More than three decades after he was arrested for his crimes, it’s been revealed that Jeffrey Dahmer‘s mom bizarrely claimed that the cannibal serial killer “didn’t hurt” his victims.
“He killed them, but he never tried to hurt them,” Joyce Dahmer previously told Dr. Eric Hickey, a criminal psychologist who has spent decades studying serial offenders.
Hickey spoke to Joyce about Dahmer’s crimes amid his new investigation into Christopher Wilder. While it was initially believed that Wilder had nine victims following his 1984 rampage across the United States, new insights indicate that he committed many more murders than initially believed.
The criminal psychologist is working with Australian investigators Andy Byrne and Mark Lewellyn on their crime podcast, “Catching Evil,” in which Hickey and other experts take a deep dive into Wilder’s crimes.
Dahmer was a serial killer and sex offender who killed and dismembered seventeen men and boys between 1978 and 1991. He was arrested in 1991 and was convicted of 16 counts of murder in 1992. He was sentenced to serve 16 terms of life imprisonment without parole and died in prison when he was bludgeoned by fellow inmate Christopher Scarver in 1994.
Hickey said that Dahmer exhibited traits of a sociopath, though he was capable of a distorted form of guilt and even appeared to love his mother. Meanwhile, he said that Wilder was classified as a psychopath who viewed torture as how he processed the world.
He went on to say that true psychopaths are often “social chameleons” who manage to be charming but are actually predatory in nature.
Wilder possessed “all the tools of the trade,” which included good looks, charisma, wealth and the ability to make others comfortable. Hickey added that those who got to know Wilder never realized his true character until it was too late.
Hickey also touched on the eight human heads that were meticulously arranged on a table by Dahmer, while a large black chair was positioned in front of them. Hickey claimed on the podcast that Dhamer explained the setup by saying, “Now I could be surrounded by my friends. They can never leave me. And they’re also physically part of me — because I ate them.”
Before Joyce died in 2000 following her battle with breast cancer, she participated in only a few interviews regarding her son’s crimes.
While speaking with Hard Copy in 1993, Joyce said her son was a “victim of a compulsion, an obsession.”
She also said that people blamed her for her son’s killings, though she said she did not take any responsibility over his victim’s deaths. “Intellectually, I know that I had done a good job as a parent. I knew this had to come from something outside of Jeff … we still do blame mothers,” she said.
Joyce went on to say that she believed her son would have benefitted from therapy, adding that society could learn a lot from his case. “He’s not a monster. He’s a human being. And I think he deserves some help,” she said.
