I broke Jeffrey Dahmer’s story in 1991. Here’s what the new Netflix series went wrong – The Independent

JNetflix’s new Jeffrey Dahmer series has sacrificed precision for drama, according to the reporter who first broke the sensational story more than three decades ago.

Anne E Schwartz said The Independent that the filmmakers behind Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story took “artistic license” with many key details, saying the series “doesn’t look much like the facts of the case”.

“When people watch Ryan Murphy’s Netflix series and say ‘Oh my God, that’s terrible.’ I want to tell them that it didn’t necessarily happen that way,” she said.

Ms. Schwartz worked as a court reporter for the Milwaukee Diary in 1991, when she received a call from a police source informing her that they had found a human head and body parts in a city apartment.

Rushing to the scene, Ms Schwartz said she arrived to find only a few police officers there and entered the Oxford Apartments building for further examination.

“I went up to Dahmer’s apartment, and kind of poked my head in, because you’re a journalist, you want to know,” she said. The Independent.

“I guess what was odd was that it didn’t look odd.”

She said officers slowly began to understand the scope of the crime scene upon discovering the Polaroids Dahmer had taken of his victims in various stages of dismemberment.

“They didn’t know what they were finding,” she said.

“I was a crime reporter for five years, so I know what it smells like when you walk into a building with a corpse or a decomposing body. It wasn’t that. It was a very chemical smell.

Ms Schwartz, who later worked in communications for the Milwaukee Police Department and the Wisconsin Department of Justice, said the portrayal of the city’s police officers as racist and homophobic was incorrect.

“I spent a lot of time with them, interviewing the people who were there. Again, that’s a dramatization, but in a time when it’s not really easy for law enforcement to gain community trust and buy-in, that’s not a very portrayal. useful.

In the Netflix series, Glenda Cleveland, who tried to alert the police to Dahmer’s shooting, is portrayed as living in a nearby apartment. In reality, Ms Cleveland, who died in 2011, lived in a separate building.

“Within the first five minutes of the first episode, Glenda Cleveland knocks on her door. None of this ever happened,” Ms. Schwartz says.

“I had issues with the buy-in because I knew it wasn’t accurate. But people don’t look at it that way, they look at it for entertainment.

After publishing a bestseller on the case in 1991, The Man Who Couldn’t Kill EnoughMs Schwartz said she received a phone call from Dahmer in the newsroom of a television station she worked on complaining.

Several psychiatrists who had interviewed Dahmer told Ms Schwartz that his behavior could be attributed to his parents.

“He hated it. For someone who showed no emotion or seemed to care, he was very protective of his parents, especially his mother,” she said. The Independent.

The phone call was “very fast and very precise”.

“He had no inflection in his voice. He was so vanilla, he was so flat. There was nothing. He just said no one was responsible for what I expected of me.

Ms Schwartz said Dahmer was very “cunning” in the way he selected his victims. He talked to them at length in bars and on the street to attack men on the margins of society, and whose disappearance would set off no alarm bells.

This, along with his gruesome body disposal techniques, helped him get away with killing 17 boys and men before his crimes were discovered.

Additionally, victims of crime in Milwaukee’s gay community in the 1980s and early 1990s rarely reported offenses to police for fear of being reported to their families or employers, she said. declared.

After the murders attracted national and international attention, people regularly turned up at Oxford flats looking for memorabilia.

When Dahmer’s building was razed last year, some tried to take bricks and bits of dirt, and the land remains vacant and surrounded by high fences to this day.

As the Dahmer series broke Netflix’s Week 1 record for most hours watched, Ms. Schwartz says Milwaukee is “absolutely done hearing about the case.”

“The people of Milwaukee think it’s a horrible stain on the city, they don’t want people to think about it.”

Last year Ms Schwartz wrote an updated version of the 1991 book and re-interviewed the main characters to gather their thoughts 30 years later.

His new book released last October, Monster: The True Story of the Jeffrey Dahmer Murders.

* Monster: The True Story of the Jeffrey Dahmer Murders was published by Union Square Publishing and is available on Amazon.