Between May 1990 and July 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer killed and dismembered 12 men and teenage boys in Apartment 213 of Milwaukee's Oxford Apartments before one of his intended victims escaped and led the police back to the crime scene.
Warning: This article contains graphic descriptions and/or images of violent, disturbing, or otherwise potentially distressing events.
Wisconsin Historical SocietyOxford Apartments in Milwaukee, where Jeffrey Dahmer killed 12 of his 17 victims.
Few crime scenes in American history were as horrifying as Jeffrey Dahmer’s apartment. When two police officers stepped into the serial killer’s Milwaukee residence on July 22, 1991, they were horrified by what they saw.
A freshly severed human head stared back at them from the refrigerator. A drawer full of Polaroid photos showed Dahmer’s victims in various stages of dismemberment. And three torsos were disintegrating in a giant vat of acid.
Dahmer killed 17 men and teenage boys between 1978 and 1991, and 12 of those murders took place in Apartment 213 at 924 North 25th Street in Milwaukee. He also kept the corpses of many of his victims, prompting his neighbors to complain about the smell.
But they never imagined what the foul odor emanating from Jeffrey Dahmer’s apartment really was.
The Horrors Of Apartment 213
By the time Jeffrey Dahmer moved into Milwaukee’s Oxford Apartments in May 1990, he had already murdered five people. His first victim, 18-year-old Steven Hicks, was a hitchhiker Dahmer picked up three weeks after high school graduation in 1978. He took Hicks back to his childhood home in Bath Township, Ohio, and strangled him because he didn’t want him to leave. Dahmer then masturbated over Hicks’ corpse before disposing of it.
He didn’t kill again for nearly a decade. Indeed, Dahmer claimed that his second murder in November 1987 was an accident. He invited a man named Steven Tuomi to the Ambassador Hotel in Milwaukee, intending to drug and molest him. But when he woke up the next morning, Tuomi had seemingly been beaten to death.
Dahmer’s next three murders were certainly intentional, though. He killed James Doxtator, Richard Guerrero, and Anthony Sears at his grandmother’s house, luring them there for sex before strangling them. Dahmer even preserved Sears’ head and genitals in acetone — and he took these macabre souvenirs with him when he moved into Oxford Apartments a year later.
Milwaukee Police DepartmentJeffrey Dahmer’s bedroom, where he tortured, sexually assaulted, and killed many of his victims.
Within a week, Jeffrey Dahmer’s apartment was officially a crime scene. He killed Raymond Smith and took the first of what would become a chilling collection of dozens of Polaroid photos of his victims’ bodies in suggestive positions.
Over the next year, Dahmer would murder six more men and boys in his lair. Then, in May 1991, the serial killer’s reign of terror almost came to an end.
Dahmer had invited 14-year-old Konerak Sinthasomphone to his apartment and offered him money to pose for semi-nude photos. Once the boy was inside, he drugged him with sleeping pills, drilled a hole in his skull, and injected hydrochloric acid into his brain. Dahmer then left the apartment to drink at a nearby bar.
When he returned, Sinthasomphone had escaped and was standing naked with three women in the street outside Jeffrey Dahmer’s apartment. The police soon arrived, but Dahmer convinced them that Sinthasomphone was his boyfriend and had simply had too much to drink. The officers allowed Dahmer to lead the boy back inside, where he met a grisly end.
Dahmer ramped up the frequency of his murders after this incident, killing four more victims over the next two months. On July 22, 1991, he lured a fifth man back to his place, again offering him money for nude photos.
His name was Tracy Edwards, and he would soon be known as the lone survivor of Jeffrey Dahmer.
The Horrific Scene Inside Jeffrey Dahmer’s Apartment
As soon as Tracy Edwards entered Jeffrey Dahmer’s apartment that July night, he had a feeling that something was amiss. And after his captor handcuffed him, Edwards knew he had to escape by any means necessary. So, he convinced Dahmer to remove one of the cuffs and later took the first chance he got to punch him in the face and run out the door.
Milwaukee Police DepartmentJeffrey Dahmer’s final intended victim, Tracy Edwards, escaped from Dahmer’s living room.
Once he was outside, Edwards flagged down two police officers, Robert Rauth and Rolf Mueller. Although they were skeptical, they followed Edwards back to Jeffrey Dahmer’s apartment. They never could have expected what they would find inside.
Mueller first noticed a knife beneath Dahmer’s bed. Investigating further, he opened a drawer and spotted 74 Polaroid photos of nude males and dismembered bodies. Mueller and Rauth quickly handcuffed Dahmer and called for backup. While waiting for their colleagues to arrive, Mueller opened the refrigerator and found the head of Oliver Lacy, a man Dahmer had killed a week earlier.
A subsequent search of Jeffrey Dahmer’s apartment revealed even more horrors: three additional severed heads, seven skulls, two human hearts, bags of organs, severed hands, two preserved penises, a torso in the freezer, and three more torsos in a blue 57-gallon drum full of acid in the corner of Dahmer’s bedroom. “It was more like dismantling someone’s museum than an actual crime scene,” Dr. Jeffrey Jentzen, Milwaukee’s chief medical examiner at the time, later told Medicine at Michigan magazine.
Milwaukee Police DepartmentPolice found 74 Polaroid photos of Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims in his drawer and three torsos disintegrating in acid in a blue barrel.
Dahmer was later sentenced to life behind bars for his crimes, and he was murdered in prison in 1994. But by that time, the lair where he’d taken so many lives himself was long gone.
What Happened To Jeffrey Dahmer’s Apartment?
As the news of Dahmer’s chilling crimes broke, his neighbors at Oxford Apartments were disturbed by what had taken place right next door. Some of them had noticed a bad smell coming from Dahmer’s place and had even confronted him about it, but he always had an explanation.
Milwaukee Police DepartmentA 1991 mugshot of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.
Pamela Bass, who lived across the hall from the serial killer, said she sometimes noticed the odor of garbage or bad meat. “I would go tell him, ‘Jeff, something’s stinking again,'” she told The New York Times two days after Dahmer’s arrest. “He would say it was the rotten meat in his freezer. He even bought a bunch of Pine Sol once like he was really going to get rid of it this time. But it didn’t help.”
“Maybe we should have thought something,” Bass continued. “But how could anybody know he was collecting dead bodies? I didn’t know what a dead body smells like.”
Jeffrey Dahmer’s apartment quickly became a macabre landmark. Curious crowds gathered outside, and the media flocked to Milwaukee. City officials, concerned about safety and the potential for morbid tourism, soon made a plan to erase the site from public view.
In August 1992, the Campus Circle Project, a non-profit organization sponsored by Marquette University, purchased the property for $325,000, as reported by the United Press International (UPI) at the time. By that November, the apartment building had been demolished.
Google MapsAn empty lot stands at the former location Oxford Apartments today.
Art Murchison, a spokesperson for Career Youth Development, another agency involved in the transformation of the property, told UPI at the time, “The land it is on will be made a grassy area with flowers to represent life rather than death and pain which the building represents.”
Today, the lot where Jeffrey Dahmer’s apartment once stood remains empty. But while the building itself has been erased, the memory of what once happened in that spot haunts the residents of Milwaukee to this day.
After reading about the chilling crimes that took place in Jeffery Dahmer’s apartment, go inside the disturbing story of Gary Heidnik, the “House of Horrors” killer who inspired Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs. Then, look through 21 haunting photos of Ed Gein’s house.
