Eat Thy Neighbour (23 page)

A nice-looking white man opened the door and apologetically let them in, explaining he had been depressed over losing his job at Ambrosia Chocolate, had had a little too much to drink and got a little crazy. He was sorry and would get the key to the handcuffs. While one of the policeman stayed with Tracey Edwards, the other escorted Dahmer to his bedroom to get the key. When Dahmer opened a dresser drawer the cop noticed the pile of Polaroid photos of bodies – and parts of bodies. He also noticed that the refrigerator in the photos looked like the one in Dahmer’s kitchen. Hadn’t the naked black guy said something about seeing something ‘nasty’ in the fridge when he went to get a beer? Leaving Dahmer in the custody of his partner, the cop wandered into the kitchen and looked into the refrigerator. The thing on the shelf looked back at him. ‘There’s a goddamned head in here!’ he shrieked. The head belonged to Oliver Lacey and next to it, in a plastic bag labelled ‘to eat later’, was his heart.

With that, Dahmer completely lost his wits. Fighting like a wildcat he was cuffed, hustled out to the cruiser and taken to the police station. Minutes later a throng of detectives and forensic experts were combing through Dahmer’s apartment. It was like nothing any of them had ever seen, or would ever want to see again. In addition to Oliver Lacey’s head and heart in the cooler compartment, there was a bag of human meat. The freezer contained the heads of Jerry Weinberger, Matt Turner and Joe Bradehoft. A chest freezer held the torsos of Matt Turner and Jerry Weinberger. In the kitchen closet was a soup kettle containing two hands and Anthony Sears’ genitalia. A metal filing cabinet in Dahmer’s bedroom contained the skulls of Konerak Sinthasomphone, Raymond Smith,
Curtis Straughter and Anthony Sears, Errol Lindsey’s skin, Ernest Miller’s skeleton and 74 Polaroid photos of partially dismembered bodies. In all, portions of thirteen of Dahmer’s seventeen victims were recovered from the slaughterhouse. There was also the 55-gallon drum filled with human sludge, the muratic acid, a hypodermic needle, an electric drill and a
-inch drill bit to be used in the creation of sex-zombies and a circular saw for dismembering corpses.

While lab technicians and forensic experts ploughed through the gruesome souvenirs of Dahmer’s life, the boy himself was spilling his guts to the police. His confession, which ran to just over 160 pages, contained some of the weirdest personal insights in history:

It’s hard for me to believe that a human being could have done what I’ve done, but I know that I did it.

If I knew the true, real reasons why all this started, I wouldn’t probably have done any of it.

If I’d been thinking rationally I would have stopped. I wasn’t thinking rationally because it just increased and increased. I was very careful for years and years, you know. Very careful about making sure that nothing incriminating remained, but these last few months, they just went nuts.

If I hadn’t been caught or lost my job, I’d still be doing it. I’m quite sure of that. I went on doing it and doing it and doing it . . . How arrogant and stupid of me to think that I could do something like this . . . as if nothing ever happened.

I should have gone to college and gone into real estate and got myself an aquarium, that’s what I should have done.

Appearing for Dahmer’s defence was Gerald Boyle who had defended him on the child molestation charges three years
earlier. Against Boyle’s advice, Dahmer changed his plea from innocent by reason of insanity to guilty but insane. Now Boyle had to convince the jury just how crazy his client really was, even if it was obvious that he had murdered seventeen men and boys.

The security around the Dahmer case was like nothing ever seen in America. Everyone who went into the courthouse was ‘patted down’ for weapons and scanned electronically. The courtroom was constantly swept for bombs, both electronically and by sniffer dogs, and an 8-foot high bullet-proof glass screen protected the defendant from the hordes of people who wanted him dead. Prospective jurors were warned, ‘You are going to hear about things that you probably didn’t know existed in the real world.’ And the entire, grisly affair was to be broadcast on nationwide television.

It was the prosecution’s intention to persuade the jury that although what he did was the act of a madman, Jeffrey Dahmer was completely sane. Ultimately, as is the case in most such trials, it would be the psychiatrists’ job to convince the jury of the accused’s state of mind at the time of his crimes. There were a wide variety of professional opinions on why Dahmer did what he did; Dr James Fox, Dean of the College of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University in Boston said, ‘If he felt at all uncomfortable about his own sexual orientation, it is very easy to see it projected on to these victims and punishing them, indirectly, to punish himself.’ It was all great theatre, but the jury did not buy any of it. After three weeks of testimony it only took the jury five hours to find Jeffrey Dahmer both sane and guilty on all counts.

Although nothing was going to ameliorate his sentence, after being found guilty Dahmer read a four-page apology to the families of his victims. ‘I know how much harm I have caused . . . Thank God there will be no more harm that I can do . . . I ask for no consideration.’ He got none. He was sentenced to
fifteen consecutive life terms without hope of parole. Had he lived so long, Jeff would have been up for release in 957 years.

After his sentencing, Dahmer commented, ‘I couldn’t find any meaning in my life when I was out there. I’m sure as hell not going to find it in [prison]. This is the grand finale of a life poorly spent and the end result is just overwhelmingly depressing . . . it’s just a sick, pathetic, wretched, miserable life story, that’s all it is.’ Later, he commented to his lawyer, ‘. . . if I was killed in prison, that would be a blessing right now’. It was one wish that Dahmer would have granted. On 28 November 1994, while on a toilet cleaning detail with two other inmates, Jeffrey Dahmer, aged thirty-four, along with fellow inmate Jesse Anderson, was murdered by the third man on their crew, a schizophrenic killer named Christopher Scarver, who believed himself to be a new messiah.

In 1996 the city of Milwaukee apportioned $400,000 to buy the entire contents of Dahmer’s apartment and have them incinerated to prevent anyone from buying them to create a Jeffrey Dahmer museum. All things considered, it was probably a wise move.

Fourteen

Sushi Dreams: Issei Sagawa (1981)

W
hen Issei Sagawa was born in 1949 his nation was undergoing a difficult rebirth. The Japan of honour, family values and dedication to the god-emperor had been virtually obliterated, along with Nagasaki and Hiroshima, when the USA dropped atomic bombs on those two cities in 1945. The new Japan – a nation with a morbid fascination for degrading game shows, corporate humiliation, prostitutes dressed like children and vending machines that dispense soiled women’s underwear – had not yet come into existence. Along with his nation, Issei Sagawa would experience similarly difficult beginnings leading to an equally questionable outcome.

Although his mother had undergone a previous pregnancy without undue difficulty, Issei presented problems from the earliest stages of development. Born so premature that his father could literally hold him in the palm of one hand, Issei also suffered from anoxia: a severe, pre-natal oxygen deficiency that often causes brain damage. As a result of his delicate physical condition, Issei spent most of the first two years of his life – when most infants are bonding with their mothers – in the sterile surroundings of a hospital.

Once he was well enough to rejoin his family on a full-time basis, everyone did their best to include little Issei in family activities. At a new year’s celebration during his third year, his father, Akira, and his uncle, Mituso, entertained Issei and
his older brother with one game after another. In one of the games, Mituso pretended to be a child-eating giant while Akira took the part of a brave Samurai warrior who was sworn to protect the children. The men wrestled for possession of the boys while their small charges squealed with delight, simultaneously frightened and thrilled at the attention. At the end of the game, uncle Mituso defeated the Samurai and carried off the boys, running through the house growling and swinging them under his arms, insisting he was going to take them off to his cooking pot. It was a completely harmless bit of fun, but it affected Issei far more than it should have. Years later, Issei would recall that from that day onward he was tormented by dreams of cannibalism in which he and his brother were being cooked in a vast cauldron. The dreams began spilling into his consciousness, peppering his thoughts with images of cannibalism and human flesh, but now the roles were reversed. Rather than the helpless victim, Issei was the controlling cannibal who held sway over the fate of his prey. Flesh eating became the central focus of his inner mind and he read an endless stream of comic books and horror stories about cannibals. Eventually, as he neared puberty, the obsession took on decidedly sexual overtones. At one point, he attempted to explain his strange fixation to his brother. ‘When I was sleeping with my brother I tried to tell him that when I saw a beautiful girl I wanted to eat her. But my brother didn’t understand. He laughed, so I was very ashamed.’

If Issei’s internal life was confused and disturbed, his external reality was not a lot better. Although he was extremely intelligent, he never fully developed physically and his health always remained precarious. ‘I got ill very often . . . [and] I was not happy at school, especially when I was a high school student. Sometimes [the other students] said something that hurt me: “You are very small” or short, or thin, something like that. It hurt me very profoundly.’ Indeed, Issei was noticeably
physically different from the other boys. Even at maturity he stood just under 5 feet tall, had unusually tiny hands and feet and walked with a pronounced limp. To make matters worse, he had a high-pitched, effeminate voice. Not surprisingly, his self-image was something less than ideal and he knew he was never going to be the kind of man that women were likely to throw themselves at. Still, like Napoleon Bonaparte and Alexander the Great, Issei Sagawa was a very tiny young man with very big ambitions. While Napoleon and Alexander wanted to conquer large nations, Issei just wanted to conquer a large woman: a tall, blonde, Nordic-type woman to be specific. ‘Because I’m so short and small, I admire tall and beautiful women. I prefer white girls.’ While a lot of men want to pursue tall women, Issei Sagawa was one of the few who has ever believed that the ultimate consummation of the relationship would be to eat them. So long as he was surrounded by Japanese girls, there was no temptation to act on these morbid fantasies, but once he entered university, all that changed.

After high school, Issei entered Wako University in Tokyo where he majored in English Literature. As an elective course, he signed up for a class in German. The professor was a tall, blonde German woman with whom Issei instantly became obsessed. ‘When I met this woman in the street, I wondered if I could eat her,’ he once told a British reporter. It was obviously a question he needed to answer, if only for his own peace of mind.

One summer night, Issei crawled through his German professor’s window fully intent on killing and eating her. Creeping through the apartment, he found the woman asleep in bed and began fumbling around, looking for something with which to bludgeon her senseless before taking the first bite out of her body. By the time he found an umbrella, and decided it was a suitable weapon, the racket had roused the woman who began screaming and shouting. Terrified, Issei stumbled back out of the window and fled the scene. Whether or not she
recognised him, or how word of the incident got out, we have not discovered, but although no charges were brought against him, Issei was sent to a psychiatrist to discuss his little problem. It did not take long for the psychiatrist to label Issei Sagawa as ‘extremely dangerous’. What other recommendations he may have made are unknown because Issei’s father, Akira, was by now the head of Kurita Water Industries, extremely rich and extremely powerful. He engineered a cover-up and sent Issei out of Tokyo, to finish his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Osaka. By 1980 Issei was living in Paris and had signed up at the Sorbonne’s Censier Institute to study for a PhD in English Literature.

All these years, Issei had been nursing his desire to eat a tall, beautiful blonde woman. He was certain he could do it, he just needed to plan it out better than he had the last time. Now over thirty years old, Issei knew that he would have to do it soon or the urge would drive him completely crazy. He already had one of his tools in place. On moving to Paris he had purchased a .22 rifle, insisting that he needed it for self-defence. Now, all he needed was a victim. The easiest source of meat he could think of were the local streetwalkers. ‘During the day I was studying . . . but when it was dark, the obsession arrived and I went outside my apartment to look for prostitutes. Then, when I have them in my house, in my room, when they used the bidet, I tried to shoot them but I couldn’t, really couldn’t. It’s not the sense of morality or something. I don’t think so. I was scared.’