The true crime genre has a tendency to portray killers and victims in a way that only leads to further pain, and Netflix’s new series about the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer is no different. This approach is summarised by the show’s exclusion of a powerful statement from the uncle of one of Dahmer’s victims.
On the last day of Dahmer’s trial in 1992, the families of the men and boys who lost their lives at his hands gave victim impact statements to the court.
Stanley Miller, the uncle of Ernest Miller, appeared with a photo of his nephew pinned to his suit pocket. With clear and concise words, Stanley spoke of his family’s distress at the loss of Ernest, who was a brilliant dancer and dreamed of taking his talents further.
In his statement, Miller addressed Dahmer, who sat emotionless: “Despite the fact that you had the knives, the saws, the vat, the acid, the drills and possibly a gun, when he was in a semi-conscious state of mind, you didn’t give him a chance to fight for his life. You took his life like a thief in the night. Rather than facing him and letting him fight for the things he [held] most dear, you took the coward’s way out.”
“Did you ever stop to think that this is someone’s son? Did you ever stop to think that this was… Someone’s brother, nephew, uncle, cousin, grandson or just someone’s friend that’s missing him dearly?”
These words were profound. In the documentaries, books and commentary on Dahmer, there has been a focus on an idea that his crimes were perpetrated while the victims were in an unconscious or semi-conscious state.
But Dahmer’s interest was not in the act of killing – it was in the dehumanising acts that came afterwards.
Through Dahmer’s actions, the victims were depersonalised, becoming less than people. Not just at the time of the murders, but afterwards through the violent retelling of their stories, limited to brutal descriptions of their deaths and bodies.
Just like the 17 victims who were denied the right to fight for what they held dear, the families have also been denied the right to fight for the memories of their loved ones.
Some family members have spoken about their disbelief at how the Netflix series portrayed them and their loved ones, including Shirley Hughes, the mother of Tony, 31.
“I don’t see how they can do that,” Hughes said, before adding that it was difficult to talk about Tony’s murder and politely ending the call. “I don’t see how they can use our names and put stuff out like that out there.”
Rita Isabell, the sister of Errol Lindsay, had her victim impact statement recreated in excruciating detail in the Netflix show without her consent.
Isabell told Insider that in the statement she had wanted to show what it was like to be “out of control” because that was how Dahmer’s lawyers portrayed him as they argued for an insanity defence.
She described the victim impact statement as an out-of-body moment, and when the Netflix series aired she again found control had been taken away:
“It brought back all the emotions I was feeling back then. I was never contacted about the show … they just did it.”
When you search for the names of Dahmer’s victims, you find only brief accounts and grainy pictures, many of which depict them as young and free.
But readily available are pictures that Dahmer took himself and the stories he told, again and again, always through his eyes and his prism: bodies for his own use, bodies he could control, bodies not worthy of a future.
Many of these young men were black and gay. Their life journeys are depicted as being orientated towards a dangerous encounter with a serial killer, rather than as people navigating the violence of a racist and homophobic society; people who must have gravitated towards spaces they considered safe.
One of the boys, Jamie Doxtator, was Native American. Netflix’s Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story depicts Doxtator, 14, as an adult man and gives him no further representation beyond sitting on Dahmer’s couch, with the perception that his is an inevitable and ungrievable death.
The other boy, Konerak Sinthasomphone, could have been saved if not for the racist and homophobic actions of the local police who saw no evidence of injury and trusted the word of the white man over that of the black women who came to his aid.
The retellings of the Dahmer story always focus on questions of how a man could become a monster, or whether he always was one. There are brief glimpses in the Netflix show of how a racist, homophobic society could provide the conditions for him to kill; and suggestions there is an impunity that allows for the killing of predominately young black men.
But there is less focus on how a society founded on stolen Indigenous land and stolen black bodies – a settler-colony founded upon white supremacy – could give rise to the extreme dehumanisation perpetrated by Dahmer himself.
Dahmer’s acts were not just for sexual gratification, but also for his delight in the extreme forms of terror that have always been perpetrated against black and Indigenous bodies. The focus is on the individual – what in Dahmer’s childhood made him like this – and not on the conditions that make black people the targets of such violence.
These conditions not only make it possible for a serial killer like Dahmer to exist – they also feed into an irrepressible appetite for violence, which is satisfied by the true crime genre.
These conditions mean Dahmer is occasionally seen as an object of sympathy, as an anti-hero or a caricature to be mimicked in TikTok videos: “I just like the actor, not Dahmer!”
And these conditions mean the voices of victims are continually silenced.
We are all complicit in the way true crime has become entertainment at the expense of victims. Meanwhile, the victims’ families must deal with the resurfacing of grief and trauma as the lives of their loved ones are told through the eyes of the killer, and not their own.
The 15 men and two children Dahmer killed had names and identities: Steven Hicks (18 years old), Steven Tuomi (24), Jamie Doxtator (14), Richard Guerrero (25), Anthony Sears (26), Ricky Beeks (33), Edward Smith (28), Ernest Miller (22), David Thomas (23), Curtis Straughter (18), Errol Lindsey (19), Anthony Hughes (31), Konerak Sinthasomphone (14), Matt Turner (20), Jeremiah Weinberger (23), Oliver Lacy (23) and Joseph Bradehoft (25).
They become part of the shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer, when they should be repatriated, their stories told with love and care of by those who always loved and cared for them, outside of the cycles of new TV shows and podcasts.
• Amy McQuire is a Darumbal and South Sea Islander writer and a postdoc Indigenous fellow at QUT
