Note: Jeffrey Dahmer was the ‘guy with the camera’.
I lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin roughly from 1987 to early 1991. Being a bartender, I typically worked nights, so my off time was during the day which worked out well because my boyfriend at the time and I were both athletic and had active outdoor lifestyles that included biking and swimming. If you know Milwaukee at all, you know that it has a great waterfront (Lake Michigan). To give you a bit of a description of Bradford Beach, the primary place for swimming, looking east from Lincoln Memorial Drive, you have the horizon, the water, a sandy beach, a snack bar with an open sheltered area, the sidewalk which, if my memory serves me, had a railing delineating the beach and the sidewalk, and the road.
Just as if you are a regular anywhere, over time you naturally recognize other regulars. Well, in Milwaukee during those years, I was a regular at the Bradford Beach. Today, people with cameras are everywhere but back then, if someone referred to “the guy with the camera”, I would undoubtably know who they were talking about…because he too was a regular and the only person I remember with a camera. He always stood in the same place on the sidewalk next to the railing. It wasn’t until after he was apprehended that I realized, the ‘guy with the camera’ was Jeffrey Dahmer.
I will never forget one day in particular; I had been prescribed a course of tetracycline antibiotics. One of the recommendations while on tetracycline is to stay out of direct sunlight so, even though I went down to the lakefront where I would normally be in the water and on the beach, I hung out on the steps in the shade underneath the snack bar shelter. As I was sitting there facing the water, off to the right just behind me was the ‘guy with the camera’ aiming his camera to the left in front of me. I watched him for a short time, trying to figure out just what he was taking pictures of. If you were watching me in that moment, you’d see me looking back and forth as if I were watching a tennis match. I initially thought he was taking snapshots of two women sunbathing on the beach. (Hey, a tall, relatively attractive male taking pictures of half-naked women on a beach makes a lot more sense than, as my brother puts it, someone “scoping out his next meal”.) However, based on the angle I could tell that he wasn’t aiming at the sun-bathing women, it was the two Polynesian looking guys walking along the shoreline that he was targeting. I didn’t think much of it and went on with my life. I don’t know exactly when this happened, but it was probably about a year later, after I had moved to Asheville, NC, that I saw on the news that Jeffrey Dahmer had been apprehended. It was an OMG moment, “THAT’S THE GUY WITH CAMERA!”.
Posted by Margaret Ryan
Bradford Beach camera Jeffrey Dahmer Milwaukee BLOG WHAT THE...?
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