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Serial killers fascinate the public, but behind every infamous case lies a network of law enforcement officers, journalists and communities grappling with the horror. True crime stories like those of Ted Bundy, Son of Sam and Jeffrey Dahmer continue to captivate audiences.
In this episode of the Policing Matters podcast, host Jim Dudley speaks with Anne E. Schwartz, the journalist who first reported on the Jeffrey Dahmer case, to recount her experiences during the investigation. Having covered night shifts on the crime beat, Schwartz was the first on the scene and had unparalleled access to the detectives and officers who uncovered Dahmer’s atrocities. In this conversation, she offers insight into the challenges of reporting such a case, the psychological toll on law enforcement, and why, decades later, the public remains fascinated by true crime. Schwartz also addresses the portrayal of Dahmer in the media, including the controversial Netflix series, and offers a candid perspective on the real events behind the dramatization.
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About our guest
With more than 35 years of experience, Anne E. Schwartz is an award-winning print and broadcast journalist, author and internationally recognized trainer and advisor on strategic communication and public relations practices for law enforcement, prosecutors, tribal police, fire/EMS and others in criminal justice and public safety.
In 1991, as a crime reporter for the former “Milwaukee Journal” newspaper, she broke the story of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer and wrote the book, “The Man Who Could Not Kill Enough: The Story of Milwaukee’s Jeffrey Dahmer.” Anne and the reporting team were nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. An updated edition of the book was released in 2021 as “Monster: The True Story of the Jeffrey Dahmer Murders” with a new preface and final chapter, available for the first time in both audio and digital editions. Anne is featured in dozens of documentaries on the Dahmer case, on global TV networks and streaming services.
She has deployed to Albania, Armenia, North Macedonia and the Republic of Maldives to provide training on best practices in criminal justice communications strategies. Anne has conducted training seminars for prosecutors and judges from Bosnia, Lebanon and Uzbekistan through the ABA Rule of Law Initiative. She is a communications/media trainer for the Wisconsin Department of Justice, and she is an Adjunct Professor in strategic communications at the National Criminal Justice Training Center at Fox Valley Technical College.
She co-authored, “Strategic Approaches to Improve Communications Initiative: A White Paper for Law Enforcement Executives” and “Strategic Communication: A Toolkit for Police Executives” for the U.S. DOJ Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS). She subsequently provided training to police executives nationwide and in Canada on the strategies outlined in the publications.
Memorable quotes from this episode
- “I was the only reporter on the scene for probably about an hour. They hadn’t even put up the crime scene tape yet.”
- “Dahmer didn’t look like a monster — serial killers look like everybody else. That’s why they go so long without getting caught.”
- “I have to remember that these people were real victims. They have real families that are still out there, and this is a horrifying story for people to hear about. I always have to remember that.”
Key takeaways from this episode
- Serial killers often evade suspicion because they appear “normal.” Schwartz emphasizes that serial killers like Dahmer don’t fit the Hollywood stereotype of monsters, which allows them to operate unnoticed.
- The psychological toll on law enforcement is immense and often underreported. Officers involved in the Dahmer investigation suffered from long-lasting trauma, which wasn’t properly acknowledged or treated at the time.
- Dahmer manipulated both his victims and the police. Schwartz explains how Dahmer’s calm demeanor and manipulation skills allowed him to avoid detection during critical moments.
- The media portrayal of true crime stories can distort reality. Schwartz critiques the inaccuracies in the Netflix series about Dahmer, reminding us that films and shows often take liberties with the facts.
- True crime’s popularity reflects the public’s need for control. According to Schwartz, the public’s fascination with true crime stems from a desire to understand and prevent these horrors, even though the reality is far more complex than what is portrayed on screen.
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Episode transcript
Jim Dudley: Hey, welcome back, and I hope you’re catching us on YouTube as well.
The likelihood of coming across a mass murderer is not something we’d expect during a normal course of duty. Would we recognize it? The encounter may not be what we see in the movies or read about in books. In truth, the encounter may be placing a ticket on the windshield of a parked vehicle while the murderer or killer is at work. Maybe it’s a traffic stop along a highway, or perhaps it’s pulling over the car of a bomber who just left the scene of the crime. Or maybe it’s during a response to a particular call for service that may seem like a domestic disturbance.
Well, all of those things, of course, happened. They’re real. We could talk about Son of Sam, we could talk about the Unabomber, or McVeigh and the bombing in Oklahoma. And today, we’re going to talk about Jeffrey Dahmer — that last domestic disturbance call. Since leaving journalism, she has worked in a variety of communication roles with law enforcement, including the Milwaukee Police Department and the Wisconsin Department of Justice. She’s served on too many committees, boards, and contributed to articles and publications for law enforcement for us to talk about right now. So, you can check out her full bio on our show notes page.
I’ve got a great guest here. Welcome to Policing Matters, Anne E. Schwartz.
Anne E. Schwartz: Thank you, Jim. I’m so glad to be here with you, and any chance we have to talk about good police work and bringing down a serial killer, I’m glad to be part of that.
Jim Dudley: Yeah, so you wrote the book in 1991, “The Man Who Could Not Kill Enough,” and the 2021 update, “Monster: The True Story of the Jeffrey Dahmer Murders.” Please start from the beginning. I’m guessing that it was a slow news day and you get this call that will pretty much change your life?
Anne E. Schwartz: As cops know — and journalists — you never make the comment out loud, “It’s a slow day,” because that’s when something happens. I was a young police reporter, covering night cops, which is the unenviable shift of 4 to midnight, Friday, Saturday, and Sundays. So, you pretty much say, “I’m not going to have a life, I’m just going to do this.” But this was actually during the week. I got a call from one of my sources saying, “Anne, you’ve got to get out here to 25th and Kilbourn. There’s a guy, it looks like he’s been saving body parts in his apartment.” You know, we just — we weren’t really sure what we were looking at here, and that was it: “Got to get out here.”
So, I’m used to you guys, Jim. I know that sometimes people like to have a little fun with you. Someone calls you and tells you something that’s not true. But the tenor of this officer’s voice was such that I thought, “You know what, I’m going to go. I’m going to just go see what happens.” So, I went out to 25th and Kilbourn and was the first reporter on the scene. I was the only reporter on the scene for probably about an hour. They were still — the crime scene tape wasn’t up yet. Dahmer had already been removed from the scene and was gone. What I found were the neighbors — they evacuated the building because this was going to be a hazardous materials incident. It was a hazmat response because of all the chemicals that Dahmer had kept in that apartment. The police didn’t know what else to do.
I’m talking to the neighbors, and the neighbors are unlike anything you usually see at a crime scene. People are always talking, saying, “Hey, talk to me!” — and people talk. But it was so quiet. It was the eeriest quiet I have ever heard. For as many people standing outside, nobody was speaking. One woman, Pamela Bass, who turned out to be Jeffrey Dahmer’s across-the-hall neighbor, said to me, “They’re saying they found body parts in that apartment — that people might have been killed in there.” I talked to her for just a little bit, then I walked into the apartment building.
Remember, it’s early. But also remember, when I’m walking up to that apartment, the police aren’t behaving like it’s a normal crime scene — because it’s not. It’s something most of these veteran officers have never seen before. So, I’m standing at the doorway of the apartment. All the detectives were inside. There were two officers and a couple of detectives. It was still very early. They had found Polaroids that Jeffrey Dahmer had taken of his victims in various stages of dismemberment in a dresser drawer. Nobody was looking to say, “Hey, what’s Anne E. Schwartz doing standing there?” I mean, nobody had any idea I was there. I didn’t walk into the apartment, but I was at the threshold. I looked around a little bit just to see what it looked like. But I wasn’t standing there thinking, “Oh my gosh, this is history. This is a serial killer.” And the police weren’t either — they were just trying to grasp what they were looking at.
That really is the story of Jeffrey Dahmer. It’s all about people saying, “No, it couldn’t be,” or “What really is this?” That was the beginning of my telling the story and following the Jeffrey Dahmer case. Even as we sit here, you know, 32 years later, 33 years later — I keep forgetting how long it is — the second book, “Monster,” came out in 2021, which was the 30-year anniversary of the case. One of the things I wanted to do was go back in time and re-interview some of those police officers who were there that night, some of those detectives, and say, “Thirty years later, what does life look like? Do you ever think about it? Do you ever think of the case?”
The police ended up at that apartment that night because the man who would have been Dahmer’s 18th victim escaped — Tracy Edwards. He’s running down the street with a handcuff on. He escaped Dahmer’s apartment because, he said, “It was just getting very freaky.” He’s running down the street and sees two police officers — Bob Rauth and Ralph Mueller. Ralph Mueller, we just lost, I think, about a year and a half, two years ago. His wife, by the way, told me in the second book, “He was never the same. He suffered from horrible trauma, night tremors, PTSD.” But 1991, Jim — you remember policing in 1991 — suck it up, get back out there. He suffered till the day he died.
But he and his partner that night in 1991 stopped and talked to Tracy Edwards. They were joking, “Hey, which one of us did you escape from?” because Edwards was running with just one handcuff. Tracy Edwards starts telling them this fantastical story, but all he really wants is to get out of the handcuffs. He doesn’t really want to report this because he just went back to a guy’s apartment to have sex with him for money. It’s not like he wants to tell the police, “Hey, and it got weird.” He just wants to get out of there. But the more he talked to these officers, they were like, “Well, let’s just see what’s going on here.” Thank God for those two officers.
They walked back to Dahmer’s apartment with Tracy Edwards. They knocked on the door. Dahmer looks out and sees two officers outside his door. Dahmer, remember, has a history of fooling the police. He’s a master manipulator. And you and I, I’m sure, will talk about how he fooled the police when one of his victims was in his clutches and he was able to tell the police a story that they believed. But on this night, Dahmer sees the officers, and then he sees Tracy Edwards in the back when he opens up the door. Dahmer tries to fight, and then finally, like many serial killers do, he just gives in. He realizes it’s over. He realizes he’s caught.
From that night on, it’s been 33 years of telling that story. It’s Milwaukee, Wisconsin — people don’t — have you ever heard, in your life in policing, people say, “Oh, that doesn’t happen here. That kind of thing can’t happen here”? That’s exactly what Milwaukee felt that night.
Jim Dudley: Right, so when you’re talking to this group of neighbors and they’re all saying, “Oh, he’s such a nice guy, a quiet neighbor,” all these things we’ve always heard after these kinds of incidents, when did it start to sink in to you that this is more than that one-time murder — that you realize the enormity of the situation?
Anne E. Schwartz: One of my sources told me that there was a blue barrel inside the apartment that appeared to contain body parts. That’s not a normal homicide. They were also finding skulls in his apartment. Not just one — not a body — but skulls. Dahmer had painted some of the skulls because he always thought it was a possibility that somebody might come in or see that he was saving skulls as trophies. So, he painted a couple of them gray so they would look like plastic models, and he could say, “Oh, those aren’t real.” But they were real people.
I’m looking up on my office wall, and I have the headline up there that says, “Body Parts Litter Apartment.” That was the very first headline, the very first news Milwaukee had a serial killer.
Jim Dudley: So, you describe getting there, talking to the people outside, getting to the threshold, and seeing inside the apartment. What was your access like? You had made relationships with local PD before that. What kind of access did you get to this story?
Anne E. Schwartz: I had a lot of access to the story because do you know a cop that doesn’t like to tell a story, Jim? They love to tell a story. And this was so incredible, so unbelievable. And I’m proud of the fact that they always spoke to me. I did a lot of things as a cub reporter that reporters just don’t do anymore. I went on ride-alongs on my own time. When I was reporting for the paper on that cop shift, I had to sit in a room and listen to scanners, then go out to anything that sounded interesting. I had built up trust. I had done many stories before the Jeffrey Dahmer case where people had given me information and they weren’t burned. That world — I don’t know if it exists anymore. Maybe there are reporters that people talk to. When I counsel law enforcement about how to speak to the media, I say, “Don’t.” Then I lay out a set of talking points and say, “Be very careful.”
The officers who talked to me did this at great peril to their own jobs because there was an investigation into who gave me all the information that I had in this case. So, I’m talking to the neighbors when I first arrived, and I have to believe those were the last real, true interviews that those people gave because the versions of this story that have come out since have changed as this case went global. That’s when the police started using the phrase “serial killer.” So, I know that we’re getting into some uncharted territory here.
Jim Dudley: Yeah, for sure. And you talk about what happened next over the unveiling over time. You just gave two really good inside views. One is that cops like to talk, and we’ve talked about it on this show — how we have a sense of humor, sometimes a morbid sense of humor at these kinds of scenes — and that’s to deal with the trauma, the vicarious trauma, and the trauma that cops see. As a reporter, you’re witnessing vicarious trauma as well. Did you ever commiserate with cops? Did you ever talk about the impact of this? You mentioned the one officer who had PTSD for years — till the day he passed — due to this one particular incident. How about you?
Anne E. Schwartz: Perhaps I have a cold heart, Jim, we just don’t know. But I’m 63 now, and I’ve been — you know, I started as a reporter when I was in my 20s. So, it’s a lot of years of seeing a lot of scenes and seeing a lot of cops. I’ll tell you what’s different — you talked about how we all kind of have that very dark, weird sense of humor. I’ve seen that at every crime scene except this one. This one, and then anything involving a child. I’ve never seen a time when there wasn’t like a little jocularity, a little bit of laughter among the officers. I know that the detectives and police officers that responded to this incident were as gobsmacked as I was and as the public was to be in the middle of that.
My poor, dear departed father, Victor Schwarz, was not happy that this was the thing that was going to identify me really for my entire career. I am forever, if you Google my name, almost always associated with Jeffrey Dahmer. I’m not complaining, but it certainly is something I didn’t imagine. I just kind of wish it was Harry Potter instead, but you know, that boat sailed too.
I think that what happens is I have told the Dahmer story for 33 years, and I start to forget that when you say things like, “Well, you know, he had a blue barrel,” or “There were body parts in it,” I have to remember that these people were real victims. They have real families that are still out there, and this is a horrifying story for people to hear about. I always have to remember that.
Jim Dudley: Yeah, for sure. I know we forget that sometimes. Hey, listen, I want to take a quick break. I want to know about your feelings on the film portrayals and actually the general sense of the public’s fascination with true crime, especially the more grisly, the better. But first, I’d like to take a moment to thank our sponsor.
And we’re back. I’m speaking with Anne E. Schwartz, author of “The Man Who Could Not Kill Enough” and “Monster: The True Story of the Jeffrey Dahmer Murders.” Anne, first of all, I want to say that if we Google your name, a lot comes up besides Jeffrey Dahmer. You’ve contributed so much to law enforcement, not only in Wisconsin but for the Department of Justice and on various boards, all in the interest of law enforcement. I want to thank you for that.
Anne E. Schwartz: Oh, right back at you, my friend. Your service is appreciated as well. I’m glad to have been somebody who was trusted by the police to tell their stories, and I continue to try to help them tell their stories. Life after May of 2020 has not gotten better for the police. There is more need than ever for the police to come out, tell their stories, and talk about what’s going on.
Back in our day — now we sound like we’re 100 — it was, “We don’t have anything to tell you yet. When we do, we’ll let you know.” And then, you’d put out a little news release and everybody would pretty much parrot whatever was in that release. May 2020, George Floyd — there’s no grace anymore. There’s more demand than ever to tell the story. That is a big part of why I talk about the Dahmer case.
You mentioned the portrayals in movies and television. There was a Netflix piece I contributed to. I always contribute to the documentaries. I’m featured in a documentary on Netflix right now, “Conversations with a Killer: The Story of Jeffrey Dahmer.” But I didn’t participate in the Netflix series that Ryan Murphy did. There’s a difference between those two things. One of them is a documentary — here’s what happened, here are the facts. The other is a movie. It’s a movie, and you can’t be mad. I was so angry when I watched it the first time because I said, “There are things in here that aren’t even true!” They aren’t even true.
Dahmer didn’t have a neighbor in his building who called the police and said, “It smells in here.” Glenda Cleveland, the woman who eventually called the police when she saw Konerak Sinthasomphone — the young boy who was running up the alley — she didn’t live in his building. They had never even been in the same place together. So, there’s a lot of liberties taken in that movie. It’s not a positive portrayal of the police. But I’ve spent a lot of time talking about this case, especially the incident where Jeffrey Dahmer, in May of 1991, was confronted by police when Konerak Sinthasomphone, the 14-year-old boy who didn’t look like a 14-year-old boy — people forget that part. Well, I shouldn’t say people forget that part, not a lot of people have told that part of the story.
It’s unrealistic to me for people to think that someone back in the late ’80s, early ’90s, would say, “Aha! Serial killer.” Who in the world would? Konerak was to be Jeffrey Dahmer’s next victim. There were four more people who were killed after Konerak. He was going to be one of Dahmer’s victims. What happens with serial killers is toward the end of their spree, they get sloppy, they get messy. Between May and July, Dahmer killed five more people. The bodies were quite literally stacking up in his apartment. But he was getting sloppy.
He didn’t put enough drugs in Konerak’s drink to knock him out completely. Konerak passed out, and Dahmer left to go get more beer. Dahmer was also an alcoholic. While he was out getting beer, Konerak woke up and ran out of the apartment. Dahmer had done something else before Konerak had gotten out of that apartment — he had drilled a hole in the boy’s skull and was trying to create some sort of zombie-like figure. I mean, we’re in the mind of a really, really screwed-up guy.
Konerak is still able to move, and he runs out of the apartment. He’s running up the alley, and a lady in the apartment building across the alley sees a naked guy running up the alley and thinks the police should come and check this out, which they did. Dahmer is off getting beer. The police show up at the scene, and there’s a med unit already there. Konerak is sitting on the back of the med unit, wrapped in one of those big blankets that look like aluminum foil. He’s not a great English speaker, but remember, he’s also got a hole drilled in his head and he’s drugged. So, he’s not able to communicate with the officers.
Jeffrey Dahmer walks up with his six-pack of beer, calm as can be. He’s talking to two police officers who, to this day, wish they would have had a crystal ball and been able to say, “Gosh, this guy is a serial killer.” But here’s the thing about serial killers, Jim — they look like everybody else. It’s why they go so long without getting caught.
Dahmer is talking to the officers, and he says, “That’s my boyfriend, Jim.” He continues, “We’re in a relationship. Jim got a little drunk and ran out of the house. I’ll just take him back with me.” The officers said, “Okay,” but you know, we’re not going to stop there. And Konerak does not have a reaction when Dahmer shows up — no sign of, “No, no, don’t send me with that guy.” So, they go back up to Dahmer’s apartment.
That’s why it’s important for me to mention what it looked like when I stuck my head in the apartment — it looked like a single guy’s apartment, not a torture chamber. The officers walk into the apartment with Dahmer and Konerak. And Konerak sits down on the couch. His clothes are kind of folded neatly in the corner of the couch. Also, there are Polaroids already on the coffee table that depict very sexualized poses of Konerak, taken by Dahmer. So, the officers didn’t have probable cause to say, “We’d like to see the rest of the apartment,” because if they had seen the rest, they would have found Tony Hughes’ body laying on the bed in the next room.
But again, what are we expecting from our officers in 1991? I know a lot of people don’t like that I defend the police in this case. I really do, because I don’t know what more they could have done that night. They left, and Dahmer killed Konerak immediately after they left. He went on to kill four more people. But the idea that he somehow “slipped through the system” — I don’t give it that cavalier characterization.
There are always lessons when we go back and look at these cases. You know what I make sure the law enforcement I work with does? First thing, whenever they catch a serial killer or someone for a grisly homicide, I say, “Go back and find every call for service you ever had at that guy’s house or in that neighborhood. Let’s look at any court cases.” But that information wasn’t accessible to the officers on the street at the time.
It’s an unrealistic expectation that two street cops in 1991 Milwaukee would have said, “Something’s wrong here,” because they were in a challenged neighborhood. These were apartment buildings where every building you walk into has some kind of nasty smell going on, whether it’s a mix of odors. In this case, it was chemical. And this is where I always tell people to put their sandwiches down — because when you walk into a house or room where someone is deceased, you know that smell. But this wasn’t the smell. This was chemical, because Dahmer was using so many chemicals to try to deal with the bodies. The bodies were literally piling up.
Yes, his apartment stunk but let me take you on the grand tour of other apartments where police officers end up doing investigations and let’s see what those smell like in the hallways where people use them as walkways and alternatively as urinals, where they you know where garbage is known to stack up. So that’s the part of this story that is so highly publicized. I’m watching one of the people in the Netflix series portraying a character that really did not exist — Glenda Cleveland, she existed but not in the way that she did in the movie — win an Emmy Award. I just kind of sit there and it’s like well again it’s a movie.
Jim Dudley: Yeah, sometimes they make know that they make these conglomerate characters based on four or five that they just don’t have time for so they make them one person. So, 30 years later, if a similar call were made — a guy running down the alleyway naked after escaping from someone’s house — how do you see that situation playing out? Would things be different now?
Anne E. Schwartz: There were so many lessons learned from the Dahmer case. Look where we are now with DNA technology and profiling. Back then, we had some of the best profilers from Quantico come to Milwaukee to help. But remember, Jeffrey Dahmer was operating right in the city. He wasn’t like the Gilgo Beach killer, where we knew someone was operating. We didn’t know Dahmer was operating. He was so clever. When he went to the gay bars in Milwaukee, he would have conversations with men about their families. If they told him they were close with their families, he wouldn’t choose them as victims. He picked people who he thought wouldn’t be missed. And in many cases, those victims weren’t missed by their families. There was no fear gripping the city of Milwaukee because people didn’t know he was out there.
Jim Dudley: Yeah, and you know, crime statistics back then were different. We were dealing with the crack epidemic, all-time highs in robberies, and the like. So, I get what you’re saying in that context. But what about the public’s fascination with true crime now? It seems like people can’t get enough of true crime podcasts and shows. What do you think is behind that?
Anne E. Schwartz: So “The Man Who Could Not Kill Enough” was my first book. It’s now out of print, so the only book you can get is “Monster.” What’s so interesting about it is, I don’t know that I got a McDonald’s Happy Meal with the royalties from the first book. It came out in 1992, in June, and it was okay. One of the reasons I was given for reissuing this book in an updated format was the idea that people are fascinated now with true crime.
There was always this thing where, when I talked to people in the ’90s, they’d say, “Oh my God, that was disgusting, that was awful — tell me more.” And that still happens. But the true crime fascination is something I don’t fully understand because I don’t consume true crime as a genre outside of the book that I wrote or the documentaries I participate in. I’m usually watching the documentaries just to see, you know, if I look fat or something.
It’s just not something I’m interested in. However, look at where we’ve come in the portrayals of a lot of these crimes. There was actually a movie done — interestingly enough, it was Jeremy Renner’s very first movie. He played Dahmer in a really bad B-movie, based on the first book, and it was on TV and it was awful. People hated it. You know, all the usual things that go with a B-movie. But we’re in a different place now. We have things on cable like “Dexter,” and he’s a folk hero. I think people want to know why.
People love what is the most popular genre on television right now — police procedurals — because they want to see behind the curtain. They want to know. I always loved talking to retired guys like you, Jim, because you always say, “Ah, it’s not that interesting. I don’t have any stories.” You don’t realize how fascinating that job is, and people want to see behind that curtain. They want to see how you caught the guy, what mistakes the guy made. That’s what people love. And I think true crime, in some way, is people saying, “I’m going to make sure nobody I know is doing anything like this,” or “I don’t want to be a victim.”
I think people are just fascinated by these fantastical stories, and as you retell them for television or movies, the next one has to be more fantastical than the last.
Jim Dudley: Well, this one’s hard to beat.
Anne E. Schwartz: That it is. And you know, people in Milwaukee say the same thing that people all over the country who are listening to this say: “That could never happen here. Oh, that would never happen here.” Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the heart of the Rust Belt in 1991—this guy was killing since 1978. His first murder was when he was 18 years old, in Ohio, and then he moved here. But how are we supposed to know that somebody like this is operating in our neighborhood? We didn’t know.
I’m grateful that whenever people want to talk about the case, because if it means that one more person understands and gets the truth, I’m all for that. I also use it as an opportunity to say police officers did yeoman’s work in this. They weren’t searching for a serial killer — they had their serial killer. The hardest part of this case was identifying all of the bodies and the remains in that apartment and matching them up to the families.
You know, they didn’t have a whiteboard. They didn’t have anything like that. What they had was a room they called the war room, and there was a blank wall. They had these big white pieces of paper — 17 of them — each representing one of the 17 victims. The reason they knew there were 17 is because Jeffrey Dahmer confessed to it. So, they got “Gray’s Anatomy” — the anatomical figures — and made photocopies, 17 of them. Then, as they found body parts, they circled the different parts on each paper. It was crude, but it was early. Who else do you call and say, “Hey, what was your serial killer investigation like?” There wasn’t exactly a lot of information sharing.
The FBI says there are as many as 50 serial killers operating at one time in this country. I think more and more law enforcement, more and more communities, are going to find people like Rex Heuermann, or whoever they find next.
Jim Dudley: So, 33 years ago, cub reporter Anne E. Schwartz goes out on this call of a murder — and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The next month, the next two months, three months, through the trial — that’s a lot of trauma to carry with you. What’s your relationship been like with law enforcement since? I know the answer because I’ve seen your bio and all the great work you’ve done since. How do you keep your head in it? How do you keep your nose in the law enforcement genre?
Anne E. Schwartz: Because my beginnings were as a journalist, and I think there’s nothing more important than to tell the story. And if I can help law enforcement, which I do — I’m with the law firm of Cielo, Nichols, and Hall. I started a division for that law firm, where we represent the public sector: municipalities, police departments, sheriff’s departments, firefighters — anyone who is in that very public space, who has to talk about something that happened, because everyone is litigious, right?
That’s how I look at it. I’m kind of a risk manager. I’m a risk management tool when I come in after a police shooting or an officer-involved shooting and say, “Okay, what do we know? What can we say? What can we show?” You don’t have to look further than Kenosha, Wisconsin, if you want to see where they could have used somebody helping them in that way to come out and say, “Here’s what actually happened with that shooting.”
We’re seeing more and more video being released earlier. We didn’t have that before. But we’re seeing law enforcement push video out there more often now. I help them figure out what that looks like. How can we frame your message so that we’re telling your story and mitigating the amount of misinformation that’s flying around?
Yeah, I can’t get away from you guys. I just love working with law enforcement. I always have. I’ve worked with some amazing police chiefs, and now I work with prosecutors who are coming under fire more and more. People are asking, “Why is that guy out? What’s that guy doing out?” Sometimes the prosecutors don’t like it, but they have to say, “Here’s why this guy’s out.” You saw that with the Waukesha Christmas parade case, where Darrell Brooks drove his car through a Christmas parade, killing six people in Waukesha, Wisconsin — another small suburb where people said, “This doesn’t happen here.” Now, we’re seeing barriers that look like something out of Kabul when we have a Christmas parade because people don’t want anyone to drive through and run over people.
Law enforcement is changing. I want to help them figure out how to still do the job amid that changing atmosphere. That’s what keeps me going.
Jim Dudley: Nice. Well, we appreciate it. Thanks so much for being on the show. Thanks for what you do, Anne E. Schwartz, author of “The Man Who Could Not Kill Enough” and “Monster: The Story of the Jeffrey Dahmer Murders.” Thanks for taking time with us today.
Well, listeners, thanks for listening. Let me know what you think about today’s show. Drop me a line at policingmatters@police1.com. What do you do when your agency gets a case like this? She just talked about the mood going from excitement to flat and silent. Considering the officers and the people on the periphery, what are the long-lasting effects it has on them. The public loves to hear about these cases. I don’t know if they’d be that excited if they were actually on the scene. Tell me what you think. Drop me a line.
All right, take care! Thanks for listening.
