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1. FRAGMENTARY EVIDENCE
JEFFREY DAHMER’S FIRST VICTIM
 
I should have gone to college and gone into real estate and got myself an aquarium, that’s what I should have done.
 
—JEFFREY DAHMER
 
When they pulled the car over at three in the morning on June 21, 1978, police in Bath Township, Ohio, thought they had a drunk driver on their hands. It was the summer solstice, the year’s longest day and shortest night. The sky was already beginning to lighten when the police officers ordered the man behind the wheel, a blond, bespectacled teenager, out of the car and put him through a sobriety test. He passed. One policeman shined his flashlight in the car, spotlighting a pair of garbage bags in the backseat. “What’s in the bags?” he asked.
 
The young man said the bags contained old garbage he’d forgotten to take to the dump. The police ticketed him for crossing the center line in the road and sent him on his way. “Scared the hell out of me,” Jeffrey Dahmer later told an FBI interviewer.
 
Had the officers detected the odor of decaying flesh, Dahmer might not be known today as one of the most evil men who ever lived. Seducer, murderer, necrophiliac, cannibal—Dahmer was all of these things. Thirteen years later, on the cusp of his eighteenth murder, he would be found out and would willingly, almost eagerly, tell all.
 
“I couldn’t believe it. I thought I was dreaming, so I went back home,” Dahmer said of his encounter that June night when, according to pagan legend, a fair brother kills his darker brother, who descends to the underworld until the winter solstice, and then returns to slay the lighter brother. Dahmer played out half of the legend that night in 1978. Another man would complete the cycle sixteen years later.
         
Four days before his nineteenth birthday, Steven Hicks was hitchhiking to his girlfriend’s house after a rock concert when Jeffrey Dahmer picked him up. The date was June 18, a few days after Dahmer’s graduation from high school. Dahmer’s parents were divorcing. Locked in a bitter custody battle over Jeffrey’s younger brother, neither parent showed any interest in the older boy’s future. His father had moved out of the family home in the upper-middle-class suburb of Akron, Ohio; his mother and younger brother were visiting relatives in Wisconsin. Jeffrey had the house to himself. Hicks, with brown hair and an engaging smile, accepted Dahmer’s invitation to stop at the house for a few beers, expecting Dahmer would drive him to see his girlfriend afterward. But Dahmer intended nothing of the sort.
 
Interviewed by a special agent of the FBI on August 13, 1992, Dahmer spoke of a “pretty good, pretty average” relationship with his parents and brother. His father was a research chemist with a Ph.D. His mother had emotional difficulties; Dahmer told investigators he felt guilty for having been born, as his mother had told him she suffered a nervous breakdown after his birth. While he was growing up both parents apparently were so absorbed in their own marital difficulties that they left him pretty much to himself. Neither appears to have worried about young Jeff’s fascination with dead animals, the way he brought them home, dissected them, removed their flesh, and preserved their skeletons. Heads of dead animals were impaled on sticks in the yard. Even if he wasn’t doing it consciously, young Jeffrey was perfecting his grisly art. While he worked on dogs, cats, and rats, I wonder if he imagined that one day he would use these skills on human beings. By the time he was sixteen, Dahmer was having homosexual fantasies in which he envisioned having total control over others. He told his FBI interviewer of one dream in which he struck someone with a blackjack and had sex with the inert body. His thoughts troubled him, and in high school he turned to alcohol to numb himself.
 
Standing at the side of the road, his thumb extended, Hicks provided an opportunity Dahmer found irresistible. The two shared a twelve-pack of beer, but when Hicks asked for a ride to his girlfriend’s house, Dahmer became furious. “I just didn’t want him to leave,” he later told detectives. As Hicks sat on a chair in the bedroom, Dahmer hit the young man on the back of his head twice with an eight-inch barbell, then strangled him. When he knew Hicks was dead, Dahmer cut the body open to examine it. A day or two later, he dragged the body to a crawl space under the house, cut it into small pieces, put it into garbage bags, and stuffed the bags into a drainage pipe in the backyard. Three days later, afraid that dogs attracted by the odor would dig up the remains, he loaded the bags into the car and had his encounter with the police.
 
Frightened by his narrow escape, Jeffrey drove home and set to work removing flesh from Hicks’s bones. Then, using his father’s sledgehammer and a large boulder at the side of the house, he smashed the bones and threw the fragments into the woods behind the house, turning first in one direction then another, as though he were scattering seeds.
 
Based on my own experience rendering bodies down to the bone, even after only a few days in the summer heat I’m sure the remains were difficult to work with. Despite the ugliness of it all, Dahmer could easily have smashed the bones and scattered them in half a day. Years later, when Dahmer was telling the police about his Milwaukee murders, he mentioned the Hicks episode as well, supplying only Hicks’s first name and saying he had gotten rid of the remains so thoroughly that no one would ever find them.
 
He was wrong. You can smash a blue-and-white china plate into a hundred pieces, but you’ll still be able to recognize that it’s a broken blue-and-white plate. You can smash bones and strew them around, but you still haven’t destroyed their value as evidence. What Dahmer did to Steven Hicks’s bones was identical to what happens to bones when a jet plane crashes or, to a lesser degree, what happens to the human skull when a bullet passes through it. It’s my job as a forensic anthropologist to piece bone fragments back together and identify to the highest possible degree of certainty whose bones they are. And that’s what I did when Steven Hicks’s bones arrived at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., where I was working in the physical anthropology department’s laboratory.
 
The long, dark corridor that leads from the elevator on the third floor of the Smithsonian Institution to the physical anthropology department’s laboratory is lined with drawers, each containing human remains. The Smithsonian houses the bones of some thirty thousand individuals. Some have been identified, others have not. Most were collected by Smithsonian scientists during an era of exploration when laws governing exhumation were more relaxed than they are now. I remember listening to one anthropologist as he recounted nights spent traveling down rivers in the Yukon, searching for graves and burials. He would collect as many remains as he could and then hurry off before neighborhood dogs caught up with him. The Smithsonian has for many years served as an institution fostering research and knowledge about humankind, and part of that knowledge is about past generations and people from around the world. When I worked there, I felt like the proverbial kid in the candy store.
 
Unlike the first two floors of the Smithsonian, where the public is welcome to explore the results of the institution’s work to increase knowledge of American history and heritage, the third floor is off limits. You have to apply at the security office with a very good reason for visiting what the news media often call “America’s attic.” Even with your security badge, a Smithsonian employee will turn the key in the elevator panel lock that opens the way to the third floor and accompany you to the lab, releasing you into the custody of the person you’ve come to see. Getting upstairs at the Smithsonian is difficult and carefully monitored for good reason. When the Federal Bureau of Investigation moved in across the street from the institution, in 1936, Smithsonian anthropologists began helping to solve crimes. The privacy of the third floor is necessary, not only to ensure the safety of the human remains and priceless artifacts housed there, but also to protect the integrity of the scientific processes practiced in the lab.
 
Along the third floor’s dark hallway on August 16, 1991, strode William A. Cox, coroner in Summit County, Ohio, carrying a carton containing remains he wanted us to analyze. Dr. Cox wanted to know if the bones he was bringing us belonged to Steven Hicks, murdered thirteen years earlier—and whether anyone else’s bones were mixed in with Hicks’s.
 
I’d come to the institution in 1988. To me it was hallowed ground, the former domain of Larry Angel, the man who first exposed me to forensic anthropology. I had gone on a field trip while I was an undergraduate at the College of William and Mary, and Dr. Angel had been there to give us an overview of the field. A smallish fellow, with muttonchop sideburns and a bow tie, christened by one magazine writer as Sherlock Bones, he’d run us through some of the things you could find out from examining a human bone. I was hooked. Dr. Angel, the personification of a “skeleton sleuth,” occupied the physical anthropology lab at the Smithsonian for many years, although he didn’t set the longevity record. That belonged to Dr. T. Dale Stewart, one of the lab’s founding fathers, who came to work faithfully for sixty-six years.
 
When Dr. Angel died, the Smithsonian brought in Doug Owsley to take his place. I’d known Doug from the University of Tennessee, where I began my doctoral work; he brought me along with him to Washington. Typically, Smithsonian anthropologists are hired for their expertise in a particular area. For example, Owsley’s research spans some three hundred years, specializing in Native Americans who lived on the Central Plains of the United States between the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. He’s also done considerable research on soldiers of the Civil War, remains found on Easter Island, Kennewick Man, and corpses buried in cast-iron coffins. He is a voracious examiner and collector of information. Doug brought me to the Smithsonian because of my eye for detail. The summer I met Doug, within moments of looking at some foot bones, I found cut marks suggesting that the bodies of some American Indians had been ritualistically taken apart at the joints and defleshed. This talent, which I consider a visual gift, came into play more than a decade later while I was working the Dahmer case.