For the defense, attorney Gerald Boyle said, “This is not an evil man, this is a sick man.” To make an insanity plea stick, Boyle must prove Dahmer suffered from a mental disease that crippled his ability to tell right from wrong and control his actions. So he offered a story that was often more grisly than the one from the police. In the eighth grade, Dahmer developed sexual fantasies about young men. At 14 he daydreamed of sex with corpses. After high school, he picked up a shirtless hitchhiker, knocked him out with a barbell, strangled him and dismembered him. For a while he tried to change. He went to church with his grandmother, then backslid. Searching for partners over whom he could have “total control,” he stole a department-store mannequin, read newspaper obituaries of dead young men, cruised a cemetery, tried and failed to unearth a body. Then in November 1987, after a drunken orgy, he woke up on top of a corpse in a seedy Milwaukee hotel. He bought a suitcase, dismembered the body and took it home in a cab. “Jeffrey Dahmer did not want to stop,” Boyle said. “He wanted to create zombies-people who were there for him.”
Dahmer killed young men so they couldn’t leave him. He paid $ 100 for an “Exorcist iii” video and played it all the time-for victims before he murdered them. He told the police that he ate only those young men he liked: he wanted them to become part of him. “At one point they were human beings,” he said. “Then they were reduced to four or five garbage bags.”
A “freak … crazy,” said Tracy Edwards, one of the few who got away. Edwards testified that Dahmer liked to chant. He changed personalities from nice guy to monster. He told Edwards to open the refrigerator: inside was a human head. Then Dahmer asked him to lie on the floor next to him: “He told me he wanted to listen to my heart beating.” Dahmer liked hearts. He kept them in the refrigerator, too.
Prosecutor E. Michael McCann argued that Dahmer “knew at all times that what he was doing was wrong.” He usually killed on weekends, so he wouldn’t miss work. He picked victims without cars because they wouldn’t be so conspicuous once they were gone. He painted his victims’ skulls so they wouldn’t look quite so real. The prosecution also derided Boyle’s theory that Dahmer was a necrophile. “He wanted to keep them alive,” McCann argued. “He preferred a pliant, live body.” A jury of 13 whites and one African-American will decide if Dahmer is mad or legally sane, and whether he goes to jail or an asylum. The makeup of the jury outraged victims’ families, who wanted more minorities and gays on the panel. Even without them, it shouldn’t be hard to pass judgment on Jeffrey Dahmer.
