On June 5th 2025, a member of r/Milwaukee asked those who could remember:
“What was your reaction when Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested?“
Decades on, many people could still recall where they were when the news broke; how it had made them feel; the impact it had on the community; and their connections to the young men suddenly redefined as victims.
Some described their trauma from the coverage, others admitted their intrigue – while younger commenters had been oblivious to the gravitas of the crimes until much later.
To mark almost thirty-four years since Dahmer’s arrest in July of 1991, thirty-four of those most interesting and plausible responses have been selected and shared here.1
1.) “I remember this vividly! We were camping in Door County. My friends dad had the newspaper and the front page was barrels and people in hazmat suits. Dahmer covered the entire front page! I was 15 and thought no way in hell could THIS be happening where I live! And the story just became more twisted each day they released information to the public.”
2.) “I was in middle school at the time the news came out. Our reaction was to tell horrible jokes about it so we could pretend the world wasn’t a horror movie.”
3.) “It was crazy to see it unfold, but one thing was that suddenly a lot of people around here had stories like, ‘Oh wow, that dude tried to pick me up at The Grand Avenue [Mall],’ or, ‘That guy relentlessly hit on me on the bus a couple times’ – and most of them were fairly recent. That fucker was on a tear.”2
– Jeffrey Dahmer in an interview with psychiatirst, Dr. Smail
4.) “I was a kid, so it was scary, but also kind off my radar in a way. My dad lived down the block from the apartment and insisted he’d ran into Dahmer and he’d asked if my dad wanted a beer (my dad would jog daily at the time), but I don’t know… Dad was a big, muscular, middle-aged man – which wasn’t really Dahmer’s type.
We lived in the area, so we drove by the apartment along with a bunch of other people. My uncle came to visit once, when lived in an upper, and when he came to the door, my mom called down from the window, “Who is it?” He joked around and said, “Jeffrey Dahmer” in a spooky voice.
People almost immediately were making jokes about Ambrosia chocolates. It was all over the news and they just kept showing those barrels getting wheeled out of the building. I had a nightmare about our landlord keeping brains in our garage and my dad worked with someone whose brother was one of the later victims…
It was just weird to hear about places I’d been – or lived near – on the national news and associated with such awful things.”
5.) “A dear friend of mine actually moved to Milwaukee the week Dahmer got arrested and considered going back home.”
6.) “I was young, so it was horrifying, but I don’t think I fully grasped how bad it was and what we later found out regarding the cops. I do remember my aunt being over and it was on the news. She said, “I don’t know why he had to do all that when he was good looking.” Even as a kid, I knew that was fucking weird to think – let alone say out loud to others.”
7.) “Don’t recall exactly – being that I was four – but I lived directly across the street from his grandma’s house (interacted with her several times, really nice lady) and I do remember all the news trucks and cops everywhere. My mom got interviewed by a French news crew.”
-DA Michael McCann argues that Dahmer was capable of controlling his killings
8.) “I vividly remember. Working at a restaurant on 3rd street, I was so shocked. Ran out of the kitchen crying. Chef’s and cooks did the same. We were in total shock. We knew many people who visited [Club] 219 and other gay bars in area, where he may have met others. After that, I met a new coworker who worked at the chocolate factory across the street from the resturaunt.
At the same time, I was at university and had a class where we had the opportunity to have the prosecuting attorney, Michael McCann, speak with us every week. He was amazing.”
9.) “My mom would tell people every chance she got that Michael McCann was our neighbour.”
10.) “I was around 19 or 20 and my friends and I would frequent the same gay bars that Dahmer was hunting in. I’m absolutely sure I was mere inches or feet from him multiple times, but of course he wasn’t interested in us [as women].”
11.) “I was about 5 years old and what I did see in the news (the coverage was non-stop) was horrifying. It scarred me for a long, long time. Well into adulthood.”
12.) “They kept showing on the news those blue barrels being removed. I was shocked that something like that was happening in the city. My best friend’s sister went to high school with Konerak Sinthasomphone. When the victims names were released, she took out her year book and showed us his picture.”
13.) “I went to school with Konerak (the Asian boy he killed). I will never forget meeting Konerak in P.E class and asking him where he was from. He spoke very broken English and told me that he was from Laos. We were in sixth or seventh grade at the time. I had moved away after eighth grade, and when I learned about Dahmer killing him, I was saddened. I’ll never forget him.”
14.) “When I first heard about it, I was disgusted. The next day while I was working, detectives came to my job to talk to two coworkers. Turns out one was Tracy Edward’s twin and the other was with Tracy when Dahmer picked him up. The coworker, James (fake name) said Dahmer approached them both, but James had a bad feeling about him so he refused.
When the victims were identified, I found out a high school friend was one of them.”
15.) “I remember my parents had told me they’d stayed in those same apartments for some time when they first moved to the area, and it creeped me the hell out as a child. But, man, it was just so grisly. I was around 14 at the time, so I caught a lot of scenes on the news. Them wheeling out the drums of bodies and chemicals was a pretty burned image… I never really thought if that had any effect on me growing up, but I can’t imagine it was great.”
16.) “I was 12 or 13. I remember the constant news coverage. I think it led me to a lifetime interest in trials and true crime to this day. I also remember wishing I could get jury duty or somehow be a professional juror! Unfortunately, in my entire life, I’ve only gotten called once and never got picked.”
17.) “I think I’ll always hear an echo of my dad saying, “He’ll die in prison, because they don’t like guys like him.” ‘They’ being the other prisoners.”
18.) “You’d be surprised how many people I’ve met – who’ve never even been to Milwaukee – who, when hearing I’m from here, reply: ‘Oh, Jeffrey Dahmer!’ Not ‘Oh, Giannis!’ Hell, I’d even be happy with ‘Oh, Liberace!'”
19.) “I wasn’t in Milwaukee, but California. It was such an odd and horrific series of crimes. The thing I remember was a movie was due to be released called Body Parts. It was cancelled3, of course. Similar to Collateral Damage being set for release until the September 11th attacks.
I was a young adult and it’s terrible to think of local kids seeing all this on the news and hearing about it everyday for months… There’s a whole other layer when it’s in your backyard. People and places you know are involved.”
20.) “I was too young for the arrest, but I remember the coverage up until his death. Most of what I knew came from people with older siblings, and whatever I could understand from the nightly news my parents watched. I can watch documentaries and listen to podcasts on some horrible events, but I can’t do Dahmer stuff. Too close to home, too real. It makes me feel like a scared kid again, and not in a ‘rollercoasters are scary fun‘ way. More like a ‘I’m helpless, confused and monsters are real’ way.”
21.) “I had relatives visiting from out of the country and it was somewhat embarrassing, I have to admit.”
22.) “It was absolutely shocking. I was big into the punk scene then (in my early 20s) and quite a few of the bands who came to town to play a show were intrigued. They wanted to see his apartment building or where he worked at the chocolate factory. I drove some of them past the buildings QUICKLY.”
(l) The Ambrosia Chocolate Factory in downtown Milwaukee, where Dahmer used to work as a mixer – (r) A local films the Oxford Apartments, where Dahmer murdered 11 men
23.) “I was in Oshkosh for work, heard about it on the radio, drove home to Milwaukee as soon as I could, and went straight to his building. All the networks were already there with satellite trucks. I grew up fascinated by serial killers, had read all about Ed Gein, and needed to see the Dahmer crime scene unfold. It was surreal.”
24.) “Anger at the police.”
25.) “My then-girlfriend and I rented out Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and had just finished watching it. We both needed to watch something light after, as that movie was pretty messed up. The local Milwaukee news channel then cut in immediately to what we were watching and broke the story. It was insane.”
26.) “I was 14 and about to start high school. I will never forget seeing them remove a big white box from the apartment on TV. I haven’t looked at that image since. Ambrosia Chocolate was very well known and delicious (before). I will never forget Rita Isbell yelling and lunging at Dahmer [in court].”
27.) “I started crying. I was horrified.”
28.) “To be honest, I wished they made the names of those he took away as well known as they did his. He shouldn’t be remembered for what he did.”
29.) “Six of my friends piled into my 1979 Malibu classic station wagon and we drove down to his apartment. So many cops everywhere, we couldn’t get any closer than a few blocks away.”
30.) “My then-boyfriend and I went out for dinner at Coerpers with his sister and her boyfriend. We were standing outside, saying our goodbyes, when all hell broke loose. Sirens everywhere. It was crazy. We get home and flip on the TV, and it was breaking news. Will never forget it and we were only blocks away while it was happening.”
31.) “I was a kid and didn’t really understand everything that was happening. All I remember is that it was summer time and the news kept showing those barrels being wheeled out.
Much later, I found out a girl in my school had an uncle who was one of the victims. She had the book written by Anne E. Schwartz4 and she let me read it, so most of what I knew was from that book.”
32.) “I was 10, so I just laughed when the t-shirts came out saying, ‘Milwaukee: Where you can eat the people, but can’t drink the water.'”
33.) “I worked with two of the youngest victims relatives. We were warned not to talk about it.
Also, I had taken the Route 10 bus everyday past his apartment for years, and it still gives me shivers when I think of it.”
34.) “I was seven, and when I heard he worked at a chocolate place, I assumed it was the one near us (it wasn’t), and that he was putting people in the chocolate.
Between that, the O.J trial, and cryptosporidium, it was a pretty wild childhood.”
Sources:
- r/Milwaukee
Header image from The Milwaukee Journal
Footnotes:
- Responses edited for readability ↩︎
- In the six months leading up to his arrest, Dahmer murdered eight people – sometimes killing a new victim before having dismembering the last. “Things just started piling up,” he later said. “Person after person… I was just driven to do it more frequently and more frequently until it was just too much… I couldn’t control it any more.” There are undoubtedly people alive today who were approached by Dahmer and turned him down, so some stories recounting such encounters are likely true. However, many others – even if plausible – are still impossible to verify. Human memory in regards to faces – particularly after only one brief interaction – is notoriously unreliable, and people retroactively insert familiary into shocking events as a means of trying to make sense of them. The archetype of the ‘creepy stranger’ can also be conflated in memory, especially after media saturation. While his parole officer noted that he was “definitely spooky”, Dahmer was an objectively handsome man who, for the most part, appeared normal and polite. One of the reasons so many men were willing to go home with him, even if the prospect had been further sweetened by money ↩︎
- Body Parts wasn’t cancelled, but its advertising (which depicted images of severed limbs) was pulled from the Milwaukee press. Some local cinemas also decided not to screen the movie, which was set to be released about a week after Dahmer’s arrest ↩︎
- Schwartz was the first reporter to break Dahmer’s story to the media via The Milwaukee Journal. She later released a book about Dahmer in ’92, called The Man Who Could Not Kill Enough. In 2021, it was updated and re-released as Monster: The True Story of the Jeffrey Dahmer Murders. According to Schwartz, Dahmer had rang her newsroom while he was in prison, complaining of the way her book had depicted his parents ↩︎
Absolutely love the header image you chose because that represents the situation so well. I imagine it was just like that and for some time Milwaukee was all about Dahmer and the comments you put together underline it! Also the still ongoing engagement in the recent reddit post shows that even though the case is closed for more than 30 years now, Milwaukee people are still ‘haunted’ by it.
A personal note in between: Last week I sent you a longer note using the contacts form on your blog. Not sure whether you’ve got it since I had to try multiple times to send it (the send button didn’t work on the mobile).
And a question 😀 Regarding the picture of JD’s “prison owned copy”. Wasn’t the edition shown released in 2011? I always thought the first edition (which Jeff could have had) was the one you posted recently in your collection-post? (slide 2 books& magazines).
Saw this reddit thread then saw your post, thinking it was gonna be a lazy buzzfeed copy of other peoples comments. Happily surprised! You put them together well with the extra pics. Never seen that one of Konrac before. Fantastic find.
That rare picture of konerak :O Thank you for posting!!!