“I  don’t need to watch it, I lived it.”

Rita Isbell, the sister of Dahmer victim Errol Lindsey

Jeffrey Dahmer was born on May 21, 1960, to Lionel and Joyce Dahmer in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  He was an American serial killer, cannibal, and sex offender. Between 1978-1991 he murdered 17 young men and boys. His victims consisted of Black, Latino, and Asian homosexual men. He sought out his victims at gay bars, malls and bus stops. Dahmer took his victims back to his apartment, drugged them, and then continued to strangle them gruesomely to death.

After killing his victims,  Dahmer engaged in unthinkable acts such as necrophilia, dismembering the victims’ corpses, and eating their tendons. In 1991 he was sentenced to sixteen life terms.

Despite Dahmer’s unimaginable and horrific offenses, Hollywood and other major media enterprises, such as Netflix, continue to romanticize his story and pray upon the public’s obsession with true crime and murder stories to gain profit, despite the continuing pain and trauma of the victims’ families. Several dramatizations of the serial killers’ life have been made, starting from “The Secret Life of Jeffrey Dahmer” in 1993, “Dahmer” in 2002, “Raising Jeffrey Dahmer” in 2006, “My friend Dahmer” in 2017, and the recent Netflix series “Dahmer-Monster: The  Jeffrey Dahmer Story.”  

Hollywood capitalizes on the popularity of actors and uses them to depict the main characters in true crime series, which often distracts the audience and masks the raw inhumanity of the crimes these serial killers commit. For example, in Netflix’s recent ten-part series on Jeffrey Dahmer,  the popular actor, and heartthrob Evan Peters portrays Jeffrey Dahmer. 

Peters fame from previous roles in the series “American Horror Story” and the “X-men” movies enables the viewers to imagine the real-life Jeffrey Dahmer in a softer, more attractive image. However, there has been strong criticism in general of the film industry for using attractive actors to romanticize notorious serial killers such as Ted Bundy (played by Zac Effron) and even the beloved fictional serial killer “Tate Langdon” played again by Evan Peters in “American Horror story.”