Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream: A Forensic Psychiatrist Illuminates the Darker Side of Human Behavior (44 page)

Jeffrey Dahmer was particularly remembered for his mutilation of dead animals. As a youngster, he would roam the woods adjacent to his home, collecting dead animals and often abusing their carcasses. He collected and placed into jars a large number of animals and animal parts. Once Dahmer came across a road-killed dog. He dismembered it, cut off the head, and impaled it on a stick. Andrei Chikatilo suffered from chronic bed-wetting. So did Kenneth Bianchi.

Edmund Kemper’s cruelty to animals was enormous. He buried a kitten alive, dug it up, took it to his room, decapitated it, put the head on a spindle, and offered prayers to it. One of his favorite prayers— which he also offered in church—was that everyone in the world would die except himself. At around age 13, Kemper was killing neighborhood cats and other animals. When one cat seemed to prefer his sister to him, he sliced off the top of its head with a machete, exposing the brain. Then, as the cat went into convulsions, he stabbed it repeatedly until it died. Afterward, he burned the body, keeping some of its parts in his closet. He also cut off the hands and head of his sister’s doll.

Kemper would repeat these actions as an adult in his murders. He decapitated one of his victims and kept her head in a box in a closet of his mother’s apartment for a while before burying the head underneath a stepping stone near the back door, which faced his bedroom window. “I talked to it,” he later told police; “I said affectionate things like you would say to a girlfriend or wife.” One of his last victims was his mother. He cut off her head and right hand, and he cut out her larynx and put that in the garbage disposal. He put the head on his mantelpiece, so he could throw darts at it. In fantasy, as much as in other aspects of life, the child is father to the man.

As noted earlier, there are thousands upon thousands of children who have been bed-wetters and fire-setters and have been cruel to animals but who have not grown up to be serial sexual murderers. One expert observed that such children are statistically much more likely to become vice-presidents of corporations than to become serial killers. Nevertheless, this “terrible triad” of behaviors is usually a sure sign of a child who is in trouble. Psychologically caused bed-wetting usually implies emotional disturbance, together with poor impulse control. Torturing and killing animals demonstrates an ominous level of sadism and cruelty. Fire-setting by a child is usually a symptomatic expression of sexual and aggressive overstimulation. Fire often expresses the child’s hyperactive excitement and deep-seated anger. The recognition and treatment of children who display these symptoms appears to be critical to the prevention of future violence of all kinds.

As for child abuse, which is also present in the backgrounds of most serial killers, its precise relationship to their killing remains a mystery. It may act as a trigger that later sets off murderous impulses in individuals predisposed toward violence. Very many thousands of children have been abused, and very few of them become serial killers. Nevertheless, the recognition and treatment of children who have been abused are also of potentially great importance to the prevention of future violence.

Deviant Fantasies, Lethal Orgasms

In the ideal, sexual love between two persons is the mutual, tender, intimate exploration of one another that ultimately becomes a joyful celebration of the couple’s caring relationship. In real life, however, sexual relations may come to include elements of power, domination, deprecation, anger, and even cruelty. For some couples, these latter elements may add creativity and zest to their sexual experience. In all sexual relationships, both conscious and unconscious fantasies are played out. In other couples, however, these added elements serve to make their relationships unhappy.

Men who become serial sexual murderers are usually sexually dysfunctional. Most suffer from some form of impotence during “normal” sex. Whether they are heterosexual or homosexual, serial sexual murderers are unable to have and to maintain mature, consensual sexual experiences with other adults. Serial sexual killers can, however, achieve powerful orgasms if their extremely deviant sexual fantasies are fulfilled. Many of their sexual acts are regressive, sadistic parodies of sexual intercourse. Some, for example, insert objects into their victims and masturbate. Bundy raped one college girl vaginally and rectally with an aerosol can. The homosexual killers on record have shown a marked preference for sadomasochism, torture, and bondage.

The fantasies of serial sexual murderers link sexual and destructive acts. These powerful fantasies reflect themes of power, dominance, exploitation, and revenge. Most people have fantasies of sexual adventure. In serial killers, these are fused with ideas of degradation and humiliation of others. In most people’s fantasies of sexual adventure, the partner experiences as much fun as the dreamer. Not so with sexual murderers: the more fun the serial sexual murderer is having during his fantasy, the more lethal danger the fantasy partner will experience. A common male fantasy is to have sex with a beautiful model or movie star. A common serial sexual murderer fantasy may begin with a beautiful model or movie star but goes on from there to fantasies of immobilizing and slashing her during sex. The more pain she suffers, the greater his enjoyment. The articulate and brutally perverted Ted Bundy described the moment of thrilling orgasm this way:

You feel the last bit of breath leaving their body. You’re looking into their eyes. A person in that situation is God! You then possess them and they shall be a part of you, and the grounds where you kill them or leave them become sacred to you, and you will always be drawn back to them.

As sexual killers go through puberty and adolescence, and experience sexual arousal, their deviant sexual fantasies deepen. The fantasies that they already have are supercharged by the upsurge in sex hormones and are further fed by the solitariness that they also cultivate. The lethal fantasies gain power and finally begin to drive not only the dreams of a potential murderer, but most of his waking thoughts, too. Ed Kemper remembered, “I knew long before I started killing that I was going to be killing, that it was going to end up like that. The fantasies were too strong. They were going on for too long and were too elaborate.”

Once killers have had the fantasies spill out into reality, and have committed a murder based on them, they feel further empowered. The killing makes them feel invincible and, this too, feeds the fantasies. The elements of murder then become integrated into more and more elaborate, continually embellished and Byzantine sadistic sexual fantasies. Over time, the serial sexual murderers improve their homicidal techniques, learning from prior mistakes to become more efficient killing machines. Chikatilo, horrified by the murder of his first victim, vowed to himself it would never happen again. But when it happened for the second time, he accepted his murderous identity and rejoiced with a spontaneous celebratory dance. When Kemper cut off the head of one of his later victims, “There was almost a climax to it,” he recalled. “It was kind of an exalted, triumphant-type thing, like taking the head of a deer or an elk or something would be, to a hunter.”

Why would a person do such things as Kemper did—keep the heads and perform sexual acts with them, keep mementos of hair, skin, and personal belongings, keep Polaroid photos of the bodies and eat parts of his victims? “If I killed them,” Kemper said of his victims, “they couldn’t reject me as a man. It was more or less making a doll out of a human being, carrying out my fantasies with a doll, a living human doll.” When he destroyed his victims, down to their individual parts, Kemper felt “a fantastic passion overwhelming me.” Echoing Bundy, he said that he returned to one of his victims’ burial site because “I visited there to be near her. I loved her and wanted her.” The compulsion to come back to the murder site and relive those moments has been referred to by one expert as “rolling in it.” During the time that the killings were taking place, Kemper was having a platonic relationship with a young woman to whom he eventually became engaged, and who later described him as a perfect gentleman. Today, in prison, Kemper feels he is not completely alone. At his trial, he chillingly explained, “I wanted the girls for myself, as possessions. They were going to be mine. They are mine.”

Jeffrey Dahmer discussed his fantasies with several of the psychiatrists who examined him before his trial. He began compulsively masturbating two or three times a day at age 14, initially to a conventional though homosexual fantasy of having sex with a well-proportioned, muscular male. By his late teens, his fantasy had evolved into rendering his victims unconscious and exposing their viscera. His only delight and sense of feeling alive came from the all-consuming, relentless urge for sexual pleasure as his fantasy now defined it.

Dahmer desired a warm male body next to him that he could totally control and that would never leave him. He needed a compliant, nondemanding, unresisting, always available partner. And so, when a victim visited his apartment, Dahmer would furtively put him to sleep with a rum and coke drink spiked with a ground-up sleep medication. If the victim woke and tried to leave, Dahmer would strike and immobilize him. He would then come up close and listen to the victim’s body sounds. What Dahmer really wanted sexually was hugging, genital fondling, mutual masturbation, lying together for long periods of time so he could listen to his partner’s heartbeat and feel human warmth.

It is possible that Dahmer could have found consenting adults who would fulfill those parts of his fantasy having to do with being close and with bondage, but Dahmer had few social graces and even less confidence that he could meet someone who could gratify his sexual needs. So, to satisfy those needs, he immobilized and killed his victims. He performed primitive frontal lobotomies on two of them while they were still alive, boring holes into their heads with a small electric drill. He then used a turkey baster to inject weak muriatic acid into one victim, boiling water into the other, producing convulsions and, after a few hours, death in the latter victim. These failed experiments expressed his fantasy: that he would never be alone but would always possess compliant, zombie-like sex slaves upon whom he could perform his preferred sex acts.

Dahmer was not a true necrophile. He would rather have satisfied his sexual wishes with a live body, but he did not think anyone would cooperate with him, so he used dead bodies. That way, his victims did not awake to assault him or to escape and inform the police—or even to demand from Dahmer, in return for their sexual favors, sexual acts for themselves, particularly anal sex, which Dahmer detested. Although he committed monstrous acts on the bodies of his victims, Dahmer apparently was not a sadist. His goal was not to derive pleasure from torturing his victims but to create sex slaves through his demonic “zombie experiments.” Dahmer defies definitive psychiatric diagnosis. This was quite apparent from the divergent diagnoses proffered by forensic psychiatric experts during his trial.

Once Dahmer had killed his victims, he felt it was a shame to waste their lives, so he kept various of their body parts, even though he disliked the act of cutting up the bodies. He decapitated 11 of the victims and kept some of the heads in a refrigerator, along with genitals and other parts that Dahmer used to enhance his masturbation. He also created a ghoulish temple of painted skulls and skeletons on a table flanked by incense urns and lit by blue globe lights.

If he ate his victims, Dahmer thought, they would provide him with strength and vitality, and they would live on through him. So he treated a victim’s biceps and heart with meat tenderizer, fried them in cooking oil, and added steak sauce. Dahmer later said the biceps tasted like steak, but the heart was spongy and rather tasteless. While he dined, Dahmer watched a pornographic video and drank more and more alcohol. By consuming parts of his victims, Dahmer was living out primitive cannibalistic merger fantasies, perhaps an aberrational twist of the universal human wish to fuse with others.

Mind Murder and Sexual Murder

In the book
Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives
, Robert Ressler and colleagues note that “many [serial sexual killers] emphasize that they are doing exactly what everyone else thinks of doing.” Well, not exactly. Most people do experience cruel, sadistic thoughts and feelings at some level and at some time, but it is highly unlikely that they grapple with the same intensity and elaboration of sadistic sexual fantasies as serial killers, much less put them into action. Lionel Dahmer, in speaking of his son’s first victim, whom Jeffrey Dahmer had no memory of killing, chillingly revealed,

He had awakened, as I had awakened at times in my youth, feeling a terrible certainty that I had committed murder. The only difference was that Jeff had actually done it, had actually done what I had only feared having done. I had awakened in a panic that consciousness had soon ended. Jeff had awakened into a nightmare that would never end.

For some, the fascination with the lurid crimes of serial sexual killers betrays a fear that within them the same violent demons lurk. Yet it is highly unlikely that “good” persons who harbor conscious, garden-variety sexually sadistic fantasies and impulses will ever slide down the slippery slope into serial killing. In my judgment, serial sexual killers are on the extreme end of our human dark side. They act out consciously the antisocial impulses that “normal” men and women keep locked way in the dark crevices of their mind. Yet bits and pieces of sadistic sexual fantasies may escape in the form of disguised dreams, symptoms, or quirky behaviors in almost everyone. Many years ago, Freud observed that the sexual life of so-called normal people often contained behaviors that were commonly found among what he called the sexual perversions. Freud said, “The conclusion now presents itself to us that there is indeed something innate lying behind the perversions but that it is something innate in
everyone
, though as a disposition it may vary in its intensity and may be increased by the influences of actual life.” Given the complexity and vicissitudes of individual psychosexual development, Freud’s observation that every man (and woman) is entitled to at least one perversion is certainly understandable.