Eat Thy Neighbour (22 page)

In September 1987, Jeff was drinking in a Milwaukee gay bar and fell into conversation with Steve Tuomi. After they rented a hotel room, Jeff proceeded to murder Tuomi and pass out: when he woke up there was blood on his mouth. Dahmer hurriedly bought a large suitcase, stuffed Tuomi’s body into it, hauled his macabre luggage back to his grandmother’s basement and had sex with the body before throwing it in the garbage. Jeff seemed to be amazed that he had killed for a second time. ‘I just couldn’t believe it happened again after all those years . . . I don’t know what was going through my mind. I [have] tried to dredge it up, but I have no memory whatsoever.’ Somehow, with the death of Steve Tuomi, a dam broke inside Jeffrey Dahmer’s head. Whatever he had been trying to hold in check was about to drown out his entire existence.

The urge to kill and desecrate the body of another human being came again four months later. In January 1988 Dahmer picked up and murdered fourteen-year-old Jamie Doxtator who often loitered outside gay bars desperately trying to find someone to love him. Less than three months later, he did the same thing to Richard Guerrero. Events that had once seemed, to Dahmer at least, like terrible aberrations were now becoming a monstrous habit.

Although she was completely unaware of her grandson’s unspeakable urges, Jeffrey’s landlady-grandmother was exhausted by his loud, drunken lifestyle. In late summer 1988 she asked him to move and in late September he took an apartment in Milwaukee proper. As if released from the only remaining tether on his unbridled inhibitions, the next day Jeff found himself in serious trouble with the law.

On 26 September, Dahmer approached a thirteen-year-old Laotian boy and offered him $50 to pose for nude photographs. The boy was willing but Dahmer still felt it necessary to drug him so that he could have sex with him. Later, when the woozy boy staggered home, his parents realised something was terribly wrong. The hospital confirmed that he had been drugged, the police were called in and Dahmer was arrested while at work at Ambrosia Chocolate. Charged with exploitation of a minor and second-degree sexual assault, he was bound over for trial in January, but released on his own recognisance.

Anxious about the outcome of his trial, Dahmer decided to relieve the tension by picking up Anthony Sears. Amazingly, Dahmer even let one of Sears’s friends drive them back to his house before he murdered the man.

Before Dahmer’s case came up in May, he was ordered to undergo examination by three psychologists. Unanimously, they agreed that he was manipulative and evasive and should be hospitalised for intensive treatment. Dahmer’s lawyer, Gerald Boyle, again hired by Jeff ’s father, argued that because it was Dahmer’s first offence, he should not be imprisoned. Innocently, he told the court, ‘We don’t have a multiple offender here. I believe that he was caught before it got to that point.’ In a statement to the court, Dahmer buttressed his attorney’s argument. ‘What I have done is very serious. I’ve never been in this position before. This is a nightmare . . . I do want help. I want to turn my life around.’ The judge bought Dahmer’s plea and put him on five years’ probation with the first year to be spent under a ‘work-release’ programme whereby Dahmer could go to work every day but had to return to jail at the end of his shift. Ten months later, Jeff ’s behaviour seemed so exemplary that the judge offered him early release. At no time during his detention had he been ordered to seek professional counselling. Even a letter from Lionel Dahmer, urging the judge not to allow his son to go free until he was forced to get help, did no good. If
no one else understood that Jeffrey Dahmer had real problems, his father did. He said he was afraid that his son ‘would never be more than he seemed to be – a liar, an alcoholic, a thief, an exhibitionist, a molester of children. I could not imagine how he had become such a ruined soul. There was something missing in Jeff . . . We call it a conscience.’

Although he went back to stay with his grandmother temporarily, by May 1990 Dahmer had taken apartment number 213 at the Oxford Apartments located at 924 North 25th Street in Milwaukee. Knowing full well that he was living on the edge, in addition to the security system on the building’s main doors, he installed a separate alarm system and security locks on his own apartment. They would be absolutely necessary for what he had in mind.

Now in a constant emotional frenzy, Dahmer increased both the frequency and ferocity of his attacks. In June he murdered Edward Smith; a month later it was Ricky Beeks. September was a bumper month that garnered him two playmates; the first was Ernest Miller and the second David Thomas. By now, Dahmer had honed his modus operandi to a fine edge. His targets were always young men with unsettled lives, and he often chose victims who, like himself, had drink problems or were frequently in trouble with the law. Many of them were members of racial minorities. He knew that the police never paid much attention when such people simply dropped out of sight.

The pattern of Dahmer’s approach was as predictable as his victims’ profile. He would pick a likely candidate at a gay bar or bookshop and fall into conversation with them. Being nice looking and articulate, he had no trouble getting them to agree to go back to his apartment; the ploy was either to watch ‘porno’ movies or pose for photographs. Once inside his lair, he would offer them a drink laced with prescription sleeping pills. When they were no longer capable of offering any resistance, he would strangle them with his belt or his bare hands, or simply
slit their throat with a sharp knife. Then he would strip off their clothes, photograph them and have sex with the corpse. Now well into the swing of things, Dahmer would begin to mutilate the body, cutting it open, revelling in the heat emanating from the internal organs and photographing the entire process. Finally, he would dissect his prey, laying the best parts aside. Prime cuts, like biceps, hearts and thighs were wrapped in plastic and put in the fridge or frozen for later consumption. The sexual organs were cut off and preserved in jars of formaldehyde while the skulls were boiled clean and coated with granite-effect spray paint. Sometimes, he liked to pull out his growing collection of skulls and masturbate in front of them. The remainder of the carcass was dumped into a 55-gallon plastic container filled with acid that would reduce muscle and bone to a greasy sludge that could be flushed down the toilet. There were, of course, variations on the theme. Ernest Miller’s entire skeleton was boiled clean and bleached, awaiting later reassembly. Later, one victim would be flayed, his skin tanned like a piece of leather.

One of the few cannibals ever to give an explanation for his predilection, Dahmer would later insist that he believed that by eating his victims he was able to make them a part of him and that, in a way, they would always be with him. In the most perverse way imaginable, Dahmer was ensuring that his one-off lovers would never abandon him and that he would always remain in control of the relationship. If possible, Dahmer’s need for control and terror of rejection drove him to acts more bizarre than cannibalism. Even Dahmer found what he did so awful that he hesitated to talk about it. ‘I didn’t want to keep killing people and having nothing left except the skull . . . This is going to sound bad, but . . . should I say it? . . . I took the drill while he was asleep . . .’ What Dahmer hesitated to describe was his attempt to make zombie love-slaves. He hoped that by drilling a
-inch hole in the head of his drugged victim and injecting
muratic acid into their brain, he could, quite literally, turn them into zombies that would wait patiently while he was out and be ready to love him when he came home. It did not work. Most of the victims died almost instantly although a few hung on for several days as their brain was slowly eaten away. But still, Jeff kept trying.

In February 1991 he met and killed Curtis Straughter. The next month it was Errol Lindsey and the month after that Tony Hughes. Hughes’ case was particularly tragic in that he was a deaf-mute and more than grateful to anyone who would spend a little time with him. Had he been alive, he would probably not have been so grateful when Dahmer left his body lying on the floor for three days before cleaning up the mess. Even Dahmer realised that his urge to kill was accelerating its pace. ‘After the fear and terror of what I had done had left, which took about a month, I started it all over again. From then on it was just a craving, a hunger. I don’t know how to describe it, a compulsion. And I just kept doing it, doing it, doing it.’ And by the time he killed Tony Hughes he was ‘doing it’ almost once a week. At that rate, something was bound to go wrong.

On 27 May, the very evening he dissected Tony Hughes’ body, laying aside the good bits and dropping the rest into the vat of acid, Dahmer went out hunting again. Later that evening he met a fourteen-year-old oriental boy named Konerak Sinthasomphone. Using the photo ploy Dahmer lured him back to his apartment, drugged him, raped him and drilled a hole in his head. Somehow, while Jeff was busying himself getting the muratic acid ready, Konerak stumbled out of the apartment, down the stairs and into the street. Minutes later, around 2.00am, he was spotted by two eighteen-year-old black girls as he wandered around naked, babbling incoherently, blood running all over his head and down his legs. One of the girls ran to help him while the other called 911 emergency. Even before the police cruiser arrived Dahmer was out in the street looking for Konerak.
The girls managed to keep Dahmer and his victim apart until the police pulled up, and then tried frantically to explain to the cops what had happened. Dahmer interrupted, insisting that the boy was a lot older than he looked and was, in fact, his nineteen-year-old lover. The police never bothered to call in a request for background information on Dahmer – which would have revealed that he was on parole for molesting a child, who was, as it happened, Konerak Sinthasomphone’s older brother. Neither did they seem to notice the blood covering the boy’s head and legs. All they saw was an articulate, 31-year-old white male and two teenage black girls. Who were they going to believe? Joking that the whole thing was just a ‘homosexual lovers’ spat’ they led Sinthasomphone back to Dahmer’s door and handed him over. Minutes later Konerak was dead, his flesh was in the fridge, his skull waiting to join the rest of the collection.

When the story came out, the officers who had led Konerak to his death were summarily fired but took their case to court, won, were reinstated with full pay and later named Officers of the Year by the Milwaukee Police Union for their ‘righteous’ struggle to clear their good names.

Now in the last stages of his insanity, Dahmer finally decided what to do with all the skulls he had been collecting. Increasingly divorced from reality, he convinced himself that if he built a shrine to the devil he could conjure up the Evil One himself and convince him to fork over ‘special powers and energies to help me socially and financially’. The shrine was to take the form of a long, black table with six skulls arrayed down each side and a complete skeleton at each end. He already had almost enough skulls and Ernest Miller’s skeleton was just waiting to be wired together, so why not? Later, Dahmer would look back on this episode with mixed feelings about the devil. ‘Am I just an extremely evil person or is it some kind of satanic influence, or what? . . . I have to question whether or
not there is an evil force in the world and whether or not I have been influenced by it . . . I have no idea. Is it possible to be influenced by spirit beings? I know it sounds like an easy copout . . . but from all that the Bible says, there are forces that have a[n] influence on people’s behaviour. The Bible calls him Satan. I suppose it’s possible because it sure seems like some of the thoughts aren’t my own, they just come blasting into my head . . . They do not leave.’

Whether or not the devil made him do it, Dahmer was doing it as fast as he possibly could. Only two weeks after nearly being caught trying to kill Konerak Sinthasomphone he was off to the Chicago Gay Pride Parade. There he met Matt Turner, and together they travelled back to Milwaukee by Greyhound coach. A few weeks later, on 5 July, Jeff was back in Chicago where he picked up Jeremiah Weinberger. Again, they went back to Milwaukee but there must have been something very special about this one – Jeff lived with him for four days before killing him. Maybe something Jerry found in the fridge made him want to get away and Jeff just couldn’t bear to be deserted again.

A week later he picked up Oliver Lacey and only four days after Lacey it was Joseph Bradehoft’s turn. Joe lay on Dahmer’s bed for two days before the ghoul decided to dismember him. But even the best fun eventually comes to an end, and for Jeffrey Dahmer the end came on 22 July when he picked up Tracey Edwards. Tracey was thirty-two years old, as big as Dahmer, black and a far more formidable opponent than Jeff was accustomed to.

The two officers in the passing police car realised that something on North 25th Street was definitely wrong when they spotted the naked black man running down the street – a pair of handcuffs dangling from one wrist – frantically trying to wave them down. When they stopped he explained that he had just escaped from some ‘weird dude’ who had tried to drug him, handcuff him and threaten him with a knife. He
had managed to punch the ‘freak’ and escape. Did they have a key to the ’cuffs? Finally, someone listened. The officers asked Edwards to show them where the suspect lived. Together the two uniformed officers and the naked black man went up to Dahmer’s apartment.