I interviewed Jeffrey Dahmer’s mom…her chilling words exposed why he murdered 17 men

The words Jeffrey Dahmer’s mother spoke to the man studying her son were as chilling as the crimes themselves.

Dr Eric Hickey, a forensic psychologist who interviewed Joyce Dahmer face-to-face in 1994, said she wanted him to understand one thing above all else about the man who murdered 17 men.

Dahmer lured men home, killed them when they tried to leave and then eviscerated, disemboweled and cannibalized parts of their bodies, Hickey told the Daily Mail, describing Dahmer as a lonely, deeply depressed man with crushingly low self-esteem who feared rejection and retreated ever further into a fantasy world.

As a young man, Dahmer had even attempted to dig bodies from graves before he began finding men in bars, according to Hickey.

His mother, who had left Jeffrey with his father while taking his younger brother David, later carried self-blame over the unhappy family life that preceded the bloodshed.

Yet when Hickey entered her Fresno home, Joyce delivered a haunting distinction: ‘Jeffrey never tried to hurt anybody. He killed them, but he never tried to hurt them.’

Her words, Hickey said, pointed to a disturbing insight into Dahmer’s motive. ‘He wasn’t interested in the suffering of the victims,’ he explained.

‘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. 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.’

Dahmer, who was born in 1960 in Bath, Ohio, committed his first murder at 18 years old, and continued the spree mostly throughout Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

He would meet vulnerable men in bars, shopping malls or bookstores, enticing them back to his apartment with money or offers to take their pictures. 

‘He’d literally pick out men who were sitting by themselves,’ Hickey said. ‘He could tell they didn’t have any friends, and he’d find somebody he could take home with him. Men who would not be missed for some time.’

Once inside his apartment, Dahmer would drug his victims, then strangle or stab them. But the horror did not stop there – he kept skeletal remains, skulls and various body parts as mementos of his crimes. 

Hickey’s access to the serial killer’s family began by chance in a California store when he ran into a man visiting the area from Chicago because his mother tried to kill herself.

The psychologist, who had just completed a documentary about Dahmer the week before, told the Daily Mail: ‘It just hit me who this guy was. And I’d never seen him before. I said, “Oh my gosh, you’re Jeffrey Dahmer’s brother, aren’t you?” And he goes, “I am!”‘

Hickey spent several days interviewing David in Chicago, which led to the meeting with Joyce.

‘We talked about how he didn’t try to hurt them in the sense that he wasn’t driven by meanness or a desire to make them suffer,’ Hickey said.

‘He just needed to be with somebody. His obsession was to kill them and then have their bodies.” 

However, he stressed: ‘Most people are needy, but they don’t cross lines like that.’

Instead, Hickey believes Joyce’s words reveal a distinction inside her son’s warped psychology. 

In his view, Dahmer was not seeking the sight of agony itself; he wanted absolute control over bodies that could not laugh at him, leave him or say no.

‘Dahmer wasn’t sadistic,’ Hickey said. ‘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.’

That terror of rejection, Hickey argued, formed against a bleak family backdrop.

Dahmer’s parents did not get along, his mother was hospitalized over mental-health struggles and communication inside the home was poor.

Hickey said Joyce remembered her son as ‘very sad,’ ‘always kind of depressed’ and ‘kind of a downer kind of guy.’ 

At school, he became a class clown as he tried to fit in, yet he lacked social confidence and hid that he was gay.

He took a girl to his senior prom in what Hickey described as his only date with a woman. It did not go well, and several weeks later Dahmer killed his first victim.

Hickey said Dahmer had already fantasized about that man and imagined rendering him unconscious so he could lie beside him without having to risk a real encounter.

‘The idea of being with someone who might reject him was just overwhelming to him,’ Hickey said. ‘He just couldn’t do that.’

The family rupture then sharpened that isolation, according to Hickey. Joyce left the home with David while Dahmer remained with a father to whom he was not close.

‘He really felt he was totally abandoned,’ Hickey said. ‘And that would push him over the edge.’

Asked whether Dahmer might have taken a different path had Joyce brought him with her, Hickey made clear that the answer could only be speculation. 

But he said a move to California might have brought Dahmer into contact with other young gay men and diverted him from the fantasies consuming him.

‘There’s certainly a possibility that he would not have become a serial killer,’ he said. ‘That could have been an intervention.’

Hickey said Dahmer spent years attempting to obtain corpses from graveyards before turning to bars, where he selected isolated men and brought them home.

In the early killings, Hickey believes the fatal trigger came when those men announced that they needed to return to their lives.

‘Had those men stayed with him, they would have lived,’ he said. ‘In the beginning, they would have lived.’

Hickey’s point was not that the victims caused their deaths, but that their completely ordinary decision to leave ignited Dahmer’s pathological fear of abandonment. 

Dahmer alone responded to that fear by killing them.

Each murder then drove the fantasy further. Dahmer began exploring, disemboweling and eviscerating the bodies before eventually cannibalizing parts of them.

‘At some point, he crossed another line,’ Hickey said. By then, when Dahmer brought a man home, ‘he knew he was going to kill them.’

Joyce was left to examine her own decisions after her son was caught. Hickey said she wondered whether better communication and a happier home might have changed him, and she carried ‘some self-blame.’

But he rejected the idea that one parent or one event created the killer.

‘She wasn’t a bad person,’ he said. ‘It was a combination of things that led him down that pathway.’

Hickey describes that combination through a 30-70 framework: a possible biological or genetic predisposition, followed by the far greater impact of a child’s environment.

‘Nature kind of loads the gun,’ he said. ‘It’s the nurturing, or the lack of nurturing as they’re growing up, that will pull the trigger.’

Joyce, meanwhile, did not press Jeffrey for undisclosed details about the killings, according to Hickey.

‘She knew he did them, didn’t want to know about the details, because they were so horrific,’ he said.

Dahmer was caught on July 22, 1991, after an intended victim named Tracy Edwards escaped from Dahmer’s Milwaukee apartment and flagged down police. 

He was beaten to death by a fellow inmate on November 28, 1994, at the Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin.

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