Secrets of a Serial Killer

Along the decaying Walker's Point strip in Milwaukee, the gay bars line up like tarts in the night, identical red neon signs extending their OPEN invitation to the restless in pursuit of easy comfort or casual sex. One night last summer a blond six-footer in jeans and a black nylon net shirt stood in Club 219 sizing up his prospects. "Hi. I'm Jeff. I like the way you dance," he said to a muscular black model. A loser's come-on. But it was the hour of inner beauty in Club 219, that last-chance moment near closing when the lights go up and standards plummet. The model bought it, and the two men wound up in the blond man's apartment. It was hot that night. The model thought he could smell mildew. And when he looked into the bedroom he saw a mattress stained with dried blood and a knife with a blue plastic handle. He looked into the blond's eyes. His skin crawled. "Boom. Boom," he now recalls. "I knew and he knew I knew some thing was wrong." Precisely. To go home with this stranger could cost you your life.

As it happens, the eyes of Jeffrey Dahmer-hazel, placid, almost vacant—project no sinister gleam. If anything, he looks more like a spacey nerd than a serial killer. But murder is his muse. There is no question about the basic facts in the Dahmer case: at least 15 dismembered bodies; the head in the fridge and heart in the freezer; the blue barrel of acid for leftovers. Dahmer has confessed this to the police. In a Milwaukee courtroom this week, he will sit down, screened from spectators by a wall of bulletproof glass eight feet high, while his defense attorney tries to explain him. The details would chill de Sade: the way he killed Ernest Miller, removing the flesh from his bones and bleaching his skeleton; the time he took Matt Turner home after a Gay Pride parade, drugged him with sleeping pills, strangled him and threw his body into the blue barrel; the occasion he had sex with Oliver Lacy's corpse. "He talks about killing people just as if it's like pouring a glass of water," says Deputy Chief Robert Due of the West Allis Police Department in suburban Milwaukee. "He shows no emotion whatsoever."

The larger question behind the trial is whether society has adequate ways of handling people like Dahmer, Charles Manson or Son of Sam once they are caught. Dahmer has entered a guilty plea. The problem for judge and jury in Milwaukee will be to determine his sanity, whether he goes to jail or to a mental hospital and whether he might one day go free. At first glance, it is hard to see how anyone could be more crazy. As John V. Liccione, chief psychologist for the Milwaukee CountyMental Health Complex, puts it, "What do you think about a person who kills people and has sex with their dead bodies and eats some of them-do you think he's nuts?" But psychologists and lawyers are wildly at odds over the mind and culpability of serial killers. What Freud would explain, Blackstone would punish. "You don't have to have the Jack Nicholson look when he goes smashing down the door with an ax," explains Martin Kohler, a prominent criminal lawyer in Milwaukee. "It doesn't have to be that dramatic."

"Drama" isn't the right word for the secret life of Jeffrey Dahmer, or for his trial; "horror show" is more like it. In court this week, the TV cameras will be there right alongside the deputy sheriffs with their semiautomatic weapons and the bomb-sniffing dog, poking into everything. It's as if Jack the Ripper were going on trial before the whole world. Prosecutor E. Michael McCann worries that the coverage will provide lessons on drugging and butchery to would-be sadists and give nightmares to children. "I don't think the nation is well served," he says. But now that "Silence of the Lambs" has made serial murder the grist for a best seller, hit movie and home video, there will be no looking away. And if Hannibal the Cannibal offered mass entertainment, perhaps Jeffrey Dahmer will provide a therapeutic shock to those who wallow so deeply in the pornography of violence in books, movies and on TV that they blur the distinction between let's pretend and the real thing.

Dahmer didn't always get his man. At least five of his potential victims escaped to tell their stories to friends or the police. To reconstruct the life of a serial killer, NEWSWEEK reporters interviewed three of these witnesses, along with psychologists and legal experts on multiple murder. What emerged was the profile of a criminal soul in relentless torment, languid one moment, frantic the next-but always deadly.

Stories about the serial killer who wouldn't hurt a fly have become pulp cliches; true to form, Dahmer appeared outwardly harmless to most people until the night he was caught. Forty-eight hours before his arrest, he was cruising Club 219 in Walker's Point. About 20 minutes before closing, a young African-American named A. (he won't give his full name because he's afraid of reprisals if he admits his bisexuality) stepped out of the hot white lights on the dance floor. He found himself looking at Dahmer, who was drunk but also shaved, combed, flattering. Dahmer said he was an electrician from Chicago, sick of being lonely. A. brushed off the advance twice. Dahmer persisted, offering $100 for some conversation, no sex. Imploring, he said, "You're the nicest guy I've met in Milwaukee." Finally A. agreed to a 3 a.m. rendezvous in a parking lot outside the Oxford Apartments. He arrived to find the stranger puffing a cigarette and drinking a beer. "Oh, I'm so glad you came," Dahmer told him. "Most people never come."