When the police arrived, Dahmer claimed Simthasophone was his boyfriend and he’d just had too much to drink after a fight.The police made a couple gay jokes before helping Dahmer take his victim back to his apartment. Three young women had found him and called the police. He came back to find Simthasomphone had woken up and escaped his apartment. In the process of committing his 13th murder, Dahmer left his victim, 14-year-old Konerak Sinthasomphone, alone in his apartment after injecting hydrochloric acid into his frontal lobe. While Dahmer started out drugging, assaulting and then strangling his victims, eventually he started to experiment with keeping them alive, but incapacitated.
Milwaukee’s gay community was used to people coming and going and no one-police or civilian-had connected any of the disappearances or considered that there might be a serial killer among them. By 1991 he had already killed 10 people but he was nowhere close to being caught. Some of his victims were male prostitutes and he met some of them at gay bars around Milwaukee. Jeffrey Dahmer committed the murder and dismemberment of 17 men and boys between 19.
Rather than believe the victim, police brushed them off and Gacy remained free to continue killing. Gacy committed a number of assaults that didn’t end in murder and despite reports being filed by the victims, police believed Gacy when he claimed it was nothing more than a consensual “sex-slave” relationship gone awry. Newspapers labelled Gacy the “Homo Butcher”, and referred to the murders as “bizarre sex slayings”, and “gay sex-murders”. Gacy, the owner of a successful construction business, claimed his victims were “male prostitutes” and “hustlers” when in reality, many of them worked for him at his construction company and lived at home with their parents. Peacock’s new docu-series, John Wayne Gacy: Devil in Disguise dives into how Chicago police and the media turned to victim blaming to explain how Gacy had managed to get away with murder for so long. He told police he had more bodies buried in the crawl space under his house in a suburb of Chicago which led investigators to find the remains of 33 young men and boys that had been missing for anywhere from a few months to a few years. In 1978, 36-year-old John Wayne Gacy was arrested for the murder of 16-year-old Robert Piest. Here are four gay serial killers that evaded detection in part because of homophobia.
Due to deeply ingrained biases, ignored and mishandled evidence, and assumptions about the victims, some of these cases took decades to solve while victim counts continued to grow. This month, we’re taking a look at some of the most infamous gay serial killers-and how their victims were treated, by the police, the media, and the public. Queer Crime is a monthly column focusing on true crime with an LGBTQ+ spin whether it’s the victim or the perpetrator. Meanwhile hate crimes, including murders of gay, trans and non-binary people are on the rise. From serial killers like Ted Bundy, the Golden State Killer and Paul Bernardo to victims of the most talked-about unsolved cases like JonBenet Ramsey, the media is busy covering a certain (very small) selection of cases. At the same time, we know that cases that get the most attention are usually ones that are committed against white, middle class, cisgender people. If you’re a true crime fan, you know there’s no shortage of books, documentaries, podcasts and original reporting dedicated to the victims of violent crimes and the people who commit those crimes. These prolific serial killers could have been caught sooner if police weren’t so quick to brush off their victims…