Dahmer Found Sane in Grisly Murders of 15

As the relatives of his victims quietly wept, a jury decided Saturday that confessed serial killer Jeffrey L. Dahmer was legally sane when he murdered and dismembered 15 boys and men in one of the nation’s most grotesque killing sprees.

Dahmer, who faces mandatory life imprisonment for each of the murders, will be sentenced Monday. Wisconsin law does not permit capital punishment.

The dramatic end to the case that shocked and horrified this city and the nation came as Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Laurence C. Gram Jr. read 15 separate verdicts that Dahmer did not suffer from mental disease at the time of each of the killings. When Gram read the 15th verdict, assuring that Dahmer would be imprisoned and not committed to a state mental institution, cheers and applause erupted in the part of the courtroom reserved for relatives of Dahmer’s victims.

Two of the 12 jurors disagreed with the verdicts, but the votes of only 10 were necessary for a ruling in the unusual sanity trial.

Dahmer pleaded guilty to the murders last month. He also pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. To find him insane, 10 of the jurors had to agree that he suffered from a mental disease that prevented him either from knowing right from wrong or from being able to control his actions.

While the trial centered on the question of whether Dahmer could control himself, the jury never got that far, ruling that he did not suffer from a mental disease.

“This met my fondest hope,” Milwaukee County Dist. Atty. E. Michael McCann said of the verdicts. “The tragedy here is (that) I think he could have stopped at any time.”

Dahmer’s defense attorney, Gerald P. Boyle, said he warned the 31-year-old former chocolate factory worker earlier Saturday that he would probably lose the insanity defense.

After the verdicts, Boyle said, Dahmer told him: “ ‘Thanks for trying.’ ”

The relatives of Dahmer’s victims praised the jury of five women and seven men who deliberated for about 10 hours beginning Friday afternoon.

“I am just overwhelmed by that verdict,” said Therese Smith, the sister of Edward W. Smith, 28, who was killed by Dahmer in June, 1990.

Dahmer sat impassively, his eyes downcast, as Gram read the 15 verdicts. His father, Lionel, and stepmother, Shari, were also in the courtroom. After the verdicts were read, the Rev. Gene Champion, a Baptist minister who has been counseling some of the relatives of the victims, spoke briefly with Dahmer’s parents.

Champion and others said they hoped the verdicts by a jury that included only one black would begin to diminish the racial tension in the wake of a murderous rampage by a gay white whose victims were mostly gay black men.

After the verdicts, the jury met with state-appointed psychiatrists. Jurors have been offered free counseling after hearing some of the most gruesome testimony ever presented in a courtroom, including graphic accounts of how Dahmer slit open his victims, performed sex acts on their corpses and cannibalized some of them.

Under Wisconsin law, Boyle had the burden of proving that Dahmer was insane at the time of the killings. However, the level of proof that Boyle was required to meet was not the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard used in criminal trials, but “the greater weight of the evidence” measurement that applies to civil cases.

The key issue throughout the trial was whether Dahmer could control his bizarre impulses for sex with the dead. He admitted 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.

Hoping for an insanity verdict in at least one of the 15 murder counts, Boyle stressed what he called the progressive nature of Dahmer’s mental illness. He said that after Dahmer killed his fifth victim, Anthony Sears, in March, 1989, “we’ve got ourselves a very, very sick, uncontrollable young man.”

Dahmer has confessed to the murder and dismemberment of 17 men and boys. He faces a separate murder charge in Ohio in connection with the killing of Steven Mark Hicks near Dahmer’s boyhood home in Bath, Ohio, in 1978. He has not been charged with what is believed to be his first murder in Wisconsin in 1987 because the body of the victim, Steven W. Tuomi, has never been found.

The incident that most shocked the city was the discovery that last May, two months before the murderous rampage was stopped, police were called to Dahmer’s apartment by reports of a naked, bleeding youth in the street. Dahmer convinced the police officers that the youth was his gay lover who had gotten drunk. The officers returned him to Dahmer’s apartment.

During the trial, it was disclosed that the 14-year-old youth, Konerak Sinthasomphone, had been a victim of one of Dahmer’s crude lobotomy attempts. Dahmer killed Sinthasomphone shortly after police left his apartment. He also killed four others before he was discovered two months later.