CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The World of Jeffrey Dahmer

The whole thing was a house of mirrors. Little was what it seemed to be; false reflections were everywhere, and a turn could lead either to a safe exit, into another maze, or you might bump into something that was not quite real, coming the other way.

Bath Township is supposed to be an idyllic place, a small island of tranquillity on the outskirts of the Akron metropolis. In reality, it has been home to several major crimes. Jeffrey Dahmer’s slaughter of Steven Hicks was followed only a few years later by a bizarre murder-for-hire case in which an executive was killed in a feud over who was going to take over a business. Summit County Prosecutor Lynn Slaby was elected to office on November 4, 1981, and the very next morning got a call from the sheriff, saying something peculiar had happened up in Bath Township. By the time the complex case was done, eleven people were indicted and eleven were convicted.

Milwaukee had the reputation of being a city where everybody got along together, where people mixed without much regard to color and ethnic background, where German cordiality and the welcoming, gemütlich spirit prevailed. The image was badly tarnished in the aftermath of the Dahmer affair, when deep racial divisions came to the surface and serious problems came to light, particularly the lack of confidence that the police had in their chief, and a similar lack of trust that the minority communities had for the law enforcement officers.

Mayor John Norquist, chief executive of the city at the young age of forty, was cruising to reelection the following year, only to see the leadership of the city by his administration suddenly brought into question. He said that the way others, outsiders, viewed Milwaukee was not as important as seeing his administration restore the faith of the various communities. Even while he made that statement, the power structure of the city went into damage-control mode.

Police officers are supposed to be people who can be trusted to make the correct decisions in moments of maximum stress, for that is how they are trained. But around midnight on May 27, three officers failed to make a simple background check on a naked boy and a smooth-talking white man. Their choice to leave the two alone resulted in the death of the boy and allowed the white man to remain free to kill again. The cops then worsened the situation by laughing about their investigation, and their strange brand of humor was recorded on tape for all the world to hear. The entire police force then shot itself in the foot by turning the suspension of the three cops into a major political issue that gave the Milwaukee Police Department the peculiar stance of justifying the fatal decision that signed the death warrant of Konerak Sinthasomphone. Their anger at what has happened says that they still believe cops can do no wrong, for seldom have their leaders expressed sorrow for the deaths that followed the botched investigation.

And, most of all, there is Jeffrey Dahmer, who was not at all what he seemed to be. To seventeen young men and boys, he appeared to be an okay guy with a bankroll big enough to persuade them to come back to his apartment for a session of nude photography. “I can understand how people fell for his stories,” said Celeste Dalton, a relative of victim Anthony Sears. “He just doesn’t look like the kind of person that would commit the crimes that he did.” Once in his clutches, few would escape. For behind the door of apartment 213 in the Oxford Apartments lay not just a one-bedroom flat, but a dungeon, a maw of death.

Then there were Dahmer’s allegations of the multiple deaths, the brutalization of the victims, the necrophilia, the pedophilia and the stashing away of human meat to eat. That tale of horror was closely followed by a statement that he did not kill anyone, anywhere, other than the one victim in Ohio and the sixteen others in Wisconsin. Once under the wing of a lawyer, the terminology of the statement reduced the foulness of murder to merely an “incident” or, as attorney Gerald Boyle would say, “these very, very sad things.” In other statements, Boyle said Dahmer was feeling remorseful and was overcome with despair and anguish. Authorities in other states were expressing extreme reluctance to believe anything Jeffrey Dahmer had to say, particularly when he had gone through a thorough probationary supervision process without giving so much as a hint that he was slaughtering people, sometimes within hours of talking with his probation officer.

The probationary experience was another of the unreal points of the story, for in theory, a person under maximum supervision is actually being handled. Had a probation agent ever gone to apartment 213 in the “bad neighborhood,” he or she would likely have noticed something was not quite right—perhaps a body in the bedroom, or skulls in the closet, or bones in a vat of acid. But they never left their office, as far as Dahmer was concerned.

The Wisconsin Department of Corrections shifted into damage control with the smoothness of a true bureaucracy, ordering agent Donna Chester not to speak to any reporters. All communications were to be handled out of departmental headquarters in Madison, where officials insisted that their department workers could sleep well, because they had followed all the rules in the Jeffrey Dahmer situation.

“As far as the probation or parole agents are concerned, they did exactly what they were required to do under the administrative code, they violated no work rule, they violated no administrative code, they violated no laws. Their actions are perfectly in accordance with our policies and procedures,” declared Joseph Scislowicz, the departmental information officer.

He said that Chester was also handling 120 other cases at the same time that she was dealing with Dahmer, and that her supervisor had granted a waiver, relieving her of having to visit his home. “She was not required to go there,” said the spokesman, “because of her very heavy caseload.”

Even had she or another agent gone to see Dahmer, it was only “speculative” that anything would have been noticed, said Scislowicz. “She did what she was required to do, did a good job, and is a very fine agent.” It is true that an agent might not have found anything at the apartment had one gone there, but by staying away, the agents of course would find nothing.

The public information officer, putting his department on the high moral ground, observed, “So many people want to flagellate themselves over this bizarre character. I guess that is their privilege, but we’re not going to do it. We’re not pointing fingers at anybody.” But he added that, if one wanted to speculate, you would have to put Dahmer’ s neighbors, the police, his counselors, his high school English teacher, his grandmother, his parents, members of the gay community, schoolmates, and the mailman on a list of people who might have prevented the tragedy. He did not list the probationary system that had marked Dahmer down for maximum supervision. “Hindsight is always forty-forty,” he said, closing his interview with an appropriately out-of-focus statement.

The public relations man said that the department may ask its various regions to determine how many waivers they are granting on such things as visits to the residences of probationers.

In fact, Scislowicz was correct, to a point. Dahmer certainly hoisted enough storm warnings along the way for someone to have figured out that at least something was seriously wrong with him, all the way back to when he was shooting the breeze with a teenage friend, confiding that he would like to test his taxidermy skills on something more than the usual squirrel. Something, perhaps, like a human being. But in the end, it was the legal system that was to blame, because they are the professionals whose salaries are paid by the taxpayers whom they are to safeguard. With the job comes responsibility to take an extra step whenever necessary, to run the identification checks and to follow up when report after report turns up on a probation officer’s desk stating that someone under maximum supervision is going downhill. In Milwaukee, those public servants took the easy way out, with disastrous consequences.

At the end, comedic things began to happen. Two city cops on the suicide watch in Dahmer’s cell reportedly obtained his autograph.

 

Authorities had a difficult time piecing together the concoction that Dahmer used as a sleeping potion, but early on they began to focus on benzodiazepine, a tranquilizing prescription medication that he could have received while under treatment as part of his probationary status. Other drugs that were being discovered in victims’ tissues by the medical examiner were Halcion, cocaine, and a type of menzodiazepine, while searchers in the apartment picked up a prescription for Lorazepam, another form of benzodiazepine. Such drugs have a strong effect when mixed with alcohol, and in quantity could probably, experts say, render someone unconscious. Chloroform had been found in Dahmer’s closet.

After his victims had passed out and been killed by strangulation, Dahmer then faced a monumental task. Every time he found himself with a new corpse in his tiny apartment, he had to dispose of the body. That would not be an easy job at any time but particularly when you live in the middle of a city, surrounded by people on all sides.

For starters, it is very messy. An average American male body contains about thirteen pints of blood. The arithmetic is easy, because two pints equal one quart, and four quarts equal one gallon. But to put the volume into context, consider this as an example:

Suppose you go to the dairy case in your local supermarket, and into your basket you load one big gallon jug of milk, one tall quart of orange juice, and a little pint carton of cottage cheese. Now suppose that instead of the milk, o.j., and cottage cheese, each of the containers in your cart were filled instead with blood. That is about the amount of blood that Jeffrey Dahmer had to get rid of every time he began to butcher a body. And he claims to have done it seventeen times.

Smaller people would have meant less blood, of course, but the rule of thumb is about a pint of blood for every twelve pounds of body weight. It would be a formidable task to wash away that much blood, since it is about three times thicker than water. Complicating even that task would be the fact that it would be combined with the other bodily fluids present at death.

Then he had to deal with the various organs. Once the heart stops beating about four times per breath, it becomes just a lump about as big as a fist and weighing just under a pound. Then there is the stomach, that J-shaped receptacle that takes up space in the middle of the torso, up to thirty feet of intestines, and a brain weighing about three mushy pounds.

It is not easy to dispose of a human body.

There are 656 muscles, tight sinews, some more than a foot in length, that are strong and so fibrous that they resist all but the sharpest knife.

But muscles are relatively soft, unlike the 206 bones in a body, a multitude of big and little obstacles to a saw. Each arm has 32 bones and a leg has 31. The skull, which many people think of as a single thing, actually is made up of 29 different bones. The spine has 26, there are 6 in both ears, and even 1 in the throat.

And the hardest of all are the enamel and dentine that make up a tooth. Archaeologists regularly uncover teeth that have been buried for thousands of years. In addition, the thirty-two permanent teeth of an adult human is like a roadmap to his or her identity. Comparing dental records is an accepted method of determining the name of a John Doe in the morgue.

So, seventeen times Dahmer faced this daunting task. With the help of modern power tools and technology, a bathtub, some plastic garbage bags, and the unwitting assistance of neighbors who didn’t pursue their questions about the smells of decay and odd noises coming from Dahmer’s apartment, he was able to carry off the deed, time after time. Crushing bones, draining away blood, using a barrel of acid to pull away stubborn flesh and simply tossing the scraps, wrapped in plastic bags, onto the garbage heap. He was able to do it not just once, but seventeen times, disposing of most of the evidence, except for the skulls he kept as trophies and various body segments that he refrigerated, according to his own words, to eat at his convenience.

 

Perhaps the single most important influence on Dahmer’s life, on a continuing basis, was alcohol. Classmates report that by the seventh grade, just out of grammar school in Bath Township, he would come to school reeking of alcohol. In later years, he would wear a long coat into class, with a flask or bottle of whiskey tucked securely in an inside pocket. On breaks, while some boys might sneak into the restroom to try a cigarette, Dahmer would find some private corner and have a drink or two. Fifteen years ago, when Dahmer was coasting through the public school system, the idea of a teenager being an alcoholic was a foreign concept. Today, we know better. Most alcoholics start when they are very young, getting someone to buy a six-pack for them, or drinking from their parents’ private stock, or even sharing a brew with Dad while a football game is on television.

By the time he hit college and the army, he was a full-fledged alcoholic, unable to get through the day without drawing some courage from a bottle. Nothing emphasized that disease as much as the episodes of wildness that marked his behavior when he returned to Ohio from the army. The signals were all there. At one point, he apparently went to a few meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, but the simple truth that would have been espoused there—that Jeffrey Dahmer alone was responsible for Jeffrey Dahmer—would not have been what he wanted to hear. He was not ready to put the bottle down. His morose drinking eventually cost him everything—his job, his friends and even his freedom. But it was also a prime factor in costing seventeen people their lives.

 

An interesting point is that not only were the scientific profiles of a serial killer right on the money with Jeffrey Dahmer, but so would be an astrological reading for this Gemini, who was born under the sign of the twins, the two different personalities in one person. Not all Geminis, of course, tend toward criminal behavior, for that particular sign of the zodiac has produced such creative people as Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Thomas Mann. But a reading of his chart would have shown the following, for those who follow such things.

Dahmer was born on the Taurus cusp, with his moon in Aries, and of “his” planets, an astrologer would find Mercury in Gemini, Venus in Taurus, Mars in Aries, Jupiter and Saturn in Capricorn, Uranus in Leo, Neptune in Scorpio. The sun would be in Gemini, giving him an urge to be different, a rule-breaker who rebels against authority, but ready and glib in his speech. The moon in Aries would mean he possessed a flaring anger and longed for power. He would be a restless, hotheaded, and dangerous opponent who enjoys a stalking hunt.

Other “planetary” attributes would be a love to touch and possess people, holding on to them tightly. He would play to win and take a loss personally, have a large sexual ego, and like to play the conqueror. A melancholy, suspicious personality would dominate him. And, with his Neptune in Scorpio, the astrologer would find that such a person has a love for chemistry, with a possible addiction to alcohol.