The Million Dollar Man
Thursday, July 25, 1991
On Thursday, July 25, three days after his arrest, Jeffrey L. Dahmer was brought to court, named in a criminal complaint that accused him of four counts of first-degree intentional homicide.
He was unshaven, with a dark, two-day growth of stubble on his face. Dark rings encircled his puffy eyes and he looked exhausted when he was escorted by deputies into a big courtroom of the Milwaukee County Safety Building, an old structure downtown on State Street that was built in
the style of a very large, square bomb shelter. Water stains dripping from air conditioners that have come and gone over the years streak the building’s facade like trails of rusty tears.
The first thing that was noticed by spectators—a surprise—was that Dahmer did not come into the courtroom clad in the usual orange outfit of a county prisoner. Instead, he wore dark slacks with no belt and a white shirt that had blue vertical stripes and a button-down collar. It was open at the neck. His dirty blond hair was rumpled, swept left to right, as if he had pressed it down with his hands instead of a comb. Dahmer looked much more like a slightly soiled college student up before the law for a traffic beef than a man accused of four heinous crimes.
But there were differences that morning between a minor violation and the complaints that Dahmer faced. Some vast differences. For starters, no traffic offense had ever drawn such media attention, at least not since Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts ran off the bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, an accident resulting in the death of a young woman and another sorrow for a jinxed political family.
In Milwaukee that morning, eight tripods topped with television cameras lined the rear of the courtroom; a uniformed marshal stood amid them at parade rest in the aisle, facing the rear door. A phalanx of still photographers, their shutters buzzing and clicking like a swarm of bees, were on the left flank, wall to wall, their
lenses glued to the prisoner. The jury box was occupied on that Thursday by newspaper reporters and television people, with a batch of extra chairs lined up next to it in which sat even more media representatives. The crowd had been formed into a thick horseshoe of humanity around Circuit Judge Frank T. Crivello, who sat, black robed, at the far end of his courtroom, presiding over the strange scene. There was not a vacant seat, and even with all the standing room filled in, spectators still lined the back wall, their view of the proceedings blocked by the television cameras.
In front of and just below the judge, clerks and court personnel worked hurriedly at a desk, making certain the paperwork was flowing to its proper place, because the law runs on a river of paper and ink. A gaggle of uniformed officers and other court wardens clustered in a doorway to the left of the judge’s high-backed, black leather chair. Two tables faced Crivello. At the front were District Attorney McCann and three other representatives of the state legal system who were to press the complaint.
Just in back of them, at a second table, sat Dahmer, flanked by his lawyers, Gerald Boyle and Wendy Patrickus. He did not wear manacles, even when escorted into the courtroom, something that, when seen on television, would further anger some members of the black community, who felt that Dahmer might be getting special treatment. The lack of cuffs would continue in other
hearings, although the clinking that could be heard in the hallway prior to the prisoner’s arrival hinted that Dahmer was wearing the steel bracelets until he had to make his entrance.
The hearing was not actually the initial legal maneuver aimed at finally putting him away. The day before, on July 24, an affidavit had been filed by Homicide Lieutenant David Kane to make sure that Dahmer stayed in jail until the machinery of justice could sort things out. After laying out his evidence, which traced the arrest of the suspect and the recovery of body parts in the apartment, Kane had had no trouble making his affidavit stick, with the court swiftly determining that enough probable cause existed to hold Dahmer for a hearing.
Kane’s affidavit gave the first official glimpse of the horrors that were about to unfold, as he recounted how Officers Robert Rauth and Rolf Mueller encountered Dahmer and went into his apartment.
(3) That while inside that apartment, Officers Rauth and Mueller observed Polaroid photographs which included photographs of young males who were dead and in the process of being dismembered.
(4) That Officers Rauth and Mueller also observed a severed human head within the refrigerator.
(5) That an investigation of the homicides at the scene led to the recovery of evidence
which included a total of seven (7) severed human skulls and four (4) additional severed human heads on which the flesh remained.
(6) That the resident of the apartment, Jeffrey L. Dahmer, indicated that he had killed the persons whose heads and skulls he had and had dismembered their bodies.
(7) Dahmer further stated that he had met these individuals either at taverns or shopping areas and induced them to return with him to his home by offering money so that he could take pictures of them.
(8) Dahmer further stated that he would drug these individuals and usually strangle them and then he would dismember the bodies, often boiling the heads to remove the flesh so that he could retain the skulls.
(9) Jeffrey Dahmer further stated that he took Polaroid photographs of a number of these persons while they were alive, after he had killed them, and of their heads and body parts after he had dismembered them.
Kane further noted that Medical Examiner Jeffrey Jentzen had determined that the remains found in the apartment were the parts of at least eleven people.
That extraordinary synopsis of what had happened at 924 North Twenty-fifth Street resulted in Judge Crivello approving the motion that the prisoner be continued in the custody of the court. Then he also granted the D.A.’s request for a bail
of one million dollars, to make sure Dahmer didn’t go anywhere. Boyle, Dahmer’s attorney, did not even try for a lower bail figure and said his client had no wish to contest the state’s request for detention. Since Jeffrey Dahmer had been fired from his job as a chocolate mixer, it wasn’t likely that he would be able to meet such a high figure and by setting it at a million dollars, the court made sure no one else could spring him.
That process took place on Wednesday and was but a formality that led to the hearing on Thursday, when formal charges could be filed against Dahmer. District Attorney E. Michael McCann had drawn up a five-page document that he brought into court that day.
Dahmer listened impassively in the jammed, but silent, courtroom as the counts were read out. He was accused of murdering Matt Turner, Jeremiah Weinberger, Oliver Lacy, and Joseph Bradehoft between the days of June 30 and July 19, 1991. The judge listened carefully as the district attorney described Dahmer’s version of how he lured the victims to his apartment, killed them, and cut up their bodies.
A thin microphone sat on the rectangular table in front of Dahmer, but the prisoner remained silent throughout the procedural hearing.
Identification of the victims who were recorded in that first complaint had been made by Jentzen, the county medical examiner, who had not only relied upon the expertise of his own office, but
also had summoned help. Forensic odontologist Dr. L. T. Johnson and Wayne Peterson, a specialist with the City of Milwaukee Police Department, Bureau of Identification, joined in the hurried, horrible task of testing parts of dismembered corpses to determine who they once had been.
Weinberger was identified by comparing dental records with one of the human heads taken from the freezer. The names of Lacy, Bradehoft, and Turner, who was also known as Donald Montrell, turned up from fingerprints lifted from hands that had been found in the apartment. Lacy, the sixteenth to die, was the first to be positively identified.
The state now had four names. Eventually, they would increase that total. Dahmer claimed he had killed seventeen and one of those was in Ohio, beyond the jurisdiction of the local authorities. That left sixteen dead people for the Milwaukee authorities to identify and to build a case around. And at this point, they had only four.
In addition to the killings, the prosecution threw in a charge of something called “habitual criminality,” which said Dahmer was a repeat offender, because he was still serving out his probation from an earlier offense while he murdered all of these people. By becoming a serial murderer, he had violated the terms of the five-year probationary sentence that had been mandated for the molestation of the Laotian boy. For that, too, he must pay.
McCann was asking for a mandatory life sentence
on each of the four homicides, each a Class A felony in legal terminology. For the habitualcriminality offense, he wanted another ten years tacked on to each sentence. The four murder counts were strong, particularly since Dahmer, when not in court or in his cell, was sitting in an interrogation room, apparently giving police every detail he could remember about the deaths. In a nearby building, the medical examiner’s staff was verifying the evidence. Therefore, the last charge seemed almost superfluous, almost a case of the system slamming shut the barn door long after the horse had run away. They had finally stumbled across a killer who had slipped through their fingers so many times, and now they would throw the book at him. Life plus ten, four times. That was McCann’s target.
After the court session on Thursday, Dahmer was returned to jail and sat down for more talks with investigators, who were listening with growing incredulity to the story spilling from his lips as he smoked one cigarette after another. If he couldn’t have his liquor around, at least a substitute addiction was being allowed. The police were showing him pictures of people who had been reported missing and sometimes he would look more closely at one, and pinpoint a victim. Notes would be made and the strange conversation would continue, but the expressionless eyes still revealed little about the man inside of Jeffrey Dahmer.
However, there was one jarring moment early
on. Investigators reported that Dahmer seemed genuinely surprised when he was told that the Laotian boy he had gone to jail for fondling was an older brother of the fourteen-year-old Laotian boy whose name was among those he was saying he had killed.
Gerald P. Boyle, his lawyer, told a news conference that Dahmer himself had made the decision to come clean. “He said, ‘This is my fault. There is a time to be honest, and I want to be honest.’”
Boyle said that Dahmer appeared to be remorseful and that after a forty-five-minute talk with his client, he found the prisoner to be “hurting.”
His family was also hurting. In Fresno, California, his mother, Joyce Flint, soon went into seclusion, getting support from co-workers at the Central Valley AIDS team, where she was a caseworker, but being deluged by media calls. Lionel Dahmer, Jeffrey’s father, telephoned a Milwaukee television station on Thursday night, criticizing the media storm that was assuming hurricane proportions and was taking a toll on his elderly mother, Catherine, in West Allis.
Lionel said that he had not yet spoken with his son, but expressed a father’s anguished love in his brief chat with host Joe Smith on WMVS-TV “I did not realize just how sick he was. I realize now that he is mentally ill, but I did not know the extent. And I will, as I always have, stand by him in my thoughts and prayers.”
Lionel, feeling as though he were caught in a
thick nightmare, would later say that his son Jeffrey was insane.
In New York and in Hollywood, California, another problem arose in connection with the Dahmer case. Paramount Pictures was about to release a new film on August 2, and they were worried that Milwaukee might not be ready for it, under the circumstances. The name of the motion picture was Body Parts. Television advertisements were canceled in the area and copywriters quickly altered some of the wording to make it more acceptable.
Meanwhile, police from around the country and in Germany were keeping the telephone lines, the teletypes, and the fax lines humming, sending in special requests. They wanted to know if the man being held in Milwaukee was responsible for unsolved crimes in their areas. Illinois, too, was curious to know exactly where the men that Dahmer said he had picked up in Chicago were killed.
Florida, in particular, wanted to know if he was saying anything about the 1981 murder of six-year-old Adam Walsh of Hollywood, whose head was found in a canal near Vero Beach a few weeks after he was kidnapped. Germany had five dismemberment killings in the area around Baum-holder, where Dahmer had been based during his soldier days, murders they were trying to clear up. And Fresno, California, police also asked about an unsolved case. Milwaukee police said that anyone with an open case of particularly
brutal proportions seemed to be inquiring whether Dahmer was involved. That included ordinary Milwaukeeans who were worried about loved ones who had gone missing over the past few years.
Inside the city jail, Jeffrey Dahmer was continuing to detail his slaughter, victim by victim, smoking as he talked. The man was admitting to killing seventeen people. He said that in disposing of the bodies, he had relied upon the city garbage collection service because he regularly crushed the bones and dumped them, along with bloody shreds of flesh tied into plastic garbage bags, in outdoor trash containers. The evidence of carnage would be hauled away, courtesy of the Milwaukee taxpayers. Garbage collectors who were interviewed confirmed that there was a bad smell around the bin behind the Oxford Apartments, and that once an ooze of blood-colored liquid had sloshed out of a torn plastic bag, but they thought nothing of it. After a while, a garbage collector gets used to seeing strange things. And the smell? Of course garbage smells.
In a statement issued through Boyle, Dahmer said:
“I have told the police everything I have done relative to these homicides. I have not committed any such crimes anywhere in the world other than this state, except I have admitted an incident in Ohio. I have not committed any homicide in any foreign country or in any other state. I have been totally cooperative and would have admitted
other crimes if I did them. I did not. Hopefully this will serve to put rumors to rest.”
The short statement was astonishing on a couple of points. In a semantic leap, he had referred to a brutal murder as being merely an “incident,” using a word that has nothing to do with death. And in his one-paragraph statement, he did not say that he was sorry about anything at all.
Florida authorities had already established that Dahmer was living in the Dade County area, only a fifteen-minute drive north of Hollywood, at the time little Adam Walsh vanished in 1981. They did not put a lot of faith in the statement of a serial killer and began making plans to question him.
But whatever the shortcomings of the statement may have been, it was important that Dahmer had pointed out the one exception to his murder pattern, the “incident” that took place a long time ago, back where he grew up in Ohio. In the summer of his senior year in high school, he told investigators, he had picked up a hitchhiker and taken him to his home in Bath Township. Then, for the first time, he had killed a human being.