Konerak Sinthasomphone: The Boy Who Escaped Jeffrey Dahmer

A fourteen-year-old boy is outside an apartment building in Milwaukee. He is groggy. Three women gather around him and call the police. The man who approaches says the boy is his boyfriend. The women object. The officers take the boy back inside with that man.

The boy is Konerak Sinthasomphone. The man is Jeffrey Dahmer.

This is not a story in which nobody noticed something was wrong. People noticed, intervened, and asked for help. To understand how Konerak was returned to danger—and how Dahmer was eventually caught—we need to begin before that encounter outside the building.

Dahmer had killed before Konerak met him. His first known victim, Steven Hicks, died in Ohio in 1978. Dahmer served in the Army, later moved to the Milwaukee area, and began killing again in 1987. His victims were men and boys whom he drew into private spaces, often with an offer of money.

There was also a prior crime with a devastating connection to this one. In 1988, Dahmer sexually assaulted a thirteen-year-old boy named Keison Sinthasomphone. Keison escaped and reported what had happened. Dahmer was convicted of second-degree sexual assault and enticing a child for immoral purposes. In May 1989, he received a year in a correctional facility, with work-release privileges, followed by five years of probation. One condition forbade contact with anyone under eighteen.

Keison was Konerak’s older brother.

After his release, Dahmer rented an apartment on North 25th Street. He remained under supervision, meeting regularly with a probation officer. A later federal appeals-court opinion described him as cooperative in those meetings and noted that he kept a job at a chocolate factory for much of that period. His probation officer did not visit his apartment; her supervisor had approved waivers of home visits.

That court was considering a lawsuit brought by the family of another Dahmer victim. It concluded that the record did not establish reckless conduct by the probation officer. The ruling does not make what happened inside the apartment any less appalling. It shows how different the Dahmer seen in scheduled appointments was from the Dahmer whose crimes were still concealed.

By the spring of 1991, Dahmer’s violence had escalated. In April, he attacked nineteen-year-old Errol Lindsey. A later account of the murders describes Dahmer trying to leave Lindsey alive but incapacitated by drilling into his skull and introducing acid. Lindsey regained consciousness; Dahmer subsequently killed him.

Then came the day Konerak encountered Dahmer. Thirty-one-year-old Anthony Hughes had already been killed and was still in the apartment when Dahmer brought the fourteen-year-old there. According to the retrospective account published by Biography, Dahmer photographed and drugged Konerak, then tried the same kind of assault on his head. He left the apartment for several hours.

What follows is especially troubling because Konerak got out. He reached the area outside the building, where the women found him and sought police help.

Dahmer returned and told the women that Konerak was his friend. They resisted his attempt to take the boy inside and told him they had called the police. When officers arrived, Dahmer gave them a different account of the situation: he claimed Konerak was nineteen, that they were boyfriends, and that the trouble followed an argument and too much drinking.

The women continued to object. Nevertheless, the officers escorted Dahmer and Konerak to the apartment. Dahmer showed them photographs he had taken of the boy, presenting them as evidence of a relationship. The officers treated the encounter as a domestic dispute. The later account says they noticed a strange odor in the apartment. They left Konerak there with Dahmer.

We do not need to invent what Konerak thought or said to recognize the consequence of that decision: a child who had made it outside was back inside the apartment, without the people who had tried to help him.

After the officers left, Dahmer attacked Konerak’s head again, introducing acid. Konerak died. Dahmer later dismembered his body, as he did Anthony Hughes’s, and kept their skulls.

Konerak’s death was not the end of the killings. The following month, Dahmer lured Matthew Turner to Milwaukee. In July, he killed Jeremiah Weinberger and other victims. Each subsequent death makes the encounter outside the apartment harder to set aside. It was a concrete opportunity to remove Konerak from immediate danger. The women had sounded the alarm; Dahmer’s explanation prevailed.

The break in the case came on July 22, 1991—not through a review of that earlier police encounter, but because another man escaped Dahmer’s apartment.

That man, identified in Biography’s account as Tracey Edwards, had gone inside with Dahmer. Edwards later told police that Dahmer had put a handcuff on his wrist and threatened him with a knife. He got out and encountered patrol officers near the building. The FBI’s account places that encounter at about eleven-thirty that night: the officers saw a partially clothed man with a handcuff dangling from his wrist and went to investigate what he reported.

This time, the person seeking help was able to lead police directly back to the apartment while they investigated his account.

Dahmer let the officers in and acknowledged putting the handcuff on Edwards. He said the key was in his nightstand. In the bedroom, an officer saw photographs showing bodies in various stages of dismemberment. When Dahmer tried to get away, the officers subdued and arrested him. A visit prompted by one survivor’s account had exposed evidence of many murders.

Investigators found the remains of eleven victims in the apartment. Dahmer confessed to more than a dozen killings. The FBI assisted Milwaukee authorities by examining evidence and working to identify victims, using DNA profiling and other laboratory tests. The photographs and remains opened the investigation; forensic work helped establish whose lives had been taken.

In 1992, Dahmer was sentenced to life imprisonment for the Wisconsin murders. He was also convicted of a murder in Ohio. In 1994, another inmate killed him in a Wisconsin prison.

There is a temptation to tell this case as the story of a notorious killer who was finally unmasked. But Konerak Sinthasomphone’s story has a more painful center. He was fourteen. He escaped. Three women stayed with him and called for help. Then he was returned to the man who killed him.

Tracey Edwards’s later escape led officers into the apartment and ended Dahmer’s freedom. Remembering how he was caught should not erase the earlier moment when Konerak got out—and people tried to keep him safe.