It may look pretty true-to-life, but there's plenty of factual inaccuracies in Netflix's Monster.
Here's what the show gets wrong about the Jeffrey Dahmer story.
The dramatized version of Jeffrey Dahmer's life shows him getting a job in a blood plasma
clinic in Milwaukee.
While there he gets hold of a bag of blood and sidles up to the roof, where he proceeds
to consume it.
This isn't strictly accurate.
It's true that after being discharged from the military, where he worked as a Germany-based
Army medic between 1979 and 1981, he got a job as a phlebotomist in a plasma clinic.
His discharge from the army happened due to accusations of alcohol abuse.
After leaving, he got a job in a delicatessen, but was thrown out of the hotel he was lodging
in for not paying the rent.
He had stints living with his father and stepmother as well as his aunt, punctuated by trouble
with the law.
"I knew I was sick or evil or both.
Now, I believe I was sick."
Only a week after he moved in with his family, he was arrested for disorderly conduct related
to his drinking.
Dahmer was fined $60 and given a 10-day jail sentence, which was suspended.
It wouldn't be the first time he was arrested on this basis.
When he moved in with his aunt, Dahmer started working in the Milwaukee Blood Plasma Center.
Yet surprisingly for a future cannibal, Dahmer did not initially like the taste of blood.
Rather than drinking a whole bag of it, he reportedly took some from the blood plasma
clinic where he worked, trying a vial before spitting it out.
Jeffrey Dahmer's violent rampage came to an end in 1991, when he was caught after one
of his victims alerted the police, having narrowly escaped from Dahmer's apartment.
The killer was tried, convicted, and given 15 consecutive life sentences.
His attempt to plead insanity was rejected, and in total he was sentenced to 941 years in prison.
Yet he would serve less than three of those years before meeting his ultimate fate.
"I didn't ever want freedom.
Frankly, I wanted death for myself."
Fellow prisoner Christopher Scarver, another convicted murderer, had grown angry with Dahmer's
behavior in prison.
Scarver claimed to the New York Post that he was particularly upset over Dahmer's fondness
for pretending ketchup was blood and shaping prison food into what looked like human body parts.
Dahmer's murder apparently came about because Scarver felt that he was unrepentant about
his crimes, something his fellow prisoner claimed he could tell from the serial killer's eyes.
However, Scarver later wrote in a blog post that the Post misquoted him.
Dahmer's lawyer also contested Scarver's claims, saying that taunting people wasn't his former
client's "style."
Monster shows Scarver attacking inmate Jesse Anderson before moving on to Dahmer.
However, in reality he went for Dahmer first.
Although he had initially been isolated from the other prisoners, Dahmer had requested
a greater level of interaction, including being able to work and eat meals with the
general prison population.
He apparently used to taunt them by saying "I bite."
When left alone with Anderson and Dahmer while on cleaning duty, Scarver attacked and beat
Dahmer to death before turning on Anderson.
Jeffrey Dahmer stated that one of his victims, a man from the deaf community named Tony Hughes,
only became known to him the night before he was murdered.
This was untrue.
Although Monster shows them dating over the course of 1991, in reality they had known
each other since 1989.
According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, a friend of Hughes stated that the pair had
been seeing each other for two years before Hughes was abducted.
Dahmer had visited her house at least six times in search of him.
According to Esquire, Hughes had become a member of the deaf community when some medication
he received as an infant led to a permanent loss of hearing.
He also became a mute.
Despite these setbacks, his mother reported that he was a happy and confident young man
who had modeling aspirations while he was a college student in Madison, Wisconsin.
Monster shows Hughes and Dahmer forming a relationship where Dahmer displays an unusual
degree of tenderness towards the other man.
Hughes was seen alive for the final time in May 1991 at Milwaukee's 219 Club.
Dahmer lured him back to his apartment, drugged him, and murdered him, dismembering his body
in the process and keeping his skull as a trophy.
Monster shows Glenda Cleveland, the conscience of the whole saga, living in the same building
as Jeffrey Dahmer.
Although Cleveland lived near Dahmer and tried to alert the police, she was not his direct
neighbor like the show claims.
In the show, Cleveland's suspicions are piqued when she hears the disturbing sounds of screams
and a body being dismembered coming through the air vent into her apartment.
She takes note of this and is furious with the police as they only apprehend Dahmer when
his potential 18th victim, Tracy Edwards, escapes from Dahmer's apartment and alerts
them about his attempted murder.
She had tried numerous times to contact the police and the FBI about her suspicions after
she recognized one of the missing men as someone Dahmer had interacted with, but it was weeks
until Dahmer was caught.
Yet the show deviates from the truth in that Cleveland didn't live in the Oxford apartments building.
Instead she was in a building nearby.
The Milwaukee Sentinel Journal points out that there is a moment in the Netflix show
when Dahmer makes her a sandwich, something that happened to other people in his building
but was cited in particular by Pamela Bisson, one of Dahmer's neighbors.
A chilling exchange of this nature happens during the show, but with Cleveland, who never
experienced it.
Monster therefore seems to fuse the characters of Bisson and Cleveland together.
The officers in the Jeffrey Dahmer case faced heavy criticism rather than veneration as
the show implies — even though both men saw their careers recover.
In Monster, Balcerzak and Gabrish are shown receiving "officer of the year" awards for
finally apprehending Dahmer.
In reality, no such things happened.
An AP story from 1991 shows that the men tried to defend their actions in the face of staunch
criticism and a suspension from duty after it was revealed they had unknowingly returned
one of Dahmer's victims to him.
14-year-old Konerak Sinthasomphone had escaped naked and bleeding from Dahmer's apartment,
but was returned and left there after the two patrolmen believed Dahmer's story that
they were lovers and that Sinthasomphone was an older man who was simply drunk.
Dahmer later admitted to murdering the teenager just after the police dropped him off.
The officers involved said that there seemed to be no other red flags.
Both were suspended for seven weeks and then fired.
However, Balcerzak and Gabrish were both reinstated in 1994, and given around $55,000 of back-pay.
The judge who made the decision claimed the penalty for their conduct had been too harsh,
a decision that was heavily criticized by community activists as it was believed the
men's homophobia and racism stopped any further investigation.
Somsack Sinthasomphone was attacked by Jeffrey Dahmer in 1988 after the older man persuaded
him to come back to his apartment and pose nude for him.
Somsack agreed to do it after Dahmer offered him money.
Since escaping from communist-dominated Laos, the Sinthasomphone family had been taking
jobs as welders and machinists to support the family.
Dahmer had recently moved from his grandmother's house and into an apartment of his own, giving
him more space to pursue his crimes.
Although he didn't try to kill the teenager, Dahmer drugged and assaulted him, causing
him to flee in terror.
Dahmer was arrested in September 1988, and in January 1989 he pled guilty to the charges
of second-degree sexual assualt and "tempting a child for immoral reasons."
Judge William Gardner is castigated in the show for not understanding the broken English
of the father of the Sinthasomphone brothers.
However, Anne E. Schwartz's book Monster: The True Story of the Jeffrey Dahmer Murders,
states that the family was not present for the sentencing as they were not told it was happening.
Dahmer was ordered to serve a year at a work release camp followed by a five-year probationary period.
He wrote a letter expressing remorse and was released in 1990 — a decision that the New
York Times highlights the family were not told about, although the Milwaukee Police
Department insisted they were.
Ron Flowers came perilously close to taking Jeffrey Dahmer's final body count to 18 rather than 17.
Dahmer offered him assistance when he saw that Flowers was struggling with a broken-down car.
Monster shows him taking Flowers back to his grandmother's house and drugging his coffee
with the intention of ultimately murdering him.
"There was a big element of wanting complete control over someone."
However, the Netflix series shows Dahmer's grandmother intervening to prevent it.
She gets suspicious about Flowers' unconscious state despite Dahmer's claims that he simply
had too much to drink, insisting on staying awake until Flowers comes around.
She even goes as far as escorting the two men to the bus stop so that Dahmer makes sure
Flowers gets home.
The young man wakes up at the end of the bus route, being told to leave by the driver,
and fully gains consciousness in hospital.
Yet the Tab reports this not to be true.
What actually happened was that Flowers, despite being a fairly lean figure in the show, weighed
250 pounds and was deemed to be too heavy a potential corpse for Dahmer, who was unconvinced
that he would be able to drag the body away to hide it.
Flowers only remembered going to Dahmer's house before waking up in hospital.
He claimed the other man had assaulted him, but when the police questioned Dahmer they
believed his version of events.
The first episode of Monster shows Dahmer's last potential victim, Tracy Edwards, trying
frantically to leave Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment after Dahmer threatens him with a knife.
"He told me at that point that if I didn't do what he said he would kill me."
He somehow manages, despite the door to Dahmer's apartment being heavily secured with multiple locks.
Edwards had been lured to Dahmer's residence by the promise of money in exchange for his
posing for nude photographs.
He became suspicious when he noticed foul odors and boxes of hydrochloric acid.
Dahmer then handcuffed him before getting him to be the subject of his polaroids.
Edwards calmed him down when Dahmer became violent, but punched him in the face during
the killer's lapse in concentration.
He would later claim that Dahmer "underestimated" him.
Upon escaping, he was able to convince the police that Dahmer had tried to kill him.
The investigation of Dahmer's apartment led to his final arrest and ultimate conviction.
However, the show got one detail of the scenes with Edwards wrong: there were only two locks
on Dahmer's door.
The Lad Bible describes how Edwards' account of the story changed after the incident, claiming
during appearances on talk shows that there were multiple locks on the door.
Additionally, the blog for the Little Dean Jail crime museum draws attention to a photo
of the door that was taken at the crime scene, which formed a part of the police file.
It only shows two locks.
A year before his son died in prison, Jeffrey Dahmer's father Lionel wrote a book titled
A Father's Story in which he analyzes the various reasons for why his son might have
turned out the way he did.
"His mother didn't know.
I didn't know.
And apparently none of his playmates knew."
He includes his belief that his wife's addiction to various medications, including sleeping
pills, while pregnant with Jeffrey hindered their son's emotional development.
Monster highlights that she was diagnosed with postpartum psychosis.
Yet Lionel also blames himself, with the book detailing how he had a youthful fascination
with using hypnosis as a tool of control.
He also had similar fantasies to his son about wondering what it would be like to murder
people.
In the book he laments having not made the connection between this and his son's more
psychopathic tendencies.
The Netflix series shows that the book was a commercial failure, even if it gained some
favorable reviews from critics.
Yet the show is incorrect when it states that all 17 families of Dahmer's victims tried
to sue for royalties due to Lionel not gaining permission to use their life stories.
In reality, the Orlando Sentinel highlights that only two families tried to do this.
According to Collider, the book was so commercially unsuccessful that it didn't generate enough
profit to give any meaningful support to the families of Dahmer's victims.
Joyce Dahmer, Jeffrey's mother, reportedly tried to publish an account refuting her ex-husband's
claim that her health issues contributed to her son's twisted development.
Such a book was never released.