Was Jeffrey Dahmer mentally ill? Psychiatrist said bizarre sex-zombie scenario could have stopped rampage
MILWAUKEE, UNITED STATES: Jeffrey Dahmer, a notorious serial murderer who killed 16 men between the ages of 14 and 33, was apprehended in 1991. He was found guilty and given 16 consecutive life sentences in 1992 but was killed two years later by another prisoner.
During his trial, a psychiatrist for the prosecution said that Dahmer would not have killed repeatedly if his attempts to lobotomize a victim and transform him into a zombie-like sex partner had been successful.
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"As far as his first choice, his real sexual interest was not in a corpse," Frederick Fosdal said during cross-examination at Dahmer's sanity trial. "He was more interested in homosexual intercourse with a live body."
According to Fosdal, who stated that Dahmer started the experiments because he had become tired of the labor involved in dismembering and disposing of victims, a zombie-like sex slave "was a solution to his dilemma."
Dahmer, according to Fosdal, had a mental illness at the time he murdered and dismembered 15 young men in Milwaukee County, but he was not legally insane since he was aware of his wrongdoings and was capable of stopping himself from killing.
Dahmer did not have delusions when he attempted to turn four of his victims into sex slaves by drilling holes into their skulls and injecting boiling water or an acid solution into their brains, the psychiatrist clarified. He stated that he thought Dahmer, who admitted to performing 17 dismemberment murders, would have never committed another murder if one of the experiments had been successful.
Fosdal admitted to Gerald Boyle, the defence counsel, that he did not go through the specifics of how Dahmer intended to feed or care for his 'slaves'. Dahmer suffered from necrophilia, a sexual attraction to corpses, but his attempts to create sex slaves showed that Dahmer was not attracted only to the dead, he claimed.
Although Fosdal refrained from claiming that Dahmer had a mental illness during his testimony, Dahmer did suffer from a number of sexual abnormalities. He admitted under cross-examination that Dahmer's disorder was so severe that he suffered from a mental disease.
However, according to Fosdal, the disease did not "cause the degree of impairment" required for Dahmer to be unable to follow the law. Two managers from a Milwaukee chocolate factory where Dahmer worked from 1985 until soon before his arrest, when he was fired for absenteeism, testified that they had no prior issues with him.
Under cross-examination, Wayne Boening and Melvin Heaney, the employees, claimed they were unaware that Dahmer had a skull in his locker for a portion of the time he worked there. Forensic psychiatrists concluded that Dahmer had psychopathy or an antisocial personality disorder in light of the evidence and specifics surrounding the murders.