The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer Page 19
If one or both parents are obsessed with ill-health and the struggle against it, this, too, according to Fromm, may help create a negative influence. The mother is most important in this respect. She must notice her child’s growing responses to the rich world around him, encourage them, draw them out, make adventure from them and thus instil a forward-looking optimism. The mother who notices instead everything that is wrong with the child, sees each sneeze as a setback, every illness as a failure, is likely to create an atmosphere of negativity. ‘She does not harm the child in any obvious way,’ writes Fromm, ‘yet she may slowly strangle his joy of life, his faith in growth, and eventually she will infect him with her own necrophilous orientation.’5 Jeff became alarmingly self-sufficient, almost autistic in his lack of connection, imprisoned in total isolating narcissism. There is a possibility, to put it no higher, that Joyce Dahmer’s absorption in her own health and mental well-being, and especially the absence of hope which accompanied it, may have contributed to his gradual sinking into that silent brooding sludge which is the nest of necrophilia. There is, however, no evidence whatsoever to support this idea.
Finally, there is a dangerous point when adolescence begins and the first sexual stirrings are experienced. At the trial, Dr Dietz was to make reference to the (literal) coincidence of Dahmer’s first exposure to the internal organs of a mammal (when he brought the pig’s head home from school) and his first masturbation, implying that this collision forced the one interest to fertilise the other. This is quite possibly true. A boy may become fetishistically fixed on a particular towel if that was the object with which he was drying himself when he experienced his first ejaculation, and for a while refuse to use any other. Dahmer’s awakening sexuality happened to occur at the same time as his unhealthy thoughts about viscera and the two became fused. Add to this the memory that his own viscera had been handled by somebody else when he was four, and still more that there was a depressive dark mood around the house when he entered puberty, and one has a very dangerous cocktail of influences. Necrophilia may to some extent derive from ‘a libidinal association between first orgasms and a depressed, morbid state due to family disruption’, write Smith and Braun.6 In other words, it matters hugely what state of mind the boy is in, whether joyful or harassed, adventurous or aridly curious, when the first orgasm is experienced; the associations may remain for life.
None of this is to say that every mother who takes too many pills will nurture a necrophile, nor that every child who is interested in skeletons will want to make a living person into one. It is the confluence of all these matters, their collision and combined strength which exerts a phenomenal hold on the personality. Any one influence would, by itself, be risibly inadequate to produce so catastrophic an outcome as happened in Jeff Dahmer’s case. The fact remains that there is very little evidence, in his childhood, through adolescence, in personality and interests, of a biophilous character, one eager to find fun and beauty in life, to move forward and upward on the spiral of adventure. His were the downward-turning, inward-looking, suffocating spirals of Infinity Land.
The world’s literature does not exactly abound in examples of necrophilic behaviour, despite some particularly florid and implausible passages in de Sade and Baudelaire. A little-known story by C. M. Eddy, however, matches the development of Dahmer’s necrophilia to an uncanny degree. The narrator describes his infancy thus:
My early childhood was one long, prosaic and monotonous apathy. Strictly ascetic, wan, pallid, undersized, and subjected to protracted spells of morbid moroseness, I was ostracised by the normal, healthy youngsters of my own age . . .
Had I lived in some larger town, with greater opportunities for congenial companionship, perhaps I could have overcome this early tendency to be a recluse . . . My life lacked motivation. I seemed in the grip of something that dulled my senses, stunted my development, retarded my activities, and left me unaccountably dissatisfied.
The first corpse he sees is that of his grandfather, a moment he describes as ‘that portentous hour’, and his life is changed forever. ‘A baleful malignant influence that seemed to emanate from the corpse itself held me with magnetic fascination. My whole being seemed charged with some ecstatic electrifying force, and I felt my form straighten without conscious volition.’ The narrator goes on to become a killer, with increasing frenzy as one murder follows ever harder upon another; he is ineluctably bound by a compulsion to seek constant renewal of that terrible thrill which comes solely with the proximity of a corpse. ‘I knew, too, that through some strange satanic curse my life depended upon the dead for its motive force; that there was a singularity in my make-up which responded only to the awesome presence of some lifeless clod.’7
Fiction, yes, and overblown fiction at that, but possibly more instructive than most factual accounts of what are nowadays called ‘serial killers’. Jeff Dahmer might himself have written the words quoted above, or at least would recognise their veracity. The descent into necrophilia can only be achieved at the expense of true emotional realisation of what one is actually doing, and this stifling of residual emotion has to be carefully nurtured. Dahmer prepared himself by getting drunk. He needed alcohol to give him courage to go seeking at the bars, alcohol to smooth the rite of drugging, more alcohol to smother his inhibitions against murder and drive up his urge to keep someone, yet more to cope with dismemberment. But alcohol could not do it alone. There was in addition the much longer preparation of secrecy, as he fought to protect what he knew was a degenerate personality from the interference of morality. For a time, until 1987, he had struggled in the opposite direction, to turn his life around, as he put it, and break free of the death-love which infected him. But that was gone, shattered; all his efforts now were bent towards feeding the bitter appetite of his dark inhabiter.
‘The destruction of the dams of shame, disgust and morality, which must take place in the erection of necrophilia,’ wrote A. A. Brill, ‘requires more psychic labour than in the construction of any other perversions.’8 Dahmer’s dams of shame had been breached after the murder of Steven Tuomi and were subsequently sunk beneath a flood of diseased imaginings. With the death of his fourteenth victim, this flood was about to give way to manic frenzy and cumulatively derisory experiments. He thought he might find a way to keep somebody without having to kill him. One of those he would like to have kept was a boy called Konerak.
On Friday, 24 May, the day Tony Hughes died, Konerak was involved in a fight at Pulaski School with another boy. It was little more than a schoolboy scuffle of no great moment, but such scramblings for status tend to assume the role of major events in playground life, and there was talk the fight would resume that evening at Mitchell Park Domes. It never did. Konerak, colloquially known as ‘Khum’ or ‘Kolack’, was a friendly, high-spirited youngster who did not make enemies. The next evening, Saturday, 25 May, he went to a party at Crystal Palace with Laotian friends. On Sunday morning he took a shower at 10 a.m., then went downtown. That was the last time his brother saw him. The brother was called Somsack; for Konerak Sinthasomphone was about to be the second member of this immigrant family to fall into the hands of Jeffrey Dahmer, Somsack being the boy whom he had sexually assaulted in 1988.
That Sunday Dahmer had left the body of Tony Hughes on his bedroom floor and gone to the Grand Avenue Mall for lunch at the Spiesgarten. He afterwards idled around window shopping until about five o’clock, with no apparent intention of looking for a companion; it was, after all, not the time of day when he would usually prowl, and he had not fortified himself with alcohol. He left by the main entrance on Wisconsin Avenue, about to cross the road to catch his bus home, when Konerak walked in, wearing bib jean shorts and black tennis shoes. On an impulse, Dahmer stopped him and asked if he would like to earn $50 by posing for some pictures. Konerak was initially reluctant (‘He hemmed and hawed a little bit’, said Dahmer), but eventually consented to go home with the man. One is bound to wonder whether he remembered what had happened in s
imilar circumstances to his brother three years earlier; if he did, the recollection did not deter him. They took the bus together.
At the apartment Dahmer took two photographs of Konerak posing in his underwear, one standing up and the other lying down. Then he prepared the drugged drink and Konerak passed out for several hours, during which time he was caressed and fellated, and Dahmer fell asleep for a while as he cuddled him. It was in the course of this long Sunday evening that he proceeded with his latest and most pitiless experiment, one which he had in fact already attempted unsuccessfully on two previous victims and would employ on yet more before he was caught. Having discovered that a corpse was only satisfying for a short period, and that he would much prefer to have somebody who was alive but stayed with him, having also determined that nobody would stay under the conditions he would impose, he came upon the idea that he could perhaps destroy a person’s will by surgery, and keep him in a zombie-like state deprived of independent thought. ‘I didn’t want to keep killing people and have nothing left except the skull,’ he said.9
To this end, while Konerak was deeply unconscious, he took his drill and bored a narrow hole through his cranium, at the top, three-quarters back on the crown and slanting forward. His intention was to reach the frontal lobes, but his understanding of their location was necessarily only approximate. With a marinating syringe which he had bought at Lecter’s Kitchen Supply, he then injected muriatic acid into the brain, inserting up to two inches of the needle. Relating this aspect of his crimes, Dahmer was uncharacteristically embarrassed. ‘This is going to sound bad,’ he said, ‘but . . . should I say it? . . . I took the drill while he was asleep . . .’ It is a shard of a moment when his ‘dams of shame’ have not been totally breached, and the moral conscience flickers briefly. We shall have more to say about this attempt to create a ‘zombie’ when the matter is raised in court.
Very late at night, about 1.30 on Monday morning in fact, Dahmer left Konerak naked and asleep in the sitting room while he went out to a local bar for a beer. He was gone about half an hour, nearly had a second glass, but thought it better to get back and see how his captive was progressing.
Meanwhile, Konerak had woken up and found his way out of the apartment. Johnny Laster was driving down the street with his girlfriend next to him when they were astonished to see a naked young man lurch across the road in front of them, then walk into a tree. He looked as if he was drunk. An unidentified black man helped him to his feet and moved on. First two, then three black girls came to Konerak’s rescue. They were Tina Spivey, Nicole Childress and Sandra Smith. Konerak could not talk and was obviously disoriented. He kept holding his head in his hands, sitting down on the kerb, getting up again and staggering. The girls thought he had been taking drugs. They also said they saw blood on his testicles and pubic hair, as well as coming from his anus, but none of these observations was ever corroborated. They certainly did not see any blood on his head. Konerak had a generous head of hair, hanging almost to his shoulders, which obscured any damage they might have seen on the skull. One might imagine that drilling through the cranium would produce a great deal of blood outflow, but a narrow hole might have no such effect and be completely dry. This means that nobody present realised what had happened to Konerak, and he was in no state to be able to tell them.
Jeff Dahmer turned the corner and saw Konerak faltering and being questioned by the girls. ‘My first thought was to get him back to the apartment,’ he said, ‘because he was naked.’ He also admits to being ‘scared’ at that point. Telling the girls that he would look after him, he took him by the elbow. Konerak resisted, swinging his arms about and dragging his feet, at one point clinging on to a tree. The girls were by now even more seriously alarmed. How could they be sure this man even knew the boy? In the melee which ensued, Dahmer pulling Konerak down the alley behind the apartment building, the girls trying to stop him, he referred to Konerak by three different (fictitious) names, which convinced them that he was lying. One of the girls said Konerak cried out, ‘No, no’, when Dahmer got hold of him and marched him off in a full nelson headlock. Miss Childress said the boy was ‘stumbling, trying desperately to get away’. She would argue no longer; she ran across the road and called the police.
Officers Joseph Gabrish and John Balcerzak in Squad Car 36 received the call ‘man down’ at 2.06 a.m. They were on the scene within four minutes, and by this time found a crowd of over fifteen people watching the struggle. As soon as the police car arrived, Dahmer’s attitude and demeanour relaxed. No longer using force, he was seen by the officers to be walking with the naked man, while others around were screaming at him. They asked Dahmer what was wrong with his friend, and sat Konerak on the hood of the squad car, covering him with a yellow blanket. He said nothing, and there was no evidence of any injury to him or any blood visible. Dahmer proceeded to explain that the man was a friend of his, and that he frequently behaved in this erratic manner, running around naked, when he had had too much to drink. That evening, he said, he had been on Jack Daniels whiskey. His name was John Hmung. No, he did not have any cards to support this identification, because John received his mail at another address. The strong implication was that he frequently stayed with Dahmer (who gave his own correct name and address and showed his Ambrosia card) and that they were homosexual lovers.
Tina, Nicole and Sandra were convinced that he was ‘just a kid’, whereas Dahmer told the officers he was twenty years old. In the report subsequently made to the District Attorney’s office on the conduct of the officers it is revealed that there were a variety of estimates as to his age, ranging from thirteen to twenty. In fact he was fourteen, slim, and 5 feet 3 inches tall. ‘The Asian people, they look young. It’s hard to tell their age,’ says Dahmer. Gabrish and Balcerzak were satisfied they were dealing with a young man over sixteen. They were also satisfied that Dahmer, with his quiet, consistent manner, was doing his best to be co-operative, while the loudly protesting girls were, in their view, interfering with their enquiries. For their part, the girls were intensely frustrated that the police should seem to pay more attention and lend greater respect to this dubious white man while they, the black girls who were doing their civic duty, were being ignored. Nicole tapped one of the officers on the shoulder, at which he ‘exploded’ and yelled at her to ‘shut the hell up’ and not interrupt, not to tell him how to do his job.
The officer shone a flashlight into Konerak’s eyes, but would not, as Miss Spivey suggested, examine his anus. Spivey also said that Konerak was playing with his penis, but no other witness has supported this observation. At length the officer said, ‘Madam, this is a domestic thing’ and bade her let the matter rest. They invited Dahmer to take his boyfriend back indoors, and when Dahmer appeared tentative in grabbing hold of the boy, they suggested that he would have to be firmer. Dimly realising what was about to happen, Konerak started struggling with the police officers as well. ‘So one took his one arm on one side and the other took his other arm on the other side and they escorted him back up, about half a block to the apartment,’ said Dahmer. In this manner was Konerak Sinthasomphone delivered to his executioner.
In the apartment, Dahmer showed the police the two Polaroid pictures he had already taken of Konerak, which paradoxically supported his contention that they were intimate. This, together with the fact that Konerak’s clothes were neatly folded on the sofa, and that he sat quietly, apparently contented, for the five minutes or so that they were there, convinced them that they had not come upon anything improper. In the bedroom a few feet away, behind an unlocked door, lay the body of Tony Hughes, already bloated up. An officer noted that there was a smell of excrement in the apartment, but did not think to investigate further. ‘He was on the floor and I had the light off in there,’ recalls Dahmer, ‘and one of the officers sort of peeked his head around in the bedroom but didn’t really take a good look or anything.’ They then left, with the cheering remark, ‘Well, you just take care of him.’
In the
light of the fact that the officers in question were suspended when the Dahmer case broke, it is worth remembering that the call ‘man down’ is a routine one which might occur any number of times in one night. Records show that on 27 May Gabrish and Balcerzak responded to calls at 1.26 a.m., 1.40 a.m., 1.50 a.m., 1.59 a.m., 2 a.m. and 2.30 a.m., as well as to Konerak’s distress at 2.06 a.m. It was a normally busy work-load.
Within an hour of their departure, Konerak was dead. Dahmer injected his brain with a second syringeful of acid, hoping thereby to keep him, but against this new assault he stood no chance. He decapitated him, opened him, photographed him. The body was taken apart and disposed of along with that of Tony Hughes, their discarded torsos acidified together when the killer had retained the parts of them he wanted to keep.
Konerak was reported missing the next day. His school locker was searched for clues. His brother Somsack was interviewed, but he made no connection between this sudden disappearance and his own experience in 1988; there was no obvious reason why he should. The filed missing person dossier declared that no foul play was suspected. On 30 May, Konerak’s portrait was published in the Milwaukee Sentinel and was immediately recognised by Miss Childress. She called the F.B.I. and was advised to notify the Milwaukee Police. This she did, telling them not only that this was the boy whom she had tried to save three days before, but that she had since seen the man he was with, in the Grand Avenue Mall, and would identify him again without difficulty. It is, to say the least, a thousand pities that these various strands were not spotted by somebody and tied together. They would have had the suspect’s name and address as well as circumstantial witnesses had the log-book of Squad 36 been pulled and the identity of ‘John Hmung’ (now correctly identified by Miss Nicole Childress as Konerak Sinthasomphone) been investigated. ‘Man down’ and ‘missing person’ are separate matters which do not normally cross, and so Childress’ alarm went unheeded.