Jeffrey Dahmer’s defense attorney recalls first meeting with serial killer: ‘I felt like Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs’

Wendy Patrickus is a participant in Netflix’s ‘Conversations With A Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes’

Wendy Patrickus, who was once Jeffrey Dahmer’s defense attorney, opens up about working on behalf of the serial murderer in a new documentary.

Conversations With A Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes will air on Netflix on 7 October in the UK and in the US. Patrickus participated in the documentary, directed by Joe Berlinger, to discuss the case and her involvement in Dahmer’s legal team.

At the time she was assigned Dahmer’s case, Patrickus was in her twenties and had just moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where Dahmer was arrested in July of 1991.

In the documentary, Patrickus recalls being sent to speak with Dahmer by her boss Gerald Boyle, who also worked as Dahmer’s attorney.

“When I first went in to see him, it was a very small interview room,” she says in the program. “There was Jeff sitting in the corner of the table. I was incredibly nervous, because this is something that I felt was way over my head. ... I felt like Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs.”

If you’ve not seen that 1991 film by Jonathan Demme, Starling is a fictional FBI trainee in the adaptation of Thomas Harris’s 1988 novel of the same name. In both the book and film, Starling tries to enlist the cooperation of serial killer Hannibal Lecter to solve another series of murders.

In the new Netflix documentary, Patrickus discusses having to build a rapport with Dahmer in order to perform her duties as an attorney.

“In order to be a good defense attorney, you have to be non-judgemental and develop a trust,” she says. “He called me Wendy, and I called him Jeff.”

She is then heard on tape telling Dahmer: “This is okay, Jeff. I mean, don’t be embarrassed about it. Am I making you uncomfortable?”

“No,” Dahmer replies. “It has to be faced, so... It’s just so bizarre, isn’t it? It’s not... It’s not easy to talk about. It’s something I’ve kept buried within myself for many years, and it’s like trying to pull up a two-ton stone out of a well.”

Wendy Patrickus and Jeffrey Dahmer in ‘Conversations With A Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes' (Netflix © 2022)

Dahmer confessed to killing 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991. He was sentenced to life in prison in 199 and was killed while imprisoned on 28 November 1994.

The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes is the third instalment in Netflix’s Conversations With A Killer series, whose first two seasons focused respectively on Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy.

It is being released a bit more than two weeks after Ryan Murphy’s Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, a dramatization of the case.