'I carried it too far, that's for sure.'

Presents Joan Ullman's first-person report from the insanity trial of Jeffrey Dahmer. What she heard; What she was waiting to hear; Dahmer's explanations; Mixed emotions about attending; Proof of his sanity; Must define sanity.

By PT Staff, published on May 01, 1992

I kept waiting for someone to say that some of his or her best friends were cannibalistic mass murderers.

An effusive, Italian-born psychiatrist doubted that Dahmer had actually devoured his victims--despite grisly evidence recovered from of his freezer. "That would be too much like a vampire. [And] I don't think he was a Dracula," he stated. I asked him whether his European roots might have led him to protect the purity of the Dracula stories from being tainted by Dahmer's grisly acts. He denied it by pointing out that "Hungary isn't that close to Italy."

In a phrase inapt considering Dahmer's admitted tenderizing, sauteing, and sampling of the hearts, biceps, and thigh muscles of several appealing victims out of "curiosity," another doctor said the killings themselves were "distasteful to Dahmer. The doctors had also said the killings were "offshoots" of his frustrated quest for the perfect zombie. But most such interpretations were offshoots of the doctors' main struggle to arrive at a diagnosis. The prime one was paraphilia. It was not the only diagnosis.

Along with paraphilia. necrophilia, partialism, and other features. Dahmer was also diagnosed as suffering from alcoholism, a personality disorder i not otherwise specified," and an antisocial personality disorder with obsessive-compulsive and sadistic components. He was also diagnosed as having a sexual disorder not otherwise specified." But a psychiatrist explained that Dahmer was not a sexual fetishist "since hoarding was not his main goal."

Although he slaughtered more than a dozen homosexuals, I knew Dahmer wanted to set the record straight--that he had no bias towards homosexuals. However. from the endless references to Dahmer's politically correct paraphilia--with its own built-in denial of any anti-gay bias--I surmised that the doctors were also trying to make themselves and their profession look good.

Yet I began to wonder whether Dahmer and the doctors weren't unwittingly engaged in gay-bashing nonetheless. The hammering away at his absence of hate. sadism, or bias against gays created oddly discordant images.

Milwaukee's mass murderer appeared to be a squeamish, picky--and gentlemanly--homosexual: a reluctant practitioner with refined sensibilities (as shown by his preference for predominant! one-way. non-reciprocal, "light sex"). This made Dahmer sound considerably superior to the brutish, mostly black bathhouse and gay-bar pick-ups and/or victims.

Of course the real brute was Dahmer himself

The expert testimony left me increasingly relieved I wasn't a juror. By now I had no idea how anyone could possibly decide whether Dahmer was sane or insane.

Boyle argued that bodies were piling up so fast in Dahmer's apartment that he was showering with two or three corpses in his tub which clearly showed he was nuts. "I think it showed that Mr. Dahmer had guts" the prosecution's star psychiatric witness shot back.

Experts also quibbled over whether a bizarre drawing Dahmer made for psychiatrists. depicting a "temple," showed delusional thinking. The drawing showed a black table top, a skeleton, and skulls from his own collection, as well as occult items, including two gritting symbolizing evil and a black leather chair he told them he wanted to buy.

Dahmer had told several of the doctors that when he sat in this chair, he would become like the satanic god in his favorite movie/video, The Exorcist III, and would obtain power and wealth from real-estate ventures.

One psychiatrist testified that Dahmer's temple talk suggested "psychotic-like" thinking, but another disagreed. "It was certainly unusual. But it was not delusional," he testified. The doctor added that this was "because Dahmer's ideas were "much vaguer than a delusional, or unchanging, belief."

Psychiatrists also clashed over whether Dahmer's ideas about his drawing were "superstitious beliefs" or just signs of "normal stubbornness."

The experts disagreed just as strongly--and confusingly--on whether Dahmer's hoarding of heads and genitals was psychotic.

"It was very, very bizarre behavior," explained a psychologist. But you could also call it "a pretty realistic way to keep trophies."

The psychologist pointed out that hunters display animal-head trophies on walls without being called insane or labeled paraphiliacs. "Paraphilia can lead to pretty unusual stuff...occult beliefs," the doctor observed. "Satanic kind of stuff like [in the movie] Rosemary's Baby. But this would not necessarily show an impaired mind."

I didn't know about Dahmer's mind. But the numbing mumbo jumbo was certainly impairing my mind. I also wondered if the doctors 50 to 80 or more hours of evaluation had turned them into the zombies he had sought so futilely till the trial.

Yet if Dahmer's zombie complex--as I had begun to think of it--was as contagious as the dire references to his sick, severely disordered, very, very ill etc. conditions implied, zombism wasn't limited to the doctors.

Before closing arguments, in a professional gesture of closing ranks unprecedented in an adversarial proceeding such as a trial, Boyle and McCann even closed ranks physically--they exchanged a brief bear-hug.

A lawyer on an hourlong nightly TV wrap-up later said he had never seen a "less adversarial" trial.