Ryan Murphy’s lurid, grisly and not particularly incisive dramatic series “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” is the No. 1 TV show on Netflix and amassed more than 196 million viewing hours in its first week of release, even as controversy erupted around the project, with the family members of some Dahmer victims saying the series exploits the memories of their loved ones. Just two weeks after the debut of “Monster,” Netflix is releasing “Conversations with a Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes,” a three-part documentary series featuring Dahmer’s own words and the usual collection of interviews, archival footage, crime-scene stills and soft-focus re-enactments.
While the series can be compelling, and it’s still shocking after all this time to hear the details of Dahmer’s horrific crimes, about halfway through I began to wonder: Is this really necessary? Are we learning anything new about this monster? The hook in “Monster” is that we’re hearing Dahmer’s own voice in previously unreleased tapes, but do those recordings provide anything beyond satisfying a certain morbid curiosity? I’m not so sure.
This is the third entry in Joe Berlinger’s “Conversations with a Killer,” following documentary series about Ted Bundy (2019) and John Wayne Gacy (2022). Berlinger is a talented and prolific filmmaker whose work includes “Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich” (2020) and “Murder Among the Mormons” (2021), and he once again demonstrates acumen for telling a tough story with respect, compassion, attention to detail and thoroughness. There’s no denying our fascination with these true-crime series, and this is a serious, well-edited and comprehensive effort.
Still, for those of us who remember the Dahmer story and those who already know the horrifying details of the depths of his depravity, it just doesn’t feel vital — in large part because there’s nothing in Dahmer’s own words that offer anything close to an explanation for his hideous actions. He sounds like a robotic observer of his own life, even as he goes into detail about how he killed, dismembered, eviscerated and sexually assaulted his victims — in some cases, after they were dead.
In Episode 1, titled “Sympathy for the Devil,” we’re told, “Attorney Wendy Patrickus recorded over 32 hours of conversations to prepare for Jeffrey Dahmer’s defense. The conversations took place from July to October 1991. These tapes have never been publicly released … until now.” Cut to Patrickus in present day, telling us she had just moved to Milwaukee, it was her first job and “I felt like Clarice Starling in ‘The Silence of the Lambs.’ He called me Wendy, I called him Jeff.”
Comparisons to the fictional Hannibal Lecter are inevitable, what with Dahmer sharing Lecter’s propensity for eating parts of his victims — but whereas Thomas Harris’ creation was a sophisticated and brilliant and abhorrent psychopath, Dahmer’s self-analysis doesn’t go much deeper than, “I didn’t seem to have the normal feelings of empathy,” or saying he would kill his victims because, “I didn’t know any other way to make them stay and to control them. I had no choice in the matter.”
The series features interviews with journalists who were reporters in Milwaukee in the 1980s and 1990s, law enforcement personnel, psychiatric experts, prosecutors, defense attorneys, all sharing recollections. Berlinger walks us through the timeline in a straightforward, mostly linear fashion, with occasional flashbacks to Dahmer’s upbringing in a troubled home, and his early fascination with small dead animals. (In the ninth grade, Dahmer recalls, they dissected a baby pig in science class; Dahmer took the pig’s head home, peeled off the skin and kept the skull.) Episode 2, titled, “Can I Take Your Picture?” notes Dahmer’s obsession with mind control and films such as “The Exorcist” and “Return of the Jedi.” (Dahmer identified with the Sith and their yellow eyes, even going so far as to buy yellow contact lenses he would wear when going out to stalk his prey.)
We hear Dahmer’s monotonous tone on the tapes, as he describes how he tried to turn his victims into “zombies” who would still be alive, but unable to resist his sexual assaults: “And so uh, I had a drill at home. It’s gonna sound bad … but uh, should I say it or not? I took the drill while [one victim] was asleep and drilled a small hole in his skull to see if I could make it so he would … be in a zombie state.”
On multiple occasions, Dahmer would come into contact with police, including one time when he had body parts stuffed into trash in his car, and another occasion when 14-year-old Konerak Sinthasomphone was found naked and dazed outside of Dahmer’s apartment — and the police decided it was a lovers’ quarrel and literally walked the boy back insider Dahmer’s apartment. An hour later, Konerak was dead.
Much of the third episode centers on the courtroom debate about whether Dahmer was insane or evil, when it’s clear he was both. (The man ate body parts, drank blood, built a pedestal in his apartment and set skulls on top of it and around it.) At trial, Dahmer was found sane and sentenced to multiple life terms in prison at the Columbia Correctional Institution in Wisconsin. On Nov.’ 29, 1994, an inmate bludgeoned Dahmer to death with a weightlifting bar. As the documentary notes, there was a certain twisted irony to this, as Dahmer had killed his first victim with a dumbbell weight. His story is over. I’m not convinced we need to revisit it anymore.
