Here's What Happened To Jeffrey Dahmer's Apartment
The small, one-bedroom Milwaukee, Wisconsin apartment hid a house of horrors. Just 15 minutes after the police arrived at Jeffrey Dahmer's home the night of July 22, 1991, for a report of a handcuffed man who had fled apartment 213 at 924 North 25th Street, the city's medical examiner began to catalog the serial killer's grisly trophies, according to Knight-Ridder News Service and Esquire. He found three human skulls in a filing cabinet, a vat of acid containing three human torsos, and a human head in the refrigerator, among other abhorrent discoveries.
"It was more like dismantling a museum than a death investigation," Jeffrey Jentzen, the medical examiner, told The Ann Arbor News in 2008. The investigators eventually found the remains of 11 men in the apartment. Less than a year and a half later, the 49-unit Oxford Apartments was nothing more than a nightmarish memory after wreckers ripped it down. Today, the site is a grass-covered lot surrounded by a fence, per the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Campus Circle Project
Not long after the horrific discovery in the Oxford Apartments, where Dahmer had lived from May 1990 to July 1991 when police arrested him, renters who could afford to, fled the complex, according to Seventeen. Then in August 1992, an organization named the Campus Circle Project purchased the Oxford Apartments for $325,000 (about $711,000 today), per the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the Associated Press. The Campus Circle Project was an urban renewal organization with ties to nearby Marquette University, per the Associated Press.
The organization decided to raze the apartment building and that November wreckers began ripping down its walls and roof. "It has been a symbol of anger, pain, violence, and death," Patrick LeSage, the project's head, told the AP in November 1992. "It needs to be replaced with a sign of our commitment to support the healing process and to work together as a community of people who care." LeSage said they tore it down out of respect for the victims' families. The Campus Circle Project offered to help relocate the tenants who remained in 15 apartments in the complex.
Faltered projects
When the wreckers demolished Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment, Shirley Hughes, the mother of one of Dahmer's victims, Anthony Hughes, rejoiced. "I am so happy it's coming down," she told the Kenosha News at the time. "We have been through so much and spring is coming and we need to make the green space." And while they planted grass on the site, nothing else sprang up in its place. There were several proposed projects but none came to fruition.
Over the years, residents have proposed turning the lot into a playground or a space for middle school students to learn about the environment, per the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. One couple even pitched turning the Oxford Apartments, before the wreckers got to the building, into a crime museum. The current owner, real estate developer Ogden Homes, bought the site in 2011 for $500 with the stipulation it couldn't put a building on the lot, per the Marquette Wire, and so it remains a green space.