Portage community remembers real life moments from new Jeffrey Dahmer Netflix series

PORTAGE, Wis. — A new series on Netflix, “The Jeffrey Dahmer Story,” takes viewers into the life of Milwaukee’s infamous cannibal killer, and concludes with his death in prison.

But Sheril Lannoye won’t be among those tuning in.

She remembers that day all too well. She was working at the Portage Public Library the day Dahmer was killed.

News 3 Now Reporter Kathryn Merck with Sheril Lannoye

“We got a call from CNN,” Lannoye recalled. “They said ‘Do you have a layout of the prison?’ We thought, ‘Something is going on at the prison, and they can’t tell us.'”

At the time of his death, Dahmer was serving nearly one thousand years in the Columbia Correctional Institution for his cannibalistic murders. On November 28, 1994, a fellow inmate beat him to death within the Portage prison’s walls.

“You just don’t forget this stuff,” Lannoye said. She said she also worked at the hospital where Dahmer had been taken to after he was beaten. 

As the new TV series introduces more and more people to the town, Lannoye says it shows moments she doesn’t like to relive.

“I won’t be watching that show,” said Lannoye. “It was bad enough to live through it.”

Lannoye explained how many archived articles surrounding the prison show the city’s issues with it even being there in the first place.

“There are all these articles about why we shouldn’t have had the prison here,” Lannoye said. “We didn’t want to be known as ‘Portage, the prison city.'”

According to Netflix, people have streamed nearly 300 million hours’ worth of “The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” in its second week online.