Milwaukee Murders: Did They All Have to Die?

By ALEX PRUD''HOMME

How can it have happened? Police officers are alerted that a dazed, naked Asian boy is staggering on a Milwaukee street. Jeffrey Dahmer, 31, convinces them that 14-year-old Konerak Sinthasomphone is his homosexual lover. Dahmer happens to be a convicted child molester, but the police do not check him out. Instead of rescuing the young Laotian immigrant from Dahmer, who has since confessed to murdering and mutilating 17 men over the past 13 years, the cops seem to laugh off the incident as a gay love spat. They deliver the 14-year- old to Dahmer's apartment. And as soon as they leave, Dahmer reportedly proceeds to strangle the boy and dismember his body.

The release of police-department radio and telephone transcripts apparently showing how badly the officers had blundered intensified the shock and anger that have gripped Milwaukee ever since the decomposing remains of 11 bodies were discovered in Dahmer's small apartment two weeks ago. Police made their grisly find only because they came across another fleeing victim, who told them Dahmer was trying to kill him. Black and gay leaders, noting that most of Dahmer's victims were nonwhite and some were homosexual, have accused police of years of bigotry and neglect.

Though police chief Philip Arreola attempted to defuse the situation by suspending the three officers involved in the Sinthasomphone case and filing administrative charges against them, public indignation rose as new details came to light. According to local news accounts, two black women called the cops in the early-morning hours of May 27 and reported that they found the youth, naked and bleeding, being chased by Dahmer. Laurie Eggert, a police- union lawyer, said the three officers who responded found the boy highly intoxicated and attributed the bleeding to a scrape on the leg. Dahmer convinced the officers that the boy was his 19-year-old lover and that they had quarreled. When the officers returned the youth to Dahmer's apartment, says Eggert, they saw nothing unusual.

According to the Milwaukee Journal, they should have. The paper said Dahmer told investigators that when the officers brought the boy back, photographs of victims were strewn about the apartment and the body of one victim was in the bedroom, "smelling like hell."

The police transcripts show that the officers involved apparently joked and laughed about the incident with the dispatcher. "Intoxicated Asian, naked male. Was returned to his sober boyfriend," said a policeman, who added that his partner "is going to get deloused." Glenda Cleveland, whose daughter and niece initially spotted Sinthasomphone on the street, later called the police and repeatedly asked what had been done about the "child." One of the officers who had been at the scene responded, "It wasn't a child, it was an adult . . . It is all taken care of . . . It's a boyfriend-boyfriend thing."

Milwaukee blacks are incensed because the cops believed Dahmer, who is white, instead of the black women. "This is a very racist city," said community activist Queen Hyler. "You have a white guy killing people weekly, with bodies stacking up in a building occupied mostly by blacks, but the cops are too busy riding shotgun on the black community to pay any attention." Black and gay leaders have called for an independent investigation of the department, claiming that it is still philosophically under the sway of Harold Breier, who retired as police chief in 1984 after a rigid 20-year reign. Meanwhile, Chief Arreola was facing sharp criticism from within his ranks after suspending the three officers involved in the May 27 incident and ordering an internal investigation.

As the investigation continued, a profile of Dahmer emerged that seems to suggest he fits classic patterns of a serial killer. Says Robert Ressler, a former FBI agent and a pre-eminent expert on mass murderers: "Dahmer falls into the subcategory of the sadistic, sexually oriented serial killer who is inevitably a white male loner and usually intelligent." This type of killer, says Ressler, generally comes from a broken home, has had poor parenting and/ or was abused early in his life, usually doesn't marry, is often an alcoholic or drug addict and can be suicidal. Dahmer -- who according to his father was molested by a neighbor boy at the age of eight, though Dahmer himself denies it -- seems to fit most of these criteria.

Last week police searched the grounds of the former Dahmer house in Bath, Ohio, for the remains of Steven Hicks, who may have been the murderer's first victim. In 1978 Hicks, 18, was hitchhiking when Dahmer, also 18 at the time, took him home, killed him with a barbell and smashed his bones with a hammer. So far, about 100 bone and three tooth fragments have been recovered from the grounds. Investigators plan to test them against a lock of hair and dental records that Hicks' parents provided in the hope of proving a match. In a statement issued last week, the Hicks family said, "We have spent a great deal of time trying to understand the motivation for such a heinous crime and concluded that some acts are so evil they simply cannot be explained."

With reporting by Mary Cronin/New York and Georgia Pabst/Milwaukee