Serial Killer's Soul (21 page)

I was grateful for that letter from the pastor. After I read it, I didn’t feel so alone. It felt good to receive some spiritual support. I was also glad to hear about Jeff, to know that for the most part he was doing OK.

As the days and weeks and months ticked by in Racine, I often thought about why God placed me, a new Christian, in the cell next to Jeffrey Dahmer’s.
I knew that my excitement in finding the hope that Jesus gave helped me talk to that man whose soul I honestly believed Satan inhabited.

I believe it was God’s will and the work of the angels that I live near Jeff so my Christianity could rub off onto him. God gave me a special gift, the opportunity to share God’s goodness with a sinner so confused by Satan that he became one of history’s worst criminals. I believed with all my heart that God wanted me to share with Jeff the message of hope that I had received just a few years before.

It’s a message I continue to share.

Keep alert and pray. Otherwise temptation will overpower you. For the spirit indeed is willing, but how weak the body is! (Matthew 26:41
, TLB)

June 8, 1994, is a day I’ll never forget. After serving four years and six months of my ten-year sentence, I was released early for good behavior from the Kettle Moraine Correctional Facility. It was a warm, sunny June day. The inmates and guards gave me a great deal of support. I’d been a model prisoner.

Before my release, staff members and inmates encouraged me to stay clean. They gave me the same advice over and over: Don’t follow the same pattern; do some volunteer work; learn some skills; be a good father and a law-abiding citizen; get a job; stay home; go to church; and if you do go someplace, tell someone where you’re going.

I told the prison officials that I’d be moving back in with my old girlfriend, Janice, the mother of one of my three children. I also said I believed I would find work quickly in Milwaukee because I’d lived there and had a number of contacts.

My actual release date was suppose to be in September 1996. I believed it was God’s intervention for me to be released two-and-a-half years early. I thought of Jeff. I was still sad for him, sad that he would live in prison for the rest of his life. I never stopped praying for him.

I left Kettle Moraine at 8 a.m. An officer took me and some other inmates to the bus stop where we boarded the bus to Milwaukee. The clothing I wore came from the Salvation Army–used clothing, but much better than the prison clothing I’d been wearing for more than four years. It reminded me of growing up, but this time I was grateful for those hand-me-down clothes.

I knew my life wasn’t going to be easy and I was a little afraid. I knew that sometimes men who were in prison had a difficult time adjusting to life outside of
prison. It can be hard to get back on their feet and sometimes they pick up right where they left off because that’s all they know. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I knew what I wanted and I knew I didn’t want to go back to prison.

The first thing I did when I got to Milwaukee was make a beeline to Janice’s house. That was a big mistake. She had a new boyfriend and they didn’t want anything to do with me. She wouldn’t even let me see my son, mainly because she and her new boyfriend were on drugs and she was pretty spaced out.

I needed to get away from there. If I associated with anyone doing drugs while I was on parole, I could be sent back to prison. I left with just two hundred dollars in my pocket, no place to stay, no job, and no prospects.

I called Nancy and Jerry Christianson. Jerry was in prison many years ago, but God saved him, and now he and his wife run New Song Ministries. They picked me up and took me to meet Vern, a friend of theirs in West Allis who was also involved in New Song Ministries.

There were six of us at Vern’s place. We prayed, praised God, and sang songs. The whole time I felt that the devil was still trying to tempt me, saying, “you’ve been gone too long and I know you want to get back into the mess of things.”

I couldn’t sit still. I kept getting up, trying to find excuses not to sing. I’d go out for a cigarette. Then I’d come back in and sit down. Then I’d get up again. I just wasn’t ready for all this singing and praising God. I needed to do something.

When I looked back on that afternoon, I realized the devil was having a heyday with me. All afternoon I was up and down, up and down thinking, wanting to go, but not knowing where.

The devil worked hard inside me. I prayed, asking God to help me relax. I knew that God had sent me Jerry and Nancy and I needed to put my faith in what God had in mind for me.

Trouble was, I was scared that before long I’d be doing some of the things I did before. Finally, I gave in to the devil, left Vern’s place, and went back to my old girlfriend’s apartment to pick up some clothes I’d left there before I went to prison.

She kicked me out and told me I couldn’t ever stay there again. She shut the door on me. I decided to go to the Salvation Army and ask for help.

I got into a cab but, on the way, asked the cab driver to stop when I saw a woman walking on the street near 20
^th
and Lisbon. I knew prostitutes frequented that neighborhood. That woman was one and I stayed with her that night.

The next morning I felt terrible. I was upset with myself for giving in to the devil and hooking up with that prostitute, and because my old girlfriend was with another man. I thought I still loved her.

One thing’s for sure, I still had all my same old problems. No money, no job, no prospects, and here I was sinning again.

That afternoon I went to the Milwaukee Rescue Mission and called Jerry and Nancy again. They were supportive. They picked me up and prayed for me. They got me a room at the Philadelphia Church of God in Christ on North Martin Luther King Drive.

Pastor Barden ministers to prisoners and he let me stay in the Brotherhood House over the church. When you stayed there, the pastor expected you to attend Pentecostal church services three days a week, including Bible study. I stayed for a short time while I worked a few temporary jobs.

All the while, I thought about my kids and my old girlfriends. A lot of my previous sins and crimes came into my head. The devil worked me over pretty good in those days, but because I followed the Brotherhood House rules, I stayed out of trouble.

One day I met another brother who belonged to Parklawn Assembly of God church. He invited me to meet Pastor Harvey and to attend services there. I met a woman on the bus who was also on her way to Parklawn. We talked about Christ and got to know each other a little more whenever we saw each other at services.

One night the woman called me and said she was lonely. I knew if I left the Brotherhood House and spent the night with her, I’d break curfew and get kicked out… but I did it anyway. Why, I kept wondering, is the flesh so weak?

It was a big mistake. It added nothing but chaos to my life. She was a married woman, separated but not divorced. One day the pastor’s sermon
discussed the immorality of being unfaithful to a spouse and the sinfulness of trying to covet thy neighbor’s wife. It seemed like he and everyone in the church was talking directly to me. I finally told the pastor about the woman but he said he already knew.

I got a room elsewhere and worked various temporary jobs. I eventually went back to the woman’s house because every other place I ended up was nothing but a drug house. People dealt and took drugs all around me, and I couldn’t risk being caught with folks like that.

By the second week in November 1994, I knew I needed to leave Milwaukee altogether. I called my sister and brother in St. Louis and asked them to come and get me. For a fleeting moment, I missed prison and I understood why some people wanted to go back. In prison you don’t have to worry about women, money, finding a place to sleep, or finding a job. In prison there also isn’t the everyday struggle of trying to stay clean from drugs and alcohol. There is a lot less temptation in prison.

I thought about Jeff and wondered how he was doing. I hadn’t written a letter to him since my release. I heard about him in the news occasionally. Both his parents had been in the media, discussing their roles in Jeff’s life. His father, Lionel was writing a biography on Jeff and their family life. Jeff had said to me once during our time together that someday the world would be writing books about him–I guess he was right.

His mother, Joyce, also had been in the news a few times and talked about how she loved Jeff even though he did terrible things.

Apparently both his parents visited him in prison. In some ways I was jealous of Jeff, having parents who loved him regardless of his wrongs. He had people there for him, who supported him; he even had priests and people like me who wrote him letters about staying with God. I needed that kind of support. I started to think that maybe I needed a letter telling me about God, love, and strength more than he did right now. I felt lost.

My family picked me up and I moved to Florissant, Missouri, a St. Louis suburb where my sister lived.

Four days after Thanksgiving, on November 28, 1994, I received a shocking call from an old Milwaukee friend.

“Calvin, did you hear that Dahmer’s dead?”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. My friend told me that I needed to come to Milwaukee because reporters wanted to interview me. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to talk about Jeff right then but, at the same time, I knew there was a side to Jeff that no one else saw or understood. A lot of people,
most
people, called him a monster. However, I believed there really was a good side to Jeff, one that the world needed to see.

I boarded a plane that night and flew back to Milwaukee. I read the Chicago papers during a layover.

That’s when it hit me.

Jeffrey Dahmer was dead.

His search for peace and understanding of the Lord’s forgiveness was over. I was sad as I read those newspapers in Chicago.

As soon as I got to Milwaukee, I caught pneumonia and was admitted to St. Joseph’s Hospital. Reporters from Channel 12-TV interviewed me, but the interviews weren’t good because I was too sick.

Jeff’s death struck me to the core. It hurt to think that he was gone. I felt sorry for him and I felt bad, partly because of the way he died. He had already suffered so much in prison, but I told myself that God looked out for him.

I knew Jeff had requested and been baptized in May 1994 by a Church of Christ minister named Roy Ratcliff from Madison. Jeff wore a white robe and Radcliff submerged him in the prison’s steel whirlpool normally used for handicapped inmates.

I was so happy Jeff was baptized. He finally let Jesus into his heart. During an interview, Ratcliff said that Jeff was completely sincere and wanted to live a new life. He wasn’t baptized for selfish reasons; Jeff did it because he wanted to be with God and looked forward to a life and an afterlife with God. Jeff finally let go of his demons.

For me personally, I knew in my heart that God forgave Dahmer’s sins.
That gave me some peace of mind during the next days. I felt relief knowing that our time together had helped him, in some form, to realize God’s goodness and helped him to see that even a serial killer’s soul could be saved.

For the time has come for judgment, and it must begin first among God’s own children. And if even we who are Christians must be judged, what terrible fate awaits those who have never believed in the Lord? (I Peter 4:17
, TLB)

November 28, 1994.

The headline of the
Milwaukee Journal
blared across the page in thick, black letters: “Dahmer Slain in Prison.” Jeffrey Dahmer had served a little more than two years and nine months of his sixteen consecutive life sentences.

When he was brutally murdered in the bathroom near the prison gymnasium on that gray November day, Jeffrey was thirty-four years old. That morning he ate breakfast with the other prisoners in his unit. At 7:50 a.m., officers escorted Jeff from his cell to his job cleaning the gym. Just twenty minutes later, security found Jeff and another white prisoner, Jesse Anderson, both in pools of blood with multiple skull fractures, both men savagely beaten.

An ambulance sped Dahmer to Divine Savior Hospital in Portage, just a few miles from the prison. At 9:11 a.m., just an hour after he was beaten, Dahmer was pronounced dead from massive head injuries.

Anderson died two days later from his injuries.

Later another prisoner, twenty-five year old Christopher J. Scarver, confessed. He worked with the two inmates, cleaning the prison gym bathroom. He used a twenty-inch metal bar he had removed from a piece of exercise equipment in the gym to bash Dahmer’s head during the attack.

Scarver was a convicted murderer serving a life sentence at Columbia for the 1990 execution-style shooting death of Steven J. Lohman. Lohman had worked with Scarver at the Wisconsin Conservation Corps. Even before he murdered Dahmer, Scarver would not have been eligible for parole until 2042.

After Dahmer’s death, people asked why Jeffrey had been alone and
unsupervised in the prison bathroom. Officers at Columbia said Dahmer could have asked for a more segregated, more secure living and working arrangement, but he chose to be out with the general prison population. I heard that, because it was during the holidays, the prison guards were more relaxed. The guards thought since nothing had happened in the past so nothing would happen then. Scarver and Dahmer were unsupervised for a little more than twenty minutes.