Nobody Was Blind That Night — Leslie L. Stevens

The names first. The archive insists.

Steven Hicks. Steven Tuomi. James Doxtator. Richard Guerrero. Anthony Sears. Raymond Smith. Edward Smith. Ernest Miller. David Thomas. Curtis Straughter. Errol Lindsey. Anthony Hughes. Konerak Sinthasomphone. Matt Turner. Jeremiah Weinberger. Oliver Lacy. Joseph Bradehoft.

Seventeen men and boys. The youngest, James Doxtator and Konerak Sinthasomphone, were fourteen. The oldest was in his early thirties. They were mostly Black, mostly brown, mostly queer, mostly poor, mostly disappearing into a Midwestern city that had — by the time their killer arrived — already perfected the art of not noticing.

Everyone knows the killer's name. That is not what this entry is for. We will get to him the way the Milwaukee police got to him: embarrassingly late, only after a man got out alive and walked half a mile through the summer night with a handcuff still hanging from his wrist.

This entry is for the men who didn't get out.

THE NIGHT THE CITY HAD A CHOICE

May 27, 1991. Just before two in the morning. A fourteen-year-old Laotian boy named Konerak Sinthasomphone stumbled out of an apartment at the Oxford Apartments on North 25th Street, naked, drugged, bleeding. He had a hole drilled into his skull, where his attacker had been pouring hydrochloric acid into his brain to make him compliant. Konerak made it down to the sidewalk and collapsed.

Two cousins, Sandra Smith and Nicole Childress — Black, teenagers themselves — found him. They flagged a passing patrol car. They told the officers, John Balcerzak and Joseph Gabrish, that this was a child, that he was bleeding, that something terrible had happened to him in that building.

Then the killer came outside in his jeans, calm and white and articulate, and told the officers that Konerak was his nineteen-year-old boyfriend and they were having a domestic quarrel.

The cousins protested. They protested again. They protested a third time.

The officers walked Konerak back into the apartment with the killer. Inside that apartment, in a room the officers did not search, the body of Anthony Hughes — thirty-one years old, Deaf, killed three days earlier — was lying on the floor.

The officers radioed dispatch as they left. My partner is going to get deloused at the station, one of them said, laughing. The recording exists. You can listen to it.

Konerak was murdered within the hour.

The two officers were briefly fired and then reinstated with full back pay. John Balcerzak was later elected president of the Milwaukee Police Association.

Two girls on a sidewalk saw a child. Two officers, standing in the same place at the same hour, saw a domestic quarrel.

Nobody was blind that night.

THE SPELL OF UNSEEING

Here is the older haunting, the one the documentaries skip past on their way to the refrigerator full of heads.

Milwaukee in 1991 was one of the most segregated cities in America. The Oxford Apartments stood in a neighborhood the wealthier residents of greater Milwaukee did not visit, and the local police did not investigate with anything resembling vigor. The young men who vanished from there vanished into a paperwork pile nobody had any incentive to dig through. Their photographs were not on the evening news. Their families were told to wait. The AIDS crisis was peaking; queer men were dying everywhere in mysterious and undocumented ways.

A young Black or brown man disappearing from a gay bar on 27th Street was not a story. It was a Tuesday.

This is the spell. It was not cast by Jeffrey Dahmer. It was cast a long time before him, by red-lining and broken neighborhoods and the long American habit of deciding which bodies the law is willing to look at and which bodies it is willing to lose. Dahmer did not hide in shadow. He hunted in the daylight of a city that had already decided not to look.

His neighbors knew. Pamela Bass, who lived next door, smelled the rot through the walls for months and complained to the building manager. The manager called Dahmer, who explained the smell as a broken freezer, a dead aquarium, meat gone bad. The complaints stopped traveling upward. People stopped asking. The smell, neighbors later said, was so bad you could taste it on your teeth.

You can call it indifference. I want to call it what it actually was. It was a spell — a learned, ancestral, civic agreement to unsee certain people in certain rooms.

Dahmer wasn't a lone wolf. Dahmer was the wolf the gate had been left open for.

When he was finally caught on July 22, 1991, it was not because the police got smart. It was because a thirty-two-year-old Black man named Tracy Edwards talked his way out of that apartment, ran into the summer night with a handcuff still on his wrist, and refused to be unseen.

THE SPELL DID NOT END IN 1991

In September of 2022, Netflix released Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. Ten episodes. Over a billion hours viewed in sixty days. It launched a franchise that has since given us the Menendez brothers and Ed Gein.

The families of the victims were not consulted. Most of them learned the show existed when a friend texted them a screenshot.

Rita Isbell, the sister of Errol Lindsey, watched an actress recreate her real-life courtroom victim impact statement — word for word, gesture for gesture, the most devastating day of her life staged for prestige television — without anyone ever calling her to ask.

She wrote about it afterward. She used the word bothered.

The industry should have stopped reading at bothered. It did not.

Here is what I did not understand until I put those two years side by side. The spell was never only about refusing to look. Netflix looked. Netflix looked at Konerak Sinthasomphone with more attention, more budget, more research hours than the Milwaukee Police Department ever spent on him while he was alive.

The spell is about which looking counts.

In 1991 these men were not worth a second glance. In 2022 they were worth a billion hours. Neither number was ever about them. A city declined to see them because seeing them would have cost something. An industry consented to see them because seeing them paid — and in both cases the men themselves were the one party nobody asked.

We called it a limited series the way a former generation called it a human interest piece.

THE ARCHIVE'S VERDICT

Dahmer is dead. He has been dead since November of 1994, beaten with an iron bar in a Wisconsin prison by a fellow inmate named Christopher Scarver.

He was never the deepest haunting in this story.

The deeper haunting is the unseeing — the civic spell that let seventeen men disappear from one city across thirteen years while the system built to find them shrugged, and that thirty-one years later sold their disappearance back to us in ten episodes.

That spell is not gone. That spell is the inheritance.

So we say the names, because saying them is the one act the spell cannot absorb.

The city was taught not to see them.

The teaching held.