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MILWAUKEE (AP) _ A handcuffed man flagged down police, said he'd been attacked and led them to an apartment where they found many pieces of human bodies, including three heads in a refrigerator, authorities said Tuesday.

Police Chief Phillip Arreola said there were many victims, most male and of various races. He didn't specify the number. One officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said there may have been 15 victims.

The Milwaukee Sentinel, quoting a source it didn't identify, reported Wednesday that the man who lived in the apartment confessed to killing 11 men and that there may have been as many as 18 victims. The paper's source also said the man confessed to cannibalism.

The Sentinel, quoting other sources it didn't name, also reported that police found 11 skulls scattered in a file cabinet, a closet, a refrigerator and a freezer and three headless torsos in a vat in the man's bedroom.

Police late Tuesday wouldn't comment on the reports.

Jeffrey L. Dahmer, 31, who lived in the dingy, fly-infested apartment, was taken into custody late Monday, police said. Police removed boxes filled with body parts, a barrel of acid, a refrigerator and a dresser brimming with photographs and drawings of mutilated dead bodies.

Neighbors had complained of a stench for up to a year, and on Tuesday a hazardous materials team wore yellow rubber suits and breathed from air tanks while removing boxes from the apartment.

One neighbor said he had heard the sound of sawing from the apartment at all hours.

Arreola said it was too early to determine if the killings were sexually motivated, adding, ″We don't know if this individual acted alone or in concert with other individuals.″

Dahmer was booked on suspicion of homicide but wasn't charged Tuesday, Lt. Thomas Breitlow said.

Ella Vickers, 31, who lives next door, said she and her husband had smelled a repugnant odor for some time.

″We've been smelling odors for weeks, but we thought it was a dead animal or something like that. We had no idea it was humans,″ Ms. Vickers said.

Rolf Mueller, one of the patrolmen who made the discovery, said officers were overpowered by the stench. Mueller said he found three preserved human heads in the refrigerator.

″You think you've seen it all out here, and then something like this happens,″ said Mueller, a 10-year police veteran.

Larry Marion, who managed the apartment when the suspect moved in two years ago, said the smell was so bad last spring that many residents complained.

He said the suspect claimed his refrigerator was broken, causing meat to spoil. Marion said the stench had permeated from the apartment intermittently for about a year.

″He didn't associate with many people, kind of a loner. But, he never caused any problems. He worked every day and always paid his rent,″ Marion said.

One neighbor told police he and his wife had heard sawing coming from the apartment at all hours of the day and night.

″I asked my wife, 'What is he building in there?‴ said Vernell Bass, 35.

Arreola said the body parts were found after a man on the street, handcuffs dangling from his wrist, flagged down a patrol car Monday night and said he had escaped from the apartment ″after actually being handcuffed and threatened with a knife.″

Milwaukee County Medical Examiner Jeffrey Jentzen said no identification had been made on the dismembered bodies and it wasn't known how long they had been in the apartment. Jentzen said police wouldn't let him elaborate on what body parts were found or their condition.

Arreola said missing persons files are being reviewed and that police departments in other states have contacted him.

The FBI is helping Milwaukee police work with other police departments, though the agency isn't investigating, spokesman Dale Mueller said.

Dahmer originally was from Medina, Ohio, and had been in Milwaukee several years, Arreola said.

Court records show the man has a conviction for second degree sexual assault for offering a 13-year-old boy $50 to pose for nude photos in 1988. He was released from jail last year after serving about a year, and was placed on a five-year probation.

At the time, his father wrote to Circuit Judge William Gardner asking that the court ensure his son ″get some type of treatment″ upon his release.

″I do feel this may be our last chance to institute something lasting and that you can hold the key,″ Lionel H. Dahmer of Medina, Ohio, wrote in the letter dated March 1, 1990. There was no answer at his home Tuesday afternoon.

Jeffrey Dahmer also was cited in 1982 at the Wisconsin State Fair on a charge of indecent exposure, Milwaukee County Sheriff's Department records said.

Ambrosia Chocolate Co., a downtown manufacturer of candy, confirmed Dahmer worked in the company's manufacturing department from Jan. 14, 1985 to July 15 of this year. He was allowed to keep working there during the day while in jail for the sexual assault conviction, court records showed.

The apartment complex is about three miles west of downtown, a few blocks from the Marquette University campus. Neighbors said it was a high-crime area. ″You hear gunshots all the time around here,″ said Henry Barnett, 26.

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Severed Heads, Other Body Parts Found in Milwaukee Apartment

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MILWAUKEE (AP) _ A handcuffed man flagged down police, said he'd been attacked and led them to an apartment where they found many pieces of human bodies, including three heads in a refrigerator, authorities said Tuesday. Police Chief Phillip Arreola said there were many victims, most male and of various races.

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Credit... The New York Times Archives

This is a digitized version of an article from The Times's print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.

Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions.

A convicted child molester whose apartment was strewn with body parts is believed to have killed at least 17 people, and some killings may have occurred more than a decade ago, the police said today.

They said they had found parts of 11 bodies in the apartment of the 31-year-old suspect, Jeffrey L. Dahmer, who was formally charged today with four counts of first-degree intentional homicide. Mr. Dahmer was also charged at the hearing in State Circuit Court here with habitual criminality.

Police Chief Philip Arreola said investigators had learned of about six more victims from Mr. Dahmer and "concurring, corroborative information provided by other people."

The Milwaukee Journal reported today that police officials in Germany wanted to question Mr. Dahmer about five mutilation murders near an Army base where he was stationed in the early 1980's. Suspect on Probation

Mr. Dahmer was assigned to an armored unit for about two years in Baumholder, Germany, said Joyce Wiesner, a spokeswoman for the Army Reserve in St. Louis. She said he was discharged as a private first class on May 24, 1981.

Mr. Dahmer, who is on probation for the 1988 sexual assault of a teen-age boy, is being held on $1 million bail. The homicide counts with which he was charged carry mandatory life sentences, and the habitual criminality charge would add 10 years to each count.

He appeared in court but did not speak.

The authorities said Mr. Dahmer had confessed to drugging, strangling and dismembering the victims, boiling some of their skulls to preserve them and photographing the victims in various stages of dismemberment. Hints of Cannibalism

The Medical Examiner, Jeffrey Jentzen, said the victims' remains were "not inconsistent with cannibalism."

Mr. Jentzen said he hoped to complete identification of six more victims by Friday afternoon.

Four victims who have been identified were from Illinois and a fifth was from Milwaukee, the authorities said.

In a four-page criminal complaint based on statements he made to the police, Mr. Dahmer said he met two of his victims on Milwaukee streets, one at a Chicago gay bar and another at a Chicago gay pride function from June 30 to mid-July.

In each case, the victim was invited back to the apartment, eventually given a "sleeping potion," strangled, dismembered and his body parts kept in a vat, refrigerator or freezer, the complaint said.

The police were led to the apartment on Monday by a handcuffed man who they said had escaped and flagged down officers. The man, Tracy Edwards, 32, said he escaped by gaining Mr. Dahmer's trust during a four-hour conversation.

"He underestimated me," Mr. Edwards said. "God sent me there to take care of the situation."

Mr. Edwards said he had met Mr. Dahmer, a former chocolate factory worker, at a mall and had gone to the apartment for a beer.

John Paul Ranieri, a street minister who said he had met Mr. Dahmer in a tavern in the last month, said the suspect hated homosexuals and blacks and suffered from problems with alcohol.

Relatives of Mr. Dahmer, who is from Medina, Ohio, said they discovered a vat filled with bones and slime three years ago when he lived with his grandmother but could not tell if the remains were human or animal.

Four victims whose remains were found in Mr. Dahmer's apartment were identified as Joseph Bradehoft, 25, of Greenville, Ill., and three Chicagoans: Oliver Lacy, 23; Jeremiah Weinberger, 23, and Matt Turner, 20. The Milwaukee victim has been identified, but the name was not immediately released, the police chief said.

According to an affidavit filed in court on Wednesday, Mr. Dahmer told the police he would meet his victims at shopping malls or taverns and lure them back to his apartment by offering to photograph them.

Chief Arreola said the authorities were "not yet ruling out the possibility that other individuals may be involved" in the killings. He declined to specify.

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17 SLAYINGS TIED TO MILWAUKEE MAN (Published 1991)

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There is no easy explanation for Jeffrey Dahmer.

In semi-rural Bath Township--where he witnessed his parents at war; where he collected animals' bones and carcasses; where he first took to drink; where in a single year he attended his senior prom and, he says, killed his first man--there are abundant clues to a burgeoning evil.

But there are no simple answers to the mysteries of a monstrous heart. There are no signposts that say that this young man, though abused and afflicted, could grow up to kill 17 other young men.

"He's done monstrous acts, yet he's a human being. Why? Only Jeffrey can answer that," said Susan Lehr, a former neighbor.

Jeffrey Dahmer's father, Lionel, says that his son was sexually abused by a neighborhood boy when he was 8 years old, about the time the family moved here.

It is not clear what effect the episode had on the youngster. But it is certain that other unhappy events of childhood lingered, chief among them the bitter breakup of his parents' marriage.

Their divorce was granted on July 24, 1978, after each charged the other with "extreme cruelty and gross neglect of duty."

Acrimony continued; two years later, Joyce Dahmer called Bath Township police with a report of a shouting and shoving match with her ex-husband. There were no arrests.

"The police were out several times," Lehr said.

Her four sons were playmates of Dahmer's. "At the time I knew him, there was something devastating going on in his life and there wasn't anybody there to help him. I feel bad about that," she said.

During the divorce, Jeffrey Dahmer was left alone. His mother moved to Wisconsin with his younger brother, David; his father had moved out of the house. He was left with no food, no money and a broken refrigerator.

It was at that time, on June 18, 1978, Dahmer told police, that he killed his first victim: a hitchhiker brought back to the house for a couple of beers. Dahmer said he choked the man with a barbell, smashed the body to bits with a sledgehammer and scattered the pieces in his yard. A recent search turned up more than 500 pieces of bone.

"The guy wanted to leave and I didn't want him to leave," the 31-year-old Jeffrey Dahmer told police 13 years later.

The people who knew Dahmer in those days may not have known the depths of his loneliness, but they were well aware of his solitude, and of his penchant for bizarre behavior and odd pastimes.

Young Dahmer kept the bones of chipmunks, squirrels, dogs, cats, groundhogs and raccoons inside formaldehyde-filled pickle jars that lined his childhood clubhouse. He roamed the neighborhood for road kills that shared space in an old toolshed with spiders, praying mantises and other bugs in specimen jars.

Nearby was a cemetery that struck Dahmer's chums as even more bizarre.

"He had a little graveyard with animals buried in it. There were skulls placed on top of little crosses. He had quite a collection of skeletons," said Eric Tyson, 28, a former neighbor.

Schoolmate Mike Costlow told The Plain Dealer in Cleveland that Dahmer also collected stuffed rabbits, owls and small birds. When Costlow asked about taxidermy in 1978, Dahmer told him: "I always wanted to do that to a human."

In seventh grade, classmate Chip Crofoot noticed Dahmer sipping gin from his locker and coming to school drunk. "I don't remember much about him other than his drinking. He pretty much kept to himself all the time," Crofoot said.

Dahmer played clarinet and intramural tennis in school. He had a chemistry set and showed an early interest in biology. He made average grades because of a combination of A's and Ds.

Acquaintances recall Dahmer drawing chalk outlines of fictional bodies, faking epileptic fits at the mall, yelling out at inappropriate times and sneaking into the picture of the National Honor Society when he didn't belong. His face is blotted out of the group photo in the Revere High School yearbook.

Senior-prom date Bridget Geiger remembered Dahmer as painfully shy but polite: "He didn't say two words to me. He didn't even kiss me good night."

She said she attended a party at Dahmer's house several weeks later but left because it involved a seance and someone suggested contacting the devil.

Dahmer failed to get past the first semester at Ohio State University. He sold his blood to buy alcohol. He joined the Army on Dec. 29, 1978, but was discharged in 1981, about nine months before his hitch was up. Drinking again.

Army buddies who served with him as a medic in Germany said he mixed Beefeater martinis in his barracks from a briefcase that contained shakers, stirrers and fancy flasks. When he drank, he listened to Black Sabbath and other rock music on his headphones.

"He'd be shut out from the rest of the world. He'd drink until he passed out, then wake up and start again. He didn't even go out for chow," said David Rodriquez of Springfield, Mass.

"He was smart, but he just wanted to slide by," added Michael Masters of New York's Long Island. "He was just goofy. He always had that look about him, that sinisterness. He was on a steady decline in life. He was on a losing skid and didn't know how to pick himself up."

After the Army discharge, Dahmer worked at a sandwich shop in Florida and slept on the beach. He returned to Ohio, then went to live with his grandmother in the Milwaukee suburb of West Allis.

Some scrapes with the law hinted at an anger seething inside: an arrest for public drunkenness Oct. 7, 1981, in Ohio; disturbing the peace by dropping his pants in front of a crowd in Wisconsin on Aug. 7, 1982; lewd and lascivious behavior in Milwaukee on Sept. 8, 1986.

A 1988 allegation that he drugged an Illinois man and tried to take his money was dropped for lack of evidence by West Allis police.

During his stay at his grandmother's, Dahmer said he killed three times before he moved into a one-bedroom flat in a tough Milwaukee neighborhood.

Meanwhile, he was hired in 1985 as a laborer on the graveyard shift at the Ambrosia Chocolate Co. for $8.75 an hour.

In 1989, he was convicted of fondling a 13-year-old boy he had lured with the promise of $50 if the boy posed for pictures. His five-year sentence was suspended, and he served 10 months in a work-release program that allowed him to keep his night job at the chocolate factory.

Dahmer told police the killings resumed when his time in the work-release program was up.

Then, last July 14, he was fired from his job for chronic absenteeism.

On July 22, a handcuffed man escaped from his apartment and alerted police; they found the remains of 11 bodies Dahmer admitted dismembering, including four heads in a refrigerator and freezer plus seven acid-washed skulls.

In all, Dahmer admitted strangling and butchering 17 males over a 13-year period. He told police he had sex with four of the corpses, and he saved the heart of one victim "to eat later."

This is the life trail left behind by Jeffrey Dahmer--a trail that experts hope will lead them to some understanding of why he did what he did.

David Silber, a psychologist at George Washington University, pointed to the animal remains Dahmer collected as a youth. "His behavior didn't change. The objects changed," Silber said.

"This is a person that is very deficient in some ways. His character probably wasn't very strong to begin with, and it got beaten down by ways in which he was treated throughout life," the psychologist said.

"If there's anything monstrous about him, it's the monstrous lack of connection to all things we think of as being human--guilt, remorse, worry, feelings that would stop him from hurting, killing, torturing," he said.

Park Dietz, a forensic psychiatrist from Newport Beach, Calif., said that of the serial killers he studied, 58% strangled their victims.

"It's a very personal, intimate means. One can actually feel the victim expire, see them go into convulsions and hear the last efforts to breathe," said Dietz, a consultant to the FBI.

Dietz also said serial killers are apt to photograph their work, make a journal and keep trophies--either body parts or articles of clothing.

"In absolute contrast to the stereotype, they are the most controlled, calculated, cunning offenders," Dietz said. "What's so hard for people to understand is that their level of desire and need to do it is the same as the ordinary man's desire to have ordinary sexual relations."

An FBI report completed in the 1970s notes that serial killers almost always are white males, loners from troubled homes who are smart but underachieving. There often is physical, sexual or psychological abuse as a child. As adolescents, they show cruelty to animals about 46% of the time.

An essential feature is being sexually aroused by their bloody handiwork. The victims are merely objects--"These were sexual props, not people," Dietz said.

And killing does give them pleasure. "They keep souvenirs to remember their fondest moments," said James Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University and co-author of "Mass Murder: America's Growing Menace."

No one is discounting sexual perversity as a factor in the Dahmer murders. But police also blame the profound loneliness that has afflicted Dahmer for a very long time. He was quoted by a detective as saying that he believed the body parts would keep him company.

"He killed them so they wouldn't leave," an investigator said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "He didn't want anybody else to leave him."

Martha Schmidt, a sociology professor at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio, knew Dahmer in high school, before the killing started. He was the first victim, she suggests; had he been saved, there would have been no others.

"He was tortured and lost at a very early age," she said. "His behavior was always on the edge. He seemed to cry out for help, but nobody paid any attention to him at all."

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Murder in Milwaukee: Experts Struggle to Explain Dahmer's Compulsion : Crime: His behavior was always on the edge, childhood acquaintances say. But no one intervened to help him, and his problems escalated.

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There is no easy explanation for Jeffrey Dahmer. In semi-rural Bath Township--where he witnessed his parents at war; where he collected animals' bones and carcasses; where he first took to drink; where in a single year he attended his senior prom and, he says, killed his first man--there are abundant clues to a burgeoning evil.

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Inside the Mind of Jeffrey Dahmer: Serial Killer’s Chilling Jailhouse Interview

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Jeffrey Dahmer - Full Trial - Serial Killer

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Netflix will release documentary series ‘Conversations With a Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes’ in October

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Milwaukee serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer will be the subject of Netflix’s true-crime documentary series “Conversations With a Killer.”

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North Twenty-fifth Street is only a couple of miles from downtown Milwaukee, yet it contrives to feel dislocated, apart. There is an air of listlessness about the neighborhood, as if ambition here has been sat upon and the future is questionable. The small detached houses with verandas were obviously once pretty, even elegant, but now they stand like ghosts of a happier time, and you do not walk down the street without listening for footsteps behind you.

The Oxford Apartments at No. 924 is an interruption of the street's pre-war architecture, a modern two-story building with a cream-colored façade. It looks, and is, cheap. Outside hangs a large American flag. When I passed two months ago, it hung limply at half-mast.

The scene of a crime is nearly always a soul-damaging place, but almost none in modern American history compares to the spectacle that awaited police in Jeffrey Dahmer's small second-floor apartment. For once that anodyne term "human remains" was horribly accurate. Apartment 213 contained seven skulls and four heads, three in a free-standing freezer, one in a box on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator. In the freezer compartment of the refrigerator there were assorted body parts. In a blue fifty-seven-gallon barrel there were headless torsos, mutilated pieces of human bodies, hands, and assorted limbs. There were also more than a hundred photographs of people taken at various stages of dismemberment, most so disgusting that even seasoned police officers could not look on them without feeling faint.

In all, Jeffrey L. Dahmer has been charged with thirteen counts of first-degree intentional homicide and two counts of first-degree murder, though he has confessed to having killed seventeen men: Steven Hicks, Steven Tuomi, James Doxtator, Richard Guerrero, Anthony Sears, Raymond Smith (also known as Ricky Beeks), Edward Smith, Ernest Miller, David Thomas, Curtis Straughter, Errol Lindsey, Tony Anthony Hughes, Konerak Sinthasomphone, Matt Turner, Jeremiah Weinberger, Oliver Lacy, Joseph Bradehoft. That so many were named within a few days of Dahmer's arrest on July 22, and all of them since, is attributable not merely to the forensic skills of the Milwaukee County medical examiner but also to the confessed serial murderer's own wish to assist in every way toward positive identification.

The Milwaukee City Jail has been a smoke-free zone since July, and Jeffrey Dahmer, a pack-a-day man, is reduced to sniffing smells from the air vents in his cell when prison guards have a smoke. But he is transported by two detectives from the jail to the Milwaukee Police Department one floor below for his sessions with investigating officers, and there he is allowed to smoke as many cigarettes as he likes. (Dahmer is now in the Milwaukee County Jail.)

It is noticeable how subdued Dahmer is now, despite the lack of cigarettes. His confessions are made not in any spirit of bravado or satisfaction, but in abject remorse. His lawyer, Gerald Boyle, is on record as having referred to Dahmer's "anguish." The word may even be too mild to describe the depths of introspective horror which now afflict him.

That a man should be capable of what Jeffrey Dahmer says he has done is in itself a mystery of human destructiveness which is in no way diminished by the spate of "serial killers" revealed in recent years. That he is also in distress, and as appalled as we are by the contemplation of his own acts, compounds the mystery by lifting him from the simple category of a monster whom we can view from a fascinated and safe distance into an uncomfortably recognizable human being. As the scores of journalists who descended upon Milwaukee pieced together Dahmer's history, he gradually emerged as disconcertingly ordinary, even unremarkable, until the secret dissolution of his personality finally erupted upon the world.

We must not treat Dahmer the way he treated his victims, as objects in a fantasy, but must try to inhabit his world, to imagine what it might be like to live inside the head of Jeffrey Dahmer. This is not impossible, for there was a case in England in 1983, so similar in detail, character, and motive, as to make one blink in disbelief.

Dennis Nilsen, a highly intelligent thirty-seven-year-old civil servant with a penetrating gaze and a dark sense of humor, was arrested in February 1983 and charged with six counts of murder and two of attempted murder. He quickly confessed to having killed fifteen men, three in his attic apartment on Cranley Gardens and twelve at a previous address, also on the outskirts of north London. Nilsen worked as an executive officer at a government-sponsored employment agency, and in the evening went to pubs and gay bars for a drink and a chat. Sometimes he took people home with him, and sometimes he killed them. He would wait until they were drunk and sleepy, then strangle them with a tie. (Dahmer gave his victims a drugged drink, strangled them with a strap or his bare hands, and once used a knife.) Having accomplished this, he would look after the body, care for it, wash and clean it, dress it, put it to bed, sit it in an armchair, and often masturbate beside it. (Dahmer is alleged to have told the police that he once had anal penetration with a corpse.) Some days later, Nilsen would place the body under the floorboards. When the space there became crowded or the stench became overpowering, perhaps several months later, he took the bodies out, dismembered them with a kitchen knife, and burned them on a bonfire in the backyard. Once he was in the Cranley Gardens attic flat, without access to a garden, he sliced the bodies into two-inch strips and flushed them down the toilet (he was eventually caught when the plumbing backed up as a result). The heads were boiled on the kitchen stove. (Dahmer seems to have dissected the corpses almost immediately. He used an electric saw, and acid baths for disposal. The heads were boiled and saved.)

There is a tragedy for the people who died, and another for those who carry death with them.

Nilsen referred to the evening of his arrest as "the day help arrived." I first met him two and a half months later, and we had corresponded for three weeks before that. I interviewed him for eight months before his trial, read his own fifty-volume prison journals, and wrote a book about his case, Killing for Company, published in Great Britain. Nilsen is the first murderer to present an exhaustive archive measuring his own introspection, and his candid, articulate reflections allowed a unique opportunity to enter the mind of a mass murderer, a mind that is frighteningly similar to Jeffrey Dahmer's.

In his "normal" manifestation, Dennis Nilsen is an engaging companion, well-spoken, intelligent, and very persuasive. From the letters we had exchanged, I expected someone who was sensitive and introspective. At our first meeting, however, I saw an assertive man, bristling with confidence and swagger, amazingly relaxed as he slouched with an arm over the back of his chair, totally in command and behaving as if he were interviewing me for a job. He gave an impression of intellectual intensity, coupled with a surprising truculence. I soon learned that this was a radical political streak exaggerated by his having to spend countless hours confined with nobody to speak to.

Nilsen is tall, slightly stooped, with a mild but persistent Scottish accent and a natural disposition to hold forth on all manner of subjects. His argumentativeness has frequently brought trouble upon him as a discontented prisoner who is forever pointing out that prison rules should be obeyed by prison governors as well as inmates. His dark sense of humor, too, has often been criticized. During his first interrogation Nilsen, a smoker like Dahmer, asked what he was supposed to do without an ashtray; when told he could just flush the butts down the toilet, he replied that the last time he did that he was arrested. He once told me that if a film is ever made of his case, "they will have to put the cast in order of disappearance."

When I went to see him in August at Her Majesty's Prison Albany on the Isle of Wight (where he is serving a life sentence), to talk about Dahmer's alleged crimes, Nilsen was reluctant at first to address the subject. He looked at me in unaccustomed penetrating silence for a long while, and it was clear that he was contemplating scenes he would far rather banish to the past. Then, in beginning to explain the motivation behind the horrifying deeds he and Dahmer have in common, Nilsen made an observation on the film The Silence of the Lambs, a movie about serial murderers which he has not seen, though he knows the book. He said that the depiction of Hannibal Lecter, the dangerous, cerebral killer, is a fraudulent fiction. "He is shown as a potent figure, which is pure myth," Nilsen said carefully. "It is his power and manipulation which please the public. But it's not at all like that. My offenses arose from a feeling of inadequacy, not potency. I never had any power in my life."

Eventually, Nilsen was willing, even eager, to examine the case of Jeffrey Dahmer in detail. The comments he made and the letter he subsequently wrote to me, giving his understanding of Dahmer's mind, appear later.

Jeffrey Dahmer's legal representative is Gerald Boyle, an ebullient, gregarious man who is recognized all over Milwaukee and always greeted with genuine glee. You feel that people know he is a man of heart, good-natured and generous, and as often happens with those who enjoy life rather than complain about it, he is no longer slim. He is just over fifty, but with hair prematurely white, and his Irish ancestry has endowed him with both a sense of humor and a sense of natural justice. His older brother is a Jesuit priest. Boyle himself is a believer without being dogmatic.

Boyle has known Dahmer for three years; they first met in 1988 when Dahmer was charged with child molestation. "It was completely impossible to imagine then," says Boyle, frowning with emphasis and bewilderment, "that he had already killed a number of people. No sign whatsoever. Never once suspected."

Boyle hopes that a proper examination of his client's case may open the way to discern the cause of his tragic torment. "If we can illuminate the condition which afflicts people like Jeffrey Dahmer," he says, "we might have done some little thing for humanity." He has engaged a distinguished forensic psychologist, Dr. Kenneth Smail, to report on Dahmer's state of mind.

The facts of Dahmer's case, once stripped of invention and exaggeration, are straightforward enough. ("Forty percent of what has been printed in the papers is untrue," Dahmer has said recently.) The son of Lionel Dahmer, a chemist, and his first wife, Joyce, Jeffrey was born in Milwaukee but brought up in Bath Township, Ohio, in a middle-class setting. His parents were incompatible and spent so much energy in argument that they had little left to devote to him. They were "constantly at each other's throats," he has recalled. His abiding memory of childhood is of isolation and neglect. He had no close friends, no one with whom he felt at ease and affectionate. He withdrew into a private world wherein he could create his own stories, fantasies that always turned out right as long as no one jostled them.

At Revere High School in Richfield, Ohio, Jeffrey did reasonably well, but was once again noticeably solitary. He played clarinet and tennis, but quite clearly did not belong with any group. Like many friendless children, he took to playing the fool, acting in a bizarre manner to claim attention. According to one classmate quoted in the press, he would bleat like a sheep in class, or fake an epileptic fit. Such are the measures to which the outsider resorts in order to win admission. If that does not work, one can always hijack admission, as Jeffrey apparently did by twice slipping into group photographs of his high school's honor society, where he did not belong. When the photograph was published in the school yearbook in his senior year, his image was blacked out.

Meanwhile, there are reports that he enjoyed skinning dead animals and scraping the meat off with acid. (Many of these reports have come via his stepmother, Shari Dahmer.)

"Dahmer's 'buzz' comes from the whole continuing ritual exploitation of the victim's passivity."

The atmosphere at home had become worse since the birth of Jeffrey's younger brother, David, to whom so much demonstrative affection was offered that Jeffrey was left to draw the conclusion that he was somehow unworthy. Lionel and Joyce finally put an end to their unfortunate marriage in 1978, he having done his best to stay away from her in the last months. They fought bitterly over custody of their younger son. When the divorce was effected, Joyce packed her bags and took off with David, then twelve, leaving Jeffrey to fend for himself. He was eighteen, a morose and sullen figure, heavily hurt by desertion. There was no one to whom he could turn for solace. He was anyway so secretive by then that he never revealed himself for fear that the "self" would be unattractive and misprized. A few weeks later, he picked up a hitchhiker, Steven Hicks, and brought him home. When Hicks said he should be moving on, Jeffrey smashed him in the head with a barbell and strangled him, dismembered his body, crushed the bones with a sledgehammer, and scattered the remains in the woods. Hicks was effectively obliterated, by a man he did not know, because he had threatened to abandon him.

After one semester at Ohio State University, Dahmer dropped out and enlisted in the army for a period of six years. After only two, however, he was discharged under a section of the Military Justice Code that covered drug and alcohol use. He habitually drank himself into a stupor. It was yet another way of turning his back upon a world where he felt he did not belong.

At this point, he went to live with his paternal grandmother, Catherine Dahmer, in West Allis, near Milwaukee, and took a job in a blood bank. By 1985 he was working at the Ambrosia Chocolate Company as a general laborer, a job he held until July 15 of this year, one week before his arrest. He was still a "loner," except that he occasionally brought home young men whom he had met casually at a gay bar. Lionel Dahmer and his new wife, Shari, decided that this was too much for the aging grandmother to cope with, and said he must leave to find a place of his own. What none of them knew was that, by April 1989, three of the men whom Jeffrey had taken to the house in West Allis never left it.

Dahmer's erratic behavior had attracted the attention of the law, though not of the homicide squad. State Fair Park police charged him with disorderly conduct in August 1982. He was convicted and fined. In 1986 he was arrested for exposing himself to children; he later claimed that he had merely been urinating and had no idea he was observed. The charge of lewd and lascivious behavior was commuted to disorderly conduct, and on March 10, 1987, he was found guilty and sentenced to one year on probation.

Then, in 1988, Dahmer picked up a thirteen-year-old Laotian boy, offering him fifty dollars to pose for photographs. He gave the boy a drink laced with a sleeping potion, and fondled him. Dahmer was charged with second-degree sexual assault and enticement of a child for immoral purposes. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to eight years, but as he expressed contrition the sentence was stayed to one year's detention and five years' probation, with the eight years suspended upon future conduct (they will now automatically have to be served in full). This meant he could keep his $9.81-an-hour job at the chocolate factory and return to the jail in the evening. He was also to receive psychological treatment to deal with his sexual confusion and his dependence upon alcohol.

Nilsen speculates that claims of Dahmer's cannibalism are probably "wishful thinking."

That was three years ago. Dahmer is now apparently shocked to discover that the boy involved in this offense was the brother of Konerak Sinthasomphone, whom he murdered in May. He had no idea they were related.

Because of a heavy caseload, his probation officer did not insist on making visits to Dahmer's apartment, but always consulted with him at her office. He seemed willing and cooperative. Her reports indicated that Dahmer felt some guilt about his preference for male partners. His mother, who had moved to Fresno, California, spoke to him by telephone for the first time in five years and indicated that his homosexuality caused no problem as far as she was concerned.

Two of the speculations which have grown like fungus since July are that Jeffrey Dahmer hated black men and despised homosexuals. According to several sources close to him, neither is true. It has been suggested that he is homosexual by default-that his sexual orientation was not a preference but a compensation for the impossibility of having a relationship with a woman-but in reality he is a genuine homosexual who has had difficulty coming to terms with the fact. And he insists that there is no racial significance in the fact that most of his victims were black. On the contrary, it is more than probable that he invited them back to his apartment because he liked them.

A young man named Kenny Magnum was quoted by The Washington Post as saying, "He killed six of my friends, and you know, before all this, I would have said he was a regular guy." That, indeed, is the crux of the matter-Dahmer's "normality." Jeffrey Dahmer is tall, lean, well built. Those who have met him say that he looks you in the eye as he talks, instead of darting glances to the floor or meditating in the middle distance, as dissemblers often do. He has a ready smile, but is shy and tentative. All this relates to the sober Dahmer. Army and work colleagues have told of his dramatic change of character when drunk. He would turn aggressive, dogmatic. One person described how he would become loquacious with drink, and then tedious, until he felt he had to walk away from Dahmer to avoid boredom.

Neighbors are quoted as saying he was well mannered and polite, though he kept himself to himself. Taxi drivers found him intelligent. One of them recalls driving him back from the shop where he bought the fifty-seven-gallon barrel which he would subsequently use to dispose of unwanted remnants of his guests.

Other taxi drivers frequently took him from the apartment to a restaurant called the Chancery, where he would dine alone. Sometimes they picked him up at the 219 Club on South Second Street, a popular downtown gay bar.

That, too, is relatively normal. Though the 219 Club stands anonymously enough on a grim, featureless street where you expect to find only warehouses and used-car lots, once I stepped beyond the simple door, I could have been in Paris or London. Rather than a grim, sleazy, furtive joint with mysterious dark corners and strange smells, it is a cheerful and robustly pleasant place, serving generous cocktails at decent prices and boasting a bright dance floor lit with special effects. Patrons are clean and assertively happy. Jeffrey Dahmer would not look at all out of place in such a venue, and he didn't. One man at the bar, who asked to remain anonymous, told me, "Sure, I saw him in here a number of times. Good-looking guy. I would have gone home with him right away if he'd asked me."

Dennis Nilsen receives one visitor a month. He submits your name to the Home Office and, if it is approved, you arrive on the appointed day at the appointed hour and a guard walks you into Albany prison. After passing through several guard stations and steel doors, you arrive at a small square table in the prison visiting room, surrounded by other such tables, at which prisoners and their girlfriends hold hands and gaze at each other. Guards sit around the edge of the room, but they cannot hear conversations.

Even in his simple prison uniform of blue denim trousers and blue-and-white striped shirt, the same as everyone else, he stands apart, and glances indicate he is recognized. Nilsen thinks his notoriety is a fiction of the press, but that is because he tries to forget the emotional import of what he did, and the rest of us cannot.

When I visited Nilsen recently, he knew that I wanted to ask him for his opinions of Jeffrey Dahmer. He had read several accounts of Dahmer's case in newspapers that warders had left lying around, and had heard reports on BBC radio. Though he was initially reticent on the subject, Nilsen is a perceptive, talkative man with intellectual pretensions, and he was soon willing to analyze Dahmer from his own unique perspective. As usual, he began by taking refuge in humor, moving his chair opposite me "because we don't want anyone to get ideas."

Dennis Nilsen is the son of a Scottish mother and a Norwegian father who met during the Second World War in Scotland and separated soon afterward. He does not remember seeing his father at all, and was brought up by his mother and grandparents. An insecure, melancholy little boy, Nilsen worshiped his adventurous, seafaring grandfather. One day when he was six years old, Nilsen was excited when his mother asked him to come and see "Grandad." She took her son into another room, where a long box lay on trestles, and lifted him up to look inside. In the box was his grandfather. The taboo against the mention of death had disastrous consequences for the boy: the image of the loved one and the image of the dead object were fused.

The confusion of love with inanimate bodies became sexual when Nilsen was eight. He nearly drowned as he waded from a beach near his home into the North Sea; he was rescued by a teenager who then molested him as he wavered in and out of consciousness. (Dahmer's father reportedly told police that when Jeffrey was eight he was sexually molested by a neighbor boy. Dahmer has said he has no memory of the incident. His father now says the assault never occurred.)

At school Nilsen was friendless and, like Dahmer, a bit of a joker. He spent twelve years in the Army Catering Corps, where he learned his butchering skills. (Dahmer learned all about the disposal properties of acid by virtue of his father's having been a chemist.) He also discovered an alternative to solitary sex: "The novelty of one's own body soon wore off and I needed something positive to relate to," he remembered later. "My imagination hit on the idea of using a mirror. By placing a large, long mirror on its side strategically beside the bed, I would view my own reclining reflection. At first always careful not to show my head, because the situation needed that I believe it was someone else. I would give the reflection some animation, but that play could not be drawn out long enough. The fantasy could dwell much longer on a mirror image which was asleep." Later, the fetish involved makeup "to erase the living colour."

After leaving the army, Nilsen lived alone in various flats in London. Though promiscuous, he was surprisingly puritanical about the life he was leading. Anonymous sex, he wrote, "only deepens one's sense of loneliness and solves nothing. Promiscuity is a disease." Like Dahmer, he felt guilt about his homosexuality, and he, too, brushed with the law when he picked up a boy who fell asleep in his flat after drinking, and woke up to find himself being photographed. A tussle ensued, but following an interview at the police station no charges were brought. The camera is an essential element in both Dahmer's and Nilsen's cases, for it is one of the props of the florid fantasy life that eventually swallowed up both men.

Nilsen made one attempt at a domestic relationship, but it was doomed and lasted only a matter of months. Dahmer has never had an enduring relationship, though there was one association that went on for two and a half months. Both men were confirmed outsiders, looking at the real world from an imprisonment not of their own choosing, but which they learned to cherish for want of anything else. "I had always held within me a fear of emotional rejection and failure," wrote Nilsen. "Nobody ever really got close to me. . . . There was never a place for me in the scheme of things. . . . My inner emotions could not be expressed, and this led me to the alternative of a retrograde and deepening imagination. . . . I had become a living fantasy on a theme in dark endless dirges." This may also represent an accurate portrait of Jeffrey Dahmer's frame of mind.

"The loner has to achieve fulfillment alone within himself," writes Nilsen once more. "All he has are his own extreme acts. People are merely supplementary to the achievement of these acts. He is abnormal and he knows it."

Nilsen reached the point where he felt utterly useless and superfluous to society. "Loneliness is a long unbearable pain. I felt that I had achieved nothing of importance or of help to anyone in my entire life. I would think that if I drank myself to death my body would not be discovered until at least a week after (or longer). There was no one I felt I could call upon for real help. I was in daily contact with so many people, but quite alone in myself." (Dahmer is also apparently convinced that, even before the murders, there was no source of pride for him, nothing he could point to in his past with any degree of satisfaction.)

At the end of 1978, Nilsen spent six whole days with his dog over the Christmas period, until he went out for a drink the evening before New Year's Eve and met a young man, whom he invited back. In the morning the man would be leaving. Nilsen decided he would keep him. The man was strangled in his sleep. Thus began what he has disconcertingly called his recruitment of "a new kind of flat-mate." Dahmer is alleged to have admitted that his first victim, Steven Hicks, was killed at the moment when he realized the boy was going to leave. Thereafter the pattern was disastrously repeated, with each departure a threat of abandonment, a death of its own.

In both cases the pattern took some time to establish itself. A whole year elapsed between Nilsen's first murder and his second, some six and a half years in Dahmer's case. Nilsen's frequency of killing gradually escalated into a desperate, unstoppable orgy of panicky destructiveness, with seven men murdered in one year. Dahmer's last four victims died within three weeks. "Each one seemed to be its own last time," wrote Nilsen, who insists that the term "serial killer" is inaccurate because it suggests the intention to repeat. "You might as well call Elizabeth Taylor a serial bride," he adds dryly.

It is painful for any of us to survive without a proper sexual and social identity, and for this we need to be in touch, sporadically if not constantly, with human goodness. Both Nilsen and Dahmer appear to have been denied this advantage. They each resisted tactile contact. Nilsen's mother admitted to me that she could not cuddle him as a baby; she wanted to, but he appeared to repel demonstrations of affection. The Cleveland Plain Dealer quoted Dahmer's stepmother, Shari, as saying, "He couldn't embrace, he couldn't touch. His eyes are dead."

It is common in semi-autistic children and adolescents to hold this kind of distance, but it is debatable whether the condition is genetic, or whether adults should be held accountable for it. At any rate, it may engender in the long term an unassailable habit of distrust. Dahmer's probation officer noted that his general outlook toward people was "basically mistrusting." In the same interview Dahmer said that if he could change anything in his childhood it would be the way his parents behaved toward each other (he would "change that parents didn't get along").

This ingrained suspiciousness makes it difficult for such people to express any emotion apart from anger, and renders them liable to attribute to others certain attitudes and feelings without checking if they are true or justified. It becomes slightly easier to imagine, then, that Dahmer's victims may have unwittingly stumbled into a private drama in which they played a role foisted upon them by his interpretation of their attitude or indifference. They could not have intuited the deep, frustrated aggression which lay beneath that retiring façade.

Hence the purpose of fantasy in Jeffrey Dahmer's life. He told the police that he had been lost to fantasies from childhood. Even as an infant he had been withdrawn, living privately in his own dreamworld. Gradually, the fantasy life became more important than life outside it, and he emerged only reluctantly to face practical realities. Imperceptibly, the private, cherished world of fantasy took the place of the real world, diminishing the value he might place on real people.

There is nothing inherently bad about fantasy; indeed, it is very common and quite harmless. To the lonely child it is a solace, and must be welcomed. It may take hold if the loneliness is not relieved in adolescence, however, and grow larger and more complex in adulthood. Once fantasy becomes more beloved than reality, it cannot be held in check, and risks breaking through the barrier into real life. People from the real world are often unaware of the terrible danger they run in coming close to such intensity.

This is how Dennis Nilsen expressed the feeling which might have possessed Jeffrey Dahmer: "I made another world, and real men would enter it and they would never really get hurt at all in the vivid unreal laws of the dream. I caused dreams which caused death. This is my crime." And again: "The need to return to my beautifully warm unreal world was such that I was addicted to it even to the extent of knowing of the risks to human life. . . . The pure primitive man of the dream world killed these men. . . . These people strayed into my innermost secret world and they died there. I'm sure of this."

There is a Manichaean touch to this awful vision which would come as no surprise to a theological student, for it is axiomatic that the man imprisoned in fantasy has forsaken the world of God to pursue his miserable life in the vivid, seductive, intoxicating world of Satan. (Jeffrey Dahmer's favorite movie, which he watched again and again, is Exorcist II, and it would be hard to find many films more satanic.) It is not at all unusual for murderers to feel that they are a battle-ground for opposing forces-darkness and light, God and the Devil, good and evil-or that they are two people in one, the "bad" identity being held responsible for wicked deeds and the "good" one chastising him. To an extent, this is true of all of us, but the repetitive murderer illustrates the condition most starkly. "I always covered up for that 'inner me' that I loved," Nilsen wrote. "He just acted and I had to solve all his problems in the cool light of day. I could not turn him in without also destroying myself. In the end he lost. He still lies dormant within me. Will time destroy him? Or was he only lost temporarily? When I was on my high, [my dog] would become sometimes frightened. She was only a simple dog but even she could see that it was not the real Des Nilsen . . . She would go off to a quiet corner and hide. She would greet me the next morning as though I had been away . . . dogs know when your mind has been changed in a drastic way."

Dahmer's mind grew so distorted as to require nourishment in death, but the "normal" guy whom people saw in the street or at the 219 Club disapproved of his conduct. Dahmer's contrition after his conviction for molesting a child was genuine enough. In July of this year he issued a statement through Gerald Boyle, apologizing to the families of the dead "for all the heartache he caused." It would be facile to dismiss this as simple hypocrisy.

Dennis Nilsen said that at the actual moment of killing he was in the grip of an overwhelming compulsion. "My sole reason for existence was to carry out that act at that moment," he wrote. "I could feel the power and the struggles of death . . . of absolute compulsion to do, at that moment, suddenly." He claimed that he had no power of responsibility at the time, and that, afterward, he was inhabited first by fear, then by "a massive and suppressed remorse." The police had shown him a picture of one of his victims, for identification. "I looked at a photo of Martyn Duffey today," he wrote to me, "and it shocked me seeing him so lifelike in that photo and dead, gone, destroyed by me. I can't stop thinking about it. I am . . . amazed that all this-from beginning to end-could ever happen." Dahmer has also recently spoken of "compulsion."

With both men, the agents which facilitate loss of control and smother the inhibitory mechanism are music and alcohol. Dahmer listened to heavy-metal rock bands like Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath, Nilsen to Shostakovich and Abba. Dahmer would use an eight-track player with headphones and retreat into his "own little world"; the second of Nilsen's victims was actually strangled with the cord of his headphones as he was listening.

Nilsen drank great quantities of Bacardi and Coke; Dahmer drank almost anything that was available, but especially beer and martinis. Many witnesses quoted in the press have attested to his extraordinary Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation when drinking. A colleague from Dahmer's army days, David Rodriguez, said, "He's a likable guy, except when he's drinking he's different." His bunkmate in the Eighth Infantry Division at Baumholder in West Germany, Billy Capshaw, said Dahmer became moody and menacing when drinking. "You could tell in his face that he wasn't joking. It was for real. That's why it bothered me. It was a whole different side. His face was blank." Even his stepmother told The Plain Dealer, "He has a terrible drinking problem. It makes him a different person."

Nilsen wrote, "The pressure needed release. I took release through spirits and music. On that high I had a loss of morality and danger feeling . . . If the conditions were right, I would completely follow through to the death."

As a result of this disastrous loss of control, the aftermath of each killing involved a careful reconstruction of self and sanity. Nilsen said that he sometimes could not remember the actual moment of murder, but would find a dead body in the morning and realize that it had happened again. He would then have to walk the dog and go to work as part of his "normal" life. The New York Times quoted police sources to give an account of Dahmer's second murder, the first in Milwaukee (this does not appear in the official criminal complaint against him). He met the man at the 219 Club and went with him to the Ambassador Hotel. There they both got drunk and passed out. "When he [Dahmer] woke up, the guy was dead and had blood coming from his mouth." Dahmer then left the body in the hotel room, went to a store and bought a suitcase, returned to the hotel, and put the body in the suitcase. He called a taxi and went to his grandmother's house in West Allis, where he was then still living, taking the suitcase with him.

All this sounds callous and chilling, as indeed it is when all we are required to do is imagine it. If you actually have to do it, it is a devouring nightmare. Dahmer had not killed for six and a half years. He probably thought it would never happen again. Then it did. He had to emerge quickly from the episode of what psychologists call "dissociation" (when he was controlled by fantasy and not by reason), and reassemble his personality on the spot. He had to rediscover his emotion, his feeling, his self, and what he found would horrify him. Most devastating of all would be the knowledge, the near certainty, that he would do it again. To continue living with the recognition that you have the hands and heart of a killer is to walk in a permanent hell. As the crimes sped up and Dahmer was eventually surrounded by human debris, his personality teetered on the verge of total disintegration. There is a tragedy for the people who died, and another for those who carry death with them.

It is even possible that Jeffrey Dahmer dimly feels some kind of "shared" tragedy with the victims, as if they have all suffered from indifference and neglect and are united in this dramatic dénouement. If this is true, it is, pathetically, the closest Dahmer has ever felt to anyone, and that death should be required to effect this "togetherness" is an eloquent judgment upon his state of mind. Nilsen very often identified with the people he killed, envied them almost. Describing the moment of "coming to" after a murder, he wrote, "I stood in great grief and a wave of utter sadness as if someone very dear to me had just died. . . . I sometimes wondered if anyone cared for me or them. That could easily be me lying there. In fact a lot of the time it was." Elsewhere, he wrote, "I was engaged primarily in self-destruction. . . . I was killing myself only but it was always the bystander who died." One of the reasons Nilsen was able to murder so many men was that most of them were young, single, unemployed drifters-nearly invisible when they were alive, forgotten when they disappeared. Of Dahmer's victims, The New York Times said, "Some of them were like Mr. Dahmer himself, people of whom society did not take much notice."

We have only to pursue this line of thinking a little further to tangle with the vexed matters of necrophilia and cannibalism, both of which may be relevant to Dahmer's case; for the desire to identify with the victim, to be at one with him, to share his fate, cannot in the end be more graphically expressed than by eating him.

Necrophilia is often misunderstood because it is generally held to mean sexual congress with a corpse, whereas that is only one manifestation of the disorder. It was certainly appropriate to John Christie, who murdered six women in a London house in the 1950s, because he could only perform sexual intercourse if the women were dead; he killed them in order to have sex with them. But there are other necrophiles: those who steal corpses and hoard them, those who like to sleep in cemeteries, and those who find death beautiful. Necrophiles are difficult to recognize, but according to Erich Fromm's findings they often have a pallid complexion (as does Dahmer), and they speak in a monotone (Dahmer's voice is reportedly almost devoid of expression or inflection). They are fascinated by machinery, which is unfeeling and antihuman. (Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, played with car engines for hours on end. Both Nilsen and Dahmer are keen on photography and movies.) They are pedantic about dates and details, i.e., "facts" rather than "feelings" (Peter Kürten, the Düsseldorf sadist of the 1920s, had precise recall of murders he had committed thirty years before; this trait also applies to Dahmer and Nilsen), and see things in black and white rather than color (Nilsen called himself the "monochrome man"). They also feel happy with routine, however bizarre, because it, too, is mechanical. (In high school, Dahmer reportedly developed a ritual walk to the school bus-four steps forward, two back, four forward, one back-from which he never deviated.)

One kind of necrophile is the "lust murderer," for whom the act of killing provides excitement: when he felt the urge and had no victim at hand, Peter Kürten would break the neck of a swan in the park and drink its blood. But there is an entirely different necrophile who is appalled by sadism and entranced by the sight of a dead body. Nilsen's crimes place him in this category, and Jeffrey Dahmer may possibly represent a variation of the type. There are stories of Dahmer's having conserved the corpses of animals when he was a child, and there is the even more telling admission that he drugged his victims with a sleeping draft. To the cynic, this may appear to be the easiest way to ensure that the victim could not fight for his life, but it may just as readily show that Dahmer loved the look of an inert, unmoving body. He used a drug (Halcion) to sedate young Sinthasomphone, the Laotian thirteen-year-old whom he fondled in 1988, and made no attempt to kill him.

The Milwaukee Sentinel unearthed the interesting information that Dahmer had once been evicted from a gay bathhouse. While other men were intent upon making contact and perhaps having sex, Dahmer would invite a man to his private room and offer him a drugged drink. It happened so many times that he was told not to come back. One of the men was unconscious for three hours. "His interest in me didn't seem to be sexual," the man recalled later. "It seemed to be to get me to drink. Maybe he was experimenting with me to see what it would take to put someone out." It is much more likely that he wanted to gaze upon, and touch, a body which did not resist his attentions. It is like the game of "playing dead," a pretense children use to explore and touch one another's bodies without fear of reprimand.

Dennis Nilsen's experience may offer yet more clues. For him, the dead body was an object of beauty, even of veneration. "I remember being thrilled that I had full control and ownership of this beautiful body," he wrote of one victim. "I was fascinated by the mystery of death. I whispered to him because I believed he was still really in there." Of his last corpse, Stephen Sinclair, he wrote, "I entertained no thoughts of harming him, only concern and affection for his future and the pain and plight of his life. . . . I had a feeling of easing his burden with my strength. . . . I just sat there and watched him. He looked really beautiful like one of those Michelangelo sculptures. It seemed that for the first time in his life he was really feeling and looking the best he ever did in his whole life." Later Nilsen said that the man had never been so appreciated before. Nilsen also called his actions "misplaced love out of its time and out of its mind."

The uneasy truth is that necrophilia is often the most extreme perversion of something which is essentially good, the love instinct. In On the Nightmare, Ernest Jones divided necrophiles into two types: those who have a "frantic aversion" to being deserted, like Periander, one of the Seven Sages of Greece, who is reputed to have had coitus with his wife, Melissa, after her death; and those who want union with the dead, either to give love and solace or to express hatred. Both categories have their application in Nilsen's case, and both may have something to teach us about Dahmer. Nilsen masturbated over or beside the corpse, and Dahmer has told the police he had "oral sex" with a dead body on more than one occasion.

"I think that in some cases I killed these men in order to create the best image of them," wrote Nilsen. "It was not really a bad but a perfect and peaceful state for them to be in." He experienced "a feeling of oneness" with the corpse. Dahmer has likewise expressed the desire to join somebody, to be "at one" with another person. The most vivid way in which this can be achieved is by taking the flesh of another into one's body.

Necrophagy, or the eating of corpses, is an extremely rare aberration, though some grisly instances of it have been recorded in detail by J. Paul de River, a specialist in the field. It is essentially the most desperate measure to which one may resort in a desire for human contact, and is pitiful as well as repulsive. Jeffrey Dahmer confessed under interrogation that he had saved the heart of one of his victims "to eat later," and there is another report that he placed biceps in the freezer. In effect, this was a way of "keeping" someone with him, in other words, a perversion of the romantic notion "to have and to hold."

However ghastly we may find the practice, cannibalism actually has a long history among some civilizations and has often been considered honorable by those tribes which have entertained it as a noble ritual. Indeed, a strong echo still exists in our society, for what is more symbolically cannibalistic than the sacrament by which Christians take the body and blood of Christ into themselves? In this context, it is interesting that Nilsen (who never admitted to necrophagy) frequently uses words like "purification" and "sacred" and "this almost holy feeling" when describing his behavior toward those who died at his hands. Of his last victim he wrote, "Here in this cell he is still with me. In fact I believe he is me, or part of me."

It is Nilsen's opinion that claims of Dahmer's cannibalism are probably not true. "He is talking subconsciously," Nilsen told me in our recent interview. "It's a kind of wishful thinking. What he really wants is spiritual ingestion, to take the essence of the person into himself and thereby feel bigger. It's almost a paternal thing, in an odd way." Significantly, Milwaukee Police Chief Philip Arreola told The Milwaukee Journal early in the investigation that "the evidence is not consistent" with cannibalism, implying that none of the body parts which littered the apartment supported Dahmer's contention.

(Somewhat tentatively, I asked Nilsen if he had ever been tempted to eat parts of his victims. As usual, he used his strange brand of humor to disguise an unpleasant subject. "Oh, never," he replied. "I'm strictly a bacon-and-eggs man.")

When all these fantasies subside, the horror of the real event obtrudes once more. In the days and weeks following his arrest, when Nilsen had been "rescued" from the nightmare of his London flat and forced to ponder upon what he had done, he described himself as "unclean." It was after the eleven days of his long confession to the police that he reached the lowest depths of remorse and self-loathing. "My mind is depressively active," he wrote. "The details of this case are horrible, dark and alien . . . I must be a really terrible, horrific man. . . . I am damned and damned and damned. How in heaven's name could I have done any of it?" There was one particular killing which he could not bear to think about; when the subject was raised his eyes filled with tears, and he left the interview room rather than be vanquished by emotion.

There are again parallels here with Jeffrey Dahmer. According to several sources, he, too, feels "damned," beyond redemption, unforgivable. He, too, feels the pain of having done things more heinous, in his own eyes, than anyone else. Though he has not been seen to shed tears, he is known to view with foreboding the likely retelling of his actions in court.

According to Nilsen, Dahmer would have felt, on his arrest, an immediate sense of relief that it was all over. "He couldn't leave his apartment. He was trapped, stuck in that prison as in a tomb. There was both attraction and repulsion and at the moment it's repulsion which will predominate. He will feel an immediate sense of relief that it's all over, followed by oppressive guilt and shame. He will need to get through this somehow and find some self-esteem to help grow towards maturity. Whatever institution he goes to will be better than the prison he has been carrying around with him, because people will be there, and he will not be alone anymore."

Nilsen also thinks that Dahmer might not have properly "come out" yet, and that had he felt less ambiguous about his homosexuality the murders might conceivably not have occurred. In prison, Nilsen wrote a poem which dramatically confused the notion of killing men as one crime and loving men as another, with the subtext that guilt for the latter might be replaced by guilt for the former. The poem reads, in part:

Confusion in the fact of being evil,
"Born into evil, all the time?
When evil is the produce
Can there be a doubt?
When killing men has always been a crime. . .

There is honour in killing the enemy,
There is glory in a fighting, bloody end.
But violent extirpation
On a sacred trust,
To squeeze the very life from a friend?

Sentencing the fact of being evil,
Dying of evil all the time.
When love is the produce,
Can there be a doubt?
When loving men has always been a crime.

"When Dahmer lost his job," continues Nilsen, "he lost the only visible means of normality. After that, things could only get worse. Had he not been caught, bodies would have been coming out of the window. He was feeling like an alien in a hostile environment, without any roots whatsoever."

Nilsen's last glimmer of self-esteem was to hold on to his "innocence," by which he meant not to deny that he had killed, but to give voice to the feeling that he had in some way been used by a power to which he had surrendered control. He could see both the angel and the devil in himself, and the survival of his self-regard depended entirely upon his keeping that angel, however tiny and weak, in view.

It sounds as if Jeffrey Dahmer is not yet able to see the angel. He is still in despair, his present position confirming his black view of himself as an outsider whose life serves no purpose, who would be better off dead. And yet he did not rest until he had identified all the victims. The police, unable to make official comment, allow the inference that he was not only cooperative but even helpful. "If I can restore names to them all," Dahmer said, "at least that is something good I can do."

Nilsen talked about Murder Under Trust, "under my roof and under my protection-the most horrible thing imaginable." But it was not the most horrible thing he did. Philosophically and emotionally, we must all recognize that we are capable of killing, but we shrink from the desecration of corpses. When I told Nilsen that it was this which defined the gulf that separated him from the rest of humankind, he remonstrated with me and told me my moral values were confused. His reasoning was that, while it was wicked to squeeze the life out of a person, it was harmless to cut a dead body, which was only a thing and could not be hurt. This was, I had to say, logical but inhuman. Respect for the dead goes beyond civilization to the very marrow of our bones, to essential concepts of worth and spirit. It may be illogical, but its absence, to the common man, points to madness.

There was one particular day when I forced myself to face this madness, and my life has not really been the same since. I had previously written about eighteenth-century history or twentieth-century literature, and was quite unused to delving into the dark recesses of mental disorder. I found myself at ease with Dennis Nilsen, and asked the police to show me the evidence of what they had found in his London flat, to remind myself of what he had done. They were reluctant, for they knew what disastrous effect the photographs could have. There were two brown cardboard boxes containing photographs of progressive discovery, starting with the house, then the door of the apartment, then the bath, from beneath which protruded two human legs, then the black garbage bags, and the contents of the bags, and so on. I could look at only twelve of them before I was overwhelmed with pity for these poor young men, reduced to refuse. It breaks one's heart, too, to think of little Konerak Sinthasomphone, who tried to escape from Jeffrey Dahmer and was brought back, or of Tony Hughes, the deaf-mute who went trustingly to Apartment 213 and might have found no way to protest what was happening to him. These images enter the brain, and nothing can ever dislodge them.

How could Dennis Nilsen, with quasi-scientific curiosity, inform me that the weight of a severed head, when you picked it up by the hair, is far greater than one might imagine? Clearly, to be able to make such a comment, to dismember the bodies of people he had seen when alive, and to continue living surrounded by their pieces, demonstrates insanity. This is the res ipsa loquitur argument-"The thing speaks for itself"-which is circular but correct.

Despite the common sense inherent in the proposition, it is difficult to convince juries of it, because they somehow feel the murderer is thereby being excused. Juries cannot bring themselves to consider that a person can know what he is doing, but have no emotional awareness of it at the time; that if the emotional factor is drained from him he is like an automaton. When Nilsen was convicted in 1983, the jury was initially divided down the middle on the question of his mental responsibility, and came back to seek further guidance from the judge, who introduced the nonlegal and nonpsychiatric concept of evil. "A mind can be evil without being abnormal," he declared. He seemed more certain about the matter than any philosopher since Socrates, and his certainty sent Nilsen to prison rather than to a mental institution.

In the state of Wisconsin, the American Law Institute test of insanity (which has progressed somewhat from the 1843 M'Naghten test) requires that Jeffrey Dahmer show that he suffered from a mental disease or defect which significantly reduced his capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of his acts, if he wishes to establish nonresponsibility for them. A predilection for fantasy over reality and consequent incompetence in determining reality may point in this direction, but there is strong resistance to what has been called "the power of the psychiatric excuse."

My book on Nilsen was called Killing for Company for good reason. Dead people became his companions. Most of them died because Nilsen believed they would soon go home and he did not want them to. He wished to keep them, to cherish them, to be with them, so he killed them. Jeffrey Dahmer has likewise admitted that the decision to kill was made when his "friend" wanted to leave. On the day of his arrest, he had eleven "friends" to keep him company-all skulls or severed human heads. If this does not indicate a mental disease or defect that impaired his ability to distinguish wrong from right, reality from fantasy, it is difficult to know what might.

There has been a rash of cases, especially in America, that postdate the Boston Strangler of the early sixties (Albert De Salvo), then thought to be a killer without parallel, and that surpass him in the horror and magnitude of their crimes. There is every reason to conclude that murderers like Dennis Nilsen and Jeffrey Dahmer are becoming progressively less rare and may well come to represent a type of "motiveless" criminal who belongs predominantly to the twentieth century.

The public does not really want to find the reasons for this, and who, perhaps, should blame them? They are content to read a crazy catalogue of odious incidents and go no further. As I wrote about Nilsen in 1985, sympathy with murder is unthinkable; it is even safer not to understand. But this craven attitude amounts to abnegation of responsibility. The murderer takes his place in the jumbled kaleidoscope of the human condition. So, too, does his audience. For them to enjoy the display of crime, detection, and retribution, while refusing to be drawn into a steady contemplation of themselves as audience, and of the subterranean disturbances which the case echoes, would be fruitless.

Bertrand Russell called Spinoza the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers, and ethically the most supreme. This seventeenth-century Dutch Jew of Portuguese descent was despised by Jews and Christians alike for his lack of prejudice. "I have striven not to laugh at human actions," he wrote, "not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them."

From his prison cell, serial killer Dennis Nilsen speculates about Jeffrey Dahmer's motives

Friday the 23rd of August 1991

Thanks for the (all too brief) visit. My first observation of D is that he had two primary social factors working against him. The first is that obviously recurring theme of being "a loner." The second is that (to use the American phrase) he was born on the wrong side of the tracks. I guess that in his most early formative years his immediate household may have been female-dominated (with or without the presence of a passive male adult). As is often the case with serial killers "he always secretly wanted to be someone " as an adjunct to his lifelong world of fantasy (where he is already powerful and potent). In "real" society he feels that he is a dispensable "nobody" as insignificant as those whose remains adorn his private world (his apartment).

The dichotomy is that his power aspirations are not easily transferable into the real world because he has not been endowed with the overt powers of viable drive and ambition in interpersonal relationships in the real world. He achieves "sexual" fulfillment by acts of power of conquest to render the threatening potency of another man into the absolute and manageable state of passivity. He "fears" the potency of real men because he is by nature a wan and socially shy personality. His need for feelings of self-esteem are usually satisfied only in his fantasies (imagination) because he cannot garner such fruits from live people. He needs a totally unresisting, passive model of a human being in order to "cross the bridge" temporarily into "society." (Being human he needs "fulfillment" in the human three-dimensional world of real flesh and blood.)

It is significant that a common view of the Stone Age depicts a potent male clubbing a sexually desirable female into unconsciousness and "wedding" her by an act of copulation with her passive body. Here we have the ingredients of power/violence rendering the desired person into a state of extreme passivity followed by sexual release for the conqueror. It is the opposite poles of gross action and gross passivity that attract. This is the constant in the serial-killing conundrum whether the victim is male, female or child. Dahmer's "buzz" comes from the whole continuing ritual exploitation of the victim's passivity. Each expressive sequence in the ritual gives sexual and self-esteemed satisfaction. It is a grossly perverted psychosexual act of copulation and like normal acts of copulation the satisfaction is of relatively temporary duration. The ejaculation is merely the biological release of inner pressure as is necessary for this human cycle of peaks and troughs.

D is buzzing with excitement and power (his heart rate is pounding at maximum speed) as he "lives out" his omnipotence. (It's the only time in his life when he feels in his fantasies.) This is while he is stripping, washing and handling his unresisting spouse. These are all acts of possession and expression of extreme dominance. Perhaps subconsciously he is regressing back to his first (and only) memories of human touch, dependency, security and comfort. (As a very small boy being soiled, undressed, washed, powdered, dressed and "laid out.") After this brief and early period of clear identity and security he drifts away into the wan growing little boy devoid of warmth, touch and comfort. As all humans will do if they cannot satisfy their needs in reality he has drifted to a substitute world where his imagination creates false fodder to feed his hunger. As conditioning advances he finds it less and less easy to relate to other people. Psychologically speaking Dahmer becomes both victim and predator (an easy accomplishment in one's imaginary world). Brian, this is what you described in me as "virile male in performance and passive female in spirit" (an ungovernable mess of contradictions).

His unfolding aberration escalates in accordance with to what degree he is detached from reality (for example, what is termed NECROPHAGY is an extreme example of extreme detachment). This is manifested in "going all the way" in eating the heart of one's victim/spouse. (If you have the power to eat a man's heart this demonstrates your extreme power to possess and his extreme passivity.) The painting and display of the victim's skull is a constant reminder of one's potency.

The paradox is that D cannot hate his victims because his objective is achieved by exercising his will to sexual power and potency. The need is "love" for him and death for the hapless victim. Dahmer is "forced" to unnaturally seek to accede to the demands of his natural instinctive drives. He is perhaps partially aware that his "love" is really for himself or a created entity within his deranged personality. It seems clear that his personality will remain disordered in the absence of a self or presented therapy to help him come to terms with the engine of his acts.

P.S. I'm still in the dungeon.

13 Horror Movies for Wimps

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North Twenty-fifth Street is only a couple of miles from downtown Milwaukee, yet it contrives to feel dislocated, apart. There is an air of listlessness about the neighborhood, as if ambition here has been sat upon and the future is questionable.

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MILWAUKEE (AP) _ One by one, 11 victims were lured to Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment from encounters at gay bars, city streets, shopping malls and bus stops.

They included a runaway, some free spirits, mostly single young men looking for a good time. They were promised money if they posed for pictures and watched sex videos with a sandy-haired, brown-eyed companion who offered them drinks.

Whoever they thought he was, Dahmer turned out to be a butcher who told police they met a singular fate: He spiked their drinks with sleeping potions, strangled them and cut up their bodies, keeping their heads and other body parts in his apartment.

Grieving families are struggling to understand how their loved ones could have been willingly taken in. One clue comes from the man who escaped Dahmer's clutches Monday night and alerted police.

″He seemed so normal,″ said Tracy Edwards, 32, a father of six who met Dahmer at a city mall and was led there by an invitation to a party. ″He turned from Mr. Right to Mr. It ... It was like I was confronting Satan himself.″

Edwards fled with a handcuff dangling from one wrist. He had spotted a large knife under Dahmer's bed and smelled the stench of death of 11 others who had been there before him.

Dahmer, 31, a former employee of the Ambrosia Chocolate Co., admitted killing 11 people in his apartment, and police say he has killed six others. Dahmer is a convicted child molester with a history of alcohol abuse. The boy he molested in 1989 was the brother of one of his victims.

Those killed in the apartment ranged in age from 14 to 33. Police said nine were black, one was Laotian and one was white. Police on Saturday identified the 11th victim, Anthony Sears, 26, of Milwaukee. One of them, Jeremiah Weinberger, 23, was last seen July 6 leaving Carol's Speakeasy, a gay bar in Chicago, with an unidentified man. Dahmer told police he and Weinberger took a Greyhound bus for the 90-mile trip to Milwaukee.

Weinberger stayed two days and the two had sex. But Dahmer objected when he wanted to leave, so he was drugged before he was killed and mutilated. Dahmer paused from his gory chores to take pictures.

″My son was hypnotized by a cobra. Unfortunately, he bit,″ Weinberger's father, David, told a reporter this week.

Two Chicago gay publications ran notices of Weinberger's disappearance, and his friends distributed fliers, urging anyone with information to call a toll- free number. No one did.

Another victim, Oliver Lacy, 23, disappeared July 12 when he went to a Milwaukee mall for ice cream. Lacy had moved here from Chicago four months ago to be near his 2-year-old son and his fiance.

″I don't know how this person lured my son,″ said the victim's mother, Catherine. ″He wasn't the type of person who would let someone come up to him like that.″

Lacy's death was particularly chilling. Dahmer said he had anal sex with Lacy after he was killed. Dahmer also told police he cut up the body and saved the heart ″to eat later.″

The most troubling case involved Konerak Sinthasomphone, 14, the son of Laotian immigrants who was going to play soccer with friends when he vanished May 26.

Several residents alleged that police missed a chance to stop Dahmer when the boy was seen May 27 staggering around the streets naked and bleeding from the buttocks.

But the boy was allowed to return to Dahmer who apparently convinced police that it was a squabble between two homosexual lovers.

Police Chief Philip Arreola suspended three officers Friday after confirming they had contact with Dahmer and the victim. He said they failed to write a report or check Dahmer's background, which included his conviction of molesting Sinthasomphone's older brother. The police union called the suspensions premature.

″The whole thing is crazy. I don't know what to say,″ said Anoukone Sinthasomphone, 25, the brother of the dead boy.

Some families had grown accustomed to frequent wanderings.

Catherine Straughter, grandmother of Curtis Straughter, 18, said he left their Milwaukee home on Feb. 18.

″I haven't seen him since that day,″ Mrs. Straughter said Friday. ″He was out all over with everybody.″

Matt Turner, 20, ran away from his home in Flint, Mich., and had resided at a halfway house for runaways in Chicago. His family last heard from him June 29, the day before Dahmer said he met Turner at a gay rally in Chicago. They took a bus back to Milwaukee.

The family of Ricky Beeks, 33, of Rockford, Ill., also said it wasn't unusual for him to be gone for long periods. Beeks, also known as Raymond Lamont Smith, was last seen in May 1990 when he came to Milwaukee to visit family. Beeks had a 10-year-old daughter.

Other families fretted over missing loved ones but felt powerless.

Tony Hughes, 31, of Madison, was last seen May 24 with a friend leaving the 219 Club, a gay bar in Milwaukee. His mother, Shirley, said Hughes, a deaf mute, was visiting family here and indicated he would be staying overnight with them.

Hughes had taken a new job two weeks earlier but never got his first paycheck, she said. She was unable to contact the friend because she only knew a first name - Jeffrey.

″He was outgoing, jolly, happy. He could easily make friends,″ Ms. Hughes said of her son. ″I just prayed and asked the Lord to show me where my son was. I just wanted to know if he was dead or alive. The way he died, it hurts. Words can't describe it.″

Joseph Bradehoft, 25, had recently moved into a Milwaukee apartment rented under his brother's name, Donald, and was looking for work. Bradehoft recently lived in Illinois and Minnesota, where he had a wife and three children.

Dahmer told police he met Bradehoft, carrying a six-pack of beer, at a bus stop. He said he offered him money to pose and Bradehoft came to his apartment for sex. Then the grisly pattern was repeated.

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Families Struggle to Understand How Their Loved Ones Fell Prey

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MILWAUKEE (AP) _ One by one, 11 victims were lured to Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment from encounters at gay bars, city streets, shopping malls and bus stops. They included a runaway, some free spirits, mostly single young men looking for a good time.

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Credit... The New York Times Archives

This is a digitized version of an article from The Times's print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.

Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions.

On page 98 of Jeffrey L. Dahmer's Ohio high-school yearbook is a photograph of 45 honor society students lined up shoulder to shoulder, their hair well combed, their smiles confident.

One senior three rows from the top has no smile, no eyes, no face at all: his image was blacked out with a marking pen, reduced to a silhouette by an annoyed student editor before the yearbook went to the printer.

That silhouette was Mr. Dahmer in the spring of 1978, a couple of months before he says he killed his first victim, with a barbell. It was 13 years before he confessed to one of the most horrific strings of slayings in modern times.

With grades that ranged from A's to D's, Mr. Dahmer fell far short of honor society standards, but he sneaked into the photo session as if he belonged. No one said a word until long after the shutter had clicked.

In all the years he cried out for attention, it was one of the few times he got caught. By then he had taught himself to live behind a mask of normalcy that hid his often contradictory emotions. It was a mask no one pulled down until one night last month, when a man in handcuffs dashed out of Mr. Dahmer's bizarrely cluttered apartment in a tough Milwaukee neighborhood, called the police and stammered that Mr. Dahmer had been trying to kill him.

The authorities say that at least 17 other men did not get away: that Mr. Dahmer drugged their drinks, strangled them and cut up their bodies with an electric buzz saw; that he discarded bones he did not want in a 57-gallon drum he had bought for just that purpose; that he lined up three skulls on a shelf in his apartment, but only after spraying them with gray paint, to fool people into thinking that they were plastic models, the kind an aspiring artist or a medical intern might study.

Once, he told the police in Milwaukee, he fried a victim's bicep in vegetable shortening and ate it.

Some criminal psychologists see traits in Mr. Dahmer that they have studied in mass killers like Theodore Bundy, who was was electrocuted in Florida in 1989 after a 15-year trail of violence that investigators believe took the lives of at least 30 young women across the nation, or John Wayne Gacy, who was convicted in 1980 of the sex killings of 33 young men in Chicago.

"We're dealing with some of the same dynamics that we can see in Gacy: the dysfunctional family, a guy who denies his homosexual feelings to erase whatever shame he might feel in committing these acts, who destroys the people who attracted him in the first place," said Ted Cahill, who wrote a book about the Gacy killings. "He's punishing himself and punishing them at the same time."

The police report said he did not kill his next victim until roughly a year later, this time at his grandmother's house. He told the police he met the man at the 219 Club and gave him sleeping pills after they had sex. Then he strangled the man after he dozed off. He said he also drugged his third victim at his grandmother's house. Talking of Everything Except the Darkest Side

Mr. Dahmer was arrested in 1986 for taking photographs of a 14-year-old boy and was convicted and sentenced to a year in jail. The killings resumed, he told the police, when he was released after serving a partial sentence. He was seeing a parole officer at the same time.

He said that in 1989 he had sex with a man, drugged him and stabbed him with a hunting knife. Then he dismembered the body in the bathtub and used hydrochloric acid to destroy the bones.

Mr. Dahmer said his next killing, two months later, followed the same routine: sex, drugs in a drink, death and dismemberment. "Subject states he began getting quicker at cutting up the bodies," the police report noted.

What unfolded in his sessions with the parole-probation officer, Donna Chester, was a partial look at his life. She was unavailable for an interview last week. But her impressions of Mr. Dahmer recorded in an 81-page document that was released by the Wisconsin Department of Corrections, give no indication that Mr. Dahmer set off alarm bells during their chats.

The reason was that he seemed to talk about everything except the killings.

He sometimes expressed interest in talking about his sexual orientation, but often could not bring himself to say what was on his mind. "Client states he knows he prefers male partners but client feels guilty about it." Ms. Chester wrote.

He also talked about family tensions. "He is uncomfortable with his family," she wrote after a session, "because (1) his father is controlling, (2) he has nothing in common with his brother who attends college and (3) he is embarrassed by his offense." He said he had talked with his mother and that she had told him she knew he was gay but that it did not matter.

Money was also on his mind. Ms. Chester wrote that Mr. Dahmer "gets angry at people who make a lot of money, saying "why are they so lucky?' And he 'hates' them for having so much."

Ms. Chester told Mr. Dahmer he had a good job, but he was frustrated that he always seemed short of cash and that the life he longed to lead was beyond his means. But for all of Mr. Dahmer's complaining about finances, his job appeared to be going well. He earned about $9 an hour at the candy factory and took home $250 to $300 a week, depending on how much overtime he put in.

Soon that security was in jeopardy. On July 8, Mr. Dahmer told Ms. Chester he was in danger of losing his job because of arriving late or not showing up.

On July 14, just days before his arrest, he told Ms. Chester he had been dismissed. He told her he had overslept after spending all day visiting his grandmother in a hospital.

The police reports indicate that the killings became more frequent as things at work deteriorated. He told the police that he killed on June 30, July 4 and July 19.

Three days after that last killing, he was arrested shortly after the man in handcuffs fled his apartment and flagged down police officers.

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17 Killed, and a Life Is Searched for Clues (Published 1991)

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The Milwaukee police responded two months ago to reports of a naked and bleeding teen-ager on the street. The three officers who investigated were apparently persuaded by Jeffrey L. Dahmer, now suspected in 11 killings, that the incident was a domestic dispute.

Yesterday the three officers were suspended.

Article, page 6.

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Police in Milwaukee Knew About Suspect (Published 1991)

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Send any friend a story
As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share.

Credit... The New York Times Archives

This is a digitized version of an article from The Times's print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.

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Two months before butchered bodies were discovered in Jeffrey L. Dahmer's apartment in Milwaukee, neighbors called the police and said they had seen a dazed-looking teen-ager shambling on the street outside, naked and bleeding.

The police who investigated left after Mr. Dahmer apparently persuaded them that the young man was of age, that the two were living together and that the incident was a domestic dispute.

The teen-ager, identified by the authorities as Konerak Sinthasomphone, 14 years old, is now dead, one of as many as 11 victims found in the second-floor apartment that neighbors said was known throughout the complex for foul smells and the whine of an electric saw. The dead youth was the brother of another teen-aged boy Mr. Dahmer was convicted of molesting two years ago, a crime for which he was on probation before his arrest this week. Three Officers Are Suspended

Yesterday the three police officers who spoke with Mr. Dahmer at his apartment in May were suspended with pay.

"There is no doubt I am taken aback by this information," Chief of Police Philip Arreola said at a news conference, according to The Associated Press. "This is a matter of grave concern to me and the entire department."

Chief Arreola said the officers were suspended because they did not write a formal report or run Mr. Dahmer's name through the police computer, which would have revealed his prior child-molestation conviction. He said he would take whatever action was warranted once the investigation was completed.

The neighbors who sought help at the time say the officers brushed off their complaint. They said Mr. Dahmer emerged from his apartment and chatted with the officers. Then they let the teen-ager, who was muttering and incoherent, which Mr. Dahmer explained as the result of drinking, go back inside with him. That was on May 27. Konerak Sinthasomphone has been missing since the day before, The A.P. reported.

"This could have all been prevented," Nicole Childress, 18, one of the women who called the police, was quoted as saying. "If they had listened that night, that little boy would still be alive and all the others wouldn't be dead."

The boy and his brother, who was molested by Mr. Dahmer when he was 13, were both members of a family of refugees from Laos.

Ms. Childress and a cousin were quoted by The Associated Press as saying they saw a boy, bleeding from his buttocks, on the street near Mr. Dahmer's apartment. But a police spokesman, Capt. Joseph Purpero, said, "The information we have is he was bleeding from a skinned knee."

Mr. Dahmer, 31, has been charged with four murders and the police say they plan more charges. The former candy factory worker, who lost his job a week ago and told the authorities he was deeply in debt and facing eviction on Aug. 1, has acknowledged drugging, strangling and dismembering 11 people there. He is said to have boiled some skulls to remove the flesh and to have kept one heart in a freezer to eat later.

The identities of three more victims were disclosed yesterday: Erroll Lindsey, 19, Curtis Straughter, 18, and Ernest Miller, 22, all of Milwaukee. One of the 11 victims has yet to be identified. Family's Double Tragedy

On the night police officers were called to Mr. Dahmer's apartment, he apparently persuaded them that he and the Sinthasomphone youth were living together and had been drinking. The officers were said to have listed the incident as a "domestic squabble between homosexuals."

But Ms. Childress said of the youth, "He was struggling; he was reaching out to me for help." The other woman, Sandra Smith, 18, said: "We tried to give the policemen our names, but he just told us to butt out."

Chief Arreola said there was no indication that the Sinthasomphone killing was in retaliation for Mr. Dahmer's sexual assault conviction involving the victim's brother, for which Mr. Dahmer was given a 10-month sentence. He is said to have lured the brother, then 13, to his apartment with an offer of $50 to pose for pictures. Investigation in Ohio

The two incidents struck a family that found its way to Milwaukee in 1980, after fleeing the Communist regime of Laos, Laotian residents in Milwaukee told The A.P. "It is like you are running and you think you escape but you are coming to a dangerous world in this place," said Shoua Xiong, executive director of the Lao Family Community Inc.

Anoukone Sinthasomphone, the 25-year-old brother of the two boys, told The A.P. yesterday: "We thought it likely that he was in there. The whole thing is crazy. It is terrible."

Mr. Dahmer has also told Milwaukee detectives that he committed a murder in Ohio in 1978, the year he graduated from high school there. Yesterday the authorities in Bath, Ohio, the town near Akron where Mr. Dahmer grew up, began preparing to dig up the yard outside the house where his family lived and to search the woods nearby. The Dahmers moved some years ago.

Detectives from the Summit County Sheriff's Department and the Bath police interviewed Mr. Dahmer in Milwaukee yesterday, and there may be further questioning today.

The authorities have refused to identify the missing person except to say that he was a 19-year-old male from Coventry, Ohio, about 15 miles from Bath. Mr. Dahmer is believed to have met him at a bar in Akron.

The complaint filed against Mr. Dahmer in Milwaukee said he took part in homosexual acts with at least three of the victims, including one who was already dead.

The police in Milwaukee say Mr. Dahmer brought men home from bars frequented by homosexuals and from shopping centers, promising them money if they would let him photograph them. Reuters quoted officials as saying that he often traveled to Chicago to seek out potential victims; he said he met one victim at a parade for homosexuals there.

Investigators are also looking into whether Mr. Dahmer may have been responsible for murders that remain unsolved in several other states and in Germany, where he was stationed as an Army medical orderly in Bad Kreuznach in the late 1970's and early 1980's.

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Milwaukee Police Once Queried Suspect (Published 1991)

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Dahmer Victim Who Escaped Now Accused Of Homicide

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Murder trail may cover five states - The Canberra Times (ACT : 1926 - 1995) - 29 Jul 1991

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1st report on Jeffrey Dahmer case (July 23, 1991) | FOX6 News Milwaukee