Jeffrey Dahmer's Apartment

Author: Jewls Krueger

Jeffrey Dahmer is one of the most infamous serial killers in American history. He did not begin killing at this location, but the majority and the most disturbing of his crimes happened here, inside a one bedroom unit at the Oxford Apartments on North 25th Street, just west of downtown Milwaukee.

Dahmer moved into Apartment 213 on May 14, 1990, after leaving his grandmother's home in the suburb of West Allis. By the time he arrived, he had already killed five men. Over the next fourteen months, he would kill twelve more, and the apartment would become one of the most notorious crime scenes in the country when police finally entered it in the summer of 1991.

Jeffrey Dahmer

Dahmer was born in Milwaukee on May 21, 1960, and grew up in Ohio, where he committed his first murder in 1978 at the age of eighteen. He did not kill again for nearly a decade. After a short and troubled stint in the Army and a series of moves, he returned to Wisconsin in the early 1980s to live with his grandmother, hoping the change would help him stop drinking and find steady work.

He resumed killing in 1987. His second victim, Steven Tuomi, was killed in a rented room at the nearby Ambassador Hotel that year, and Dahmer went on to kill three more men at his grandmother's house before moving out on his own. By 1990 he had already accumulated a record that included a conviction for sexually assaulting a boy, yet he remained on probation and free to rent his own apartment. The unit on North 25th Street gave him privacy, sat within walking distance of the gay bars where he met many of his victims, and was close to the chocolate factory where he worked. It rented for about $300 a month.

The Building and Its Neighbors

The Oxford Apartments was a 49 unit complex, and Dahmer's second floor apartment was small and unremarkable from the outside. That ordinariness helped him avoid attention for more than a year, even as the evidence of his crimes accumulated inside.

Over time, neighbors began to notice. Residents complained to the building manager, Sopa Princewill, about foul odors, falling objects, and on at least one occasion the sound of a saw. Dahmer explained the smells by claiming his freezer had broken and spoiled his food, or that several of his tropical fish had died. The complaints were never escalated to the police, and Dahmer continued killing.

The Murders

In the fourteen months Dahmer lived at the Oxford Apartments, he killed twelve men. His first victim there was Raymond Smith, a 32 year old whom he lured to the apartment with an offer of money on May 20, 1990, less than a week after moving in. He gave Smith a drink laced with sleeping pills and strangled him on the floor.

The pattern repeated with most of the men who followed. Dahmer met them at bars, malls, and bus stops, offered money for sex or to pose for photographs, and led them back to Apartment 213. Once inside, he gave them drinks laced with sedatives, then strangled them after they lost consciousness. He photographed many of the bodies with a Polaroid camera before dismembering them in his bathroom.

As his crimes escalated in 1991, Dahmer began trying to keep his victims alive in a permanently compliant state. On several of them he drilled into the skull and injected hydrochloric acid or boiling water into the brain. These attempts were usually fatal. One victim, Errol Lindsey, briefly regained consciousness after the procedure before Dahmer killed him. The men Dahmer killed at this apartment ranged in age from their teens to their thirties, and most were Black or from other minority backgrounds, a fact that later fueled anger over how slowly the wider community and the authorities responded.

Konerak Sinthasomphone

The best known failure to stop Dahmer involved a 14 year old boy named Konerak Sinthasomphone, who was the younger brother of a boy Dahmer had molested in 1988. In late May 1991, Dahmer drugged Konerak and drilled into his skull, then left the apartment to buy alcohol. Konerak escaped to the street, naked and disoriented, where three young women found him and called 911.

When two Milwaukee officers arrived, Dahmer returned and told them the boy was his intoxicated adult boyfriend. The women protested and tried to tell the officers the boy was bleeding, but the officers accepted Dahmer's account, walked the pair back to the apartment, and logged the call as a domestic matter. Dahmer killed Konerak after they left. The handling of that call became one of the most heavily criticized aspects of the entire case, and the two officers were later dismissed, though they were subsequently reinstated after appeals.

What Investigators Found

Dahmer kept parts of his victims, particularly their bones. He had seven skulls and two complete skeletons in the apartment and told investigators he intended to build a private altar from them, arranged on a black table with the two skeletons at either side. He also admitted to eating the hearts, livers, and other body parts of three of the men he killed there, later identified as Raymond Smith, Ernest Miller, and Oliver Lacy.

A search of the apartment turned up four severed heads, the seven skulls, the two skeletons, preserved body parts including hands and genitalia, and a chemical drum in the corner holding three torsos dissolving in acid. Investigators also recovered 74 Polaroid photographs documenting the dismemberment of his victims. The county medical examiner later remarked that the scene was more like dismantling a museum than processing an ordinary crime scene.

Dahmer's Arrest

Dahmer's crimes ended on July 22, 1991, when Tracy Edwards, a 32 year old man Dahmer had handcuffed and threatened with a knife, escaped and flagged down Milwaukee police officers Robert Rauth and Rolf Mueller with a handcuff still attached to his wrist. Edwards led them back to the apartment.

Inside, Mueller found Polaroid photographs of dismembered bodies in a bedroom drawer, then opened the refrigerator and discovered a severed human head. Dahmer fought briefly with the officers before he was subdued and arrested. The full search that followed uncovered the remains and artifacts that would define the case.

The Confession and Trial

Over the two weeks after his arrest, Dahmer waived his right to a lawyer and confessed in extraordinary detail to detectives Patrick Kennedy and Dennis Murphy, in interviews that eventually totaled more than sixty hours and produced a confession of nearly 180 pages. He admitted to killing seventeen men in all, sixteen in Wisconsin and one in Ohio.

He was charged with fifteen counts of murder in Wisconsin and pleaded guilty but insane. His trial, before Judge Laurence Gram, turned entirely on whether he was legally sane at the time of the killings. Defense experts argued he was driven by compulsions he could not control, while prosecution experts described him as a calculating man who planned each murder and worked hard to avoid detection. On February 15, 1992, the jury found him sane on every count, though two of the twelve jurors dissented each time. Two days later he was sentenced to fifteen consecutive life terms. Wisconsin had no death penalty, having abolished capital punishment in 1853. He received a sixteenth life sentence in Ohio that May for his first murder.

Dahmer's Death

On November 28, 1994, Dahmer was beaten to death by a fellow inmate, Christopher Scarver, at the Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin. The three men had been left largely unsupervised on a work detail. A second inmate attacked in the same incident later died as well. Scarver received additional life sentences for the killings.

Recent Developments

Public interest in the case surged again in 2022 with the release of the Netflix series Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, with Evan Peters in the lead role. The series drew renewed attention to the Milwaukee locations tied to the case, including this one, and prompted fresh debate about how such stories are told and how the victims' families are treated in the retelling.

The Site of Dahmer's Apartment Today

The Oxford Apartments were demolished beginning on November 16, 1992. By that summer only about fifteen of the 49 units were still occupied, and the building had been bought by the Campus Circle Project, a Marquette University affiliated redevelopment effort. Its leaders described the building as a symbol of anger, pain, and violence, and said tearing it down was meant to help the neighborhood heal. Residents were offered relocation assistance before the wrecking crews arrived.

The property has stood empty ever since. Plans to turn it into a memorial garden, a playground, or new housing never moved forward. The lot sits in the Avenues West neighborhood, on North 25th Street just south of West State Street, next to the Cantona Court Apartments. Today it is grass and a few trees behind a black iron fence, with no marker or memorial of any kind.

Anyone who visits should remember that this is a residential block where people live and that several families lost sons and brothers here. Stay on the public sidewalk, keep a respectful distance, and do not disturb the neighbors or the current residents nearby.