October 8th, 1997 to October 14th, 1997

The Killing Fields

Jeffrey Dahmer and the Mind of a Serial Killer

Part Four by Lori Weiner

Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy and Larry Eyler were three of this country's most notorious serial killers-and they were all gay or bisexual. In last week's Outlines, we looked at murders committed by Gacy and Eyler. This week, we take a closer look at Jeffrey Dahmer.

Dahmer was born May 21, 1960 in Milwaukee, Wis. According to the book, The Milwaukee Murders: Nightmare in Apartment 213 by Don Davis (St Martin's Press), the boy's family moved to Bath Township, Ohio, just outside Akron before Jeffrey was of school age. He was a lonely and eccentric youth who had a hard time making friends. Later, after he confessed to killing more than 17 men and boys, police would state that "basically ... the primary thing that motivated (Dahmer) to kill was making sure nobody would ever leave him."

When Dahmer was in his senior year of high school, his parents divorced. The proceedings were bitter and focused on custody of the Dahmers' younger son, 12-year-old David; both parents desperately wanted the boy. They did not feel similarly about their eldest child. Jeffrey himself was hardly addressed at all in the proceedings, fueling his feelings of isolation and alienation. According to The Milwaukee Murders, the court declared 18-year-old Jeffrey "legally emancipated," meaning he was considered an adult and could do as he pleased.

According to The Milwaukee Murders, it was at about this time, while still in Ohio, that Dahmer is believed to have killed for the first time.

With his mother and brother out of town and his father already gone from the house, Dahmer picked up Steven Hicks, 19, and invited him home for a beer.

When Hicks insinuated that he had to go home, Dahmer reportedly strangled him with a barbell and buried the body in the backyard.

Ultimately, Dahmer's biological mother won custody of David and disappeared from her older son's life, settling in Fresno, Calif., without informing Jeffrey.

A ccording to The Milwaukee Murders, after high school Dahmer spent an unproductive quarter at Ohio State University before enlisting in the Army, where he was stationed in Germany. He signed up for a three-year stint, but was released early into his third year after he refused to participate in an alcohol rehabilitation program. Dahmer was a legendary drunkard who frequently went berserk when on a bender, hurling epithets and picking fights with anyone crossing his path.

The Milwaukee Murders reports that after his discharge from the Army, Dahmer drifted through Florida before returning to the Midwest, first settling with his father Lionel and his new wife Shari in Ohio but then moving to his grandmother's home in suburban Milwaukee. While in the home of his grandmother, Dahmer killed "about five men" by his own estimate. It was also at his grandmother's house that Dahmer began stripping human flesh from its bones with acid.

The Milwaukee Murders reveals that between January 1985 and September 1988, Dahmer frequented the now-defunct Club Bath Milwaukee, where he invited men into his cubicle and served them a drink laced with powerful sedatives. Some men suffered no ill effects, but several became violently sick and at least one was hospitalized. As a result Dahmer was permanently barred from the facility.

According to The Milwaukee Murders, when Dahmer's chronic drunkenness compelled his grandmother to put him out, he moved into the Oxford Apartments in downtown Milwaukee. It was very convenient, being walking distance from his third-shift job at the Ambrosia Chocolate Factory. Here Dahmer embarked on a frenzy of death, with 12 victims claimed between June and December of 1990.

On Sept. 3, 1990, Chicagoan Ernest Miller met Dahmer in front of an adult bookstore. Using a typical ploy, Dahmer invited Miller to his apartment, offering money if Miller would agree to pose for pornographic pictures. Miller agreed, and upon arrival at Dahmer's apartment accepted a drink, laced with sedatives, from the blond killer. When Miller was sufficiently disoriented, Dahmer strangled him, had sex with the corpse, then dismembered it. Usually Dahmer would behead the victim, strip the flesh from the skull, and paint it grey. Dahmer sometimes cannibalized his victims as well, with authorities finding numerous human organs in his refrigerator upon his arrest.

According to The Milwaukee Murders, on March 25, 1991, Dahmer received a phone call from his long-estranged mother. It is unknown whether a flood of emotions resulting from this contact sent Dahmer into a rage, but for whatever reason, Dahmer killed seven times within the next three months. Two Chicagoans met their deaths at Dahmer's hands during this time: 20-year-old Matt Turner, who met Dahmer at Chicago's Gay and Lesbian Pride Parade, and 24-year-old Jeremiah Weinberger, who was picked up by the killer at Carol's Speakeasy, a gay bar, on July 5.

Turner's and Weinberger's lives may have been saved if Milwaukee Police Department officers John Balcerzak, Joseph Gabrish, and Richard Porubcan had arrested Dahmer on May 27, 1991.

On that day, 14-year-old Konerak Sinthasomphone was observed fleeing from Dahmer, naked, blood streaming from his anus and appearing disoriented. (Dahmer would later state in his sanity trial that he had given Sinthasomphone a lobotomy with a household drill.)

Officers Balcerzak, Gabrish, and Porubcan accepted Dahmer's explanation that the youth was his 19-year-old lover, with whom he'd been having a "spat." The officers returned the teenager to Dahmer without investigating further; Sinthasomphone was killed immediately upon the officers' leaving.

The incident sparked fierce unrest in MIlwaukee, where residents noted that Dahmer, who lived in a racially mixed section of the city, tended to kill nonwhite men (Sinthasomphone was Asian, and many of Dahmer's other victims were African-American). Residents speculated that perhaps the lives of people of color, particularly those perceived to be gay, were not as important to the Milwaukee police as the word of a white man. The officers' reported joking about the Sinthasomphone incident after returning to the station exacerbated the tension further, and in September of 1991, Balcerzak and Gabrish were fired. [Officers Gabrish and Balcerzak filed an appeal for reinstatement, eventually prevailing in 1995. While Gabrish had already retained employment on the police force of nearby Grafton,Wis., and elected not to return to Milwaukee's police department, Balcerzak was reinstated and serves on the Milwaukee force today.]

The Milwaukee Murders reports what happened next: On July 22, 1991, Dahmer was finally apprehended by Milwaukee police after attacking Tracy Edwards, 31. The man managed to escape as Dahmer prepared to slay him, and Edwards led authorities back to Apartment 213 and its grisly contents. Dahmer meowed like a cat as he was led away in handcuffs. Ultimately he issued a 179-page confession to 15 murders and was handed an equal number of life sentences after a lurid sanity trial where graphic details of the killer's experiments in lobotomizing and wiring the brains of his victims, freeze-drying their corpses, and creating a "totally passive sex slave" were revealed. Dr. Park Elliott Dietz, a forensic psychologist who testified for the prosecution, was quoted in the Chicago Sun-Times as saying that: "Dahmer's first choice was to have a living partner who gave in to his demands. His second was for what Dahmer described as a zombie. His third choice was for an unconscious partner."

Jeffrey Dahmer was found sane by a jury and remanded to the Columbia Correctional Institute in Portage, Wis., a mere 75 miles from Milwaukee. He was kept in solitary confinement for his own safety during his first year in prison, but as he entered year two, he expressed a desire to mix with the general population. The wish was granted and almost immediately he began experiencing harassment from other inmates. On July 3, 1993, Dahmer's throat was slit by a prisoner who had honed a toothbrush into a knife. He survived that attack, but by November of 1993 Dahmer was dead-his head crushed with a broom handle wielded by Christopher Scarver, who was assigned to work detail with him. Scarver was imprisoned for homicide and described as delusional, schizophrenic, and manic-depressive. Dahmer's killer claimed to be the million-year-old son of God.

Cause and Effect
What begets a serial killer? Did John Wayne Gacy's, Larry Eyler's, and Dahmer's conflicted feelings of rage and obsession around their homosexuality stir a cauldron of madness that eventually led to brutal and unforgiving death for at least 71 men and boys, many of them from the Chicago area?

Bob Long, Public Information Officer for the Chicago office of the FBI, notes that serial killers are typified by an "intimate" connection with their victims. "A (crime) scene is identified as being the possible work of a serial killer if there is evidence of sexual contact either before or after the moment of death," said Long. "Serial killers also will frequently take mementos of their victims with them, such as wallets, clothing, or as in Dahmer's case, parts of their body."

Andrew Cunanan was not typed a "serial killer" primarily because he did not engage in sexual intercourse with his victims (with the possible exceptions of the earliest murders of Jeff Trail and David Madson).

The FBI practices a well-publicized technique in tracking serial killers called "profiling." If the FBI identifies a crime scene as attributable to a serial killer (based on evidence of sexual contact between victim and killer) and there are no obvious suspects, highly trained "profilers" are called in to examine the area and determine what type of person would have been most likely to commit the crime based on evidence such as location and condition of the body. Often, it is possible to determine gender, age, and ethnicity of a serial killer through profiling. Profilers also match crime scene data with that of other unsolved crimes in search of patterns (as journalist Gera-Lind Kolarik did with the Larry Eyler slayings in 1982; see last week's Outlines). According to Long, profiling is approximately 70% accurate in identifying a given suspect's personality type.

Serial killers share common characteristics. Most had unhappy childhoods in splintered, dysfunctional homes, and in many cases the young killer was not raised by his biological family but by outsiders or distant relatives. He is usually poorly educated and unable to function effectively in mainstream society, and a family history of alcoholism, drug abuse, and violence are almost always present.

Long says that sexual orientation in and of itself "doesn't play a role" in the making of a killer, but with murder, as any case of extreme violence, the perpetrator is often driven by deep fears and anxieties. In the cases of Gacy, Eyler, and Dahmer, each man felt anxiety around his homosexuality.

Gacy, a bisexual, married twice but appears to have been deeply ashamed of his attraction to young men. Eyler was openly gay and socialized in Chicago's gay bar scene, but embraced a hyper masculine image designed at least in part to deflect what he perceived as criticism of his sexuality, and by extension his masculinity. Jeffrey Dahmer was a self-loathing gay man who butchered his victims in an attempt to create the perfect sex partner, according to his own confession. And Andrew Cunanan, identified as a "spree killer" and not a "serial killer" mainly because he did not engage in sexual intercourse with his victims, was openly gay. Did internal homophobia cause him to lash out against other gays? Did perceived pressure from society and his family fuel his rage? His motivations for setting off for the Midwest to begin the trail of death may never be known.

What is "homosexual overkill?" How can gays and lesbians protect themselves from violent crime? The Killing Fields concludes next week with a look at prevention and protection.

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