The Apartment on North 25th Street: What happened to serial killer-cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer's crime site?
Warning: This article contains graphic content
Netflix's latest true crime entry DAHMER - Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story—a 10-part miniseries about the infamous American serial killer, sex offender, and cannibal in the '70s—has since trended worldwide.
Dahmer, portrayed by Evan Peters, notoriously raped, murdered, and dismembered 17 men and boys—while also eating some of them—between 1978 and 1991. He committed his crimes in his very own residence, where he also kept his victims' bodies.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation's 1991 records state that Dahmer lived in Apartment 213 at 924 North 25th Street in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
As Vanity Fair detailed in its Nov. 1, 1991, story, Apartment 213 contained seven skulls and four heads, three in a free-standing freezer and one in a box on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator.
The refrigerator's freezer compartment contained assorted body parts, while a blue 57-gallon barrel had headless torsos, mutilated pieces of human bodies, hands, and assorted limbs.
Dahmer, dubbed as the Milwaukee Cannibal, also took over a hundred photographs of people at various stages of dismemberment, which made police officers looking at them feeling faint.
He was arrested in July 1991, and in the following year, was handed 16 life sentences for his crimes. On Nov. 28, 1994, Dahmer met his end after a fellow inmate beat him to death.
Many viewers have been wondering what happened to the hellhole where Dahmer had violated human life. The long and the short of it: It no longer exists.
An Associated Press report published in Oregon's daily The Bulletin on Nov. 17, 1992, said Campus Circle Project, which owned the 49-unit Oxford apartment complex, ordered the building's demolition.
Campus Circle Project President Patrick LeSage said the place has been "a symbol of anger, pain, violence and death," so it needed to be replaced with a sign of their "commitment to support the healing process" of the victims' families.
In any case, prior to the demolition, many residents didn't seem keen on living whence Dahmer committed his crimes.
By August 1992, only 15 of the 49 units were occupied. The Project also offered to help relocate the residents before the demolition, as keeping them proved to be more costly than still being open for tenants.
The company pledged to plant grass and flowers on the site after the demolition.
Thirty years later, however, the pledge remained a pledge.
PhilSTAR L!fe did a search on Google Earth, and found that the demolition site, an empty lot, has grass and a few trees—but not flowers. A wrought iron fence also surrounds the perimeter.
A photo taken by Ebony Cox for local newspaper The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel showed a clearer view of Apartment 213's former location on the heels of the Netflix miniseries trending worldwide.
A Feb. 19, 2021, YouTube video uploaded by The Rusty Belt, filmed in July 2019, also showed a first-person perspective drive-by along the location, describing it as an "empty space."