Michael Ross, a man who knew Jeffrey Dahmer and several of his victims, remembers the men killed by Dahmer as “beautiful souls” in a new documentary.
Ross is one of the participants in Conversations With A Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes, which will be released by Netflix on 7 October in the UK and in the US. The documentary is airing about two weeks after the release of Ryan Murphy’s Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, which also came from the streaming service.
After his arrest, serial killer Dahmer confessed to killing 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991. He met several of his victims at gay bars in Milwaukee, which he frequented regularly.
“After this all came out, several people in the bars said, ‘I remember him, I remember him,’” Ross says in the documentary about Dahmer’s crimes. “Well, of course we all did. Milwaukee’s only this big.”
In the documentary, Ross remembers gay life as having been “really up and coming” in Milwaukee in the 1980s.
“For a city like Milwaukee, we had a good time,” he says. “We had a ball. ... You could be yourself. You had freedom, so you were comfortable. We’d get dressed up and go to the bar. The bars had beautiful music. People always wanted to dance.”
He adds: “We were all just coming into who we are, accepting ourselves. A lot of those people were beautiful souls.”
Later on, Ross recounts a time when people started disappearing at an alarming rate, on an almost weekly basis. Some of them later turned out to have been victims of Dahmer.
“It saddens me every time I think about any of those gentlemen,” Ross says. “Because like everybody else during that time, they were trying to find themselves. They weren’t expecting to get killed.”
Dahmer’s victims, as listed by the Desert News and USA Today, were Ricky Beeks, Joseph Bradehoft, Jamie Doxtator, Richard Guerrero, Steven Hicks, Anthony Hughes, Oliver Lacy, Errol Lindsey, Ernest Miller, Anthony Sears, Konerak Sinthasomphone, Eddie Smith, Curtis Straughter, David Thomas, Steven Tuomi, Matt Turner, and Jeremy Weinberger.
Dahmer was sentenced to life in prison in February 1992 and killed by a fellow inmate while imprisoned in November of 1994.
