Too Much Blood

To keep a promise...

As regular readers know, I was in Milwaukee a week and a half ago and it was the home to Jeffrey Dahmer, another completely fucked up individual. Here's what happened at his arrest:

"The placid, rational blond 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 fucking 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.

There was a door that led to the bedroom, bedroom closet and bath which had been outfitted with a dead-bolt lock. Anne E. Schwartz, the reporter who was first on the scene describes what she saw in her book The Man Who Could Not Kill Enough: '...in the back of the closet was a metal stockpot that contained decomposed hands and a penis. On the shelf above the kettle were 2 skulls.

Also in the closet were containers of ethyl alcohol, chloroform, and formaldehyde, along with some glass jars holding male genitalia preserved in formaldehyde...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.' Some of the photos were his victims before he murdered them in various erotic and bondage poses...His ritual for luring, murdering and disposing of his victims was usually the same. He invited the men to his apartment to watch sexually-explicit 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. He frequently had sex with the corpse and later masturbated on it.

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. He was fascinated by the color of the viscera and sexually aroused by the heat that the freshly-killed body would give off. 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, frequently the genitals and head. The genitals were preserved in formaldehyde. The heads were boiled until the flesh came off. Once the skull was bare, he painted it with gray paint to look like plastic.

Not unusual with necrophiliacs is cannibalism. 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 more tasty. Eating human flesh gave him an erection. His famous freezer contained strips of frozen human flesh. He had tried human blood too, but it did not appeal to his taste buds.

Like Eddie Gein, he tried to perfect the art of preservation and taxidermy so that he could practice the state-of-the-art on his victims.

Control was an all important issue for Dahmer. He could not tolerate rejection or abandonment. Even in his homosexual relationships, he did not want to please his sexual partner, he just wanted to have his own pleasures. Pleasure to Dahmer meant performing oral or anal sex on his partner, whether alive or dead.

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. Needless to say, it caused death right away in a few victims, but one supposedly functioned minimally for a few days before dying."

OK, gimme an example of a non-white guy or a woman who has done such things. And I don't mean in the heat of war or under coercion. Again, this nutcase was a white guy. (Dahmer died in 1994 when his head was crushed by a fellow inmate that was black and schizeophrenic - who thought he was the son of God. At least this guy didn't eat human flesh.) Looking at a review of the book Cannibal Kilers, I see that of the 4 people profiled, they are all men. Three are white. Two are from Wisconsin. D'oh! (And don't be fooled - Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho is based on Robert Bloch's book of the same name.) The Boston Strangler was white, right?

Fuck! I can just tell that I'm going to start reading up on these twisted, demented psychos and have nightmares. When I read that issue of From Hell - the one which was dedicated entirely to Mary Kelly's murder - I had nightmares. Great. Another reading tangent for me to go on. Why can't I just be a normal person and not go off on such tangents and not read and not have nightmares and just...just be normal?