Who gets more of your sympathy -- Jeff Dahmer or Martha Stewart?

Thay would be my state, Wisconsin, which for 150 years or so has never seen fit to enact a death penalty. I like that about this place.

I apologize for posting my initial, emotional, GD-sounding reply in an IMHO poll thread. My sympathies always seem fall on the side of the victim’s family (or in this case; 17 families).

Niptick: Bobby Beausoleil is still alive (albeit incarcerated for life). In fact he has a
web site .

No death penalty and good cheese, sounds delightful.

Wow… those Dahmer jokes get FUNNIER AND FUNNIER each time I hear them.

I lived in Milwaukee at the time… I lived less than a half mile away. There wasn’t anything funny about it… ever.

Plenty of clueless people and others who were working out their issues were making Dahmer jokes.

They weren’t funny then. Your gallows humor is disgusting.

Stewart committed a crime and tried not to get caught.

Dahmer committed many, many crimes over and over and tried not to get caught. The first time the police came to his door with a naked 14 year old boy, he claimed it was a “lover’s spat.” Dahmer groupies claim he did good by “destroying gay trash.”

I’d rather met up with Martha than with Jeffrey. But that’s just me.

Oh sure - I try the Atkins diet, make one or two little faux pas, and I never hear the end of it.

Regards,
Shodan

Who gives a crap if you lived in Milwaukee? Pull the stick out of your butt. That was the funniest joke I’ve read in a while.

Anyway, I have some sympathy for Martha because I really think that the forcefulness of the prosecution had more to do with who she was than what she did. That is, she was treated, in a sense, unfairly by the justice system.

I have symphathy for Dahmer because he shouldn’t have been killed in jail like that. I also find it hard to believe that a guy just turns out to do such evil as him without someone having done such evil TO him. So, if that’s true, I have some sympathy for him as a person. Less, obviously, if he was just a sicko who enjoyed torturing people. I don’t know his story.

I’m sure all the body parts lying around the house were from humane kills.
:slight_smile:

Also neither.

the life and times of Mr. Dahmer : http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/notorious/dahmer/naked1.html

While in jail, Dahmer was beaten to death by a schizophrenia man who was acting on the command of God. This was right after he became a born-again Christian.

We are free of his presence and Satan lost the battle for his soul. The Lord works in mysterious ways…

crimelibrary is an excellent site, by the way. Read the one on Albert Fish. Truly disturbing.

Yeah. Albert Fish has never gotten the proper respect he deserves.

He should definitely be in the upper echelon with Ted Bundy, Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy.

He needs a movie or a better PR firm.

HH Holmes was pretty disturbing. A man who built a “hotel of horrors” during the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Lured people into this hotel and killed them in creative ways.

I’m sure that comforts the victims families.

“Soon to be a major motion picture” starring Leonardo DiCaprio, incidentally. (It began as a movie version of the recent bestseller Devil in the White City but has been whittled down to just Holmes.)

Sorry, brain fart. With all these corpses, I get em confused.

Tony Hughes, the young deaf-mute man whose skull was found in Dahmer’s apartment, was a friend of a friend. Another friend was the only journalist to enter Dahmer’s apartment on the night of his arrest before the police began tearing it apart. An acquaintance found one of Dahmer’s “practice” victims. And a high school classmate’s father was Dahmer’s defense attorney.

Dahmer had every reason during the insanity portion of his trial to come up with mitigating causes for his mental abberations. He went into sickening detail, for his psychiatrist and attorney, about his methods, and the sexual thrills he would get with the corpses. But he made no claim about being abused in any way as a child.

I couldn’t agree more. It is a common misconception, even among many health care professionals, that just because someone committed creimes no mentally healthy person would commit, that therefore they are not guilty of the crimes by reason of insanity. No one denies Dahmer was sick, but the court at the time found that Dahmer was
a) sane enough to know what he was doing was wrong; and
b) not driven by compulsions he couldn’t withstand.

If (a) or (b) had been the case, he would have been sent to a mental hospital, not jail.

Having said that, Dahmer’s case is not straightforward. Even among the FBI’s serial crime unit, behavioural profiling experts debate Dahmer’s sanity…mostly along the “compulsions"line.”*

However, a true psychotic, driven by compulsions they couldn’t control, would actually be very unlikely to become a serial killer, simply because they would not be able to get very far without being caught. Their compulsions would HAVE to be acted on any time, any place they arose…ie even in broad daylight, in front of witnesses. End of criminal career.

To quote the former head of FBI’s behavioural science unit:

**

Bottom line, if they only do it when no one’s looking, they are not under the control of “compulsions”.
*“Mindhunter”, by John Douglas, p256
** ditto, p348

Not meaning to nitpick, but are you sure of the above facts? I always thought that Manson never actually killed anybody with his own hands, only (not that it makes a difference morally), but by exerting control over the inadequate nobodies who proclaimed him as their god and leader.

In the case of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, I thought Manson only came to their house after his “Family members” had killed and mutilated them. (Again - like that makes a moral difference - the guy was still the instigator. No way should he ever get parole.)

I can sympathize with greedy people. I can be greedy so I understand it. Sometimes people do bad things for money, but that doesnt mean they are horrible people. I don’t have any sympathy for the desire to mutalate and murder someone for a sexual high. In fact I feel a thousand time more sympathy for mosquitos I swat then I have for humans with such desires.

I guess that’s the difference between having a soul or not.

I’m so glad you can find amusement in the grisly death of so many.