Dahmer Shocks Even Expert on Deviant Psyches : Murder: Renowned Newport psychiatrist’s examination found killer ‘rational’ about his unspeakable deeds.

As a frequent expert witness, Dr. Park Dietz has delved into the psyches of John Hinckley, Betty Broderick, Robert Bardo, William Bonin and a host of other notorious criminal figures.

But none strikes a scarier chord than his latest interviewee--Jeffrey Dahmer--if only because the Milwaukee serial killer assumed such a calm and “normal” facade, the Newport Beach psychiatrist said Monday at a news conference. Dietz had recently returned to Orange County after testifying for the prosecution for two days at Dahmer’s trial.

“I don’t think I’ve examined any offender since Hinckley (President Reagan’s would-be assassin) who was as articulate, rational and motivated to speak the truth” as Dahmer, said Dietz.

“What’s frightening to the public about criminals like Jeffrey Dahmer is that he seems so normal,” Dietz said. “He was so able to explain what he’d done and why he did it.”

Dahmer offered anything but the “frenzied” and “out of control” appearance that many would expect from a person accused of his heinous crimes, Dietz said.

At his sentencing Monday in Milwaukee County Circuit Court, Dahmer was ordered to spend the rest of his life in prison. Last week a jury found that he was sane when he killed 15 young men whom he had lured to his home. He drugged some and had sex with them after they were dead, sometimes dismembering and eating parts of the bodies.

“I take all the blame for what I did,” Dahmer told the court Monday.

Dietz, who lives in Newport Beach and is a psychiatric consultant for the FBI, was paid $3,000 a day--for a total of $39,000--by the prosecution to work on the Dahmer case. He has offered expert testimony in several hundred criminal and civil trials and has built his reputation as an expert on celebrity “stalkers.”

In the Dahmer case, Dietz interviewed the suspect for 18 hours in Milwaukee in early January and spent two days last week on the witness stand asserting his belief that under Wisconsin law, Dahmer was sane and legally responsible for his actions.

Since leaving the witness stand last Thursday, the 43-year-old Dietz has declined to elaborate in the media on his assessments. But at Monday’s press conference in Irvine, he detailed his macabre discussions with Dahmer and offered new insights into the case.

Dietz said he was shocked by how forthright and even analytical Dahmer was in discussing his crimes. Unlike the cases of most criminals, Dietz said, he didn’t have to spend most of his time discerning lies from truth in the defendant’s statements.

Dahmer is “trying to come to terms with what he’s done,” Dietz said. While the defendant could give details on chronologies of his crimes, “he’s as perplexed as anyone as to how this began,” he said.

While there were disputes among the seven psychiatrists who dealt with the case, Dietz said his own conclusions are firm: Unlike a Ted Bundy or other notorious killers, Dahmer was driven not by a desire to kill and induce suffering, but rather by a desire to have sex with men.

Dahmer once told him, Dietz said, that if he had found an attractive man who would have maintained an agreeable sexual relationship, “he’d never have had to kill anyone.” But because that didn’t happen, he was driven to drug and ultimately kill many of the young men he met--having sex with them before and after death, Dietz said.

The killer was sexually deviant, but not insane, Dietz said.

Dahmer’s success in avoiding detection for so long, his destruction of evidence and his use of condoms when having sex with corpses all pointed to an ability to control his actions and to his ultimate sanity, Dietz asserted.

Dietz praised the Milwaukee jury for seeing through the defense’s argument and for holding Dahmer legally culpable for his actions.

The verdict was important “as a message to countless other men who long to commit sexual crimes,” Dietz said. “If the jury had found Mr. Dahmer insane, it would have been open season for sex offenders.”

* 15 LIFE TERMS FOR DAHMER: Mass killer won’t be eligible for parole for 936 years. A1