FRESNO, Calif. (Reuters) — The mother of infamous serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, Joyce "Rocky" Flint, a central California AIDS worker, died at the age of 64, associates said Wednesday.
Flint, a case manager at the Central Valley AIDS Team and founder of "The Living Room," an HIV community center that opened in Fresno in 1996, died Monday of breast cancer, according to colleagues.
"Everybody loved her. She would do anything for her clients and for anybody really. She was just this wonderful person," said Julio Mastro, the Living Room's executive director.
Flint, who was divorced, found herself in the media spotlight in 1991 when her son Dahmer admitted killing 17 young men and boys in Milwaukee in an orgy of murder, necrophilia and cannibalism that shocked the nation.
Dahmer was killed in 1994 in prison, where he was serving multiple life terms.
While throwing herself into her work with AIDS patients, Flint was never able to shake the memories of her son's crimes and his death.
"I wake up every morning and for a split second I don't know I'm Jeffrey Dahmer's mother, and then it all floods in," she said in a newspaper interview in 1993.