Now Playing
Handcuffs, Photographs, and a Refrigerator: The Night It All Collapsed
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
When Tracy Edwards fled Jeffrey Dahmer's Milwaukee apartment in July 1991 with handcuffs on his wrist, he ended thirteen years of killing — and exposed every system that had let it continue. This chapter traces the final collapse: the officers at the door, the photographs, the refrigerator, and the verdict that followed.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
It's July twenty-second, nineteen ninety-one. A man named Tracy Edwards is walking down North Twenty-Fifth Street in Milwaukee at around midnight with a pair of handcuffs dangling from his wrist.
Dahmer's story doesn't begin at the Oxford Apartments. It begins much earlier, and much further out.
In nineteen eighty-eight, Dahmer was convicted of sexually assaulting a thirteen-year-old boy. That boy was the younger brother of Konerak Sinthasomphone.
In May of nineteen ninety-one, Dahmer lured fourteen-year-old Konerak Sinthasomphone to his apartment. He drugged him.
Dahmer's neighbor at the Oxford Apartments, a woman named Glodean Cleveland, had been complaining for months. She reported the smells.
When the officers entered apartment two thirteen on the night Tracy Edwards led them back, the signs were everywhere. Polaroid photographs of victims in various stages of dismemberment were scattered on the floor.
The legal case against Jeffrey Dahmer moved quickly. He confessed.
Dahmer did not serve the sentences handed down. He was killed inside the prison.
In November nineteen ninety-two, just over a year after Dahmer's arrest, the Oxford Apartments were demolished. The city tore the building down.
His mother, Joyce Dahmer, had struggled with mental health issues during his childhood. His parents' divorce was bitter and disruptive.
Chapter summary auto-generated from the verified script. Listen to the full episode for the complete content.