Could Dahmer have killed a porn actor in LA in 1990?
Could infamous Milwaukee serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer have committed one more unconfessed mutilation murder?
After a new witness responded to a true crime podcast, a filmmaker and a detective in Los Angeles have been re-examining Dahmer’s possible connection to the unsolved death of a gay porn actor last seen on Halloween weekend 1990.
“Is there a trail of Dahmer to LA? Has it been exhaustively checked out? No,” says the filmmaker, Rachel Mason. “We have one person in L.A. saying he was here.”
Eau Claire native William Newton moved to Los Angeles in the mid 1980s. He performed in gay porn videos as Billy London and was a regular at Rage, a nightclub at the center of West Hollywood’s gay scene.
He was last seen at Rage on Oct. 28, 1990. The next day, a transient found parts of Newton’s dismembered body in a trash bin about 3 miles down Santa Monica Boulevard. He was 25.
On the 30th anniversary of Newton’s murder, it was featured on the L.A. podcast. The hosts solicited any information that might restart the investigation. Ron Wheeler contacted the show, and later police.
Los Angeles Police Department cold case Detective Jim Lamberti said Wheeler recounts talking with an attractive stranger from the Midwest at Rage before noticing the man leave with Newton. When Dahmer’s face was all over the news after his arrest about a year later, Wheeler told Lamberti, he recognized him as the man who left with Newton.
In 1991, Milwaukee police asked police around the country if they had any unsolved cases that might tie into Dahmer. Details of Newton’s death certainly fit Dahmer’s method of killing — a young gay man killed and dismembered. Police in Los Angeles shared the Newton file with Milwaukee.
But Dahmer, who confessed to 17 murders, denied killing Newton. Dahmer was killed in prison by another inmate in 1994.
Anne E. Schwartz, a former Milwaukee Journal reporter who just published her second book about Dahmer, thinks he was telling the truth. She said the original detectives on the case felt Dahmer, after his arrest, was truly unburdening himself by confessing to all his crimes, even some police might never have linked to him.
“I would argue Dahmer wanted to die,” Schwartz said. “I don’t think he’d care about the death penalty. It doesn’t fit experts’ profile of serial killers who fess up once caught.”
Schwartz was the first reporter on the scene at Dahmer’s apartment. She wrote her first book about the case within months. She said Sterling Publishing approached her about revisiting the story on the 30th anniversary, focusing on its impact on the people, communities and organizations involved years later.
For, “Monster: The True Story of the Jeffrey Dahmer Murders,” Schwartz said she re-interviewed many of the people from her first book. After she left journalism, Schwartz spent eights years as the spokesperson for the Milwaukee Police Department. She now works as a consultant to various government agencies trying to improve their public information processes or dealing with media demands during crises.
Mason, the filmmaker, thinks the prospect of execution might have stopped Dahmer from admitting to Newton’s murder in California. She also notes that if Dahmer were possibly visiting his mother in Fresno, he would be less than a four-hour drive from West Hollywood.
Schwartz notes that Dahmer did confess to killing his first victim, Steven Hicks, in 1978 in Ohio, a state that had the death penalty at the time.
“Do I think it’s a legitimate tip?” asks Lamberti, the LAPD detective. He said the odds are against Dahmer getting to Los Angeles, since he didn’t have much money and was on probation in Wisconsin.
“But, that said, he was regularly reporting but there’s a period of about a week in late October (1990) when there’s no record.” On cold cases, he said, you chase every Hail Mary, and sometimes they pay off.
Lamberti said Wheeler told him he reached out to the FBI and police when he first recognized Dahmer as the person he saw with Newton, but no one ever got back to him.
“I’ve got this loose end flapping in the wind that I’d like to tie down,” he said.
Mason’s film about Newton’s death is titled “pretty boy blue.” She said she hopes someone in the Milwaukee area might know something about Dahmer’s whereabouts in October 1990. She’s taking tips at billylondondoc@gmail.com, and has a trailer about her project on Facebook.
“There are guys in Milwaukee who know something and have never told anyone. I’ve talked to some,” she said. She suspects that many in the gay community of the early 1990s felt vilified and uncomfortable about talking with police over concerns about their own involvement with drugs, porn or sex work.
“BiIly was LA’s gay Black Dahlia, and no one’s ever figured it out,” Mason said, referring to the 1947 mutilation murder of 22-year-old Elizabeth Short, one of the city’s oldest, most publicized unsolved homicides. It was the subject of a 2006 film by director Brian DePalma.