CHAPTER EIGHT
“I’m sorry I missed my appointment again,” she said at the door. A school girl apologizing to the home-room teacher for being late. “And I’m sorry to be disturbing you at home. But I really need to talk to you.”
“Come in,” Dr. Sallee replied. His eyes thinned, then he smiled minutely. Dr. Sallee was a leaning, balding man who seemed constantly buoyant in some subdued way, despite an equally constant physical awkwardness Helen could never decipher. He had a nice Colonial brick house in the East End full of bookshelves and portraits. Dark, cluttered. In the den hung a picture of Sigmund Freud, while over the mantle was a large portrait of Elvis Presley. At work, Sallee routinely dressed in fine slacks, shirt, and tie, covered by a cliched white labcoat. Now, though, off duty so to speak, he dressed simply in jeans and t-shirt. Dr. Sallee was the chief of the state police mental hygiene unit as well as the chief psychiatric consultant for the H. Andrew Lynch Evaluation Center, where all convicted state incarcerees were evaluated; whether they would officially be deemed criminals or mental patients was decided by this man. He showed her into a similarly dark and cluttered study and sat behind a teak desk identical to the one he had at his office. Helen sat down in an armchair opposite.
“And I can also tell,” he continued, “that your problems with Tom are not what you want to talk to me about.”
Helen felt flummoxed. “How did you know? What, you can tell just by looking at me?”
“Of course. It’s all kinesthetics, Helen. The way you walked to the door with a harried spring in your step. The very open way you’re sitting across from me right this moment. You generally sit with your knees together and your hands in your lap, a position of introversion and personal insecurity.” Sallee’s gaze drifted upward, in contemplation. “No, I’d say you’re here to talk to me about something completely irrelative to your personal life. Am I right?”
“Yes,” Helen admitted.
“Something work related?”
“Yes.”
Heaps of books threatened to overrun the desk top. Sallee had to nearly look over them to address her. “Let me take a guess. The Dahmer business that was in the papers today?”
For a third time, then, she said “Yes” to this uncanny man.
“Your contention, I presume, is that Dahmer is dead, and that someone else is pulling a copycat.”
“Exactly,” Helen said. “And I might need you to back me up with the press.”
“You doubt your own professional credibility?”
“I’m just a flatfoot, Dr. Sallee, but you’re a clinical psychiatrist, and the press is a different animal altogether.” Helen felt surprisingly collected, something she’d never felt before in the midst of Sallee. “We’ve got DNA tests going on some hair evidence found at the Arlinger murder site, and when they come back negative we’ll be off the hook. But that could take weeks.”
“And in the meantime, you’re worried that the newspapers will cause an undue level of fear by slanting their articles to suggest that Dahmer’s still alive?”
Helen nodded. “So that’s why I need your help. I’ll need to keep reiterating our conviction that Dahmer’s modus is completely different from the perp at P Street, despite minor similarities.”
“Minor similarities that the press will enforce as major. Some trace suggestions of cannibalism, cooking utensils. And an unbound victim who showed no signs of struggle. These are elements that any killer would be well aware of just by reading the papers two years ago. This is all easily conveyed, but the hard part is conveying it convincingly.”
“And that’s exactly why I need to know more details…about Dahmer.”
“Well, then I suppose I’m the man for the job, Helen.” Sometimes Sallee smiled in a way so subtle it was hard to even interpret as a smile. “But, I warn you—psychiatrists are only right ninety-nine percent of the time.”
“I’ll take the odds. You actually interviewed Dahmer, didn’t you? A long time ago?”
“Um-hmm. I was his first official clinical interviewer, to be precise. I evaluated him in 92, gave him his initial battery of TATs, Meyers-Kastles, and MMPIs. The most significant thing you can tell the press is that Dahmer’s psychiatric profile was existential—an existential costive, we call them—reclusive, complaisant, and completely lacking psychopathic and pathological behavior patterns. He never lied, either; pathological criminals always lie.”
Helen scribbled notes, then looked up leerily. “What about the, you know, the sexual element?”
“Let me elaborate more specifically. Dahmer was an existential stage-costive with an obsessive-thematic erotomanic impulse. He was subject only to an unsystematized longing-delusion—in other words he was not delusional in typical ways. Despite the mode of violence, he was actually very affectionate toward his victims. He loved his victims, which explains his attempt to lobotomize them.”
Helen’s expression twisted. “Lobotomize—”
“Oh, yes. On several occasions, Dahmer drugged his victims to unconsciousness and then drilled holes in their skulls, after which he inserted various types of needles into their brains—”
Helen paled.
“—and he did this, not to be brutal, but to try to damage their motor capabilities. He even claimed that one such victim survived for a short time after regaining consciousness. To put it more colloquially, he wanted ‘love-zombies.’ He wanted lovers who wouldn’t leave him. I recall him elucidating something to the affect: ‘I loved them all, and I wanted them to stay with me. When they died, I kept parts of them, so that parts of them would be with me always.’“
“In other words, that’s why he kept the skulls, and the body parts in the freezer?”
“Yes, and that explains the cannibalism too. When a victim died, he’d eat a part of that victim, ‘so that part of him would be inside of me,’ he said.”
Helen tapped her pen on her pad. “Why didn’t you commit him?”
“No responsible psychiatric evaluator would’ve. Our guidelines for incarceration versus institutionalization are very specific.” Sallee quickly slipped a paper-covered manual— State of Wisconsin Parameters for Penal Admission: A Psychiatrist’s Guide—and, without opening it, quoted: “‘The clinician in charge of psychiatric evaluation must never admit a subject to state mental-hygiene custody unless said subject demonstrates verifiable symptoms of psychopathy or hallucinosis.’ What that means is that Dahmer needed to display a clear separation from reality, the ‘Right from Wrong’ tenet. Which he didn’t. I also did the evaluation on Tredell Rosser, Dahmer’s alleged murderer, and a completely different story. The press is charging that Rosser should never have been put in prison in the first place, because he’s completely insane. But they’re completely wrong. He’s a pure-bred Ganser.”
Helen knew the term. Ganser Syndrome was common among prison inmates: faking a psychiatric disorder in hopes of receiving a transfer to a mental hospital. “Rosser was trying to push some sort of religious fixation, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, and he’s quite good at it,” Sallee affirmed. “But not good enough for me. He continues to claim that he’s a thousand years old, and the Son of God, a very well-formed forgery of a systematized grandiose pietistic delusion. I could tell he was lying the minute he stepped into my office, but he’s convincing enough for laymen and even some of the prison officials. Eventually I got the court’s permission to narco-analyze him. He’s perfectly sane, read about Ganser techniques in some book by one of those underground publishers.”
“Then why did he kill Dahmer?”
“For popular status on the mainline. Several of Dahmer’s victims were African-American. Rosser knew that he’d become a hero inside by killing Dahmer and Vander, the latter being affiliated with white supremacist groups. And all this hoopla about as possible conspiracy, that Rosser was aided by detention employees—it’s pure nonsense. He’s the lone perpetrator. By killing Dahmer and, at the same time maintaining his Ganser, he knows he’ll be relocated to a mental hospital.”