The Killers
Plainfield, Wisconsin, is a little country town that huddles in the upper left-hand corner of rural Waushara County, about 115 miles straight northwest of Milwaukee. It is a pleasant community, a very quiet place. But when the news broadcasts in the summer of 1991 began talking about the slaughter in Milwaukee, memories awakened in Plainfield, memories of 1957, memories of Edward Gein.
For in that quiet, halcyon year when Dwight Eisenhower was still in the White House, just as deer season was opening, Gein went on the kind of rampage that would in later years strike fear
in the nation, even when the term serial killer had become part of the everyday lexicon. Back in Ike’s day, things like that just didn’t happen. America, particularly rural America, wasn’t that kind of place. Or when such gruesome business did happen, the instant television services that we know today were not around and the pictures of the blood and the bodies were not instantly hurled around the country.
TV and newspapers, however, had done a splendidly sensationalist job the previous year when nineteen-year-old Charlie Starkweather and his fourteen-year-old girlfriend, Caril Fugate, went on a rampage that killed ten people in eight days, including her baby sister. Their escapade captured the attention of the nation, since it stood out as a most unusual crime spree. Starkweather eventually was executed in the electric chair, but Fugate, who once even wrote personally to the White House, asking Ike himself to help her get out, was released from prison in 1976, without any help or even attention from the president. Starkweather, feeling romantic to the last, had said he wanted to have her sitting on his lap when he was electrocuted.
But Starkweather was simply a little thug, leaving a “bang, you’re dead” trail across a couple of western states. People didn’t quake in their boots at the thought that Charlie Starkweather might be out there somewhere.
Gein was different. A quiet, ordinary man who lived in an old farmhouse in an old farming community,
it would be discovered that he was a prototypical mass murderer, a quiet guy who committed unspeakable acts of barbarism upon defenseless and vulnerable women. The idea that an Edward Gein might come tapping at your door some night is the stuff of nightmares.
Gein admitted that he killed and dismembered two women around Plainfield in the fall of 1957. He also admitted digging up the graves of the beloved dead of Plainfield, the corpses of women, and mutilating them. He used the flesh of his victims and the body parts gathered in his grave robbing as sewing material, fashioning vests, belts, and even a face mask made from a real face. He would wear the gory outfit when he tried to summon the spirit of his dead mother, waltzing around in his bizarre home filled with furniture covered in human skin.
Gein was more than a killer. He was insane and committed the worst kind of atrocities, leaving Plainfield in a state of shock when his house of horror was finally discovered. It was into this kind of serial-killer category that Jeffrey Dahmer fell; a person who would strike without warning, creating a fantasy world of his own, not caring who had to die to fulfill his evil dreams. And, like Gein, he was from Wisconsin.
Also from the Badger State is a sixteen-year-old boy who is awaiting trial on charges of killing a family of five, then dismembering and burning the bodies. Another resident is Joachim Dressler, the Racine man who killed and cut up James
Madden. But Wisconsin is not alone in producing killers. There isn’t anything in the water or the air causing this phenomenon.
From Ohio sprang Gary Heidnik, who was sentenced to die for his 1988 Philadelphia atrocities. He kept six women chained up in a cellar of horror, and two died. One of the women who died was chopped up, cooked, and fed to his dogs. From Massillon, near Bath Township where Dahmer grew up and made his first kill, came Oliver James Huberty, who was to gun down twenty-one people in a California fast-food restaurant in 1984. Ohio also does not stand alone.
The United States seems to be on a dreadful path where grotesque and mass murders are concerned. It’s apparently a growth industry, and what is considered a shocking crime today can be eclipsed tomorrow. Some of the crimes are not even terribly frightening because they are already past history by the time the headlines hit the street. The rampage is done. Only when the killings are known to the public and the police cannot catch the perpetrator does a vise of fear grip a town, a city, or a region.
Richard Speck slaughtered eight nurses, one by one, in a single bloody night in Chicago in 1966. And thirty-three young boys were killed by John Wayne Gacy, who buried them beneath his home in the Chicago suburbs. In both situations, the public did not know that the killings were happening, and was not alarmed. That was the way it was with Dahmer. He claimed to have killed
seventeen of the most vulnerable members of Milwaukee’s citizenry—children and homosexuals—and was in custody, behind bars, before anyone knew anything about it. Except for the unfortunate individuals involved, there wasn’t enough time for terror.
In contrast are the killers like Wayne Williams, David Berkowitz, and Charles Manson. They held three of the largest cities in the United States—Atlanta, New York, and Los Angeles—in sheer terror while they stalked their victims. People did not care to take a chance with a stranger or stay out alone late at night while those men were on the loose.
Manson, of course, became the Godfather of the Mass Murderers, because of his unrepentant hatred for the human race, his orchestration of the deaths and mutilations of pregnant actress Sharon Tate and six others in 1969, and for committing his butchery in California, where the media always stand ready to once again treat the public to the gaze of his mad eyes. The words “Helter Skelter,” the title of a Beatles’ song scrawled in blood at the scene of the Manson family’s crime, left an indelible imprint on the American psyche.
Killers with rifles are a somewhat different category. Be it a sniper assault, like Charles Whitman mowing down fourteen people from his perch atop the University of Texas tower in 1966, or a James Earl Huberty blasting away in a San Ysidro McDonald’s restaurant, killing twenty-one,
mostly children, in the summer of 1984, there is little that can be done when a man with a gun starts shooting into a crowd. If you get out of the area, your chances of survival are good.
But when the silent ones come padding about, that is when terror awakens. People like Albert DeSalvo terrorizing women as the Boston Strangler, the Hillside Stranglers, Zebra Killers, Green River Murderers, and Charlie Manson. The fear of the unknown is blackly fascinating, but the accompanying publicity usually goes hand in hand with a massive police manhunt until the killer is discovered and killed or brought to justice.
Jeffrey Dahmer brought a little bit of both worlds to his spree. He was as macabre as they come, if one believes Dahmer’s own words, but he moved unseen around Milwaukee and Chicago. Without publicity, he did not have to fear a reaction from a system of justice that is already over-burdened with crime. As long as he didn’t do anything foolish, like let a victim escape, Dahmer was able to keep killing with impunity.
The drumbeat goes on, for Dahmer is merely another mass murderer, not the ultimate mass murderer, in the United States. We have too many of them, averaging, in some studies, three mass murders of some sort every month.
“We are definitely leading the pack,” observed Robert Ressler, the former FBI agent who became a specialist on serial murderers. “It really has become something as American as apple pie from
the standpoint of the sheer numbers we deal with year to year.”
However, mass murder has a scale, and the number of people that a single person can kill is limited when compared with governmental slaughter such as Germany’s killing of six million Jews during World War II and Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge wiping out three million of their fellow citizens. Even U.S. Army Lieutenant William Calley’s Americal Division outfit tearing through the village of My Lai, slaughtering Vietnamese peasants, puts a lone killer into a dimmer light. Many people killing many other people is one thing, however; one person killing many people can be terrifying.
According to Ressler, mass murders by one person are not even anything new. He cites a countess in the Middle Ages who enjoyed bathing in the blood of village girls, and another ancient murderer who supposedly killed six hundred boys. The evil monarch Vlad the Impaler had gardens of victims who had been run through by long spikes.
But aside from the fact that these barbarous deeds are done, the question remains of who can commit such an atrocity, particularly in an age when civilization is supposedly at its zenith.
Jack Levin and James Alan Fox, in their exhaustive study Mass Murder: America’s Growing Menace, studied forty-two mass killers and put together a composite profile of such a person. It fits Jeffrey Dahmer like a glove:
He is typically a white male in his late twenties or thirties. In the case of simultaneous mass murder, he kills people he knows with a handgun or rifle; in serial crimes, he murders strangers by beating or strangulation. His specific motivation depends on the circumstances leading up to the crime, but it generally deals directly with either money, expedience, jealousy, or lust. Rarely is the mass murderer a hardened criminal with a long criminal record, although a spotty history of property crime is common. The occurrence of mass murder often follows a spell of frustration when a particular event triggers sudden rage; yet, in other cases, the killer is coolly pursuing some goal he cannot otherwise attain. Finally, though the mass killer often may appear cold and show no remorse, and even deny responsibility for his crime, serious mental illness or psychosis is rarely present. Most unexpectedly, in background, in personality, and even in appearance, the mass murderer is extraordinarily ordinary. This may be the key to his extraordinary “talent” for murder: After all, who would ever suspect them?
Ressler, whose own extensive work has become a handbook for investigators, said that Dahmer was different in some respects from the run-of-the-mill mass killer because he displayed the attributes of both organized and disorganized types
of killers, indicating a more complex personality structure. “All the buzz words apply to him, but from both sides of the house. That only means that he has a mixed bag of behavioral traits. He would lure victims to his apartment, get people into his clutches, then he will go into bizarre rituals such as cannibalism and necrophilia that are not normally found in your organized type of offender,” he said.
Certainly, no one suspected Dahmer of being anything worse than a drunk. His total of killings, although only standing at seventeen, may not top the list numerically, but he will always be remembered for the butchery, the necrophilia, and the alleged cannibalism that he inflicted. But fame is fleeting, even for mass murderers.
Jeffrey Dahmer had not even reached his arraignment date before the spotlight started to shift away. Only a few weeks after Dahmer was arrested, Donald Leroy Evans of Galveston, Texas, a hangdog-looking white guy with a shock of dark hair across his forehead, confessed to police that he had kidnapped and killed a ten-year-old girl from Gulfport, Mississippi. While he was admitting things, he said he had also killed maybe sixty more people, dating back to 1977. Police are still attempting to prove his claims.
The same week, in New York, a jury convicted Julio Gonzalez of murdering eighty-seven people. He’d had a fight with his girlfriend at the Happy Land social club in the Bronx in 1990, went out
and bought a dollar’s worth of gasoline, and splashed it around the front door, then tossed on a match. The place erupted in flames, killing dozens of dancers trapped on the second floor. The girlfriend survived.
And in Strathfield, Australia, a masked man walked into a shopping mall, chopped a fifteen-year-old girl to death with a machete, and opened fire with an AK–47 assault rifle, killing five and wounding eight before taking his own life with a bullet to the head.
So it goes.
Dr. Peter R. Breggin, a psychiatrist in Bethesda, Maryland, and author of Toxic Psychiatry: Why Therapy, Empathy and Love Must Replace the Drugs, Electroshock, and Biochemical Theories of the “New Psychiatry” (St. Martin’s Press, November 1991), has written that nearly all perpetrators of violence began as victims. “They lacked, and continued into adulthood to lack,” he wrote,
meaningful, caring human ties. Typically, they responded to these impairments by adopting exaggerated “masculine” attitudes.
We live in a society in which children of both sexes are frequently abused physically, sexually and emotionally. Often they are neglected and abandoned. People who go on to become violent have been especially subjected to overwhelming humiliation in their
abusive childhoods. They have been ridiculed and shamed, and treated as worthless, unlovable, defective or inferior … .
When children or adults are inflicted with these deep humiliations, frequently they want to strike back, to get revenge, to prove themselves, and especially to humiliate others as thoroughly as possible. This can lead to subjecting others to debasing sexual assaults.
Because they have been shamed and made worthless in their relationships starting early in their lives, these individuals are fearful and distrustful of people. They tend to become loners and to be described as withdrawn, while their violence smolders underneath.
Ressler believes there are no kids who are just plain bad seeds. “I don’t see it as being any sort of an inherent or evil or genetic type of problem. I see it as being induced by faulty parenting,” he said.
Cannibalism. The very word conjures up nightmares and deeply held fears in almost everyone. The thought that you may not only die, but that parts of your body may be eaten by a fellow human being, puts such a possibility in a category of its own. Cannibalism has a private pedestal in the dank halls of fear, and this was one of the taboos that Jeffrey Dahmer allegedly violated. He
put a heart in his refrigerator because, he told police, he intended to eat it later. Body meat apparently was found wrapped in the freezer. According to one published report citing an official document, he fried a biceps in vegetable oil and ate it.
Reports of men and women being devoured date back to the planet’s earliest legends and are mentioned frequently in mythology. In more modern times came the frightful stories of explorers who ended up in boiling pots, as tribes of hungry natives danced around the fires in darkest Africa and on distant Pacific islands.
Travels by seafarers provided tales of crews and passengers of foundered ships who would resort to killing and eating the flesh and drinking the blood of people with whom they shared their lifeboats when rations ran out. The same pattern was repeated as explorers pushed into the world’s uncharted spaces and were trapped with no hope of escape unless they resorted to such a barbarism. Among the most well known examples is the history of the Donner party, which resorted to cannibalism when they were trapped by winter storms high in the Sierra Nevadas mountains of California.
Cannibalism actually was almost condoned in recent years in one extraordinary story, the graphic tale of a plane that crashed on a snowcapped peak in the Chilean Andes. Many of the passengers died, and their frozen bodies were to become a food supply for the survivors in that
bleak and desolate place. When Piers Paul Read wrote his book Alive in 1974, describing the event, even the august New York Times hailed it as “a classic human adventure.”
What made the difference, moving the taboo subject from horror to literature, was that the Chilean ordeal invited people to put themselves in the place of the surviving passengers of that crashed Fairchild F–227. If fate had put the reader in an identical situation, would he or she have been willing to swallow human meat in order to survive? It made one wonder.
The pattern emerged that whether the situation involves Greek seamen, jungle explorers, frontiersmen caught in a storm, downed aircraft passengers, or, perhaps some day, astronauts stranded on a bleak planet, the argument can be made that impossible conditions justify what would normally be an act of barbarism. One might be sympathetic to the life-or-death decisions of people marooned in a hostile place, knowing that their own lives might depend upon the choice to eat the dead person beside them.
Of course, all that may be good for coffee-shop philosophers, but it doesn’t apply in the world of crime, where cannibalism is simply another act of madness. At first, when Dahmer was jailed, the stories flew far about the possibility of cannibalism, with even the medical examiner saying some of the early evidence found in the apartment was consistent with the possibility of cannibalism.
But that awful term soon began to fade from the legal script. Dahmer was going to be tried for murder. Cannibalism was not even mentioned in the criminal complaints.