Ep. 122 | The Murder of Konerak Sinthasomphone

On the night of May 27th, 1991, a fourteen-year-old boy named Konerak Sinthasomphone stumbled out of the Oxford Apartments in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He was naked, drugged, and bleeding. Three women found him on the sidewalk and called 911. When police arrived, they had everything they needed: a visibly injured victim, three eyewitnesses insisting he was a child, and the man who'd drugged him standing right there, calmly trying to explain it all away. Ten minutes later, officers carried Konerak back upstairs to the man’s apartment - the apartment of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer - where he was strangled to death within the hour.

This isn't a story about whether police could have caught a killer sooner in some abstract sense. It's a story about ten specific minutes, on one specific night, when three private citizens did everything right to stop the murder of a 14-year-old boy, but three sworn officers simply handed him back to his killer. Konerak didn't die because no one noticed. He died because the people who noticed weren’t believed, and the people with the power to act chose not to.

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