Netflix’s latest true crime show, this time charting the crimes and background of notorious serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, has made a strong impression with viewers and critics. The series feels sick – yellow footage transports us to Dahmer’s warped mind and his miserable Milwaukee apartment where he committed most of his crimes throughout the 1980s.
There’s a lot to confuse on the show, not least the guy’s headspace himself, but perhaps one of the more eye-catching questions revolves around Dahmer’s yellow eyes, or more specifically the yellow contact lenses he likes to wear. Yes, this creepy yellow-eyed representation of Dahmer on the Netflix cover of the show isn’t just there for design, it’s based on something real the infamous killer was doing.
In the show, we see Dahmer with yellow eyes for the first time in Episode 2, after he drugged 14-year-old Lao boy Konerak Sinthasomphone in his apartment. From the boy’s first person perspective, we see Dahmer’s back at the end of the bed, before he turns around to reveal that he’s wearing yellow contact lenses. At first, you think that maybe the yellow eyes are part of the drunken boy’s delirium, but then we realize that Dahmer actually set them up to present to his victim.
Dahmer then seems eager to show his victim his contact lenses, saying he loves them because they make him look like Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, who is “so cool.” Throughout the show, Dahmer watches various movies with his victims. Along with Star Wars, The Exorcist Part III was one of his favorites, and in Episode 1 we see him watching a clip of that movie where a demon – again with yellow eyes – attacks a priest trying to expel him from his human host. Both of these films, and their villains, were actually Dahmer’s obsessions in real life, and they weren’t added to the show just for chilling effect.
There were countless interviews with Dahmer over the years leading up to his death at the hands of a fellow prisoner in 1994, but none of them spoke of his love for Star Wars, The Exorcist, or The Emperor. Information about his fondness for these films and yellow contact lenses was first conveyed in 1992 by Dahmer’s attorney, Gerald Boyle, during the trial. a 1992 story by The Washington Post Covering the case said the following:
Boyle said Dahmer became obsessed with two movie characters – the emperor in “Return of the Jedi” and the devil in “The Exorcist III.” Boyle said Dahmer bought yellow contact lenses in an attempt to resemble the emperor and felt that “because of what it was…no entity other than Satan was associated with.”
Connecting Dahmer’s film interests to Satanism may have been somewhat of a stretch by Boyle. Despite possessing the Satanic Bible, Dahmer never expressed an interest in the Satanic religion and was not identified as a Satanist, but the use of links with the Satanic religion in court would have been evocative at a time when the United States was still in the midst of the so-called ‘Satanic panic’. “
It’s possible that Boyle’s information regarding contact lenses based on The Emperor and the Devil from The Exorcist came from psychic evaluations of Dahmer himself, but it’s also possible that he embellished the story for the jury. The details are so specific that Dahmer will likely wear yellow contacts at some point With his victims, but we can’t be sure it was some kind of long-term habit or gimmick for him.
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