Dr. Eric Hickey has revealed the chilling way Joyce Dahmer described her son’s murders during their 1994 interview.
The forensic psychologist, who spent a week with Jeffrey Dahmer’s mother that year, said Joyce carried deep guilt about her son’s childhood. She had left Jeffrey to be raised by his father, Lionel, while taking her other son, David, with her when the marriage ended. That fractured family history weighed on her as she spoke with Hickey about the man who killed 17 men between 1978 and 1991.
Hickey secured the extraordinary interview through pure chance. He had been browsing in a Fresno, California store when he spotted a man he suspected was David Dahmer. Though not entirely certain, Hickey approached him and asked directly: “You’re Jeffrey Dahmer’s brother, aren’t you?” David confirmed his identity and asked how Hickey knew. “I didn’t,” the psychologist replied. “But I had a feeling.”
Before that revelation, David had already explained that he had come from Chicago to care for his mother. Joyce had recently attempted to take her own life, drawing her younger son west to California. Hickey first interviewed David over several days, then gained access to Joyce herself.
The psychologist recalled Joyce’s precise wording about the murders, delivered during their sessions and later cited through Walden University. “My son never tried to hurt anybody,” she said. “He killed them, but he never tried to hurt them.”
Hickey said he “completely understood” what Joyce meant by that distinction. “He wasn’t interested in their suffering,” the forensic psychologist explained. “He just needed them, he needed to have their bodies.”
Hickey elaborated on Jeffrey’s psychological state, as reported by Mail Online. “He wanted to be with people, but he knew he wasn’t comfortable being with them while they’re alive because of the rejection he felt,” Hickey continued. “The idea of being with someone who might reject him was just overwhelming to him. He just couldn’t do that. So he was more comfortable with them being deceased.”
Joyce also remembered her late son in simpler, more maternal terms. She described him as “very sad,” “always kind of depressed,” and “kind of a downer kind of guy.”
Jeffrey Dahmer’s crimes were extraordinarily gruesome, involving cannibalism and necrophilia alongside the killings. He was arrested in 1991 and initially pleaded not guilty, later changing his plea to guilty by reason of insanity. A jury deemed him sane, and he received 16 life sentences across two separate trials. In 1994, the same year Hickey interviewed Joyce, Jeffrey was murdered by a fellow inmate at a Wisconsin prison.
Joyce Dahmer passed away in November 2000 from breast cancer at the age of 64.