Joyce Dahmer (née Gantenbein; born July 20, 1944) is an American author, best known for her 1986 book A Quiet Evil. Dahmer was born in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, the daughter of a butcher and a homemaker. She has three brothers and one sister.
She attended high school in Beaver Dam and graduated in 1962. She married Lionel Dahmer in 1963, with whom she had two sons.
The couple divorced in 1981. Dahmer wrote A Quiet Evil while working as a journalist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
The book chronicles the life of Jeffrey Dahmer, her ex-husband’s son and one of America’s most notorious serial killers.
Early life
Joyce Dahmer was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on May 14, 1936 to Lionel and Anna Dahmer. She was raised Catholic and attended local schools. After high school, she married Lionel Dahmer Sr. and they had three children together: Lionel Jr., Jeffrey, and Deborah. The couple later divorced and Joyce remarried to Elmo Uhrmacher in 1978.
Joyce has always been a supportive mother to her children. When her son Jeffrey started having trouble in school, she advocated for him and helped him get the resources he needed to succeed.
She also supported him when he came out as gay at the age of 18. Even after he was arrested for murder, she continued to stand by him and visit him in prison.
In recent years, Joyce has spoken publicly about her son’s crimes and her experience as a mother of a serial killer. She has also written a book called A Mother’s Story: My Son Jeffrey Dahmer.
Marriage and family
Marriage and family are important to Joyce Dahmer. She was married to Jeffrey Dahmer, a notorious serial killer, for 18 years. Despite the horrific nature of her husband’s crimes, Joyce remained loyal to him until his death in 1994.
Joyce has two sons from her marriage to Jeffrey. One son, David, was adopted by Joyce after Jeffrey’s arrest. The other son, Jeremy, was born shortly after Jeffrey’s arrest and remains close to his mother.
While Joyce has never remarried, she has found love again with a man named Chuck Thomas. The couple has been together for over 20 years and currently live in Ohio.
The murders
Jeffrey Dahmer was born on May 21, 1960, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to Lionel and Joyce Dahmer. He had an older sister, Diana.
His parents divorced when he was eight years old and Dahmer grew up mainly with his mother, who worked as a telemarketer.
She remarried when he was eleven, but the marriage quickly ended in divorce. As a teenager, Dahmer began drinking heavily and developed an interest in necrophilia and cannibalism.
In June 1978, Dahmer murdered his first victim, Steven Hicks. He lured Hicks back to his house with the promise of alcohol and then bludgeoned him to death with a barbell.
He then dismembered the body and buried the remains in his backyard.
Dahmer continued to kill over the next thirteen years, mostly young men whom he lured back to his home with promises of sex or money.
He would usually drug them before killing them, sometimes disposing of the bodies by dissolving them in acid or burying them.
In some cases, he kept parts of the bodies as souvenirs. In 1991, he began keeping skulls in his apartment as well as photographs of his victims.
On July 22, 1991, Dahmer was arrested for disorderly conduct after police found him wandering the streets naked and drunk.
A search of his apartment revealed Polaroid photographs of dismembered corpses and human heads in his refrigerator. Dahmer was sentenced to fifteen life terms in prison, where
Arrest, trial, and sentence
Jeffrey Dahmer’s gruesome crimes came to light in July 1991, when one of his victims, 32-year-old Tracy Edwards, escaped from his apartment and alerted the police. Dahmer was arrested and initially charged with kidnapping and sodomy.
As the police began to investigate, they discovered a horrific scene inside Dahmer’s apartment. In addition to the body of Edwards’ friend, Steve Hicks,
they found four more corpses, all in various stages of decomposition. Dahmer confessed to killing 17 men and boys in total, as well as dismembering and cannibalizing many of them.
Dahmer’s trial began in January 1992. He pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, but the jury rejected this defense and found him guilty on 15 counts of murder. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Later life and death
In her later years, Joyce continued to live in Ohio, where she worked as a nurse. She was married and had three children, but her husband died in 2000. Her son Jeffrey Dahmer died in prison in 1994, after being convicted of murdering 17 people.
Joyce Dahmer died on November 29, 2012, at the age of 78.
In popular culture
In popular culture, Joyce Dahmer is best known for her marriage to serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. The couple met in high school and married in 1967, when Joyce was 19 and Jeffrey was 18. They had one child together, a son named Jeffrey Jr., who was born in 1970.
The marriage ended in divorce in 1978, after 10 years of marriage. In the years following the divorce, Joyce spoke publicly about her ex-husband and his crimes on several occasions.
In 2006, she wrote a book about her life with Jeffrey Dahmer, titled My Life with a Serial Killer: The Wife of Jeffrey Dahmer.
Joyce Dahmer has also been the subject of several documentaries and made-for-television movies, including The Secret Life: Jeffrey Dahmer (1993), which starred Carl Crew as Jeffrey Dahmer and Rosanna Arquette as Joyce Dahmer.
References
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