Criminal Minds (39 page)

In 1987, while Dahmer was on probation for that crime, he met Steven Tuomi, twenty-six, outside a gay bar. They went to a hotel room rented in Dahmer’s name and drank together. Dahmer claimed that he blacked out, and when he woke up, Tuomi was dead. Sure that he had beaten the young man to death, Dahmer bought a large wheeled suitcase and put the body in it, then took it to his grandmother’s house and put it in the fruit cellar for a week. At the end of the week, he cut the corpse open, masturbated, and “defleshed” the body. He smashed the skeleton with a sledgehammer—except for the skull, which he kept—and put the flesh and the broken bones out with the garbage. The skull he soaked in undiluted bleach, to clean it, but it became too brittle, and he eventually had to throw that away, too.

The next year, Dahmer moved out of his grandmother’s house. He was making a living working at a chocolate factory in Milwaukee, so he rented a one-bedroom apartment, figuring that would give him more freedom for what he must have already known was coming. His next brush with the law came when a young Laotian man he had drugged and photographed got away and reported the assault. The police came to the apartment, but once again they failed to find the clues, including a skull in one of Dahmer’s drawers.

From there, a routine developed. Dahmer would go out to a bar or a bathhouse and pick up a man. Since sex with live humans wasn’t as enjoyable for him as sex with corpses, he drugged the man with sleeping pills, then strangled him. He photographed each stage of murder and dismemberment to use later for sexual stimulation. As time went on, he became more creative in his methods of disposal, such as by dissolving body parts in chemicals or acids. He kept some bones and several skulls, planning to build an altar with them to use for some vague ritual, in the hope of receiving special powers.

Ultimately, killing men and having sex with their corpses wasn’t enough. To feel closer to them, to feel some continuing control over them, he began eating their flesh. Also like Berdella, he experimented with ways to turn them into zombies, such as by drilling a hole in their heads and pouring or injecting acid into their brains. He claimed that most victims died right away but that one remained somewhat functional for a couple of days. The ideal would have been for one of them to live on, completely under his control, with no thoughts but to serve Dahmer in whatever way he wanted. The idea that a lover might reject or leave him was too horrible to bear.

Samantha Malcolm, the “doll”-collecting unsub in “The Uncanny Valley” (512), wants her victims completely controlled as well, only in her case most of them are treated with enough care that they live for months as human dolls. Malcolm kidnapped and drugged her victims into paralysis, but, unlike Dahmer, she didn’t rape, murder, or cannibalize them.

As Dahmer got better at dismembering, his cooling-off period became shorter and shorter. In 1989 he killed only once. In 1990, living in a different Milwaukee apartment, he murdered four young men. In 1991 there were eight homicides, at a rate of one a week.

In May 1991, the police missed yet another chance to catch him. Dahmer picked up a fourteen-year-old Laotian—by sheer chance, the little brother of the man he had molested who had gotten away and reported him—and photographed him, drugged him, and drilled a small hole in his skull. He gave the boy an injection of boiling water, then went across the street to get a beer before the bar closed. While he was gone, the boy woke up and left Dahmer’s apartment.

When Dahmer returned, he saw the boy sitting on the sidewalk, disoriented. Someone had called the police, and they were trying to interrogate him. Dahmer stepped up and told the police that the boy was his lover (he told them that the boy was older, that Laotians just look young) who had gotten very drunk and ran away after an argument. Once again, Dahmer was persuasive. The officers helped Dahmer get the boy back into the apartment. There they saw the photos that Dahmer had taken earlier, which seemed to confirm Dahmer’s story. They left the boy there. Had they looked in the bedroom, they would have found the body of Dahmer’s previous victim, still on the bed three days after his murder.

That simple act could have saved five lives. Instead, Dahmer killed the boy as soon as the police left, and, as if inspired by his near miss, set a frantic pace for the rest of the summer.

On another occasion, detectives interviewed Dahmer about a different homicide—not one of his—in the building. Despite the terrible smells that always lingered in Dahmer’s apartment now, the detectives didn’t question him about his own activities. Yet another would-be victim escaped and reported Dahmer’s assault, but the police interpreted it as a tiff between gay men and didn’t even question Dahmer.

On July 22, 1991, Dahmer took a man named Tony Edwards home. He tried to handcuff Edwards, but he got the cuffs locked around only one wrist. When Edwards fought back, Dahmer threatened him with a large knife. Edwards got away and ran into the street, where he flagged down a police car. He convinced the cops to return to Dahmer’s apartment with him and told them to look in the bedroom for the knife that Dahmer had brandished.

The cop who went into the bedroom saw more than just a knife. He saw some of Dahmer’s collection of photographs that documented the stages of death and dismemberment. He told his partner to cuff Dahmer.

Photos weren’t even the half of it. Once the police started looking at the apartment, they found a decomposing severed head in the refrigerator, along with three bags of human organs. Three more heads and other body parts were stored in a freestanding freezer. A sealed oil drum contained three torsos soaking in acid. Still more body parts, in various stages of decomposition, were scattered around the apartment, along with all the skulls.

Dahmer tried to deny the crimes, but only briefly. Of his seventeen victims, most were black, and some were Asian or Hispanic. Three were Caucasian, like Dahmer. Since serial killers usually murder within their own race, there was speculation that Dahmer’s homicides had a racial motive behind them. Dahmer denied this; he said it was due to the neighborhood he lived in and the mix of people who frequented the bars he went to. He would have murdered white men if they had been available, but they weren’t.

Dahmer was ultimately charged with fifteen homicides. He first pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, then changed his plea to guilty but insane, a variation allowed under Wisconsin law. After a two-week trial, the jury took five hours to find him guilty and sane, and he was sentenced to 957 years in prison.

In prison, Dahmer felt threatened by the African American inmates, who believed that his murders had been racially motivated. In July 1994, slightly more than two years after his sentencing, he and another inmate were attacked by Christopher J. Scarver, a delusional schizophrenic who heard voices telling him he was the son of God. Scarver bludgeoned Dahmer and the other inmate to death with the rod from a set of weights—poetic justice, perhaps, considering that Dahmer’s first murder had been committed with a barbell.

 

 

FOR ALL OF THE MENTIONS
of Dahmer on
Criminal Minds
, none of them occur in the two episodes that focus on cannibalism. These are “Blood Hungry” (111) and “Lucky” (308). The cannibal in “Lucky,” barbecue restaurant owner Floyd Ferrell, feeds one of his victims to the search party that is looking for her.

What’s particularly creepy is that Ferrell isn’t unique among cannibals in his choice of profession. Hadden Clark, a former student at the Culinary Institute of America and a professional chef, was a cannibal who killed at least two people in Maryland and is suspected of several more. His older brother, Bradfield, was convicted of strangling and dismembering a dinner guest in California, and cannibalism is believed to have been a factor in his crime as well.

German serial killer and cannibal Georg Grossman was a professional butcher who sold meat on the black market during World War I, and he had a sausage stand at a train station. Upon his arrest, evidence of at least three dead women was found in his apartment; it’s believed that up to fifty may have disappeared at his hands and that the meat he served was often human.

Elsewhere in Germany during the same period, cannibal Fritz Haarman preyed on young boys, murdering between twenty-four and fifty of them. Like Grossman, he sold some of his human meat on the black market.

Finally, as recently as November 2009, three homeless Russian men were arrested for killing a man, eating part of him, and selling the rest as meat to a local kebab kiosk.

AS FRITZ HAARMAN AND GEORG GROSSMAN
demonstrate all too A awfully, grisly murder is not strictly a U.S. phenomenon. Every continent, with the possible exception of Antarctica, has had its share of killers, some well known and others more obscure, and some of their stories are reflected in
Criminal Minds
episodes.

Most serial killers like to get close to their victims. For this reason, knives are a far more popular weapon with these murderers than guns are. Killers who use fire as a weapon, however, don’t really have the proximity option.

Clara Hayes, in the episode “Compulsion” (102), says, “I do this for Charon.” The “this” to which she refers is the setting of a series of fires at Bradshaw College in Tempe, Arizona, the most recent with fatal results. Discussing the unsub’s motive, the BAU’s Spencer Reid says, “When asked about his motives, Peter Dinsdale said, ‘I am devoted to fire. Fire is my master.’ ”

The full quote, in fact, is “I am devoted to fire and despise people.” Dinsdale did say these things, but not until a law enforcement fluke brought in one of the most prolific—and unnoticed—serial killers in English history.

 

 

KINGSTON UPON HULL
, an industrial city 150 miles north of London along England’s east coast, couldn’t be more different from Tempe, in the Phoenix metropolitan area and, in real life, the home of Arizona State University. But beginning in 1973, Hull, as it’s known, was the site of arson fires that went unsolved until 1979. They were set by Peter Dinsdale, who had, by the time of the 1979 blaze, changed his name to Bruce George Peter Lee, in honor of his hero, martial arts star Bruce Lee.

Dinsdale, who was physically and mentally disabled and subject to epileptic fits, could never have been a martial arts star. He was born in Manchester, England, in 1960, to a prostitute who turned him over to his grandmother to raise when he was six months old. In his lower-class neighborhood in Hull, he became a familiar figure, going to a special school for the disabled and becoming widely known as “Daft Pete.” He was a constant target of mockery by the town’s other children. Sometimes he seemed intent on avoiding attention, keeping to himself while warning others that they had no idea what he’d been up to. Most assumed that he couldn’t have been up to much. They were wrong.

Dinsdale set his first fatal fire at the age of twelve, although he might well have begun committing arson before that. Richard Ellerington, six years old, attended the same special school as Dinsdale. On June 23, 1973, Ellerington’s parents went out for the evening, leaving Richard and their five other children home with babysitter Carol Dennett and her own baby. All of the children were in bed by the time the couple returned, and because of the late hour, Dennett slept over.

Billows of smoke awakened the family around 7 a.m. The house was in flames, but everyone escaped except young Richard. The firefighters found his body after the blaze had been extinguished. When the school bus stopped outside the smoldering Ellerington house, word spread that Richard had died in the fire. Dinsdale sat on the bus, looking out the window and saying nothing.

On October 12 of that year, he set a fire that killed seventy-two-year-old Arthur Smythe, who had gangrene in both legs and couldn’t get out of the house in time to save himself. The fire was blamed on a faulty kerosene heater. On October 27, David Brewer, who was at home because of an industrial injury, died in a fire that would be attributed to clothes hanging to dry before an open fireplace. The next year, fire claimed the life of eighty-two-year-old widow Elizabeth Rokahr. An inquest concluded that she had been smoking in bed. Two years passed before Dinsdale’s next arson homicide: he set a fire that killed thirteen-month-old Andrew Stevenson in 1976.