I parked beside the alley.
The fenced-in lot bordering it contained the place where Dahmer’s apartment building used to stand. Inside the fence, the ground was covered with dry, brown grass and a dusting of gritty snow. The lot looked unremarkable and anonymous, which was exactly what the city of Milwaukee wanted. Bulldozing the building and clearing the rubble had been a way of trying to erase from the city’s collective memory what had happened here.
I got out of the car, walked to the chain-link fence, and peered through to the other side.
The cloud-dampened light and flecks of restless snow accentuated the lonely, foreboding mood of this place.
After working as many cases as I have, you realize that you can scrub a floor clean of blood, you can tear out a wall or knock down a building, but tragedies all too often seem to stain the air of these places of death, to rip open space and time and root themselves stubbornly to a specific location.
The invisible, tormented geography of pain.
My thoughts traveled back to hearing about what’d happened just on the other side of this fence, back to the stories about the sixteen young men who’d died at Dahmer’s hand so close to where I was standing, and I couldn’t help but feel a chill.
The wind was picking up and bit into my face. But that’s not what was giving me shivers. My thoughts of Dahmer were.
Even now, three years after he was beaten to death in prison, the shock was still there, fresh and painful in my city.
It was like those stages of grief that psychologists talk about-denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Milwaukee hadn’t reached the acceptance stage yet. I have my own theory about grief-you get angry, and then you repress it or it swallows you whole. Either it disappears or you do.
But that was just me.
And so, Jeffrey Dahmer.
A psychopath like none in a generation.
He would pick up young men from the bars in this neighborhood on Milwaukee’s west end-usually they were African-American, but he wasn’t picky when it came to race. He was more interested in looks and physique.
His MO: drug their drinks, get them back to his apartment, handcuff them, overpower them, kill them, eat them. Sometimes he would stuff their corpses into vats. Sometimes he would sleep with the bodies or chop them up and keep the body parts in the fridge and the skulls beside a candlelit altar to Satan in his closet. Sometimes he drilled holes in the heads of his victims while they were still alive and poured acid into their brains, hoping to turn the men into zombie love slaves.
During his trial he pled insanity. And lost.
In the end, he was convicted of fifteen homicides, but he admitted to two more, including one in Ohio. The city of Milwaukee later purchased his estate and all of his possessions were buried in a landfill, the location of which only five people knew-Captain Domyslawski, Lieutenant Thorne, Detective Annise Corsica (who’d led the investigation), and two city sanitation workers I hadn’t met who drove the garbage truck and dumped out its contents.
The location was kept secret so the site wouldn’t be visited by curiosity seekers or scavenged by souvenir hounds. It was grisly just to think about, but a certain segment of society collects memorabilia from killers like Dahmer and, inevitably, the site where his belongings were dumped would’ve become a Mecca for people interested in collecting keepsakes of cannibals.
Though by now Dahmer’s belongings were certainly covered by a mountain of other trash, I was still thankful that no one had discovered which landfill had been used. Keeping people away would have been an endless, disturbing ordeal for local law enforcement.
I walked to the telephone pole where we’d found Lionel Shannon.
No clues jumped out at me. No sudden revelations came to me.
The snow picked up. The minutes ticked by.
Finally, with the thoughts of what’d happened last night and the things Colleen Hayes had told us this morning circling through my head, I left the alley and drove to HQ for the briefing.