The Tenant in 213

Dahmer mug shot -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
The name “Jeffrey Dahmer” is now one of legend, albeit the horrific, infamous variety. The name is used in moments of overzealous character shading, the same way one might toss out “Hitler” or “Jack the Ripper”. What’s interesting is that Dahmer was actually a soft-spoken slacker in his personal demeanor. His career consisted of stints in the US Army and at a candy factory (ironically the Ambrosia Chocolate Factory), interrupted by stints of unemployable alcoholic stupor.

Dahmer’s parents were Lionel and Joyce – an analytical chemist and a housewife. They were good parents to Jeff and his younger brother David – no Mommie Dearest tales to tell. Jeff spent most of his unremarkable childhood in Bath, Ohio. There were a couple of harbingers of trouble to come, but not so much that anyone spoke of anything like psychotherapy. Jeff was a preteen loner, riding his bike for miles around his neighborhood. Loners are certainly not always killers although a killer is seldom the life of the party. Jeff also had an unseemly fascination with dead animals, going so far as to dismember them and reposition the cadavers in unusual ways (a dog’s head on a stake). When a teenage boy exhibits any fascination with dead bodies it should be a red flag. Even to be overly enthused about hunting, splaying or butchering such creatures as fish or deer would raise my own eyebrows. I worry about someone who can’t see any spark of soul or suffering in animal kind.

Jeff’s pacific childhood did experience a serious bump – his parents divorced when he was 17. Jeff had already developed a problem with alcoholism in his teens; the drinking habit continued into college where he flunked out of his first semester at Ohio State University. His father urged him to join the Army, where Jeff excelled initially but washed out again (within a couple of years) due to his drinking. Jeff moved in with his grandmother in 1982. A grandmother’s love could not overcome Jeff’s bizarre behavior: he kept store mannequins and fire arms in his bedroom. He was arrested more than once for indecent exposure and public lewdness. Probably most alarming were strange foul odors coming from the basement which Jeff said was merely an experiment with a dead squirrel gone awry. He was trying to dissolve it chemically, he said. In fact, at this point Dahmer had already killed @ 5 men, four while staying at his grandmother’s house. That she never investigated the odors is amazing – probably some major denial at work. That she finally kicked his craziness to the curb (in 1988) is to her credit.

The next grisly chapter is the one so frequently played in our pop culture playbook (category “Horror”). Dahmer got a job at the Ambrosia Chocolate Factory and took Apartment 213 at the Oxford Apartments. He went on a 2-year killing binge where he picked up his young male victims at bars. He gave them sedatives or blindsided them with blunt instruments they were little expecting. There was never anything approaching a fair fight. The victims, primarily Asian and black, were summarily dismembered; some body parts were dissolved in acid, some were refrigerated as souvenirs and some were devoured as food. Some, it appears were kept for secret ceremonies using votive candles. The apartment managers and Milwaukee police turned deaf ears and blind eyes to the numerous accumulating clues. Neighbors complained of foul smells and sawing noises, occasional screams. The police believed Dahmer’s story over that of his young, drugged victim when the young man attempted an escape – they returned the boy to Dahmer’s “care”.

Finally in 1991, a young Tracy Edwards fought off Dahmer’s attempt to handcuff and subdue him. Edwards ran to the police (half-clothed and hand-cuffed). He brought them back to Dahmer’s apartment where at length and at last, they found his macabre butchery shop. Dahmer was tried and easily convicted in 15 of the 17 murders. He was given a life sentence at Columbia Correctional prison where he himself was finally murdered at age 34 by a fellow inmate, Christopher Scarver. Scarver was celebrated as a folk hero by some, probably people not knowing that he was a schizoid killer with nearly as many issues as Dahmer. Scarver also killed a bystander when he killed Dahmer, maybe collateral damage – who knows what goes on in any of their minds.

A lot is made of the fact that Dahmer’s father was an evangelical Christian, and that Dahmer himself claimed the status of Born Again Christian in the last year of his life. A Church of Christ minister actually met with Dahmer and baptized him during Dahmer’s incarceration. I can’t claim to know the mind of other men, much less the mind of God. Nevertheless, blogSpotter will humbly guess what God might be thinking (assuming the existence of a God with man-like thought process)... I think that God probably, oddly, forgives just about everything because God himself is the architect of our brains – including our obsessions and all of our misfiring neurons. But – I think the Architect would figure in this case that the human containment was appropriate (minus Dahmer’s brutal murder in a prison lavatory), and that the free will mechanism sometimes goes off the track. That is blogSpotter’s reductionist viewpoint – I’m willing to hear anyone else’s viewpoint for comparing and contrasting.

Jeffrey Dahmer brought the lore of killer-maniacs to chilling new heights of gruesome goriness. The actual man probably doesn’t live up to his monstrous legend, but it doesn’t matter. People tend to embellish a story and this story invites embellishment. The strange details of Apartment 213 are scary enough that the unadorned story can give us all the willies for a lifetime.

© 2010 blogSpotter