Jeffrey Dahmer was either a ”steamrolling killing machine” who couldn`t control himself, or a warped, cowardly and sexually selfish man who killed for a few hours of pleasure.
Those were the conflicting portraits jurors took into deliberations late Friday afternoon after the three-week sanity trial drew to an end with impassioned closing statements from the defense and prosecution.
They heard defense lawyer Gerald Boyle depict Dahmer as a ”desolately lonely” man so sick with homosexual fantasies of sex with corpses from boyhood on that he dared not tell anyone. It was a sickness that grew and grew, Boyle said, until Dahmer, his will power eroded, ”threw in the towel” and gave up trying to control it.
”He was so impaired as he went along this killing spree that he could not stop,” Boyle told jurors. ”He was a runaway train on a track of madness, picking up steam all the time, on and on.”
Boyle showed jurors a hand-drawn chart with Dahmer`s initials occupying a large circle, while radiating outward like sun rays was a catalog of his acts: ”cannibalism, necrophilia, showering with corpses, chanting and rocking, planning a shrine of skulls, drugging, acidifying bones, defleshing skulls, attempting lobotomies with a drill, taking home road kill, going to graveyards, watching pornographic videos,” and more.
”Can you believe anyone in the world saying a guy who did (these things) isn`t mentally impaired, that he is just evil?” Boyle asked.
He outlined Dahmer`s slide from a 1987 murder he told police he cannot recall through his attempts with religion to resist his impulses to possess the passive-drugged or dead-bodies of other men, and on into his accelerated pace of killing last summer. It was especially during these final killings that Dahmer careened wildly out of control, Boyle said.
He focused on the death of 14- year-old Konerak Sinthasomphone last May as an example. The boy, drugged and bleeding, was returned to Dahmer`s apartment by police after he sought to flee. But rather than clear his apartment of evidence after killing Sinthasomphone, Dahmer kept the skulls and body parts of 11 victims until his arrest nearly two months later.
”This was a crazy man. . . . One would have to be blinded not to accept that he was so out of control that he could not conform (to the law),” Boyle said.
But deep inroads were made into his appeal when prosecutor E. Michael McCann displayed to jurors large color photographs of each of the 15 victims Dahmer is charged with killing in Milwaukee since 1987.
McCann told of how, at age 18, Dahmer killed a young hitchhiker his age, McCann said, ”for his sexual satisfaction.”
”We`re talking about a tremendously selfish, warped man,” he said. He sought to show that Dahmer came from a privileged background compared with most of his victims, and, other than being troubled by the marital tensions of his parents, suffered no great hardship.
Dahmer was not a man ”ravenously out of control,” McCann said. In all his killings, he used ”cold-blooded planning,” for an equation that reflected an utter disregard for human life.
”It`s your life for my sexual satisfaction,” he told jurors. ”Your body will rot in a couple of days, so my sexual satisfaction for a couple of days will cost you your life.”
Drugging the young men was not the ”kindly act” before death that the defense depicted, McCann said, but a cowardly act.
Dahmer was so cowardly he said, that he killed at least two of his drugged victims because he feared a confrontation with them when they woke up. McCann brought tears to the eyes of spectators when he described how none of Dahmer`s victims were given the chance to fight for their lives.
”Do you think if I asked each one of these young men, even down to the 14-year-old Konerak and the 15-year-old (Jamie) Doxtator, and I said, `Look, would you like to take him on with your bare hands, even with his knife, and take him on?` ”
”Every one of them would have said, `My God, give me a chance for my life. Of course. Let him have his knife, and I`ll confront him bare-handed and fight for my life.` ”
”How indecent and vicious to drug a man who didn`t even have a chance to reach out to grasp for life. That was no favor,” McCann told jurors.
In reaching their verdict, jurors must first decide whether Dahmer had a mental disease when he killed. They are not bound by psychiatric definitions of insanity in doing so. If they find him insane on any one count, they then must determine whether the disease impaired his ability to control himself.
