Criminal Minds

by Jeff Mariotte

  Back home in 1982, after being arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct, Dahmer moved in with his paternal grandmother in West Allis, Wisconsin. He tried to straighten out his life, tried to push away the sexual fantasies and the booze. He attended church with his grandmother and thought that he was doing a good job of regaining control of himself.

  Eventually, though, the compulsion to have sex with men began to rule him again. He started going out to gay bars, bookstores, and bathhouses. He bought a male mannequin, which he kept under his bed, hoping that by playing with it and controlling it he would satisfy the urge to do the same with real men. It didn’t work. There were more arrests, for indecent exposure. In 1986, after the second arrest, he served ten months in jail. He was soon arrested again, for fondling a thirteen-year-old boy.

  In 1987, while Dahmer was on probation for that crime, he met Steven Tuomi, twenty-six, outside a gay bar. They went to a hotel room rented in Dahmer’s name and drank together. Dahmer claimed that he blacked out, and when he woke up, Tuomi was dead. Sure that he had beaten the young man to death, Dahmer bought a large wheeled suitcase and put the body in it, then took it to his grandmother’s house and put it in the fruit cellar for a week. At the end of the week, he cut the corpse open, masturbated, and “defleshed” the body. He smashed the skeleton with a sledgehammer—except for the skull, which he kept—and put the flesh and the broken bones out with the garbage. The skull he soaked in undiluted bleach, to clean it, but it became too brittle, and he eventually had to throw that away, too.

  The next year, Dahmer moved out of his grandmother’s house. He was making a living working at a chocolate factory in Milwaukee, so he rented a one-bedroom apartment, figuring that would give him more freedom for what he must have already known was coming. His next brush with the law came when a young Laotian man he had drugged and photographed got away and reported the assault. The police came to the apartment, but once again they failed to find the clues, including a skull in one of Dahmer’s drawers.

  From there, a routine developed. Dahmer would go out to a bar or a bathhouse and pick up a man. Since sex with live humans wasn’t as enjoyable for him as sex with corpses, he drugged the man with sleeping pills, then strangled him. He photographed each stage of murder and dismemberment to use later for sexual stimulation. As time went on, he became more creative in his methods of disposal, such as by dissolving body parts in chemicals or acids. He kept some bones and several skulls, planning to build an altar with them to use for some vague ritual, in the hope of receiving special powers.

  Ultimately, killing men and having sex with their corpses wasn’t enough. To feel closer to them, to feel some continuing control over them, he began eating their flesh. Also like Berdella, he experimented with ways to turn them into zombies, such as by drilling a hole in their heads and pouring or injecting acid into their brains. He claimed that most victims died right away but that one remained somewhat functional for a couple of days. The ideal would have been for one of them to live on, completely under his control, with no thoughts but to serve Dahmer in whatever way he wanted. The idea that a lover might reject or leave him was too horrible to bear.

  Samantha Malcolm, the “doll”-collecting unsub in “The Uncanny Valley” (512), wants her victims completely controlled as well, only in her case most of them are treated with enough care that they live for months as human dolls. Malcolm kidnapped and drugged her victims into paralysis, but, unlike Dahmer, she didn’t rape, murder, or cannibalize them.

  As Dahmer got better at dismembering, his cooling-off period became shorter and shorter. In 1989 he killed only once. In 1990, living in a different Milwaukee apartment, he murdered four young men. In 1991 there were eight homicides, at a rate of one a week.

  In May 1991, the police missed yet another chance to catch him. Dahmer picked up a fourteen-year-old Laotian—by sheer chance, the little brother of the man he had molested who had gotten away and reported him—and photographed him, drugged him, and drilled a small hole in his skull. He gave the boy an injection of boiling water, then went across the street to get a beer before the bar closed. While he was gone, the boy woke up and left Dahmer’s apartment.

  When Dahmer returned, he saw the boy sitting on the sidewalk, disoriented. Someone had called the police, and they were trying to interrogate him. Dahmer stepped up and told the police that the boy was his lover (he told them that the boy was older, that Laotians just look young) who had gotten very drunk and ran away after an argument. Once again, Dahmer was persuasive. The officers helped Dahmer get the boy back into the apartment. There they saw the photos that Dahmer had taken earlier, which seemed to confirm Dahmer’s story. They left the boy there. Had they looked in the bedroom, they would have found the body of Dahmer’s previous victim, still on the bed three days after his murder.

  That simple act could have saved five lives. Instead, Dahmer killed the boy as soon as the police left, and, as if inspired by his near miss, set a frantic pace for the rest of the summer.

  On another occasion, detectives interviewed Dahmer about a different homicide—not one of his—in the building. Despite the terrible smells that always lingered in Dahmer’s apartment now, the detectives didn’t question him about his own activities. Yet another would-be victim escaped and reported Dahmer’s assault, but the police interpreted it as a tiff between gay men and didn’t even question Dahmer.

  On July 22, 1991, Dahmer took a man named Tony Edwards home. He tried to handcuff Edwards, but he got the cuffs locked around only one wrist. When Edwards fought back, Dahmer threatened him with a large knife. Edwards got away and ran into the street, where he flagged down a police car. He convinced the cops to return to Dahmer’s apartment with him and told them to look in the bedroom for the knife that Dahmer had brandished.

  The cop who went into the bedroom saw more than just a knife. He saw some of Dahmer’s collection of photographs that documented the stages of death and dismemberment. He told his partner to cuff Dahmer.

  Photos weren’t even the half of it. Once the police started looking at the apartment, they found a decomposing severed head in the refrigerator, along with three bags of human organs. Three more heads and other body parts were stored in a freestanding freezer. A sealed oil drum contained three torsos soaking in acid. Still more body parts, in various stages of decomposition, were scattered around the apartment, along with all the skulls.

  Dahmer tried to deny the crimes, but only briefly. Of his seventeen victims, most were black, and some were Asian or Hispanic. Three were Caucasian, like Dahmer. Since serial killers usually murder within their own race, there was speculation that Dahmer’s homicides had a racial motive behind them. Dahmer denied this; he said it was due to the neighborhood he lived in and the mix of people who frequented the bars he went to. He would have murdered white men if they had been available, but they weren’t.

  Dahmer was ultimately charged with fifteen homicides. He first pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, then changed his plea to guilty but insane, a variation allowed under Wisconsin law. After a two-week trial, the jury took five hours to find him guilty and sane, and he was sentenced to 957 years in prison.

  In prison, Dahmer felt threatened by the African American inmates, who believed that his murders had been racially motivated. In July 1994, slightly more than two years after his sentencing, he and another inmate were attacked by Christopher J. Scarver, a delusional schizophrenic who heard voices telling him he was the son of God. Scarver bludgeoned Dahmer and the other inmate to death with the rod from a set of weights—poetic justice, perhaps, considering that Dahmer’s first murder had been committed with a barbell.

  FOR ALL OF THE MENTIONS of Dahmer on Criminal Minds, none of them occur in the two episodes that focus on cannibalism. These are “Blood Hungry” (111) and “Lucky” (308). The cannibal in “Lucky,” barbecue restaurant owner Floyd Ferrell, feeds one of his victims to the search party that is looking for her.

  What’s particularly creepy is that
Ferrell isn’t unique among cannibals in his choice of profession. Hadden Clark, a former student at the Culinary Institute of America and a professional chef, was a cannibal who killed at least two people in Maryland and is suspected of several more. His older brother, Bradfield, was convicted of strangling and dismembering a dinner guest in California, and cannibalism is believed to have been a factor in his crime as well.

  German serial killer and cannibal Georg Grossman was a professional butcher who sold meat on the black market during World War I, and he had a sausage stand at a train station. Upon his arrest, evidence of at least three dead women was found in his apartment; it’s believed that up to fifty may have disappeared at his hands and that the meat he served was often human.

  Elsewhere in Germany during the same period, cannibal Fritz Haarman preyed on young boys, murdering between twenty-four and fifty of them. Like Grossman, he sold some of his human meat on the black market.

  Finally, as recently as November 2009, three homeless Russian men were arrested for killing a man, eating part of him, and selling the rest as meat to a local kebab kiosk.

  16

  On Other Shores

  AS FRITZ HAARMAN AND GEORG GROSSMAN demonstrate all too A awfully, grisly murder is not strictly a U.S. phenomenon. Every continent, with the possible exception of Antarctica, has had its share of killers, some well known and others more obscure, and some of their stories are reflected in Criminal Minds episodes.

  Most serial killers like to get close to their victims. For this reason, knives are a far more popular weapon with these murderers than guns are. Killers who use fire as a weapon, however, don’t really have the proximity option.

  Clara Hayes, in the episode “Compulsion” (102), says, “I do this for Charon.” The “this” to which she refers is the setting of a series of fires at Bradshaw College in Tempe, Arizona, the most recent with fatal results. Discussing the unsub’s motive, the BAU’s Spencer Reid says, “When asked about his motives, Peter Dinsdale said, ‘I am devoted to fire. Fire is my master.’ ”

  The full quote, in fact, is “I am devoted to fire and despise people.” Dinsdale did say these things, but not until a law enforcement fluke brought in one of the most prolific—and unnoticed—serial killers in English history.

  KINGSTON UPON HULL, an industrial city 150 miles north of London along England’s east coast, couldn’t be more different from Tempe, in the Phoenix metropolitan area and, in real life, the home of Arizona State University. But beginning in 1973, Hull, as it’s known, was the site of arson fires that went unsolved until 1979. They were set by Peter Dinsdale, who had, by the time of the 1979 blaze, changed his name to Bruce George Peter Lee, in honor of his hero, martial arts star Bruce Lee.

  Dinsdale, who was physically and mentally disabled and subject to epileptic fits, could never have been a martial arts star. He was born in Manchester, England, in 1960, to a prostitute who turned him over to his grandmother to raise when he was six months old. In his lower-class neighborhood in Hull, he became a familiar figure, going to a special school for the disabled and becoming widely known as “Daft Pete.” He was a constant target of mockery by the town’s other children. Sometimes he seemed intent on avoiding attention, keeping to himself while warning others that they had no idea what he’d been up to. Most assumed that he couldn’t have been up to much. They were wrong.

  Dinsdale set his first fatal fire at the age of twelve, although he might well have begun committing arson before that. Richard Ellerington, six years old, attended the same special school as Dinsdale. On June 23, 1973, Ellerington’s parents went out for the evening, leaving Richard and their five other children home with babysitter Carol Dennett and her own baby. All of the children were in bed by the time the couple returned, and because of the late hour, Dennett slept over.

  Billows of smoke awakened the family around 7 a.m. The house was in flames, but everyone escaped except young Richard. The firefighters found his body after the blaze had been extinguished. When the school bus stopped outside the smoldering Ellerington house, word spread that Richard had died in the fire. Dinsdale sat on the bus, looking out the window and saying nothing.

  On October 12 of that year, he set a fire that killed seventy-two-year-old Arthur Smythe, who had gangrene in both legs and couldn’t get out of the house in time to save himself. The fire was blamed on a faulty kerosene heater. On October 27, David Brewer, who was at home because of an industrial injury, died in a fire that would be attributed to clothes hanging to dry before an open fireplace. The next year, fire claimed the life of eighty-two-year-old widow Elizabeth Rokahr. An inquest concluded that she had been smoking in bed. Two years passed before Dinsdale’s next arson homicide: he set a fire that killed thirteen-month-old Andrew Stevenson in 1976.

  By this time, Dinsdale had a regular MO. He either entered a house through an unlocked door and poured kerosene, then lit it, or he poured the kerosene inside through the mail slot and stuffed burning paper in to ignite the accelerant.

  During his teen years, Dinsdale wasn’t just setting fires. He worked at a racetrack and a pig market, sometimes babysat for younger children, and earned extra cash as a “rent boy,” a young man who loiters around public restrooms to provide sexual services for older men.

  His fire-setting habit continued, however. He severely injured Ros Fenton, who spent months in the hospital and lost her unborn baby, as well as her daughter, Samantha. In another incident, six-month-old Katrina Thacker was killed.

  Dinsdale’s worst attack might have been at the Wensley Lodge retirement home. Eleven elderly men perished in the blaze, making it one of Britain’s worst mass murders. This fire was blamed on a plumber who had been using a blowtorch in the boiler room earlier that day.

  All of these fires were attributed to accidents, so the police never got involved. Only the Brewer and the Thacker fires were the results of some slight, real or imagined; Dinsdale set the others simply because he could.

  In “Zoe’s Reprise,” Morgan and the team pursue a copycat serial killer who is re-creating the techniques used by past famous murderers.

  The end of Dinsdale’s reign of fire came after he set a fire at the home of Tommy and Edith Hastie. Tommy was a small-time criminal who was in prison for burglary. His oldest son had been involved in the robbery with him, and the other children were frequently in trouble. The night of the fire, the couple’s three daughters were staying with relatives, and Edith Hastie was home with her four sons. She woke up when the house was almost fully engulfed in flames. Charlie, fifteen, managed to push Edith out a second-story window. She broke an ankle, but she lived. Only one of her sons survived his burns.

  This time, arson was easily confirmed. Detective Superintendent Ronald Sagar discovered a ring of kerosene and some used matches near the door. Dinsdale later admitted that he had tried to start the fire with matches and, failing that, had shoved lit newspaper inside.

  Sagar had a hard time making progress in the case. In that neighborhood, talking to the police was frowned upon. Every apparent lead turned into another dead end.

  Only one tip seemed promising. A witness had seen two men running away from the Hastie house and getting into a Rover 2000. Drug dealers favored those cars, and the Hastie family was known to have crime connections. Perhaps one of the Hasties had angered a dealer. This, too, led nowhere, and after a couple of months of the police watching everyone in the area who drove a Rover 2000, the witness declared that he’d made a mistake—the occurrence he had seen had taken place on a different night, not the night of the fire.

  Sagar was running out of ideas, and the case was growing colder. Because one of the Rover 2000 drivers he’d followed had been a frequent customer of rent boys, Sagar decided to haul some of them in for questioning.

  One, Bruce George Peter Lee, admitted not only to knowing Charlie Hastie but also to having engaged in sexual activity with him. The case had been open six months, and Sagar’s superiors wanted to shut the investigation down. Sagar rea
d Dinsdale his rights, then accused him of starting the fire, suggesting that their “indecency” was behind it.

  “I didn’t mean to kill them,” Dinsdale said of the Hasties. He admitted that Charlie had demanded money or else he’d tell the police what they’d been up to. Dinsdale had a crush on Angie Hastie, Charlie’s older sister, but she wouldn’t give him the time of day. These two factors made him angry enough to burn down the house.

  Once he started confessing, Dinsdale told Sagar about the other fires and pointed out houses that he’d burned. He had, he said, started at least thirty fires around Hull. By the time he was finished confessing, he had accepted the blame for twenty-six deaths. “I like fires,” he said. “I do. I like fires.”

  Dinsdale pleaded guilty to twenty-six counts of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished capacity, with some arson counts thrown in for good measure. He was sentenced to the Rampton Secure Hospital, a high-security mental institution.

  In 1981, the Sunday Times of London investigated Dinsdale’s claims and concluded that he could not have started the fire at Wensley Lodge. A justice agreed and struck those eleven deaths from Dinsdale’s record, setting his body count at only fifteen—still a major figure in the annals of British murderers.

  At Rampton, Dinsdale married a fellow patient, Ann-Marie Davison. He’s legally entitled to be married, but he and his wife are not allowed to consummate their marriage.

  Although Dinsdale could theoretically be released if he’s ever judged sane, given his record it’s unlikely that he will ever be free to start fires again or to enjoy relations with his bride.

  WHEN THE BAU profilers travel to Mexico in “Machismo” (119), they discuss the apparent discrepancy between the number of serial killers that Mexico has had and the number that the country admits to having. Jason Gideon blames the “Chikatilo syndrome.” Spencer Reid elaborates a bit, explaining that Andrei Chikatilo, a Russian, murdered more than fifty people before he was caught, largely because the Soviet Union believed that serial killers were a decadent Western phenomenon and therefore wouldn’t admit that it had one.