Conversations with a Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes: Netflix documentaries release footage of serial killer confessions

Dahmer – Monsters: The Story of Jeffrey Dahmer continues to be the top show on Netflix, but the streaming platform just released a new documentary series about the infamous serial killer. Conversations with a Murderer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes.

What makes Oscar winner Joe Berlinger’s three-part docuseries stand out is that it depends on 32 hours of recorded conversations Dahmer had with attorney Wendy Patrickus from July to October 1991 to prepare his defense. As the documentary notes, the tapes have never been released until now.

Patrickus was then just a young lawyer in her twenties. She had just moved to Milwaukee, lived alone and didn’t have many local friends. She received a call from her boss, Gerry Boyle, saying they had a new case and he needed her to go to the police administration building to speak to someone he had represented in the past, and described that Dahmer be a “nice man”. Patrickus recalls Boyle saying, “Don’t worry, he won’t bite your head off.”

“I felt like Clarice Starling silence of the Lambs‘ says Patrick Conversations with a Murderer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes. “He was very polite, I guess I was a bit surprised at how welcoming Jeff was.”

She added that she knows how important it is to build trust with him and not be judgmental in order to be “a good defender”.

“It’s not easy to talk about,” Dahmer says in an early recording we hear in the docuseries. “It’s something I’ve had buried inside me for many years.”

“I had wondered why I was forced to commit all the murders. What I sought would fill the emptiness I felt. Murdering someone and getting rid of them doesn’t bring much lasting joy or sense of accomplishment, and yet through the years I still felt the urge to do it.”

Kenneth Mueller, a former homicide lieutenant at the Milwaukee PD, explains on the show that the way Dahmer is able to recall every detail of his murders is “incredible.”

The story goes on

“I didn’t seem to have the normal sense of empathy,” we hear from the Dahmer recordings. “It started with fantasizing, fantasizing, it always started with fantasizing, and eventually the fantasies seemed to have come true.”

“If there’s one area that’s really to blame, it’s my own twisted thinking. I haven’t thought normally in years.”

The first of Dahmer’s murders was 18-year-old Steven Hicks in 1978, who was hitchhiking to a rock concert when the serial killer saw him.

“It was the first time I had a desire to control,” we hear Dahmer say in his recorded conversations with Patrickus. “I don’t know exactly why I hit him, other than that I wanted to stay with him longer.”

“I thought how amazing it was that I actually did it to another human being. It shocked me to get to this point and there was a sense of excitement, control but mixed with a lot of fear.”

The fascination with Jeffrey Dahmer is followed by a strong headwind

From the moment Ryan Murphy’s Dahmer – Monsters: The Jeffrey Dahmer landed on Netflix, With Evan Peters playing Jeffrey Dahmer, it’s garnered a lot of attention and some admittedly odd reactions.

As we hear Dahmer trying to understand why he desired to kill 17 men, Conversations with a Murderer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes takes you back to his childhood, when he was often neglected and left alone by his parents, to his drinking and the special dynamic of evading the police, as a white man chasing gay men of color.

Wendy Patrickus also points out that it was a “struggle” for Dahmer to come out and recalls telling her, “I don’t like being gay.”

“I made a really serious effort to change my way of life, change my desires, get rid of the homosexual feeling I had,” says Dahmer in the tapes.

Listening to the serial killer talk about his murders in his own words is absolutely chilling, probably enough to induce some nightmares, particularly how openly and non-defensively he speaks about what he’s done.

The timing of the Netflix release Conversations with a Murderer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes really underscores our fascination and constant appetite for detective stories, for better or for worse.