Between the 6th of June 1978 and the 19th of July 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer killed 17 young men aged between 14 and 31. He tortured, raped, mutilated, dismembered, and photographed most of his victims. He also performed necrophiliac acts on their bodies and cannibalised at least one of his victims. When police arrested him three days after his last killing in apartment 213 at the Oxford Apartments, 924 N. 25th Street, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, they found a human head on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator; in the freezer compartment they discovered three freezer bags containing two hearts and a severed muscle; another freezer held three more heads, a torso, and various internal organs. In a closet, along with chloroform, ether, and formaldehyde, a kettle holding two hands and male genitalia sat next to two bleached skulls. Blood covered the bed and the surrounding area. The walls and refrigerators were covered with Polaroid pictures of most of the victims—the photos showed various scenes of sex, torture, rape, death, dismemberment, and necrophilia stylized as if in extreme pornographic magazines. In cupboards and cabinets, police found five painted skulls, a skeleton, a scalp, and more male genitalia. A 57-gallon tank held three decomposing torsos. The apartment, heavily bolted and alarmed, also contained bleach, odour absorbers, and incense to hide the smell of putrefaction, plus acids and Soilex used to dissolve body parts. The tools of Dahmer’s necrophiliac trade were also found—drill bits, claw hammers, hunting knife, hypodermic needles, and a handsaw.
Dennis Nilsen killed a minimum of 15 men between the 30th of December 1978 and the 26th of January 1983. He strangled them using ligatures, neckties, headphone leads, or with his bare hands, and then drowned them in buckets, sinks, and baths. He kept the bodies under floorboards, sometimes whole, sometimes dismembered, and then removed them for sex or for company. He would then dismember them and either burn the bodies or boil them and flush them down the toilet. A drain-cleaning company, called in to unblock the drains of the house at 23 Cranley Gardens, Muswell Hill, London, found what they first thought to be chicken blocking the pipes. Police questioned Nilsen who admitted his crimes and showed police the remains of two bodies hidden in a tea chest in a wardrobe.
Sentenced to 15 life terms in February 1992, Jeffrey Dahmer served his sentence in Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin, became a born-again Christian, and died on 28 November 1994, beaten to death by fellow inmate Christopher Scarver. On November 4th 1983, the judge at the Old Bailey sentenced Dennis Nilsen to 25 years for six murders and two attempted murders, the Home Secretary amended this to a whole-life tariff and Nilsen remains incarcerated at HMP Full Sutton maximum-security prison working on his autobiography. ‘I filled twenty notebooks my first year, thirty-one my second, nineteen my third. At this time I was as close to true remorse as I ever came. It was as if I had been in a dream that lasted eleven years, and had woken from it into a world I barely recognized. How had I ever done twenty-three killings? What had made me want to? I attempted to plumb the depths of my soul with words. I dissected my childhood and family (stultifying but hardly traumatic), my sexual history (abortive), my career in various branches of the civil service (utterly without distinction, except for the number of times I was fired for insubordination to my superiors). This done, and little learned, I began to write about the things that interested me now. I found myself with a great many descriptions of murders and sex acts performed upon dead boys. Small details began to return to me, such as the way a fingerprint would stay in the flesh of a corpse’s thigh as if pressed into wax, or a cold thread of semen would sometimes leak out of a flaccid penis as I rolled it about on my tongue. The only constant thread running through my prison notebooks was a pervasive loneliness with no discernible beginning and no conceivable end. But a corpse could never walk away.’[219]
Poppy Z. Brite’s 1996 novel Exquisite Corpse, fictionalizes a meeting between Nilsen and Dahmer. Denis Nilsen becomes the serial killer Andrew Compton who—Bundy-like—escapes prison by feigning his own death. In New Orleans, among rent boys and Voodoo fetishes he meets artist Jay Byrne (Jeffrey Dahmer). Both men are obsessed with necrophilia, cannibalism, and lust murders. ‘Before, in my previous life, I’d told all my boys my real name. There had never seemed any need to do otherwise. Tonight I had been using Arthur, since none of the men who approached me were interesting. But to this man I said, “Andrew.” “I’m Jay.” He reached across the table to shake my hand. His grip was cool, dry, and languid. When I shook hands with a potential companion, I always slid my palm over his palm and grasped his wrist, briefly encircling it with my fingers, gauging his reaction to such an intimate, dominant touch. But now I was shocked to feel Jay doing the same to me. We both snatched our hands away and stared at one another.’[220]
11
NecroPosthuman
Born the wrong gender as far as his mother was concerned, Jerry Brudos[221]—like his contemporary Charles Manson—hated it when his mother dressed him in girl’s clothes. Whereas Manson’s mother neglected her child, Brudos’s met any form of rebellion with psychological and physical abuse, chastising him for sexual thoughts, forcing him to clean up any nocturnal emissions, emphasizing the immorality and degradation of sex. Brudos entered his teens hating his mother, hating women, his life, and set out on the road in a necrophiliac Freudian revenge tragedy—Badlands, Weekend, The Hitcher, and Natural-Born Killers all rolled into one person.
Born in 1939, Brudos acquired a list of paraphilias—including podophilia (feet), retifism (shoes), transvestic fetishism, and voyeurism. Shoes became his main and controlling fetish and, from the age of five, he developed an obsession for black stilettos. Playing at a local dump, he found a pair of spike-heeled shoes and took them home. As he modelled them in front of the mirror, his mother walked in and screamed at him, calling him abusive names. She confiscated the shoes and threw them on the fire. This excited Brudos, the violent behaviour mixed with the forbidden. His mother forbade him to go near her shoes, this increased his desire for them and he began to steal shoes from neighbours, and even his kindergarten teacher. In his book on Fetishism and its Discontents in Post-1960 American Fiction, Christopher Kocela quotes from Lacan and uses his theory of ‘das Ding’ and ‘object petit a’ in an analysis of fetishes. ‘It no longer surprises us when a man ejaculates at the sight of a shoe, a corset, a mackintosh; yet we would be very surprised indeed if any one of these objects could appease the hunger of an individual, no matter how extreme.… Therefore, in speaking of imaginary satisfaction, we are thinking of something highly complex. In the Three Essays, Freud explains that instinct [drive] is not simple data but is rather composed of diverse elements which are dissociated in cases of perversion.’[222]
Brudos associated shoes with the forbidden, the forbidden became his focus of revenge, the ultimate forbidden thing—the death of his mother, the ejaculation into and over the withdrawn, confiscated, and destroyed shoes—the withheld, forbidden, and hidden vagina. They are cut off from reality, Brudos using them (or misusing them—they are now products of inutility) as representations of the hymen, marriage, and mother. Kraft-Ebbing writes, ‘By a transference through association of ideas, gloves or shoes obtain the significance of a fetich [sic]. Max Dessoir… points out that among the customs of the middle ages drinking from the shoe of a beautiful woman (still to be found in Poland) played a remarkable part in gallantry and homage. The shoe also plays an important role in the legend of Aschenbrödel (Cinderella).’[223]
221
For details of Jerome Brudos’s life and crimes see: Eric Hickey,
222
Christopher Kocela,