Joe Berlinger may have just revealed Jeffrey Dahmer as the subject of the next season of Conversations With a Killer following Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy.
In an exclusive interview with MovieMaker, we asked the director if Jeffrey Dahmer might be the subject of the true crime series’ next season. And while Berlinger didn’t give us an official answer — Netflix hasn’t renewed the series for Season 3 yet — he did say that Dahmer would be “a pretty good bet.”
“Since no plans have been announced, I’m not necessarily able to tell you that. But I think if you were a betting person, it would be a pretty good bet to think that that might be where we’re headed,” Berlinger said. “I can’t confirm, just because I’m not allowed to. But you could imagine.”
Dahmer, also known by nicknames like The Milwaukee Cannibal and The Milwaukee Monster, confessed to murdering 17 men and boys from the late 1970s to the early 1990s.
Also Read: John Wayne Gacy Tapes: Joe Berlinger Is Fascinated by Killer Clown’s ‘Betrayal of Trust’
If Joe Berlinger did choose Dahmer for the next subject of Conversations With a Killer, it would be well-timed, considering Evan Peters is set to star as the famed serial killer in Ryan Murphy’s upcoming series Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, which is slated to premiere sometime this year.
Dahmer was previously played by Ross Lynch in 2017’s My Friend Dahmer, directed by Marc Meyers, and by Jeremy Renner in David Jacobsen’s 2002’s horror-thriller Dahmer. Dahmer has also been the subject of multiple true-crime documentaries in the past, including the Real Stories documentary Jeffrey Dahmer: The Milwaukee Cannibal, which you can watch in full on YouTube.
Conversations With a Killer: The John Wayne Gacy Tapes premiered on April 20, quickly shooting up to No. 1 on Netflix’s most-watched list. Berlinger told us he won’t let the series go on in perpetuity, but he does want to keep exploring the “golden age of serial killers” — of which Dahmer is undoubtedly a key player.
“I don’t think Conversations With a Killer is going to go on forever,” he said. “There’s a handful of killers who represent… I use this word perversely, but — the ‘golden age of the serial killer’ really starts with [Charles] Manson’s arrest and ends with Dahmer. So you’ve got Gacy, you’ve got Dahmer, you’ve got Son of Sam. I mean, all of these are interestingly connected, because police departments, for whatever reason, didn’t learn to communicate with each other. Cases could have been solved far earlier if there was greater communication.
“There wasn’t a lot of knowledge about serial killers. Once Bundy was arrested, that’s when the mind hunter profiling — they interviewed Bundy and that’s when that whole period of profiling really came to be. But until then, law enforcement and the FBI were not doing a great job in corralling this growing spate of serial killers during that era.”
Another factor that contributed to serial killers being able to roam free during the late 20th century was the lack of DNA technology.
“The other thing is forensic science… was not where it is today. No DNA technology. There was a lot less opportunity to solve this kind of crime than there was once DNA and other forensic techniques were created. So this period is a fascinating period. It’s the most prolific period of serial killing in the country,” he said. “Police departments were fragmented, prevailing social attitudes towards the day impacted how people thought about victims of crime. So for all these reasons, it is a very interesting period.”
Will Jeffrey Dahmer be the next subject of Berling and Netflix’s Conversations With a Killer series? According to Joe Berlinger, you might want to bet on it.
Main Image: Jeffrey Dahmer pictured in Jeffrey Dahmer: The Milwaukee Cannibal courtesy of Real Stories.
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