Groupon’s Dahmer Walking Tour Somehow Manages to Offend People

I mean really, if a walking tour involving one of America’s creepiest and deadliest serial killers offends you you have to totally be the easily offended type, am I right, Groupon?

Yes, that’s a real Groupon offering and yes, people did (not so surprisingly) get offended. And not to take a moral high ground here- I love true crime stories as much as the next person- but considering the local nature of a walking tour and the fact that Dahmer’s victims were numerous and still have living relatives makes the idea of a walking tour of his crimes a bit more macabre than many of the cemetery and crime-themed ones available today.

Victor Ray is the Walker’s Point Association president (that being the area where a bar Dahmer frequented to pick up victims was located) and he says that the tour offered at a discount rate on Groupon’s Milwaukee service is in poor taste and too soon:

“I just don’t think this is the right timing… And a tour of the area is not the right thing to do. It’s sensationalism in its finest.”

Ray says that a mother of one of Dahmer’s victim’s reached out and implored him to help stop the tour from capitalizing on the series of murders that claimed her child. That woman declined to be identified or interviewed by press. Bam Marketing and Media spokeswoman Amanda Morden spoke with the Associated Press about the decision to continue offering the tour, saying that enough time had passed since the murders to make a walking tour less sensational, and that “whether or not” people like it, “it’s part of our city’s history… it’s part of our nation’s history.”

Do you think it’s in poor taste for Groupon to offer a Jeffrey Dahmer walking tour?