Nightmare on North 25th Street
Anthony Daniels
THE SHRINE OF JEFFREY DAHMER by Brian Masters Hodder, £14.99, pp. 242 The extremes of human behaviour fascinate us all, for they seem to shed light on what is loosely known as the human condition'. Another way of putting it is that they demonstrate to us the possibilities, usually dark, which lurk within us. Brian Masters is the author of an unsurpassed study of the mind of a mass murderer, Dennis Nilsen, which raised questions far beyond its immediate, ghoulish subject- matter. Mr Masters came as near as anyone could in Killing for Company to an understanding of Nilsen; yet by the end of the book, there remained an unbridged and perhaps unbridgeable gap between what Nilsen did and any conceivable explanation of it. One was left wondering what It means, philosophically speaking, to under- stand another human being. In The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer, Mr Masters tries to do for the case of all American who murdered 17 young men for sexual purposes what he did for the case of Dennis Nilsen in Killing for Company. The former book is considerably less successful than the latter for two reasons: the author had little direct access to Dahmer, whereas he spent hundreds of hours with Nilsen, and Dahmer, though intelligent, is a much less articulate man than Nilsen. Missing, therefore, are the rationalisations and evasions, the half-confessions and semi- justifications which made Killing for Company not merely fascinating in its own right but a tract for our times. Nevertheless, Mr Masters has succeeded admirably in providing a convincing por- trait of another mass murderer. Whether such is needed, I leave it to others t(?, decide; but I should be dishonest if I did not admit that I found the story of Jeffrey Dahmer interesting, to say the least. Mr Masters' motives in writing this book have been publicly questioned; but who, I want to know, questions the questioners? Jeffrey Dahmer grew up odd. His mother was a pill-swilling hysteric, his father dis- tant and unapproachable; he never socialised adequately, was completely self' enclosed and began drinking heavily at high school. He was so socially inept that he never learnt to approach people in the ordinary way; exclusively homosexual, he was unable to form even the semblance of a relationship, and fantasised about possessing the inert, unresponding boches of athletic young men. Eventually, his fantasies gave rise to murder and `ordinary necrophilia, and then to ever more bizarre
James Michie
Dear dead unheroes . . .
Dear dead unheroes and unheroines Who mangled your own selves — and I've known ten, Hectic, vivid, amusing women and men - What's your verdict now? Are you damned for your sins?
Some said so; others shrugged kindly; a few cried For a dislocated day or month or two And scratched the scab of no-guilt, as friends do (As I did) who are abashed by suicide.
But now that an old colleague of sixty-five Has blown his brains out, I'm inclined to call A halt to pity for self-pity. All Those guns, ropes, razors, ovens . .. Why not contrive Some evanescent exit, in a style That will raise at least the ghost of a half-smile?
_behaviour: he drilled the skull of victims he 'lad drugged and injected their crania with muriatic acid or boiling water to try to Produce living bodies unattached to human Will
Perhaps the most astonishing story in the whole book is that concerning one of Dahmer's victims, a 15-year-old boy who briefly escaped his clutches and staggered naked into North 25th Street, Milwaukee, Ins skull drilled and injected by Dahmer with muriatic acid. The police found him, but delivered him back into Dahmer's hands when the latter claimed him as a frrend; within the hour, he was dead and dismembered. This story surely speaks volumes of the state of inner-city America. , I find Mr Masters less than convincing in his efforts to explain Dahmer's appalling behaviour. He makes much of a double Inguinal hernia repair Dahmer underwent at. the age of four, saying that it destroyed Ms fragile sense of control over his own existence and led him to fantasise about the nature of his innards (many years later he would masturbate in the presence of his victims' intestines and ejaculate into them). Fortunately for mankind, the post- °Perative complications of hernia repair are generally less severe than this; and on Mr Masters' own account, Dahmer's tiPbringing, while not entirely satisfactory, contained nothing which could plausibly beyond his descent into frightfulness ueYond even the wildest imaginings of avant-garde film directors, painters and authors.
Similarly, I found Mr Masters' discussion
of Dahmer's sanity • or madness 1:ndluminating. Lawyers (understandably for their purposes) demand to know Whether an accused is sane or mad, and !Ssume that all people can be satisfactorily fated into one or other category. This is nominalism gone . . . I nearly said mad. If one asked anthropologists whether the accused was tall or short, allowing no measurement and giving no definition of Where the dividing line lay, cross- examination would soon reduce them to self-contradictory absurdity. All too often, this is what happens when forensic Psychiatrists are called as expert witnesses. Mr Masters does not approve of the one Psychiatrist at the trial, Dr Park Dietz, who seemed to bring clarity to the proceedings. :le said that Dahmer could not be blamed fur having necrophiliac fantasies (none of us controls how his or her sexual prefer- ences are formed), but he was responsible for acting upon them, just as a heterosexual man is responsible if he rapes the woman Of his dreams on the street. (If he is not b,5Ponsible for this, for what is he responsi- c?) No doubt those excluded from sexual fulfilment by the horrific nature of their desires will remain forever unhappy; but neither common law nor the American constitution provides protection for those who, pursuing their own gratification, torture, dismember and cannibalise others.
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