Part Two of an ongoing look at locations connected to the case, this installment focuses on Dahmer’s workplace, residences and bathhouse activity.
Part One (covering some of Dahmer’s hunting grounds) can be found here.
Club Bath Milwaukee • Ambrosia Chocolate Factory
North 24th Street Apartment • The Oxford Apartments
Club Bath Milwaukee
704-A W. Wisconsin Ave. Milwaukee, WI 53233.
The homosexual bathhouses were a cultural phenomenon of the 1960s and 70s.
Typically featuring clubs, bars, saunas, swimming pools, a TV lounge (usually screening pornography), and gym equipment, such venues were generally less discreet than the older Turkish baths.
Upon checking in, a man would be assigned a locker or changing room before stripping down to just a towel – often utilising the one-bed private cubicles for near-anonymous sex.
Just one of 42 establishments in the national Club Bath franchise, Club Bath Milwaukee opened in June 1974 and, for a long time, was one of the focal points of the city’s gay community.
The entrance to CBMKE was located in an alley just north of Wisconsin Avenue – a block from the Milwaukee Central Library and a few doors from the Fire Department Headquarters.
Hosting popular specials (including its famous “[Hotdog] Weiners for $1”), annual ‘Mr. Club Milwaukee’ contests, and promotional events for other gay businesses, Club Bath fostered a private, membership-based community where men could explore their sexuality in a cleaner, brighter setting than the darker, grittier venues that had previously dominated the scene.
At one point, the entire Club Bath chain claimed to have as many as 500,000 members. One of whom was Jeffrey Dahmer.
Dahmer had first started frequenting the bathhouses in 1985, when he was in his mid-20s. At the time, no one in his family knew he was gay, and the bathhouses gave him more freedom to be himself – and to develop part of the M.O for his later murders.
“I trained myself to view people as objects of potential pleasure instead of people, instead of seeing them as complete human beings,” he explained. “Sounds callous, and it is, but that’s what I did.”
– CBMKE manager Bradley Babush talking about Dahmer
Although the bathhouses enabled him to accumulate a steady number of one-night-stands, Dahmer did not like being the receiving partner during anal sex – having twice been painfully put out by the experience. He preferred a more dominating role, and – unable to find a partner who would remain passive or completely yield to him – preferred when his partner was not responsive at all.1
“I looked at it as an experience of taking,” he said. “There wasn’t any mutual giving, not in my mind anyway. I was always quite selfish.”
This selfishness led to him getting a repeat prescription for Halcion – a fast-acting benzodiazepine, also known as Triazolam – and drugging the men who accompanied him into his cubicle. Once they were unconscious, Dahmer would lie with them for several hours – listening to the sounds of a still, but still breathing, body and rubbing up against it in acts of frotteurism.
One man came forward anonymously after Dahmer’s arrest, claiming he had once been drugged in the bathhouse between 1 and 2 AM by a tall, “fairly good looking” blond called Jeffrey who said he worked at a nearby chocolate factory.
“I thought I’d take a couple sips [of the drink he offered] to make the guy happy and get on with it,” the man told The Milwaukee Journal. “The next thing I remember, I was out in the common area, fully clothed, and somebody told me he had drugged me and I had gotten sick all over the place… His interest in me didn’t seem to be sexual; it seemed to be to get me to drink. Maybe he was experimenting with me to see what it would take to put somebody out.”
The man had been unconscious for more than three hours.
About 10 more patrons would be subject to this form of ‘experimentation’, until one man ended up in hospital for over a week after Dahmer accidentally overdosed him.
Though Dahmer was swiftly banned from the venue, none of the drugged victims wished to press charges, presumably to avoid negative publicity and to protect their own private lives. As a result, a brief inquiry led only to police advising manager Bradley Babush not to let Dahmer in again, and Dahmer moved his encounters to nearby hotels – including The Ambassador, where several more men would be drugged and where 25-year-old Steven Tuomi would eventually be killed.
“[The police] didn’t think anything was serious enough, so they didn’t investigate further,” Babush later told the press.
The HIV and AIDS crisis marked the beginning of the end for Club Bath.
Believing that the men’s bathhouses were heavily contributing to the issue – and later alarmed by a tuberculosis outbreak – the State of Wisconsin ordered Club Bath Milwaukee to shut down in 1988.
City by city, the rest of the Club Bath chain followed.
Ambrosia Chocolate Factory
1113 N. 5th St, Milwaukee, WI 53212.
For decades, the sweet smell of chocolate filled the air of downtown Milwaukee, courtesy of the Ambrosia Chocolate Factory.
Founded in 1894 by Otto Schoenleber (who had converted his furniture workshop into a small chocolate-making operation), Ambrosia once manufactured various candy bars – such as its Luki-Chuki choco stars, Peanut Slabs, shredlike woodland-inspired ‘Bark’ bar, Pecan Rounds, Nut Chunk’s, and sweet vanilla ‘Angel’s Food’2 – as well as those sold in the very first Stollwerck vending machines.
However, by the mid-twentieth century, the factory had shifted its primary focus to large-volume products like powdered cocoa, flavorings, and bulk chocolate sold to other confectionery companies for use in Eskimo Pies, Chips Ahoy! choc chips, Sally Fields cookies, and other mass-produced goods. The Tixie was among the last of its named own-brand chocolate bars and remained purchasable at the downtown Milwaukee shop and outlet stores – alongside baking blocks, cookie chunks, sweeteners, fudge, jelly bellies, seasonal gifts (like heart-shaped Valentine’s chocolates, candy cigars for Father’s Day, and ‘Halloween taffy’), various coatings and hard candies.3
Free sweet treat and desert recipes were also available in store, and by 1985 Ambrosia was capable of producing 500,000 pounds of chocolate each day.
The company’s wholesome reputation suffered a dark blow when it transpired that Jeffrey Dahmer had worked there as a mixer for six years, up until just before his final arrest.
Dahmer had joined Ambrosia’s team of nearly 400 staff on January 14th, 1985, via a job agency.
Working the Sunday-Friday, 11 PM-7 AM graveyard shift4, he was responsible for measuring and mixing large batches of ingredients — powdered sugar, cocoa, treacle and oils — into several eleven-thousand-pound drums, operating the machinery, and signalling to the floor crew once the thick chocolate paste was ready to be released for further processing.
He did not consider it bad work for $8.75 an hour5 (though the heavy lifting would lead to a year-long stint on steroids for joint pain), and Detective Pat Kennedy noted that Dahmer seemed proud to have played a role in producing the chocolate Kennedy had praised during his interrogation.
Lionel Dahmer, however, seemed dissapointed that his son hadn’t progressed beyond manual labour, and Dr. Norman Goldfarb (tasked with assessing Dahmer in 1989 after a charge of sexual assault on a minor) wrote that he was “underemployed”, but “has done little to this point to effectively change [his present place in life].”6
When later asked by his probation officer about his skills, Dahmer wrote: “I know how to mix chocolate – that’s about it.”
Despite Dahmer having been arrested at the factory following the assault on Somsak Sinthasomphone – and although his employment had coincided with his killing of multiple young men during his free time – his earlier company reports had been generally positive. Commended for his work, he was found to be ‘resourceful’, ‘willing to learn’, ‘consistently improving’, ‘congenial and cooperative’, ‘neat and clean’, and ‘an asset to the mixing department.’
His 1987 company report had described him as “rarely absent and rarely tardy”
It was only after his final arrest that Dahmer’s coworkers learned the mild-mannered company asset had stored the severed head of one of his victims in his yellow-painted work locker for nine months whilst living at the House of Correction — during which time he frequently brought Ambrosia chocolate samples to the women who worked there.
NANCY GLASS: Were you almost flaunting it?
D: Yes, but that’s how strong the compulsion was.
Dahmer began to fall out of favour with his employer as he took increasing amounts of time off to spend with his victims and their subsequent disposal.
“I knew my job was in jeopardy around February,” he told Dr. Ken Smail, referring to his last months of escalating violence. “All I would have had to do was just stop [killing] for several months at a time and space it out, but it didn’t happen that way. I was just driven to do it more frequently and more frequently until it was just too much – complete overload.”
On July 18th, 1991 – just five days before his arrest – Dahmer was formally dismissed.
“An hour before I had to go to work, I was trying to decide whether to strangle him then, or keep him alive during the night,” Dahmer later said, regarding the murder of 24-year-old Oliver Lacy. “I chose the latter and missed work, and was fired that Sunday.”
His official termination letter cited “excessive absenteeism” and chastised him for failing to take corrective action. “This is something that you alone control,” chided Human Resources – oblivious to the compulsive frenzy with which Dahmer had been killing.
“I called in one night – I had that black weight lifter [Oliver Lacy] with me. I thought I had one more day of sick leave, but I didn’t… I decided to spend the night with him, thought I’d still have a job in the morning. But that did it.” – Dahmer explaining his suspension
Having failed to update his contact information, it’s unlikely Dahmer would have actually seen his dismissal letter, which was sent to his grandmother’s address. His arrest effectively rendering its contents redundant, regardless, and sparing him the need to have his belongings removed from company property “no later than July 25th.”
The news of Dahmer’s crimes shocked his co-workers, who recalled him as polite, often feeding on peanut-butter-and-honey sandwiches, reading books about animals and fish, and occasionally falling asleep on the job. One had given him lifts home in bad weather; another recognised him from a gay bar they both visited. Beyond that, he’d kept to himself.
It also led to the factory recieving several crank calls, and even accusations that Dahmer had mixed human remains in with the chocolate.
“We have strict controls here,” a company official insisted. “Everything is inspected every step of the way.”
Its business was not affected directly, however: contract volume remained heavy, and workers – granted counselling via the employee assistance program – did not have their productivity seriously disrupted.
Ambrosia’s downtown plant was closed in 1992 when the company moved to a new state-of-the-art facility on the city’s northwest side. The Ambrosia name and brand was later taken over by the Minneapolis company Cargill (whose current facility on Milwaukee’s West Carmen Avenue remains open and productive), while the old factory was completely demolished in 1993.
North 24th Street Apartment
#204, 808 North 24th St., Milwaukee, WI 53205.
In the summer of 1988, Dahmer moved from his grandmother’s West Allis home (where he had been living for six years) to a small one-bedroom apartment four miles away.
Catherine Dahmer had grown concerned about her grandson’s behaviour (including his heavy drinking and late night company with men) and a family meeting led to the decision that it would be best if 28-year-old Jeff moved out. Dahmer took the skull of Richard Guerrero with him to the new apartment – along with two small stone gargoyles and a long black table which he’d intended to incorporate into a shrine.
He had barely entered his new lease when, on the 27th of September, he was arrested for the sexual assault of 13-year-old Somsak Sinthasomphone7.
Dahmer had encountered Somsak on the street the previous day and offered him $50 to pose for some photos. “I thought he was nice and just wanted to try out his new camera,” the boy later explained.
– Somsak Sinthasomphone testifying on Dahmer
Back at the apartment, Somsak was instructed to model with his shirt open and his pants unzipped, while the drug slipped into his drink began to take effect.
“You’ll look sexier,” Dahmer told the increasingly woozy teenager as he pulled down Somsak’s underwear and touched him. When Dahmer began listening to the sounds of his stomach and kissing downward from his navel, Somsak fled. He was later hospitalised, diagnosed with a drug overdose and questioned by police – who, during their search of the apartment, failed to discover Richard’s skull hidden in a draw under a towel.
Dahmer insisted that he hadn’t intentionally drugged Somsak and that there must have been sleeping pill residue in his cup. He also claimed he hadn’t known Somsak was a minor and that he hadn’t meant to touch Somak’s private part, it had just “kind of popped out.” None of these claims were brought by Judge Gardner, however, who in 1989 sentenced Dahmer to one year in the House of Correction and five years’ probation with work release.
Though his time in the House of Correction meant Dahmer had to abandon North 24th Street and move back in with his grandmother, Dahmer attempted to make one more use of the apartment in November 1988.
Thinking it would still be vacant (he had only moved out in October) and still having the key to it, Dahmer tried to enter with another man – only to find that someone else had already moved in. As he and the man retreated down the stairwell, Dahmer was struck hard from behind. He passed out and later awoke to find himself at the police station, $350 worse off and in need of stitches.
The apartments at 808 North 24th Street still remain today, listed as an income restricted property.
Inside one of 808’s 541-square-foot apartments
The Oxford Apartments
924 North 25th Street, Milwaukee, WI 53233.
A predominantly Black neighbourhood with a 18% white population in 1990, the area encompassing North 25th Street mostly consisted of multi-unit apartment buildings – including the 49-unit Oxford Apartments.
On May 14th 1990, Dahmer hired Aetna Moving Storage Incorporated to help relocate from his grandmother’s house in West Allis to the now infamous Apartment 213 in Milwaukee – a half-hour walk from the Ambrosia Chocolate Factory where he worked.
Though the local crime rate around North 25th Street was high, Dahmer was willing to take his chances in the neighbourhood and later told Dr. Ken Smail that – despite being a victim of theft on occasion – it was a “generally quiet” area.
“There wasn’t a lot of distraction or noise [and there was] a lot of privacy,” Dahmer said. “It was nice enough for the price.”
The price was $300 a month (minus electricity) and Dahmer decorated the small one-bedroom apartment with prints by Franz Marc, Victor Skrebneski and Salvadar Dali – along with several other images of muscular nude men.
When police searched the residence in the summer of ‘91, they also found over 70 Polaroids taken by Dahmer of several victims in various states of undress and dismemberment.
There was also a well-tended fish tank, home to African cichlids and tiger barbs.
Brian Masters (author of the bestselling The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer) noted that:
“The move to North 25th Street was the final step in Jeff Dahmer’s decline. It is not an exaggeration to say that the freedom which total privacy and easy accessibility afforded him was his passport to disintegration.”
Dahmer’s freedom meant twelve young men would lose their lives in Apartment 213 – many within mere weeks or days of one another:
- Raymond Smith (32) — died May 20, 1990
- Eddie Smith (27) — died June 14, 1990
- Ernest Miller (22) — died Sept. 2, 1990
- David Thomas (22) — died Sept. 24, 1990
- Curtis Straughter (17) — died Feb. 18, 1991
- Errol Lindsey (19) — died April 7, 1991
- Tony Hughes (31) — died May 24, 1991
- Konerak Sinthasomphone (14) — died May 27, 1991
- Matt Turner (20) — died June 30, 1991
- Jeremiah Weinberger (23) — died July 5, 1991
- Oliver Lacy (24) — died July 15, 1991
- Joseph Bradehoft (25) — died July 19, 1991
Remains from most of those twelve were later recovered.
Neighbours had complained several times about strange and foul odours coming from somewhere, but when the source was traced back to #213, Dahmer placed the blame on a malfunctioning fridge and the death of some of his fish.
After the full extent of Dahmer’s crimes came to light, the residents of the Oxford Apartments were in shock.
“Everyone in the building felt suckered,” explained Vernell Bass, Dahmer’s opposite neighbour who had become relatively friendly with him. “We all felt that Jeffrey Dahmer had played us. It’s really hard to become fond of someone [then] to find out that, actually, that person had a dagger in your back… I had no idea that this is what was occurring right across the hall from where we lived.”
Vernell’s wife Pamela was also deeply rattled. “What kind of human being would do that?” she asked. “What does that make him?”
Even those who hadn’t been so familiar with Dahmer as a neighbour were left marked by the revelations.
“Sometimes I have dreams I’m still living across the hall from him and he’s over there chopping and drilling,” another resident admitted a year after Dahmer’s arrest. “I used to be a nice, laughing, outgoing person, [but now] I’m still kind of scared. I’m scared to trust people because of what has happened. Because of what Jeffrey did.”
In August 1992 – six months after Dahmer had been sentenced to 15 consecutive life terms in prison – plans were announced to demolish the mostly vacated8 apartment block after the local Marquette University purchased it for nearly $500,000.
“The land it is on will be made a grassy area with flowers to represent life, rather than death and pain which the building [currently] represents,” said Art Murchison, a spokesman for the project.
Three months later, the apartments were razed as some of the victims’ friends and family looked on.
Today the site remains vacant – now branded by Google as a “tourist attraction.”
“The souls of twelve men inhabit that place, including my brother Eddie’s.” – Theresa Smith, sister of Dahmer’s seventh victim
Sources: Wisconsin Historical Society, The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer by Brian Masters (1993), I Have Lived in the Monster by Robert K. Ressler & Tom Shachtman (1997), Court TV, Zillow, Inside Edition, Milwaukee History, Wisconsin LGBT History Project, 213Dahmer, Cult Collectibles, Official case documents, The Milwaukee Sentinel, Argus-Leader The Post-Crescent, et al.
Footnotes:
- Despite a common misconception that Dahmer favored sleeping with the dead, forensic psychiatrist Dr. Park Dietz testified that Dahmer’s first preference was for a living partner who would consent to ongoing “light sex.” In Dietz’s words, “a consenting, continuing partner.” That person, however, would have to be completely submissive and unwilling to leave. His second preference was for someone alive but stripped of free will, while his third was for an unconscious body. It was this third option that Dahmer most often obtained ↩︎
- Various Ambrosia chocolate wrappers have fallen onto the ‘murderabilia’ market over the years, claiming to have been from when Dahmer worked at the factory – with some people even speculating that he may have handled the exact chocolate once contained in them. Most of these wrappers pre-date Dahmer by several (in some cases many) decades, however, and fail to take into account that by the mid-80s and early 90s, Ambrosia’s range of consumer bars had been reduced to limited outlet offerings after primarily shifting to bulk and industrial supply (the afforementioned Luki-Chuki’s, for example, date to the 1920s). It was Ambrosia’s lack of more diverse products which stopped it from becoming a household name like Cadbury or Hershey. Typeface, packaging (inc. waxed paper and presence of hanging holes), use of pre-1960s state abbreviations (‘Wis.’ rather than ‘WI’) and abscence of modern elements like barcodes and nutrition panels, further argue against such wrappers being from Dahmer’s era ↩︎
- Each year the factory would create a 100-pound chocolate Easter Bunny for store display ↩︎
- Dahmer used the excuse of being exhausted from third-shift work to obtain a prescription for the sleeping pills he used to drug his victims ↩︎
- Increased to about $10 an hour by 1991 ↩︎
- Dahmer was also noted to have complained about his job, so his later sense of fondness for it likely stemmed from the work not having demanded much of him when his thoughts were elsewhere ↩︎
- In a bizarre twist of fate, Somsak was the brother of Dahmer’s thirteenth victim Konerak Sinthasomphone ↩︎
- The few remaining occupants were helped with the financial costs of relocating ↩︎
I love these blog entries… they get into the nitty gritty of the case details. So interesting.
I have some dirt supposedly from outside his Oxford window (2 floors down I imagine) … it’s probably from Cleveland. lol
Thanks for the continued great work.
Interesting story about the origin of the famous Ambrosia factory. I always thought that when everything about Jeffrey came out, they suffered losses in sales. Thanks for the information! 👍
He was fired not because of Lacy, Ambrosia co-workers never had problems with him from before. He was fired because the arrest have been planned. Then…. I see you repeat the old good story, but the fact is the same, to give a toxic Halcion dose to an adult man you need 6 – 7 tablets – in one drink. Does it look real, to get such mess in your drink and not to suspect anything? Halcion is a short-working medicin used to perform the first phase of sleeping, to get person easier to fall asleep. But to drill holes in the skull or rape person under Halcion is impossible. That bathclubs and 200 (300?) sexual partners – where are they all? Two strange anonymous with artificial mustaches and blurred faces talking about Dahmer after trial…where are others, if even bartender or baker still gives interviews they sold JD a beer or bans.
And, the cherry on the top, “another” JDs apartment have been rented by Michael McCann, it is documented..
The devil is in the details.
I didn’t know that Jeffrey brought chocolate samples to the women who worked there, from what I understood in the post.
Your posts are always so packed with information, including many rare facts I just didnt know before! 😻😻 👍
The samples, pic of the factory being shut up, the 2 timecards ..Thank you for sharing!