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The Four Who Didn't Have to Die: After the System Handed Him Permission
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In May 1991, a naked, drugged fourteen-year-old escaped Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment — and police walked him back inside. Four more men died before it ended.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
There's a moment in May of nineteen ninety-one where the story of Jeffrey Dahmer could have ended. A fourteen-year-old boy was outside on a Milwaukee street, naked, disoriented, barely conscious.
To understand how we got to May of nineteen ninety-one, you need the shape of what came before. Dahmer began killing in nineteen seventy-eight.
In May of nineteen ninety-one, Dahmer brought Konerak Sinthasomphone to his apartment. Konerak was fourteen years old.
Here's something that makes that decision harder to understand with time. Dahmer was on probation at that moment.
Between Konerak Sinthasomphone's return to Dahmer in May of nineteen ninety-one and Dahmer's arrest in July of that same year, four more people were killed. Matt Turner, Jeremiah Weinberger, Oliver Lacy, and Joseph Bradehoft.
On the twenty-second of July, nineteen ninety-one, Tracy Edwards escaped from Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment. He made it out with a handcuff still attached to his wrist.
The evidence retrieved from that apartment is difficult to summarize briefly without losing its significance. The photographs Dahmer had taken of his victims at various stages, the preserved remains, the systematic nature of what the investigators found, all of it pointed to someone who had been operating this way for years with complete impunity.
Dahmer stood trial in nineteen ninety-two. He entered a plea of guilty but insane, asking the jury to find that his mental illness had stripped him of control over his actions.
What this episode keeps returning to isn't the horror of the crimes themselves. It's the number of moments where ordinary institutional action could have interrupted the timeline.
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