What happened to the real Glenda Cleveland in ‘Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story’?

There are very few heroines in the Netflix series ‘Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story‘, one of the best true crime documentaries of recent years, but without a doubt Glenda Cleveland is one of them.

Glenda became a fighter key to putting Jeffrey Dahmer behind bars when the police ignored his multiple warnings. He continued to fight for victims’ justice long after Dahmer was arrested.

But who was the real Glenda and where is she now? This is what happened to her and why Niecy Nash declared that it was an “honor” to represent her in ‘Dahmer’, the series that gives voice to the victims.

Who was the real Glenda Cleveland?

In a departure from the true story, Glenda Cleveland was not, as portrayed in ‘Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story’, Dahmer’s neighbor. In real life, the woman who lived next door was Pamela Bass.a woman whom Dahmer was relatively fond of.

In fact, in the interviews granted since the arrest, Bass has stated that he was “friendly” and that he had even fed him sandwiches, although he feared that, once his crimes were revealed, they would contain human flesh.

However, for the sake of storytelling, Pamela Bass was erased to some extentwith items of his personality and history merged with Glenda Cleveland’swho had lived in the building adjacent to the Oxford Apartments that Dahmer called “home”.

Glenda had been suspicious of Dahmer for a long time, especially because of the bad smell coming from his apartment and his tendency to use power tools late into the night.

But she completely changed her mind about him on May 21, 1991, when her daughter Sandra Smith and her niece Nicole Childress alerted Glenda about Konerak Sinthasomphonea dazed and confused young man.

The 14-year-old had been rendered nearly catatonic after Dahmer drugged him, drilled a hole in his head and poured acid into his brain. Miraculously, the teen managed to regain consciousness and stumble out of the building, where he was tended to by Glenda as she called the police on the street.

Dahmer found the police and Sinthasomphone with the women on her way back from a store and – unbelievably – managed to convince the police that the teenager was 19 years old and that her boyfriend was “just drunk”. Believing Dahmer above women, the policemen involved then helped bring Sinthasomphone back to Dahmer’s apartment to “cool down”. Sinthasomphone was murdered that same night.

In a recording of a phone call now released, Glenda called the police. to get an update, only to have the men on the other end of the line brutally dismiss her as “fixed” despite her “are you sure?” pleas.

When posters of the missing Sinthasomphone began to circulate, he called the police again, only to be ignored again.

If they had listened to their repeated calls for help, at least five victims would have been saved.

What happened to Glenda Cleveland?

After Dahmer’s arrest, Glenda largely avoided the media spotlight, insisting that “I just wanted to get back to normal”.

In the following years, FShe was praised as the heroine she was and what she had tried to be, received formal honors from the City Council and County Board, and was applauded by local women’s groups and the Milwaukee Police Department.

To a large degree, returned to normalstaying in her job as a data entry specialist until her position was no longer needed. After of that, basically he retired.

According to him ‘Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’Glenda Cleveland stayed in her home next to the Oxford Apartments (which were later torn down and turned into a vacant lot) until 2009. She then moved to another building less than a mile away.

He died on December 24, 2010 at the age of 56 due to natural causes. A post-Milwaukee butcher death (by the way, do you know how Jeffrey Dahmer died?)

Speaking of her performance in ‘Dahmer’, actress Niecy Nash said: “If anything, I’d like people to know that Glenda Cleveland was special. She was a special woman. Showed a constant effort to get someone to do something. It deserved much more than a cutesy little plaque at the foot of a social hall somewhere.”

“She deserved so much more to have the police stand up in front of her and say, ‘Look what we did and what we tried to do.’ And I want people to know that we all know or have been or will be a Glenda Cleveland in this lifetime.”