The Jeffrey Dahmer Tour

Milwaukee has never been entirely comfortable with Jeffrey Dahmer tourism. That has not stopped it from existing. Since 2012, the Cream City Cannibal Tour has taken people through the streets of Walker's Point, following locations connected with the bars and nightlife where Dahmer met several of the young men he later murdered. The tour deals with one of the darkest chapters in the city's history, but it also raises a rather uncomfortable question of its own: at what point does remembering a crime become entertainment?

Jeffrey Dahmer murdered seventeen young men and boys between 1978 and 1991. His first known victim, Steven Hicks, was killed at Dahmer's family home in Ohio in 1978. After moving to the Milwaukee area, Dahmer began killing again in 1987, and the murders continued with increasing frequency until his arrest four years later. Many of his victims were young gay men, and many were Black, Asian or Latino. Several moved through the same gay bars and clubs concentrated around South Second Street in Milwaukee's Walker's Point neighbourhood.

That stretch of Second Street is the focus of the walking tour. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Walker's Point was an important centre of Milwaukee's gay nightlife, with bars, clubs and gathering places that offered a community at a time when being openly gay could still carry considerable social risk. Dahmer exploited that environment. The tour operator says seven of his seventeen victims were approached or met along the streets covered by the route.

One of the most important locations was Club 219 at 219 South Second Street. Opened in the early 1980s, it became a popular gay dance club known for drag shows and remained in business until 2005. Dahmer was a regular presence in the area's nightlife and met several victims either at Club 219 or nearby. Among them was Steven Tuomi, whom Dahmer met in 1987 before taking him to the Ambassador Hotel.

Tuomi was Dahmer's second known murder victim – not his first, as is sometimes claimed. On 20 November 1987, Dahmer rented a room at Milwaukee's Ambassador Hotel and brought the 25-year-old Tuomi back with him after they had been drinking. Dahmer later claimed that he woke the following morning to discover that he had beaten Tuomi to death but could not remember the killing itself. He transported the body in a large suitcase to his grandmother's house in West Allis, where he dismembered it. The Ambassador still exists, although it is not part of the walking route and the often-repeated claim that the murder happened specifically in Room 507 has never been substantiated.

The location most closely associated with Dahmer's crimes is also absent from the tour. In May 1990, he moved into Apartment 213 at the Oxford Apartments, 924 North 25th Street. During the following fourteen months, twelve of his victims were killed there. Neighbours complained repeatedly about the terrible smell coming from the apartment, which Dahmer explained away with stories about spoiled food, dead tropical fish and problems with his freezer.

On 22 July 1991, the killing finally stopped because Tracy Edwards refused to become another victim. Dahmer had brought Edwards back to Apartment 213 and handcuffed him, but Edwards managed to strike him and escape through the front door with one handcuff still hanging from his wrist. He encountered Milwaukee police officers and persuaded them to return with him to the apartment. Inside, one officer discovered Polaroid photographs documenting dismembered bodies. A search quickly revealed human remains throughout the apartment, including severed heads, skulls and body parts stored in refrigerators and containers.

The discovery also forced Milwaukee to confront an earlier police failure that remains one of the most disturbing parts of the case. On 27 May 1991, fourteen-year-old Konerak Sinthasomphone escaped from Dahmer's apartment while drugged, naked and bleeding. Several women tried to help him and called police. Dahmer convinced responding officers that the boy was his adult lover and that they were having a domestic dispute. Despite the witnesses' objections, the officers returned Konerak to Dahmer's apartment and left. Dahmer killed him shortly afterwards. The case became a major source of anger within Milwaukee's gay and minority communities and raised serious questions about racism and homophobia in the police response.

The Oxford Apartments were demolished in November 1992. The address remains an empty piece of land rather than a museum or official memorial. Various ideas for redeveloping the property have come and gone, but none has permanently transformed it. People interested in the case still seek out the site, although the Cream City Cannibal Tour deliberately remains in Walker's Point and does not make the several-mile journey to North 25th Street.

The walking tour itself began in 2012 and was controversial almost immediately. Relatives of victims and members of the local community protested, arguing that people were making money from murders whose surviving families were still very much alive. Groupon withdrew a promotion for the tour following complaints. When the organisers later offered to donate some of the proceeds to the National Organization of Parents of Murdered Children, the organisation refused the money, saying it would not benefit financially from a business built around murder tourism. The tour continued anyway.

The argument never entirely went away. When the tour was promoted again in 2018, people who had personally known Dahmer's victims publicly objected. Wesley Lemieux, a friend of victim Eddie Smith, described seeing the advertisements as reopening memories he had lived with for decades. The tour operators have defended the programme as an examination of criminal history that discusses psychology, victimisation and the circumstances that allowed Dahmer to continue killing. Those two views remain difficult to reconcile.

The tour received international attention in 2018 when journalist David Farrier visited Milwaukee for the Netflix documentary series Dark Tourist. The programme follows Farrier as he investigates places and businesses built around death, disaster and crime, making a Jeffrey Dahmer walking tour almost inevitable subject matter. The Milwaukee section appears in the third episode, where Farrier also meets people whose fascination with Dahmer goes considerably beyond ordinary historical curiosity.

Today the Cream City Cannibal Tour is still operating. It is an outdoor walking tour lasting roughly 75 minutes and begins at 422 South Second Street before moving through Walker's Point. The neighbourhood itself has changed considerably since Dahmer knew it. Many of the old gay bars are gone, and restaurants, breweries and newer businesses now occupy buildings where the nightlife of the 1980s once flourished. Club 219 closed in 2005, although the building survives.