Conversations With A Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes, a new documentary about the Jeffrey Dahmer case, is airing on Netflix from 7 October.
Based on audio tapes of conversations between Dahmer and his defense team, the three-episode docuseries retraces Dahmer’s crimes, his arrest in July of 1991, and his conviction on multiple murder charges.
Following his arrest, Dahmer confessed to having killed 17 boys and men between 1978 and 1991. He was sentenced to life in prison and was killed while imprisoned in 1994.
Netflix’s new documentary includes poignant contributions from people who interacted with Dahmer and his victims. One participant remembers the people Dahmer killed as “beautiful souls”, while a neighbor of Dahmer’s recounts attempting to confront him and feeling “suckered” when Dahmer was revealed to be a serial murderer.
Here are some of the most important moments in Conversations With A Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes:
Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims were just “trying to find themselves”
Michael Ross, who knew Jeffrey Dahmer and several of his victims, remembers the men killed in the documentary.
“We were all just coming into who we are, accepting ourselves,” he says at one point. “A lot of those people were beautiful souls.”
He adds later on: “It saddens me every time I think about any of those gentlemen. 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.
Law enforcement’s failures
The documentary raises the question of how Dahmer was able to murder multiple people over the course of several years without being arrested, even though he was a convicted sex offender.
“I was in the bars often. Nobody asked me about anybody,” Michael Ross says. “I didn’t have any police officer, any detective come up to me and say, ‘What do you know about this person or that person?’ This wasn’t a couple of months or a couple of weeks. This went on for years.”
Ross is one of several participants to point to the fact that most of Dahmer’s victims were young, gay men of color. “If the victims had been white and straight, the search would have been more in-depth, more specific,” he says in the program.
The documentary looks back specifically on the case of Konerak Sinthasomphone, a 14-year-old boy who managed to escape from Dahmer’s apartment but was sent back with Dahmer after the police arrived at the scene.
Crocker Stephenson, who was a reporter for the Milwaukee Sentinel, recounts how “two young women interceded” in an attempt to protect the boy.
“Two 18-year-old Black girls, protecting him from Dahmer,” he says. “The police don’t listen to those girls. They didn’t even take their names. They kept telling them to be quiet, that they would arrest them if they kept talking.”
Glenda Cleveland, who lived in the area, is heard calling the police to press the matter, to no avail. “How old was this child?” she asks at one point. Upon being told he was “an adult”, she insists: “Are you sure?” Cleveland is then told “it’s all taken care of.”
“People say [the police] were just doing their jobs, they were just doing the best they could - that falls very far short of what they should have done,” Stephenson says. “If they’d run his name, they would have found that [Dahmer] was on probation for assault a Laotian boy who would turn out to be Konerak’s brother. How does this happen?”
Neighbors tried to find out the truth
Vernell Bass, who lived in the same building as Dahmer with his wife Pamela Bass, is also a participant in the documentary.
He says that one night, he was woken up by a “horrible smell” around 2:30am, after which he covered the bottom of his door with a towel and went back to bed. According to Bass, his wife went to investigate the smell and detemined it was coming from Dahmer’s apartment.
Dahmer was later discovered to have been storing the remains of some of his victims inside his home.
“She took a lawn chair and she sat in our apartment with our door open, waiting for Jeff to come home,” Bass says of his wife. “When he came home, she confronted him about the smell.”
Bass says Dahmer claimed his freezer had stopped working. Dahmer is heard recounting the same episode on an audio tape of a conversation between himself and his defense attorney Wendy Patrickus.
“I told them it was just the freezer that went on the blink,” Dahmer says on the recording.
Jeffrey Dahmer’s defense in court
Dahmer’s defense attorneys Gerald Boyle and Wendy Patrickus are featured in the documentary, in part explaining how they approached worked during Dahmer’s trial.
Dahmer pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to multiple charges of murder. That meant a jury was tasked not with determining whether he could be considered to have perpetrated the crimes beyond a reasonable doubt, but rather with determining whether he could be held responsible for his actions.
“My duty and my goal were to prove that he was insane during the commission of these offense,” Boyle says in the documentary.
Dr Fred Berlin, a forensic psychiatrist who testified for the defense, is another participant in the documentary.
“In my professional opinion, Mr Dahmer did lack substantial capacity to conform his behaviour to the requirements of law,” he says. “I believe that he met at that time the statutory requirements for an insanity defense, and I still believe that today.”
Dr Berlin adds later that if Dahmer is not considered to have “a psychiatric disorder,” “then I don’t know what we mean by psychiatric disease.”
Dahmer’s lawyer on building a rapport with him
Wendy Patrickus, who also worked on Dahmer’s defense, discusses having to build a rapport with Dahmer in order to perform her duties as an attorney.
“In order to be a good defense attorney, you have to be non-judgemental and develop a trust,” she says. “He called me Wendy, and I called him Jeff.”
She is heard on tape telling Dahmer during one of their early conversations: “This is okay, Jeff. I mean, don’t be embarrassed about it. Am I making you uncomfortable?”
“No,” Dahmer replies. “It has to be faced, so... It’s just so bizarre, isn’t it? It’s not... It’s not easy to talk about. It’s something I’ve kept buried within myself for many years, and it’s like trying to pull up a two-ton stone out of a well.”
Conversations With A Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes will air on Netflix on 7 October in the US and in the UK
