Netflix’s Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story
Ep. 9: “The Bogeyman”
Directed by Jennifer Lynch
Written by Ian Brennan, David McMillan, & Reilly Smith

* For a recap & review of Ep. 8, click here.
* For a recap & review of Ep. 10, click here.
Jeffrey’s in prison and trying to acclimate to life there. He jokes with a guard that he asked for “two cyanide pills” and “a razor blade.” He receives some mail. A letter from a girl called Alice tells him about boys dressing up like him at high school for Halloween and a comic book has been made about him. She sends him $5 and asks if he’ll send something back, like a drawing maybe, agreeing to send more money if he writes to her. So, of course, Jeffrey picks up a sheet of paper. He traces his hand out on the page, writing a little note to Alice on the bottom, too. One day in the prison cafeteria, Jeffrey yells out about a chicken drumstick looking like “a human thumb,” then he puts ketchup on a stripped chicken bone, talking about how things looked when he was finished with a victim. A Black prisoner says he doesn’t like that, but Jeffrey replies: “My fans do.”

Glenda’s back at her apartment but the memories of Dahmer still linger, from the police tape on the old apartment to the media like CNN still camped outside looking for any residual stories they might be able to discover. Her daughter Sandra doesn’t want her to stay in that place, claiming she can still smell “the death” there. Glenda can’t afford it and she generally doesn’t want to leave, she doesn’t want Jeffrey to take anything else from her at this point.
In prison, Jeffrey pays a guard $5 to get him a tape of whale sounds. He plays them while lying in bed with a sock over his face. It only pisses off the other prisoners and eventually the guards, too. They soon take away Jeffrey’s tape. One of the guards says he wishes Dahmer was given the electric chair, and Jeffrey, in darkly comic fashion, says he tried to get it: “They gave me 900 years instead.”
Tony Hughes’s mother Shirley gets a package from the people who wrote the comic book about Dahmer. She’s infuriated. She wants to sue. Her lawyer also tells her about Lionel’s book. He suggests they go after the family for the money, along with Jeffrey and the city, too. Elsewhere, Lionel and Shari are reading reviews of his book. There’s something interesting in here about true crime and making money off the experiences of victims. Yes, Lionel’s son is the murderer, but he didn’t suffer like his son’s victims, and there’s an exploitative nature to it all, especially since there’s a potential movie deal in the works. In prison, Jeffrey sees a report on tv about Lionel and the book, looking proudly at his father.

It isn’t too long before Lionel hears about legal repercussions. A judge has ordered that any profits from the books will go to the victims’ families, as well as any money Jeffrey makes in prison. The families are rightly angry about money being made off the horror stories of their loved ones. At home, the Sinthasomphones receive a nasty racist phone call telling them to go back where they came from, as they’re still reeling from what happened to Konerak. Not only that, Somsack remains traumatised by his own encounter with Dahmer. Everybody whose lives Jeffrey touched have been irreparably altered forever. Somsack relives his own trauma and has nightmarish visions of what his brother experience at Dahmer’s hands, too.

The cops are largely busy patting themselves on the back at a big celebration, where the two cops who let Konerak Sinthasomphone go back to a serial killer are given awards for nonsense. Juxtaposed with this is the police chief at a tiny reception somewhere in a church basement, giving a citizen’s merit award to Glenda Cleveland for her effort to try and save Konerak. Glenda says she’ll accept the award only if the police do better. She tells the chief: “Don‘t let this happen again.” The Sinthasomphone family are busy seeking a civil suit against the city, as well. The lawyer is going to sue for $10-million. She also intends to take whatever money Dahmer makes for the families, as well. Yet that only makes white folks more angry and the Sinthasomphone family get more racist calls at home throughout their nights.
Everybody’s trying to move past the horrific things Dahmer did to the victims, but the memories continue to haunt them all in various ways. Glenda can’t even sit in her living room anymore without hearing all the noises she once did through the vents, reliving the horrors all over again. A lot of folks in the building have taken to going downstairs and sleeping together in the hall, a form of communal trauma and also comfort. And that only lasts so long before the manager puts a stop to it for safety reasons.
Glenda goes to the funeral for Konerak, where the family are grieving and a priest who helped the Sinthasomphones come over from Laos is lending a hand. She goes to speak with Mr. Sinthasomphone and introduces herself. She apologises to him for trusting the police even when she knew something was wrong. He doesn’t hold that against her, saying: “You do everything you can.”
We see Lionel go visit his mother, now in a care home. He laments the film not going forward, claiming he only wanted to help other parents “look out for the warning signs,” as if he wouldn’t have made a ton of money. He says he would’ve had Raquel Welch play his mother. He then tells his mother that Jeffrey loved her “in his own way.” He assures she did her best to try and help Jeffrey, too.

Glenda comes upon a few young men taking weird photos outside their apartment building, and her daughter Sandra smashes the men’s camera. They go upstairs and turn on the television to see Jeffrey on Dateline with his father, talking about the murders and his motives. None of the victims’ families are happy to see it on television, though nobody can look away, either. Konerak’s harrowing tale is told, but Glenda can’t listen to any more of it, turning the TV off.
Glenda doesn’t get why Jeffrey gets to “tell his story” all over the place like a Halloween tale. Soon, cops show up at her door. The cops are there to arrest Sandra over the broken camera; the guy who owned it is pressing charges. Just more shitty fallout from Dahmer’s crimes, all the side effects and repercussions coming to bear down on the same community Jeffrey terrorised for years.

Joe Zilber, a real estate developer, paid a bunch of money to get everything from the auction of Dahmer’s things. He had it all destroyed. Then he brings the money to all the families, each of them getting over $30K. We also see Mr. Sinthasomphone get another racist call, which we then discover is coming from the two cops who were put on leave but recently reinstated. Ugly stuff, though unsurprising. Ron Flowers is working on counselling people while simultaneously attempting to get past everything about Dahmer that haunts him, too.
At home, Glenda hears from the building manager that the city’s buying the building and demolishing it. She only has 60 days, though there are relocation expenses taken care of; little comfort. Glenda wants the city to do something to honour the victims’, but she certainly won’t hold her breath to wait for it. A couple months later, the old building where Dahmer once lived and committed many of his crimes is being torn down, as if it’ll somehow excavate the very memory of Jeffrey and the things he did. Glenda sees a vision of Dahmer in the window while she watches the demolition, a ghost continuing to haunt the place.

In prison, Jeffrey sits in an inmate congregation, singing along with a religious hymn. He’s attacked and stabbed in the neck by a Black prisoner suddenly. But this doesn’t kill Jeffrey. He’s in the prison hospital later when mail comes, giving Dahmer more of the infamy and notoriety he enjoys when he sees a grisly Christmas card featuring him as Santa Claus holding a severed head. A guy writes that he’s Jeffrey’s “biggest fan” and likens Dahmer to Michael Myers.