Dead Men Walking

by Bill Wallace

  When, in November 1979, Nilsen tried to strangle a young Chinese man in his flat, his intended victim escaped and actually reported the attack to the police. When officers arrived to question Nilsen about the incident, Nilsen told them that the Chinese man had been trying to ‘rip him off’. They let it go and left him free to find other victims.

  The next was twenty-three-year-old holidaying Canadian, Kenneth Ockendon who Nilsen also met in a pub, the Princess Louise in High Holborn, around 3 December 1979. They went back to the Melrose Avenue flat where they ate a meal. Later. as Ockendon listened to some music through headphones, Nilsen felt rejected and became angry. He strangled the Canadian with a flex and then sat down, put the headphones on and listened to music for hours. He washed the body before putting it to bed and lying beside it. In the morning, as he had to go to work, he stuffed the body in a cupboard.

  The following day, he photographed it in various positions before climbing into bed and having sex with it. Like the last one, he slipped it under the floorboards but would, when he felt lonely, get it out and sit it beside him on the couch to watch television. Afterwards, he would clean it up, and put it back under the floorboards with a loving ‘Goodnight’.

  Martin Duffey, a sixteen-year-old trainee butcher, followed five months later, his corpse spending a fortnight in the cupboard before disappearing under the floorboards. Then Nilsen strangled a twenty-six-year-old Scottish man, Billy Sutherland, with his bare hands. Nilsen admits to remembering nothing of killing Sutherland, explaining that when he killed he entered a trance of some kind.

  His next seven victims’ names are all unknown. There was a Mexican or Filipino, a down-and-out, picked up in a doorway, and a further five who were killed between late 1980 and late 1981. They were mostly homeless or itinerant young men who were missed by no one. His eighth victim lay under his floorboards for almost a year, while the ninth and tenth victims were young Scottish men he picked up in Soho pubs. The eleventh victim was a young skinhead with a distinctive tattoo – a dotted line around his neck with the words ‘Cut Here’.

  The police were again informed of Dennis Nilsen’s activity after a Scottish barman he picked up fought him off and fled the flat. Once again, however, they refused to get involved, putting it down to a homosexual contretemps.

  Martyn Barlow was a twenty-four-year-old with learning difficulties whom Nilsen found outside his building. The man was in such a bad condition, very weak from epilepsy, that Nilsen took him to hospital. When he was released on 18 September 1981, he went back to Nilsen’s flat to thank him for helping him. Nilsen responded by strangling him after they had eaten a meal together. He thought Barlow was a bit of a nuisance and he just fitted into the cabinet under the kitchen sink.

  By now, of course, the question of hygiene was becoming pressing. There was a terrible smell at 125 Melrose Avenue which the neighbours began to complain about. Inside his flat, flies were hatching out in the putrefying flesh of the bodies he had stuffed into cupboards and under the floorboards. He began to carve the corpses up, undressing to his underpants to do so. The heads were boiled in his large cooking pot, stripping the flesh off the skull; he knew about butchery from his time as an army cook. He stashed body parts all over the garden.

  In October 1981, having thoroughly cleaned out the old flat and removed the body parts from the garden and burned or buried them, he moved to Cranley Gardens and celebrated not long after, on 25 October, by taking a gay student, Paul Nobbs back to his new flat where they both got drunk and went to bed together. When Nobbs awoke the next morning, he discovered bruises around his neck. He was informed at University College Hospital that it appeared that someone had tried to strangle him. Had Nilsen exercised restraint for once in his life?

  When John Howlett came back to his flat with him in March 1982, Nilsen, for once, wanted him to leave, not enjoying his company. He strangled him after an almighty struggle and having been forced to hit him on the skull to subdue him. He was then drowned and hidden in a cupboard. Later, he dissected the body, disposing of the flesh down the toilet and the bones in the dustbin.

  Nilsen has no memory of killing Archibald Graham Allan. He does remember leaving him dead in the bath for three days, however, before carving up his body.

  His final victim was twenty-year-old drug addict, Steven Sinclair, whom he met in Leicester Square. After strangling Sinclair with a piece of string, he bathed him as usual before carefully putting him to bed. He surrounded the bed with mirrors, took his clothes off and lay beside the dead body, looking at himself.

  At his trial which began on 24 October 1983, Nilsen was charged with six murders and two attempted murders, although he had happily confessed to fifteen when arrested. At his trial he enjoyed being the focus of attention and although defence lawyers pleaded diminished responsibility and wanted the charges reduced to manslaughter, he was found guilty by a vote of ten against two. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.

  In prison, Nilsen claims to have composed more than eighty symphonic suites, painted and written poetry. He has also written an unpublished autobiography, History of a Drowning Boy.

  Jeffrey Dahmer

  It started innocuously enough, two police officers, Robert Rauth and Rolf Mueller, of the Milwaukee Police Department knocking on the door of Room 213, in a building called the Oxford Apartments. They had, a short while before, encountered a young black man who had come running towards them with a pair of handcuffs dangling from one wrist. Deliriously happy to have found them, he started ranting hysterically about a madman who had tried to kill him. Tracy Edwards gave them an address and they were now knocking on the door of that address.

  The door swung open to reveal a tall, good-looking young white man with sandy hair. He calmly let them into the apartment, leading Rauth and Mueller to believe at first that there must have been some kind of mistake. But there was something about the place that made them uneasy. The smell. The smell of something rotting, like fish that had been left out too long.

  The man gave his name as Jeffrey Dahmer and when they told him that Tracy Edwards was claiming that he had threatened him, he apologised. He had recently lost his job, he said, and was upset. He had also been drinking and things had just got a little out of hand.

  The officers asked him for the key to the handcuffs but Dahmer suddenly became visibly nervous. He seemed to be playing for time, perhaps weighing up his options as he stalled them. Politely, but firmly, they insisted that he get the key. Suddenly, Dahmer became hysterical, screaming at them and looking as if he might get violent. The officers grabbed hold of him to subdue him and there was a struggle. He was no match for their training, however, and within seconds he was on the floor being cuffed and having his rights read to him. When they called in to run a check run on him, they quickly received the response that Jeffrey Dahmer had a conviction for sexual assault.

  Now very interested in what had happened earlier, one of the officers asked Edwards to tell them what had happened. He explained that he had met Dahmer in a shopping mall about four hours ago and had come back to his apartment with him. As they sat on the sofa drinking beer and rum and coke, Edwards told them he began to feel drowsy. Dahmer tried to put his arms around him and he woke up and said he was going. He had already felt uneasy when he had seen male pin-ups on the apartment walls. He was more into women, he told the officers. Before he could get up, Dahmer had quickly put a handcuff on one of his wrists but he managed to fight off his attempt to put it around the other. He stopped struggling when Dahmer produced a large butcher’s knife and held it against his chest. Seated like that, he spent the next hour watching the film The Exorcist. Seeming to get bored with the video, Dahmer calmly told Edwards that he was going to cut his heart out and eat it. But first he was going to strip him and take some pictures. As he stood up to get his camera, Edwards seized his chance, swinging a punch at Dahmer and kicking him. Dahmer was knocked off-balance and Edwards ran for the door. As Dahmer ran after him, offering to unlock the cuff
s, Edwards did not hesitate. He flung open the door and threw himself down the stairs as fast as his feet could carry him.

  While one officer remained with Dahmer, the other decided to have a look around the apartment. Going into the kitchen, he opened the refrigerator door and froze in horror. ‘There’s a fucking head in the refrigerator!’ he screamed.

  He was wrong. There were actually three heads, neatly wrapped in clear plastic bags. There were also plastic food bags containing human meat. In a cupboard in the bedroom there was a cooking pot containing decomposed hands and a penis. On the shelf above that there were two skulls. Male genitalia were preserved in formaldehyde and there was a variety of chemicals in containers – ethyl alcohol, chloroform and more formaldehyde.

  In a filing cabinet they found three skulls as well as photographs that seemed to have been taken as victims died. There were also gruesome photographs of corpses. In one, a man’s bloody head lay horrifically in a sink, while another depicted a victim cut neatly open from neck to groin. Others showed men in erotic and bondage poses. A kettle contained two more skulls and a blue plastic barrel hid three human torsos. There was a blood-stained electric saw – they had stumbled on a slaughterhouse.

  Jeffrey Dahmer confessed to killing seventeen men, cooperating freely and seemingly glad to have a chance to get it all off his chest. He was yet another in a series of serial killers like John Wayne Gacy and Dean Corll, but the difference was that he did not just kill them; he also ate them. He was a cannibal and would most certainly have eaten Tracy Edwards’ heart, as he had promised. The only foodstuffs in the apartment, apart from human meat, was a packet of crisps and a jar of mustard.

  Jeffrey Dahmer was born in Milwaukee in 1960, his family later moving to Akron, Ohio. The young Dahmer was a happy, normal little boy until at the age of six he underwent surgery for a double hernia. His father, Lionel, maintains that he was never the same little happy-go-lucky child again. He grew more introverted and strangely emotionless. It emerged at his trial that he took an unhealthy interest in dissecting animals, stripping the flesh off them and on one occasion putting a dead dog’s head on the end of a stake. As he grew older, he became more tense and was inordinately shy. Soon, completely unmotivated, he started drinking.

  He killed for the first time at the age of eighteen, his victim another eighteen-year-old, Steven Hicks, who had been hitch-hiking when Dahmer picked him up. He brought Hicks back to his house and killed him by smashing his skull with a weight because ‘he didn’t want him to leave.’ He then masturbated over the body before burying it in the woods behind his house.

  He did not kill for another nine years, enrolling in the army in the meantime and getting a posting to Germany. His drinking let him down, however, as it often did and he was discharged for drunkenness. Back in Milwaukee, he moved in with his grand-mother for a while, working at the Ambrosia Chocolate Company. He began to frequent the city’s gay bars but as ever usually spent the evenings drinking alone. When he did actually get into a conversation with anyone, his drinking companion more often than not ended the evening in a drugged coma. He was experimenting with the chemicals that would later enable to do what he wanted to his victims in the privacy of his own apartment. One of his drinking companions wound up in hospital and the proprietor of the bar in which he had collapsed barred Dahmer.

  He was also beginning to get into trouble with the police. He was picked up for a number of minor offences – drunkenness, disorderly conduct and so on. His father wrote later that his son had become ‘a liar, an alcoholic, a thief, an exhibitionist, a molester of children. I could not imagine how he had become such a ruined soul…there was something missing in Jeff…We call it a “conscience”… that had either died or had never been alive in the first place.’

  Then, on 8 September 1986, two twelve-year-old boys reported him to the police. He had exposed himself and masturbated in front of them. When he was picked up he claimed merely to have been urinating. He got a year’s probation.

  He stayed out of trouble during that year, but just a few days after the end of his probation, he murdered again. He picked up twenty-four-year-old Stephen Tuomi in a gay bar. They went to a hotel and went to bed together. Dahmer claimed to remember nothing, apart from waking up in the morning to find Tuomi dead. He had been strangled.

  He wondered how on earth he was going to get the body out of the hotel but quickly arrived at a solution. He slipped out and purchased a large suitcase into which he crammed the corpse. He took a taxi to his grandmother’s house where he lived in a basement flat. He dismembered the body, stuffed the various bits into plastic rubbish sacks and put them in the dustbin. As he relaxed afterwards, he pondered on how much he had enjoyed it, how exciting it had been. He realised at that moment that the only way he could satisfy his sexual urges was to kill. From then on, that was his life’s work.

  Between 16 January 1988 and 19 July 1991, he would kill fifteen young men, more often than not black. They would be invited back to his apartment, given a drugged drink and either strangled or stabbed to death. The body would then be dismembered and bagged for eating, the parts that he did not need being left out with the rubbish. He told police that by eating the flesh of his victims, he believed they would come alive again in him. He experimented with seasoning and meat tenderisers. Eating human meat gave him an erection, he said, and his fridge contained strips of human flesh.

  He further explained that before his victims died, he sometimes tried to perform a kind of lobotomy on them. After drugging them, he would drill a hole in their skulls and inject hydrochloric acid into their brains. He was trying to create a functioning zombie-like creature that he could exercise ultimate control over and control, after all, was really what it was all about. Needless to say, most died during this procedure, but he claimed that one survived for a few days.

  By March 1988, he had claimed his third and fourth victims, fourteen year-old Native American, Jamie Doxtator and twenty-five-year-old Richard Guerro.

  Soon the smells and the drinking became too much for his grandmother who threw him out. He moved to an apartment in Milwaukee, at 808 N. 24th Street and the day after he moved in, he picked up thirteen year-old Laotian boy called Sinthasomphone, who agreed to pose for photographs for fifty dollars. By grim coincidence, he was the older brother of a boy Dahmer would kill in 1991. But, he did not kill Sinthasomphone and, when the boy returned home, his parents realised he had been drugged. The cops picked Dahmer up on charges of sexual exploitation of a child and second-degree sexual assault. He pleaded guilty, claiming he thought the boy was older.

  His arrest did not put him off his stride, however. As he awaited sentencing, on 25 March 1989 he killed Anthony Sears, a handsome black male model. Dahmer boiled the skull to remove the skin and painted it grey. He still had it when he was arrested.

  In the style of the true psychopath, Dahmer put on a superb performance in court, charming and manipulative. The prosecution sought a prison sentence but he got off with five years’ probation. He was also ordered to spend a year in the House of Correction under ‘work release’, which meant he went to work during the day and returned to jail at night. In spite of a letter from Dahmer’s father, pleading with the judge not to release him without treatment, he was released after just ten months and went to live again with his grandmother, before moving into his rooms in the Oxford apartments in May 1990.

  Exactly a year later, a naked fourteen-year-old Laotian boy, Konerak Sinthasomphone, was found wandering on the streets of the Milwaukee neighbourhood in which Dahmer’s flat was located. He talked to a couple of women, but was largely incoherent, having been given a drugged drink by Dahmer. The police were called and took the boy back to Dahmer’s flat to investigate. Dahmer told them, however, that Konerak was his nineteen-year-old boyfriend and that there had been a drunken row. The police thought it was probably no more than a domestic argument and handed the dazed boy over to Dahmer, while at the same time noting a strange smell in the apartment.
A few hours later, Sinthasomphone became Jeffrey Dahmer’s thirteenth victim.

  He was indicted on seventeen charges of murder, later reduced to fifteen and against the advice of his attorney, pleaded guilty, claiming insanity. The argument was that no sane person could have done what he did. The prosecution, on the other hand, pursued the line that he was a murderous psychopath, a cold-blooded killer whose murders were carefully planned and premeditated.

  The trial, starting with jury selection on 29 January 1992, was inevitably a circus. There was heavy security, and an eight-foot barrier of steel and bullet-proof glass was erected around the area where Dahmer would sit, protecting him from angry members of the Milwaukee public.

  It took the jury five hours to decide that Jeffrey Dahmer should go to prison and not to a psychiatric hospital. He was found guilty on all fifteen charges.

  On the day of his sentencing, he read out a statement from the dock that could have been taken as an apology of sorts for the horror he had created.

  Your Honor, it is now over. This has never been a case of trying to get free. I didn’t ever want freedom. Frankly, I wanted death for myself. This was a case to tell the world that I did what I did, but not for reasons of hate. I hated no one. I knew I was sick or evil or both. Now I believe I was sick. The doctors have told me about my sickness, and now I have some peace. I know how much harm I have caused…Thank God there will be no more harm that I can do. I believe that only the Lord Jesus Christ can save me from my sins… I ask for no consideration.

  They obliged. He was locked up for a total of 957 years.

  He would only serve two of those years, however. Sent to Columbia Correctional Institute in Portage, Wisconsin, he was segregated from the rest of the prisoners. This failed to prevent him being attacked by a razor-wielding Cuban inmate in the prison chapel, however. Dahmer behaved himself, becoming a born-again Christian and was gradually being integrated into the prison population.