SERIAL KILLER’S SOUL
SERIAL KILLER’S SOUL
Jeffrey Dahmer’s Cell Block Confidante Reveals All
By Herman Lee Martin
As told to Patricia Lorenz
Copyright ©2010 Herman Lee Martin and Patricia Lorenz All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part, by any means whatsoever, except for passages excerpted for the purposes of review, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For information, or to order additional copies, please contact: TitleTown Publishing, LLC
P.O. Box 12093 Green Bay, WI 54307-12093
920.737.8051 | titletownpublishing.com Scripture quotations marked (TLB) are taken from THE WAY, The Living Bible, copyright ©1976. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, IL 60189. All rights reserved.
Cover design by Mike Stromberg Interior layout and design by Erika L. Block Edited by Julie Rogers
PUBLISHER’S CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA: Martin, Herman Lee.
Serial Killer’s Soul : Jeffrey Dahmer’s Cell Block Confidante Reveals All
by Herman Lee Martin ; as told to Patricia Lorenz. -- 1st ed.
Green Bay, WI : TitleTown Pub., c2010.
p.; cm.
ISBN: 978-0-98230089-3
1. Dahmer, Jeffrey.
2. Serial murderers--Wisconsin--Milwaukee--Biography.
3. Prisoners--Wisconsin--Biography. I. Lorenz, Patricia. II. Title.
HV6534.M65 M37 2010 2010934527
364.152/320977595--dc22 1009
Printed in the USA by Thomson-Shore first edition printed on recycled paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Put on all of God’s armor so that you will be able to stand safe against all strategies and tricks of Satan. For we are not fighting against people made of flesh and blood, but against persons without bodies—the evil rulers of the unseen world, those mighty satanic beings and great evil princes of darkness who rule this world; and against huge numbers of wicked spirits in the spirit world. So use every piece of God’s armor to resist the enemy whenever he attacks, and when it is all over, you will still be standing up. (Ephesians 6:11-13, The Living Bible)
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. An Unholy Childhood
2. Still Running From the Law
3. A New Life Begins
4. Another Sinner Captured
5. Trials of Life Inside Maximum Security
6. Life Goes on Without Dahmer
7. Dahmer’s Day in Court
8. Back to Serve His Time
9. Who is This Man, Dahmer?
10. The Great Weapons Search
11. And So It Begins
12. Dahmer’s Private Hell
13. Is Your Soul Dead?
14. More Questions, More Answers
15. Inferiority Complexes
16. The Pull Between Good and Evil
17. A Quiet, Lonely Sunday
18. Another Letter from Jeff
19. The Day Before My Disciplinary Hearing
20. Hearing Day Arrives
21. Corresponding with Jeff from Afar
22. Unanswered Letters
23. My Release from Prison
24. The Murder of Jeffrey Dahmer
Afterword
Final Notes from Patricia Lorenz
About the Authors
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Herman Martin, who was willing to open his life and his heart to share with others his incredible journey spent in the cell next to Jeffrey Dahmer.
Tracy Ertl, the joyful, hard-working owner of TitleTown Publishing, who had faith in this book from the first moment she heard about it.
Ellen Kozak, one of America’s leading copyright attorneys who asked me to be the ghostwriter for this book in 1995 and who had faith in it for the fifteen years it sat in limbo awaiting the right publisher.
Julie Rogers, editor, whose amazing attention-to-detail work ethic has certainly helped make this book reader ready.
Jessica Engman, a talented intern at TitleTown Publishing who did follow-up interviews with Herman and thus provided insightful rewrites fifteen years after the original manuscript was written.
Erika Block, creator of the book’s easy-on-the-eyes interior design.
Michael Stromberg, cover artist. As we all know it’s the cover of a book that sells it.
Thank you to all who had a part in this book birthed, with considerable labor pains, over many years. I am especially grateful for having the opportunity to do the final rewrites and present a book that will hopefully encourage readers to think and explore on their own the many issues and ideas that this book presents.
Thank you to Herman for finally having the courage to go forward with his story fifteen years after the beginning.
Patricia Lorenz
June 1, 2010
INTRODUCTION
My curiosity overtook my fear. As I sat on my bed and stared at the gray wall separating us, I looked up at the vents at the top of my cell. Those vents led directly into Jeffrey Dahmer’s cell. My eyes trailed down toward the metal sink attached to the wall. I compared the distance between the two and, if I stood on the sink, I figured I could get close to the vents. Close enough, maybe, so I could talk to him quietly. I wondered if he would talk back.
Curiosity or fear, which would prove stronger?
I took a deep breath and felt my palms getting sweaty. I stood up, went over to the sink, put both hands onto the sides, and hoisted myself up onto it. My heart was thudding so loudly I almost wondered if he could hear it. The pipes beneath the shiny metal of the sink creaked slightly under the new, unwanted addition of my weight. I steadied myself, leaning in toward the wall. I listened closely for just a moment, straining, to see if I could hear any sign of life from a man who took that very thing from so many others.
If I had met Jeffrey Dahmer before it all happened, before Tracy Edwards’ escape and Dahmer’s subsequent arrest, I probably would have fallen for Jeff’s lies, too. I would have returned to his apartment in downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and my fate may have been the same as the seventeen others whose lives he claimed. Granted, I wouldn’t have gone there for the same reasons as the others, who mostly went for sex, drugs, alcohol, promises of money, or gay porn. That wasn’t my bag. I would have gone to his apartment to steal stuff.
I learned to steal at an early age. Stealing is a behavioral addiction that has followed me my entire life, even now. Stealing, for me, is like a drug. After years of being clean and waiting for the right time to reveal my Dahmer story, I still failed to resist the urge to steal and landed back in prison. I had everything to look forward to and failed. I, along with many other people, always wondered if Dahmer was human when he could do the things he did. Perhaps Dahmer was indeed human but also had his own addiction? Dahmer’s addiction was that he couldn’t resist the compulsion to kill.
There’s one thing to set straight from the start: to steal is one thing, to lie is another.
When the police arrested Jeffrey Dahmer in 1991, I was already in the Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin. I was serving time for theft–armed robbery, to be specific. We watched Dahmer on the news religiously. Everyone around me watched his trial, the evidence, the gross details… everything. The inmates at Columbia and I heard it all. We were inmates, yet we were shocked. The entire city of Milwaukee was shocked on that July day in 1991. The world was shocked.
It was a virtual pandemic of fear. Parents worried about their children. Police worried that there would be a Dahmer wanna-be who would attempt to pick up where Jeff left off, a “copy-cat” killer. City officials argued about what to do with items taken from Dahmer’s apartment: his tools
, his photographs, and all his other belongings. People were angry, scared, and looking for someone to blame. The news stations couldn’t get enough of the Dahmer story. Programs popped up about how parents could protect their children, problems with big cities, innercity area crime, issues with the police, discrimination, and the problems with the legal system. When something like Dahmer happens, the world is full of blame and finger pointing.
Jeffrey Dahmer was born on May 21, 1960, to Lionel and Joyce (Flint) Dahmer. He started out like any normal kid, doing normal kid things. Somewhere around the age of five though, he ventured off the “normal kid” path and began to show an interest in bones and dead animals.
Around the age of ten, Jeff’s dad gave him a chemistry set. Lionel Dahmer was an analytical chemist and possibly had aspirations that maybe Jeff wanted to become a scientist, too. Dead animals and bones could be a sign of an aspiring archaeologist or a penchant for biology. However, Jeff used the chemistry set to explore his interest in dead things further and not in anything resembling a “scientific” interest. The interest was more morbid fascination than science.
The set had various chemicals, things like formaldehyde and various acids. Jeff learned like an apt pupil how to use the formaldehyde to preserve animal remains and the acid to remove the skin from the bone. Jeff’s morbid interest didn’t apparently include actually torturing animals or even killing them, a typical trait of many serial killers; instead, he liked to mutilate the ones that were already dead ones.
One day he found a dead dog by the side of the road. He took the animal home, sawed off its head, and mounted the head on a stake in the woods near his house. He then gutted and skinned the carcass and nailed it to a tree in the shape of a cross.
Jeff’s unusual interest in death wasn’t his only difference from kids his age. He had a lonely childhood with few friends. In school, one could say he had a difficult time connecting with other students. He was the quiet, awkward kid who often found himself the target of anyone touting bully potential. At the same time in life, his parents were going through a nasty divorce and were often absent or absorbed in their own issues.
As the years went on, Jeff became angrier, sadder, and lonelier. He was a kid with bad ideas and parents too caught up in their own life traumas to help him through those dark times.
After his parents’ divorce, everything in his life began a steep, downhill spiral. Jeff was eighteen when the divorce was final. His parents endlessly fought a proverbial tug-of-war surrounding custody of his younger brother. Jeff paid the price by being frequently ignored as he wasn’t directly involved in the battle and, as a legal adult, wasn’t a prize for his parents to quarrel over.
It was in June 1978, shortly after Jeff’s high school graduation, when something snapped and he killed his first victim, seventeen-year-old Steven Hicks. Later, Jeff said it was an experiment … an experiment to see if he could really kill someone.
The biggest mistake of Steven Hicks’ entire life was hitchhiking that night. Jeff saw him and opted to pick him up. Jeff must have already had his plan set in his head and Stephen was the unwitting target. Jeff talked Stephen into going back to his house. Agreeing, they went back to Jeff’s empty home to drink some beer and hang out. After awhile, things took a drastic turn for the worse. Later, Jeff told everyone that he didn’t want Stephen to leave and merely wanted to keep him around. What he did, however, was knock Steven unconscious with a barbell, rape him, and then use the same barbell to crush Stephen’s windpipe, killing him.
Jeff dragged Stephen’s lifeless body behind his house and buried him in a crawl space. A few years later, for whatever reason, he returned, cut up the body, and scattered the remains around a wooded lot near the house.
After high school, Jeff attended Ohio State University. His scholarly stint was short lived; after only a semester, he dropped out because he drank too much and never attended class. His dad, likely disappointed and frustrated, forced him to join the Army. In 1981, the Army decided they didn’t want Jeff either, again because of his alcoholism. He was discharged and Jeff moved to Miami Beach, Florida, where he kept drinking.
Later that year he moved back to Ohio to live with his dad and stepmother, but his drinking problem continued. By the fall of 1981, Jeff officially started his criminal record when police arrested him and charged him with drunk and disorderly conduct.
His dad kicked him out.
In 1982, Jeff moved into the basement of his grandmother’s house in West Allis, Wisconsin. While there, Jeff’s drinking problem escalated and his behavior became even stranger. In 1982, police arrested him again, this time for indecent exposure. He was arrested a third time in September of 1986 on a second charge of indecent exposure for masturbating in front of two boys.
On September 15, 1987, almost eight years after murdering Stephen Hicks, Jeff met Steven Tuomi. The two hooked up at a gay bar in Milwaukee and ended the evening at a hotel. Jeff was drunk; too drunk to even remember murdering Steven. When Jeff sobered up and realized what had transpired, he left and bought a large suitcase. He returned to the hotel and stuffed Tuomi’s body inside the suitcase. He went to his grandmother’s house, suitcase in tow. In his grandmother’s basement, Jeff took Tuomi out of the suitcase and had sex with the corpse. Eventually, he chopped Tuomi’s body up and boiled the flesh from the bones. He packed the remains in trash bags and hauled them to the garbage.
No one ever found a single fragment of Tuomi’s body.
Jeff killed again a month later, in October 1987. James Doxtator was a fourteen-year-old American Indian boy. Dahmer also met him outside a gay bar and convinced him to come back to his grandmother’s house to pose for naked pictures. Jeff said he would give him fifty bucks and it was easy money. Jeff did take the photos but decided that wasn’t the end of the bargain. He drugged James, strangled him to death, and took more photos.
Richard Guerrero, a twenty-five-year-old Hispanic man, was reported missing in March of 1988. What the world had yet to realize was that Guerrero was Jeff’s next victim. Jeff, likely inspired by his previous success, did the same things to Richard that he had to Tuomi: killed him, had sex with the body, chopped it up, and threw out the remains. This time, however, he kept Richard’s head and genitals as trophies.
Jeff’s grandmother, oblivious to what was occurring in her own basement, had enough of her grandson’s odd behavior. She had tolerated strange noises, awful smells, his drinking, and the young men he kept inviting back to her house. She kicked him out in the summer of 1988.
Jeff found an apartment in Milwaukee and was apparently enthralled with his newfound privacy. After living in the new apartment for only one day, Jeff met a thirteen-year-old Laotian boy named Somsack Sinthasomphone. Jeff lured the boy back to his apartment, where he drugged and sexually assaulted him. This boy, however, managed what the others had not; he escaped. Jeff was soon arrested, serving ten months in jail, receiving five years’ probation, and registering as a sex offender.
He moved back into his grandmother’s basement.
While living at his grandmother’s home for the second time, Jeff met and killed twenty-four-year-old African American Anthony Sears in 1989.
Dahmer’s murder toll was up to four with one failed attempt.
In May 1990, Jeff’s grandmother finally kicked him out for good. She later swore she never knew about the men and boys he killed while he lived in her home. Jeff moved into an apartment in downtown Milwaukee–Apartment 213, at 924 North 25th Street. This apartment later became infamous after the truth of Dahmer’s killing spree emerged.
Now that Jeff had an apartment to himself and the return of his privacy, he was free to do whatever he wanted. The apartment was in a poor, mostly black neighborhood. Jeff later confided that the area was ideal for killing because people there didn’t like to get cops involved and cops, likewise, didn’t seem to care as much if people who lived there went missing. He said that even if people saw something or thought something was out of ordinary, the
y often didn’t call the cops. Drug dealing and prostitution were everyday facts and no one liked to put their nose in anyone else’s business, fearing they’d mess up their own. Jeff felt a freedom he reveled in. He could do whatever he wanted.
His murderous nature in full swing, he killed as he pleased. He started to keep more trophy body parts from his victims: heads, skulls, genitals, hands, organs, torsos, skeletons, even entire bodies. He used acid to remove parts he didn’t want to keep. His acid of choice turned the parts into a black, jelly-like sludge. The sludge was then poured down a sink or flushed down the toilet.
In June of 1990, Jeff met twenty-eight-year-old African American Edward Smith. As was his normal modus operandi, Jeff lured Smith back to his apartment, drugged him, and then killed him. Jeff cut off Smith’s head, boiled off the flesh, and painted the skull gray to make it look like a replica of a medical student’s model.
The next month he convinced twenty-seven-year-old Ricky Beeks to come to his place. Jeff also drugged him, killed him, and performed necrophiliac acts on the corpse. He chopped up the body, keeping random trophy parts.
Jeff seemed to target men in their twenties. He picked them up at bars or at the mall and brought them back to his apartment. Neighbors complained about the sounds and the smells. Jeff lied to get the neighbors to leave him alone, and his compulsion continued.
• September 1990
Ernest Miller
• September 1990
David Thomas
• February 1991
Curtis Straughter
• April 1991
Errol Lindsey
• May 1991
Tony Hughes
In May of 1991, police almost caught Jeff shortly after he murdered Hughes. Jeff later said he got sloppy and lazy. He met a fourteen-year-old Laotian boy, Konerak Sinthasomphone, who just so happened to be the brother of Somsack Sinthasomphone, the young boy Jeff sexually assaulted a few years earlier.
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