The Archdiocese of Milwaukee Was Balls-Deep in Sex Scandals — Then Jeff Dahmer Showed Up. It’s a Miracle!
Knowing the Story Was Fake Isn’t Enough
By 1991, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Milwaukee was on the verge of collapse from decades of priest abuse cover-ups. Lawsuits were looming. SNAP (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests) was mobilizing. And then, right on schedule, Jeff Dahmer appeared…a ready-made monster to steal the headlines and bury the real scandal.
This wasn’t just a media frenzy. It was a strategic misdirection. The people who built this narrative – prosecutors, priests, publicists – didn’t just find a distraction. They wrote a script. And they needed a fall guy to play the villain.
Knowing the story about Jeff Dahmer was a fabrication is only the surface. The real question is: who created it…and why?
This project isn’t just about proving the story about Jeff Dahmer is a lie, even though this is essential. It’s also about exposing the institution that needed people to think it was true. Because when the Church needed a miracle, it didn’t turn to God, it pulled a “gay cannibal” out of its ass.
The Real Monster Wore a Collar
Before Milwaukee’s headlines were dominated by gay sex zombies, acid barrels and bone altars, the city already had a monster problem…just not the fake one Netflix would later dramatize. This real monster wore a collar, not a fishnet tank top.
By the late 1980s, the Archdiocese of Milwaukee was imploding under the weight of its own lurid sex secrets. It wasn’t a secret to them, of course. They knew exactly what they were sitting on. They’d known for years. The public? Still blissfully unaware.
“The archdiocese, under the direction of Archbishop Rembert Weakland and Bishop Richard Sklba, transferred to new church assignments clergy with a history of sexually victimizing children without notifying police, parishes, schools or communities of the criminal conduct of these priests and religious.”
(Peter Isely, founding member of SNAP and former Midwest Director, 2004)
Under the gay Archbishop Rembert Weakland – the Church’s very own PR-savvy theologian-in-chief – a quiet but methodical game of human shuffleboard was underway. Priests who raped kids weren’t reported, they were reassigned. Some were sent to “treatment centers” (read: ecclesiastical rehab for the criminally degenerate), while others were simply moved to a fresh crop of altar boys.
One of the worst, Father Lawrence Murphy, allegedly molested over 200 deaf children at St. John’s School for the Deaf. And yet Murphy died a priest, uncharged, untried, unpunished. He was still a clergyman. Still covered by cassock and Canon Law.
“The archdiocese, while claiming a public commitment to treat victims with compassion, repeatedly adopted aggressive legal tactics, even when offenders acknowledged to church authorities their guilt, including harassing victims for court costs after the 1995 and 1997 Supreme Court decisions and seeking judgments against victims for bringing civil cases and placing liens on their homes.”
Isely Report
By the late ’80s, survivors of these predator priests were finally beginning to organize. SNAP was founded. Lawsuits were being drafted. Archdiocesan lawyers were waking up in cold sweats. The public still hadn’t been let in on the story, but inside the Church walls, the panic had already started.
“In the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, as with other dioceses around the United States, the existence of sexually abusive clergy and the church’s awareness of the problem began surfacing in the late 1970’s. Knowledge of the problem was obtained largely through media investigations or criminal and civil cases. This trend continued throughout the 1980’s and peaked in the early to mid-1990’s when the issue mushroomed into a national scandal. 1992 was a watershed year in public awareness of the crisis, nationally and locally.”
Isely Report
Translation: the cover-up was running out of room. They’d maxed out their secrecy credit card. Any more exposure, even one high-profile case, could blow the whole rotten thing wide open.
And then, just in time, Jeff Dahmer walked into frame with a refrigerator full of human meat, an acid barrel, and a handsome face tailor-made for tabloid infamy. Perfect.
Within 48 hours, the Church’s problem had been replaced by America’s favorite problem: the lone psycho. You can’t put a religious institution on trial if everyone’s busy obsessing over whether a middle-class white guy ate a black man’s bicep with ketchup or A-1.
So what got buried? Everything. The lawsuits. The archdiocesan memos. The priest transfers. The “treatment” facilities.
And at the center of it all? Rembert Weakland, still sitting in his office, still signing reassignments, still hoping no one would notice that the house was already on fire.
Smoke Bomb in The New Yorker, Body Parts in the Fridge
One week.
That’s how long the American public had to absorb a glowing, puff piece about Archbishop Rembert Weakland in The New Yorker before Jeff was “arrested” supposedly with a head in his fridge, some uneaten biceps, and a barrel of acid in his bedroom.
The date: July 15, 1991. The headline: “The Education of an Archbishop”. The vibe: “Don’t worry, folks…Archbishop Weakland is a tortured intellectual who listens to Bach and reads St. Augustine before breakfast. Sure, he’s had to move a few pedo priests around, but let’s focus on his complicated inner life and how misunderstood he is by Rome.”
There’s a word for this kind of journalism: preemptive containment.
At the exact moment that lawsuits, whisper networks, and survivor groups were beginning to catch fire, Weakland’s public relations machine dropped a feature-length smoke bomb in the most respectable liberal magazine in America. No mention of Father Murphy, the priest who molested deaf children under Weakland’s watch. No hint that the Archdiocese was sitting on a volcano of liability. Instead, we get operatic prose about his “struggles with modernity” and a deeply sympathetic portrait of the man in charge.
And then one week later Jeff Dahmer gets “arrested,” and Weakland goes from stressed theologian to relieved archbishop, like a man who just shat out a decade of lawsuits.
Now we’ve got cannibalism, bone altars, gay sex zombies. It was tabloid nirvana. The press had a chew toy, and they ran with it.
And Weakland? He disappeared. Not literally. He still showed up for Mass and the occasional press quote…but metaphorically, he was gone. He made a vague remark about how people shouldn’t get “too preoccupied” with the gruesome murders. No real statement. No front-facing role. He vanished into the pews while Jeff’s name took over the airwaves.
This wasn’t neglect. It was strategy.
It’s called anchoring bias, a psychological shortcut where the first shocking thing you hear becomes the yardstick for everything else. Drop one apocalyptic headline into someone’s brain, and suddenly everything less grotesque fades into background noise. You could tell people the Archdiocese was running a kiddie abuse carousel behind the altar, and they’d still be like, “Yeah, but did the guy really drill into someone’s skull to make a sex zombie?”
That’s the trick: give people one all-consuming atrocity, and you can commit a dozen quieter ones in the same zip code. It’s like flashing your dick during a pickpocket job…the distraction’s loud, weird, and unforgettable. And while everyone’s gawking at the cannibal in cuffs, the Church walks out the back door with its reputation barely singed.
So, on July 22, 1991, Jeff Dahmer became the anchor. Everything else – pedo priests, payout settlements, archdiocesan shell games – got shunted to page 17 or buried altogether.
And that New Yorker article? It reads now like PR for a sinking ship.
Hallowed Be Thy Catholic Network
Jeff Dahmer didn’t just show up at the perfect time, he was the fucking show. A confused prop in a Catholic courtroom pageant, dressed up like the devil and dropped into America’s living room. The whole thing was a high-stakes morality play staged by a network of devout Catholic fixers trying to keep their own skeletons – and altar boys – from tumbling out of the closet. Jeff was the human smoke bomb they tossed into the crowd so nobody would see Father Murphy’s zipper coming down.
In Wisconsin, the Archdiocese of Milwaukee didn’t just have defenders in the pulpit…it had them in the governor’s office, on the state’s highest court, and at the prosecution and defense tables in Jeff Dahmer’s trial.
If you want to see how deep the Catholic protection network ran in Wisconsin, start at the top. In 1991, Governor Tommy Thompson wasn’t just the state’s most powerful elected official…he was also a devout Catholic in a state where the Archdiocese of Milwaukee was facing mounting scrutiny over clergy abuse. Thompson didn’t need to handpick every justice for the protection to work; the machinery was already in place. When the right cases came before the Wisconsin Supreme Court, the overlap between faith, position, and outcome was hard to miss.
Take Justice Roland B. Day. Thompson didn’t appoint him, but in 1995 Day authored the majority opinion in Pritzlaff v. Archdiocese of Milwaukee, effectively telling abuse survivors, “You’re too late, and we can’t interfere with how the Church runs its affairs.” The ruling built a First Amendment shield around the hierarchy. Soon after, Day was chairing the Madison Diocese’s sexual-abuse review board…the kind of panel the U.S. bishops’ Charter says should be made up of Catholics “in full communion with the Church.” See Page 22, Norm 5.
Two years later, Justice Patrick Crooks, another Roman Catholic, doubled down, writing in a 1997 opinion that “A bishop may determine that a wayward priest can be sufficiently reprimanded through counseling and prayer.” Translation: the shield didn’t fade; it hardened.
It’s like someone spilled communion wine all over the Wisconsin judiciary and nobody brought a towel.
The DA, the Defense, and the Diocese
But the real show was inside the courtroom in 1992 where Jeff Dahmer supposedly pleaded guilty…though oddly, no one can seem to find a signed guilty plea. It’s like the paperwork ghosted the whole trial.
Michael McCann. Catholic. District Attorney. And…surprise!…his name shows up in public records for 808 N. 24th Street, the same place where Jeff Dahmer supposedly molested Somsack Sinthasomphone in 1988.
Yes, the prosecutor’s name is tied to the alleged crime scene. That’s not a coincidence. That’s a legal faceplant in slow motion.
Then there’s Gerald Boyle, Jeff Dahmer’s defense attorney and lawyer for the Archdiocese in other cases involving…you guessed it…accused pedo priests. (Do a search for “Boyle” on that page to see what he was up to.) So, the man supposedly fighting for Jeff’s rights was also defending the very institution most invested in keeping the Church’s skeletons in the sacristy.
Meet Gregory O’Meara. The Assistant DA. Eventually left prosecution altogether and became a Jesuit priest and law professor at Marquette University. This is the part in the mob movie where the hitman ends up at seminary.
Later, O’Meara cranked out an academic curio casting Jeff Dahmer as Isaac…the kid trudging up the mountain, last to learn he’s the offering. It wasn’t subtle. In fact, it was a confession in disguise.
You don’t need a theology degree to see what he was doing: Jeff wasn’t the monster…he was the offering. A quiet, emotionally broken sacrifice handed over so the Archdiocese of Milwaukee could slip out the back door untouched.
The Distraction Worked — And That’s the Point
So what did we get?
A soft-spoken young man who supposedly ate people, kept heads in his fridge, and turned a one-bedroom efficiency apartment into a horror prop house…yet the case was never really tested in court. No preliminary hearing, no cross-examination, no parade of physical evidence. Just a confession with another man’s Social Security Number and a public too hypnotized by the gore to ask questions.
Meanwhile, the Archdiocese of Milwaukee got exactly what it needed: time, distance, distraction.
The lawsuits? Delayed.
The headlines? Hijacked.
The Archbishop? Untouched.
By the time anyone asked what was happening with Father Murphy, the deaf school, the transfers, the sealed records, the hush money…Jeff Dahmer had already eaten the country’s attention span.
That’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s anchoring. Give people a vivid enough freak show, a single monster they can picture, and they stop looking at the boring, systemic horror next door. You can paper over rape, obstruction, and decades of abuse with one sensational crime scene.
And let’s be real: this didn’t happen by accident.
The governor was Catholic.
The DA Michael McCann? Catholic, of course. Buddies with Archbishop Weakland, in fact.
Jeff’s defense attorney, Gerald Boyle? Catholic and a lawyer for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee who was representing pedo priests.
The assistant DA, Gregory O’Meara? Catholic. He became a Jesuit priest and he’s now the rector at Marquette.
William Gardner, the judge who supposedly sentenced Jeff for “molesting” Somsack Sinthasomphone at the DA’s apartment? Do you have to ask? Catholic and McCann’s buddy.
Dr. Lodl, the psychologist who “treated” Jeff? A Catholic who later sat on the Diocesan Review Board.
The two police officers -Balcerzak and Gabrish – who supposedly returned a bleeding “Konerak” Sinthasomphone to Jeff Dahmer? They helped Gerald Boyle defend Capuchin priests and brothers accused of sexual assault. Search the page for “gay spat”.
The Sinthasomphone family? They were brought to the US from Laos by the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. A close family friend was Father Peter Burns, a man on the Archdiocese’s list of restricted priests.
And the Archbishop got a glowing New Yorker profile a week before the story broke.
That’s a Catholic network and a rogue’s gallery.
And when the network felt real heat…when the walls started to close…boom. Enter Jeff Dahmer, stage left: a ready-made distraction, a meat grinder for media attention, a walking psyop tailor-made to absorb every ounce of outrage.
This was institutional choreography. It worked. The Church got cover. The system got quiet. And Milwaukee got its monster.
The choreography worked for three decades. The music just stopped.