Edward Lee - Dahmer's Not Dead

“Yes.”

Heaps of books threatened to overrun the desk top. Sallee had to nearly look over them to address her. “Let me take a guess. The Dahmer business that was in the papers today?”

For a third time, then, she said “Yes” to this uncanny man.

“Your contention, I presume, is that Dahmer is dead, and that someone else is pulling a copycat.”

“Exactly,” Helen said. “And I might need you to back me up with the press.”

“You doubt your own professional credibility?”

“I’m just a flatfoot, Dr. Sallee, but you’re a clinical psychiatrist, and the press is a different animal altogether.” Helen felt surprisingly collected, something she’d never felt before in the midst of Sallee. “We’ve got DNA tests going on some hair evidence found at the Arlinger murder site, and when they come back negative we’ll be off the hook. But that could take weeks.”

“And in the meantime, you’re worried that the newspapers will cause an undue level of fear by slanting their articles to suggest that Dahmer’s still alive?”

Helen nodded. “So that’s why I need your help. I’ll need to keep reiterating our conviction that Dahmer’s modus is completely different from the perp at P Street, despite minor similarities.”

“Minor similarities that the press will enforce as major. Some trace suggestions of cannibalism, cooking utensils. And an unbound victim who showed no signs of struggle. These are elements that any killer would be well aware of just by reading the papers two years ago. This is all easily conveyed, but the hard part is conveying it convincingly.”

“And that’s exactly why I need to know more details…about Dahmer.”

“Well, then I suppose I’m the man for the job, Helen.” Sometimes Sallee smiled in a way so subtle it was hard to even interpret as a smile. “But, I warn you—psychiatrists are only right ninety-nine percent of the time.”

“I’ll take the odds. You actually interviewed Dahmer, didn’t you? A long time ago?”

“Um-hmm. I was his first official clinical interviewer, to be precise. I evaluated him in 92, gave him his initial battery of TATs, Meyers-Kastles, and MMPIs. The most significant thing you can tell the press is that Dahmer’s psychiatric profile was existential—an existential costive, we call them—reclusive, complaisant, and completely lacking psychopathic and pathological behavior patterns. He never lied, either; pathological criminals always lie.”

Helen scribbled notes, then looked up leerily. “What about the, you know, the sexual element?”

“Let me elaborate more specifically. Dahmer was an existential stage-costive with an obsessive-thematic erotomanic impulse. He was subject only to an unsystematized longing-delusion—in other words he was not delusional in typical ways. Despite the mode of violence, he was actually very affectionate toward his victims. He loved his victims, which explains his attempt to lobotomize them.”

Helen’s expression twisted. “Lobotomize—”

“Oh, yes. On several occasions, Dahmer drugged his victims to unconsciousness and then drilled holes in their skulls, after which he inserted various types of needles into their brains—”

Helen paled.

“—and he did this, not to be brutal, but to try to damage their motor capabilities. He even claimed that one such victim survived for a short time after regaining consciousness. To put it more colloquially, he wanted ‘love-zombies.’ He wanted lovers who wouldn’t leave him. I recall him elucidating something to the affect: ‘I loved them all, and I wanted them to stay with me. When they died, I kept parts of them, so that parts of them would be with me always.’“

“In other words, that’s why he kept the skulls, and the body parts in the freezer?”

“Yes, and that explains the cannibalism too. When a victim died, he’d eat a part of that victim, ‘so that part of him would be inside of me,’ he said.”

Helen tapped her pen on her pad. “Why didn’t you commit him?”

“No responsible psychiatric evaluator would’ve. Our guidelines for incarceration versus institutionalization are very specific.” Sallee quickly slipped a paper-covered manual— State of Wisconsin Parameters for Penal Admission: A Psychiatrist’s Guide —and, without opening it, quoted: “‘The clinician in charge of psychiatric evaluation must never admit a subject to state mental-hygiene custody unless said subject demonstrates verifiable symptoms of psychopathy or hallucinosis.’ What that means is that Dahmer needed to display a clear separation from reality, the ‘Right from Wrong’ tenet. Which he didn’t. I also did the evaluation on Tredell Rosser, Dahmer’s alleged murderer, and a completely different story. The press is charging that Rosser should never have been put in prison in the first place, because he’s completely insane. But they’re completely wrong. He’s a pure-bred Ganser.”

Helen knew the term. Ganser Syndrome was common among prison inmates: faking a psychiatric disorder in hopes of receiving a transfer to a mental hospital. “Rosser was trying to push some sort of religious fixation, wasn’t he?”

“Yes, and he’s quite good at it,” Sallee affirmed. “But not good enough for me. He continues to claim that he’s a thousand years old, and the Son of God, a very well-formed forgery of a systematized grandiose pietistic delusion. I could tell he was lying the minute he stepped into my office, but he’s convincing enough for laymen and even some of the prison officials. Eventually I got the court’s permission to narco-analyze him. He’s perfectly sane, read about Ganser techniques in some book by one of those underground publishers.”

“Then why did he kill Dahmer?”

“For popular status on the mainline. Several of Dahmer’s victims were African-American. Rosser knew that he’d become a hero inside by killing Dahmer and Vander, the latter being affiliated with white supremacist groups. And all this hoopla about as possible conspiracy, that Rosser was aided by detention employees—it’s pure nonsense. He’s the lone perpetrator. By killing Dahmer and, at the same time maintaining his Ganser, he knows he’ll be relocated to a mental hospital.”

Helen surveyed her notes, chewed her lip as she thought. “Now, can you give me some kind of potential profile on the P-Street killer? Is there enough you can draw from based on the crime scene?”

Sallee began to seem bored, fingering a big, blue Stelazine paperweight. A flier top the desk clutter read: What Every Doctor Should Know About Extrapyramidity. “That’s relatively easy. Whoever committed the Arlinger murder looks like a clear-cut X,Y,Y Syndrome. The underpinnings were spiteful, even mocking, totally unlike Dahmer in his day. Dahmer would never leave a body for the police to find; that’s why he disposed of many of the parts in separate parcels, dissolved them in drums of corrosives, etc. His very first victim, in fact, a hitchhiker he murdered when he was eighteen, was disposed of similarly; he buried the separate pieces in the woods behind his house. His entire life from pre-adolescence to adulthood is a prime example of unwavering costive existentialism. Burying pieces of things he was fond of in places he was in proximity to. Dahmer was raised in Bath, Ohio, claimed that his father gave him a chemistry set for his birthday. He’d solicit people in the papers who were trying to give away pets, and he’d take them, kill them, and then dissolve the carcasses down to their skeletons with high-acid and base compounds he’d concoct with the chemistry set. It was his secret, he never told anyone, then or now. Psychiatric labels are very specific; subjects tend to remain very solidly in their categories once they’ve reached instinctive phases. There’s little individuality, in other words. Gacy, Bundy, Henry Lee Lucas all came from totally different backgrounds, were subject to totally different formative upbringings, and executed equally different m.o.s—yet they all had nearly identical IQs—rather high, by the way—and remained subject to the same pathological symptomology. More recent examples are Rene Aulton and Susan Smith—maternal filicists. Mothers who kill their own children all display nearly identical behavior patterns despite totally dissimilar reactive and reflective designs.” Sallee paused for a consideration. “Is this all going over your head?”