Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Conversations With A Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes’ On Netflix, Featuring Interviews Between The Serial Killer And His Defense Team

Conversations With A Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes is the third in Joe Berlinger’s Conversations With A Killer series, where he presents never-before-heard interview audio with notorious serial killers; Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy were featured in the first two editions. With the Dahmer scripted series camping out at the top of Netflix’s Top 10, the timing of this release isn’t a coincidence.

CONVERSATIONS WITH A KILLER: THE JEFFREY DAHMER TAPES: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Wendy Patrickus looks at the camera and starts telling the story of how, as a young attorney in 1991, her boss Gerald Boyle told her to go interview one of his clients: Jeffrey Dahmer.

The Gist: Most of the docuseries is built around conversations Patrickus had with Dahmer after he was arrested in Milwaukee in July, 1991. As most people know, his apartment was full of body parts in various states of decay, plus a massive pot which he may have used to cook the remains of the men he murdered. His first murder took place in Ohio, where he murdered and dismembered Steven Hicks in 1978. He moved to Milwaukee to live with his grandmother and even entered the Army, but started killing again in 1987; his second victim was Steven Tuomi.

Around these conversations, we hear from local reporters, from Patrickus and Boyle, from E. Michael McCann, the Milwaukee County DA who prosecuted Dahmer, along with one or two of his childhood friends.

The conversations paint the picture of a man whose family’s religious background had him fighting the fact that he was gay. But beyond that, he always wanted control in whatever sexual encounters he had, and he had control fantasies that involved having sex with unconscious and dead men.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? As we mentioned earlier, this is the third entry in the Conversations With A Killer series, and they’re all structured in similar fashion.

Our Take: For those of you who are completely turned off by Netflix’s hit scripted series Dahmer — and there are plenty that are — they may get a more satisfying view of Dahmer via The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes. You get to hear from Dahmer himself, and despite knowing that everything he’s saying is from his twisted perspective, it’s still the best way to even inch your way into the mind of someone who was so sick.

As with most serial killers, Dahmer sounds absolutely normal, even contrite about the thoughts that led him to murder his victims, many of which were men he picked up from gay bars in Milwaukee. There was shame about his sexuality, shame about his desire to control his victims and shame about the impulses that led him to kill and dismember.

What we don’t hear yet in the first episode is what impulse drove him to then go the extra step of cooking and eating the parts of his victims, and the desire to keep those parts in his Milwaukee apartment rather than get rid of them like he did with the remains of some of his early victims.

It’s also fascinatingly disconcerting to hear his defense attorneys, especially Patrickus, talk about Dahmer like he was just a guy they knew. “He called me Wendy and I called him Jeff,” Patrickus said about the relationship they built as she interviewed him for his defense. It takes a hell of a lot of personal integrity to look at Dahmer and see him as a person and not just a depraved murderer; it was a skill Patrickus needed to have in order to get the information out of him that he did. But it’s still discomfiting to hear him referred to as “Jeff” throughout the episode.

Sex and Skin: The talk about Dahmer fighting his sexuality is pretty harrowing. One thing we weren’t sure of, though, is if some of the interviewees were using that as a cause for him to kill, dismember and eat his victims. If so, it feels like a huge, not all that informed leap.

Parting Shot: “My desires were… bestial, obviously,” Dahmer says about how his impulses led him to kill more and more people after 1987.

Sleeper Star: Patrickus gets the nod here, basically for how calmly she describes being face to face with Dahmer through those interview sessions.

Most Pilot-y Line: Berlinger uses reenactments to show Dahmer talking to Patrickus in prison. They’re a bit more intrusive than he intended, we think. Even though they’re wordless, and shot in a fashion that’s supposed to look a bit abstract, they still stick out.

Our Call: STREAM IT. If you want to get into the mind of Jeffrey Dahmer, there’s no better way than hearing from the killer himself, and Conversations With A Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes gives viewers more than enough opportunity to hear from Dahmer about the impulses that led him to kill.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.