Netflix has released a new Jeffrey Dahmer docuseries titled ‘Conversations with a Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer tapes.’
Sentenced to 15 life sentences — and then a 16th for a murder committed years earlier in Ohio — in 1992, Dahmer, 34, was beaten to death in prison in 1994.
“The discovery shocked the nation and stunned the local community, who were incensed that such a depraved killer had been allowed to operate within their city for so long,” the description of the series on Netflix’s media site reads.
“Why was Dahmer, who had been convicted of sexual assault of a minor in 1988, able to avoid suspicion and detection from police as he stalked Milwaukee’s gay scene for victims, many of whom were people of color?”
Directed by documentary veteran Joe Berlinger, who also made the “Conversations” installments on serial killers Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy, the series features “never-before-heard” audio interviews between Dahmer and his defense team “answering open questions of police accountability through a modern-day lens.”
The three-part docuseries hinges on 32 hours of recorded conversations Dahmer had with attorney Wendy Patrickus from July to October 1991, to prepare for his defence.
Patrickus was just a young lawyer in her 20s at the time. She had just moved to Milwaukee, lived alone and didn’t have many local friends.
She got a call from her boss, Gerry Boyle, who said they have a new case and he needed her to go to the police administration building to talk to someone he had represented in the past, describing Dahmer has a “nice man.” Patrickus remembers Boyle saying, “don’t worry he won’t bite your head off.”
“I felt like Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs,” Patrickus says in ‘Conversations with a Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes.’ “He was very polite, I was somewhat surprised, I guess, at how cordial Jeff was.”
“It’s not easy to talk about,” Dahmer says in an early recording we hear in the docuseries. “It’s something that I’ve kept buried within myself for many years.”
“I had wondered why I was compelled to do all the murders. What I was searching for that would fill the emptiness that I felt. The murdering someone and disposing of them right away gives no great lasting pleasure or a feeling of fulfillment, and yet I still felt the compulsion to do it throughout these years.”
You can watch ‘Conversations with a Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes’ on Netflix here.
