On February 17, 1992, the families of fifteen men and boys were allowed to speak to Jeffrey Dahmer in a Milwaukee courtroom. Most of them stayed calm. Errol Lindsey’s sister did not; she shouted, "Jeffrey, I hate you!" Thirty years later her words came back to her in a Netflix drama, spoken by an actress, and she said that nobody had asked her.
Films and series about serial cases are made for audiences. The people with the most at stake in how they are made are the relatives of the dead and the few survivors, and they have said so in many ways: with outrage, with qualified acceptance, with a request to be left out, with silence. What follows is what they said, in their own words wherever those words were kept, and what the makers said in return, not the crimes themselves. Sometimes the families have said nothing in public at all.
Jeffrey Dahmer pleaded guilty but insane to 15 murders. A jury rejected the insanity claim, voting 10 to 2 on each count, and he was sentenced on February 17, 1992, to 15 consecutive life terms. On November 28, 1994, a fellow inmate killed him in a Wisconsin prison.
Relatives spoke twice in those two days. After the sanity verdict Shirley Hughes, the mother of Tony Hughes, thanked God, the prosecutor and the jury for "bringing in justice for us." Louis Rios, a relative of Ernest Miller, said he had prayed every night that Dahmer would not be declared insane. At the sentencing two days later, one relative asked whether Dahmer had ever considered that his victim was someone’s son, and another said, "I refuse to let you destroy me."
In September 2022 Netflix released the series Dahmer, with Evan Peters in the title role. By Deadline’s count it became Netflix’s second most-watched series, with 205.33 million hours viewed in its third week. Relatives of the victims were among its critics. Rita Isbell, who is Errol Lindsey’s sister, told an interviewer that the series dramatizes her victim impact statement from 1992. She said she was never contacted about the show and that she was upset to see her name on the screen and an actress repeating her words: "when I saw my name come across the screen and this lady saying verbatim exactly what I said." She did not watch it. "I don’t need to watch it. I lived it. I know exactly what happened." Netflix, she said, should have asked the families for permission and could have shared some of the profit with the victims' children and grandchildren. "That’s just greed," she said.
Eric Perry, a cousin of Errol Lindsey, wrote on Twitter that the series was "retraumatizing" his family. Okayplayer, a culture site, describes the relatives who criticized the series as boycotting it.
The complaint Isbell makes is about consent and money. In a courtroom thirty years earlier the families had been given a place and a chance to speak. In the series, she says, her words were reused without a call to her.
The film with the longest record of reaction from a family is Dead Man Walking. Its subject is Sister Helen Prejean, a Catholic nun who accompanied condemned prisoners, and it was drawn from her 1993 book. The film, released in 1995, combines the stories of her first two death row counselees, Elmo Patrick Sonnier and Robert Lee Willie. It was nominated for four Academy Awards at the 68th ceremony, and Susan Sarandon won Best Actress.
Willie was convicted of the first-degree murder of Faith Hathaway, 18, who was killed on May 28, 1980, in Washington Parish, Louisiana. A jury sentenced him to death in October 1980. The Louisiana Supreme Court vacated the sentence in 1982; a new penalty hearing produced a death sentence again, which the court affirmed in 1983; and on August 6, 1984, the Fifth Circuit affirmed the denial of federal habeas relief. His co-defendant, Joseph Vaccaro, was also convicted of first-degree murder but received a life sentence. Willie was executed on December 28, 1984.
Faith’s mother, Elizabeth Harvey, and her stepfather pressed for Willie’s execution and kept attending executions afterward, in the investigator’s words as an effort to keep another family from suffering the same loss. When the film appeared, Elizabeth Harvey told Prejean, as Prejean recalled it in 1996, that it "crucified us." Prejean said she thought she would die when she heard it, and asked herself: "how could I do that to them?" She also said she had run the manuscript of her book by the Harveys before publication so that they could correct anything inaccurate, and that she regretted not reaching out earlier to a survivor of the second crime, who was a minor at the time: "a failure on my part."
Elizabeth Harvey’s own account, given to Frontline in the same year, concerned who gets heard. "And if we don’t speak for them, they are going to be silent forever," she said of victims. She had hoped Prejean would reach out to victims' families: "I wanted her to see the other side of the coin." Of Prejean’s public prominence she said, "They’ve given her that attention. She couldn’t have gotten it all by herself."
Others in the case spoke to the book’s accuracy rather than its tone. Mike Varnado, the Washington Parish investigator, said Prejean "didn’t go to the files, she didn’t go to the clerk’s office," and that she relied mainly on a defense file and Willie’s account. He said he resented her bringing the case back up. A court clerk who attended Willie’s 1980 trial, Jo Anne Smith, thought Sean Penn’s portrayal of Willie startlingly close: "the similarity was almost frightening." A survivor who testified at the trial said Willie was clearly in charge, which Frontline’s reporter notes contradicts the way the book portrays his role. The Harveys read Willie’s last gesture as defiance, not peace; Prejean was present at his execution and hoped it signaled peace. "No one will ever know," Frontline’s reporter concludes.
Charles Cullen, a nurse who worked in New Jersey and Pennsylvania hospitals until 2003, pleaded guilty to the murder of 29 patients and to attempted murders, and told investigators the real number of his victims was 30 to 40. On March 2, 2006, he was sentenced in New Jersey to 11 consecutive life terms; on March 10 he received further life sentences in Pennsylvania, his twelfth life sentence overall coming in the case of Ottomar Schramm, who died in 1998. He avoided the death penalty by agreeing to help prosecutors identify his victims. Charles Graeber, who wrote the 2013 book on which the 2022 Netflix film The Good Nurse is based, believes the true figure could be in the hundreds.
The relatives of the patients he killed spoke at his sentencing. Richard J. Stoecker, whose mother was one of the victims, told Cullen: "In case he forgot what my mother looked like, look into my eyes now, Mr. Cullen." Kristina Toth, Schramm’s daughter, said the Pennsylvania sentence offered no closure: "We live in a world touched by someone else’s evil and that will never change." Cullen did not attend that hearing. Seven years later, asked on 60 Minutes to explain himself to the families, he said: "It felt like I needed to do something and I did. And that’s not an answer to anything."
No relative of a victim is known to have spoken publicly about the 2022 film. The makers' account of the film begins from the other side of the story. The film, directed by Tobias Lindholm, follows a colleague, Amy Loughren, played by Jessica Chastain, who helped detectives, and Eddie Redmayne plays Cullen. Redmayne said the cast and director "really leaned into" Cullen’s kindness and charm "and not the serial killer side," because Loughren had felt that she was dealing with two different human beings. Graeber, in Netflix’s own interview, said the film is "no more a serial killer movie than Titanic is really about an iceberg": it is about institutions and the people around them, and Loughren is the character audiences can recognize because an ordinary life is disrupted by someone like Cullen. The fact-check site HistoryvsHollywood says the film’s depiction of the plea deal and sentencing matches the real case, and that some episodes of Cullen’s time with Loughren’s daughters are creative license.
Graeber said one more thing that touches the families: they opposed Cullen’s offer, made from prison, to donate a kidney. The families' position on that is known only through Graeber.
Ted Bundy was executed at Florida State Prison on January 24, 1989, after death sentences in 1979 and 1980. He confessed to many killings in his last days, and the total has never been settled. In January 2019 a film about him, starring Zac Efron and Lily Collins, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.
A woman who survived the January 1978 Tallahassee crimes gave her reaction to TMZ on January 29, 2019, days after the trailer appeared. She said she did not object to a Bundy who was charming: "I believe that in order to show him exactly the way he was-- it’s not really glorifying him, but it’s showing him." Then she added: "I think the movie does glorify him more than I think he should be." Her advice to viewers was to see the film "as long as they understand that what they’re watching wasn’t a normal person," and she hoped that it would help women "be more aware of their surroundings, and be more cautious." On his charm she said that when people describe Bundy positively, that is what he projected, what "Bundy wanted you to see."
No relative of a victim is known to have spoken publicly about the film. The survivor’s statement is the one that circulated, and it is a mixed one: acceptance of the film as a warning, and discomfort at how much it flatters its subject.
Aileen Wuornos was convicted of first-degree murder in six cases in Florida. A Volusia County jury returned the verdict in the Mallory case in January 1992; she pleaded no contest to three more on March 31, 1992, and pleaded guilty in the remaining two, with sentences imposed in February 1993. She received six death sentences, and she confessed to a seventh killing that was never charged. She was executed on October 9, 2002.
Terry Griffith, whose father, Charles "Dick" Humphreys, was one of the men killed, watched the execution. "I’m glad that it’s over," she told CBS News. "In my opinion, it was a very easy death, it was a little bit too easy."
The 2003 film about Wuornos was the first feature of its writer-director, Patty Jenkins, and Charlize Theron won the Best Actress Oscar at the 76th Academy Awards for her performance. In an interview with the magazine Hot Press in 2004, Jenkins was asked about relatives of the men Wuornos was convicted of killing. There had been no adverse reaction from them, she said: "No, well not yet." She said she was very concerned about the families and hoped they would not see the film. The film is not the victims' story, she said, but "Aileen’s side of the story"; she kept the men as generic as she could, did not sympathize with Wuornos’s actions and did not mean to say that the victims deserved their fate, though she could not control how audiences read it.
The statement comes from the maker and not from a relative: a director saying in advance that the film was not meant for the people it concerned. Some critics said, Hot Press notes, that the film does not fully condemn the killings. Variety’s review of a separate 2003 documentary about Wuornos, by Nick Broomfield, says it focuses on her background and her "bewildered rage" and does not address the victims or their families.
Jack Unterweger was serving a life sentence for murder, imposed on May 31, 1976, when he became one of Austria’s best-known prison writers. Willi Hengstler’s film of his autobiographical novel was shown at the World Film Festival in Montreal and won the Vienna Film Prize in 1989. He was paroled on May 23, 1990. On June 28, 1994, a jury in Graz returned guilty verdicts on murder in nine of eleven cases involving women killed between 1990 and 1991, and he died by suicide in his cell hours later, so the verdict never became final.
Jack, a 2015 film by the writer-director Elisabeth Scharang, premiered at the Locarno Film Festival with Johannes Krisch in the lead. Whether the film glorifies Unterweger is the question its reception turned on, and the answer is mixed. A review in Salzburg24 said the film’s atmospheric rather than socially realistic style supports the Unterweger mystique, which makes it strong but "open to criticism," at least in Austria, and that the film gives little attention to the murdered women and puts the women close to Unterweger at the center. Scharang told the paper: "Fact is: I don’t know whether he committed the killings or not," and the film ends with a text panel that leaves the accused with the benefit of doubt. Variety’s reviewer did not call the film a glorification; the review’s objections were that it is confusing, does not explain his appeal and distorts facts for artistic effect.
No relative of a victim is known to have spoken publicly about the film. The record for Unterweger is of a different kind from the other cases: a public image that took shape before the verdict, helped by a film of his own novel that won a prize while he was in prison, and a later film that its reviewers discuss mainly in terms of him.
Francisco de Assis Pereira, a motorcycle courier in São Paulo, was arrested in August 1998 and convicted by juries of murder, with other charges. His combined sentences are reported at more than 280 years. Under the legal maximum that applies to his crimes, he could reach the limit of his sentence in August 2028. As of October 19, 2026, the São Paulo public prosecutor’s office was examining his mental health, and the state prison administration said there were no conclusive technical elements to justify compulsory internment.
In October 2024 Amazon’s Prime Video released Maníaco do Parque, a fiction film directed by Mauricio Eça, and, in November, a four-episode documentary series, Maníaco do Parque: A História Não Contada. The two take different positions on the victims. O Povo’s reviewer judged the film "a responsible approach that respects the victims' memory": it criticizes sensationalist media that blamed the murdered women, and it avoids romanticizing the offender. It invents a journalist, who by Metrópoles’s account stands for the victims and for sexism in newsrooms, and who was created so that Pereira would not be the protagonist again. Gazeta do Povo’s reviewer called the film "full of inventions."
The documentary series is built on the people the film leaves out. The series includes new interviews with women who escaped him and with relatives of his victims, as well as his family and unreleased audio of Pereira. It argues that some women met prejudice when they tried to report him to the police, and that acting on those reports could have sharply reduced the number of women killed. The reviewer called it more mature than the film and more useful to anyone who wants the real facts. No relative of a victim is known to have spoken publicly about the film; the series is where relatives of the victims appear on camera.
The record is uneven. For Dahmer there are relatives' words in 1992 and again in 2022, and between them a change of venue: what had been testimony in a courtroom became material for a production. For Willie there is a family’s reaction recorded by the nun the film honors, an investigator’s account of what the book got wrong, and a clerk who thought the actor right. For Cullen there are 2006 statements from relatives and, about the film, only the makers. For Bundy a survivor’s mixed verdict. For Wuornos a daughter’s remark on the execution and a director’s advance worry. For Unterweger a review that says the film gives the dead little attention; for Pereira reviews that judge how the film treats the victims, and a series that put relatives on camera.
The objections are of several kinds. One is consent, as with Dahmer. Another is fairness to the dead, as in Louisiana, where Elizabeth Harvey and the investigator both said the victim’s side had been left out. A third is focus: the Cullen film puts a colleague in the center, the Wuornos film is by its director’s account not the victims' story, and Jack is about a man. A fourth is glorification, which the Bundy survivor raised and then qualified, and which Jack’s reviewers largely did not. A fifth is distance: the Brazilian series is the only production here whose reviews say it went to the families.
What the record shows is relatives and survivors arriving, years later, at a work about the worst event of their lives, and saying in a sentence or two what they thought of it.
• May 28, 1980: Faith Hathaway is killed in Washington Parish, Louisiana; Robert Lee Willie is sentenced to death in October 1980.
• March 29 to 30, 1984: the federal district court denies Willie’s habeas petition and the Fifth Circuit stays his execution; August 6, 1984: the Fifth Circuit affirms the denial of habeas relief.
• December 28, 1984: Willie is executed.
• 1989: Willi Hengstler’s film of Jack Unterweger’s novel wins the Vienna Film Prize.
• January 24, 1989: Ted Bundy is executed.
• May 23, 1990: Unterweger is paroled.
• January 1992: a jury convicts Wuornos in the Mallory case.
• February 15, 1992: a Wisconsin jury finds Dahmer sane; February 17: he is sentenced to 15 consecutive life terms.
• 1993: Helen Prejean’s Dead Man Walking is published.
• June 28, 1994: a Graz jury finds Unterweger guilty in nine cases; he dies by suicide the same night.
• November 28, 1994: Dahmer is killed in prison.
• 1995: the film Dead Man Walking is released; Susan Sarandon wins Best Actress in 1996.
• August 1998: Francisco de Assis Pereira is arrested.
• October 9, 2002: Wuornos is executed.
• 2003: Patty Jenkins’s film about Wuornos is released; Charlize Theron wins Best Actress at the 76th Academy Awards in 2004.
• March 2 and 10, 2006: Charles Cullen is sentenced in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
• April 28, 2013: Cullen’s 60 Minutes interview airs.
• August 2015: Jack premieres at Locarno.
• January 29, 2019: a Bundy survivor responds to the Sundance film.
• 2022: The Good Nurse and the Netflix series about Dahmer are released; relatives of Dahmer’s victims speak against the series in September.
• October and November 2024: Prime Video releases Maníaco do Parque and the documentary series.
• October 19, 2026: São Paulo prosecutors are examining Pereira’s mental health.