Cannibal killer
Woman who helped boy after he escaped psycho’s lair
kept changing Jim to something else. He knew I didn’t believe him.
“That is when I saw his evil come out. He became very aggressive towards Konerak. He was pulling him with force and twisting his arms, trying to get him away from us.
“It made no sense. Why would he give such a hard time to someone we were helping? It made me feel terribly uneasy. His demeanour had changed hugely. He was telling me, ‘This has nothing to do with you’.
“I kept asking him his friend’s name, but it kept on changing.”
When police arrived, they failed to heed the cousins’ warnings. Officers briefly went to Dahmer’s flat, but reckoned nothing was amiss and handed the 14-year-old back to him.
Tapes of the police call to dispatchers from the scene in Milwaukee in the US state of Wisconsin reveals an officer saying: “The intoxicated Asian naked male [laughter in background] was returned to his sober boyfriend.”
Shortly after, Sandra’s worried mum called police to ask if anything was done to help the boy. An investigating officer said there were nothing to worry about and dismissed the mother’s insistence that Konerak was a child.
The truth was that Konerak had been lured to the apartment, drugged and attacked before he escaped when Dahmer was out buying beer.
When officers took the lad back to the flat, there was no second chance.
Within hours, Dahmer murdered the Laotian-American schoolboy.
If police had taken a good look around apartment 213 at 924 North 25th Street, they would have found numerous skulls, heads and other body parts in the fridge and freezer.
In a huge barrel were headless torsos and two entire skeletons.
There were also more than 100 photos of men taken at various stages of dismemberment.
In the weeks that followed, Dahmer also murdered Matt Turner, 20, Oliver Lacy, 23, Jeremiah Weinberger, 23, and Joseph Bradehoft, 25. They were all drugged and strangled. The former US
Army combat medic’s spree came to an and end on July 22, 1991 – two months after he killed Konerak. Tracy Edwards, then 32, would have been the next victim, but he managed to escape the apartment with a handcuff on his wrist.
He flagged down two officers and took them to the makeshift mortuary. Dahmer was overpowered and arrested.
Police found a freshly severed head in the fridge. As Dahmer was pinned on the floor, he said: “For what I did, I should be dead.” During police interviews, he admitted to engaging in necrophilia with victims, including sex acts with their organs as he dismembered bodies in his bath. Dahmer, who pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, was convicted on 16 counts of murder, dating back to 1978, and was sentenced to 16 life sentences – Wisconsin abolished the death penalty in 1853. It also emerged he sexually assaulted Konerak’s older brother. Dahmer was 34 and serving his time at a maximum security prison in Portage, Wisconsin, in 1994 when he was sent with two other inmates to the jail’s gym to clean the shower block.
While there, one of the men Christopher Scarver picked up a barbell and beat to death Dahmer and the other prisoner. Scarver later revealed he carried out the attack after being taunted with “severed limbs” Dahmer had constructed out of pieces of food.
Reflecting on the missed opportunity to capture Dahmer, Nicole said: “If only the police had listened to me. I did what you’re supposed to do – help someone when they’re in trouble.
“Konerak clearly was. I was devastated by what happened to him. He had managed to escape. I was angry with the police. I felt like I failed.
“I go over what happened and say ‘what would I have done differently?’. Looking back, I think I would have got him away and to the nearest hospital.
“In my heart, I feel Konerak thought he was going to make it, that he was safe and he’d be all right. I just hope he is never forgotten.”