Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer has ”a cancer of the mind” that drove him progressively out of control, defense psychiatrist Fred Berlin told jurors Monday in the confessed serial killer`s sanity trial.
”If this isn`t a mental illness, I don`t know what is,” said Berlin, director of the sexual disorders clinic at Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore.
Berlin described Dahmer as a necrophiliac driven by fantasies of sexual contact with live partners, then while they were drugged into unconsciousness- half-alive-and, finally, while they were dead. It was only during the latter state that he could achieve full satisfaction, Berlin said Dahmer told him during an interview Nov. 12.
But Berlin had no clear answer when prosecutor E. Michael McCann hammered away on the question of whether Dahmer preferred live sexual partners, or dead ones, or partners in an unconscious zombie-like state.
McCann attacked Berlin`s lack of experience in homicide cases-the Dahmer case is his first-and derided what he said was a relatively brief amount of interview time with Dahmer, 4 hours and 45 minutes.
”You spent far less time than any of the other experts,” McCann said, calculating that Berlin could have discussed each of Dahmer`s 15 charged homicides for no longer than 15 minutes.
The prosecution has attempted to show that Dahmer was not out of control, and that he had sexual liaisons with a number of men he met at gay bars and bath houses that did not end in violence or death.
Dahmer apparently sought to extend the half-alive ”zombie-like” state, said Berlin, by performing a crude lobotomy on at least one, possibly more, of his final victims.
He told psychiatrists for the defense and the prosecution that he used an electric drill and injected an unidentified solution in attempting the procedure on one drugged victim. But after returning from his shift at Ambrosia Chocolate Co. the next day, Dahmer was disappointed to find the victim had died, Berlin said.
Dahmer gave homicide investigators yet another account: that the holes were drilled after death in an attempt to aid cleaning of the skull. Local press accounts of restricted medical examiners` reports confirm that at least three skulls found in Dahmer`s apartment contained drill holes.
Under questioning, Berlin acknowledged that Dahmer knew right from wrong- not knowing the difference is one of two criteria for mounting a successful insanity defense. But because of his disorder, Berlin told jurors, Dahmer could not control his behavior.
”In my judgment, Mr. Dahmer is unable at this point in his life to stop himself, to walk away from it,” he said.
So out of control was Dahmer toward the end, Berlin said, that he had the dead body of one victim in his bedroom the night police returned an escaping victim to him, a 14-year-old Laotian boy. He killed the boy later that night, despite police knowledge of his connection with the boy.
The psychiatrist told jurors of what he said were Dahmer`s plans to build a temple made of body parts. But Berlin said it was an idea Dahmer came to view as impractical, so he considered instead having an aquarium containing a human head.
