Jeffrey Dahmer

Ever since I did a brief article on Aileen Wuornos - and, tragically, the murder of my dear Palmerston North friend Stan late in 2006 - I find myself more and more interested in the darker recesses of the human mind.

According to crime writer Harold Schechter, only about fourteen percent of all serial killers have been gay, including Dennis Nilssen, Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy. Of female serial killers, only Aileen Wuornos was identifiably lesbian. Still others rape, murder and/or mutilate anyone unlucky enough to come across them, no matter what age, ethnicity or gender, like nineteenth century French serial killer Joseph Vacher, Russia’s Andrei Chikatelo, or paedophile and deranged fundamentalist Albert Fish in the twenties.

I’ve dealt with Dahmer and Wuornos in a previous Gaynz.Com article, so what about the others? John Wayne Gacy was physically and psychologically abused by his sadistic father, masqueraded as Pogo the Clown, and preyed on teenage males. He was also married, a father, and managed a KFC outlet in Iowa and later ran a Chicago contracting business. At night, he’d pose as an undercover police officer, and prey on runaways, drifters and rent boys, before luring them to his home, raping, murdering and dismembering their bodies. In 1978, after one teenager went missing after a job interview, police raided his flat, and found twenty seven bodies hidden beneath his house, while another six were located elsewhere on his property, and in an adjacent river. Sentenced to death in 1980, Gacy was executed by lethal injection fourteen years later.

Britain’s Dennis Nilsen seemed to be an initially more sympathetic figure. He had spent time in the army, trained as a butcher, then spent a year in the London Metropolitan Police before he finally joined the Manpower Services Commission. Antisocial and lonely, he only had two regular long-term relationships with other men before sliding into madness. In 1978, he asphyxiated his first victim, and stored the corpses in his furniture, flooring and then incinerating them in a bonfire, until he moved to a new flat in 1981. In 1983, he was exposed after changing tactics and dumping body parts down the toilet. A horrified plumber later found human bones and rotting flesh when the building’s sanitation system became clogged. He was sentenced to life.

Although the above preyed on other gay men, Colin Ireland proved to be an opportunist homophobic serial killer. When the United Kingdom imposed de facto criminalisation on consensual sadomasochistic activity after the Operation Spanner trial in the late eighties, Ireland preyed on five leathermen, who were unable to contact the police for fear of criminal apprehension themselves. Finally, however, Ireland was apprehended and imprisoned in 1993.

What turns someone into a serial killer? Many theories abound. According to several FBI investigators, serial killers tend to mostly be single white males, who are moderately intelligent but have poor educational histories, often working as unskilled labourers. They usually come from abusive or dysfunctional families, usually with criminal, mentally ill and/ alcohol and drug addicted parents who sexually, physically and emotionally abuse them. This leads the individual serial killer to develop his or her own mental health problems, often resulting in suicide attempts. They may also have an interest in predatory forms of paraphilia.

Canadian psychologist Robert Hare argues that psychopaths display about twenty discernable personality attributes. They possess a veneer of charm, but are also egotistical, have low interest thresholds, are prone to deceive others, connive to do so, and lack remorse or guilt for their behaviour. They also manifest shallow emotions, lack of empathy, callousness toward others, poor social skills, early behavioural problems, difficulties with strategic reasoning, poor impulse control, irresponsibility, serial monogamy or promiscuity, criminal youth, failure to follow bail conditions and versatility in prior criminal behaviour.

Apart from the specific gender of the victims in their cases, Gacy, Dahmer and Nilssen meet most of the above criteria in one way or another. They have more in common with their heterosexual counterpart predators like Jack the Ripper, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley (the Moors Murderers of the Sixties), Peter Sutcliffe (the Yorkshire Ripper of the seventies) and Australia’s Peter Dupas than ordinary gay men, in terms of origins.

Starkly though, their victims are often the poor and dispossed, whether male or female, often members of ethnic minorities, transients or sex workers, ironically often themselves on the run from their own abusive and dysfunctional family. Perhaps that is the final irony. While we rightly abhor the carnage of serial killers, there wouldn’t be a reservoir of victims if not for contemporary social service cutbacks or gaps in those services.
As a society, are we also to blame for contributing to these senseless obscenities?

Recommended:

Harold Schechter and David Everitt: The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers: Pocket: New York: 2006.