At around two in the morning on 27 May 1991, in Milwaukee, two women found a boy in the street, naked, bleeding and unable to speak coherently. They called the emergency number and stayed with him. A man arrived and told the officers who responded that the boy was his nineteen-year-old partner and that they had been drinking and arguing. The officers walked the boy back to the man's apartment, noted the smell inside, and left. The boy was Konerak Sinthasomphone, he was fourteen years old, and the man was on probation for having sexually assaulted Konerak's older brother three years earlier. He was killed that night. Four more people died before the arrest in July. This file is about the mechanism that made those hours possible, because it was not concealment and it was not cunning.
// The theoryThe victims nobody looks for
Queer criminology is a recent field — most of its foundational work dates from the 2010s — and it makes three claims that are easy to confuse and must be kept apart. The first is historical: criminology and the law spent most of a century treating LGBTQ+ people as a category of offender, with the conduct itself criminalized, pathologised in the diagnostic manuals until 1973, and policed accordingly. The second is about defenses: the so-called panic defense, in which a defendant argues that a victim's advance provoked a loss of control, was accepted in American courts for decades and has only recently been legislated against in a minority of states. The third, and the one this file uses, is about victims: a system organized around treating a population as suspect is structurally bad at treating it as harmed. The field's point is not that any of this explains why anyone offends — it explicitly does not — but that it shapes which offenses get investigated.
The mechanism has a name from outside that field. Steven Egger, who had worked on the definition of serial murder in the 1980s, described in 1990 the “less-dead”: victims drawn from populations whose disappearance produces little institutional response — people in prostitution, the homeless, runaways, migrants, drug users, the very poor, and men who have sex with men. Egger's argument was that this is not an unfortunate side effect but a selection criterion: offenders who continue for years tend to be those who chose victims nobody would look for. He paired it with linkage blindness, the failure of agencies to connect related cases across jurisdictions and categories, which compounds the first problem — if the individual disappearances are not investigated, the pattern is not visible either.
The record of one night, which is the whole argument
The Sinthasomphone incident is included here in detail because it converts a structural claim into a documented sequence with names and times. Sandra Smith and Nicole Childress, two young women from the neighborhood, called emergency services and stayed with an injured, incoherent, naked child. Three officers attended. The man who arrived offered an explanation — an adult partner, a domestic argument, alcohol — and was believed over two Black women who were present and over the physical condition of the boy in front of them. The officers entered the apartment, where a body was in the bedroom, registered the smell, and left. In the recorded radio transmission afterwards, one of them reported the matter closed, with a joke. Glenda Cleveland called the police repeatedly over the following days to ask what had happened to the child; she was told there was nothing to pursue. Two of the officers were later dismissed and subsequently reinstated through arbitration. What this record shows is not that officers were unusually cruel; it is that a routine application of ordinary assumptions — about whose account is credible, about what a fourteen-year-old Laotian boy and two Black women were worth as witnesses, about what a “lovers' quarrel” licenses in private — produced an outcome that four more people did not survive. That is the argument queer criminology makes, and this is the cleanest evidence anyone could ask for.
// The subjectWhat the method actually consisted of
It is worth saying plainly what the offender contributed, because the institutional story can swallow it. He selected men from bars and malls, offered money or alcohol, drugged them, killed them, and disposed of the remains in his apartment; his conduct became more extreme over thirteen years and included acts after death that the trial documented at length. He was assessed at trial, where the defense argued insanity and the jury rejected it, finding him legally sane and convicting him on fifteen counts in February 1992. He received fifteen consecutive life sentences and was killed by another prisoner in November 1994. None of that is mitigated by anything in this file.
What the file adds is the part of the explanation that is not about him. He was not difficult to catch: he had a conviction for sexually assaulting a child, he was on probation, he was reported, and an emergency call put three officers inside the apartment where a body lay. The thirteen-year span is not a measure of his ability. It is a measure of how little friction there was, and the friction is the thing a society controls.
Jeffrey Dahmer
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// The crackA standpoint more than a theory, and a concept nobody can count
Four objections, and the field would accept most of them. First, queer criminology is a corrective rather than an explanatory theory: it tells you where to look and what the discipline has missed, and it generates very few testable predictions about who offends or why. That is a legitimate role, but it means it cannot do the work that strain, learning or control theories do, and treating it as a rival to them is a category error. Second, the “less-dead” is hard to quantify: the claim that marginalised victims receive less investigative effort is well supported by case studies and by clearance-rate analyses, but “less attention” is measured inconsistently, and the counterfactual — how many more offenses would have been prevented with equal effort — cannot be observed. Third, there is a real risk of misreading, and the field guards against it explicitly: nothing here implies that sexuality explains offending. This subject's crimes are not explained by his being gay, and the historical habit of treating the two as connected is precisely what the field exists to dismantle. Fourth, the institutional-failure frame can displace responsibility: a story about policing is so much more tractable than a story about a person that it can quietly become the whole account. What survives is robust and has been demonstrated repeatedly since: offenders who last select victims who will not be sought, clearance rates track the social position of the victim, and the pattern is visible in cases with no connection to this one at all.
Two things true at once
Two things are true at once and the file exists to hold them together. He killed seventeen people and is answerable for every one. And the institutions that were supposed to make that difficult were, on at least one documented night, the reason it was easy — which is a separate wrong, with its own names attached, and it does not transfer a gram of his. The finding worth carrying out is the one that generalizes beyond this case: a serial offender's duration is mostly a measure of the indifference around the victims, not of the offender's skill, and the only variable in that equation a society actually controls is whether it looks. It is also worth noting what the dramatization of this case cost: relatives of the victims said publicly that the Netflix series was made without consulting them and forced them to relive it, which is the same hierarchy of whose experience counts, arriving thirty years later in a different form.
Three key ideas
- Queer criminology makes three separable claims: that the field historically treated LGBTQ+ people as a category of offender, that “panic” defenses were accepted for decades, and that a system built to suspect a population handles it badly as victims.
- Egger's “less-dead” names the mechanism: offenders who last select victims nobody will look for, and linkage blindness hides the pattern. The night of 27 May 1991 is that argument documented with names and times.
- The field is a corrective more than a predictive theory, the concept is hard to quantify, and nothing in it implies sexuality explains offending. What holds: duration measures indifference, not skill, and looking is the variable a society controls.
Sources · to keep reading
- Egger, S. A. (1984). “A Working Definition of Serial Murder and the Reduction of Linkage Blindness”, Journal of Police Science and Administration, 12(3).
- Egger, S. A. (1990). Serial Murder: An Elusive Phenomenon. Praeger.
- Egger, S. A. (2002). The Killers Among Us, 2.ª ed. Prentice Hall.
- Mogul, J. L., Ritchie, A. J. y Whitlock, K. (2011). Queer (In)Justice. Beacon Press.
- Buist, C. L. y Lenning, E. (2016). Queer Criminology. Routledge.
- Woods, J. B. (2015). “The Birth of Modern Criminology and Gendered Constructions of Homosexual Criminal Identity”, Journal of Homosexuality, 62(2).
- Quinet, K. (2007). “The Missing Missing: Toward a Quantification of Serial Murder Victimization”, Homicide Studies, 11(4).
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is Jeffrey Dahmer?
Jeffrey Dahmer (“Milwaukee, 1991”) is a villain from Monster (Netflix), analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. After that night he killed four more people.
Why does Jeffrey Dahmer (Milwaukee, 1991) become a villain?
Jeffrey Dahmer and queer criminology: his method did not depend on being clever, it depended on nobody caring about his victims. The file on the “less-dead” and on the night of 27 May 1991.
Which criminological theory explains Jeffrey Dahmer?
Jeffrey Dahmer's case is analysed through Queer criminology. Queer criminology asks a question the discipline avoided for a century: what happens when the justice system treats a group as a suspect by default and as a victim never. From it comes the concept that organizes this file, Steven Egger's “less-dead”: victims whose disappearance receives less police attention, less press and less urgency — people in prostitution, the homeless, migrants, the poor, gay men — and whom some serial offenders select for exactly that reason. Seventeen murders between 1978 and 1991, almost all of the victims Black, Latino and Asian men. No brilliance was required. What was required was that people called and nothing happened.
