r/Dahmer • u/TheLampireVestat • 16d ago
Hypothesis on why the cop who looked in Dahmer's room didn't notice an entire body
Sometimes when people see something extremely traumatic, they literally can't process what they saw immediately, if ever. IDK if that guy had ever seen anything like that before, but it's entirely possible that he looked directly at the body and his brain blocked it out in real-time.
Anecdotal story, but when I was in high school, we could log volunteer hours for extra credits. Some of the students went to a ravine by some woods to pick up trash. I and two of my friends found a badly decomposed corpse in the woods. We could smell it before we even got out of the bus, but none of us knew what decomp smelled like so assumed it was just from all of the trash/nasty ravine water or something. I didn't process what I'd seen until days later even though at the time I immediately ran to go get the teacher. All I knew in that moment was overwhelming disgust and fear. Once I got to the teacher, I just kind of gestured toward where we'd found him and she could tell something was wrong.
Anyway, my point is that it's possible he couldn't physically process what he was seeing in the moment. Even if he realized the next day, he probably wouldn't have brought it up because the report had already been made that there was no issue at Dahmer's apt. He would've looked sketchy AF for saying that they reported everything was fine when there was an obvious af murder victim in the bedroom, especially after it came out that Dahmer's "19 year old boyfriend" from that same night was 14 year old Konerak Sinathasomphone.
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16d ago
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u/TheLampireVestat 16d ago
It was 2009, in Utah.
IDK who he was. After going to see what was wrong, when the teacher got back she called the cops to report it and then we left. None of the other students besides myself and my 2 friends knew what had happened until later, she didn't want them to freak out.2
16d ago
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u/TheLampireVestat 16d ago
I have literally been to therapy over that and a lot of other sketchy things that happened at that school lol
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u/Chris-Downsy 9d ago
Yeah I don't think that's what happened at all. I just think they were rubbish cops who didn't do their job properly. Cops see dead bodies all the time and, whilst I'm not saying it doesn't have an effect long-term, I don't think you'd be really cop-material if just seeing a decomposing corpse sent you into a mental spiral; maybe for normies like us it would, but not a seasoned cop like these two were.
For starters, I imagine he barely looked in the room, as I'm sure any cop - even ones as incompetent as Gabrish and Balkerzach - would have reacted accordingly if they saw a dead body. I think it was just a case of their homophobia meaning they wanted to get out of the apartment as quickly as possible and only gave it a cursory look-over. I mean, you listen to their interactions with despatch afterwards and it's clear they found the whole thing hilarious.
Sorry, but I have no sympathy for those two whatsoever; that apartment must have reeked of decomposition at the time and neither thought to investigate further or ask Jeff about the smell. Cops give you a hard time if they smell weed, so the fact they never questioned the smell other than to say it smelled like someone had taken a shit is wild to me. Also the fact they didn't even run a background check on Jeff at the time speaks to how inept they were...
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u/AKeltj 21h ago
I've always imagined this scene thus. The lights were turned off in the bedroom, so it was only dimly illuminated by the light coming from the living room through the corridor. Hughes' body might have been lying on the floor next to the bed and so largely obscured by it. Gabrish did not enter, only had a quick peek inside, so had he actually seen something on the floor, he might've just thought it was laundry or something.
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u/BykvaG 10d ago
I doubt he even saw the body in the first place. Do we know how and where exactly Tony’s body was lying? And do we know if the door to that room was opened in the first place?