Mike McCann, on the other hand, needed to prove that Dahmer was not legally insane — that he knew what he was doing was wrong, but did it anyway. In others words, Dahmer was an evil psychopath who lured his victims and murdered them in cold blood.
The pool of prospective jurors was warned, "You're going to hear about things you probably didn't know existed in the real world. In this case," Boyle told them, "you're going to hear about sexual conduct before death, during death, and after death. Will you be so disgusted by that you won't be able to listen?" Together, Boyle and McCann discarded potential jurors who were prejudiced against homosexuals or who didn't have any use for psychiatrists.
Anne Schwartz remembers the second day of jury selection before the prospective jurors were called into the room. Boyle held up a tabloid newspaper that read "Milwaukee Cannibal Killer Eats His Cellmate. "We all laughed," Schwartz recalled, "especially Jeffrey Dahmer... He was an attractive man when he laughed...I could see how so many were taken in by him."
On January 29, 1992, the jury and two alternates were selected. Only one black person was selected, which caused a protest among the family members. The entire case had seriously polarized the community along racial lines, from the moment the public heard Glenda Cleveland's story, through the discovery that most of his victims were black. Now, it seemed as though this jury of six white men and seven white women was just another example of racial injustice.
Boyle's defense consisted of some forty-five witnesses that would attest to various aspects of Dahmer's bizarre behavior and try to show that Dahmer's sexual and mental disorders prevented him from understanding the nature of his crime. Every hideous detail of what Dahmer allegedly did with his victims and every nightmarish thing that ever entered his head was fair game. The goal was to convince the jury that such alleged actions and such alleged thoughts did not happen with a man that was sane.
Boyle threw the question out to the jury: "Was he evil or was he sick?" Had the jury at that point in time taken a vote, it's very possible that they would have agreed with Boyle insanity defense.
Finally, it was McCann's turn to present his case. Dahmer, he told them, was a "master manipulator and deceiver who knew exactly what he was doing every step of the way, able to turn his urges on and off as easily as flipping a light switch. Did he attack other soldiers while he was in the army? Other students while at Ohio State University? The deaths, he said were not the acts of a madman, but the result of meticulous planning." (Davis).
Dahmer in Court
Two detectives took turns reading the 160-page confession. It was a catalog of sexual perversion. Detective Dennis Murphy stated that Dahmer "felt a tremendous amount of guilt because of his actions. He felt thoroughly evil." Then he quoted from Dahmer's own confession: "It's hard for me to believe that a human being could have done what I've done, but I know that I did it." He claimed that his fear of being caught was overwhelmed by his excitement of being completely in control.
The battle of psychiatrists over whether Dahmer was legally responsible and able to control his actions seemed to confuse the jury.
Finally, in his summation, Boyle drew a chart for the jury that took the form of a wheel. The hub of the wheel was Jeff Dahmer and all of the spokes coming out from the wheel were the elements of his deviance. He read them off quickly:
"Skulls in locker, cannibalism, sexual urges, drilling, making zombies, necrophilia, drinking alcohol all the time, trying to create a shrine, lobotomies, defleshing, calling taxidermists, going to grave yards, masturbating.....This is Jeffrey Dahmer, a runaway train on a track of madness..."
McCann rebutted, "He wasn't a runaway train, he was the engineer!" He was satisfying his extraordinary sexual cravings. "Ladies and gentlemen, he's fooled a lot of people. Please don't let this murderous killer fool you."
The jury deliberated for five hours and decided that Jeff Dahmer did not deserve to spend the rest of his life in a hospital, but in a prison cell. On all fifteen counts, Dahmer was found guilty and sane.
Anne Schwartz, who covered the Dahmer story for the Milwaukee Journal from its discovery through the trial, was "astonished at how normal this man looked and sounded...The day Jeffrey Dahmer was sentenced, I heard him read his statement to the court calmly and eloquently, and I wondered how easily I could have been conned.
By Marilyn Badsley
