There’s a good reason why so many people flinched when it was announced that Netflix would be releasing Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. All art mediums have been guilty of sensationalizing true crime, but television has been an especially atrocious repeat offender. Yet Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s Monster never commits the sin of glorifying Jeffrey Dahmer. By prioritizing accuracy and always centering the victims’ stories above Dahmer’s, Monster has captured a deeper truth about this case. This was never a story about a criminal mastermind who fooled the world. It was one about a disturbed man who needed professional help and, most importantly of all, a police force and media environment that failed to do their jobs on every level.
Of course, there are some embellishments in Monster. For example, the real Dahmer was beaten to death by Christopher Scarver, a fellow inmate. A convicted murderer, Scarver did claim that God told him to kill Dahmer and Jesse Anderson, another inmate who murdered his wife and tried to pin his crimes on two Black men. In the Netflix series, Scarver (Furly Mac) kills Anderson (Jeff Harms) before turning his attention to Jeff (Evan Peters), as he’s nicknamed in the series. But in reality, Scarver confessed to attacking Dahmer, first then Anderson. These are the sorts of changes to history Monster makes. The details that matter are still intact, but through imagined conversations and small tweaks, the story is made to flow better as a drama.
This dedication to truth certainly means that Monster has room for the most scandalous parts of this story. Yes, Dahmer admitted to drinking blood when he worked at a blood plasma center. Unlike what Netflix showed, it was a vial — not a bag — and he said he spit it out because he didn’t like the taste. He also really did eat his victims. During his sanity trial, Dahmer confessed to eating a victim’s biceps. He also did preserve certain body parts with the intention of cannibalism. When he was finally arrested, the police really did find a human head of a Black victim in his fridge.
Monster takes great care to ensure that these grisly details are included, but it rarely glamorizes them and it certainly never embellishes them. Actual murder scenes often don’t appear in the series. Instead, the camera carefully captures the fear of Jeff’s victims before cutting to the bloody, upsetting aftermath. Likewise, Jeff himself doesn’t get a Hollywood blockbuster-style rewrite. He’s awkward and soft-spoken, as the real Dahmer seemed to be. He’s often drunk. When he’s finally apprehended, there are no long-winded monologues you would expect from the evil villains that have dominated the world of fictionalized serial killers. Instead, Jeff’s reasons for why he murdered and defiled the bodies of 17 boys and men are those of the real Dahmer: He wanted to be close to someone, no matter the cost.
This dedication to honesty does humanize Jeffrey Dahmer to a degree. But while Monster emphasizes with Dahmer, it never sympathizes with him. For every quietly sad moment in Jeff’s life, there are a dozen more scenes that show what he cost these people, their families, and their friends.
It’s because Monster never veers into sensationalism that we can trust the rest of this often untold story. Yes, Dahmer was a cannibal. But it’s also true that Glenda Cleveland, Dahmer’s neighbor, repeatedly called the police to report that people were being hurt in Dahmer’s apartment and was ignored. At one point she even called the FBI and was dismissed yet again.
It’s true that two officers — John Balcerzak and Joseph T. Gabrish — brought one of Dahmer’s 14-year-old victims, Konerak Sinthasomphone, back to the place that would become the site of his death. One of those officers did joke about needing to be “deloused” after being in a gay man’s apartment. In the same hour that this homophobic joke was made, Sinthasomphone — a literal child — was murdered, defiled, and dismembered. Both officers were fired but were reinstated in 1994. One of them, Balcerzak, was even elected president of the Milwaukee Police Association. All of those outrage-inducing things really happened. And all of them were nationally ignored in favor of giving Dahmer more air time.
Likewise, the Oxford Apartments, which is where Dahmer committed most of his crimes, was demolished. His neighbors, who already had to endure the trauma of knowing their home was the site of one of the most chilling mass killings in American history, were pushed out of those homes. To this day the location remains a vacant lot. The park Niecy Nash’s Glenda mentions in the series never happened. There is no memorial to honor the victims or anything that could be used to bring peace to these heartbroken families or this community.
Telling the this larger, more complicated story is exactly what true crime dramatizations should be doing. There is merit is retelling these stories. The 17 lives that Dahmer took from this world need and deserve to be remembered, not as names on a Wikipedia page, but as people. The factors that allowed this killer to get away with his crimes for so long — in Dahmer’s case, a police force that listened to a white man with a criminal record over several innocent Black people, a media environment that failed to acknowledge missing gay men and men of color as a worthwhile story, and a national blitz that continued to uplift a known killer and cannibal’s voice over his victims — need to be examined.
We, as a society, owe it to the dead to listen to their stories and learn from them. Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story is a step towards that. It may just be a TV show, but it’s also a tool in trying to understand how we can do better.
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