THE LIFE AND CRIMES OF JEFFERY DAHMER

Article BY Nicholas Peacock

---

Disclaimer. What the author has written is according to his imaginings about Jeffery Dahmer’s life and crimes, based on facts, but significantly embellished. In no way does the author glorify the crimes herein. And in no way does the author seek to malign people according to their sexual orientation, creed, colour, etc.

Through a dirty lens you shall see, that…

…the moon is a skull, with sad panda eyes, a smile like a scar, craters like acne. It is pure bone-white because nothing can survive up there. Its tides resonated in my howling mind.

Hello. Jeffery Dahmer. I think you probably know about me, my life, my crimes, my untimely death in prison. I guess, that from what you know about me, you don’t like me at all. I understand that, because I never liked myself. But I think I should explain things better than you read or heard, because it isn’t as simple as you think, that someone simply wants to do what I did. It isn’t like that. We are told that we are God’s lambs, but if God exists, then so does the Devil, and then some of us are part of his flock. Anyway, as I see it now and saw it then, the world was just a wasteland, in which the rest of people lived in some parallel realm and we just about interfaced. But I could never make it over there to them. I don’t think I ever had a choice but to follow my terrible path in life, as if those were my rails and to escape them meant falling over a precipice.

 

My Beginnings

I was born on May 21st 1960 in West Allis, Wisconsin, and there was a brother. My Pa was Lionel Herbert Dahmer, my Mom Joyce Annette. My Mom was of Welsh ancestry. My Pa was of German ancestry, and I sometimes used to think about what went on over there in his homeland with his folk during the war.

Mom worked as a teletype machine instructor. Pa was a chemist (a late starter at that). I recall my early childhood as being happy. It was the halcyon of innocence, just like with most kids; who cannot possibly conceive that life is going to take a strange and disturbing turn. For a while it was like that. How could I want it any other way!

In October 1966, we relocated to Doylestown, Ohio. As I grew up, I came to think that my Pa was a fraud, because he was carrying on like a kid-student when he was a grownup family man, and the thought of him like that at college was embarrassing. So, soon I was finding my family increasingly problematic, dysfunctional, and I did not think the family unit would last. But soon it was my turn to have problems, which are very difficult to explain. By age ten, there was increasing anxiety which led to sleepless nights and problems with urinating throughout. Then, as I slept, I started to feel that something was changing in my mind, like I was sinking, or being swallowed up, that if I didn’t resist it, I would go wherever my mind wanted to take me, or something outside did. It was like a tide, sucking a person out to sea, and you have to swim for your dear life or drown. This all compounded my anxiety, so that I was urinating at intervals for much of the night, having to go to the toilet so much it caused both me and my parents inconvenience. In the end, I heard my parents having sex and decided that I would have to use a bottle, and pour it out the window.

I was coming to hate my childhood, and nowhere confirmed this more than at school. I hated the people there, and that the feeling was mutual. School is where people come together and decide who is acceptable and who is not, and I was not. There were many good-looking people at my school, better looking than me, and didn’t they know it. I never had a chance to rise in that fascistic aesthetic competition, that constant beauty pageant, that then becomes the Homecoming Court, in which students are selected because ‘they have done great works for the school’. I thought everyone knew it was a crock of shit, and I thought Americans hated the idea of ‘Royalty’. It was grotesque, but then so was I. I sometimes wondered what they would crown me as.

 

Roadkill

I still do not know exactly what the appeal of dead animals was, just that it was there and wouldn’t go away. When I was about 14, I was already well aware that I wasn’t a child anymore. I was becoming interested in my genitals and my voice was starting to change too. This I suppose can go down many routes, but I knew that sexual feelings and dead animals was not normal. I also knew that homosexuality was abnormal, but that it was much less so. Obviously, my parents were attuned to my sexual development too. I was a virgin, and felt this was a mark of weakness, cowardice, that my parents wanted me to seek girls and follow in their footsteps. But that was impossible, because, I wasn’t interested in girls, girls weren’t interested in boys who weren’t interested in girls, and they would have been disgusted by my then burgeoning interest in dead animals, which was, I think, sexual. So, I guess, I didn’t need to worry about girls.

I started walking the roads, in part to escape the turbulent household environment, where my parents would shout and grouse like stupid kids, and also to collect my thoughts and play around with them. Most people are inherently repulsed by dead and decaying animals, at least the latter, but I found them attractive. To me, it was like collecting baseball mitts, or baseball cards. I thought them a treasure unto me. Skunk, groundhog, dogs, birds, cats and I don’t know what. (I wanted to find a dead person, but could not imagine what to do with it.) I collected their carcasses and took them home in bags, and put them where I could observe them as they decayed. They would reveal their inner workings and structure, while stinking horribly and writhing with maggots. I took their bones and put them in jars. And I couldn’t really see that it was much worse than collecting insects, except maybe, that the beauty of the latter is preserved. But to me, the bones were beautiful. Most people my age were into the sexual living body, as is natural. But could anyone really explain this like a scientific equation, or why I was into bones? Maybe Freud could. I could not.

Obviously, I had to hide the bones of my findings. I hid the jars in the garden in some bushes. My parents were in an almost permanent daytime state of hostility, and hadn’t any interest in my activities. My Pa was also conducting his experiments in his cellar which created strange odours. And I guess, so was I conducting experiments. But his were meant to bring in the bacon, and they didn’t. I was becoming quite confused about the living, and quite fixated on the dead, who are passive.

 

My Parents Divorced

It had come to the end of the road, inevitable. I guess I hated them both as much as they hated each other, and hated them for the grief they caused by their mess. I had hated hearing them screwing, then hated hearing them rowing. I hated each action equally, and thought that each action was as stupid. Why would you screw someone you hated, shout the hell out of someone you screwed! I didn’t want anything to do with them after that. I hoped there was a Hell. There is.

 

I Killed a Boy

As I grew older, I lost interest in the dead animals. I grew out of them the way you grow out of some bad things. I grew into my sexuality, a new twist from about the end of that phase. I was homosexual. I knew it was considered wrong, that the Church mostly thought it was a ticket to Hell. Some of them certainly did end up there. Ironically, the collecting of carrion bones was probably more acceptable, as long as you were straight. If you were attracted to someone of your own sex, it was pure sin. If collecting animal bones was o.k., collecting those of humans was not. The Church collects bones.

I was 18 and still found making friends quite difficult. I was aware that most people didn’t like what I was or, what I might be. If they knew, which I imagined was possible, as I think that sort of thing shows up on your face, like if you are happy or sad, what I had been up to with my secret bones, then adios weirdo.

Now I was living alone in the family home, since my parents had scooted off to get far away from each other. In here, I was killing time just thinking about things, like killing people and sex with boys, and killing them, and having sex with their bodies. I didn’t want to go out and meet another homosexual, didn’t know where to, except from a gay bar though not where, and I was too young to get in likely. I went out in the neighbourhood hoping something, anything might present as an opportunity, though I knew not necessarily for what, or thought I didn’t. I had to get out and try, try to find something a like prey. So off I set, cruising in my car.

I saw him jogging and pulled up a ways in front of his path. I reckoned him 18. He was athletic, confident/well-adjusted-looking. I guessed he would take a bait of an offer to come back to my place and drink beer. I guessed many under 21 boys would. I thought that I looked quite normal there and then. Then, I thought he wasn’t quite the jock I had imagined and some contempt rose in my soul and my confidence grew, as though his had deflated, commensurate.

When he came to the window, I told him that I would give him a lift, that he’d probably done enough exercise for one day, to which suggestion, he easily agreed, like a fool who does not know he is going to die. And then, in the car, I suggested the beer, and he was game. On the drive, I tried to engage him in small talk, but what I was thinking, was, that whatever his ambitions or getting pussy, he might not be going to get any from this day on, because I might just kill him. That he was oblivious to this was a great thrill in itself.

Back home, he wasted no time getting to the beer, which suited me. I wanted him very drunk and wanted to get very drunk myself. I wanted to see if there was any way I could persuade him that he might be homosexual like me. After we were both drunk, I think that is what I must have done, because, he flipped, wanted out and fast. He was furious. Cursing me, a faggot. At that point, I knew he wasn’t going to leave the place alive, as much as he knew I was a ‘faggot’ and he knew he wasn’t and so did I. Faggot indeed. Dead person.

In short, I fell into a fury and bludgeoned him with a 10lb dumbbell. Then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, like giving birth, I strangled him to death.

I cannot explain to innocents what extinguishing a human life feels like, and doubt it would feel anything like the same way. I could say, imagine killing a cherished pet cat, whose face, as you strangle it, looks at you to say, why do you do this?, as you cry and the cat squirms and yowls, and that reinforces your sense of self-hatred at the cruelty of the act, and spurs you on. And then multiply that, if you are dealing with a loved one. But, I didn’t really feel that way about what I did to him. It felt raw, necessary, that was all. I could never hurt a cat.

The dead body is like the washing up, unless you intend to eat it, which I did not. I wanted to see the insides, the bones, to dissect it. I owned a whole human being now. There was the sense of company, and of custody. And here was a plaything without recourse to leave play with me. He had been quite rude.

Firstly, he needed to be naked. Then I masturbated over him. The following day, I went about dissecting him, after taking him into the crawlspace. I used regular kitchen knives, sharp enough. Then I got scared and buried his remains in the backyard. Then, I was in a kind of trance, thinking about what I had done, what I wanted to do with him, needed to do. I would fret about his remains, thinking that I could have more pleasure with them, but that they had to be gone. So I unearthed them, played some more with them. Then I decided to dissolve the flesh in acid. So I took as much flesh off the bones as possible, and what was left after the treatment, I flushed down the toilet. I smashed his bones with hammers and scattered the shards about the woods behind the house. Bonemeal. Bonermeal.

Pa came home with a new fiancé. He was actually surprised to see me here. I don’t think he wanted me here at all. It seemed that here was another complication in my disastrous life. I made plans to escape. I would enrol in college and bid my family adieu. That was the plan.

 

College

While my victim’s bones were slowly dissolving back to nature back home, I was going to Ohio State University, Business Studies. That was a sticking plaster, since, I wasn’t intending to go into any serious business. I was a killer, a homosexual. In the woodland, there were the remains of the boy, and they were in my head as though it were a graveyard, or a boneyard, never out of mind, as though held in there by the bone of my skull.

What I expected to find at college I did not entirely know. What I found was depressingly familiar, for, it was just like school, with the good-looking people clubbing together and shunning the lesser people. And that same loathsome Homecoming Court theme. In short, ugly people were castaways, while the beautiful people assumed their rightful place. I felt like an outcast and struggled to make any friends, and the ones I did make, I did not want to tell about my ways, nor, my crime. So, there could be no friends. Who do you tell that you killed a boy, had sex with his body, dismembered it and dissolved the remains? Answer, only yourself.

Most of people’s leisure time seemed to be orientated around finding someone to have sex with; but this was between heterosexuals. I didn’t think it would do well to try and seek other boys here.

About this time, I was drinking in a manner that should have scared me at the time, and thinking about it now it seems ridiculous. I was a trainee alcoholic. You might think that minors would struggle to strike, but there were ways and means, and I could get enough to become drunk for most of the day. Alcohol made me more comfortable within myself. It also helped me forget that I was a depraved murderer.

My drinking had gotten totally out of control. One night, I remember getting a bottle of bourbon and going back to my dorm-room. I drank it with a fury. Then, the morning brought terrible memories of a dream about the boy I’d killed. I had passed out on the floor and pissed my pants. There were some liquor bottles there which I couldn’t recall. I missed class that day and the next, while crying, shaking, shuddering, recovering from the effects, of my crime and the alcohol.

 

How the N.A.Z.I.s Thought

At college two people pretended to be my friends, likewise. They were Max and Louis. They were both quite good-looking, but not as much as they thought. They wanted to take me to meet other people at parties, I think to make a spectacle of me. On one occasion, I decided that I would go along. I would go for the booze alone, but also, because other than that, I couldn’t imagine that I’d meet anyone of any interest to me, sexually, intellectually. I assumed that the two knew I was homosexual, so I don’t know why they told me that we would be going to meet the hottest chicks on campus, except to be ironic, to wind me up. I didn’t mind that so much. And I was actually curious as to who these ‘hot chicks’ were, and how men behaved towards them, vice versa. Beauty is skin deep, and if you skin someone, they are hideous, no matter how they looked before. Leave that to the Native Americans.

I had started drinking early, somewhat nervous, and was drinking too much to know for sure what was going on, which I guess was the plan. The party was in a girl’s dorm room that was big enough to show that she came from some wealth. Both Max and Louis were right about the people in there, most of them were good looking and well adjusted. I went straight for the booze and took enough liquor straight from the bottle to relax me and cause some consternation from some of the other guests, who perhaps considered this some kind of outrage. That and the music somehow distracted me from what was otherwise becoming a quite uncomfortable environment for me. Though I had no real interest in the girls here, I could see that they had come from good breeding stock, that they knew that they were good looking, that they knew that this mattered a great deal. I didn’t like any of the boys at all; they were clearly all straight anyhow, and likely homophobic to the core. You could tell the girl whose party this was, because the other guests kept coming up to her, batting on her, complimenting her I guess. She was well liked, quite a stunning looking Nordic blonde, if you were into that, who reminded me of the actress in ‘I Dream of Jeannie’. I didn’t want to be introduced to her, but Max and Louis found me and took me to her. I was toting a beer, and probably looked pretty awful from the alcohol alone. Her name was Claire and she studied English Literature, and without any restraint, she screwed her face up before mine, as though she had seen a skidmark in her white panties. That is the only way I can describe it. I left her to that and went to get more booze and then leave.

I thought about her reaction to me, and it made me think about the N.A.Z.I.s and how they graded people according to their looks. To her, I was ‘untermenschen’, someone whose appearance generated contempt, amusement. I understood. People could be diamonds, or junk jewels, and I was the latter. The Americans might have defeated the N.A.Z.I.s, but here, as with anywhere, you got graded by your looks. You don’t see ugly people in fashion mags, adverts, because ugly people don’t sell, in fact they repel. Yet, those same outfits would claim to despise the N.A.Z.I.s and their ideals of human perfection, and yet, they choose people or discard them along those lines. They are frauds, like most humans. Perfectly logical, but wrong. Uncared for by God.

The drinking never stopped and got worse. I couldn’t continue with my course. I had guessed that my Pa was somewhat concerned about me, so when he came unannounced to my dorm room, it wasn’t much of a surprise. The scene was dire, with bottles all about the place and a general mess, as though a deranged hobo had taken residence there. That was when he urged me to quit College and join the Army.

 

Army Days

It was 1979 and I was still 18. I enlisted and was taken to train as a Medical Specialist at Fort Jackson Florida. I was interested in the human body and how to treat it, but mostly just what it was about. I had thought that I had gained some practical skills after the first death and what I’d done with the body. But that isn’t really the point, when you’re dealing with injured people. If I’d been qualified, I could have been a pathologist and had a good time at that. We were sent to Baumholder, West Germany, where I became a Combat Medic, but here wasn’t a warzone, and I wondered just how much of any action I might see. Of course, here was where my Pa came from, and the place was drenched in blood from the war, and knowing about that, it was like you could still feel the echoes of all that death. What did those people get up to back then, what were they thinking? I thought I had a fair idea. Over here there was a great deal of booze and it was cheap. I didn’t mind the work as long as I knew I could drink to oblivion afterwards. It is said that I raped two other service personnel. I should point out that a lot of people didn’t like me over there, would say most anything to malign me, a homosexual. If the allegations are true, what the two boys said, I don’t recall any involvement. I guess though, it could have been true.

My drinking got the better of me. I couldn’t do the job. In March 81 I was honourably discharged. They sent me back to Florida and offered me a ticket to anywhere in the country. I could not face my father after that. So I opted to try my luck in Miami Beach, and here I worked in a delicatessen, then a sandwich shop, while I rented a motel room. I was still underage, but if you really want booze, you can most surely get it. Most nights, I would drink as though it were the air that I breathed. At work sometimes I must have come across badly hungover, and I guess they can work out the source of what is going on. Anyway, my money mostly went on booze, and I paid the motel bills, until I got kicked out, but managed to keep my work. I slept on the beach, in a cardboard shelter, and didn’t mind that too much. You should have seen the sorts of people you got down there of a night and what they got up to. You wouldn’t have to buy porno movie again.

 

Return to Ohio

My time in Florida was coming to an end. I had no more money for anything much except booze, and the more I bought, the worse I got at my job, to the point where it was obvious something had to give. I had to go away from here, back home. I called Pa and explained. He said, that if I was to come live with him and my step Ma, things weren’t going to be like they had been in college. I believed he meant it, but I knew I couldn’t make any amends, but I had no choice but to try and rub along. He gave me the money to return. I was a pretty sorry sight, ashamed, probably drunk or hungover. My step Ma was quite decent to begin with, but soon, the house rules kicked in, chores and abstemiousness. No chance. Dad kept urging me to quit the booze; but you can’t stop what your mind wants you to do, needs, not if it needs it that bad. I had killed a boy, and some of the Army boys had suggested that I was a rapist faggot. (So you’re in the army and you think killing is o.k., but having sex with other men is obscene? Illogical!) I was screwed up from all that, and foresaw that things could only get worse.

One thing is inevitable about drinking, if it is to hide a terrible side of yourself, it goes up and up, gets wholly out of control despite your best efforts, then something is bound to go wrong. I got arrested for Drunk and Disorderly conduct, fined and given a short, suspended sentence. Dad kept trying to get me sorted with the booze, but gave up and sent me to my Gramma’s house. She seemed to care more for my sanctity. It went well for a while in the household scheme of things, me and her going to church (you know, where they tell you homosexuals are destined for Hell). But I was not cured; I was getting worse, booze or no booze, and I intended to drink as much booze as I could acquire and there was what I was thinking about with people and their dead bodies, what I thought I was going to do about that, because a leper never changes his spots.

(I Had a Dream. A swelteringly hot day in a city like New York. The streets were blowing with their usual garbage stench, and garbage came skittering and flying around; Styrofoam cups, newspapers, food wrappers, stuff; the leftovers of mankind. I was a garbage collector trailing the dumpster truck. One of a few. We hauled the garbage bags from the road, from the pails. I knew that something wasn’t right, though it wasn’t the smell as there wasn’t one. I opened a bag and it was full of body parts, limbs, heads and viscera. I opened another and another and the same. And I knew then that all the bags were thus full of body parts. The street was full of freewheeling trash, and the bags were full of dismembered people. On the packer blade was painted the upper set of white teeth set in blood-juicy gums. Above that was a weird red symbol, like a tripod or something. I remember that my impressions about this scene were that this was eternity, knowing this and feeling a sense of bliss, as though God had finally spoken to me, shown me a light to a place like heaven. When I woke up I felt nauseous and had a mild erection.)

I needed to work. It was early 82 and the music scene was changing, people were dressing up in quite a strange way. I did not mind. I got a job as a phlebotomist, or a ‘Leech’ as we were known by the doctors at the Milwaukee Blood Plasma Center. It was a dull, dead end job, but I liked contact with other living people while extracting their life blood. I liked the sight of it and imagined I could smell it, taste it, as you do when you bite your lip. I think I was the only one there who felt that away about it. That lasted 10 months. During that time, things were changing with the way I was coming to view the world and myself. It was as though I was becoming more convinced that I had to obey my urges and get on with my life, the way a bereaved person does. But my urges were quite awful, and deranged. While I had no compunction about them, consummating them, they were quite shocking even to me.

Taking people’s blood does not get you any closer to their souls. It didn’t matter to me that I was laid off for alcoholic reasons. I wanted out; I wanted to get out there and find people who would let me in. It was sexual, and it was deathly.

Gramma smelled of rotten food and nascent death, the latter being a contradiction. Her clothes were like funeral raiment, because she was near death.

Sometimes, you don’t really know what it is that you want to do or why, like you are a balloon taken by capricious winds. I can only say, that I got quite depressed when I saw the good people having an easy ride in life, and with the knowledge that they would consider me some sort of ghoul, if they knew, and that I was destined for Hell. When you know that, it is understandable that a perverse urge can come to the fore and you might act upon it. And that is what I did…When I fully exposed myself in front of some peachy people, mothers and kids at the Wisconsin State Fair Park. They were unanimously appalled judging by their shrieking and cursing. It was the desired effect: my shocking and perverted version of the ‘Birds and the Bees’. I guessed I’d get caught for it, but was surprised when they more or less let me off.

 

Work

I wasn’t up to much for some time, in fact, I couldn’t be bothered to do anything, not even get drunk. Then, in January 85 I did find some motivation and got work at the Milwaukee Ambrosia Chocolate Factory (11 p.m.–7 a.m. six nights a week, with Saturday evenings off). I was a mixer. It was pretty mindless, but my mind was on other things, things that were profound, profoundly awful far in a way enough to elide the boredom in here. In fact, I quite liked my boss and the other employees. But my world was getting exciting, and it was not their world. And that was the limit of where our paths crossed.

By this time, I was quite aware of the scene for homosexuals in Milwaukie, and I wanted a part of it. I had come to the conclusion that I looked like I was gay at least to other gays. I think I must also have looked like a pervert - I was one. To me, the gay scene was a mystery, which I would have to explore, with hope in store. I thought I could learn a lot, if not necessarily enjoy. I was simply naïve, and maybe a little frightened, of what they would make of me in their world.

 

Accosted

A Saturday afternoon, I went to the West Allis Public Library. I wanted to read about witches and the Holocaust. I was sitting at a reading table, when I noticed a man who I did not like the appearance of too much, since he was looking at me askance from my right-hand side, a chair away. He was white, about forty, overweight, balding, dressed like a schoolteacher. He was making faces at me, which seemed conspiratorial, sly and I was trying to read. He passed me an envelope, in which was written a note stating that he wanted to perform fellatio on me. I admit that I was taken aback, probably scared. Did I really stand out as homosexual that much! There were plenty of people out there who might think so and write a note and hand it to me along the lines of, ‘Hey faggot, wanna come step outside, so I can rip your head off?’. I fled.
In Milwaukie, there was a small but thriving gay community and they had their surreptitious venues. I found the bathhouses and was admitted. At first, I didn’t know the rules and was prepared to keep to myself. But soon you realise that in the bathhouses, it is a watery orgy. You could lose control in there. I did want to have sex in there, but that wasn’t all. You could take liquor in there and some patrons were drunk and high on drugs. I wanted to get someone who was comatose from either. I guess I wanted to rape an unconscious body. I found a drug dealer who sold me knockout pills. I used them on some men in a bathhouse and unsurprisingly, people complained, and the management got wise. I got expelled, from one and all in Milwaukie, if not further afield. Persona non grata, within, without.

There was an item in the newspaper about an 18yr old boy who’d died and been buried and I wanted his body, considering it the perfect sexual partner. But although I had some of the details, I couldn’t get around to finding him and digging him up. For the dead could make great lovers I was sure.

I was having incredible thoughts about killing people and having sex with their corpses, and this, with the alcohol consumption, was causing concentration at work to suffer. I didn’t think that my boss knew too much, I didn’t think his mind could encompass such things. But one or more of my colleagues likely did know that I was gay, but I thought so were they.

Sexual self-release for a lone person probably works well for most people, but only so much, when your mind is telling you that you want to rape the dead. So, on an afternoon in August, I went to the Kinnickinnic River where I expected children would be at play. Where I could play too. Yes, I saw them at whatever their innocent adventures were and wanted to corrupt their lives by exposing myself and masturbating. They were obviously horrified and ran away and told. I would have expected that and done it anyway. I was charged with Indecent Exposure, but in my defense, I said I was just urinating, which cannot have been believed. I was then charged and found guilty of Disorderly Conduct. I was sentenced to one year’s probation and compelled to attend counselling sessions. In my opinion, it was like blaming a vicious beast for killing its prey. Unfair. But I understood the rules, that society despised me, as much as I did.

The counsellor was not someone I was prepared to open up to; he could not understand my soul, let alone save it. I thought he was just gaining some delight from my sad predicament. He was condescending. We both came to accept that our sessions were merely going through the motions, like my parents did when they hated each other but had sex. He had the upper hand, could bust be into jail. I guess he just gave up on me, and wanted me to go out of sight and mind. If he only knew. I think he might have guessed, something.

I was lucky not to lose my job.

 

1987

I was still living with Gramma. If she knew about my drinking, she didn’t mind too much; but I thought she was getting a bit senile by then at least I hoped so. By now, I was having recurrent urges to engage in sexual activity with young men, and as a corollary to that kill them, and then I wanted to play in that way. The urges had a mind of their own, but I felt we were reading from the same hymn sheet. Yes, I wanted to play ball with the urges, satiate them, greatly.

You find your hunting grounds and then you hunt. Mine would be the bars of Milwaukie, where drunk and stray boys, and men went, looking for oblivion, and I their deaths, bones and flesh. I wanted to scout them out first, those bars, test the water, lie of the land. What I was after was young men who were foolish and easily duped, to come back with me and then... To begin with, I couldn’t conceive bringing one back to Gramma’s, the noise, the smell, the mess. Gramma may have been losing the plot, but sometimes I thought that it was me that was. Even the senile can cry bloody murder, and loud.

I found the bar and it was called Rinker’s and made that where I would strike. It was November when I was ready to go ahead with it. I booked a room at the Ambassador Hotel. I had my knock out drugs. There was nothing that could stop me, my zeal was bursting at the seams. I think I thought I was a superman.

On that night, after work I got a six pack of beer and drank it all within an hour, in an area of wasteland, where there was trash from other people, and you wouldn’t be that surprised to find a dead body. I was dressed casually, in jeans, chambray shirt, denim jacket, Blucher shoes. I did not want to stand out, which was ironic. I did wonder whether they would let me in, but the impression I got from having watched the queue a Saturday night, was that the dress code was optional, whereas being gay was pretty much compulsory. A work colleague told me that rape was sex by accident, how little he knew.

I arrived at just after nine, when it would seem it would be empty judging by the lack of a queue, and no doorman. Inside, it was sort of art deco design, the fittings, paintings, general décor, with supplementary pictures of men and women in attitudes that made it clear that this was not for straight people, or at least not for not for prudes; in fact, those pictures were objectively obscene, no elaboration required. It was a demonstrably gay bar and if you weren’t gay, then I think the barman would make it clear it was nada, adios. A bit defensive that way perhaps, which was understandable, because a lot of people hated gays back then. Like God.

The people who were there in the early part were all sorts, all ostensibly gay, age range 19-55. None of them were attractive in any respect. It was about 9.40 when, some unknown effect kicked in and people started turning up in droves, groups. People who were in party mode. People of all shapes and sizes, but mostly young and quite fit. How some of them were dressed, to imagine them walking the streets of Milwaukie made you fear for their safety. I guess you could say some were the gay stereotype, of the leather-clad bikers with their peaked caps. They were the clichés, for there were people who had adopted such outlandish, camp pantomime outfits. Some of which played on the former theme. There were others who were in that strange garb you probably had to source in some shop for fetishists, or maybe from a costume shop and then jerry rigged it. Men in makeup, with a few women whom I took for lesbians, since they dressed like men, in dungarees, shirts, etc, most of which did not wear makeup and were plain or ugly. Once a threshold of entrants had passed, as if on cue, the music turned up and the glitterballs started turning, various disco lights came on, and there was artificial smoke. And there was a great joyous whooping from the crowd, as though, they had arrived at the promised land. And you couldn’t but help share in the general euphoria.

I watched all this with some amusement, then some despair, because minds are like that. I did not think I fitted in and felt an outcast. I was not interested in the arrivals, in their cliques. I wanted someone like me, who had was alone, looking for companionship. After drinking four beers in my booth, I resolved that I would shortly head out, maybe cruise for a male prostitute, or simply give up and make a better plan.

But then, at just after 10:40, when I was about to give up, I saw a man in his early twenties, who stood at the bar alone. He was white, attired like a member of a New Wave band, with permed blonde hair. He wore stonewashed jeans, a black leather jacket with some silver studs, and a cravat, and a tie-dyed shirt, and cowboy boots. He hadn’t noticed me at all as I took this in.

I watched him for a while, standing at the bar, and thought he was somewhat drunk or high. He was not buying a drink and seemed to be questing for someone to buy one for him, and then I saw my chance. I went and sidled up to him and simply said: ‘I can buy you a drink if you want’. And he smiled, as if I was his saviour. Yes, he was in quite a state, but I must have been too. He asked for a bourbon and coke and I bought it, and he said great and thanks. Then we went to my booth. We introduced ourselves. He said his name was Kevin. We chatted awkwardly at first, as in ‘have you been here before? ‘what do you think of this place?’, then about what we did for a living. I lied and told him I was a trainee doctor, and he told me he was a music producer, which I thought was a lie. He seemed more wasted the more I talked to him, and soon was making little sense. I was beginning to think he was prostitute, a desperate one at that. And that was fine. For some time, I talked and he rambled nonsense. I was waiting for him to take off to the sick and sordid restrooms, so I bought more drinks, knowing that the fluid intake would make this inevitable. Then he went, and I suspected that in there he would be taking drugs, maybe engage in some lewd act in the heat of the moment. When he went, I put the knockout stuff in his bourbon and coke.

I think we must have been thrown out. I vaguely remember being accosted outside the bar, but I cannot remember how we got to the hotel. We must have been a terrible spectacle. Like two quarter-wits, clinging on to each other, staggering, who can just about combine their intelligence to get enough nous to function and navigate. It seems God looks after drunks, and perverted killers.

I simply do not recall anything about the second part of that night. In the morning, I awoke to find ‘Kevin’ beneath me. He was dead, blood oozing from his mouth. My arms were bruised and my fists scraped. I had killed him, or someone else had. No it was me. I lay with him like that for about half an hour and then came to realise that I had to get out and get him out. I was hungover, but driven by sheer panic, I dressed and still a little drunk, hurried out and ran to a cheap tourist store where I purchased a large holdall. A body was coming to Gramma’s after all.

Back home. The pressure was off for a while. First, I had time to play with the body. I couldn’t tell you all of that I did to it before I decided it was time for disposal, because I must have been in some kind of trance. When I was done, I went to work dismembering it, with haste. I cut the flesh off in small pieces and bagged them. I cut off as much flesh as I could remove as I wanted clean bones, to admire. I kept the head. I then smashed the other bones into fragments. I threw it all into the garbage. I had the head wrapped in a blanket and kept under my bed like a magic trinket, and would take it out took it to handle while I masturbated.

After two weeks, I wanted to clean the skull and dissolved the flesh with lye. The skull was what I had left of him, and it was now a magic totem. It was a memento mori. I had two skulls in my possession, and one was dead, and there were dead thoughts within the other one.

(I had a dream, that I was a giant spider, hanging upside down in the web. My abdomen was plump and hideous, striped black and red like Freddy Krueger’s jumper. My thorax was black. My arms radiated. There were bodies in the web wrapped up in silk. It was my face, and I had glowing yellow eyes. When I woke, I was crying lightly and mumbling the Lord’s Prayer.)

 

More & More

My M.O. was proven to be good, so I was good to go. Some people’s lives are cheap and no one wants to know, and you can say that about a lot of people who frequent the restrooms of certain venues. No one cares about hobos, drug addicts, prostitutes, and dysfunctional gays who want to party too hard, and are given to what the church would unequivocally call ‘sin’, which they know a whole lot about. That gives the killers of any section thereof a great deal of latitude. Because, secretly, society is glad to see the end of people who don’t make the grade. When you know that, you have a certain wind in your sails. I felt like a superman, intermittently, and like untermenschen in the lacunae therein.

I had not considered that every trip to a gay bar would result in a conquest, and I had considered too easy prey undeserving and unwarranted. What had surprised me was how some gay men who were far better looking than me, were quite easy to pick up, although much less willing to come home. I suppose I did still find the living form attractive, but when it is bones and flesh you are interested in, it matters not one way or the other, because death removes that beauty and gives you another. There were a lot of people in those bars who were so screwed up on drugs and alcohol, it made me feel good about my lot in life. And I sometimes wondered whether any of them were doing the sort of thing I was, but I came to know that this was ridiculous: it takes a special person to do such things, someone like me.

I saw this kid on a street in Milwaukie and followed him, knowing that he was a rentboy. He was a scruffy, screwed up looking Native American, who I was sure would take my bait. I approached him and told him to come with me and let me make a model of him and pay him $50, enough to would keep him in drugs for a while. He was eager, and we went back to West Allis. That night we drank some and had sex. Then I wanted him dead, so drugged him. I strangled him to death and kept his body in the cellar. What I did with his body was pretty much the same as for the previous victim. I had another clean skull for the collection I wished to grow, for my spiritual and sexual purposes. When bone is properly cleaned, it isn’t yellow, it is white, which is why they call some porcelain, bone china. If I had the time, I would like to have made porcelain using ground bones, and have utilised it.

 

1988

In March, I met Richard outside a gay bar called The Phoenix and lured him to West Allis, again with $50. I drugged him and killed him and performed oral sex upon the corpse. The body was disposed of as usual.

In April that year, I got another one back home. I thought we were being quiet, too quiet for Gramma to hear, but sometimes she was quite switched on. After I drugged him, he was still making too much noise, and Gramma called to me. I told her all was fine, to go back to bed.
After that, I couldn’t kill him. He was soon in a bad way and I drove him while inebriated, to the County General Hospital, where I left him unconscious. It was sloppy. If anyone needs to keep his eye on the ball, it is a perverted murderer.

By September, I had come to realise that Gramma wasn’t really senile, that somehow, I had misunderstood her, and that by dint of the prodigious amounts of alcohol I had consumed, and my depravity, it was likely that there was a halfway mark where our minds were at some state of disarray. Like a Venn diagram. Senility meets alcoholism. Senilihism. She knew about the men I brought home, and I had thought she wasn’t too fussed. Nor by my continual alcoholism. But there was the stench of rotting meat scraps. Obviously, there was something unwholesome about the place with me in it, although I doubted she knew the true nature of the stench. She asked me to leave and I had no choice. I could never harm Gramma.

I found a one-bedroom apartment on North Twenty-Fifth Street and moved in September 25th. I was kind of mad about it, being upheaved like that. But given what I’d been up to, it was a miracle that I could live anywhere without getting detected. I got drunk that night, frustrated that I had less space here, that disposing of bodies would be much more difficult, and if there was a stench, I reckoned that the neighbors would be far more switched on to it and call the cops. The next day I woke up still a little drunk and drank some vodka in the morning. I then went out to try my luck in the neighborhood. There was a kid of maybe 14, I watched him for a while. He looked like a runaway, likely a prostitute by the way he was hanging around on the street corner and asking for money, especially from older men. Yes. I approached him and lured him back with an offer of money for nude photographs. Easy prey. I drugged him and caressed his body. I should have guessed he would tell. I was arrested and In January 1989, convicted of second-degree sexual assault and of enticing a child for immoral purposes, which seemed strange to me, since he was eager to go. In some countries, the age of consent is much lower, like the drinking age; but in America, you are the Devil if you are much older than your partner, or lover. Illogical. The sentencing was suspended until May 1989. Now I knew that I was going to be found out at work, as a pervert. On March 20, I moved back to my Gramma’s home, not that she wanted me at all was what I suspected.

The smell had gone, and I think that was instrumental in her letting me back in. With the bones clean, there would be no smell. Now I had to worry about the sentencing, which I guessed would be quite severe. Given that I might be locked away, I was determined to continue my activities as though the shutters were coming down. My next victim I met in a gay bar. His name was Anthony and he came up to me nearing the end of the night, quite drunk and maybe a bit high, and told me that he was an aspiring model, which I believed, because he was good looking. He seemed too good looking for me. But skin a man and he is flesh, repulsive, and take that flesh away and you might as well be dating a skeleton.

We went back, drank and had sex. I then drugged him and when he was out, strangled him. The following morning in Gramma’s bathtub, I decapitated the body, and attempted to flay the corpse. I then stripped the flesh off the bones and pulverized them, and disposed of this in the trash. I had learnt that you could preserve flesh in acetone and had procured this from the hardware store in prodigious quantities, that might have aroused some interest from a clerk. I kept the head and genitals preserved that way. I kept the genitals in a mason jar, the head in a large Tupperware container. The acetone turned them off-colour, the face looked awful, with a ruined grimace as though he showed how he’d suffered and suffered the more in there. But it was as though I captured his suffering. I didn’t mind about his horrid expression like a photo, like a death mask. I had more keepsakes.

In May 89, I was sentenced to five years' probation and one year in the House of Correction, with work release permitted in order that I be able to keep my job.

 

1990

Gramma took me back in after a partial discharge, in May, for a while, then she was finally done, and I moved into an apartment, again, on North Twenty-Fifth Street. I took the salient parts of Anthony with me, his skull, his scalp, his genitals which I had removed from their acetone amnion, and dried. I painted his skull. He grew that skull in his mother’s womb, no doubt loved and cherished as he was nourished. Now I cherished his remnants. Love is confusing, and probably wrong, on many levels.

It wasn’t long before I got over the apprehensions of living in my new place and with that out the way, it was time to kill again. His name was Raymond, and he was a 30-ish prostitute, who was again lured back home with that $50 offer, and this time it was for sex. And I killed him as before. The following day, I purchased a Polaroid camera and took several pictures of his body in positions I found enticing. I dismembering him in the bathroom, boiled the legs, arms, and pelvis in a steel kettle with lye, and rinsed the bones in the sink. Lye doesn’t dissolve bones, at least not that I could work out. Acid is what you use, and in large quantities. I bought it from a hardware store, thinking that they wondered what I wanted it for, but I was also thinking that they could never imagine what was going on. If asked, I would say, I was trying to unblock the communal drains, instead of paying for a plumber, which seemed plausible. And anyway, I would be unblocking them, of the goo that you get from dissolving people in acid, or lye.

I kept the skull and dissolved the remainder of the skeleton in a container filled with acid. To beautify it, I spray-painted the skull and kept it alongside that of Anthony. I had read about a place called the Capuchin Crypt in Rome, which is full of bones arrayed and arranged in attractive configurations. I wished I could go there and pay homage. The term is ossuary, and that was what I was creating.

The functioning alcoholic that I was, I still managed to hold down my job. My boss never mentioned the situation. My probation officer was sympathetic. Deep down, people don’t want to know.

Late May. I lured another young man to my apartment, but it didn’t go to plan. I was far too drunk, so was he. Too drunk to have sex, and too drunk to kill. I passed out, and in the morning, he was gone and so was some of my clothing and a watch, total value over $300. So I had been robbed, by him. A part of me wondered if in fact I had actually killed him and lost the body somewhere. And then I woke up to the fact that I was starting to lose my recollection, and the reason why was alcohol. I did come to realise that I had been robbed, which was a small price to pay, for trying to take a life and body. We were even. He probably didn’t know how lucky he was.

June. I met up with a 27-year-old acquaintance named Edward Smith and convinced him to come back, for a drink. Where I drugged and strangled him. With him, I dissected the flesh, put the skeleton parts in the freezer to try and remove the moisture, thinking this would help the bleaching process and avoid deteriorating the bone, which could become brittle, so I thought. Then when I dried the skull in the oven it exploded. I dissolved the other bones. If you are mad, I guess you probably think your head is going to explode. Having a head explode in your oven is probably a mad thing to happen, but I didn’t actually think I was mad, but wondered how this could be.

A few months later on…He was in his early twenties, I met him on a street corner. He said his name was Ernest and maybe it was. I believed him to be a prostitute. Anyone who will come back to your place for $50 is likely a prostitute. Back home, it turned out that he was a prostitute, but one with some cheek, since, I tried to perform oral sex on him and he tried to charge me extra, which was not my understanding of how it works. But he was going to pay for it. I drugged him. It didn’t quite knock him out, so I slashed his throat, and he died squealing and glugging his own lifeblood a little, but not for long. The sound of someone dying is quite traumatic. They make you suffer for their suffering. Which is fair, but not desirable.

I posed his nude body for photographs, then got on with the ‘washing up’. I kept his severed head, heart, biceps, other portions of his muscles and dissolved the other flesh. I wanted to consume some of the flesh I kept, so put it in the freezer, and the bones too, which I had bleached.

I liked the idea of a skull painted with flowers.

 

Loss of control

(I had a dream, and in it I was king of the skeleton people in an ancient ruined and smoking city. And I was the only one with flesh. And like the sighted man leading the blind I was king. In this realm of skeleton people, I walked with one of them on my arm like a wife, and others trailed behind me as though I was the Pied Piper of Hamlyn, while the others were my meek and fawning, loyal subjects. In the distance smoke rose in a column and atop this was a giant head, of a monk, bobbing about joyous, grinning at me knowingly)

There were more killings much as before. I guess I was making quite a lot of noise dealing with the throughput of bodies in my abattoir, using a chainsaw at times, thumping bodyweight about. I had complaints and managed to fend them off with excuses which might have seemed bizarre, but much more plausible than what I was actually getting up to.

I encountered a deaf mute named Tony and I promised him rewards in writing for nude pictures. I killed him as per usual and dismembered him. I had no desire to dispose of his remains, just let them rot and fill the air with their fetor.

On an afternoon in May 1991, I encountered the 14-year-old youth Konerak on the street. He was a prostitute I was sure, so I approached him with the ‘offer’, which he took up enthusiastically. Like he had a choice! Back home I got him to pose for a few pictures, his last ever pictures alive as I intended. So, I drugged him and did the business on his unconscious body. It was then that I went for my new idea, which was really quite strange. I had bought a drill for D.I.Y. and then it occurred to me to use it to get into the skull. I drilled a single hole into his skull, which is called trepanning. But that wasn’t the only idea. I injected acid in there. I couldn’t have expected him to take well to my ministrations, if he could survive them for any length of time. He fell unconscious, and I woke him and dragged him into the spare bedroom, where the nude body of Tony, or whoever it was, lay on the floor, rotting, bloated. I wanted the zombie boy to see another and know that this was his fate. Konerak soon became unconscious again, whereupon I drank several beers while lying alongside him, before leaving the apartment for a bar.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect of Konerak when I returned, except that he was going to be in bad way. It turned out that he had tried to escape, but hadn’t got very far. He was sitting in the stairwell to the apartment block, surrounded by these women, who were giving him succor as he babbled on, like a zombie. I think they were from his race, certainly they looked that way. I went over and tried to explain that here was my lover, who’d had way too much, and was now delinquent, in a terrible state. I couldn’t excuse any other way. I took him under my arm and tried to take him back in, where he would die. But the women had already called the cops, who turned up pretty sharpish. I never liked the cops much, but on this occasion, when I explained the sordid facts about our circumstances, they backed off, despite the protests of the three women who said in broken English that he was bleeding from his rectum, who might have been illegal immigrants anyhow. The cops told them to take a hike. They wanted to come into the flat. I was not a little unconcerned by the smell, which I had gotten used to, but would be pretty rank to a cop, I believed. They came in. I don’t think they wanted to know about what we were getting up to, thinking we were a pair of degenerate faggots, that Konerak was a rentboy, and all the gross details therein. I think they just wanted to make a cursory check of the premises and scoot. They said it stank in there, which was courtesy of bloated remains of Ernest, or Tony, or both. They let me and my captive alone, to carry on as I had planned.

I was very angry with him. I injected another dose of acid into his head and he died. It was a relief, as much for him as for me, I thought. Then, I went about dismembering Konerak.

I guess I knew that things were coming to an end, because when you kill people, you know that your soul can only accept so much ruin, because it was created in the Big Bang, which is God, and it is vulnerable. I carried on in the same fashion, picking people up, killing them, dismembering them, keeping body parts. I don’t think you can get bored from such a sport, but it doesn’t always work out in the same way, because if it did, maybe you wouldn’t want to do it at all. No, I would say that it is more like a need, like oxygen. I had sunk into the lowest level imaginable, and had my ticket to Hell, express. You do that shit and come to know that the society you live in is going to find you out and get you. It is just a matter of time, and you don’t care about this known predicament when you do what you do. But the end will come.

 

Arrest

I think you can understand that when you drink too much and are a serial killer, things are liable to go wrong. I couldn’t stop drinking no matter how hard I tried, which I didn’t. The set up was ridiculous. I still had decomposing flesh in my apartment and it stank. I met three gay men and blithely invited them home with an offer of $100 bucks, to, you’ve guessed it, pose, for me and my camera. I thought they were prostitutes. They agreed to come back to the abode. I admit that I had lost good deal of my nous by this stage. The flat stank of rotting flesh, which, however you got used to it, came back to you starkly once you’d cleared your nose in the outside and come back inside. I didn’t care what they thought, because I wanted to kill them all. And I felt that I was going to get caught.

I kept up the pretence of nude photography. They were compliant, a group of fools, but once we neared home only Tracy Edwards agreed to come in. Inside to my strange lair, stinking of rotting flesh, with boxes of acid I had used to dispose of bones. I don’t know what he thought, why he didn’t get the spooks and flee after a few minutes in there. But he seemed curious. And I felt he understood too much. I showed him the tropical fish tank, and when he turned that way, I reached behind and pulled the handcuffs from inside my pants. I thought he would be passive and accede to go…go to his death like a lamb to slaughter. But I couldn’t do it.

I asked him to come to the room for photographs. He came in there, where there were many pictures of previous nudes. I picked up a knife I kept hidden under a mat on a chest of drawers. Now I saw that Edwards was scared. I pounced on him, cornered him. I put the knife against his chest, threatened to cut his heart out, eat it. Not very romantic. He was acting like a bitch, telling me he was my best friend, that we could be lovers, but I knew he was just temporising. That said, I wasn’t sure I could really bring myself to kill him – I think I’d had enough. He said he wanted to use the bathroom, and I let him go there. He returned and punched me in the face. And then he escaped.

So that’s it Jeffery, now you are going to Hell.

I escaped the death penalty, but not really. I was sentenced to Life Imprisonment with 70 years added for good measure.

I was killed in prison by battery.

(I had a dream, and in it I was dead, and reborn as a High School jock, tall and wonderful, whose interests focused on girls, the smell of their sexual essence, as opposed to that of fetid human flesh. And at the end of my happy days, I went to Heaven)