WI v. Jeffrey Dahmer (1992): Dr. Park Dietz

foreign [Music] your writing's in the area and your interests is that correct I presume so would you tell us what the term paraphilia means and what is a paraphilia the term paraphilia comes from Greek roots and was reintroduced in 1980 as a means of getting away from the term sexual deviation that had been used before that time and the Greek Roots refer to the idea that what a person with a paraphilia is sexually attracted to is something alongside the normal other than the normal area of sexual interest and each of the paraphilias for which we have a name refers to a more or less common form that unusual sexual interests may take now the fact is that anything or just about anything can become sexually attractive to an individual and all manner of unusual even bizarre sexual interests are observed but only some of them happen often enough that it's been useful to develop a particular name for that kind of sexual attraction there's a recognition in dsm-3r and certainly among people who work in this area that the names that happen to be mentioned in the book are not quite sufficient because there are so many other kinds of sexual interests that can occur and become a particular preference or interest of an individual and so to accommodate those other ones that aren't specifically named or listed there is a heading referring to paraphilias not otherwise specified and it's possible to identify a very long list of kinds of paraphilias that exist but the word means no more than what we used to mean by sexual deviation in other words it is a pattern of an enduring [Music] sexual interest in a particular kind of unusual image it's considered that the ordinary or usual sexual image that someone finds erotic is an adult human being who is alive and when individuals find something else sexually exciting and persist in that pattern of sexual excitement for long enough we happen to use six months as an arbitrary cutoff point then we label that a paraphilia now there was one political issue that came up during the dsm-3r discussions about which there's some disagreement and that is whether one should call a particular interest of paraphilia the person never acts on it and the way the debate was resolved was to say that we will only agree on using the term paraphilia for the purposes for which dsm-3r was devised when an individual has strong sexual urges toward a particular unusual kind of activity and either is bothered by those urges or acts on them or both so if a person has such urges doesn't mind having them and doesn't act on them it's technically not a paraphilia I was in the minority on that particular vote because I think if someone fantasizes torturing a woman every time he has sex with his wife it's a paraphilia even if it doesn't bother him but my colleagues outvoted me and think that it shouldn't be given a label unless it bothers him or he acts on it so a paraphilia is wanting to do some unusual sexual behavior repeatedly over at least six months and either being bothered by one's desires or acting on them can you list some of the more commonly known and recognized paraphilias well some of the more familiar ones are exhibitionism in other words individuals who have the desire to expose themselves to unsuspecting strangers if they repeatedly for more than six months have such desires and are either bothered by that or act on it then that's the diagnosis of exhibitionism a kind of paraphilia if an individual likewise has the interest in peeping into people's windows and watching strangers undress or have sex and is bothered by that or does it for long enough then that's the paraphilia of voyeurism if an individual likes to make obscene phone calls and is bothered by that or does it for long enough that's the paraphilia of telephone scatologia if an individual wishes to rub up against unsuspecting strangers as men are known to do in subways in New York and crowded elevators everywhere then that is if he does it or is bothered by the desire the paraphilia of frat tourism [Music] if one wishes to have sexual contact with a corpse and is either bothered by the idea or does it that's the paraphilia of necrophilia if an individual wants to have sexual activity with Children Under 12 and either does it or is bothered by The Urge that's the paraphilia of pedophilia all of those I think are described specifically and are mentioned at least mentioned by name and dsm-3r but that doesn't even begin to cover the turf because there are so many unusual things that people from time to time find sexually exciting fetishism is another one that's described there in which an individual has a specific sexual interest and some kind of inanimate object or material such as latex or leather garments or high-heeled shoes or some kind of underwear if someone wishes their Partners to use such things or likes to masturbate while fondling such materials or things and they're either bothered by that or act on it that's the paraphilia of fetishism and all the paraphilias are the same and being nothing more than what it is someone wishes to do technically we only give the label if they wish to do it long enough and if they're bothered by the wish or if they do it but it's nothing more than what they have an urge to do and this is essentially a sexual urge yes this this to put it another way I mean a more scientific way to make the diagnosis really would be to to look at what gives men an erection and that's how in a research laboratory one Studies paraphilias by seeing what stimuli will produce erection in the mail and if men regularly can become erect to a particular kind of unusual image then that is what scientifically we mean by a paraphilia so it has to do with what what is a turn on now if it's a normal kind of image that the culture accepts then we don't call it a paraphilia so in the United States no one would call it a paraphilia for men to be attracted to the kinds of women portrayed in Playboy Centerfolds because many men will respond to that image with an erection but if they're responding in the same way to a picture of someone who is bound and chained that would be called a paraphilia because that's not an acceptable image in our culture so you can see that to some extent it's what's accepted by the culture and society that determines which interests become labeled paraphilias and and which do not then the term paraphilia relates really to what excites the person sexually it does not as such apply to the strength of the sexual drive would that be accurate that's very accurate the strength of Sex Drive is something altogether different from what it is one wishes to do an individual can have pedophilia that is the attraction to children and yet have a low sex drive and only be motivated to have sex with a child once every six or eight months and not to be particularly motivated the rest of the time or an individual can have a high sex drive and also be pedophilic and want to have sex with a child many times a day strength of the drive is separate from whether they have the paraphilia or not and people have a lot of variation in the strength of their sex drive do some persons have more than one pedophilia at the same strike that have more than one paraphilia at the same time yes it's it's quite common for individuals to have multiple paraphilias simultaneously that's partly a byproduct of the way we classify the paraphilias we've broken the more common forms down into clusters that we've given names and because of the way we've named named them someone who likes to expose himself and make obscene phone calls would have be given two paraphilias but we could have named it differently we could have said that we'll call a particular paraphilia of courtship a courtship disorder if someone goes about interrupted courting rituals and either just exposes himself or makes phone calls or just touches people or rubs against them those are all examples of tidbits of normal courting Behavior because in a normal courtship one would look at people and call them on the phone and there'd come a time that they would touch and and perhaps rub and see each other naked but in the paraphiles there may be just a piece of that all of that that they're particularly interested in and we've broken it down with these different names but it's very common to have multiple paraphilias and one line of Research indicates that on the average someone who has one paraphilia is likely to have two to three paraphilias how do persons who have the paraphilias adapt to the paraphilia well there are a variety of adaptations possible to those who are going to live with with these urges and and not make any effort to change them those who choose to live with the disorders can adapt lawfully or quasi-lawfully or unlawfully at the lawful end of the scale the periphile May confine himself completely to Fantasy so that when he is masturbating he fantasizes about his unusual interest when he is having sex with an adult partner he fantasizes about his particular interest and of course there's nothing illegal about that and he's able to achieve an orgasm by fantasizing his favorite activity even if he's engaging in apart in sex with a partner who doesn't quite fill the bill for what he'd most like to be doing because the fantasy in his mind allows him to have all the excitement necessary to achieve orgasm and so he's relieved the biological urge or he's relieved his sex drive in that way another way that people lawfully adapt is to find a partner who is willing to simulate whatever the unusual desired activity is and who by agreement will wear particular kinds of clothing or perform particular kinds of Acts or pretend to be something they are not in order to fulfill the partner and that too is perfectly legal so for example men with necrophilia May merely fantasize about corpses while they masturbate or fantasize about corpses while having sex with a life partner or they may find a consenting partner who will simulate death and so this accounts for men who from time to time will ask their wives to take a cold bath before having sex and to life still with their eyes closed that simulates a death-like condition and some wives will gratify their husbands not fantasies and desires that way which is lawful one of the lawful adaptations of a necrophile in addition to those there are some things that begin to skirt some legalities such as making use of pornography or illegal obscenity or pornography to fulfill the Fantasy by looking at pictures of whatever it is that is stimulating and unusual or by finding a paid partner who performs either Frank prostitution Services of an unusual kind or else some simulation for example in in West Hollywood there are or at least there were when I went out with the vice squad and toured these places at least half a dozen specialized bondage and domination parlors where for a fee a man can have a partner who will simulate being a sexual Master will chain the client and spank him or whip him or beat him or on demand will play the role of a slave and allow the client to restrain and spank and otherwise abuse the person who works there some such places engage in outright prostitution and so explicitly sexual Services others don't some prostitutes cater specifically to clients with these unusual tastes and through those means using pornography or these services or prostitutes many paraphilic individuals can gratify their sexual drives actually engage in some of the sorts of things that they fantasize as most arousing or have particularly high quality photographs or images of what they like best and can fulfill their sexual drives and gratify themselves in those ways and then there are those of course who adapt unlawfully and to act on their paraphilic desires by committing crimes or commit crimes in order to be able to fulfill the paraphilic desire so for example there are fetishists who like a particular kind of underwear who will lawfully purchase it at a store or quasi-lawfully purchase it by mail soiled from somebody in the business of selling soiled underwear but there are also others who will commit the crime and shoplift underwear or steal it from the laundromat or steal it from a clothesline or even burglarize a house to go through an underwear drawer and steal underwear from a victim those are all varying ways that someone with that fetish can adapt to the desire but only some people commit the crimes to fulfill their sexual urges there's some paraphiles who never never act out their paraphilia probably most paraphiles never act on their paraphilias in any criminal way in terms of the person who wants to stop involvement in the paraphidia would you respond to what that person can do looking first to the fantasy aspect and then to the activity aspect the acting out aspect well with all due respect I think that it's immaterial and irrelevant to the issues before this court that some paraphilias cannot do certain things relative to their paraphilias is having any relevance in this inquiry and objective form of the question objection overall well The paraphile Who chooses not to commit a crime need not commit the crime he at the paraphile is as free as any other human being to choose whether to commit a crime to gratify his wishes or to not commit a crime to gratify his wishes just as an individual who would like to have money fasts and lots is in our society free to choose to commit a crime to get that money or go about it the hard way and earn it an individual who would like a particular kind of sex soon and a lot is free to commit a crime to gratify that desire or to choose not to commit the crime but gratify the desire in these other lawful or quasi-lawful ways the choice is exactly the same the freedom to make it is the same the paraphilia provides no more than the motive for what a person would like to do it does not determine whether the person does it does not impair an individual's appreciation of wrongfulness nor does it compare and individual's capacity to conform conduct it only determines what it is one wishes to do now some paraphiles do commit crimes to gratify their desires and when one looks at the peripherals who commit crimes to gratify themselves they are different in certain ways from the peripherals who don't just as people who want money and commit crimes to get it differ from people who want money and don't commit crimes to get it and it turns out that the differences are basically the same the people who commit crimes to get what they want either have something wrong with their personality their character so that they are not inhibited from the crime because they don't have the strength of character they don't have the principles the morality the usual things that keep people from committing crimes or else the ver the other very common difference is that people who abuse substances much more often commit crimes to gratify their desires than people who don't and so one finds that paraphilic criminals are much more often personality disordered alcoholic or drug abusers then paraphilic non-criminals just as robbers are much more often personality disordered or alcoholic or drug abusers then other people who'd like money but don't Rob can you tell us what paraphilic interest Mr Dahmer has well technically looking at the dsm-3 our approach to it one would point to several very specific paraphiliates that are described however there's a broader approach under which there's far more to say about Mr Dahmer's particular interests sticking to the to the more technical approach to it the three paraphilias that I think he meets the criteria for our first necrophilia because for more than six months Mr Dahmer had fantasies of and a desire to have sexual contact with Corpses and in fact did so and so that qualifies as necrophilia secondly frat tourism which is f-r-o-t-t-e-u-r-i-s-m which refers to the desire to rub up against someone else without their consent the evidence for that is that there were occasions when Mr Dahmer did that to strangers at Summerfest in which he would go around people where they were playing rock and roll and drinking beer and he would rub up he'd find a man with an attractive physique and rub up against him we did that on several occasions but more importantly he did this with the men that he brought back to his apartment including the ones who became the victims of the crimes with which he's charged and the rubbing up against men he had drugged in bath houses or at hotels or at his grandmothers or at the apartment whether he killed them or not rubbing up against men when they're drugged is rubbing against an unconsenting partner and therefore that's fraught tourism and he did that for more than six months and the third one that I think one might say he has requires a little bit more of an explanation dsm-3r makes mention of a paraphilia known as partialism partialism is an older term and it if my memory is correct on this I think it may have been I who recommended we put it back in the book I don't recall clearly on that but I think I argued that in favor of it and originally the idea of partialism was to distinguish it from fetish fetishism where a fetish is some inanimate object that the person finds attractive in partialism it is a part of the human body that one finds attractive the most familiar kinds of partialism that many clinicians have seen and that are the subject of jokes on shows like Night Court are foot fetishism or hair fetishism these used to be called under dsm-3r those would be called partialism rather than a fetish because it's a part of the human body that's sexually attractive namely feet we're here for example Mr Dahmer told me about a man he had encountered at a bath house who apparently had a foot fetish the man would for for long periods of time give other men's feet a massage by taking the other man's foot in his mouth and he would suck on the other man's foot and massage it with his mouth for a prolonged period that would be suggestive that such an individual had a foot fetish or in current terms partialism with respect to feed the the in the case of hair of course it's normal for hair to be appealing and there's an entire industry devoted to making it so of hair products but where men find hair by itself appealing and for example will cut the hair from a woman's head in a crowded place or in a library and then go home and masturbate while holding and fondling the hair or looking at it that's partialism it's only a part of the person that becomes the focus of attention well I think that partialism could be applied to describe Mr Dahmer's enduring interest in one particular part of the human body namely the internal organs somewhere along the line he acquired a sexual attraction to the appearance of the viscera which of course do have a striking appearance and as we described what about it he found appealing it's my understanding that what he found appealing was the glistening surfaces of the tissues the fact that they were colorful and although partialisms usually referring to things on the exterior of the body perhaps the term applies here and if it doesn't then it would be one of the other paraphilias not how they were specified and the Greek name that might be used for that would be splanchnophilia where splanchno refers to divisora and philia the attraction to it I'm not aware of anyone else using that term but several other times when someone's introduced some Greek term for a paraphilia it turns out that someone else had used the term 20 years ago for the same thing or in the last century because there's nothing new about about any of these conditions and nor is Mr Dahmer is the first case of someone with that particular sexual attraction to the appearance of viscera so that can be the last thing Mr Dahmer is what did you say I said Mr dahmers is not the first case of a sexual attraction to viscera those are the particular patterns that I gave diagnostic labels to but I don't think that tells the whole story of Mr Dahmer's sexual interests because there's a really a more important theme even than those and that is that what I believe he has consistently indicated and his actions are consistent with the idea that what is most appealing sexually to him is having control over another human in such a way that he can make primarily gentle uses of their body sexually the favorite activities he describes are what he often refers to as light sex ing touching rubbing hugging the kinds of activities that between consenting adults would often amount to foreplay are things that he has emphasized with victims and with other partners those were activities and those are normal activities with a consenting adult that give him pleasure and that he always enjoyed but he describes difficulty in getting partners to restrict themselves to just that because the partners that he found most often wanted to do more than that and one of the things more than that that some of them wanted to do was to have anal sex with him which he did not like having had a few painful experiences he did not want to be in that position also the partners that he was able to find universally had a deadline when they had to leave and he was unable to spend as much time as he wanted doing these more gentle ordinary activities with them that desire to be able to do those things with the men he found attractive is I think central to his desire to be able to keep them in some way where he could continue to do those things without having demands on him that were difficult to meet or painful or that he didn't want to meet without having a deadline by which it had to be done and so he devoted a considerable amount of his energy to finding a way to be able to have someone where if not someone some thing that could serve that role for him as being the person or body or part with whom he could have such gentle activities as rubbing and touching and hugging and masturbation and kissing and fondling and it's in the course of trying to find a way to keep a person for that that he engages in most of the more extreme behaviors surrounding the killings for which he's charged if I understood what Mr Dahmer told me correctly and we spent a lot of time on this during during my examination his preference his first choice would have been always to be able to have a living breathing consenting partner who permitted him to engage in all of these light sex to use this term activities that were his favorite and in fact he said to me that had any of the victims agreed to stay with him for several weeks then he would not have killed them if they'd agreed to stay and do these things and there were a few whom he found particularly appealing because the physique was so close to his ideal that had he been able to have a continuing relationship with those men he felt he would have had no need for any of the rest of what he did no particular desire to do it likewise there were a couple ideal men in videos whom he pointed out to me and described what it was about the physique he liked so which had they been available to him as consenting partners would have been all that he wanted or felt a need for to fulfill himself sexually but those ideal men weren't obtainable and the men who came as close to it as he found such as Mr Sears were going to have to leave by a deadline they had some time they had to go so if he couldn't have them in that way as a consenting continuing partner the second best way would be to have them in some other state in which they would remain with him and still be available for these activities and the second choice that would be best for him he thought would have been if he could have had one of them whose will had been destroyed he wanted to be able to take one of the men and make it so that that man had no will of his own the term he used to describe these people with no free will that he wanted to create was the term zombies and he tried two techniques for the creation of zombies the point of having a zombie was that he would have a living breathing warm human and one of the things he liked about that was that this interest in the viscera led him to enjoy listening to the sounds of the internal organs listening to the heartbeat listening to the sounds that an abdomen makes hearing the body sounds was both reassuring and exciting to him and so he would ask victims if he could listen to them but he would ask partners that and after drugging men it's one of the things he would do is to listen to their body sounds well with a zombie had he succeeded he would he thought be able to continue to do all the things he liked including that and the two techniques he actually tried were of course drilling into the skull and injecting acid into the what he thought would be the frontal lobe region and likewise drilling into the skull and injecting boiling water into the frontal lobe region he considered another possibility which was drilling a whole more at the top of the skull and inserting some electrical apparatus and plugging this into the wall to try to use electricity to achieve the goal but he felt he lacked the technical knowledge of electricity to do this and told me he didn't really know how to make a switch or a rheostat but that he'd thought about the idea the purpose here was to have someone who wouldn't leave him who wouldn't make demands who wouldn't turn him in who would do none of these other problematic things and yet who would be available as a sexual partner and so in that sense what these zombies would be would be sex slaves who meet his particular sexual desires and Mr Dahmer is not the first paraphilic and nor the first serial killer to wish to create sex slaves and to take steps to try to create such persons who would be available for his sexual use his third choice and one that he often got really was an unconscious partner because someone who is unconscious but alive allows him to do all of those things that he likes to do like kissing and rubbing and listening to body sounds and touching and hugging and of course that he did many times at bath houses a number of times at hotels to which he took men from the from the bars with all of the victims whom he's charged with killing and with some of the people who got away and that activity of drugging them allows him a period of hours when he uses the dose he preferred during which he can engage in all of these activities with an individual without having demands made on him without having somebody who's going to get up and leave in the middle of what he's enjoying where he has enough time to masturbate several times and to fulfill himself sexually in all of these ways that unconscious victim mode was of course his principle means of gratification for some period when he was going to the bath houses a lot but he continued to use that with the other victims and while not as good as the consenting awake partner who was compliant with all this it was certainly sufficiently fulfilling for him the problem of course is that keeping them unconscious long enough would be difficult to do keeping them alive while unconscious would be difficult to do and if they regain consciousness sufficiently they may escape and may turn him in for doing it as in fact nearly happened earlier and did happen eventually his next choice after that and one he only thought about and went to the library to look into briefly was that if he could find one man with sufficiently attractive physique to keep permanently while dead that would be useful because he could do many of the things he wanted they're not quite all and here what he considered was something he heard about on a TV show when we discussed it we both thought we might have seen it on 60 Minutes but neither he nor I am sure of the particular show but one show did something on people who freeze-dried their pets and Mr Dahmer's idea was that if he could get the apparatus for that and freeze dry a man of the appropriate physique he'd at least be able to continue to have him to look at while masturbating pose perhaps in various positions if they were flexible enough in that state to fondle to rub to hug to touch they would not have sounds to listen to but they would have a lot of what he was interested in and he thought that if he'd been able to freeze dry one of the more attractive men that he would not have had a desire for the other victims the step he took was to go to the library and in a magazine he thought was called taxidermy found an advertisement from A supplier of the equipment for freeze-drying animals and found that there were two sizes of the machines one of which seemed like it might be large enough for humans but the cost was prohibitive it cost thirty thousand dollars or so he thought and so that was not an available option the next best choice was that of a fresh corpse now the fresh corpse like the freeze-dried person has the problem of not having any sounds to listen to but it has the additional problem that it will not stay fresh and that decomposition is a risky business because of the accompanying odors and he had close calls because of the odors at the apartment with getting caught uh still when he committed the murders or excuse me the killings with which he's charged the availability then of a fresh corpse was such that he made use of that sexually in at least most of the instances for the few days where it was feasible to do that and that use of those corpses and his interest in that and these other activities underlies my diagnosis of necrophilia even though it wasn't his preferred activity certainly not his exclusive activity it was it was a compromise to what he would rather have been doing but an acceptable compromise that he employed a number of times and he actually did consider obtaining corpses through other means having at one point looked at the obituaries to try to spot notices of the deaths of young males and by Young here I mean late adolescents or young adults he's never had any known interest in children under 12. but that that attraction to men from 16 to 25 if he could find one who died recently he thought he might be able to obtain access to the corpse and he in fact went to two funerals in pursuit of that goal one where there was a closed casket and so I didn't know if they man would have been attractive the other where there was an open casket and he told me that he did found that young man attractive and subsequently went to the cemetery at night with the plan of digging up the grave and having access to that corpse but the ground was too hard because of the cold weather and so he couldn't dig and it got frightening in the cemetery because he heard typical horror movie sounds of a dog barking and now hooting and so he got out of there and was unable to use that means lastly along this spectrum of people or bodies or parts under his control was the other uses he made of Those whom he in fact had killed and here he told me that he made use of the viscera for masturbation by opening the victims in the course of dismembering them and there was a particular phase of the of dismemberment where he would stop sometimes to take photographs sometimes to masturbate sometimes both and that was upon opening the abdomen when the abdominal viscera are first exposed and he would masturbate while looking at that and that was a long-standing image as far as I could determine that was an interest he had had since late late in high school and this gave him occasion to make use of that particular image and that's basically the spectrum of controlling another person now to call all of that just necrophilia really sort of misses the mark but it's it's the best word we have at the moment for it we'd be better off having some other term that describes this whole range of wanting to have someone under control the reason we don't is that the issue arises for all the paraphilias because in every paraphilia what the peripheral wants is to be able to do this favorite thing or this special thing without much regard to whether other people like that or find it appealing the paraphile wants to do it when he wants to do it on his own terms and so there's always some issue of control with all the paraphilias and secondly in the case of some of the paraphilias there's a really overt obvious interest in controlling some person particularly in the paraphilias related to rape and to sexual sadism there is a an overt conscious desire to control and cause harm to another human but Mr Dahmer is different from that because as far as I could tell his statements were always consistent to me and his behavior at least up until Tracy Edwards as far as it can be induced from all the evidence was such that he did not torture his victims and took steps to prevent them from suffering whereas in in sadism they take steps to promote suffering Mr Dahmer took steps to alleviate suffering and to ensure that the victims would not be experiencing pain so control is a difficult concept with the paraphilias present in some degree in all the paraphilias and an important concept for Mr Dahmer but what he wanted was these more gentle activities with the other people we'll talk a little later about the fact that the killing being something apart from the paraphilia something in which he did not take pleasure is that correct because that's that issue later that's right with respect to did you form in the opinion as to how Mr Dahmer got this way acquired these paraphilias well I think the evidence that exists from from his history from talking to him is suggestive of how he got this way and that is specifically the timing of his first fantasies of such activities and what was going on in his life at the time the timing of his first fantasies of bringing another person under his control in order to engage in sexual behaviors was sometime during the high school years at various times the specific age and grade that Mr Dahmer has said this occurred has varied within a year or two but it seems to be around age 15 or 16 that he first had sexual thoughts of striking another person and rendering him unconscious by a blow to the back of the neck and then making sexual use of the unconscious body the first time he tried or meant to act on that was when at around that age he found a particular male jogger attractive to him and he I believe broke off a baseball bat and then he concealed himself in some brush near where the jogger was expected to pass with the idea that if the jogger came by he would strike him on the back of the neck make him unconscious and enjoy the man's body sexually for a Time the jogger didn't come by and so that didn't come to pass and Mr Dahmer never saw the man again but that seems to be the first effort to put this fantasy into action but the fantasy always precedes the action and so he must have had a fantasy of such things before he went to try to do it and he acknowledges that he had the fantasy earlier it was also around that time that he told me he first had any sexual thoughts about viscera now if one tries to look at the origins of that there are several things that seem possible origins of those paraphilic interests at that age one is that there was a ninth grade science project of dissecting a fetal pig and while all the children had the project it was Mr Dahmer who obtained the teacher's permission to take home what was left from the dissection of the pig's head and at home he made further use of it to try to preserve the skull there was nothing overtly sexual about that activity for him it didn't sexually excite him and he didn't have sex in mind but it was an exposure to that kind of contact with the tissue of a mammal that occurred around that time in his life that may have and he acknowledges that this may have occurred may have entered into his mind at a time when he was in fact beginning to masturbate regularly and frequently in ninth grade at about age 15 he was approximately one year into his pubescent sexual activity he had engaged in some sex play with a neighborhood boy about his age and he was masturbating on a regular basis sometimes as often as two or three times a day at that period and and as boys will do when they masturbate they think about various things and I believe the the evidence on the paraphilias shows that what boys think about while they masturbate is often incorporated into their subsequent fantasies and will is often the origin of their later sexual interests so that what a boy repeatedly Associates in his mind with sexual arousal becomes what he will want for a very long time to do sexually and so it may be that the thoughts of the fetal pig entered Mr Dahmer's mind just because of the timing that he happened to have been doing that around the time he's masturbating the thought wanders into his mind and then it becomes sexualized the next time he masturbates it's a little more likely to enter his mind again and if it enters his mind enough while he masturbates eventually it comes to be a sexy thought even though a year earlier the thought of tissue would not be sexy to him any more than it is to most people another incident that occurred around the same time was a class trip in his junior year to a museum he thought it was in Akron I believe in in fact the evidence indicates it's in Cleveland but a museum where he saw for the first time portions of a human body when at the Museum he saw what are known as transverse sections of the body these are used for anatomical study and every medical student goes through the initial experience of some revulsion at seeing these and eventually having to study them to learn the anatomy but the preparations are made by preserving a human cadaver and then slicing very thin sections of the cadaver preserving those slices in such a way that they can be seen and Mr Dahmer saw these slices of a human body at the Museum and he and the others stood around looking at these slices of a human body for about half an hour he told me he hadn't thought of that particular incident in years until I asked him about it and he was surprised to remember it and although does not recall that entering his masturbation fantasies allowed us how that that too may have had some influence here likewise it was around the same age I think around ninth grade that he was struck by a group of boys there were some seniors from school who saw him walking home one night and struck him in the back of the neck with what at one point he said was a billy club at another point he described it as a blackjack but whatever it was someone hit him in the back of the neck and he ran home terrified about that and that that was a significant event to him for which he had some fantasies of of retaliation and some emotional response to having been a victim of that likewise it was around this time that Mr Dahmer did engage in some dissection of animals that he'd brought home if he spotted them killed along the road in one instance he was playing something of a practical joke on his friends and he set up a bizarre scene in the woods with the dog's head out on a tree and led his friends there without telling them that that he'd put it there so they'd feel as if they all discovered it at once because he wanted to to scare them but at other times on his own he would do a dissection chiefly for the goal of getting the bones which he thought he might sometime assemble and and Preserve in a skeleton as far as I could tell Mr Dahmer was not sexually aroused by those activities but found there was some excitement in doing something that unusual found some Discovery there the first time he this much earlier when the first time he cut a fish and saw the bright orange color of of the egg Sac he was surprised at that and later when he saw the color of organs inside a mammal that was a surprise and there was some excitement in doing this but he didn't consciously recognize it as sexual and it probably therefore wasn't however somewhere and probably at that time these things became sexualized to him which is a way of saying that he learned to think of these odd things as sexy where most people don't find these things sexy and you you want you indicated you wanted to qualify this discussion about the causation you wanted to add some qualifying remarks on that yes I should point out that I can't offer an opinion with reasonable medical certainty of the precise origins of Mr Dahmer's paraphilias but as far as I can determine it's the events in that time at that time of his life that led to his acquiring the paraphilias just so the jury understands this qualifier applies just to the causation the youthful causation that caused the connection the sexual stimulus with those particular activities is that correct yes because there's still some debate in the profession as to the causes of paraphilias does the fact that Dahmer had these paraphilic interests require that he act on them no having paraphilic interests means nothing more than what it is that will produce in the mail an erection the paraphilia is a description of what is sexually exciting whether one acts to seek out that image in varying ways is not determined by the paraphilia but by other aspects of one's life one's morals one's character whether one drinks all these other things but I think it is important to point out that acquiring a paraphilia is generally not a matter of choice Mr Dahmer couldn't help what became sexy to him or couldn't have known at that point in his life how to control that and what remained attractive to him over the years was as much an inherent part of him as any human's idea of what is sexy becomes an inherent part of that person and we don't generally choose what we will find sexy it happens to us in ways we're not quite aware of what humans do choose is whether they will act on their sexual interests or not and in the same way that an individual chooses whether to Reach Out And Touch each attractive person he sees a paraphile is able to decide whether to reach out and do those things that will gratify his attractions could I ask you to just Mark that answer and I'll ask you about it later so what is the role of character that in the person who has a paraphilia well character largely determines for paraphiles and everyone else well they will go about their lives how they will behave themselves in Psychiatry we use now the term personality traits to describe enduring ways people tend to respond to the world and if individuals have personality traits that cause them problems or get them in trouble or that make them unhappy or that lead to their being unfulfilled in life we will sometimes give a diagnosis of a personality disorder which refers to nothing more than a set of personality traits that are causing distress or getting people in trouble when individuals have personality disorders or when they've got some strong personality traits that are not functional don't work too well in the world then they may get in trouble with the law as they go about their business in the case of a paraphile because there's always this interest in doing the sexual activity that's desired or at least whenever the sex drive is there the interest is there to to do the thing they find sexually attractive if there's also a problem with character they may commit crimes in order to fulfill the sexual desire and that problem with character is separate and the thing apart from the paraphilia is that correct that's right our most sex criminals both sexually deviant and possessed of some anti-social personality characteristics or traits I wouldn't use the word possessed here that conjures up some other images but but it is true that most sex criminals have both well leaving aside rapists for a moment other sex offenders most of whom are paraphilic have both the paraphilia and a personality disorder of some kind most commonly an anti-social personality disorder but I don't think Mr Dahmer has an anti-social personality disorder you will speak to some of his traits however personality traits later on in your conclusionary remarks that affected and interplaced with the paraphilias that correct probably what role does alcohol play in Mr Dahmer's situation and how did that interface with his paraphilia and with his character [Music] well in Mr Dahmer's case his drinking was very important in understanding the crimes with which he's charged the the way that paraphilic offenders who aren't character disordered get to be offenders instead of law-abiding people is often because of substance abuse in other words because the paraphilia doesn't cause anyone to commit a crime we have to ask ourselves how does why is it some peripherals commit crimes well some do because they're bad people they have an antisocial personality disorder and they don't care about anyone else so they just do it some do because they're alcoholic and they lower their inhibitions with drinking and then do these things they want to do others for other drugs or for other personality disorders but it's not because of the paraphilia it's because of these other problems that lower their inhibitions or that cause them not to have any inhibitions in the first place that they'll commit the crimes merely to satisfy themselves sexually in Mr Dahmer's case I think the key element as to why uh he did not confine himself to Fantasy and masturbation is that he was also drinking very heavily because of his alcohol abuse he was often lowering his inhibitions and in that state would find it capable to engage in a series of things that without drinking was very difficult for him to begin with Mr Downer is not particularly extroverted person he can speak comfortably to people he's not so inhibited from a social contact that it makes him anxious just to have a conversation he can have carry on normal conversations with with anyone and be polite and have no problem with that but he was a private person and not very outgoing particularly as he was engaging in uh anti-social Behavior withdrew from other people he saw the Turning Point as the Hicks homicide I think when he began to drink very heavily and withdraw from other people and so from right after high school on he had been a heavy drinker much of the time and had had few if any close friends now because he had a few or no close friends After High School it was a difficult thing for Mr Dahmer to go meet someone to develop a sexual relationship and part of the reason he would drink on weekends was to be able to work up the courage to go meet someone in the same way that that heterosexual men will sometimes go to a bar and have a few drinks before they would approach a woman because they want to overcome some of this inhibition it's it's the same here but another reason he would drink is that when he was alone with those whom he meant to harm he would have inhibitions against The Killing that he would need to drink to overcome now that's because Mr Dahmer doesn't have any paraphilia about killing people he never did he has paraphilias about doing General things with people and and foreplay-like things with them and I think he has a paraphilia about looking at viscera but killing people is not a paraphilia for him and Nora is the actual dismemberment or disposal of Corpses sexually appealing to him those were two things that a particularly disliked didn't like to kill and he didn't like it to dismember though there was a piece of the mutilation that he liked which is when you look at the abdomen but the rest of it was hard work and some of it absolutely repulsive to him just as it would be to anyone until he desensitized himself by doing it so often that it was just a dirty job and he would drink to overcome the inhibitions against those two unattractive aspects of this process The Killing and the dismemberment and he told me that he would always drink to overcome inhibitions against killing and to overcome inhibitions against dismemberment so then the killing itself was not a part of the paraphilia now because I phrased it negatively let me rephrase it is the killing a part of the paraphilia not for Mr dommer it isn't it was a paraphilia attraction that cause a compulsion and if and and if not why not a paraphilic attraction [Music] you know I've often used the expression that a bomb doesn't go off in this courtroom at a certain time that we have to quit but I noticed that the sirens do sounds pretty good to me repeat the question thanks I remember it there are two different uh ways to look at the concept of compulsion in medicine and Psychiatry we mean something very specific by compulsion a compulsion is a senseless activity that the individual recognizes is senseless and for which that I'm sorry I didn't phrase it well and which the individual engages in this activity in order to avoid some dreaded harm or to avoid something unpleasant [Music] is that complete your answer doctor no no it doesn't okay thank you this is a every Wednesday so you know doctor is a visitor do you want to break judge and restart it okay why don't we break it we'll go back to that last question then if that's satisfactory with you Mr McCann yes record some research all right please

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Id: fbX-R0LMQsk

Length: 72min 6sec (4326 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 22 2022