Silver mannequin scene
It was so bizarre, funny, sad, and creepy all in one. The way he first looks at the mannequin made me laugh. Except not so funny that later he treated real people like that mannequin.
shareAnd this is exactly what happened too. I own the first edition biography written by his father and comparing this show is very accurate.
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Especially the racial stuff? So now people want to make a hero out of Jeffrey Dahmer? I am old enough to remember when this went down. It was huge news. I remember hearing the victim statements from the families in court. The show is not pushing anything that didn’t really happen.
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“The show is not pushing anything that didn’t really happen.”
Not true. I’ve only watched the first four episodes so far but I’ve already caught several things that differ from real life, based on what I’ve studied. The big one is the altercation between Jeff and Steven Hicks, which I made a thread about.
As for Konerak, I could have sworn Jeff met him playing in the street by himself and not outside a liquor store with friends. I don’t think Jeff would risk being seen by his friend group.
I’ve never heard Jeff mention the cops making snarky comments to him. Correct me if I’m wrong.
Another thing is Tracy Edwards. I’m pretty sure he was straight and was lured from the street and not a gay bar.
In real life, Jeff’s grandma found the mannequin in his closet and not his bed, thus she probably wouldn’t have leapt to the conclusion that Jeff is gay based on this. Lionel says that Jeff claimed he liked the clothes on the mannequin and had dared himself to steal it.
As already mentioned, the women who alerted the police weren’t Jeff’s direct neighbors. His real-life neighbor who has spoken publicly was friendly with Jeff and thought that the smells coming from his apartment were him cooking something like chitlins. She never suspected murder.
Those don’t seem like big changes. All dramatizations take some liberties to build the story. No big difference that the mannequin was found in a closet v. a bed. It is still something weird his father would have harkened back to as a sign of his son’s demented behaviors.
shareThe Steven Hicks scene is a big change from real life and is kind of insulting to the victim. The show makes it look like he called Jeff an anti-gay slur and Jeff reacted in anger by hitting him over the head and then strangling him. Jeff in real life didn’t say anything about an altercation, just that he killed Steven because he didn’t want him to leave. The change makes Jeff look sympathetic and like Steven ‘had it coming’.
The change with the Konerak scene is kind of important because the real Jeff would approach men/boys who were alone and it would have been risky to allow Konerak’s friends to see him and make himself an obvious suspect.
Finding a mannequin in the closet vs. bed might cause different reactions. A mannequin in the bed has sexual connotations whereas finding a mannequin in Jeff’s closet probably would have just led his grandmother to assume he was after the clothes on the mannequin, which is what the real Jeff claimed. Lionel says in his book that it never occurred to him that Jeff may have been homosexual. It was his wife Sherri that told Lionel that she felt there was something more to the mannequin situation.
The change with the neighbor erases an interesting dynamic that existed in real life. Jeff’s neighbor being completely unsuspecting of his horrific acts and just thinking of him as a friendly guy is more chilling than your neighbor being an obvious predator.