I called Peter.
“Yeah,” he said in a huff. Pete was partner at a swanky law firm in downtown Milwaukee. Sometimes I felt like most of his job was acting very busy.
“Are we sure about this?” I asked him.
He knew immediately what I was talking about. “Of course not,” he said practically. “It’s a terrible idea, but we’re doing it anyway. You talk to Ma about it?”
“Yeah . . . she had one of her fits.”
“They’re happening more often now.” This was hard for him to admit. I tried to get the conversation back on track.
“The truly terrible television award.” I read from one of the many articles about the kid. “In acknowledgment of the extraordinary ongoing deceit of the American public represented in his television program.”
“I know, I know,” he said. “You watched the video, though?”
I swallowed some bad-tasting spit. “I did,” I said.
“So you know.”
“I do,” I whispered. I realized then that I didn’t know which prospect frightened me more: the psychic’s success or his failure.
“You saw their faces?” I could hear it in his voice: that contagion of hope. I was scared to breathe for fear I might catch it, but it didn’t really matter. I’d already been infected.
“What about the money?” I asked.
“I’ll draw up a contract.”
“A contract? This kid doesn’t care about a contract.”
“I suspect he will,” Pete said. “Oh, and Dana wants to start spending a couple of hours, maybe a few days a week, after school with you. Is that something you’d be okay with?”
I was surprised. I looked around my filthy apartment. A slant of sunlight electrified the layers of dust on the baseboards.
“Sure,” I said. “I’m not very . . . entertaining.”
“She’ll bring her homework. It’s something she wants to do. So Helena and I are going with it. Besides, she seemed to think you could use some help around your place.”
I felt my face redden and was glad Pete couldn’t see it.
“Help?” I asked. “With what, exactly?”
“I don’t know. She said it’s messy there, I guess. So it’s okay?” He had sensed my defensiveness and become eager to end the conversation.
“Sure,” I said. “She’s always welcome.”
Pete and Helena felt that, given the incident at the quarry when I’d had to pick Dana up in the middle of the night, and a few others which I never learned about, she was getting into too much trouble. They hoped that spending more time with me would keep her out of this trouble. I didn’t particularly enjoy the idea of being some kind of community service project, but I also felt my heart hiccup pleasantly at the idea of having her around more. She said she wanted to organize my study. I wasn’t thrilled with that idea either, but I didn’t think she could do any harm. The only rule was that she was not allowed to throw anything away. I stressed this strongly and received a look I was very familiar with—her face, even her lips, were full of pity. Beyond that, I didn’t mind how she “organized” the files.
Sometimes we worked side by side in the study. I had begun, at that point, another round of revisions to my case against Frank. It turned out Dana’s reorganization of the files was actually helpful in these efforts. A few times I caught her trying to read the documents I had open on my computer, but she usually averted her gaze when I noticed. And a few weeks in, I noticed that she had begun to take her own notes in a composition book. I was tempted, a few times, to read the notebook while she was in the bathroom, but I just didn’t have the heart to go through with it. Once she looked up from her work and said to me, “Have you ever seen the show Hoarders?”
I shook my head. “I don’t watch much TV anymore,” I told her.
“I think you’re a hoarder,” she said. She gestured at the boxes and the stacks of library books and the copies of the Journal and the Wisconsin Light I’d kept over the years. Things that seemed important to have and to keep, though for what reason, I couldn’t definitively say.
I shrugged at her. She was maybe right. “So?” I asked her.
“Well, it’s like a disease, and stuff,” she said. This time I laughed and she shrugged. “Like, why do you have all this stuff about Dahmer in here?”
“They broke the case that summer . . . the summer Dee disappeared,” I told her.
“I know,” she said. “But why did you keep it all?”
“I’m just saying it was all mixed in.”
Dana thought on this. “Still,” she said quietly. “It’s kind of creepy.” She waved an advertisement I’d torn from a magazine: Buy your copy of the exclusive confessions copied DIRECTLY from the files of the Milwaukee Police Department. For the low price of ONLY $13.95, True Police Case magazine readers can learn how he lured, drugged, killed, had sex, and dismembered bodies. Gerald Boyle, the Milwaukee Cannibal’s lawyer, says his client’s confession is “the longest confession in the history of America.”
These are the names of every man the serial killer confessed to murdering between 1978 and 1991: Steven Hicks, eighteen; Steven Tuomi, twenty-five; James Doxtator, fourteen; Richard Guerrero, twenty-two; Anthony Sears, twenty-four; Raymond Smith, thirty-two; Edward Smith, twenty-seven; Ernest Miller, twenty-two; David Thomas, twenty-two; Curtis Straughter, seventeen; Errol Lindsey, nineteen; Anthony Hughes, thirty-one; Konerak Sinthasomphone, fourteen; Matt Turner, twenty; Jeremiah Weinberger, twenty-three; Oliver Lacy, twenty-four; Joseph Bradehoft, twenty-five.
Edward W. Smith was nicknamed “the Sheik.” Steven Hicks grew up in Coventry, Ohio. Ernest Miller lived in Chicago and attended the Golden Rule Church of God and Christ; he was a talented dance student. Raymond Smith went by the name Ricky Beeks. Curtis Straughter called himself Demetra and belonged to Gay Youth Milwaukee. Joseph Bradehoft was married and had three children. Errol Lindsey sang in the Greater Spring Hill Missionary Baptist Church choir. Anthony Hughes was deaf-mute and could read lips. Oliver Lacy had a two-year-old son and a fiancée named Rose; his family called him “Birdie.” James Doxtator’s mother called him Jamie. He liked to play pool and ride his bike. Anthony Sears was an aspiring model who also managed a restaurant. David Thomas was a father. Matt Turner was born in Chicago; he lip-synched at a bar under the name Donald Montrell. Jeremiah Weinberger worked as a customer service rep at a cinema. Steven Tuomi worked at a restaurant in Milwaukee. Richard Guerrero was the youngest of six children. He worked at a pizzeria and often babysat his nieces. Konerak Sinthasomphone was the youngest of eight children and enjoyed swimming, soccer, and drawing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
May 1991
I often liked to have Dee over to my place if I got lonely during Leif’s long night shifts, and sometimes she’d come by of her own accord when she was annoyed with her roommate, Felicity. We’d drink wine and smoke some of Leif’s weed. One night, we were two bottles of wine in when Dee confided to me that most times, after she had sex with Frank, she went into the bathroom alone and made herself come fast with her own index finger. I laughed when she told me, though truthfully, it made me sad.
“I’m not an engineer,” Dee said.
“You mean a rocket scientist?”
“Whatever. What I mean is that I just don’t understand the mechanics. How am I supposed to come?”
I shrugged. “Practice?” I shook my head and tried again. “Perseverance?”
“This isn’t a motivational poster, Pegasus,” Dee said.
“In the meantime—” I stuck my tongue out at her and wiggled it between bared teeth.
She shoved me away and laughed a throaty laugh. “Frank says only pussies eat pussy,” Dee said.
I slammed my wine down on the table between us. Some of it spilled from the glass down my forearms.
“That is some bullshit, Dee.” I took her chin in my hand and squeezed her face so the fat of her cheeks collected around her lips. I wanted suddenly to put my own tongue on her lips,
tracing their lovely outline, if only just to show her what gentleness could feel like, the way we used to play when we were babies finding our bodies. But I felt gross for even thinking of it, and I let her go. Chalked it up to the wine and my growing dislike for Frank. “I think you need to ditch him,” I said. She was nineteen, and she could have anyone she wanted, though she didn’t seem to know it. Do we ever?
“I didn’t say the sex was bad. I like it.”
I wondered if she’d seen my thoughts about her lips pass over my face. I figured she could read my mind, because I believed I was capable of as much when it came to her thoughts.
“Of course. It’s a spectrum, not a binary, babe. But look, you give him head?”
She nodded, gulped at her wine. There was a rose-petal-pink stain on her glass.
“Then it’s only right that he return the favor, otherwise it’s some bullshit. Sorry.” I was proud of myself. Though I was only just discovering the vast joys of cunnilingus, I felt I had asserted myself as the expert in this situation. And I felt Dee was taking me seriously. I got up to roll two joints, one for Dee and me, and one for Leif. He liked one ready after he got off work.
“Oh, and Dee—you better not let him catch you in the bathroom.”
“Why?” she asked. She rolled her long neck in circles over her shoulders.
“It’s an ego thing,” I told her. “I suspect he would not be pleased.”
The TV was on low in the living room, and its gray light shone through into the kitchen. I watched a local news segment about a piano prodigy, a young Black jazz musician who’d been visiting from Chicago and had recently gone missing. They showed a picture of him: another man Milwaukee had swallowed. The reporter said he was nineteen. Dee clucked her tongue. “He looks about fourteen, if you ask me.”
I eyed her. Dee looked about fourteen herself—her primped hair, her tight, high chest, the skin of her face like a Revlon ad. Dee was a painter, but she was in cosmetology school at Mount Mary College, which she hoped would one day pay the bills. Dee told me once that she did not like to indulge in impracticalities. I took this to mean she didn’t believe she would ever make any money from painting (and, by extension, I would never make any money from my poems), and in the end, I suppose, she was right about all of that. She could do hair, nails, and makeup, turn you into one of those magazine women with no rough edges. I was twenty and still had no idea how lipstick worked.
She noticed me watching her, and her eyes widened. “It’s just like Erik said,” she whispered. “They’re disappearing.”
Later that night, almost morning, Dee left and Leif came home smelling like disinfectant and cocoa powder. He picked up the joint I’d rolled him and kissed me on the nape of my neck. He took the ashtray into the bathroom with him and set it on top of the toilet; he liked to smoke in the shower. I followed him in there, sat on the toilet lid, and snuck some puffs while he was soaping up and rinsing off. The paper was wet, and I chewed the bits that stayed in my mouth.
He poked his head out from the curtain, inhaled on the joint so his cheekbones went sharp. “Come on, then,” he said.
He exhaled slow and beckoned me in. He ducked behind the curtain, and when he popped back out, he spit a thick stream of hot water in my face. I stripped slow and watched him get hard. I loved that my body had that effect on him. He pulled the curtain back for me and I stepped in beside him. There was a dark brown slush, cocoa powder and milk chocolate and some white paste, which had washed from his hands and forearms, collecting on the shower floor. It swirled down the drain, and I put my toes in it. Leif put his hands around my neck and felt between my legs. He said I got wet faster than any woman he’d ever known. I’d learned that men thought being wet was the same thing as permission. I’d warned Dee about this too.
In the shower, Leif pinned me against the tile wall, but I turned back to him.
“What do you think about men who say Only pussies eat pussy?” I asked him.
He paused. He was hard, and maybe it was difficult for him to think then.
“Their loss. Pussy is delicious.” He put his hands on my shoulders and tried to turn me back around. He wanted me from behind. He moved a rope of wet hair from my ear. “Who the fuck says that, anyway?”
I didn’t let him turn me. “Frank,” I said.
“What the fuck. Is he Italian or something?”
“Leif!”
He laughed at his own joke. “I’m just teasing,” he said. “I heard that about mobsters.”
He turned me for the third time, and with my chest against the wall and his hand on the back of my neck, he came inside me.
It occurred to me then I was a hypocrite, preaching to Dee about egalitarianism. Her bullshit was not so different from mine. Was it any different? Once, when Leif and I were falling asleep after sex, he pulled me to him and whispered against my neck, “Sometimes I just want to beat the shit out of you.”
I stayed very still. Felt my heart leaping against his palm where he cradled my right breast.
He continued, “Just when we’re fucking, I mean.” He squeezed me.
May 1991
Glenda Cleveland: I wondered if this situation was being handled. This was a male child being raped and molested by an adult.
Officer: Where did this happen?
[Transferred to another officer.]
Officer: Hello, this is the Milwaukee Police.
Glenda Cleveland: Yes, there was a Squad Car No. 68 that was flagged down earlier this evening, about fifteen minutes ago.
Officer: That was me.
Glenda Cleveland: Yeah, uh, what happened? I mean, my daughter and my niece witnessed what was going on. Was anything done about this situation? Do you need their names or information or anything from them?
Officer: No, I don’t need it at all. No, not at all.
Glenda Cleveland: You don’t?
Officer: Nope, it’s an intoxicated boyfriend of another boyfriend.
Glenda Cleveland: Well, how old was this child?
Officer: It wasn’t a child. It was an adult.
Glenda Cleveland: Are you sure?
Officer: Yup.
Glenda Cleveland: Are you positive? Because this child doesn’t even speak English. My daughter had, you know, dealt with him before and seen him on the street, you know, catching earthworms.
Officer: Yeah—no, he’s—it’s all taken care of, ma’am.
Glenda Cleveland: I mean, are you positive this is an adult?
Officer: Ma’am. Like I explained to you. It is all taken care of. It’s as positive as I can be. I can’t do anything about somebody’s sexual preferences in life.
Officer Joseph Gabrish interviewed in the Milwaukee Journal 1991: “We’re trained to be observant and spot things. There was just nothing that stood out, or we would have seen it. We’ve been doing this for a while, and usually if something stands out, you’ll spot it. There wasn’t anything there.”
Former Milwaukee police chief Harold Breier (1964–1984): “There is no substitute for strong law enforcement. First, a police officer doesn’t have the training to take care of all the social ills of the city. And second, he should be so busy maintaining law and order that he doesn’t have time for all that crap. When I was chief, we were relating to the good people, and we were relating to the other people too—we were throwing those people in the can.”
April 2019
When Thomas Alexander began his ghost tours, I felt deeply embarrassed for my city and outraged on behalf of the serial killer’s victims and their families. Milwaukee, having failed these families in the seventies, the eighties, and the nineties, seemed poised to do so again. Perhaps, as Dana suggested, I had been obsessed with the serial killer coverage. But it wasn’t an obsession born out of a dark interest in the gruesomeness of his crimes. Rather, it was rooted in my belief that the serial killer’s fame proved something about my family’s case: We weren’t special. There were many families, in the city of Milwaukee, in the state of Wiscons
in, in the country and the world, just like mine. These families had lost loved ones whom city officials were eager to forget. Maybe these people had been murdered by a serial killer, or maybe they had been murdered by a jealous boyfriend or by a cop, but either way, these people were not special. That is what the news taught me. That’s what it is still teaching us. But a serial killer? Now, that was special.
Originally, the consensus among Milwaukee’s civic and business leaders was that the serial killer was bad for the city’s reputation. Local leaders were appalled when, in 1996, a lawyer representing some of the victims’ families wanted to auction off the killer’s estate for roughly $1 million. A judge had awarded the families the estate after they’d sued for damages, and the lawyer hoped the auction would provide some additional remuneration. Local leaders said the auction was “morally reprehensible.” They feared the belongings, which included, among other things, a drill, four knives, a handsaw, an eighty-quart kettle, a freezer, a hypodermic needle, pornographic movies, and letters received while in prison in Portage, would end up in carnivals and traveling road shows. They vowed to stop the auction and to destroy the serial killer’s belongings. They raised about half of what the families were asking for, bought the estate, destroyed what they could, and buried the rest in an undisclosed Illinois landfill.
The vice president of the city’s tourism promoters summed up these sentiments when she said, “No one in the U.S. or the world can disagree that this is a catastrophic tragedy. But I don’t think anyone is holding it against Milwaukee.”
In the end, popular opinion on the subject was slowly reversed, in part because, it seemed to me, Americans had an unusual appetite for stories about serial killers. Sometimes the appetite was just for the killers themselves. Netflix, for example, was full of shows about serial killers and the detectives who tirelessly pursued them. The actual people these serial killers had murdered were often an afterthought. Maybe a couple of naked women poised in gruesome crime scene photos. Maybe some smiling headshots. The kind of photos I’d seen posted on the doors of bars in Walker’s Point or on the Journal’s missing-persons wall.
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