised person.

  Dahmer’s hypnotic fixation was an androgynous creature of muscular physique and power combined with feminine passivity and hairlessness, mother and father, wife and husband, earth and ocean, the unrealisable perfect friend as possession and plaything. This creature was to be his own avenue to Eros, his own piece of porn. ‘Sex is the point of contact between man and nature, where morality and good intentions fall to primitive urges.’8 Dahmer’s urges were primitive indeed, too primitive to fathom save perhaps in retrospect. They dwelt in the depths of Freudian murk, and were the very antidote to the kind of Rousseauesque optimism which believed man’s essential nature was bathed in the good.

  One day he conceived the idea of finding for himself a fresh corpse, and scanned the obituary columns in search of a suitable candidate. An eighteen-year-old boy took his fancy, so he attended the funeral and watched where the body was buried. Later that night, he went to the cemetery with the intention of digging up the corpse and taking it home, but the ground was frozen and would not yield, besides which a dog barked and an owl hooted to frighten him off. Dahmer told this story to all the psychiatrists who examined him, and was consistent in the details, but none of them asked him whether he took a spade, nor whence he might have obtained it. This is not to say the story is untrue, only that it is imaginary – the fruit of fantasy. Dahmer would not have been the first to dream up such a solution: Sergeant Bertrand in France during the mid-nineteenth century was almost a legendary figure who would swim through icy rivers in order to get to a cemetery, dig up a corpse and ravish it, and there have been many since. The police are full of stories of men arrested for lurking in graveyards, but they rarely reach the press due to readers’ resistance. That Dahmer did not actually get a ready-made corpse is immaterial; the thought that he might was in his head.

  He rented a video called Faces of Death. This is not on a pornographic subject which has to be sold surreptitiously, but a commercially available depiction of grisly reality, an examination of the way in which various cultures deal with death. It includes the scene of a detailed autopsy on a young man killed in war, with the skull cut open to remove the brain. Jeff rewound the film more than once to watch this scene, and claimed that he did not understand why he was so intrigued
by it.

  Meanwhile, there were additional signs of volatility in his social behaviour. On 18 August, 1985, he was cautioned for making obscene gestures to police officers at the corner of Wells Street and 7th Street (he had ‘given them the finger’). On 7 April there had been a more serious incident, at 3.15 in the morning at a bar on South 2nd Street. Dahmer was drunk and abusive. The bartender, Miss Kluczynski, refused to serve him, whereupon he threw tokens across the bar at her and demanded he be served or he would shoot her. She called the police and Dahmer became even more furious. Four police officers were required to hold him down and take him into custody. He remained at the police station until 1 p.m. that day, released on his own recognisance against charges of Disorderly Conduct, Threat to Injure, and City Hindering. The charges were never brought to court.

  On 8 September, 1986, two twelve-year-old boys, Richard Kohn and John Ostland, were standing by the bridge on the Kinnickinnic River Parkway in Milwaukee when they saw a man by the river, with his pants around his thighs and his shirt pulled up. The man appeared to be masturbating. Richard, who was old enough to know what ‘jacking off’ amounted to, shouted out, ‘Are you having fun?’ to which the man replied, ‘Yeah, I’m having a great time.’ The boys reported this incident to the police and gave an accurate description of the man, which was then broadcast to all squad cars. Police Officer Richard Menzel spotted a man who fitted the description at West Jackson Park Drive and stopped him. It was Jeff Dahmer. He was brought back to Kinnickinnic River and positively identified by the two boys, at which point he was arrested and charged with Lewd and Lascivious Behaviour and Indecent Exposure.

  Dahmer’s defence was that he was urinating and had no idea he was being watched, but in fact his exhibitionism was always latent, and he had indulged it before in public parks. Now, for the first time, he attracted the attention of the courts and his personality would be subject to scrutiny and analysis. Light might at last be shed upon his weird private imaginings by doctors who would know what to look for. The charge against Dahmer was reduced to one of Disorderly Conduct and he was duly convicted by Judge Arlene Connors on 10 March, 1987. The sentence was suitably mild – one year’s probation – but a condition of his bail was that he undergo psychological counselling for sexual deviance and impulse control, and the court referred him to clinical psychologist Dr Evelyn Rosen.

  First of all, Dahmer was given two written tests designed to alert the doctors to likely problems and disorders of the personality. They both have impossible titles (the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory and the Forer Structured Sentence Completion Test), but their purpose is to permit the subconscious to speak through the conscious use of signal words. In the first (Millon), the patient is invited to read a number of self-descriptive statements and to indicate, merely by colouring in a circle, whether he regards the statement as true or false in his own case. Dahmer indicated that most of the statements did not apply to him, but some of those he marked as ‘true’ are interesting in the light of what we so far know about his character:

  ‘Lately, I’ve begun to feel lonely and empty.’

  ‘Ideas keep turning over and over in my mind and they won’t go away.’

  ‘I’ve become quite discouraged and sad about life recently.’

  ‘Looking back on my life, I know I have made others suffer as much as I have suffered.’

  ‘I keep having strange thoughts I wish I could get rid of.’

  The doctors drew attention to some of these by again circling them, but there is no evidence that anyone questioned Dahmer closely about these ‘strange thoughts’ and ‘ideas’, nor about the reasons for his emptiness. Since he was hugely uncooperative, it may well be that opportunities for searching enquiry did not arise. One other statement he thought was true is more alarming than the rest, because insidious: ‘I know I’m a superior person, so I don’t care what people think.’

  The second test (Forer) consisted of completing sentences which had been left open-ended. Dahmer’s showed, on the whole, that he did not take the test very seriously, but it was illuminating, nonetheless, to see how many times he made reference to his father, and always saw him as a man working rather than loving or being with him. (The italicised words are in Dahmer’s handwriting.)

  ‘My father always worked hard.’

  ‘My earliest memory of my father is when he went to work.’

  ‘When my father came home I was happy.’

  ‘When my mother came home, I was watching TV.’

  Other characteristics which stand out are a distrust of marriage, a tired cynicism, and a reluctance to be made to fit into any established pattern. The only glimmer of affection is in the sentence, ‘He felt blue when his dog died.’

  The cumulative effect, in both tests, is of a man seemingly self-doomed to isolation and disconnectedness. Despite the reference above to superiority (or perhaps because it is a postulated ideal and not a perceived reality), he is a man who feels powerless to cope with the world of the living, where people do and say things without reference to him. Secondly, he is trapped by the trivial and utterly devoid of grand design or purposeful energies. His self-image is extremely weak; he feels that he counts for nothing and is worthless. He needs to be something more than he is, something greater; he needs to grow and expand, but feels smothered. ‘The man who is able to assert himself in a socially acceptable fashion is seldom vicious; it is the weak who are most likely to stab one in the back.’9

  The truth of this remark of Storr’s needs to be emphasised. It is a paradox, and one of which we must take firm notice if we are to spot murderers in advance, that the worst and most hideous crimes are committed not by monsters of power and magnetism, but by individuals who feel impotent and inadequate. The man whose will reigns over his life and environment does not need to nourish it on destruction; it is satisfied already. But if one’s will to achieve is blocked, either by oneself or by outside influences, the resulting dam of frustration is extremely dangerous. Jeffrey Dahmer had no self-image to validate his life or justify his existence. He was a waste. He felt reduced to an inconsequential object, a piece of flotsam bobbing on the surface of life. Just as he objectified his sexual partners, because he knew no other way, so he was in turn objectified and rendered useless by the cruel sweep of circumstance. Or so he felt.

  The man who walks alone, outside society and untouched by its norms, is a volcano waiting to erupt. Nothing simmers with greater threat than the thwarted will. Dahmer’s will was crushed by apathy and by the most appalling self-knowledge. He did not think himself ‘superior’ because he had, nine years earlier, killed a man without anyone ever finding out. On the contrary, he knew that he was diminished by this, and tied, trammelled, by the need to prevent its ever happening again. If he were to assert himself, to allow the real ‘Jeff’ to break free, the expression of his will might be devastating. Only he knew how dangerous he was. The few occasions on which he had shown anger (against a tree trunk or against arresting officers) were as nothing compared to the force which lay in ambush. He saw himself as flawed, and self-imprisoned by the need to restrain this aberrant trait. He had to smother his will-drive, because he knew where it might lead, and the result was severe psychological impairment.

  The philosopher Abraham Maslow once famously put forward a theory about the ‘hierarchy of needs’, which had a crucial influence upon the generation to reach maturity in the 1960s.10 According to Maslow, the first human need is for security and food; it is only when this is satisfied that the need for sex comes forward to demand satisfaction; when sexual needs are met, then the desire for acceptance by one’s fellows is paramount, and this is the most important – the need for self-esteem. Above this occurs the intellectual and creative level which finally craves to be fulfilled, and which inspired some young thinkers of the sixties to recommend ‘doing your own thing’. Maslow postulated that to snap off one rung of the ladder in this hierarchy was to invite danger; if there is a blockage, a hindrance to advancemen
t, then the will which works its way through these progressive needs cannot go forward and becomes redundant or supine. This, he says, leads inevitably to mental sickness. The only route to psychological health is an uninterrupted journey from the need for food to the need for creativity.

  The need for self-esteem comes after that for sex, and is usually more difficult to satisfy. In Jeff Dahmer’s case, he had hardly moved forward from the most basic requirement and was living like an automaton, working to earn enough money to live until the next day when he could work again. Satisfactory sexual or emotional commitments were unknown to him, and pride in achievement unimaginable. At bottom, he would still have liked to do something which would please his father and make him feel that he had not let him down by being so useless, but he could not even contemplate this until the lower need was fulfilled. Thus was he completely unable to make himself worthy, while at the same time he knew that worthiness was laudable. It would have been easier had he been stupid. As it was, his lack of self-esteem was an endless frustration.

  It is for this reason that he resented the requirement that he should confide in Dr Rosen, and was frequently so uncooperative as to turn his back on her (a fact repeatedly asserted by the prosecution in court four years later). Dr Rosen’s notes present a vivid picture of a difficult patient, silently turbulent and sullen. She noticed how reluctant he was to talk about himself, how he became more and more monosyllabic as the session continued. The next time they met he was again ‘unresponsive’, complaining about the length of the journey to her office; surprisingly, she did not notice the significance of this irritability, which is a disguised way of looking for approval for having made the journey at all. She told him that if he had a car then he would not have such problems getting around, which is not what he wanted to hear; after that he ‘became stubbornly mute’. He also resisted any discussion about his family.