A first-person report from the insanity trial of Jeffrey Dahmer

Milwaukee—famed for its beer, cheese, chocolate, and sausages—has a Summerfest and a Winterfest. For three weeks last month I was astonished to find that this predominantly German"great city on a great lake" also had a "Dahmerfest."

The arrest last July of Jeffrey Dahmer in an apartment crammed with a skeleton, 11 skulls, packages of genitals, and preserved and frozen hearts, muscles, and innards from his 17 slaughtered victims had left me—and most Milwakeeans—braced for his trial to be a funeral GotterDahmerung.

Milwaukee's discovery of a monster in its midst had also ignited smoldering and racial tensions in people still unused to seeing their once-tranquil city rent by drugs, murder, and gang wars. Many insisted that if Dahmer had been black and his victims white, the bloodbath would never have gone undetected.

Dahmer pleaded guilty but insane before the trial. The experts who would testify also agreed that he knew right from wrong. This left just two questions for Dahmer's jury to decide: Did he have a mental disease and, if so, could he have controlled his conduct and chosen to stop killing?

But from the day I entered the fifth-floor courtroom in the reassuringly named Safety Building, the words I kept hearing from lawyers, spectators, and experts were "healing" and "understanding." The endless talk about Dahmer's profound mental illness, treatment needs, and prognoses made me think of his homicides as almost incidental.

Eventually I developed my own understanding. The euphemistic-sounding words reflected everyone's overwhelming need to deny their revulsion at Dahmer's atrocities and the issues arising from them. They tried to do this by distancing themselves and distorting the reality. Dahmer, for his part, needed to deny that sadism, or hatred of homosexuals and blacks, had motivated him to murder, dismember, and cannibalize so many such victims.

"I carried it too far, that's for sure," Dahmer told police in explaining his frustrated search for a totally compliant, zombie type slave who would always be there for him. In 60-plus hours of confessing, Dahmer had also explained that "I was not into torture. This was not a hate thing. This thing had no . This was not a thing."

The doctors needed to deny their revulsion at Dahmer's deeds, and also their personal and professional inadequacy to explain or deal with an undocumented horror on this scale. Several did so by dwelling on positive traits which they said made Dahmer "a likable guy" and "a forthright historian." Most did so by elaborating on Dahmer's explanations for why his monstrous killings were not sadistic:

"The drugging [was done] to satisfy his sexual need for a not fully cooperative partner."

"The drilling enterprise...was not sadistic...it was a realistic attempt to disable, but not to kill...."

"The killing was the unintended consequence of the drilling...the taking-of-life issue...."

"Death was an unintended by-product of his efforts to create a zombie."

"Dismembering was a disposal problem...."

"The disemboweling. . . [was] the most efficient way of handling all the remains, which only served an administrative function."

Dahmer's lawyer, Gerald P.Boyle-described as "folksy"--and fervent Milwaukee District Attorney Michael McCann needed to deny their own revulsion and the damage Dahmer's acts had done to their city.

Psychiatric testimony at Dahmer's insanity trial compounded the craziness arising from these converging denials. It spewed confusion over semantically similar--but differently defined--legal, psychiatric, and laymen's terms for mental disease and insanity. It also forced the jury to listen to crazy-sounding arguments pushed to logical absurdities by expert witnesses you could only regard as hired goons.

I became convinced that the insanity defense is an insanity that should be scrapped.

I had arrived, like many people, with decidedly mixed emotions about attending. As a psychologist, I was also braced for : Dahmer's was the second trial in less than a year in which I would hear the insanity defense argued.

The first had been a rude awakening to psychiatry's hopelessly inexact nature and dubious value as an aid to distinguishing sanity from insanity. However, I hoped the narrowly defined psychiatry's issues in Dahmer's trial would keep to a minimum the confusion introduced by the psychiatric testimony.

I was wrong.

I realized that diagnoses and definitions of , , intact thought process, and other concepts I had believed in and studied were shams. For me, one low point came when a psychiatrist said Dahmer had proved his sanity by "remembering to reach for a condom" before copulating with his "dead corpses" or their dissected parts. The psychiatrist testified that Dahmer's capacity to delay gratification and his capacity for impulse control showed he could his conduct to social norms.

The doctors' struggles to maintain their images as competent authorities only compounded the lunacy. One referred to "the cannibalism we see in these sorts of cases..." Another said he knew of "other people with a sexual to viscera." A third testified he had "seen hundreds of serial murderers in the last twenty years...."

I kept waiting for someone to say that some of his or her best friends were cannibalistic mass murderers.

An effusive, Italian-born psychiatrist doubted that Dahmer had actually devoured his victims--despite grisly evidence recovered from of his freezer. "That would be too much like a vampire. [And] I don't think he was a Dracula," he stated. I asked him whether his European roots might have led him to protect the purity of the Dracula stories from being tainted by Dahmer's grisly acts. He denied it by pointing out that "Hungary isn't that close to Italy."

In a phrase inapt considering Dahmer's admitted tenderizing, sauteing, and sampling of the hearts, biceps, and thigh muscles of several appealing victims out of "curiosity," another doctor said the killings themselves were "distasteful to Dahmer. The doctors had also said the killings were "offshoots" of his frustrated quest for the perfect zombie. But most such interpretations were offshoots of the doctors' main struggle to arrive at a diagnosis. The prime one was . It was not the only diagnosis.

Along with paraphilia. necrophilia, partialism, and other features. Dahmer was also diagnosed as suffering from , a i not otherwise specified," and an disorder with and sadistic components. He was also diagnosed as having a sexual disorder not otherwise specified." But a psychiatrist explained that Dahmer was not a sexual fetishist "since was not his main goal."

Although he slaughtered more than a dozen homosexuals, I knew Dahmer wanted to set the record straight--that he had no bias towards homosexuals. However. from the endless references to Dahmer's politically correct paraphilia--with its own built-in denial of any anti-gay bias--I surmised that the doctors were also trying to make themselves and their profession look good.

Yet I began to wonder whether Dahmer and the doctors weren't unwittingly engaged in gay-bashing nonetheless. The hammering away at his absence of hate. sadism, or bias against gays created oddly discordant images.

Milwaukee's mass murderer appeared to be a squeamish, picky--and gentlemanly--homosexual: a reluctant practitioner with refined sensibilities (as shown by his preference for predominant! one-way. non-reciprocal, "light sex"). This made Dahmer sound considerably superior to the brutish, mostly black bathhouse and gay-bar pick-ups and/or victims.

Of course the real brute was Dahmer himself

The expert testimony left me increasingly relieved I wasn't a juror. By now I had no idea how anyone could possibly decide whether Dahmer was sane or insane.

Boyle argued that bodies were piling up so fast in Dahmer's apartment that he was showering with two or three corpses in his tub which clearly showed he was nuts. "I think it showed that Mr. Dahmer had guts" the prosecution's star psychiatric witness shot back.

Experts also quibbled over whether a bizarre drawing Dahmer made for psychiatrists. depicting a "temple," showed thinking. The drawing showed a black table top, a skeleton, and skulls from his own collection, as well as occult items, including two gritting symbolizing evil and a black leather chair he told them he wanted to buy.

Dahmer had told several of the doctors that when he sat in this chair, he would become like the satanic god in his favorite movie/video, The Exorcist III, and would obtain power and wealth from real-estate ventures.

One psychiatrist testified that Dahmer's temple talk suggested "psychotic-like" thinking, but another disagreed. "It was certainly unusual. But it was not delusional," he testified. The doctor added that this was "because Dahmer's ideas were "much vaguer than a delusional, or unchanging, belief."

Psychiatrists also clashed over whether Dahmer's ideas about his drawing were "superstitious beliefs" or just signs of "normal stubbornness."

The experts disagreed just as strongly--and confusingly--on whether Dahmer's hoarding of heads and genitals was psychotic.

"It was very, very bizarre behavior," explained a psychologist. But you could also call it "a pretty realistic way to keep trophies."

The psychologist pointed out that hunters display animal-head trophies on walls without being called insane or labeled paraphiliacs. "Paraphilia can lead to pretty unusual stuff...occult beliefs," the doctor observed. "Satanic kind of stuff like [in the movie] Rosemary's Baby. But this would not necessarily show an impaired mind."

I didn't know about Dahmer's mind. But the numbing mumbo jumbo was certainly impairing my mind. I also wondered if the doctors 50 to 80 or more hours of evaluation had turned them into the zombies he had sought so futilely till the trial.

Yet if Dahmer's zombie complex--as I had begun to think of it--was as contagious as the dire references to his sick, severely disordered, very, very ill etc. conditions implied, zombism wasn't limited to the doctors.

Before closing arguments, in a professional gesture of closing ranks unprecedented in an adversarial proceeding such as a trial, Boyle and McCann even closed ranks physically--they exchanged a brief bear-hug.

A lawyer on an hourlong nightly TV wrap-up later said he had never seen a "less adversarial" trial.

The verdict, in which the jury found Dahmer sane on all 15 counts of intentional homicide, touched off more talk of healing and understanding. Dahmer himself said he had found God, and had found relief in hearing the doctors testify that he was sick and not evil. Victims' family members said they had found justice, and joined black community leaders in saying it was now time for healing.

Jurors said they had found new understanding of mental illness, which helped them see Dahmer as a person with problems who needed treatment. They said they also found reassurance in realizing that the much-cnticized Milwaukee police had not been negligent after all when they had escorted the naked. drugged, Laotian boy back into Dahmer's apartment--only conned by Dahmer, like so many others.

Local and nationally known psychiatrists and attorneys said that the city's gavel-to-gavel coverage of the trial had been cathartic, helping the community to face the horror loosed by Dahmer and to begin to heal. Legal and mental-health organizations were announcing plans to use taped segments of the trial as a teaching device, clarifying issues of mental illnesses and the insanity defense for law and psychiatry students.

Jerry Boyle hit hardest on this theme of healing. "People speak of the harm to Milwaukee by these 15 people murdered. Nonsense. We have spotlighted Milwaukee as the best place to get the fairest trial!"

Boyle also stated that arguing Dahmer's insanity plea had reminded him of his pride at being an American during the Persian Gulf War. He said the trial's "star professionals" had cleansed Milwaukee's image in the eyes of the "state, the nation, and the world," reassuring "the great people of Milwaukee [that] this sort of thing can happen anywhere."

Speaking on television after the sentencing, Boyle also said he didn't think that two officers should have been fired after Dahmer's arrest. "They were just doing their job," he said.

(Boyle failed to mention that he is a leading defense lawyer for the Milwaukee police. He also failed to note that the police could have done a better job.)

True, they might have violated the law, as Boyle claimed, if they had opened the door to Dahmer's bedroom, where his most recent victim still lay decomposing. But a routine computer check would have shown Dahmer's past arrests, and that he was still on probation for a recent conviction for sexual misconduct.

Their prompt follow-up on the missing-person report filed by the Laotian boy's family might have also brought police back to Dahmer's apartment, at least in time to save the four youths he killed afterwards.

The first really sane talk I heard after all this came from the cab driver who drove me to the airport after the verdict was announced. "Those psychiatrists talk a lot, but they don't know what they are talking about," he said. "They can't agree on anything. First they should define sanity."

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Jeffrey Dahmer

ILLUSTRATIONS

BY JOAN ULLMAN