Serial Killer Investigations (39 page)

The police went up to Apartment 213, and the door was answered by a tall, good-looking young man who apologised for causing a disturbance. His manner was so plausible that the police were about to go away when one of them noticed a strong smell of decay emanating from the flat. As they tried to force their way in, the young man—Dahmer—became hysterical. When a policeman opened the door of the refrigerator, he found himself looking at a decapitated human head. They found another severed head in the freezer, three skulls in a filing cabinet, and four more elsewhere around the flat. A kettle contained severed hands and male genitals, and packets of meat that proved to be of human flesh.

The black man who had raised the alarm, Tracy Edwards, 32, described meeting Dahmer in a shopping mall and being invited back to a party. There was no one else in the apartment when they arrived, but Edwards accepted several drinks, after which he became sleepy. Then Dahmer had snapped a handcuff on his wrist and held a butcher’s knife against his throat, forcing him to sit still as he watched a videotape of
The Exorcist.
When Dahmer said he intended to kill Edwards and eat his heart, Edwards managed to kick him and run for the door.

At the police station, Dahmer seemed glad that it was all over, and admitted that he was a cannibal and had been obsessed by dissection ever since he was a teenager, and had enjoyed stripping birds and small animals of their flesh to preserve their skeletons. And later, the same morbid obsession with dead things had led him to kill human beings.

He was 18, he explained, when he committed his first murder—when his parents were away, he had picked up a 19-year-old hitchhiker, Stephen Hicks, who sexually attracted him, and they sat in Dahmer’s home drinking beer and smoking pot. When Hicks said he had to go, Dahmer became oddly hysterical—he obviously found it worrying to be left alone—and struck Hicks on the head with a dumbbell. Then he undressed him and masturbated on the corpse. After dark he buried the body in the crawl space under the house, but later transferred it to a remote spot. He was almost caught when police stopped him for driving over the central line, but fortunately—for him—they failed to notice the parcels in the rear.

Unlike the majority of serial killers, who for the most part are from working class backgrounds, Dahmer came from a comfortable middle-class home. But his parents quarrelled constantly. He obviously suffered from a deep sense of insecurity and inferiority, partly because they seemed to prefer his younger brother Dave.

After his first murder, Dahmer joined the army, but was discharged for drunkenness. He had always been a heavy drinker, obviously finding it an escape from reality. He moved in with his grandmother in West Allis, near Milwaukee, and took a job in a chocolate factory. He had recognised his homosexuality in his early teens, and his strange inner compulsions meant that he preferred to be alone, rather than trying to join the gay community. But in Milwaukee, where he was known as a monosyllabic loner, he was banned from a gay bar for slipping knockout drugs into drinks.

In 1986, when he was in his mid-twenties, he was arrested for exposing himself to two boys, and placed on probation. In September of the following year, 1987, he committed his second murder, going to a hotel room with a homosexual named Stephen Tuomi, and apparently having normal sex before they fell asleep. In the middle of the night, Dahmer strangled him—he claimed that he had no memory of the murder, but simply woke up and found himself in bed with the body.

The murder certainly seems to have been unpremeditated. Dahmer had to go out and purchase a large suitcase, in which he succeeded in taking the body back to the basement of his grandmother’s house. There he dismembered it, and then left it out in garbage bags for collection.

This was typical of the 15 murders that followed between January 1988 and July 1991. He would pick up a young male, usually black, and invite him home—either to his grandmother’s or, after she had asked him to leave, to his own apartment on North Twenty-fourth Street. There the victim was rendered unconscious with a strong dose of a knockout drug in his alcohol, and undressed and strangled. Dahmer then dismembered the body, and disposed of it in garbage bags—although he also kept some of it in his refrigerator for cooking and eating.

Dahmer had already come close to being caught in September 1988, when he had picked up a 13-year-old Laotian named Keison Sinthasomphone and raped him in his apartment, after giving him drugged coffee. But the boy had succeeded in staggering out into the street and back to his home. The police were notified, and Dahmer was charged with second-degree sexual assault and sentenced to a year in a correction program, which allowed him to continue working in the chocolate factory.

Yet three years later, on 26 May 1991, Dahmer was able to pick up the younger brother of his earlier victim, Conerak Sinthasomphone, in the same shopping mall where he later picked up Tracy Edwards. Conerak was also given drugged coffee, and then stripped and raped. But when Dahmer went out to buy beer, the naked boy succeeded in escaping from the apartment, and stood talking to two black teenage girls, begging for help. Dahmer tried to grab the boy, but the girls clung on to him, and one of them succeeded in ringing the police. Two squad cars arrived shortly, but when Dahmer explained plausibly that the young man was his lover and that this was merely a lover’s quarrel, the police escorted Conerak back to Dahmer’s apartment and left him there to be murdered and dismembered. When this was finally revealed after Dahmer’s arrest, it caused a scandal that shook the Milwaukee Police Department.

In March 1990, Dahmer was released from the correctional centre in which he was serving his sentence for the earlier rape. By that time he had already killed five times. On 13 March 1990, he moved into the Oxford Apartments, and during the next 18 months killed 12 more victims, the last two in just over two weeks, between 5 July and 22 July 1991, the day of his arrest.

Dahmer had almost been caught after his second murder, that of Eddie Smith, on 14 June 1990. He had invited a 15-year-old Hispanic youth back to his apartment, but, for some reason, decided to try to knock him unconscious with a rubber mallet instead of the usual drugged drink. The youth fought back, and managed to reach the door. Dahmer let him go after making him promise not to tell the police. The young man broke his promise, but when he begged the police not to let his foster parents know that he was gay, they decided to do nothing about it. So once more, Dahmer managed to escape to kill again.

In the summer of 1991, the revelations about the apartment full of corpses filled the front pages for week after week, and made worldwide headlines. In January 1992, Dahmer appeared in court charged with 15 murders. He made no attempt at defence, and was sentenced to 15 terms of life imprisonment. Asked how he felt about being in prison, he remarked: ‘I couldn’t find any meaning for my life when I was out there. I’m sure as hell not going to find it in here.’

Robert Ressler happened to be in Milwaukee lecturing at a university at the time of Dahmer’s arrest, and was asked if he would testify for the defence, who had decided on an insanity plea. His own feeling was that although Dahmer was not entirely innocent, the odd mixture of ‘organisation’ and ‘disorganisation’ in his crimes made it arguable that he was not entirely sane. This is why he went twice to interview Dahmer in prison. The result shed some interesting light on Dahmer and his motivation. One of the most interesting comments entered the conversation almost by accident. He asks Dahmer if he ever committed violence in his early years, to which the reply was ‘no’, but there
was
violence against him, and he went on to tell how, on his way home from school he was approached by three seniors, and had a feeling that they were hostile. ‘Sure enough, one of them just took out a billy club and whacked me on the back of the head.’ Ressler does not pursue this. But when, a few moments later, he asks when Dahmer became interested in dissecting animals, Dahmer says that it was at the age of 16, after he had been hit on the head. It started in a biology class, when they were dissecting a baby pig.

Since so many serial killers have received skull injuries, it is inevitable to wonder if the beginning of his obsession with death and corpses was the blow on the head. By coincidence it was also the end. Dahmer was murdered in a Wisconsin jail on 28 November 1994; he was struck on the head with an iron bar by a fellow convict called Christopher Scarver, who explained that he believed he was the Son of God.

In the 1990s, I became involved in correspondence with the ‘Gainesville Ripper’, Danny Rolling, who, when he was in jail, had become engaged to Gerard Schaefer’s one-time fiancee Sondra London, now a well-known crime writer. He had written to her from Florida State Prison, where he was serving time for an attempted robbery of a supermarket store in Ocala, Florida.

It was not until January of the following year that the police had administered a blood test. Rolling’s DNA revealed that he was the man who had been involved in the sex murder of four young women on the campus of the University of Florida at Gainesville in the previous August. The crimes had caused such fear that half the students had gone home.

Sondra and Rolling entered into correspondence, and by Christmas 1992 had decided they were in love. Finally, she was allowed to visit him, and the meeting confirmed their feelings. There was, she told me, an instant and powerful physical attraction. Soon after this they announced their engagement.

This announcement, in February 1993, was featured in some newspapers next to a story claiming that he had confessed to the Gainesville murders to a fellow inmate, Robert Fieldmore Lewis.

Rolling looked an unlikely serial killer, 38 years old, tall, good-looking, and articulate, a talented artist and guitar player, who looked more like a schoolteacher in his horn-rimmed glasses. But in due course he confessed to the Gainesville murders, and eventually, to three more.

Through Sondra, I came to write an introduction to Rolling’s autobiography
The Making of a Serial Killer,
which is how I came to exchange a few letters with him. He told me that he had no doubt that he had been possessed by some demonic force when he committed the murders. It sounds like the typical excuse made by a killer; yet after studying the case, I came close to believing him.

Rolling was born in 1954 in Shreveport, Louisiana, the son of a police sergeant who had been a war hero. Unfortunately, the father was also another of Van Vogt’s Right Men. Such men, as already noted, are usually family tyrants. Rolling senior seems to have had no love for his son, and lost no opportunity of telling him he was stupid and worthless.

Rolling also went into the military, but just before he was scheduled to go to Vietnam, was caught with drugs and discharged. He was dismayed, for he had been enjoying military life. His father was furious and disgusted with him. But Danny then had a religious conversion, and married a fellow member of the Pentecostal Church. Unfortunately, he was unable to get rid of a habit he had acquired in childhood of peering through windows at women undressing. When he was caught, the marriage began to disintegrate.

On the day he was served his divorce papers, he committed his first sex attack, breaking into a house and raping a young woman who was alone. He felt so remorseful that the next morning he made his way back to her house to apologise—then saw two grim, powerfully built men come out, and changed his mind. But soon after that he committed his first armed robbery. And it was not long before he was serving his first jail term.

The brutality and violence of prison life in the South shocked him. Blacks and whites hated one another and often killed one another. He was nearly gang-raped in the shower by a group of blacks.

Free once more, he now experienced a compulsion to commit rape. He admits in his book that what he enjoyed was the surrender of the terrified girl, the sense of power; it was balm to his bruised ego. Another period in jail only confirmed his self-image as a desperate criminal.

Back in his hometown in 1989, he began peeping through the window of a pretty model named Julie Grissom. One day, after missing work for three days in a row, he was fired from his job in a restaurant. He reacted just as he had reacted years earlier to his divorce papers. On November 1989, he crept into the backyard of the Grissom household, where he had formerly played peeping Tom. Undeterred by the fact that there were three people in the house—Julie Grissom’s father and her eight-year-old nephew—he burst in and tied up all three at gunpoint with duct tape. Then he stabbed to death the boy and the elder man, dragged Julie into the bathroom and raped her against the sink, forcing her to say, ‘Fuck my pussy, daddy.’ After making her climb in the bath so he could wash out her vagina with a hosepipe, he stabbed her to death. He left after taking $200.

By now he was convinced that he had two ‘demons’, one a robber and rapist called ‘Ennad’, and the other a killer called ‘Gemini’.

A violent quarrel with his father ended with James Rolling trying to shoot him, and with Danny shooting his father and leaving him for dead. In fact, Rolling survived, minus one eye. Rolling committed more armed robberies and rapes, and then travelled to Gainesville, where he bought a tent and pitched it in the woods.

There were more voyeuristic activities—on some occasions he stripped naked with peeping. On 24 August 1990, he broke into an apartment shared by two 17-year-olds, Christina Powell and Sonja Larson, who were both asleep. He stabbed Sonja to death in her bed. Then he went downstairs and woke up Christina on the sofa, and at gunpoint taped her hands. After raping her he stabbed her to death, making her lie on her face while he did it. He left both bodies positioned for maximum shock value.

Two evenings later he broke into the apartment of 18-year-old Christa Hoyt (on whom he had been spying), and waited for her to return home. When she did, he overpowered her, and raped and stabbed her to death, also disembowelling her and cutting off her head. When police arrived on the scene, they were horrified to find her headless body seated on the edge of her bed, her severed nipples beside her.