Warning: This text contains spoilers for “Dahmer”. If you haven’t watched the entire series yet, don’t read any further.
“Dahmer” is one of the most popular true crime series on Netflix right now, leaving many viewers shuddering and horrified. No wonder, since the serial killer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer (played by Evan Peters) has been murdering at least 17 men and teenagers in the US state of Milwaukee since the 1970s. Directed by Ryan Murphey, who specializes in real-life crime adaptations.
Right at the beginning of the series, viewers are confronted with how Dahmer perfected the course of his murders. As a white man, he lived in a neighborhood mostly populated by black people. There he visited a bar in the immediate vicinity in 1991, where he met Tracy Edwards (played by Shaun J. Brown). He invites him over to his house to party a bit more – and probably to have sex too.
When they arrive at the apartment, there is a foul stench. Dahmer explains that his family sent him pork chops, but his freezer gave up the ghost. The meat was said to be rotten.
The other objects shown probably give rise to an instinct to flee in every viewer: You can see a blood-smeared drill, a large closed plastic barrel in the corner of the bedroom and a huge bloodstain on the bed. Everything in the apartment looks dirty and rundown.
Tracy Edwards, who eventually realizes that something is wrong, tries to outwit Dahmer. Finally he can flee the apartment half-naked and in handcuffs. He calls the police, which means the end of his murder series for Dahmer. For viewers, however, the series is only just beginning – combined with the question of how the serial killer could have remained undiscovered for so long.
His first victim was the hitchhiker Steven Mark Hicks, whom he killed with a dumbbell in his parents’ house – he buried his body in the garden. At first, no further murders followed, only after almost a decade did he murder another man in a rented hotel room in 1987. He murders three other men in the house of his grandmother (played by Michael Learned), with whom he lived for a while. Dahmer then takes an apartment in Milwaukee, where he kills 12 more men. His youngest victim, Konerak Sinthasomphone, was 14 years old.
In 1992, Dahmer was sentenced to a total of 900 years in prison for fifteen counts of murder. Three years after his incarceration in a maximum-security prison in Wisconsin, he is attacked with a dumbbell by a fellow inmate. He dies of his injuries an hour later.
The 10-part Netflix series succeeds in telling the story of the brutal serial killer in 526 minutes and shows how the strange little boy became a cold-blooded monster, which is said to have even eaten human parts in the end.
In addition, the viewer is repeatedly aware that there would have been numerous indications of what bad Jeffrey Dahmer was doing – without anyone stopping him. Before his arrest, he had been in contact with the police several times, but each time he got away with a black eye.
The full-length series is available on Netflix.
What: Netflix
