Please Don't Go

The series' most devastating thread is the death of Konerak Sinthasomphone, and this episode tells it in full: drugged and injured in Apartment 213, the fourteen-year-old makes it to the stairwell, where Glenda Cleveland and her daughter find him and call the police.

Officers accept Dahmer's story that the boy is an adult and the situation domestic, and escort him back inside. Intercut flashbacks to Dahmer's boyhood — a distracted father, a mother slipping into medication — set up the season's argument that warning signs kept being explained away, by families and institutions alike. The hour closes on the real 1991 call recording.