Ambassador Hotel - Milwaukee

Author: Jewls Krueger

The Ambassador Hotel is a restored Art Deco landmark on Milwaukee's west side, known today for its jazz-era architecture and its complicated place in the city's history. In November 1987, it was also the site of one of Jeffrey Dahmer's murders. Dahmer killed Steven Tuomi in room 507, the second known killing of his life and the first he committed in Wisconsin. He was never charged with the crime.

Steven Tuomi

Steven Walter Tuomi was a 25-year-old man originally from Ontonagon, Michigan, a small town on the shore of Lake Superior. He had moved to Milwaukee years earlier and was working in the city at the time of his death. Because Dahmer disposed of his remains completely and was never prosecuted for the killing, Tuomi is one of the few Dahmer victims for whom almost nothing was recovered.

Jeffrey Dahmer

By late 1987, Dahmer's behavior had been escalating for years. He had committed his first murder in 1978 in Ohio, killing 18-year-old Steven Hicks, then did not kill again for nearly a decade. In the meantime, he began drugging and sexually assaulting men he met at Milwaukee bathhouses, using sedatives to render them unconscious. After roughly a dozen such incidents, his bathhouse membership was revoked, and he began renting hotel rooms to continue the practice. He was drinking heavily and already had a conviction tied to indecent exposure. The Ambassador was one of the hotels he used.

The Murder

On November 20, 1987, Dahmer met Tuomi at a Milwaukee gay bar and persuaded him to come back to the room he had rented at the Ambassador. By his own later account, Dahmer intended only to drug Tuomi and lie beside him while he was unconscious, as he had done with others. Instead, he said, he woke the next morning to find Tuomi beaten to death, with bruising on his own hands and no memory of what had happened. Dahmer later told investigators he could not believe what he had done.

Tuomi's killing marked a turning point. Dahmer said that after this murder he stopped trying to control his compulsions and began actively seeking out victims, most of whom he lured to his grandmother's house in West Allis and, later, to his own apartment.

The Aftermath

To move the body, Dahmer bought a large suitcase and transported Tuomi's remains to his grandmother's home. About a week later, he dismembered the body and discarded most of it in the trash. He kept the severed head for a time, attempting to preserve the skull before it grew too brittle and he destroyed it.

When Dahmer was arrested in July 1991 and confessed to seventeen murders, he included Tuomi among them. Prosecutors, however, never charged him in the case. With no body, no physical evidence, and Dahmer's claim that he had no memory of the killing, the district attorney concluded the murder could not be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

The Hotel Today

The Ambassador Hotel still operates at 23rd Street and Wisconsin Avenue, on the near west side of downtown Milwaukee. It opened in 1928, designed by local architects Urban Peacock and Armin Frank, and quickly became one of the city's fashionable addresses, hosting guests who reportedly included Liberace, John F. Kennedy, and the Beatles. The neighborhood and the hotel declined through the 1970s and 1980s. In 1995, Marquette University alumnus Rick Wiegand bought the property and spent roughly 14 million dollars over the following decade restoring its marble floors, bronze elevator doors, and Art Deco detailing. It now runs as the Ambassador Hotel Milwaukee, part of Wyndham's Trademark Collection, and sits flanked by Marquette University residence halls.

Room 507, where Tuomi was killed, has become a point of curiosity for true crime travelers, and the hotel will rent it to guests who ask for it. The Ambassador is a working hotel with paying guests and staff, so anyone drawn by its history should book through normal channels and treat the property and the people in it with respect.