Some way into the first episode of Conversations With a Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes, Dahmer says, “I wanna know why I am what I am”. It is a tantalising question. Yet, it never gets answered in Netflix’s latest on the serial killer, who started his gory spree of murders in 1978. By the time he was arrested in 1991, Dahmer’s count of victims was 16.
True crime and serial killer junkies are bound to have watched at least one of the five films that have been made on Dahmer. Television has also served up at least 15 series on him. So, why should Netflix have made yet another docu-drama on him? Because, for the first time, 32 hours of tape-recorded interviews with him—mostly by his defence attorney, Wendy Patrickus—were recently released. So, Netflix decided to jump on to the Dahmer bandwagon once again, barely a month after it released Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, a 10-episode series which explores the ways and motives of Dahmer, played by Evan Peters. It got middling reviews despite its climb to the number one spot within a week of its release in September.
This latest offering is part of the Conversations With a Killer series. Of this, The Ted Bundy Tapes were the most impactful, which is not saying much as they did not say anything new about the killer’s motivations, thus defeating the show’s purpose. If Bundy’s interviews totalling 100 hours could offer nothing new, Dahmer’s recordings of less than one-third of that offer even less.
The three-episode series collates interviews with attorneys, friends of survivors, detectives, a forensic psychiatrist, police officers, Dahmer’s father, grainy family photos, home-made videos, blurry enactments, and stock footage to piece together Dahmer’s story. At places, there is an almost morbid sense of attempting a justification of Dahmer’s twisted personality. Patrickus, for instance, says that she would, at times during the interviews, be Dahmer’s mother, and at others, his therapist.
Dahmer’s own reading of himself is not that charitable. At different points he talks of his sick pleasure, the lack of empathy and his morbid curiosity of the human anatomy to explain his deeds. He does see the evil of his ways, but at no point is there regret in his voice. After a while, it gets tediously repetitive—the shots of him making coffee laced with sleeping pills for his victims, the film roll of his victims and the tape recorder being passed across the prison table.
The only slim bit of logic offered in the series is that Dahmer’s crimes went unnoticed because many of his victims were gay men of colour—not a group of interest or concern to law enforcement. His being at large for so long was also an example of police negligence, for as far back as 1968, he had been evaluated by a psychiatrist as “too dangerous to be in society”.
Patrickus says that Dahmer was willing to talk as long as he did not run out of coffee and cigarettes. In the end, that seems to be the only justification for the rambling tapes which give nothing away.