Though his thirteen-year killing spree began in Ohio, Dahmer’s baptism by the media as ‘The Milwaukee Monster’ paid grisly homage to the state of Wisconsin.
There, Dahmer murdered sixteen young men at his grandmother’s house, his own apartment, and – in one case – a local hotel.
Dahmer’s innocuous appearance, understated manner, and the convivial vibes of Milwaukee’s gay scene allowed him to move through the city without much scrutiny. The men he propositioned were often further at ease by his conventional good looks, coupled with the money he routinely offered in exchange for a liaison. “We have it on good facts that he was considered somewhat of a ‘Honey’ in the gay community,” Detective Kennedy told an early documentary crew. “People found him attractive. Several people told us that he was the kind of guy that you wanted to take care of, you wanted to baby him.”
Examining Dahmer’s regular haunts and hunting grounds allows for a clearer understanding of how his crimes unfolded. As forensic psychiatrist Dr. Dietz explained during the trial:
“By seeing his environment, I know a bit more about what he’s responding to in the world. Sometimes there are important observations that can be made, [and] anything that could help me understand his mental state at the time of the crimes was germane to what it was I wished to do.”
Part One of an ongoing look at locations connected to the case, the following focuses on several environments and social venues associated with Dahmer’s contact, approach, and opportunism.1
The Ambassador Hotel
Club 219 • Phoenix • La Cage • C’est La Vie • Gare-Bears
The Grand Avenue Mall
The Ambassador Hotel
2308 W. Wisconsin Ave, Milwaukee, WI 53233.
Known as Milwaukee’s landmark Art Deco hotel, The Ambassador opened its doors in May 1928 in a prestigious neighbourhood that housed many of the city’s wealthiest families.
Despite a period of shaky profits brought on by the stock market crash and the Great Depression, The Ambassador continued to thrive after the Second World War – attracting the likes of a moonlighting, lounge-playing Liberace; a campaigning JFK; and The Beatles, who once dropped by for dinner after a local show. However, by the 80s, prohibition and the sale of illegal substances had contributed to the neighbourhood’s decline; surrounding businesses had shut down or relocated, and the hotel’s once attractive interior had taken a hit.
In 1987, the body of 25-year-old Steven Tuomi was carried off its premises in a suitcase.
Nine years after the murder of his first victim in Bath, Ohio2, Dahmer had met Steve on the crowded pavement outside Club 219. Among the assignations made by young men eager to carry on their night past closing time, Dahmer struck up conversation with the Michigan-born cook and brought him back to a pre-booked, $43-a-night room at The Ambassador3.
Dahmer had made use of the hotel several times previously, after being banned from the local bathhouse for drugging its patrons. Back at the room, he gave Steve a cocktail of rum, coke and sleeping pills. When Steve fell asleep, Dahmer continued drinking from a bottle of 151-proof rum. He later awoke to find his companion dead.
The blood, broken rib and bruising on Steve was consistent with a man beaten to death, yet Dahmer – despite the bruises on his own forearms – had no recollection of the incident and what had happened. Left “extremely horrified” by the murder scene, Dahmer later told former FBI-agent Robert Ressler that he “had no intention of doing that.” The bottle of rum had also mysteriously disappeared – though Dahmer suspected it had gone out the window.
In a state of panic, Dahmer extended his stay, went to the Grand Avenue Mall, purchased a 3 x 3 ft suitcase and put Steve’s body in it. At about one o’clock the next morning, Dahmer checked out, hailed a cab and (with the cabbie’s help) loaded the suitcase into the trunk. The body was then left in the cellar of Dahmer’s grandmother’s house for about a week before Dahmer defleshed it and shattered the skeleton with a sledgehammer – later throwing the skull away after failing to preserve it in undiluted bleach.
“After that,” Dahmer claimed, “my moral compass was so out of whack, and the desire – the compulsion – was so strong, that I just continued with that mode.” The continuation of ‘that mode’ would last until 1991, when he was finally apprehended and charged with the murder of 15 men. Steve would not be among those formal charges, however, due to a lack of evidence connecting Dahmer to his disappearance.
Since 2014, a rumour has widely circulated online claiming that Steve was murdered in Room 507, regardless of there being no supporting evidence in hotel records, police documents, or any admission from Dahmer himself.
In 2025, the original source of the claim confirmed it had stemmed from an excitable response to being told the murder was believed to have occurred somewhere in the general area of the fifth floor – relayed by someone who themselves had no evidence for this, either. In the source’s words, it all amounted to “a bad game of telephone.”
The story was given undue legitimacy when larger Dahmer accounts began treating it as fact, or citing their “bad vibes” as ‘proof’.
The Ambassador eventually underwent several successful renovations from 2005 onward4 and remains open to this day.
Steve officially remains missing.
The orginal marble and terrazzo floor (which lines the lobby today) was covered with carpet since 1995. The carpet was carefully removed during remodelling 
The hotel’s reception area was completely gutted and its old front desk removed. A back office was built and a new desk put in place 
Owner Rick Wiegand (r) and an unidentified construction worker 
Photos from the hotel’s 2005 restoration (#1-7) and how it looks today
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Club 219
219 S. 2nd St., Milwaukee, WI 53204.
Home of regular drag show performers, male strippers, and dancers, Club 219 opened in 1981 and soon became the city’s hottest, most popular gay club (before being eclipsed by La Cage).
219 was a multi-tiered disco with a three-foot-high dance floor, glittering proscenium, velvet curtains soaring to its 20-foot ceiling, and a two-level, larger-than-life stage that hosted international performers like Gloria Gaynor, The Weather Girls, Taylor Dayne, and The Village People. Its Queens were treated like royalty and paid a salary for their live singing (lip-syncing was not allowed), while patrons were immersed in laser beams, loud music, and a high-energy atmosphere.
(circa 90s)
Its reputation darkened in the Summer of 1991 when it transpired that Jeffrey Dahmer had frequented the club and there met several of his victims.
- In November 1987, Dahmer met 25-year-old Steven Tuomi outside. Steven and Dahmer went back to The Ambassador Hotel where they drank, passed out, and Dahmer later awoke to find Steven dead. No formal charges were ever brought against Dahmer for this murder due to lack of physical evidence, and Dahmer’s inability to recollect what had happened.
- On the morning of January 17, 1988, Dahmer saw 14-year-old James Doxtator waiting for a bus outside the club. Dahmer offered James $50 if the teenager posed for some photographs. Back at his grandmother’s house in West Allis, Dahmer drugged and strangled the boy, then – in his own words – “brought him up to the bedroom and pretended he was still alive.” James’ body was dismembered a week later after Dahmer’s grandmother began to complain about a mysterious odour.
- On May 20, 1991, Dahmer met 32-year-old Ricky Beeks and offered the self-proclaimed hustler $50 for the night. Back at Dahmer’s Milwaukee apartment, Ricky was drugged and strangled. His body was the first to be immortalised as a Polaroid while it was posed and dismembered.
- On 24 May, 1991, Dahmer met 31-year-old Tony Hughes. The good-natured, life-loving Tony requested that his friends give him a ride back to Dahmer’s apartment, and didn’t seem at all anxious about being left alone with him. Several sources allege that Dahmer and Tony were previously familiar with one another, which may also have accounted for Tony’s trust – though Dahmer denied knowing any of his victims prior to their death.
Parts of Ricky and Tony were later retrieved from Dahmer’s apartment.
It was also at Club 219 that Dahmer met 25-year-old Ronald Flowers in April 1988. After Ronald’s car broke down outside the club, Dahmer offered to help jump-start it, claiming they would first need to take a cab to West Allis to retrieve his own car and equipment – despite the fact that Dahmer did not own a car. Ronald accompanied him to his grandmother’s house, before awakening in hospital, $200 poorer and with no memory of what had happened to him. No formal charges followed. After his arrest, Dahmer admitted he hadn’t killed Ronald because he was too big and it would have “created too much noise.”
Having often served him rum and coke, Club 219 bartender Scott Gunkel later recalled that Dahmer “doesn’t open up, but he’s very personable. He’s very relaxed, very calm.”
When his crimes became public, Club 219 was caught in the ensuing backlash, receiving bomb threats and being pelted with eggs.
Decades on, another former patron lamented that “for the longest time, I wanted to purchase the property and revamp it while keeping it an LGBT+ nightlife spot, but people always told me it would be in poor taste – that it wouldn’t work because of a certain demonic person.”
Club 219 closed its doors in October 2005, and by 2012 its spot had become the starting point for a controversial Dahmer-themed walking tour, designed to map out parts of the killer’s murder spree. The tour was met with protests from those who found it exploitative – including the sister of victim Richard Guerrero, who branded the tours organisers “just as evil” as Dahmer himself. Despite Groupon pulling a promotional offer for that particular tour, similar events continue to run today.
In 2019, the space that had once been occupied by so much spice and glamour was turned into a short-lived DIY craft studio and bar combo. In 2022, it was reinvented as Wall Street Stock Bar – a finance-themed, soul-playing endeavour which is still open at the time of writing.
219 South 2nd Street as Club 219 (L) and today as the Wall Street Stock Bar
Phoenix
235 S. 2nd St. Milwaukee, WI 53204.
Another of several gay bars in the one-block Second Street area known as Walker’s Point, the two rooms of Phoenix were characterised by their active dance floor, good music and party atmosphere.
Phoenix had risen from the ashes of the former Oregon House bar in May 1979, and was generally regarded as one of the more popular venues, despite being more ‘divey’ than the likes of Club 219.
The club also had unfortunate connections to the Dahmer case after two of its patrons were lured from its premises to their deaths.
- On March 17, 1988, 22-year-old Richard Guerrero agreed to go back to West Allis with Dahmer after a 2 a.m proposition outside the bar. Taking a taxi part of the way – then walking the rest so as to not disturb Dahmer’s grandmother – Dahmer and Richard engaged in light sex before Richard was drugged and strangled. His body was left in Dahmer’s bed until it could be dismembered in the basement a few hours later, once Grandma had left for church.
- On June 24, 1990, 27-year-old Eddie Smith went back to Dahmer’s Milwaukee apartment after also having been propositioned for paid photos. Eddie had met Dahmer before, found him “cute”, and had introduced him to his brother under the fond impression that Dahmer was some kind of hotshot producer (though whether that was an outright lie on Dahmer’s part or an excitable exaggeration on Eddie’s is unclear5). Dahmer later told police he felt “rotten” about the death, having been unable to preserve Eddie’s bones or skull efficiently.
15-year-old Luis Pinet had been a little more fortutious in his encounter(s) with Dahmer. A part-time worker at Club 219, Luis encountered Dahmer at Phoenix in July 1990. The two spent a night together and arranged to meet again the following day, though Luis failed to appear – later realising he had misunderstood the agreed time. That evening, they encountered one another again outside Phoenix and returned to Dahmer’s apartment, where Dahmer attempted to bludgeon Luis with a rubber mallet, then strangle him. After scuffling and talking to his assailant for a few hours, miraculously, Luis escaped – his survival often credited to Dahmer’s sobriety and the fact that Pinet was fully conscious.
Phoenix staff noted that Dahmer always took the same stool at the bar, drank and smoked alone, responded laconically to the barman, and rarely smiled. Other than occassionally falling into conversation with Black patrons, he kept to himself.
“I never saw him with another person,” said one bartender. “Never.”
As South Second Street began to lose ground as a gay mecca (due to the decline of the neighbourhood and gentrification detracting from its once ‘closeted’ vibe), Phoenix closed in March 1993.
Its space was occupied by four more LGBT bars since then, though a block of apartments stands in its place today.
La Cage
801 S. 2nd St, Milwaukee, WI 53204.
Opening in March 1984, La Cage6 was a popular, ever-evolving dance bar that would eventually overtake Club 219 as Milwaukee’s premier gay club, while attracting a crowd that extended well beyond the city’s LGBT community.
Its owner was fond of regularly remodelling its interior and, throughout its early days, the La Cage complex hosted multiple areas — including a basement pub and a short-lived, more relaxed cocktail and jazz bar — along with video screens, pageants, cabarets, and the club’s famous dance cage.
La Cage had hit Walker’s Point loud and proud with all its windows uncovered. It was a design choice previously unheard of in Milwaukee’s gay clubs, where patrons felt safest knowing no outsiders could see into their haven – and when the only window in such venues was a 12-square-inch pane of glass in the front door required for legal purposes. “People seriously thought they were going to get shot through the windows,” one employee said.
For the most part, however, La Cage was a safe place for good times – although it gained some unfortunate media attention when it transpired as another space Dahmer had frequented, and where he had met his sixth victim.
In March of 1989, 24-year-old Anthony Sears made a move on Dahmer outside the club at closing time. It was a move that author Brian Masters would describe as “a fateful initiative” on the gregarious Tony’s part.
Using the story that he was in town from Chicago visiting his grandmother, Dahmer asked a friend of Tony’s to drop them off a couple of blocks from her West Allis address – claiming they would walk the rest of the way so the car wouldn’t wake her. In truth, it was so Tony’s exact last known location would not be discovered.
Tony was drugged, strangled, embraced and dismembered. His mummified head was then stored in Dahmer’s locker at the Ambrosia Chocolate Factory for nine months while Dahmer served his sentence at the House of Correction for the 1988 second-degree sexual assault of a teenage boy.
Tony’s skull was later brought to Dahmer’s new apartment, spray-painted to conceal its authenticity, and recovered by police in 1991.
Still a prominent fixture in Milwaukee’s gay scene, La Cage remains open seven days a week until at least 2 a.m.
C’est La Vie
231 S. 2nd Street, Milwaukee, WI 53204.
Hosting a small dance floor and no coloured lights, C’est La Vie was a modest means to start one’s night (though its bartenders were set a strict – if not always obeyed – rule that they were not to go to Club 219 or Phoenix due to managerial conflicts).
Its upstairs was available for lodging, and many young men in Milwaukee first entered the gay community by taking a job there while living above the bar.
Opening in December 1974, C’est La Vie remained relatively popular throughout the 80s, hosting drag shows, strippers, and themed events like “Old-Fashioned Chicken Night” (discount cocktails for 18–21-year-olds) and “Dirty Old Man Night” for those over 40 (with free tap beer if one kept their clothes on!).
As with several other gay venues in the area, C’est La Vie was mentioned in Dahmer’s confession as a club he sometimes frequented – though no victims were picked up from its premises.
The clubs were a place for Dahmer to openly express his sexuality as a gay man in the 80s and early 90s – away from wider stigma or the religious judgement that lay closer to home. Speaking to Dr. Ken Smail, Dahmer said he’d enjoyed “the excitement of being around people that I didn’t know and the chance of meeting some nice-looking guy… [It was] the same thing that led me to the bath clubs: the excitement and anticipation of meeting a stranger in the night.”
Under more conventional circumstances, with a less destructive pathology, they may have been a way for him to meet a regular partner, or begin a normal relationship.
“It was a lot of fun,” he told the FBI. “Just being out in the crowd to that type of atmosphere. Not having to pretend that I was something that I wasn’t… And watching the strip tease acts. There’s some pretty good ones.”7
Despite promising one final show, C’est La Vie closed without any fanfare in the spring of 2008. Today the venue serves as an all-day breakfast bar.
(date unknown)
Gare-Bears
927 N. 27th St, Milwaukee, WI 53208.
Founded in 1983, Gare-Bears was said to have attracted a diverse crowd to its small space, including many gay and trans clients.
Though popular with its regulars, the circumambient neighbourhood was not without its share of crime, and accusations were often made about public disorder spilling out from the bar and onto the street.
As time went on, police would occasionally make use of Gare-Bear’s surveillance cameras, checking the security footage whenever the Dollar Store across the street was robbed – and once falsely accusing the bar’s owner of being “a white pimp in a Black neighbourhood.”
“I adapted to the neighbourhood,” a former bartender said in 2011. “It’s not about black and white. People are people. Drugs are what hurt this neighbourhood.”
A decade earlier, however, Dahmer had spent some time drinking at Gare-Bears on the night of May 29, 1991, before making the seven-minute walk back to his North 25th Street apartment.
Dahmer had headed out for a drink at around 1.30 a.m – about seven hours after propositioning 14-year-old Konerak Sinthasomphone at the local mall.
Back at Dahmer’s, Konerak was photographed, drugged, and had a small hole – two to three inches deep – power-drilled down to his brain as he dozed. Dahmer then filled the hole with a shot of muriatic acid in a bid to transform Konerak into a submissive, zombified sex partner. When Konerak awoke, he was groggy. “He wasn’t dead or anything and he talked,” Dahmer told Dr. Smail. “I thought maybe I’d be able to keep him that way.”
Dahmer hadn’t counted on Konerak stumbling, stupefied, onto the street when his captor – finding himself out of beer – left to go to the nearby tavern.
Konerak was sat, nude and disoriented, on the southeast corner of 25th and State. Had Dahmer taken the shorter route home, he would not have re-encountered him
Confronted with the sight of the naked boy surrounded by police, members of the fire department and a crowd (including three increasingly concerned young Black women) Dahmer convinced the officers that Konerak was his 19-year-old drunk lover who had a penchant for taking his clothes off. Back at the apartment, the earlier photographs of Konerak in his underwear appeared to support Dahmer’s story, and the officers left.
Within minutes, Konerak had been administered a second, fatal, injection of the acid.
The incident with Konerak would account for two of the officers being terminated for three years and raised more accusations of racism within the police department, given the officers’ trust in the Caucasian Dahmer at the supposed expense of the Black women’s concerns and the minority status of the Laotian teenager.
Konerak was not the first victim on whom Dahmer had attempted his ‘drilling technique’. Just a few days earlier, he had killed 31-year-old Tony Hughes the same way.
“I thought maybe it would work because I didn’t want to keep killing people and not have anything left except the skull,” he later explained.
When Covid-19 hit in 2020, a sign in the bar window proudly declared that, though “Corona will leave us, Gare-Bears will not!”
Gare-Bears was shut down a year later by the city council.
The Grand Avenue Mall
275 W. Wisconsin Ave, Milwaukee, WI 53203.
(featuring Professor Stein: the iconic seven-foot tight roping, unicycling animatronic bear)
Boasting 160 stores under one roof, the four-block-long, three-floors-high Grand Avenue Mall opened in 1982 at a cost of $60 million.
By 1990, an estimated 20,000 shoppers were visiting the mall on weekdays, with double on weekends.
Alongside shops and eateries such as Alan Preuss Florists; Motor Works Ltd (which offered a wide variety of car-themed gifts); Michel’s Baguette (a French-style bakery); Hello Doll ‘E’ (specialising in collectibles, clowns, and dolls); and the well-known U.S. department store Gimbels, the mall would also partake in special events – such as bringing in cattle in honour of the state’s Dairy Month.
At a time when many major city downtown retail centres were shutting down, The Grand Avenue sought to avoid a similar fate by relying on locally owned shops catering to the ‘urban’ tastes of the surrounding population, alongside national chain stores.
Dahmer made frequent use of the Grand Avenue Mall, admitting that he often headed there “to drink beer and eat pizza.” He was further fond of its McDonald’s, a chicken-and-chips establishment called Apricot Annies, coffee from a French cafe, and lunch at the upper-level Spiesgarten ethnic food court. Its Woolworths was where he purchased the suitcase used to transport the body of Steve Tuomi from the Ambassador Hotel back to West Allis; while other stores would supply knives for dismemberment.
Beyond this, the mall itself served as one of Dahmer’s hunting grounds.
Though several young men approached there declined his advances, others were not so fortunate:
- On 26 May 1991, Dahmer encountered Koneak Sinthasomphone at the mall’s main entrance on Wisconsin Avenue (“I was on my way out, he was on the way in,” Dahmer recalled).
The 14-year-old was offered money in exchange for being photographed, and the two travelled back to Dahmer’s apartment by bus. Once there, Dahmer took two pictures of Konerak, drugged him with a drink laced with Halcion, and bored a small hole through his cranium using a 3/8-inch Sears Craftsman drill before injecting his brain with muriatic acid.
Konerak was the third victim whom Dahmer attempted to convert into a ‘living zombie’ – a compliant partner whose deprivation of independent thought would ensure he would never leave his captor.
To add to the pain of the Sinthasomphone family, Konerak was the brother of the 13-year-old boy Dahmer had been charged with sexually assaulting back in 1989. The conviction had put Dahmer on work release for a year, followed by probation. He was in the second year of that five-year probation at the time of Konerak’s death.
– Tracy Edwards testifying on his escape from Dahmer
- At around 6pm on 22 July, 1991, 32-year-old Tracy Edwards was hanging out with two friends at the Grand Avenue Mall when the group was approached by Dahmer. Claiming to be a professional photographer, Dahmer offered $100 to anyone interested in partying and posing for some pictures.
After stopping at a nearby liquor store, Dahmer separated Tracy from his friends by providing a fake address at which to meet later.
Back at Dahmer’s apartment, Tracy soon found himself handcuffed at one wrist and held at knife point as Dahmer oscillated between pleasantries and an increasingly disturbed psychosis-like state.
Though Dahmer later described his own recollection of the encounter as “fuzzy” – and though parts of Tracy’s own story were challenged by the prosecution due to some fantastical embellishments – the ordeal ended when Tracy managed to escape and flag down a passing police car – inadvertently bringing Dahmer’s 13-year killing spree to an end.
After a period of economic downturn and downsizing, the shopping centre – now known simply as The Avenue – remains open today, describing itself as “a re-imagined use of the buildings that were once The Grand Avenue Mall.”
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Sources: Dahmer’s confession and official case documents, The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer by Brian Masters (1993), The Man Who Could Not Kill Enough by Anne E. Schwartz (1992), B.J Daniels, Wisconsin LGBT History Project, Court TV, The Ambassador, Trip Advisor, La Cage, Toast MKE, Old Milwaukee, ‘The Avenue (Milwaukee)’ on Wikipedia and Facebook, On Milwaukee, Restaurant Guru, Zillow, Urban Milwaukee, Shepherd Express, Arizona Daily Star, The Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle, Wisconsin State Journal, et al.
Footnotes:
- ‘Mapping Milwaukee’ will focus only on locations within MKE. Areas of significance in West Allis and Chicago may be covered under a different series ↩︎
- Coincidentally, Dahmer’s first victim had also been called Steven [Hicks] ↩︎
- Today rates start at around $150-$200+ per night ↩︎
- So even if Room 507 was the room Dahmer and Steve had used in 1987, it would not be in the same location today ↩︎
- Given Dahmer’s regular manipulation, it was likely the former ↩︎
- Also known as La Cage aux Folles (‘The Cage of Fools’) after the 1973 play about a gay couple operating a drag club on the French Riviera ↩︎
- Dahmer also made regular trips to Chicago, utilising several clubs and bath houses there ↩︎
Hi, the “Unicorn” bathrooms were mentioned in the trial. Do they still exist? Very interesting as always 👍
Impeccable research 👌
Really great piece! 😻🌟🌟 I think this is the first time I’ve seen the exact route Jeff took back to #213, so that was a nice touch. I wanted to ask .. What do you think of Shakers Bar? Do you think Jeff really went there and sat on the shaker’s stool? It’s always seemed a bit weird to me, because he never mentioned it anywhere?
Great research as always.
Very informative piece. I’m always so interested in the Ambassador Hotel and that Room 507 story. And people talking about the ‘vibe’ there.
Those later pictures look very current. Did you stay there?