As with any dramatisation of real events, DAHMER – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story bends the truth at points. Even the most faithful shows have to make some adjustments for their adaptation to be coherent for the audience, so it’s often hard to tell fact from fiction. This piece should help you tease those apart.
Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s re-telling of the story of the Milwaukee Cannibal has Evan Peters play the man who killed 17 boys and men – many of whom were queer men of colour. The show follows his life from troubled child to serial killer and also showcases some of the experiences of the victims and their families.
The Confession
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At the centre of a large portion of the show is Jeffrey Dahmer’s confession, which is the bridging point for delving into different parts of his life.
Given the reality that most of his victims were killed by him, he is the most definitive source on his own crimes. This makes it hard for us to really get a firm grasp on the events that happened when you consider that Dahmer was allegedly extremely drunk during his killings. So tragically, there is a lot that will likely never come to light.
What you perhaps wouldn’t know from the show is that the interrogation which brought about his confession went on for a whopping 60 hours. The detectives portrayed on the show, Detective Patrick Kennedy and Detective Dennis Murphy, were real, but some of the specific dialogue was made for the show (since the report is not an exact transcript).
It’s also worth noting that while the show frames the initial interrogation as the source of (most of) the information given about Dahmer’s early life, there are also details from later interviews with publications like MSNBC and Inside Edition which influence the story being told here.
The Dahmers
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One big area of contention in the facts is the exact family circumstances in which Dahmer grew up. Lionel (his father), Joyce (his mother) and Jeff himself all gave very different impressions of the circumstances in which he was raised.
In his book A Father’s Story, Lionel alleged that Joyce was very dependent on a concoction of drugs around the time of Jeffrey’s birth and was a severely mentally ill hypochondriac. Joyce largely refuted these claims and pointed out Lionel’s frequent absences from the house due to his doctoral studies. In the end, their differences would result in a divorce in 1978 which saw Joyce get custody of her youngest child, David.
Where truth and fiction lie in regards to the killer’s upbringing is largely dependent on who you believe more. The series hedges on whose perspective it thinks holds more weight, with Jeffrey himself appearing to hold minimal resentment towards either of his parents.
Tony Hughes
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While some of the extras in the show, like Joyce’s patients, are composite characters, the series mostly focuses on real people who did exist.
One exception to this is in episode 6, Silenced, which focuses on Tony Hughes (played by Rodney Burford). It’s unclear how much of this episode is fictionalised, but it seems that the specific friends Rico (Jared DeBusk) and Rufus (Michael Anthony Spady) are composite characters constructed to provide a useful insight into the experiences of deaf gay men in the early 1990s. The same goes for Tony’s experience with photographer Duane (Matt Steele), which again takes a slightly looser approach to the facts to give a broader idea of his specific experiences.
The police
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A significant portion of the show focuses on how the police failed the communities being preyed upon by Dahmer. As shown by the use of the direct transcript at the end of episode 2, it would be hard to fabricate something more shocking than the real actions of the police in this case.
However, there are still points of DAHMER‘s portrayal which are worth discussing. The first of which is that the show implies towards the end that the racist abuse directed at the families of the victims came (at least partially) from serving police officers. However, it’s unclear if there is publicly available evidence of this happening.
The other main point relating to the police that the show doesn’t cover is that John Balcerzak, one of the two men who found 14-year-old Konerak Sinthasomphone with Jeffrey and refused to take action, was later elected to be president of the Milwaukee Police Association. He headed the organisation for four years from 2005 to 2009, even surviving an expulsion attempt.
With all that in mind, DAHMER – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story is on Netflix now for those who wish to delve into the chilling life of Jeffrey Dahmer.
DAHMER – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story is available to stream on Netflix now. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide to see what’s on tonight.
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