Serial Killer's Soul by Herman Martin Read Free Book Online Page A

suggested placement on “SMURF Unit 6”. After the unit manager, social worker, and psychiatrist interviewed me, Unit 7 actually became my home.
    Three months later, on July 23, I was returning to the unit after recreation time when I noticed staff standing around the television, watching the news. I remembered the time: it was 2:30 p.m. Milwaukee police arrested a man for murdering a number of young men and boys.
    The man’s name was Jeffrey L. Dahmer.
    We learned that at 11 p.m. the previous evening, cops arrested Dahmer at his Milwaukee apartment. Officers, homicide investigators, and medical examiners examined the contents of every room in his apartment and confiscated boxes, photographs, papers, freezers, plastic barrels, power tools, knives, kitchen equipment, and human body parts. As we watched the TV in the dayroom, the unit psychologist predicted that whoever this guy was, he’d end up at Columbia with us.
    I went back to my cell to watch my own thirteen-inch black-and-white TV. I wanted to learn more about this man, Dahmer.
    As the story unfolded, the man and his crimes became the main topic of conversation throughout the prison. No matter where we were–in the gym,in the library, outdoors, in our cells, the dayroom, classrooms, anywhere in the prison–all anyone talked about was Dahmer, speculating about the crimes and the nature of the man who committed them.
    I was fixated with the case. From that day on, I watched everything I could about the gruesome murders. I read articles in the daily newspapers to keep up with the events as they unfolded. Dahmer confessed to killing seventeen men and boys and performing sex acts on them. I read all the grisly details the paper was willing to print.
    Photographs and fingerprints complete, Dahmer was sent to the county jail in downtown Milwaukee. I knew that place well. The cells were small, five feet wide and eight feet long. Each contained a steel bed attached to the wall plus a stainless-steel toilet and sink and one small shelf on the wall.
    Dahmer received the customary gray paper jumpsuit, his regular clothing confiscated. Prisoners were given paper so they couldn’t rip their clothes up and hang themselves in their cell, like I had tried when I was jailed.
    The jail itself wasn’t that old, built in the early 1950s, but it sure felt and looked dated on the inside. It was in the Safety Building, which was six stories tall. Three floors were used as the jail, which held about five hundred prisoners. The rooftop was used for recreation, for jogging, or just standing around in the fresh air.
    An antiquated morgue was in the basement. The basement also was used for discipline purposes for inmates who violated rules. During recent years, the jail housed prisoners from the House of Corrections in Franklin, Wisconsin, who were in Milwaukee for court hearings or trials, or for holding men with probation and parole violations.
    Inmates in the county jail were often on lockdown twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It wasn’t a pretty place. Peeling paint and graffiti covered the walls of every cell. In the winter the place was blazing hot in some places and freezing cold in others because old-fashioned radiators “heated” the jail. I remember being cold in my cell when I was there because I had no blankets or sheets, just a four-inch-thick blue mattress on top of the steel slab bed.
    The only sounds were cell doors, clanging when they opened or closed,or the faint wail of police and fire sirens in the distance. That old county jail was also infested with two things I really hated: mice and cockroaches. It was the most uncomfortable place I’d ever been, so crowded that sometimes inmates slept on mattresses on the dayroom floor.
    A few inmates in jail with misdemeanor offenses got jobs within the jail system. These men, called “trustees,” usually do general cleaning or assist with meals. When I was there, the trustees were paid about fifteen dollars a