In the early hours of May 27, 1991, three young women on North 25th Street in Milwaukee, Sandra Smith, Nicole Childress and Tina Spivey, found a boy in the road. He was naked, bleeding from behind, and too drugged to speak for himself. They called the police. Two officers arrived, listened to the white man who said the boy was his nineteen-year-old lover and they had been drinking, dismissed the women who kept telling them he was a child, walked him back to Apartment 213 and left.
The boy was Konerak Sinthasomphone and he was fourteen. Jeffrey Dahmer killed him that night.
Three years earlier, in September 1988, Dahmer had drugged and sexually assaulted a thirteen-year-old boy, and in 1989 he was convicted and given a year on work release and five years of probation. Two years before that, in 1986, he had been arrested for exposing himself to two twelve-year-old boys by the Kinnickinnic River and put on probation with orders to get counseling. He was still on that probation in May 1991. The boy he had assaulted in 1988 was Somsack Sinthasomphone. Konerak was his younger brother.
The officers who returned Konerak to the apartment had the means to find out who they were talking to and did not use them. Afterward, Sandra Smith's mother, Glenda Cleveland, called the police more than once to ask what had happened to the child and was brushed off. There was already a body in the bedroom: Tony Hughes, thirty-one, killed three days before.
Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer was born in Milwaukee on May 21, 1960, the elder son of Lionel Dahmer, a research chemist, and Joyce Dahmer. The family moved to Bath Township, Ohio. He collected roadkill as a boy, stripped the carcasses and kept the bones, and was drinking heavily by his mid-teens. His parents' marriage ended badly in 1978 and he was left alone in the house.
Steven Hicks was eighteen and hitchhiking to a rock concert at Chippewa Lake Park when Dahmer picked him up on June 18, 1978, three weeks after Dahmer finished high school. He took him home for a drink and killed him with a dumbbell when Hicks wanted to leave. He dismembered the body, dissolved the flesh and scattered the crushed bone behind the house. Hicks's father described his son as a deeply caring person, and told a story about a hunting trip where the boy shot a rabbit, was as proud as he could be, and then cried his eyes out. Nobody connected the disappearance to anyone for thirteen years.
Dahmer lasted a term at Ohio State before drink ended it, enlisted in the Army in 1979 and trained as a medic, served at Baumholder in West Germany and was discharged in 1981 for alcohol abuse. By 1982 he was living with his grandmother in West Allis and eventually working as a mixer at the Ambrosia Chocolate Company.
He did not kill again for nine years. Then, in the space of four, he killed sixteen more.
Steven Tuomi was twenty-four or twenty-five by different accounts, from Ontonagon in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and worked as a short-order cook. Classmates remembered him making a stained-glass lamp in art class. He died in a rented room at the Ambassador Hotel in November 1987, and Dahmer said he woke with the body and no memory of it.
Jamie Doxtator was fourteen, nearly six feet tall, and had run away from an abusive stepfather. Richard Guerrero was twenty-five and close to his mother. Anthony Sears was twenty-six. All three were taken to the grandmother's house in West Allis and killed there.
In April 1988 a man named Ronald Flowers Jr. was drugged in that house and survived, because Dahmer's grandmother came home.
In May 1990 Dahmer moved into Apartment 213 at the Oxford Apartments, 924 North 25th Street. Twelve more men and boys died there in fourteen months: Raymond Smith, who went by Ricky Beeks, thirty-three; Edward W. Smith, twenty-eight; Ernest Miller, twenty-two; David C. Thomas, twenty-two or twenty-three, a father of two; Curtis Straughter, eighteen; Errol Lindsey, nineteen, who had a daughter he never met; Tony Hughes, thirty-one, who was deaf; Konerak Sinthasomphone, fourteen; Matt Turner, twenty; Jeremiah Weinberger, twenty-three; Oliver Lacy, twenty-three or twenty-four; and Joseph Bradehoft, twenty-five.
Most of the seventeen were Black, Asian or Latino, and the killings ran for years in a city where that fact is inseparable from how long they ran.
He met them in bars, bathhouses and on the street, offered money to pose for photographs, drugged them with sedatives and strangled them. He photographed the bodies in stages, dismembered them in the bathroom, kept skulls and hands and genitals, and ate parts of some of them. In the last months he drilled into the skulls of men who were still alive and injected acid, trying to produce someone who would not leave.
On the night of July 22, 1991, Tracy Edwards got out of the apartment with a handcuff on one wrist and flagged down a patrol car. The officers who went back with him found Polaroids of dismembered bodies, then three heads in the refrigerator and freezer, skulls in a filing cabinet, a barrel of acid and remains throughout the rooms.
He confessed over the following weeks to seventeen killings going back to Steven Hicks in 1978.
He was charged in Milwaukee with fifteen counts of murder, not sixteen. Steven Tuomi's remains were never recovered and the state could not prove the death, so Tuomi is the one Milwaukee victim he was never charged over. On January 13, 1992, he pleaded guilty but insane, which waived a trial on guilt. The trial that opened on January 30 before Judge Laurence Gram was about nothing except whether he was legally sane when he did it. Defense experts described a man driven by obsessions he could not control; the prosecution argued that no disorder had kept him from knowing what he was doing or from stopping.
On February 15, 1992 the jury found him sane and guilty on all fifteen counts. He received fifteen consecutive life terms, which the court totalled at 957 years. Wisconsin had no death penalty. He was later returned to Ohio and given a sixteenth life sentence for Steven Hicks.
The jury had one Black member, in a city where most of the dead were Black, and the composition was a public grievance in Milwaukee throughout.
The two officers who returned Konerak Sinthasomphone, John Balcerzak and Joseph Gabrish, were fired by Chief Philip Arreola in September 1991, for the handling of the call and for the homophobic remarks they made about it afterward on a recorded radio channel. Balcerzak said in his first interview that with the information they had, they did the best they could. In May 1994 Reserve Judge Robert Parins ruled that dismissal was too harsh a penalty for what the evidence showed was a negligent failure to investigate; the discipline was cut to a sixty-day suspension and both were rehired with about fifty-five thousand dollars each in back pay. Gabrish went on to police work in Grafton. Balcerzak was president of the Milwaukee Police Association from 2005 to 2009 and retired in 2017.
On November 28, 1994, at the Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, an inmate named Christopher Scarver beat Dahmer to death with a metal bar from a weight room during a work detail. He killed a second prisoner, Jesse Anderson, in the same attack. Dahmer was thirty-four.
The Oxford Apartments were demolished in November 1992, and plans for a memorial garden, a playground or new housing on the lot came to nothing. Eleven of the families won his estate in damages suits, and when a lawyer for eight of them announced an auction of his belongings in 1996, a civic group raised $407,225, including $100,000 from the Milwaukee developer Joseph Zilber, to buy them; five of the eight families accepted, and the possessions were destroyed and buried in an undisclosed Illinois landfill. In 2022 the Netflix series Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story brought the case to a new audience, and relatives of some of the dead objected publicly that it had been made without them.