Jeffrey Dahmer's House: His Ohio Childhood Home and the Milwaukee Apartment Site

Jeffrey Dahmer's name is tied to two places, and he owned neither of them. The first is the ranch house in a township on the northern edge of Akron, Ohio, that his parents bought in 1968, when he was eight. The second is the site of the Milwaukee apartment building where he rented a unit until his arrest in July 1991. That building came down in November 1992, and the lot was still empty when the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel looked in 2022.

Both places are private, and neither is open to visitors. The Ohio house has had other owners since the Dahmers, and the Milwaukee lot, in the last report we found, had nothing on it. This page is about what became of the two places, and how the people around them have lived with what happened there.

The house's story, from its 1952 build to the owners who came after the family, is on the profile of Jeffrey Dahmer's childhood home.

A 1952 ranch north of Akron

The house went up in 1952, a ranch with floor-to-ceiling windows looking over a wooded hillside, and it was modern enough for its day that the Akron Beacon Journal profiled it the following year, according to the AP. The Summit County Fiscal Office's parcel record, which we read for this update, agrees on the year and the style and puts the lot at a little more than an acre and a half.

Lionel and Joyce Dahmer bought it in 1968, when their son was eight, the AP reported in 2012 and again in 2014. It was the family's house. No record or report we found puts the title in his name.

In June 1978, at 18, he killed Steven Hicks there, a death Hicks's family did not learn the truth of until 1991, as A&E and the AP have reported.

Dahmer left Ohio in the early 1980s; the AP put his move to Wisconsin in 1982.

The musician who bought it

Chris Butler, a founding member of the 1980s band The Waitresses, bought the house in 2005. He was living in New York at the time, the AP reported in 2012, and wanted a mid-century house on a big wooded lot: room for his 1950s furniture and his British Invasion music gear, and far enough from the neighbors for a band to play. By the AP's account, his agent told him whose house it had been once he was interested. He bought it anyway.

It has gone up for sale more than once since. In 2012 the asking price was $329,000, and the agent, Gregory Greco of Keller Williams, would show it only to buyers with a pre-approval or proof of funds. “This is not a museum. This is someone’s home,” he told WTVR.

That first try did not sell. The house came back in 2014 at $295,000 with a new agent, Rich Lubinski, who told the AP that the depressed market and the house's past had both worked against it. In 2016 it was offered for rent for the week of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, at $8,000, the AP reported. Earlier versions of this page said it was rented. No report we found says anyone took it.

The Milwaukee apartment

His Milwaukee address was a rental. Seventeen reported that he lived in unit 213 of the Oxford Apartments, a 49-unit brick building in Avenues West, a neighborhood on the near west side of the city, until he was arrested there in July 1991. He never owned any part of it. The Wisconsin Historical Society's architecture inventory, drawing on a 1984 survey, records the building as a contemporary-style brick block on a steel frame, and marks it demolished.

In February 1992 a Milwaukee jury found him sane, UPI reported, and he was sentenced to 15 consecutive life terms. TMJ4 puts the number of people he was convicted of killing at 16, which A&E's account explains as 15 in Wisconsin and one in Ohio. A fellow inmate killed him on November 28, 1994.

What stands on the ground now, and the city's long argument over it, are on the profile of the Jeffrey Dahmer apartment site.

Bought, then torn down three months later

The Campus Circle Project, a nonprofit that Marquette University founded in December 1991, with area businesses as sponsors, to revive the neighborhood around its campus, bought the whole building in August 1992 for $325,000. The Marquette Wire, citing the university's archives, put the building's value at about $500,000 and said the lower price reflected its notoriety rather than its condition. It was razed that November.

Green space, on paper

By 2011 the city held the empty lot. That February an alderman voted to transfer the deed to a private developer, and in July the city attorney was still revising the deed language while the Department of City Development said the lot would become green space, the AP reported. The price was $500, on terms that barred building on it and allowed some parking, according to the Marquette Wire in 2012 and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 2022.

In September 2022 the Journal Sentinel found that the lot “still sits unused.” The city's 2026 property roll, which we checked for this update, carries no parcel under the building's old street number, so we do not say who owns the ground today.

The memorial argument

Whether to mark the site has come up for more than two decades. In 1998 the director of the Avenues West Association said that “keeping a reminder there is not going to help” the neighborhood heal, the Journal Sentinel recalled in 2022. In 2011 Milwaukee County Supervisor Eyon Biddle said the families of some victims wanted a memorial on the lot, an idea that drew mixed reactions, according to the AP.

The question came back in September 2022, after Netflix released Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. Mayor Cavalier Johnson called remembering the victims “entirely appropriate” but was “cautious, however, about a physical memorial,” because one could draw people with a morbid fascination with the killer. Alderman Robert Bauman called a memorial a “terrible idea,” especially on private property, and the LGBTQ advocacy group Diverse & Resilient said it supported “whatever the victims’ families want,” the Journal Sentinel reported. A City Hall spokesperson told FOX6 the calls were coming from the public, not from the families.

The neighbors carried the attention. They told FOX6 that after the series came out, more strangers came by to photograph an empty lot and to ask where he had lived. One sent the station a photo of a sign left there in the victims' memory, which had since been taken down.

As of the last reporting we found, in 2022, nothing on the lot marks the people he killed.

We trace another set of crime sites, the places of the 1969 Manson Family murders, in Cielo Drive to Corcoran.