The Infant Hercules
Summit County, Ohio, seems to have a private jinx that makes it a metropolitan also-ran. The favorite son is Wendell Willkie, who wasn’t even born in Ohio, and when he carried the Republican banner in the 1940 presidential elections, he was trounced by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. However, he is still enshrined in brass on a courthouse wall in Akron. The favorite daughter is Judy Resnik, the brilliant kid out of Firestone High who became an astronaut, only to have the space shuttle Challenger blow up beneath her. Its most well-known institution of higher learning is the University of Akron, which pales in headlines when
compared with Kent State University, next door in Portage County, and even Kent State is more widely known as the place where national guardsmen slew students during Vietnam’s turbulent years than for academic achievement.
The biggest city in Summit County is Akron, a decaying tooth of a metro area where empty storefronts stare out on Main Street. A merchant who was asked how business was didn’t even look up while replying, “You didn’t have to take a number to get in here, did you?” The county courthouse, a massive buff sandstone building in grand Second Renaissance Revival style, sits on a downtown hillock that is ironically called “the Gore.” When the American automobile industry skidded into a ditch, it took Akron’s rubber-making giants and the city economy with it.
In 1991, just when the area was fighting a recession and a drought, Summit County’s long, rocky road got even rougher. Police investigators learned that it was here that Jeffrey Dahmer had killed his first victim, murdering Steven Hicks in a particularly gruesome manner that eventually would become a macabre trademark.
“The County of Summit—An Infant Hercules! Give him a wide berth, for he’ll be a whopper.” Such was the joyous toast that went up in 1840 when the Ohio legislature created the county by slicing sixteen townships from adjoining Portage, Medina, and Stark counties. The region was growing proudly, along with young America and
the early industries that found a home here—canal boat building, pottery and glass makers, and grain and cereal mills—providing plenty of work. But the future arrived in 1870, in the form of young Dr. Benjamin Franklin Goodrich, who decided to set up a rubber-manufacturing plant along the hospitable banks of the Ohio Canal. At the time, there were ninety-four rubber plants in the nation, and the B.F. Goodrich Company was the only one in Ohio. As he turned out rubber hoses, brewery tubing, and cushions for pool tables, Goodrich also laid the groundwork for a miracle to come.
Over the years, his success attracted other entrepreneurs who were interested in making money and rubber by taking advantage of the empty factories left by the obsolete industries, whose time had passed, and in picking up as cheap labor the trainable men the closing businesses had laid off. Frank Seiberling bought seven Akron acres in 1898 and named his company after Charles Goodyear, the man who invented the vulcanization process, which gave rubber strength as well as elasticity. Harvey Firestone arrived in 1900 to create his own tire and rubber company, and five years later he made a deal with another young industrialist, named Henry Ford, to supply tires for all the motor cars Ford could produce. A boom was born.
Draw a line due northwest from the Pittsburgh steel mills and you reach Detroit, the car capital of the world. Halfway between them is busy Cleveland,
with Akron twenty miles to the south, right on the trade routes for the transportation of raw material. Steel, rubber, and assembly lines. The formula that created mass-produced horseless carriages brought great wealth to the men who owned the factories, but it also showered money on ordinary workers. In 1910, there were only 69,067 people in Akron. By 1920, there were 208,435 living in the fastest-growing city in America. General Tire, Goodrich, Firestone, Goodyear, Mohawk, and others made Akron the Rubber Capital of the World. For a hundred years, rubber would dominate the city, although the jinx would hover around the edges.
Melwin Vaniman built a motor-powered airship in 1911 in Atlantic City, covered it with a coated fabric from Goodyear, and christened it the Akron. It exploded and crashed at sea. Twenty years later, the Goodyear Zeppelin Company constructed the largest thing in the sky, a 785-foot blimp, and named it, too, the Akron. After two years of excellent service, it crashed in the Atlantic Ocean, killing seventy-three people.
But the good times survived long enough to bring in hundreds of men from surrounding states to work in the rubber plants and make big money, money enough to buy fine silk shirts and perhaps a diamond ring for a girl back home. The “gummers,” flush with money from their paychecks, would line up six deep at the bars, and the local burlesque house had to put on three shifts a day. Among the men who heard the call
of opportunity was Willkie, a native of Elwood, Indiana, who worked for a time in the legal department of Firestone. He found the political world more to his liking because of Akron’s economic roller coaster. The boom went bust after World War I and two-thirds of the men who had rushed to Akron for jobs were put out of work.
One such typical gummer was a teenager from a farm in Cadiz, Ohio, who abandoned the rural life in favor of a paycheck in the big city. The boy’s name was Billy, and carrying only a straw suitcase, he arrived in the midst of the boom. Despite his lack of education, he soon found a job as a Firestone clerk and was making the princely sum of ninety-five dollars per month. The shy, hard working boy moved on to molding treads at the Miller Rubber Company’s rim plant, and when the Depression hit, he found work in a clothing store until he was laid off there, too. Billy, clinging to the city, became fascinated with the Akron Music Hall, and hung around the actors so much that they gave him an unpaid job as a callboy and once even let him walk onstage and say, “Your cab has come, madame.” When the Pauline McLean Players moved on because of the poor economic times, Billy was not asked to accompany them. Dejected, he headed for Tulsa to join his father in the oil fields. Later, he would try California, drop his first name of William, and just go by his middle and last names. Billy, who had a hard time even getting a blind date in Akron, became Clark Gable and did pretty well
for himself in Hollywood. Akron has always had a problem keeping its young men around.
The great days, perhaps even the mediocre days, have now fled Akron. Downtown parking lots, even the one behind the Hilton Hotel, which is built around the Quaker Oats Company’s old jumbo grain silos, still charge for parking, as if to discourage people from coming into town to shop. “Factories are laying off, downtown is laying off. Things are getting worse,” observed a bank teller on the same day that the Rubber & Plastics News, required reading in the industry, ran a cartoon on its editorial page that showed a businessman on his knees in church, praying, “And Lord, please make people buy new cars.” Akron’s population stood at 275,425 in 1970. The 1990 census trimmed it down to 222,226.
But one undeniable benefit of the industrial boom days was that middle- and upper-level executives could find a nice life-style outside of the city, beyond the smog and the traffic and the crime. Unique little communities lured them to tranquil areas of rolling land, large old trees, acres of grass, and lots of privacy. Slide ten miles north of Akron on Interstate 77, take the Ghent Road exit west, cross Yellow Creek, and you are in one such idyllic place, a bucolic village called Bath Township.
Immediately, you will hit a crossroads that is the historic heart of the little town, where West Bath Road connects with the Cleve-Mass Road, once the main route connecting Cleveland with
Massillon, two cities about twenty miles equidistant from Bath. Interstate 77 now carries that through traffic, leaving the intersection at Bath Center to local vehicles and underlining the pleasant isolation that is enjoyed by the village. “This is a place where people come to live, not to work,” said J. T. Norman, one of the township’s three trustees. “Our zoning is committed to making this a rural, residential community.” And it is just that.
Dominating the crossroads is the Bath Elementary School, a large block building that sits like a European fortress atop a knoll directly across the street from the wooden Bath Town Hall, a white plank structure that would be at home in New England. Occupying the corner to the right of the brick elementary school, on the downhill side of Bath Road, is the township’s combined fire and police departments. In 1991, that crossroads would become a very busy place.
Drive between the school and the public safety buildings and you are on a narrow, undulating route that seems to take you back in time, maybe to the days when America was not a violent place. A brown, split-level home is tucked back in the trees at 4480 West Bath Road, and on May 17, 1968, the house got a new owner and family. Lionel Dahmer moved in along with Joyce, his wife of eight years, and their two sons, Jeffrey, aged seven, and David, one.
Lionel and Joyce Dahmer were married in Milwaukee on August 22, 1959, and moved into the
downstairs flat of his mother’s home in the quiet suburban community of West Allis, just over the city line. Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer, the couple’s first child, was born on May 21, 1960, in Milwaukee’s Evangelical Deaconess Hospital. Lionel was still attending college at the time, and he continued to commute to Marquette University on Wisconsin Avenue in downtown Milwaukee until he graduated in 1962 with a degree in electrical engineering.
After taking both a bachelor’s and master’s degree from Marquette, Lionel moved the family to Ames, Iowa, in the fall of 1962 and began a grueling Ph.D. study program at Iowa State University while at the same time supporting his wife and son. He finally earned his doctorate in analytical chemistry on November 19, 1966.
Joyce was pregnant again when he found employment as a chemist with PPG Industries and the family moved again, this time to Doylestown, Ohio, a blue-collar area on the outskirts of Akron. Jeffrey’s brother, David, was born a few months later, on December 18. Lionel and Joyce started looking toward the future, and began shopping for a bigger house and a pleasant place for the boys to grow up. It didn’t take too many visits to the beautiful environs of Bath Township to convince them that the little town under the trees would be a great place in which to put down their own roots. A year later they moved to Bath, feeling fortunate to be able to finally land in such a tranquil area.
The forest can be a magical place for a boy, and the house in Bath Township was right in the middle of one. There were other houses around, but one thing the hamlet has in abundance is trees. In summer, tall trees in full bloom jam so tightly together that many of the township’s roads are little more than shady tunnels of leaves. In such a place, imaginations can grow and a boy who is shy and turns inward can lose himself for hours in the woods, watching animals, tracking, learning. It can be nice to be alone. No one tells you what to do when you are by yourself. Seclusion can be a refuge for a child, particularly when things happening at home are unpleasant and especially when a little boy has no playmates.
But it is always hard for a kid coming into a new community. For Jeffrey, who turned eight on May 21, four days after his father purchased the new home, it was even more difficult than usual. He was alone, with no friends whatsoever. He had attended the first and second grades in Doylestown, but any boyhood chums from there were far, far away. His little brother was just a baby. Summer had just begun, so school was out and other kids were already scattered. Jeffrey found himself on his own.
Later in life, after Jeffrey began getting into serious trouble, Lionel Dahmer would telephone a probation officer and divulge a disturbing piece of information. When Jeffrey was eight, his father said, a neighborhood boy had sexually molested him. Perhaps that “may be the reason why
Jeffrey has problems with sexuality issues,” the probation officer wrote on her official report for April 27, 1990. To experts, childhood molestation is a red flag, one possible origin of a troubled adulthood. But in all of the early records of the case, this was the sole mention of Jeffrey being molested, something that Dahmer himself vehemently denied. An eight-year-old boy, feeling alone in a strange new place, could have been easy prey for someone who chose to befriend him in the woods.
School days finally began and Jeffrey had an opportunity to begin mingling with children his own age, first on the short bus rides on West Bath Road, and later in the classes at elementary school. One youngster, who shared that ride in the yellow bus with Jeffrey every morning, remembered him as being funny and kind of odd at the same time. Although tall for his age, Jeff would not bully smaller classmates, but at the same time, if one were hurt, his reaction was to laugh, not help. Even as a youngster he had begun to pull back from others. And like many children, even among today’s generation, he was fascinated by the mystical nature of things, particularly about how things lived, and how they died.
While his classmates were having a difficult time connecting with him, adults liked Jeffrey. He was polite, neat, and willing to please, flashing a gentle, shy smile when he was complimented. Georgia Scharenberg, who lived next
door, recalled Jeff as being “a nice boy” who spent his out-of-school hours prowling in the woods, climbing the stony ledges and dashing among the trees. There were few playmates, she said. “Jeff was more or less with his brother all the time, and not with the other boys.” Other grownups who knew the child concurred that if anything marked Jeffrey’s behavior in childhood, it was his sense of politeness and good manners.
In the same way that Akron cannot keep its young men, Jeffrey Dahmer had a hard time keeping friends. By the time he hit junior high school, the overpowering loneliness that was to haunt his existence was already showing like an ominous banner, identifying the skinny, towheaded kid with the big glasses as being different. Mrs. Scharenberg, who worked as a cashier in the lunchroom of Eastview Junior High School, recalled that when the boy came through the line, they would usually exchange a few remarks at the register before Jeffrey carried his tray away. He would sit down with other students at a table to eat, but when he left the room, he always left alone.
In one remarkable break from his pattern, Jeffrey did begin reaching out to people. While still in junior high, he got a job selling shrubbery for a local nursery. He ran over to the Scharenbergs’ home with a catalog and, bubbling with enthusiasm, talked them into buying two apple trees and a yellow bush that would flower in the spring. It didn’t take much talking, because the couple enjoyed
helping out the neighborhood kids. The trees and bush took root and even today continue growing out in the woods that border their property (though they never did get any apples from those apple trees).
By the time his junior high days were finished, Jeffrey apparently had made a vital discovery. He had tasted alcohol for the first time and began to believe its soothing song. For a boy bogged down in melancholy moods, everything seemed a bit more rosy when he could tip back a swig or two of gin from the bottles he would hide. Life was easier. At about fourteen years of age, Jeffrey Dahmer was already taking the dark road into alcoholism, not just sipping alcoholic beverages as many underage youths do, but actually drinking to get drunk.
Something else was going on in his life, too, something in the woods behind the brown house, something that even Jeffrey probably didn’t comprehend. At about the age of ten, he had begun to experiment with things that were once alive, bleaching the bones of dead chickens, stuffing insects into bottles of formaldehyde, and decapitating small rodents. It was an interesting hobby to him, and a pastime that left its mark and would grow right along with him. Through trial and error, he learned to use acid to help strip the meat off of the bones of dead animals. It became almost second nature to him. It was not unusual for people to find the bones of animals among the leaves and vines in the woods off West Bath Road.
In 1975, when Jeff was in high school, three neighborhood youngsters were tramping through the woods behind the Dahmer home when they stumbled across what was left of a dog. The head had been cut off and the gutted carcass was dangling from a tree behind a cross made of sticks. The kids who found it would recall in later years that it looked like the remnants of devil worship. No one ever connected the carcass to the actions of any individual.
By his senior year at Revere High School, Jeffrey Dahmer had learned a few things: he could drink with the best of them, and he discovered that getting attention was easy. People would watch you if you were willing to do strange things. The consensus among his classmates was that he was one weird dude who knew no bounds in reaching out to get a laugh, to snatch a bit of spotlight for an instant. Like over at the Summit Mall, when he would go into his “retarded” act and stumble and flap around, throwing those long arms in the air and tumbling over people carrying packages and eating food. That was always good for a couple of laughs. He would take any dare. People liked him when he did strange things.
Little was sacred to him by that time. When the pictures were taken for the yearbook in his senior year, 1978, Jeff had a surprise for the eggheads in the school. Members of the National Honor Society, an elite group of students with high grade-point averages and records of community
service, gathered on the school steps to be photographed for the Minutemen, a slick annual with a scarlet cover. A nonmember edged in at the last minute. When the shutter clicked, right smack in the middle of the group, third from the top, was Jeffrey Dahmer. What a riot! When word got around that Jeff, with his less than 2.0 average, had sneaked in among the NHS geeks, there was great appreciation from those who would never come close to that kind of scholastic achievement. The story didn’t quite end there, however, because people do not get into the Honor Society by being stupid. The yearbook editor simply took an ink brush and blacked out the face and body of the intruder. In a photograph of forty-five students, Jeffrey Dahmer literally became the Boy Who Wasn’t There. Invisible, even in a crowd, and clearly unwanted.
He played it for laughs, but psychiatrists and legal experts many years later would examine that single picture closely. By that time, it would be determined that Jeffrey Dahmer had a high IQ, that despite grades that fluctuated from A to F in school, he possessed a brain that easily could have qualified him for that special group of students, had he only been willing to work to obtain that goal. They would point out that Jeff had not snuck into the picture of the tennis team, or the glee club, but only into the shot of the National Honor Society, perhaps where he felt he really belonged. Membership would have made his parents proud of him, the experts observed. Perhaps
Jeff, already being kept at arm’s length by his classmates, did not want to show off his intelligence and chose to be perceived as an unthreatening dullard, someone who would be easy to like.
His senior picture in the same yearbook, at the bottom of page 145, shows a youngster with full blond hair that dips low across his forehead. He is wearing narrow wire-rimmed glasses, a print shirt open at the collar, and a dark jacket. Except for the somewhat soulful expression on his long face, he looks exactly like any other high school student might, and certainly no different from the other 255 members of his graduating class. To the right side of the page is his school biography: “JEFF DAHMER: Band 1; Lantern 3; Tennis Intramurals 2, 3, 4; Ohio State Univ. (Business) …”
Again, the dim path followed by a loner can be seen clearly in hindsight. His work on the Lantern, the student newspaper, allowed him to be an individual in the middle of a group. Tennis also is a one-on-one game, not requiring teamwork. In a band, a person plays a single instrument, but since that also required him to be part of a disciplined unit, he apparently decided not to pursue it beyond the ninth grade.
For the class of ‘78, it was a fun year, although they didn’t finish the homecoming float until just a few hours before they had to display it. The yearbook editors noted that the fun things included the Michael Stanley Band, hanging out at the Sky Way and Whitney’s, hitting the mall when
nothing better was happening, “fluffy parties,” concerts at Blossom and the Coliseum, and visits to haunted houses. What was not mentioned was the senior class trip to Washington, D.C., a trip during which Jeff proved his mettle as a prankster to impress his classmates.
While the rest of the seniors made the usual tourist stops at the Washington Monument and the Smithsonian and trekked up to Capitol Hill, Jeff hit the telephones. Using the charm that he could summon when needed and a bit of midwestern twang, and by laying a guilt trip on a governmental aide, Dahmer engineered a visit for himself and his pals to the Office of the Vice-President of the United States of America. Walter Mondale wasn’t in at the time, but the group had a good time anyway. Then Jeff got them in to see the office of Art Buchwald, the writer who coats his satire with humorous barbs. The seniors carried the tale back to Revere High School with them, and other classmates shook their heads in amazement. They were used to Jeffrey’s antics by this time and tended to brush off his outrageous behavior by saying he was just “doing a Dahmer.” Standing on the periphery, they could enjoy it. They just didn’t want to get too close to his flame. After all, someone who drank so much and liked to trace bodies on the schoolroom floor with chalk just had to be a little bit more than odd.
One person decided to take a chance on him. When he asked sixteen-year-old Bridget Geiger to be his date for the senior prom, she accepted
because she knew that while he acted crazy around his pals, he was usually shy with girls. He promised her that he would neither drink nor act strange during their date, but he was still quite uncomfortable in his role as polite escort of a cute girl in a prom dress. Instead of a tux, Jeff wore a pair of neat dark pants, a vest, and a slender bow tie. And he was nervous, perhaps afraid that Bridget might kiss him.
The evening didn’t work out as planned. Jeff left the dance for about an hour, and the chaperons would not let him back in because they thought he might have alcoholic beverages on him. He insisted that he had only stepped out for a burger and fries. He and Bridget, along with two friends, left and spent the rest of the evening at a nearby pub, where they drank sodas and talked.
That date was followed a few weeks later by Jeff inviting her to a party at the Dahmer home on West Bath Road. Geiger described the event as a rather ordinary kind of social with only a few people around. Ordinary, that is, until the point in the evening when the group decided to have a seance. Everyone got comfortable and in a seance kind of mood. The lights were turned off. Then someone—she says it was not Jeffrey—had an idea: the group should contact Satan. Just then, the trembling flames on the candles snapped. That was enough for a good Catholic girl. She got up and left the party. She would not see Jeffrey Dahmer again until pictures and stories about
him started popping up everywhere thirteen years later.
Still somewhat sympathetic to the oddball in her senior class, Geiger contends that it’s no wonder Dahmer became so screwed up. Everyone was always picking on him at school and he would never fight back; he just internalized the hurt and laughed it off. He might have laughed, but he would not forget. When he eventually took his revenge, it would be on others, but it would be fearful and mighty and far beyond the ken of schoolyard bullies. No one would ever again black out his picture.