Ap Psychology Case Study 1: Jeffrey Dahmer

AP PSYCHOLOGY CASE STUDY 1: JEFFREY DAHMER

I. BACKGROUND

Jeffrey Dahmer’s father, Lionel,seemed to be fairly straightforward in recognizing the negative influences in Jeff's life. No family is perfect. Jeff's mother had various physical ailments and appeared to be high strung, coming from a background in which her father's alcoholism deeply affected her life.

Lionel, a chemist who went on to get his Ph.D., stayed at work more often than he should to avoid turmoil on the home front. Eventually, the marriage dissolved in divorce when Jeff was eighteen.

Jeff Dahmer was born on May 21, 1960. He was a child who was wanted and adored, in spite of the difficulties of Joyce's pregnancy. He was a normal, healthy child whose birth was the occasion of great joy. As a tot, he was a happy bubbly youngster who loved stuffed bunnies, wooden blocks, etc. He also had a dog named Frisky, his much loved childhood pet.

Despite a greater number than usual of ear and throat infections, Jeff developed into a happy little boy. His father recalled the day that they released back into the wild a bird that the three of them had nursed back to health from an injury: "I cradled the bird in my cupped hand, lifted it into the air, then opened my hand and let it go. All of us felt a wonderful delight. Jeff's eyes were wide and gleaming. It may have been the single, happiest moment of his life." The family had moved to Iowa where Lionel was working on his Ph.D. at IowaStateUniversity.

When Jeff was four, his father swept out from under their house the remains of some small animals that had been killed by animals.As his father gathered the tiny animal bones, Jeff seemed "oddly thrilled by the sound they made. His small hands dug deep into the pile of bones. I can no longer view it simply as a childish episode, a passing fascination. This same sense of something dark and shadowy, of a malicious force growing in my son, now colors almost every memory."

At the age of six, he was found to be suffering from a double hernia and needed surgery to correct the problem. He never seemed to recover his ebullience and buoyancy. "He seemed smaller; somehow more vulnerable... he grew more inward, sitting quietly for long periods, hardly stirring, and his face oddly motionless."

In 1966, Joyce was pregnant with their second son, David. By that time Jeff was in the first grade and "a strange fear had begun to creep into his personality, a dread of others that was combined with a general lack of self-confidence. He was developing a reluctance to change, a need to feel the assurance of familiar places. The prospect of going to school frightened him. The little boy who'd once seemed so happy and self-assured had been replaced by a different person; now deeply shy, distant, and nearly uncommunicative."

Lionel suspected that the move from Iowa to Ohio was the causative factor and Jeff's behavior was a normal reaction to being uprooted from familiar settings and placed into entirely new ones. Lionel, too, had suffered from shyness, introversion and insecurity as a child and had learned to overcome these problems. He figured his son would learn to overcome them too. What he didn't realize was that Jeff's boyhood condition was far graver than his and that "Jeff had begun to suffer from a near isolation."

In April of 1967, they bought a new house. Jeff seemed to adjust better to this move and developed a close friendship with a boy named Lee. He was also very fond of one of his teachers and took her a bowl of tadpoles he had caught. Later, Jeff found out that the teacher had given the tadpole to his friend Lee. Jeff sneaked into Lee's garage and killed all the tadpoles will motor oil.

Things did not get better with time.He looked tense, his body very straight. He grew increasingly shy during this time and when approached by other people, he would become very tense. More and more, he remained at home, alone in his room or staring at television. His face was often blank, and he gave the more or less permanent impression of someone who could do nothing but mope around, purposeless and disengaged.

He had one friend, who drifted apart from him at age fifteen. Lionel found out at Jeff's trial that during this period, Jeff would ride around with plastic garbage bags and collect the remains of animals for his own private cemetery. "He would strip the flesh from the bodies of these putrescent road kills and even mount a dog's head on a stake”. He enjoyed a dog and cat as pets in his childhood and kept pet fish as an adult. His fascination was with dead creatures.

Jeff grew more passive and isolated. He answered questions with barely audible one-word responses. He was drifting into a nightmare world of unimaginable fantasies. In coming years those fantasies would begin to overwhelm him. The dead in their stillness would become the primary objects of his growing sexual desire.

In high school, Jeff had average grades and participated in a few activities: he played tennis and worked on the school newspaper. However, his classmates considered him a loner and an alcoholic. He actually had a prom date, who he later invited to his parents' house for a séance.

When Jeff was almost eighteen his parents divorced. A custody battle began over David. Some months later, Lionel remarried. Whatever Lionel missed about Jeff's alcoholism, his new wife Shari did not.

Lionel and Shari convinced him to try the idea of college. In the fall of 1978, they drove him to OhioStateUniversity, but he stayed drunk the whole semester and flunked out. By this time, his drinking problem was well understood, but he would not seek help for it. Lionel read him the rules: either Jeff had to get a job or join the Army. When Jeff refused to get a job and stayed drunk most of the time, his father drove him down to the recruiting office to join the armed forces.

From that time until Jeff's final arrest in 1991, Jeff would appear to be doing well and then it was clear that he wasn't. He seemed to enjoy the Army, but then he was discharged early for habitual drunkenness. The offenses got worse as his alcoholism and emotional problems intensified. Lionel stood by him, paid for the lawyer when Jeff got in trouble with the law, urged him to seek treatment and crossed his fingers that Jeff would improve.

II:DISCOVERY OF THE CRIMINAL:

As police officers sat in their car, they saw a short, wiry black man with a handcuff dangling from his wrist. Assuming that this man had escaped from another policeman, they asked him what he was doing. The man started to pour out a tale about this "weird dude" who put the cuffs on him in his apartment. The man was thirty-two year old Tracy Edwards.

Edward's story smacked of some homosexual encounter that normally the police would avoid, but the two policemen thought they ought to check out this man that had cuffed Edwards.Jeffrey Dahmer opened the door, and he was a nice looking thirty-one-year-old blond man. Dahmer was very calm and rational. He offered to get the key to the handcuffs in the bedroom.

Once of the officers decided to go into the bedroom himself and take a look. He noticed photographs lying around that shocked him: dismembered human bodies, skulls in the refrigerator. When he collected his wits, he yelled to his partner to cuff Dahmer and place him under arrest.

The man suddenly turned on them and fought as the other cop tried to cuff him. While the one officer subdued Dahmer, the other one went to the refrigerator and opened it. He shrieked loudly at the face that stared out at him and slammed the door. "There's a head in the refrigerator!"

A closer examination of the apartment revealed an intimate juxtaposition of the tidy and the unspeakable. While the small one-bedroom flat was neat and clean, especially for a bachelor, and his pet fish well cared for, the smell of decomposition was overwhelming.

The box of baking soda in the refrigerator hardly absorbed the odors of a decomposing severed head. The freezer had three more heads, stored neatly in plastic bags and tied with plastic twisties.

Polaroid photos taken by Dahmer at various stages of his victims' deaths. One showed a man's head, with the flesh still intact, lying in a sink. Another displayed a victim cut open from the neck to the groin, like a deer gutted after the kill, the cuts so clean I could see the pelvic bone clearly."

While Dahmer had sexual fantasies about killing men as early as age fourteen, he didn't do anything about it until just after he graduated high school. He picked up a hitchhiker named Steven Hicks when he was living with his parents. They drank some beer together, but then Hicks wanted to leave. Dahmer couldn't stand the idea of Hicks leaving, so he struck him and killed him.He needed to get rid of the body so he cut it up, packaged it up in plastic garbage bags and buried the bags in the woods behind his house.

Soon, he left to join the Army and was stationed in Germany. After a couple of years, the Army discharged him for alcoholism. Once back home, he dug up Hick's body, pounded the decomposing corpse with a sledgehammer and scattered the remains in the woods.

Jeff went to live with his grandmother. Things were calm for a few months until he dropped his trousers in the company of a group of people.Four years later, he did it again. He was put on probation for a year. Then, Jeff killed his second victim Steven Toumi. He bought a large suitcase and stuffed the body inside.

He selected his third victim, a boy named Jamie Doxtator who hung around outside the gay bars, looking for relationships. Dahmer's methods became established by that time. Normally, he would meet and select his prey at gay bars or bathhouses. He would lure his victims by offering them money for posing for photographs or simply to enjoy some beer and videos. Then he would drug them, strangle them, engage in sexual activity, dismember the body and dispose of it. Sometimes he would keep the skull or other body parts as souvenirs.

By the summer of that year, Dahmer had killed four men. While Dahmer's grandmother was completely ignorant of the awful things that were happening in her basement, she was fully aware of the noise and drunkenness of Jeff and his male friends. Something had to be done.

So, on September 25, 1988, Jeffrey moved into an apartment. The very next day, he got into serious trouble. He offered a thirteen-year-old Laotian boy $50 to pose for some pictures. He drugged the boy and fondled him. By incredible coincidence, the boy's name was Sinthasomphone, the older brother of the boy that Dahmer would kill in May of 1991.

The boy's parents realized there was something wrong with their child and took him to the hospital where it was confirmed that he had been drugged. The police picked up Dahmer. He was arrested for sexual exploitation of a child and second-degree sexual assault. He pleaded guilty, although he claimed that he thought that the boy was much older than he was.

While Dahmer awaited sentencing and was living again at his grandmother's house, he met a black homosexual named Anthony Sears at a gay bar. Like the others, he offered the aspiring black model some money to pose for photos. When they reached Dahmer's grandmother's house, Sears was drugged, sexually abused, and strangled.He kept the head and boiled it to remove the skin, later painting it gray, so that in case of discovery, the skull would look like a plastic model used by medical students. Dahmer saved the trophy for two years.

Assistant D.A. Gale Shelton presented his argument to the court.Shelton wanted a prison sentence of at least five years. "In my judgment it is absolutely crystal clear that the prognosis for treatment of Mr. Dahmer within the community is extremely bleak... His perception that what he did wrong here was choosing too young a victim, -- and that that's all he did wrong, -- is a part of the problem... He appeared to be cooperative and receptive, but anything that goes below the surface indicates that the deep-seated anger and deep-seated psychological problems that he is unwilling or incapable of dealing with."

Three psychologists examined him and concurred that Dahmer was manipulative, resistant and evasive. Hospitalization and intensive treatment was recommended.

Dahmer himself spoke in his own defense, blaming his behavior on alcoholism. He was articulate and convincing, for someone who had secretly murdered several men by that time. "What I have done is very serious. I've never been in this position before. Nothing this awful. This is a nightmare come true for me. If anything would shock me out of my past behavior patterns, this is it... All I can do is beg you, please spare my job. Please give me a chance to show that I can, that I can tread the straight and narrow and not get involved in any situation like this ever again.... I do want help. I do want to turn my life around."

A marvelous performance by a true psychopath! The judge fell for it, stayed his sentence, and put Dahmer on probation for five years.

During the following fifteen months, Dahmer went on a killing binge that cost eleven men their lives. The pace of Dahmer's murders accelerated to a frenzy in May-July of 1991 when he was killing almost at a rate of one man a week. All but three were black; one was white, one was Laotian and one was Hispanic. Most, but not all, were homosexual or bisexual. Many of the victims lived what police call "high-risk" lifestyles. Most of the men had arrest records, often for very serious crimes, like arson, sexual assault, rape, battery, etc.

• Ricky Lee Beeks July, 1990
• Ernest Miller Sept., 1990
• David Thomas Sept., 1990
• Curtis Straughter Feb., 1991
• Errol Lindsey April, 1991
• Anthony Hughes May 24, 1991
• Konerak Sinthasomphone May 27, 1991
• Matt Turner June 30, 1991
• Jeremiah Weinberger July 5, 1991
• Oliver Lacey July 12, 1991
• Joseph Bradehoft July 19, 1991

His ritual for luring, murdering and disposing of his victims was usuallythe same. He invited the men to his apartment to watch videos or to pose for photos. He crushed up his prescribed sedatives and served them in a drink. Once drugged, Dahmer strangled them with his bare hands or with a leather strap.

Before any clean up began, Dahmer reached for his Polaroid to capture the entire experience so that he could remember each and every murder. Then he cut open their torsos. Finally, he would dismember the man, photographing each stage of the process for future viewing pleasure.He disposed of most of the bodies, experimenting with various chemicals and acids that would reduce the flesh and bone to a black, evil-smelling sludge, which could be poured down a drain or toilet.

Some parts of the bodies he chose to keep as trophies. They were preserved in formaldehyde. The heads were boiled until the flesh came off.Dahmer claimed that he ate the flesh of his victims because he believed that the people would come alive again in him. He tried various seasonings and meat tenderizers to make the human flesh tastier. His freezer contained strips of frozen human flesh.

Control was an all important issue for Dahmer. He could not tolerate rejection or abandonment. Even in his relationships, he did not want to please his partner; he just wanted to have his own pleasures.

This absolute need for control led him down some pretty weird roads. One of them was a kind of lobotomy that he performed on several of his victims. Once they were drugged, he drilled a hole in their skulls and injected some muriatic acid into their brains.

He had plans to create a shrine in his apartment, featuring all of his trophies, his statue of a griffin, and incense burned in the skulls of his victims, so that he could receive "special powers and energies to help him socially and financially."

He was sentenced to fifteen consecutive life terms or a total of 957 years in prison.

Dahmer adjusted very well to prison life. Initially, he was not part of the general population of the prison, which would have jeopardized his safety. Dahmer, the model prisoner, convinced the prison authorities to allow him more contact with other inmates. He was able to eat in communal areas and he was given some janitorial work to do with other teams of inmates.