Photo: Richard Brodzeller/USA TODAY NETWORK/Imagn
But two decades earlier, when she placed multiple phone calls to police regarding suspicious activity near her home that could have led to Dahmer’s capture, her concerns went unheeded.
According to multiple accounts of her involvement, including interviews she gave to local reporters after the serial killer was caught as well as her obituary in theMilwaukee Journal Sentinel, Cleveland called police repeatedly, first shortly after her daughter, Sandra Smith, and niece, Nicole Childress had also alerted authorities to no avail.
According to theChicago Tribune, Childress, then 17, called 911 in the early morning hours of May 27, 1991 to alert them of a naked, dazed and bleeding 14-year-old boy, later identified as Konerak Sinthasomphone, wandering the streets near their home.
“I’m on 25th and State,” Childress can be heard saying on a police tape. “And there’s this young man, he is buck-naked and he has been beaten up. He is very bruised up. He can’t stand. He has no clothes on. He is really hurt. . . .”
After a squad car and an ambulance were dispatched, police reported that “the intoxicated Asian naked male was returned to his sober boyfriend [Dahmer].”
According to the newspaper, Milwaukee police did not perform a background check on Dahmer, which would have revealed he was on probation for sexually assaulting Sinthasomphone’s 16-year-old brother in 1988.
When Cleveland heard from her niece and daughter that police had dismissed their initial report, she began calling authorities herself.
A few days later, she saw Konerak’s photo in the newspaper regarding his disappearance, and called police again, but no one returned her call, according to her obituary. Another phone call produced the same result. She even tried to alert the FBI but her calls went nowhere.
By the time Dahmer was later caught two months later, on July 22, he had killed Konerak and four other men.
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The Rev.Jesse Jacksoneven visited Cleveland after Dahmer was caught, saying of his frustration at the time: “Police chose the word of a killer over an innocent woman.”
In aninterviewwith a local news station after Dahmer’s capture, a reporter asked her if she had started to doubt herself when authorities ignored her persistent phone calls: “I must admit I did,” she said.
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And when asked if the police let Konerak down, she continued to speak out.
“Yes they did, he was definitely let down,” she said. “He was let down as low as he could get, and that was to his grave. You can’t get much lower than that.”
Cleveland died at age 56 in 2011, after suffering from heart disease and high blood pressure, the Medical Examiner said, per her obituary.
She was found dead in her apartment after neighbors called police for a wellness check.
source: people.com
