After 12 Days of Grisly Testimony, Jury Retires to Weigh Dahmer’s Sanity

After 12 days of some of the most grisly testimony ever heard in a courtroom, a jury was asked Friday to decide whether confessed serial killer Jeffrey L. Dahmer is a depraved monster driven by lust or the pathetic victim of a mental illness that gave him an “insatiable appetite” to have sex with the dead.

In closing arguments in Dahmer’s sanity trial here, Milwaukee County Dist. Atty. E. Michael McCann described the former chocolate factory worker as a calculating criminal who chose his victims carefully and later dismembered their bodies “to get rid of the evidence.”

“He’s fooled a lot of people,” McCann told the jury before it began deliberations late Friday afternoon. “Please, please don’t let this murderous killer fool you.”

But describing Dahmer, 31, as “the most desolately lonely human being imaginable,” defense attorney Gerald P. Boyle told the packed courtroom that the victims of his grotesque murder spree “died because of a crazy man, not an evil man.”

“No human being on the face of the Earth could do anything worse than he did,” Boyle said of his client. “Nobody could be more reprehensible than this man if he’s sane. The devil would be a tie. But he’s sick; he isn’t the devil.”

The 12-member jury met Friday night; a verdict was not expected until today at the earliest. The panel has been sequestered since the trial began almost three weeks ago.

Dahmer, a white homosexual whose victims were mostly gay black men, pleaded guilty in January to murdering and dismembering 15 males. He faces mandatory life imprisonment for each murder unless the jury finds that he was insane at the time of at least one of the crimes. If it finds he was insane, he will be committed to a state mental institution, also probably for life. Wisconsin does not have capital punishment.

Under Wisconsin law, the defense had the burden of proving that Dahmer was insane at the time of the crimes. The key issue in the trial was whether Dahmer could control his bizarre impulses. He has acknowledged repeatedly that he knew his actions were wrong, leaving a claim that he could not control himself as the only basis for an insanity defense.

There was no dispute during the trial about the nightmarish nature of Dahmer’s life. After drugging and murdering his victims, he slashed the bodies open, committed sex acts on the corpses, dismembered the bodies and ate body parts of some victims.

Addressing the jury, Boyle hammered at the almost unbelievable nature of Dahmer’s crimes by reciting a long list of Dahmer’s actions:

“Cannibalism, drilling, necrophilia, showering with corpses . . . murders, lobotomies, defleshing, masturbating two or three times a day. . . .

“This is a sick boy here, plenty sick,” Boyle added. “And anybody who says (he’s) just mean and evil is trying to sell you something that can’t be sold. This is sickness.”

In Wisconsin, a mixed verdict--that Dahmer was sane when he committed some of the murders but insane when he committed others--would mean Dahmer would be committed to a mental institution and would be imprisoned later only if psychiatrists found that he was no longer dangerous. Boyle has said he would consider this a victory, and in his closing argument Friday he stressed what he called the progressive nature of Dahmer’s mental illness.

Much of the trial consisted of a duel between both sides through the testimony of psychiatrists and other experts. In his closing argument, McCann attacked the credibility of the defense experts and argued that because Dahmer planned the killings he should be held responsible for them and imprisoned.