The Mixed Archive

The Day It Ended — Or So We Thought

November 28, 1994. A man was murdered in prison. It has been thirty-one years since his death, and society cannot stop talking about him as if he is some crazed celebrity that everyone loves and adores. This, however, is not the reason we can’t stop talking about him. Let’s go back to Monday, July 22, 1991 — the day the infamous serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested.

Even now, his story lingers in the corners of our culture — whispered about, dramatized, analyzed, and consumed. His name appears across streaming platforms, YouTube thumbnails, podcasts, and social media clips. Each promises “a new perspective,” yet tells the same story we’ve heard for decades.
And still, I click. I watch. I listen.
And I keep asking myself: why?

The Need to Understand

Maybe it’s the mystery — the human need to understand the unimaginable.
How does someone become capable of such horror?
We look for patterns, for trauma, for psychological clues that might make sense of the senseless. Because if we can define evil, we can contain it. We can convince ourselves that it’s something distant — something that couldn’t possibly live next door, or within us.

But there’s something disturbingly ordinary about him. The quiet apartment. The polite smile. The small talk with neighbors.
That ordinariness terrifies me.

Evil isn’t always monstrous in appearance; sometimes it’s calm, polite, and invisible. Maybe that’s why I can’t look away — because part of me needs to believe there’s a reason, a rule, or a sign that could stop it before it starts.

When Horror Becomes Habit

When I first started watching documentaries about him, I told myself it was for understanding — a study of human psychology and societal failure. And maybe that’s partly true.
But there’s also a darker side to this fascination.

Society dresses tragedy up as entertainment. Cameras linger on the killer’s face. Actors mimic his mannerisms. People make edits, jokes, fan theories.
We turn real horror into aesthetic — something to binge over dinner.

I think about the victims often, though they’re rarely centered in these retellings. Their names fade behind his. That imbalance feels wrong, yet it’s also what keeps me watching.
I want to remember them. I want to see past the sensationalism. But even as I try, I realize how easily empathy and voyeurism blur together.

The Mirror We Avoid

There’s a moment, every time, when I have to stop and remind myself: this isn’t fiction.
These were real lives. Real families. Real screams.
And that realization leaves a heaviness in my chest long after the screen goes dark.

So why do we keep returning to this story thirty-one years later?
Maybe because it’s safer to confront evil once it’s been caught. It gives us the illusion of control — of distance.
We can explore darkness from the comfort of our couches and tell ourselves we’re different. That we’d see the signs.
But fascination has a cost. Every retelling risks turning monsters into myths, and pain into spectacle.

Thirty-One Years Later

For me, the fascination isn’t admiration — it’s confrontation.
I look at his story and see a reflection of everything I wish weren’t true about humanity: apathy, cruelty, the fragility of empathy.
We keep talking about him not because we want to celebrate him, but because we’re still trying to understand how something like that could exist — and how we keep letting it happen again and again.

Thirty-one years later, his story remains — not because of who he was,
but because of what he revealed about us.