Ryan Murphy says he reached out to Dahmer’s victims’ families, but ‘not a single person responded’

Ryan Murphy has finally spoken out about one of Dahmer’s biggest controversies, with him revealing he did indeed reach out to the families of Dahmer’s victims.

Dahmer became a microcosm of true crime’s biggest debate, with the series seen as exploitative of real life tragedy and disregarding the very real hurt felt by real people from its titular serial killer. Murphy has made a bit of a name for himself out of macabre subject matters on TV, and one of the big complaints is seemingly something he tried to rectify.

Speaking at a Dahmer promotional event in Los Angeles, Murphy revealed the production team reached out to 20 of the victim’s families, but says they never heard anything back. From there, it seems they decided to do absolutely nothing. Who’d have thought people wouldn’t want their loved one’s murders to be brought up for the purpose of making money?

“And we, over the course of the three, three and a half years when we were really writing it, working on it, we reached out to 20, around 20 of the victims’ families and friends trying to get input, trying to talk to people and not a single person responded to us in that process. So we relied very, very heavily on our incredible group of researchers who… I don’t even know how they found a lot of this stuff. But it was just like a night and day effort to us trying to uncover the truth of these people.”

Murphy did however give his support for memorials to each of Dahmer’s victims, and said he’d put forward his own money to make it a reality. Perhaps Murphy putting his money forward, and not Netflix’s, is a tad tone deaf. Dahmer is now the second most popular English language show on the entire platform, so money for a few memorials feels very small compared to the amount of money the show has brought in.

“Anything that we could do to get that (memorials) to happen, you know, I would even be happy to pay for it myself. I do think there should be something. And we’re trying to get a hold of people to talk about that. I think there’s some resistance because they think the park would attract people who are interested in paying homage to the macabre… but I think something should be done.”

Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story is currently available to stream on Netflix, with the show having been recently one-upped by another true crime series for the service’s top spot.