The Milwaukee Cannibal: Jeffrey Dahmer

Between 1978 and 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer murdered seventeen men and boys in two states — most of them Black or Southeast Asian, most of them from Milwaukee's gay community. This episode follows the full arc of the case: a lonely childhood in Bath Township, Ohio; a first murder at eighteen that went undiscovered for thirteen years; nine years of escalating legal incidents that the courts absorbed without meaningful consequence; and then the systematic killing that began in Milwaukee's North Side in 1987 and did not stop until the night of July 22, 1991. The episode places particular weight on the figure of Konerak Sinthasomphone — fourteen years old, Laotian, the survivor of a family that had crossed an ocean to reach Milwaukee — and on the documented failure of the police response to his escape on May 27, 1991. What happened that night, and what was allowed to continue afterward, is not simply a story about one killer. It is a story about whose safety a city chose to protect.

The case is resolved: Dahmer confessed to seventeen murders, was convicted and sentenced to fifteen consecutive life terms in February 1992, and was killed in prison on November 28, 1994. The Oxford Apartments at 924 North 25th Street — where eleven of the murders took place — were demolished in 1992. As of 2026, the lot is still empty.