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

week.
    Rumor spread at Columbia that even though smoking was not allowed anywhere in the county jail, Dahmer could smoke because he was being cooperative during his confession. Dahmer had not only confessed to his crimes, he gave details including the victims’ names, where he met each man or boy, how he killed them, and what he did with the bodies.
    When the Columbia inmates heard that rumor, they were livid. Regardless of behavior, nobody let
us
smoke in our cells. It didn’t seem fair, especially when our crimes weren’t nearly as bad as Dahmer’s.
    We learned later that the rumors were just that–rumors; Dahmer never smoked in jail. The only time he smoked was when various court-appointed psychiatrists, psychologists, doctors, attorneys, and members of the clergy interviewed him for hours at a time. All of those interviews took place in either Judge Gram’s chambers or in the library next to his chambers. Officials let Dahmer smoke during his interviews, but never in the jail itself.
    Another rumor was that the guards at the county jail brought Dahmer hot
restaurant
meals after his hearings. I remembered during my stint there that, if I missed any regular meal time, all I got was a bologna sandwich and black coffee.
    The truth, which I again learned later, was that the only people who brought Dahmer anything to eat from the outside were his attorney, Gerald Boyle, and Boyle’s assistants. The meals they brought him were usually only sandwiches and candy.
    But the gossip mill made it sound as though Dahmer was living it up in jail.
    With rumors of preferential treatment running rampant, the inmates atColumbia took an early dislike to Dahmer because they were jealous of what they thought he was getting rather than hating him because of the horrendous things he had done. Somehow, that seemed backwards. The new recreation was inventing crude jokes at Dahmer’s, and his victims’, expense.
    “Do you know how much Dahmer’s bail is? An arm and a leg.”
    “Do you know what kind of shampoo Dahmer uses? Head and Shoulders.”
    The local newspapers started providing more grisly details about Dahmer’s crimes. Shocking a community of prisoners isn’t an easy thing to do, honestly, but the brutality of Dahmer’s crimes truly stunned us. Once again, the details of Dahmer and his crimes were the talk of the prison day after day.
    Because of the publicity surrounding the case and the severe cruelty of the crimes themselves, Dahmer lived in an observation cell on the fifth floor, also known as Tier 5 East, of the county jail so he could be monitored for suicide attempts.
    Tier 5 East had about one hundred and fifty single cells, each five feet wide by nine feet long. Like the rest of the prison, each cell had a sink, toilet, and a metal bunk bed.
    There are seven observation cells on Tier 5 East. The observation cells are for inmates with multi-dysfunctional problems, highly publicized crimes, or prisoners needing protective custody. Dahmer, who qualified on all three counts, had a deputy posted in front of his cell twenty-four hours a day. The officer recorded all of Dahmer’s daily activities and conversations in a journal.
    Because most of Dahmer’s victims were minorities, and because the prison population at the county jail is generally 75 percent African American, 15 percent Hispanic, and 10 percent Caucasian, the sheriff’s deputies felt a distinct need to protect him from the general prison population, including known, organized gang members within the walls of the jail.
    Rumors flew surrounding racial motivations in Dahmer’s killings. We saw on the TV news that minority communities gathered in Milwaukee, grieving over the deaths of their young men. They were outraged to learn that merelytwo months before Dahmer’s capture, two Milwaukee police officers returned a Laotian boy to Dahmer’s apartment, and the boy died at Dahmer’s hands a short time later. We even heard that one black church group went to