Netflix Releases Second New Jeffrey Dahmer Show, and It Instantly Hits the Top 10

Netflix released a second Jeffrey Dahmer project, Conversations With a Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes, on Oct. 7. The three-part documentary series instantly shot up to number two on Netflix’s Top 10 shows in the U.S., behind only Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, Ryan Murphy’s dramatization of Dahmer’s crimes. The new series is the latest in documentary filmmaker Joe Berlinger’s Conversations series, which previously covered John Wayne Gacy and Ted Bundy.

The new series uses the hours of interview tapes attorney Wendy Patrickus recorded when she interviewed Dahmer. In the first episode, she compares herself to Jodie Foster’s character, Clarice Starling, in The Silence of the Lambs. As his attorney, Patrickus had to listen to Dahmer describe the gruesome details of the 17 murders he committed.

Patrickus said she had to convince Dahmer “that I’m not somebody sitting here judging him,” notes Entertainment Tonight. She built a level of trust with Dahmer over 30 hours of recording between July and October 1991 they referred to each other by their first names. “Jeff wanted to identify all the victims,” Patrickus said, adding that she sometimes struggled to hear Dahmer explain how he murdered his victims.

Patrickus’ tapes have never been heard until now. “Wendy’s never been talked about before in the history of telling the Dahmer story because we always look at things through a patriarchal lens,” Berlinger told Entertainment Tonight. “And yet, it was Wendy Patrickus, this junior lawyer on the defense team who actually gleaned more information than even the police to help solve these victims’ identifications.”

Berlinger noted that many serial killer stories excluded the women who played an important part in solving the crimes unless there were women victims. “So, to me that’s an important element of why and how we told the story,” the filmmaker said.

Patrickus also walked through Dahmer’s apartment as her boss insisted she see the crime scene. At one point, she ran out of the apartment to throw up. “The male officers that were there, they all stood there and they all laughed. They’re like, ‘How you doing on this now? You wanted to come to a crime scene. This is what we get,’” she recalled. “It was terrifying to see that this was real.”

Conversations also includes interviews with Michael Ross and Jeff Conner, who were friends of some of Dahmer’s victims. Ross said it was important to “humanize” the victims. No relatives of the victims agreed to appear on camera.

“Recognizing that each one of those young men had a mother, a father, had sisters and brothers that loved them and still miss them,” Ross said, reports ET. “I knew Jeffrey Dahmer and several of his victims… Tony Sears was about 23 or 24. Tony Sears was a model. He was very attractive and he was always immaculately dressed. Had the most beautiful hair. Back in the day, we called them Jheri curls.”

Dahmer killed 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991, with many of his later murders involving necrophilia, cannabilism, and preservation of the remains. In 1992, he was sentenced to 16 terms of life imprisonment, but he was killed in prison in November 1994. Evan Peters plays the killer in Dahmer, which was created by Murphy and Ian Brennan. The show has dominated Netflix’s streaming charts since its release on Sept. 21.