Since September 21, when the fiction series “Dahmer: An American Cannibal” premiered with ten episodes of just under an hour each, the name and the crimes of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, who was murdered in prison in 1994, has fallen on Mit At 34, he returned to the news like it was 1991 when he was arrested and his past exposed.
The series became the second most viewed in Netflix history, behind Season 4 of Stranger Things. While the success was celebrated by producer Ryan Murphy, creator and producer of the series, and the streaming channel showing it, things were a little different on social media.
The families of the victims Dahmer killed 17 men, all young, gay and athletic between 1978 and 1991 revolted against the glorification of their personal tragedies and rallied to say Netflix gave the case morbid visibility and made them do it to experience their own traumas after more than three decades.
But success won that battle, and the network launched another miniseries, this documentary, about the case. Talking to a Serial Killer: The Milwaukee Cannibal features three onehour episodes and premieres Jeffrey Dahmer’s prison interviews with young attorney Wendy Patrickus who was just beginning her career as her boss, Gerald Boyle , she asked to take her client’s testimonies to strengthen her defense.
Boyle had had an attorney for Jeffrey Dahmer several years earlier when he was arrested for caring for a minor. But when the police came to him a second time in 1991 and entered his apartment littered with human remains, Dahmer knew he had no chance of getting rid of the charges. So he just asked to smoke cigarettes and drink coffee, in return he would say anything the lawyer wanted to know.
Dahmer tells the biggest absurdities with absolute transparency, always very polite, with a calm tone and even with the awareness that some passages can be too shocking. For example, before recounting his attempts to perform homemade lobotomies, he warns the attorney that “this isn’t going to sound very good.”
Dubbed the Milwaukee cannibal or Milwaukee monster by the press, the killer invited his victims, mostly young black men, to his apartment to pose for photographs, a job for which he would pay $50.
When they got there they were drugged and when they became unresponsive Dahmer experimented with them like drilling holes in the brain where he injected a dose of acid to turn them into some kind of undead prevent etc that they leave him.
He said he doesn’t kill out of hate, racism or homophobia. He killed because he couldn’t think of any other way to stop the boys from leaving. His fantasy was absolute control over the person, the nonreaction, so he felt free to do whatever he wanted with these attractive men and some teenagers whether sexual acts or scientific experiments, without inhibition or censorship.
Since he almost never achieved this total cooperation, he would strangle his victims and then use the inanimate bodies to perform his macabre experiments, having sex with the intact corpses and also with their innards. He dismembered some of them, threw body parts into a vat of acid, kept some parts in the fridge, others in the freezer, and some skulls on some sort of pedestal he built to remember the guys he was experimenting on.
The documentary miniseries will be directed by Joe Berlinger, just like the other two seasons of Conversation with a Serial Killer. The first, published in 2019, featured interviews with Ted Bundy, the handsome and charismatic serial killer who killed women in the 1970s and was electrocuted in 1989. That same year, Berlinger released season two, featuring unreleased testimonies from John Wayne Gacy, the “killer clown” who tortured, raped, and killed teenagers in the Chicago area in the 1970s.
In addition to Jeffrey Dahmer’s confessions, the show includes interviews with the current attorney, her then boss, footage from the trial, testimonies from police officers, psychologists, prosecutors, judges and victims’ families, as well as accounts of the crimes. It’s nowhere near as thoughtprovoking and wellproduced as the fictional series, but for those who can’t stop thinking about this horrifying tale, it’s an irresistible addition. sick maybe. But irresistible.