The Law
The dance of the lawyers began.
Milwaukee County District Attorney Michael E. McCann for the prosecution. Attorney Gerald P. Boyle for the defense. As the Dahmer case deserved, it was to be a matchup of heavyweights in the legal arena. But for four thousand votes back in 1968, the chairs could have been reversed.
In that year the district attorney’s job was opening up and two young lawyers who worked as deputy prosecutors under District Attorney Hugh O’Connell handed in their resignations to seek the elective office. Mike McCann and Gerry Boyle squared off in the Democratic primary and
McCann came out the narrow victor, eventually taking the general election, too. McCann went on to become a high-profile political figure in Milwaukee. Boyle went into private practice and became one of the best criminal lawyers in Wisconsin, covering his courtroom sharpness with a folksy Irish manner that charmed a jury. His reputation reached out to some odd quarters. When a man said that baseball star Reggie Jackson assaulted him in a bar, Reggie hired Boyle, and charges were never filed.
But the Irish charm is definitely a cover for a tough lawyer. While he was a deputy district attorney, a year before running against McCann, Boyle prosecuted and won a conviction of Michael Lee Herrington for the murders of a young woman and a ten-year-old girl and the near slaying of another young girl. Herrington has been called Milwaukee’s first serial killer.
Now he found himself defending Jeffrey Dahmer. Again.
Back in 1989, Boyle was hired by Lionel Dahmer to defend his son Jeffrey on the child molestation charge. He did, and Boyle’s presentation was an important factor in Judge William Gardner’s decision to hand down a lenient sentence that sent Dahmer to a work-release jail term for ten months and then placed him on five years of probation. That is what defense attorneys are supposed to do.
So when the telephone rang again in the last part of July, it was not really a surprise for him
to learn that, with Jeffrey in trouble, deep trouble, the Dahmers wanted Boyle at his side in the courtroom. He did not balk. Dahmer was an accused man, and in Gerald Boyle’s book, an accused man has the absolute right, under the Constitution of the United States, to have a fair trial. Everyone deserves to have a lawyer and Boyle agreed to represent Jeffrey once again. At his side was Wendy Patrickus, a Green Bay native who only joined Boyle’s law firm in January 1989.
Nothing seemed to go easily in the case, even picking the judge who would try it, a process that should have been simple, but saw some jealousy flash among the jurists.
Judge Crivello, who handled the early procedural hearing, was originally given the assignment of being on the bench for the trial itself. But Judges Laurence C. Gram, Jr., and Rudolph T. Randa thought they had been bypassed in the normal rotation of murder case assignments, and that Crivello was jumped ahead of them in line. Chief Judge Patrick T. Sheedy called a lunch meeting with his quarreling judges and settled the matter, because word of the problem had seeped out of chambers and was becoming hallway gossip outside of the courtroom.
Randa, Sheedy said, had been misinformed. But Gram was correct. It was indeed his turn. Crivello was history as far as the Dahmer case went. And as the case went, so did all of the attendant high-profile publicity. When the third
procedural hearing came up on Thursday, August 22, Crivello was not on the bench.
Court Commissioner Audrey Y. Brooks was in charge of room 112, a room on the ground floor of the Safety Building that was smaller than the circuit court chambers upstairs where the earlier hearings had been held. Once again, security was tight and dogs trained to detect explosives snuffled through the room before the doors were opened to the press at 7:30 A.M. More than one hundred people showed up to hear McCann level even more murder charges at Dahmer. Members of the victims’ families, some with photographs of their dead loved ones taped to their clothing, sat quietly in the rows behind the bar. Thirty media representatives showed up, quite a few less than in earlier hearings.
McCann, Boyle, and their aides were already in the room, at separate tables, when a side door that had been kept closed was opened by a deputy and Dahmer sauntered in, with an officer at his heels. Once again he was wearing the orange coveralls, but no handcuffs or leg irons.
The prisoner crossed the six feet between the door and his wooden chair in a couple of long strides and once again settled in, leaning back, away from the table at which Boyle and Patrickus were sitting on either side of him. Two other lawyers were with them.
McCann was again heading the prosecution team, which included a police detective captain in addition to two more lawyers.
It was a quick session and Dahmer was in and out in twenty-two minutes. McCann, for the first time, brought charges of murder against Dahmer, for the deaths of young James E. Doxtator, the previously unidentified Native American victim, and Richard Guerrero. An additional charge of intentional homicide was filed for the death of Edward Smith. The two accusations are basically the same type of charge, but Wisconsin law was changed in 1989 and the word murder became intentional homicide. As usual, there were the habitual-criminal tagalong accusations, meaning that Dahmer now might get another thirty years in prison if found guilty of the three new death accusations.
The criminal complaint stated that in January of 1988, Dahmer met a young man in front of the Club 219 and asked if he would like to make some money “by posing in the nude, viewing videos and having a drink” at the flat where Dahmer was living in his grandmother’s home in West Allis. They went by bus, and once there, engaged in sex before Dahmer gave him the sleeping concoction. Dahmer noticed the boy had two scars close to each of his nipples, about the circumference of “a cigarette.” Then, in the words of the complaint, Dahmer “killed him by strangling him; he dismembered him and smashed the bones with a sledgehammer and disposed of them; he did not keep any portion of this individual.”
The complaint also stated that in the case of Guerrero, Dahmer had met him at the Phoenix
Bar on Second Street and lured him to the West Allis home. “He asked the man to come to look at videos and take photos or engage in sex and the man came with him; they had oral sex at the house and then he drugged the man; while the man was drugged, he killed him and dismembered the body and disposed of it completely without keeping any parts; he recalls that he later saw in the personal section of the newspaper a photo of this victim and a report that he was missing.”
Edward Smith, the complaint alleged, also was offered money for sex and to pose for photos when he met Dahmer outside the Phoenix Bar. They took a cab to the Oxford Apartments, where they had oral sex and Dahmer handed over a drink laced with sleeping pills, then strangled him. “He dismembered Smith and took four or five photos of him; he completely disposed of Edward Smith’s body by placing it in garbage bags and at a later time he also got rid of the photos of Edward Smith; he further recalls that Smith wore a headband like an Arab.” Friends and relatives have confirmed that Smith would wear a “turban-like” head covering. He was called “the Sheik” around the neighborhood.
That brought to fifteen the total number of murder and homicide charges that Dahmer faced. In Ohio, authorities were preparing a sixteenth charge. Missing from the list was any charge connected with the death of Steven Tuomi, the third person that Dahmer told investigators
he slew. No remains have been found of that young man from the little town of Ontonagon on the Upper Peninsula, and authorities despaired of ever proving probable cause without Dahmer’s confirming identification of a photograph.
Dahmer showed no expression at all as the charges were filed, and offered only a brief response to confirm for the judge that he understood what was happening.
Boyle told the court that Dahmer had formally waived his right to a preliminary hearing, and Commissioner Brooks bound him over for arraignment, still on five million dollars’ bail. The defense attorney said later that a prelim, in which the district attorney would have to prove that probable cause existed to try Dahmer on each and every count, would have just been a waste of time.
The legal situation then moved to the issue upon which so much would rest: whether Dahmer was sane—competent and without “mental disease or defect”—at the time of the various killings. A battery of psychiatric examinations would determine his current state of mind, but since both sides would hire their own psychiatrists, even that result would be clouded. Boyle said that Dahmer’s state of mind at the time of a killing would be a significant factor.
While broad hints were dropped that an insanity defense was in the works, Boyle continued to play his cards close to his chest. And McCann was not cluttering up the homicide and murder charges with side matters like necrophilia and
cannibalism. It promised to come down to whether or not Dahmer was perceived to be crazy when he killed. McCann wanted to be able to prove to a jury that Dahmer was sane and the barbarous acts were those of a cold-blooded killer. Boyle wanted to demonstrate just the opposite.
There was a question about why some deal could not be worked out in advance and save the trouble and expense of a trial. Dahmer had already admitted killing seventeen people, so why could they not just lock him away in a maximum-security mental institution, since there is no death penalty in Wisconsin?
The answer was simply that so much had been made of this case, community tensions had been so heightened by the number of murders and the racial elements involved, that Milwaukee residents wanted to see Jeffrey Dahmer put away in a hard-time prison and not locked up in what one lawyer called “some namby-pamby mental hospital.”
With such political pressures in the background, the word in Milwaukee’s legal circles was that McCann had no choice but to “go for the gold” and bring to bear the full financial resources of the county of Milwaukee and the talents of his staff of some seventy-five lawyers to challenge the shrewd defense that would be mounted by Boyle.
The case boiled down not just to an insanity plea, but to the powerful issue of whether Dahmer would spend the rest of his life in a state hospital
such as Winnebago and Mendota, or in a maximum-security prison such as Columbia or Waupond. Deals can be hard to come by when the spotlight has shined so intensely on a gruesome crime.
Meanwhile, over in Summit County, Ohio, Prosecuting Attorney Lynn Slaby patiently awaited the verdicts from the Milwaukee legal arena. For Slaby, too, had a case against Jeffrey Dahmer—it was in his jurisdiction that Dahmer said he had killed Steven Hicks in 1978.
Slaby has been working on the government’s side of the table ever since earning his degree from the Akron University School of Law in 1972, first with the city of Cuyahoga Falls and then with the city of Akron before being elected county prosecutor in 1980. He has been reelected twice and in 1988 was named Ohio’s outstanding prosecutor of the year. He does not take such things as brutal murder very lightly.
No matter what the outcome in Milwaukee, Slaby laid his own plans to prosecute Dahmer. The first step was to seek an indictment from a Summit County grand jury on a charge of first-degree murder under the state law that existed in 1978. With such an indictment, Ohio would have a legal hold on Dahmer no matter when the Milwaukee episode was completed. “I feel he committed a heinous crime in Ohio and that he should stand accused, charged and convicted in Ohio,” Slaby said.
Slaby took no chances, believing that a life
sentence does not actually mean the person will serve the rest of his or her life in prison. Usually a life termer is eligible for parole in about fifteen years, and no one wants to predict what a parole board, or perhaps a new governor who has the power to commute sentences, might do in any specific case. In addition, if Dahmer were consigned to a mental institution because of a successful insanity plea, a semiannual review of his case might someday seem to warrant his release.
If, under some combination of unforeseen circumstances, Jeffrey Dahmer should someday step out of wherever he may be confined in Wisconsin, Lynn Slaby plans to have a Summit County deputy sheriff standing there to bring Dahmer back to Ohio to serve another long sentence. “We will have jurisdiction when he gets out,” said Slaby.
As far as an insanity plea, Slaby contended that in 1978, when Dahmer said he killed Hicks, the planning of the crime and the effort to sequester the remains of the victim would be proof enough that the killer knew what he was doing at the time.
The death penalty looms large in this case. Currently, prosecutors in Wisconsin and Ohio cannot ask the court to order that Jeffrey Dahmer be put to death. Wisconsin has no death penalty. Ohio voters approved one in 1981, but Dahmer said he killed Hicks there in 1978, when a death penalty was not on the Ohio books. Since that was the law
prevailing at the time, it is the one that would be used in any Ohio trial.
But Illinois, Florida, and California have shown interest in Dahmer’s whereabouts at certain times because of murders in those states or victims being picked up in them. All three have death penalties. Several lawyers have speculated that one of Boyle’s tasks is to keep Dahmer from going on trial in any of the thirty-seven states that have a death penalty.
That can be done by letting the Milwaukee case run its course. The worst that can happen is that Dahmer would get a string of life sentences (plus the muddle of extra years on the habitual-criminal charge). And a successful insanity defense might even land Dahmer in a secure psychiatric hospital. A deal could be cut between the state and the defendant at almost any time.
In Madison, the state capital of Wisconsin, legislators began having new thoughts on that absence of a death penalty. Spurred by the dismemberment of the slain victims, Republican Senator Joanne Huelsman from Waukesha said such a crime deserves the most severe penalty and reintroduced the death penalty legislation she had carried unsuccessfully in the last three sessions. Three such bills, all hers, languished in committee during the 1991 legislative session. The Wisconsin legislature banned capital punishment in 1853 after a hanging execution of a wife-killer drew an audience of almost a thousand people, and even the bloody slaughter committed by Edward
Gein in Plainfield was not enough to restore it.
Since then, no bill to reinstate the death penalty has made it to the floor of the legislature. In 1991, Governor Tommy Thompson climbed firmly onto the fence, saying he would, perhaps, favor the execution of criminals for certain types of crimes. With no capital punishment bill clearing the legislature, he does not have to sign anything, or even take a firm stand.
And finally, as night follows day, lawsuits began to flower against Dahmer. Under Wisconsin law, if a judgment is won against Dahmer, then any money he may be paid for the publication and film rights to his life story can be distributed to the plaintiffs, such as the family of one of his victims. Two suits reached for the tidy sum of three billion dollars apiece.