DAHMER: MILWAUKEE'S TRAUMA (STILL)

IT WAS A SIMPLE QUESTION with a complicated answer. We asked it in November 2019 when profiling the “Cream City Cannibal” tour of the strip of Second Street where Jeffrey Dahmer met seven of his 17 murder victims some 30 years prior: Should we be ok with this? The tour still runs today, and the recent Netflix series on Dahmer has renewed a local discussion that mostly centers on how much we'd like to stop talking about the matter.

The continued national interest in Dahmer seems firmly planted between the case's sensational true-crime content and the more reflective societal examinations of how an unassuming white man managed to freely terrorize the city's non-white gay community for five years. Our coverage of Dahmer over the years has touched on both of these angles. In September 1991, MilMag pushed back on the statement by then-Mayor John Norquist that “there is nothing about Milwaukee that caused Dahmer.” Indeed, we wrote, the city's policing and long-standing marginalization of both the gay community and communities of color had much to do with how Dahmer managed to avoid capture for so long.

In April 1992, in a follow-up to Dahmer's trial, we profiled the more ghoulish interest in the case that doubtlessly still drives the market for walking tours and TV series: the small group of “Dahmer worshippers” who attended the trial as a rite of serial killer fandom, the woman who admitted to “love fantasies” about Dahmer, and the Illinois-based musician who scribbled lyrics as he sat in the courtroom listening to testimony. “There are only two ways to go after Dahmer,” we wrote in 1991, “Either this will bring us together or leave the city more divided than ever.” Thirty years later, it seems that we've done both.