The protestors in front of the now vacant lot at 924 North Twenty-fifth Street began to thin when most of the cameras left. The news crews went to stake out spots at General Mitchell International Airport, where famed psychic Thomas Alexander would be arriving shortly. The media had never been interested in the protestors anyway; they had been interested in the protestors’ tangential relationship to the psychic. NPR was barely interested. The protestors were asking community leaders to come out and support their efforts.
But a lot of people had forgotten about the serial killer altogether, and even more had forgotten about the young men he’d killed. It had been easy for people to forget, because most people didn’t know who those men had been. After the arrest, one man’s sister said, “They could put these boys on the front of Newsweek, Time, and everything to show that these boys were real. If it wasn’t for these boys, he wouldn’t even be existing.”
But the serial killer did exist. He persisted in his existence, and in death, he became truly famous: the Milwaukee Cannibal, they called him on episodes of shows like Truly Terrifying People.
“Now, isn’t it odd that the majority of his victims were Black or Brown boys?” one of the protesters asked an NPR reporter. “You reporters have all kinds of reasons for this. None of those reasons have anything to do with the relationship between the police and the communities where these men lived in. Nobody wants to hear that story. And that story certainly won’t be told on these tours, especially not right now.”
The group put out a statement requesting that the mayor stop the show. The mayor’s office declined to comment.
When I typed Thomas Alexander’s name into Google, his baby face shone in a strip of headshots at the top of my browser. He had wispy blond hair, pearly teeth, and the upper body of a yogi. He probably could have been a model or an actor. I stared into his eyes—they were a different color in almost every picture: ultraviolet purple, bright blue, hazel. Maybe he had a rainbow of differently colored contacts in his medicine cabinet. Beneath his photos were hundreds of links to news articles about celebrities who’d used his services to contact dead loved ones. I noticed a link to his website, which was a flashy page full of glowing testimonials from celebrities. He said he was a medium, a clairvoyant, and a medical intuitive. According to his bio he was twenty.
Thomas Alexander had garnered attention most recently for predicting the death of some B-list actor. The actor’s wife begged her husband to do a reading with Thomas Alexander. During the session, Thomas Alexander contacted the actor’s dead grandmother, who said she wished she’d been at her grandson’s wedding. The actor rubbed his scruff. He got a little misty. The psychic also mentioned that some of the actor’s ancestors wanted their progeny to take better care of their hearts. The ancestors told Thomas Alexander that high blood pressure or something was an issue. The actor threw back his head and laughed. He said something like Thanks, Doc, and Thomas Alexander laughed too, so all of his immaculate teeth shone. He looked like he still had all his baby teeth.
Two weeks later, the man died of a dissected aorta. He was playing basketball with his son when his heart literally exploded. A few months after that, the widow asked Thomas Alexander to come back and do another taped reading at their home. Thomas Alexander walked around the woman’s sprawling property and told her that her husband wanted her to date again. He wanted her to move on. He told her she was still a beautiful young woman. After this episode aired and earned a record number of viewers, the television series, despite terrible critical reviews, was renewed for a second season.
I hungrily read the skeptics’ takes on him—he taped all of his readings; he used a combination of hot-reading and cold-reading techniques to convince his clients as well as his fans that he could speak to the dead; he employed flattery. This worked, apparently, because of a psychological phenomenon known as the Barnum effect, which occurs when people believe that what they are told applies specifically to them, despite the fact that it could apply to almost anyone. This phenomenon is the reason people hungrily consume horoscopes and the reason why Thomas Alexander’s readings worked so well, especially on people who were grieving.
Meanwhile, the kid refused to do live shows. He refused the skeptics’ calls. He refused requests for interviews. He smiled his Mickey Mouse Club smile and tweeted Haters gonna hate memes on repeat. He was a twenty-year-old millionaire.
I called Peter.
“Yeah,” he said in a huff. Pete was partner at a swanky law firm in downtown Milwaukee. Sometimes I felt like most of his job was acting very busy.
“Are we sure about this?” I asked him.
He knew immediately what I was talking about. “Of course not,” he said practically. “It’s a terrible idea, but we’re doing it anyway. You talk to Ma about it?”
“Yeah . . . she had one of her fits.”
“They’re happening more often now.” This was hard for him to admit. I tried to get the conversation back on track.
“The truly terrible television award.” I read from one of the many articles about the kid. “In acknowledgment of the extraordinary ongoing deceit of the American public represented in his television program.”
“I know, I know,” he said. “You watched the video, though?”
I swallowed some bad-tasting spit. “I did,” I said.
“So you know.”
“I do,” I whispered. I realized then that I didn’t know which prospect frightened me more: the psychic’s success or his failure.
“You saw their faces?” I could hear it in his voice: that contagion of hope. I was scared to breathe for fear I might catch it, but it didn’t really matter. I’d already been infected.
“What about the money?” I asked.
“I’ll draw up a contract.”
“A contract? This kid doesn’t care about a contract.”
“I suspect he will,” Pete said. “Oh, and Dana wants to start spending a couple of hours, maybe a few days a week, after school with you. Is that something you’d be okay with?”
I was surprised. I looked around my filthy apartment. A slant of sunlight electrified the layers of dust on the baseboards.
“Sure,” I said. “I’m not very . . . entertaining.”
“She’ll bring her homework. It’s something she wants to do. So Helena and I are going with it. Besides, she seemed to think you could use some help around your place.”
I felt my face redden and was glad Pete couldn’t see it.
“Help?” I asked. “With what, exactly?”
“I don’t know. She said it’s messy there, I guess. So it’s okay?” He had sensed my defensiveness and become eager to end the conversation.
“Sure,” I said. “She’s always welcome.”
Pete and Helena felt that, given the incident at the quarry when I’d had to pick Dana up in the middle of the night, and a few others which I never learned about, she was getting into too much trouble. They hoped that spending more time with me would keep her out of this trouble. I didn’t particularly enjoy the idea of being some kind of community service project, but I also felt my heart hiccup pleasantly at the idea of having her around more. She said she wanted to organize my study. I wasn’t thrilled with that idea either, but I didn’t think she could do any harm. The only rule was that she was not allowed to throw anything away. I stressed this strongly and received a look I was very familiar with—her face, even her lips, were full of pity. Beyond that, I didn’t mind how she “organized” the files.
Sometimes we worked side by side in the study. I had begun, at that point, another round of revisions to my case against Frank. It turned out Dana’s reorganization of the files was actually helpful in these efforts. A few times I caught her trying to read the documents I had open on my computer, but she usually averted her gaze when I noticed. And a few weeks in, I noticed that she had begun to take her own notes in a composition book. I was tempted, a few times, to read the notebook while she was in the bathroom, but I just didn’t have the heart to go through with it. Once she looked up from her work and said to me, “Have you ever seen the show Hoarders?”
I shook my head. “I don’t watch much TV anymore,” I told her.
“I think you’re a hoarder,” she said. She gestured at the boxes and the stacks of library books and the copies of the Journal and the Wisconsin Light I’d kept over the years. Things that seemed important to have and to keep, though for what reason, I couldn’t definitively say.
I shrugged at her. She was maybe right. “So?” I asked her.
“Well, it’s like a disease, and stuff,” she said. This time I laughed and she shrugged. “Like, why do you have all this stuff about Dahmer in here?”
“They broke the case that summer . . . the summer Dee disappeared,” I told her.
“I know,” she said. “But why did you keep it all?”
“I’m just saying it was all mixed in.”
Dana thought on this. “Still,” she said quietly. “It’s kind of creepy.” She waved an advertisement I’d torn from a magazine: Buy your copy of the exclusive confessions copied DIRECTLY from the files of the Milwaukee Police Department. For the low price of ONLY $13.95, True Police Case magazine readers can learn how he lured, drugged, killed, had sex, and dismembered bodies. Gerald Boyle, the Milwaukee Cannibal’s lawyer, says his client’s confession is “the longest confession in the history of America.”
These are the names of every man the serial killer confessed to murdering between 1978 and 1991: Steven Hicks, eighteen; Steven Tuomi, twenty-five; James Doxtator, fourteen; Richard Guerrero, twenty-two; Anthony Sears, twenty-four; Raymond Smith, thirty-two; Edward Smith, twenty-seven; Ernest Miller, twenty-two; David Thomas, twenty-two; Curtis Straughter, seventeen; Errol Lindsey, nineteen; Anthony Hughes, thirty-one; Konerak Sinthasomphone, fourteen; Matt Turner, twenty; Jeremiah Weinberger, twenty-three; Oliver Lacy, twenty-four; Joseph Bradehoft, twenty-five.
Edward W. Smith was nicknamed “the Sheik.” Steven Hicks grew up in Coventry, Ohio. Ernest Miller lived in Chicago and attended the Golden Rule Church of God and Christ; he was a talented dance student. Raymond Smith went by the name Ricky Beeks. Curtis Straughter called himself Demetra and belonged to Gay Youth Milwaukee. Joseph Bradehoft was married and had three children. Errol Lindsey sang in the Greater Spring Hill Missionary Baptist Church choir. Anthony Hughes was deaf-mute and could read lips. Oliver Lacy had a two-year-old son and a fiancée named Rose; his family called him “Birdie.” James Doxtator’s mother called him Jamie. He liked to play pool and ride his bike. Anthony Sears was an aspiring model who also managed a restaurant. David Thomas was a father. Matt Turner was born in Chicago; he lip-synched at a bar under the name Donald Montrell. Jeremiah Weinberger worked as a customer service rep at a cinema. Steven Tuomi worked at a restaurant in Milwaukee. Richard Guerrero was the youngest of six children. He worked at a pizzeria and often babysat his nieces. Konerak Sinthasomphone was the youngest of eight children and enjoyed swimming, soccer, and drawing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.