CHAPTER TEN

 

Helen spent the next day interviewing one correctional staff face after another, until the faces all seemed to blur together. Of Dahmer, they all related similar if not identical versions of his makeup. Introverted, docile, full of remorse. And completely ingenuous.

“Was he suicidal?” Helen asked the prison’s psychologist, an unenlivened if not dull woman named Bernice Willet.

“Not actively,” the demure, dark-skinned woman replied. A mane of coal-black hair draped her shoulders over a nougat cashmere sweater. “He did have an active death wish, though.”

“To what degree of detail?”

There was a hint of an accent Helen couldn’t place. “He believed that he deserved to die for his crimes.”

So did the rest of the world, Helen thought.

“But guilt reversions such as this are quite common,” Willet continued, “among incarcerated serial-killers. The uncommon thing about Jeffrey was the absolute certainly with which he believed he was going to die.”

“You’re saying he predicted his own death?”

“In a sense, yes. Jeffrey was well aware that quite a few inmates wanted to kill him. This was well-known throughout the center’s inmate population, that someone, eventually, was going to get to him. This is the only aspect of Jeffrey that can be likened to a suicidal tendency. It was a passive one. He knew he was a marked man, yet he went out of his way to qualify for a domiciliary transfer from protective custody to the general prison block.”

This was interesting. He knew someone was going to get him eventually, Helen paused to think. Could he have…

“How vengeful was he?”

“Vengeful? Jeffrey?” The psychologist nearly smiled. “He wasn’t vengeful or aggressive at all. If anything, he was close to narcoleptic.”

Helen tried to focus. What was she thinking? “How smart was he, then, how creative?”

“That’s two completely different questions, Captain. Jeffrey had a higher than average IQ, but he scored very poorly on all the creative assembly batteries. The TAT, the Weschler Revised Adult Intuition Scale, the Bender Visual-Motor Gestalt Test—Jeffrey scored shockingly low on them all.”

“Maybe he did it on purpose,” Helen considered.

“No, no, what you don’t understand is that these tests can’t be faked. Even if an inmate wrote down deliberately contradictory answers, the score scales would pick that up at once.” Willet took a moment to assess Helen’s questions. “Why do you ask, though?”

“I want to know if Dahmer was possibly devious enough to fake his docility.”

“No,” Willet responded. “Ask anyone who knew him. But that’s a strange suspicion, I must say. Why would Jeffrey wish to fake something like that?”

I wonder, Helen thought.

 

««—»»

 

“…so I’d like to know what you think about that, Father,” Helen was asking her next interviewee, Father Thomas Alexander, the prison chaplain. This was the man who’d performed the famous “baptism” of Dahmer, in the prison’s whirlpool. “The word is you were Dahmer’s only real friend and confidant.”

“Well that’s true,” the religious man answered. “I was his confessor.” Alexander seemed slightly stiffened behind his industrial gray desk, as though he had a back problem. Salt and pepper hair, a lean face that seemed weathered more by sarcasm than by age. Helen couldn’t quite say why, but there was something about the man that caused an immediate dislike.

“I need to know about Dahmer’s visitors and correspondents,” Helen was next asking. A bumper sticker adhered to the front of the desk read CHRIST ROCKS! And another: THE POWER OF JESUS IS INFINITE. Helen noticed this at the same instant a power fluctuation briefly dimmed the office lights. Too bad Jesus doesn’t run Madison Gas & Electric.

“Power flux,” Alexander observed. “For some reason we get them all the time, anywhere on the prison’s east sector. And in response to your questions, Jeffrey was a Level Five inmate. It’s a federal categorization scale, only goes up to Seven, Seven being the most critical, One being the least. The average inmate is a One.”

“So as a Five,” Helen speculated, “Dahmer was deemed significantly more dangerous than most inmates?”

“Yes and no,” the priest answered. But that fuddled Helen. Was he a priest? Or a reverend, or a minister? She wasn’t sure. But he went on, “Dangerous isn’t a word I would use to describe Jeffrey, in spite of the crimes he committed.”

Helen made an assenting nod. “Ms. Willet just got done telling me he was introverted, even docile.”

“Exactly. But he got the Level Five tag due to the nature of his crimes. It’s based on committed acts, not personality makeup, a bad rap for Jeffrey actually.”

Helen had a hard time commiserating. Poor Jeffrey. The big, bad government slaps him with a sensitive prison status.

“But getting back to what you were asking,” Alexander said, “as a Level Five inmate, Jeffrey was allowed no outside visitors other than direct blood relatives unless otherwise authorized by the Director’s office. His mother was the only one who ever came to see him, and the only exceptions I’m aware of were a few news interviewers.”

“Which the Director authorized?”

“Yes, but this was very rare. Two, three times. The only reason Dipetro allowed it, I suspect, was because he knew Jeffrey would speak positively of the center.”

Dipetro. The prison’s warden. A mover and shaker who liked to play hardball was what Helen had heard, and who was bucking to run the state’s department of public safety come the next election. “All right,” she said, “so Dahmer had no visitors other than his mother. What about correspondents?”

“That’s where the criteria is even more unjust,” Alexander told her, “based on the Level Five tag. Jeffrey was not allowed to send or receive mail. Period.”

Helen squinted. “Why?”

The minister shrugged, made a denigrating turn of his mouth. “I haven’t a clue. It’s unconstitutional if you ask me.”

“So is murdering and cannibalizing seventeen people,” Helen couldn’t resist saying.

“For one thing, you’ve been listening to too much right-wing press. Jeffrey didn’t cannibalize all of his victims,” Alexander defended.

“All right. But even if he only cannibalized one of them, why are you so quick to defend him?”

“Because the defenseless need defenders.”

“Defenseless?” Helen wanted to laugh. “He premeditatedly drugged and murdered innocent young men to pursue a sexual dementia.”

A frown drew deep lines into Alexander’s face. “On the outside, true, Jeffrey fell sway to the relegations of evil. But God forgave him of all that. And it’s inexcusable for persons such as yourself to maintain this right-wing, Pat Buchanan, lynch mob mentality.”

Now it was all obvious; the boil had been popped. “I maintain no such thing,” Helen responded, “I’m merely—”

“You’re merely acting like everyone else. No pity at all for the pitiable. It wasn’t Jeffrey’s fault that he became what he became. It was society’s. It was our fault.”

Helen didn’t buy that at all, but she saw little point in debating it. The reverend’s liberal sentiments could not be assailed. “We’re getting off track, Father. I didn’t come here to argue with you.” Then she remembered her own track.

 Mail. Correspondence… Letters.

“I need to know why Dahmer wasn’t allowed to send and receive mail.”

““Ask Oc-Ther,” he said, “after, of course, you relieve yourself from my office. The door’s right over there.”

Helen rose from her seat, secured her purse. “You’re petulant and obnoxious, Father Alexander. But have a good day anyway.”

 

««—»»

 

“Groupies,” Wayne Edwards answered her question with the single word.

“Groupies?” Helen stretched the word. But Sallee had made a similar mention now that she thought of it.

Edwards was the Center’s Chief of Occupational Therapy, an attractive man with long dark hair and a beard, and a darker voice. He wore an open flannel shirt with a black t-shirt beneath. Oddly, behind him, hung a Doctorate in Economics. He smoked Marlboros, which caused a rare pang in Helen’s memory. Christ, that cigarette looks good, she thought. But what did he mean about groupies?

“Could you be more specific, please?”

Edwards tapped an ash in a stone tray. “There are a lot of whacks out there, Ms. Closs. Screwed up, obsessive, even pathological. They’re searching for some kind of identity but they’re too maladjusted to find it. It’s the same as rock stars, movie stars, writers, professional athletes—they all have groupies.”

“I still don’t get the significance of—”

“Serial killers have groupies too, lots of them. Pen pals, obsessive fans, like that. We call it ‘remote obsessional codependency,’ and it’s quite a bit more apparent than you would think. Those guidelines from the Bureau of Prisons recommend that any inmate labeled Five or above be barred from all out-of-house correspondence. That’s the only reason Dahmer got the tag: because he was so famous. Here at Columbus County Detent, we follow those guidelines, which I think is a good idea. A lot of prisons don’t. They don’t have to unless they’re a federal prison institution. Jolliette’s a great example, and so is Jessup and Fredricksburg and Lorton, and dozen’s of other local detention centers. They don’t like the federal government telling them what to do, so they’ll ignore any BOP recs. Gacy and Speck, for example, both Level Five convicts at Jolliette, were allowed to correspond with anyone they wanted to. Any letter mailed to them were delivered to them. And any letters outgoing were processed. Big mistake. A lot of these centers believe that the BOP mail restrictions are an infringement of a convict’s rights.”

Helen tried to figure. “In other words, the regs are a good idea because they prevent an inmate from influencing, and possibly inciting, these ‘killer groupies’ on the outside?”

“Well, sure, that’s part of the reason,” Edwards agreed. “Remote obsessional codependents are mentally unstable to begin with. A lot of these nuts will regard a particular killer as something like a god. But another reason is simple good taste. It doesn’t make a prison system look good when a killer’s letters wind up on the street. Look at what happened with Gacy. Now that he’s dead, his letters have a street value of over a hundred dollars each to collectors. Bundy’s letters go for three or four, and Manson… Anything with his signature on it can cop up to a thousand dollars. Can you imagine what a letter signed by Jeffrey Dahmer would be worth to some groupie or collector?”

“Now I get your point,” Helen admitted. It was something she hadn’t even considered.

“So that’s why Dipetro was smart to bar Dahmer from ingoing and outgoing mail. The whole thing’s just a bad move that makes everybody look bad. This center’s received literally tens of thousands of letters addressed to Dahmer. He was never allowed to see a single one.”

Helen agreed with the notion, but it was her bad luck, too. “That pops my balloon real fast,” she said, eyeing Edwards’ pack of Marlboro Box.

“Would you like one?” he offered.

“I’d love one but I can’t. I quit a year ago.”

“Good for you. And what do you mean it popped your balloon?”

“I’m sure you read about the ‘Dahmer’ letter found on P Street the other night.”

“Sure. And I think I just read today that handwriting experts verified it as Dahmer’s writing.”

“That’s right. But I don’t believe for a minute that Dahmer committed the murder. It’s a copycat, and the letter was written well before the murder.”

“Ah, I see,” Edwards said. “And you want to know how Dahmer’s handwriting got out of the prison. Well, I can tell you, we’ve already been all over that.”

“Enlighten me.”

“It had to have been written before he came here, either before he was caught, or during the short time he was in Milwaukee County pending trial.”

Helen had already tried to give that speculation some credence. “I don’t think so. The nature of the letter was religious.”

“But Dahmer had some minor religious fixations before he was even caught.”

“Right,” Helen agreed. “And the major biblical quote in the P Street letter was something Milwaukee PD overheard him say on the day he was arrested. All that was in the papers, sure. But whoever leaked the contents of the letter to the press didn’t quote it entirely. The letter also made a brief reference to Dahmer’s ‘baptism.’“

“Holy shit!” Edward exclaimed. “You’re kidding me? Dahmer wasn’t baptized until last May.”

Helen rubbed her chin in disgruntlement. “Right, and that can only mean that the letter was written sometime after last May, and how can this be, since Dahmer hasn’t been allowed to send any letters since the day he got here?”

Edwards leaned back in his gray, upholstered chair. He eyed her with something akin to amused sorrow. “Looks like you’ve got a hell of a problem on your hands, Captain.”

Helen sighed. “Tell me about it.”

 

««—»»

 

James J. Dipetro ran the slam; he’d been the Director of the Columbus County Detention Center for ten years, and for ten years there hadn’t been so much as a single escape. An action guy who didn’t fool around. They sent him in here to do a job, and now that he’d done it, he was up for a high-level post in the local government. Helen could imagine his outrage at the multitude of accusations suddenly leveled against himself and his facility. Right now this guy’s got about as much chance of making Director of Public Safety, Helen thought, as I’ve got of making the Olympic Figure Skating Team.

“You want what?” Dipetro asked. Hyper-tensive, Type-A all the way. A big beefy man with a trimmed beard and light-brown hair thinned by worry and stress. And a derisive glare sharp as an icepick.

“Access to your maintenance logs and personnel rosters,” Helen repeated. She’d gotten nowhere in the Records and Admin offices. “I want to cross-reference them, see which employees had any kind of regular contact with Dahmer.”

“What the hell for?”

“To verify a conspiracy theory.”

“That’s all I need,” Dipetro griped. “As if the goddamn press isn’t bad enough telling everyone that Dahmer’s still alive. Now I got the state cops wanting to tell them it was one of my people who helped get him out.”

This guy was going to be a tough case. “That’s what I’m trying to disprove, Mr. Dipetro. I don’t believe that Dahmer’s alive anymore than you do. But this entire furor in the press revolves around the letter left at the crime scene. Your upper staff have assured me that Dahmer was barred from maintaining outside correspondence because of his federal status rating—”

“That’s right,” Dipetro hastened to agree. “That asshole hasn’t sent or received a single letter since the day we locked him down.”

“—therefore it must’ve been someone working inside the prison who was forwarding mail for him. This whole schmear in the papers revolves around the P Street letter; that’s how they’re able to maintain the assertion that Dahmer escaped. If I can prove that one of your employees was smuggling out correspondence for him, then the lid gets slammed shut on the press and you’re off the hot seat.”

“Oh, well—”

 “And furthermore, if I’m lucky, it’ll probably lead me to the real killer, who’s probably some kind of psycho groupie, a guy who paid one of your employees to exchange correspondence under the table.”

Dipetro’s pit-bull demeanor changed quick when he realized that Helen was on his side. “Right. Great. So tell me exactly what you want.”

Helen gave him a card with the state police data-processing batch/search-code on it. “Tell the people in your records office to transfer all prison maintenance logs and duty rosters to my computer. Then I can run a cross-check.”

“You got it, but…” Dipetro grumbled through a pause. “I can tell you right now, all the DOs on transport and escort duty have a revolving schedule. Same in any prison, for obvious security reasons. And as for the rest, contractors and maintenance personnel are never allowed in the cells unless the inmate is on detail somewhere else in the center.”

Helen felt certain she was on the right track. “Fine, Mr. Dipetro. But let’s just do this my way, okay?”

“Sure, sure,” he mumbled and picked up the phone. “Right now I’d sell my soul to get these newspaper assholes off my back.”

 

««—»»

 

Two hours later, back in her own office, Helen had a name.

 

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