Wendy Patrickus recounts the 30+ hours she spent with Jeffrey Dahmer in 'Conversations With a Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes.'
As the attention surrounding Jeffrey Dahmer continues to grow following the release of the Netflix true-crime limited series, Dahmer - Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, he is the subject of the new docuseries, Conversations With a Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes, which offers additional perspectives on the serial killer’s murders. One of them is Wendy Patrickus, who was a young attorney when she was tasked with spending over 30 hours with Dahmer, interviewing him about his life and crimes.
“I felt like Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs,” Patrickus says in the first episode of the three-part documentary, before detailing her experience sitting across the table from her client from July to October 1991, trying to absorb all the gruesome details Dahmer revealed about the 17 men and teenage boys he killed over a 13-year span.
In order to get all the information that she got out of him, Patrickus says she had to convince him “that I’m not somebody sitting here judging him.” In fact, she had to build a trust with him so that he felt comfortable opening up to her for as long as he did. “He called me Wendy, and I called him Jeff,” she recounts.
“Jeff wanted to identify all the victims,” Patrickus reveals. Not only that, but he also recounted what was going through his head as he murdered each of his victims. And at times, “that was more than I could stand,” she says of hearing the specifics around how he killed them.
She adds, “I was flabbergasted.”
Those previously unheard recordings are at the center of the docuseries from director Joe Berlinger, who explained to ET why he wanted to feature the lawyer on-camera. For him, one of the biggest takeaways was how this woman was largely erased from the narrative surrounding Dahmer.
“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 says. “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.”
“But, until recently, we weren’t really including women in the storytelling around serial killers other than as victims,” he continues. “So, to me that’s an important element of why and how we told the story.”
In addition to speaking to Dahmer, Patrickus’ boss, Gerry Boyle, insisted that she walk through Dahmer’s apartment, which was now a crime scene following his arrest. After describing what she saw once inside, she had to leave so she could vomit outside the building.
“I was the only woman,” she recalls. “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 adds, “It was terrifying to see that this was real.”
Later, when she saw the Polaroids that Dahmer took of his victims’ mutilated bodies, Patrickus says everything took on a whole new scope for her. “I had nightmares with it,” she says, recalling, “I was just thinking, ‘How am I going to get through this? I don’t have anybody to talk to about it.’”
Patrickus is just one of many people who spoke out for the docuseries, detailing the horrifyingly horrible things Dahmer did. Berlinger says that while he didn’t have trouble convincing most people to go on camera, “Wendy was a little reluctant.”
But once she did, she was able to demonstrate just how evil Dahmer was. “Was it hard for me to listen to all this stuff? It always is. It's always painful,” Berlinger says of sitting down with the lawyer as well as the other people who participated in the docuseries.
Conversations With a Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes is now streaming on Netflix.
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