The Other Dahmer Lawyer: Lawrence Vuillemin, the Catholic Fixer Who managed the Civil Case
The Church’s Traveling Damage-Control Show
The deeper you dive into “Dahmer,” the more you keep finding the same type of guy lurking around the edges…Catholic, connected, and nearby when something needs to be quietly buried to help the Church escape the blast radius.
Enter Lawrence Vuillemin…the Akron attorney who defended Jeff, Lionel, Joyce, and Shari Dahmer in the wrongful death lawsuit filed by the parents of Steven Hicks. On paper, he’s just a civil lawyer doing his job. In reality, he’s another name from the same well-worn Rolodex the Catholic Church reaches for when things get ugly.
After he showed up to represent the Dahmers, Vuillemin defended – surprise, surprise – Catholic priests accused of molesting kids – including two who ended up on the Diocese of Cleveland’s official list of credibly accused clergy. Like Gerald Boyle, Lawrence Vuillemin was on the Church’s clean-up crew.
So that’s one Church-connected lawyer managing Jeff Dahmer’s criminal trial (Gerald Boyle), and another Church-connected lawyer managing Jeff Dahmer’s Ohio trial. Different firms, different cities, same Vatican stench.
Milwaukee Had Boyle. Cleveland Had Vuillemin. The Church Had a System.
Lawrence Vuillemin didn’t just drift into the Dahmer case by accident. He belonged to the same tight little circle of Catholic attorneys who always seemed to show up when the Church needed to put out a fire without making a scene.
After the civil suit, Vuillemin didn’t vanish…he followed the same well-worn path as Gerald Boyle. In Milwaukee, Boyle defended Dahmer in court while helping protect abusive priests behind the scenes. In Cleveland, Vuillemin did the same thing.
He went on to represent priests in the Diocese of Cleveland facing allegations of sexual abuse. And not just vague accusations…these were priests who later landed on the Diocese’s official list of clergy with substantiated abuse claims. The Church confirmed it. The men were restricted. And like Boyle, Vuillemin was the Catholic Church’s guy.
If you want to see what kind of rot he was defending, look no further than the clergy file.
Rev. Joseph Lieberth, pastor of Holy Family Church in Stow, was suspended in 2002 after admitting to sexual misconduct with a 17-year-old boy back in the 1980s. The Diocese assigned him to a so-called “life of prayer and penance,” which is Catholic HR-speak for: you’re fired, but politely.
Rev. John J. Mueller, of St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception in Wooster, was accused of abusing a teenage girl in the 1960s and manipulating another woman in the 1970s while serving as her annulment counselor, which is just about as dark and Catholic as it gets. The Church’s review board found both claims credible. Mueller was removed from ministry and died while still under restrictions.
These weren’t rumors. They weren’t trial-by-tabloid. They were formally reviewed and confirmed by the Church itself…the same Church that hired Vuillemin to defend them.
Faith-Based Fraud
To any sane, moral person, the idea that God would sign off on a bunch of crooked Catholic lawyers and priests scapegoating Jeff Dahmer to save the Church’s image isn’t satire, it’s blasphemy dressed as damage control. Even Orwell would’ve called it too cruel to print.
But If you grow up Catholic enough, long enough, you’re not taught that the Church represents God. You’re taught it is God’s house, God’s mouthpiece, God’s authorized dealer on Earth. So the line between “protecting the Church” and “doing God’s will” blurs until it disappears completely.
In the end, sin gets rebranded as service. Lying? Not great. But if it protects the Church, it’s understandable. Burying abuse? Regrettable, sure…but still better than a front-page scandal. Because scandal is the real enemy. Not the predator priests. Not the cover-up. Not the system that fails everyone in its blast radius. No, the thing they fear most is public exposure.
The Passion of Jeffrey Dahmer
Isaiah 5:20 might as well have been carved into the courtroom walls: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness.”
Because that’s exactly what they did to Jeff.
He came forward. He told the truth, the family secret he couldn’t carry anymore. He admitted what happened to Steven Hicks. Not for attention. Not to cut a deal. But because he believed truth mattered. And what did they do with it? They strapped a monster mask to his face and rolled cameras. They turned an act of conscience into a national horror story. They took a broken, remorseful man and cast him as the villain of the decade, not because it was accurate, but because it was useful.
Because the Catholic Church – drowning in lawsuits and decades of predator priests – needed a bigger villain. So they fed the media a “gay cannibal”, turned him into the monster of the century, and watched the cameras pivot away from the real problem. Meanwhile, the actual predators, the ones with collars and pensions and sealed files, got shuffled around or quietly retired. No mugshots. No Dateline specials. No Netflix series.
Jeff became the story so they could bury theirs. They called him evil when all he did was confess. They called themselves good while cleaning up for men who destroyed lives in sacristies. They flipped the moral compass and acted like God signed off on it.
God’s Legal Team
Gerald Boyle wasn’t just Jeff Dahmer’s defense lawyer; he was Milwaukee’s go-to Catholic fixer, the man the Church called when “spiritual failings” crossed into felonies. After Boyle was done with Jeff’s staged criminal “trial”, Lawrence Vuillemin handled the encore. The Akron Catholic attorney stepped in for the civil case. Think of Vuillemin as Boyle’s understudy, running the same play in a different zip code.
District Attorney Michael McCann, a fellow Catholic who literally shared an address with Jeff Dahmer at one point, ran the prosecutorial side of the “serial killer” circus. He moved inside the same Milwaukee circles as his good friend Archbishop Rembert Weakland, the man later exposed for both embezzlement and sexual misconduct. When the Archdiocese of Milwaukee’s credibility was burning, McCann’s office delivered an absurd and grotesque morality play that kept the flames pointed elsewhere. And if you think “shared an address” is just a figure of speech, buckle up.
In the official version of events, the supposed assault on Somsack Sinthasomphone happened at 808 N. 24th Street…Jeff Dahmer’s apartment, so the story goes. But you can run a reverse-address search using a genealogical database and see the punch line for yourself: that address doesn’t trace back to Jeff Dahmer at all. It shows up as belonging to Michael McCann, the DA who prosecuted Jeff. You don’t have to take my word for it. Run the search, and watch the whole “serial killer” narrative tilt sideways. Somehow, the “killer’s apartment” is the DA’s address. They never planned for the day when the cover story could be undone by a skeptic with Wi-Fi and ten spare minutes.
Assistant DA Gregory O’Meara did something you don’t see every day: he swapped his legal briefcase for a collar. O’Meara joined the Jesuits and today serves as rector at Marquette University…a Catholic institution that has now quietly air-brushed “Jeffrey Dahmer” out of the reverend’s official bio. It used to be there, a brag in the “Leadership” section, until someone decided the past was bad for business.
Judge William Gardner played his part, too. He’s the one who sentenced Jeff for supposedly molesting Somsack Sinthasomphone…inside, of all places, the district attorney’s apartment. Years earlier, Gardner had been Assistant District Attorney under E. Michael McCann, the same office that brushed off reports about Father Lawrence Murphy, the priest accused of molesting as many as 200 deaf boys at St. John’s School for the Deaf.
According to The New York Times (March 26, 2010), when survivors tried to report Murphy’s crimes in the 1970s, they were turned away by police. So they went to McCann’s office, where Gardner was Assistant DA, and were told it would be referred to the archdiocese. “ Calls to McCann and Gardner were not returned. John Conway, an advocate for the victims said, referring to DA Michael McCann and assistant DA, William Gardner, “A criminal priest was an oxymoron to them.” Father Murphy was only removed from St. John’s after a lawsuit was filed.
“The deaf men and their advocates were told that Father Murphy, the school’s director and top fund-raiser, was too valuable to be let go, so he would be given only administrative duties.
They were outraged. They distributed “Wanted” posters with Father Murphy’s face outside the cathedral in Milwaukee. They went to the police departments in Milwaukee, where they were told it was not the correct jurisdiction, and in St. Francis, where the school was located, Mr. Conway said. They also went to the office of E. Michael McCann, the district attorney of Milwaukee County, and spoke with his assistant, William Gardner.
“A criminal priest was an oxymoron to them,” Mr. Conway said. “They said they’ll refer it to the archdiocese.”
Calls to Mr. McCann and Mr. Gardner this week were not returned.”
The New York Times, March 26, 2010
And overseeing the psychological flank was Dr. Charles Lodl, Jeff Dahmer’s psychologist (see The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer by Brian Masters, p. 130). After the trial, Lodl joined the Archdiocese of Milwaukee’s Diocesan Review Board…the same inner circle tasked with policing the priests Boyle, McCann, Gardner, and Vuillemin had spent years defending.
The Church Didn’t Need God. It Had Lawyers.
By the time the credits rolled, every name in “Dahmer” had a parish connection and a conscience made of Teflon. The Church didn’t have to tell them what to do. Decades of loyalty training had already written the script. Boyle, Vuillemin, McCann, Gardner, Lodl…they weren’t rogues; they were the system. The only thing that ever got buried deeper than Steven Hicks was the truth.
They called it faith. History will call it fraud.