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Where Is Tracy Edwards Now? The Jeffrey Dahmer Survivor’s Life Was Reportedly “Destroyed”
Edwards’ former defense attorney said he “was never able to put the pieces back together in his life.”
Between 1978 and 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer killed 17 men and boys — but the serial killer’s violent career came to an end due to a man named Tracy Edwards, whom he met in July 1991. As was dramatized in Netflix’s Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, Dahmer lured Edwards to his apartment under the pretense of an art shoot, ultimately intending to kill him.
But Edwards was able to overpower Dahmer and escape the apartment — returning with police, who discovered evidence of Dahmer’s previous murders and arrested him.
Since escaping Dahmer, Edwards testified against his would-be killer in 1992. But while Edwards may have survived Dahmer’s attempted murder, his former defense attorney says his life was negatively impacted as a result. “The way that I’ve characterized it, in a nutshell, is that the incident with Dahmer made Tracy into Humpty Dumpty — he was never able to put the pieces back together in his life,” Paul Ksicinski told Fox News. “At times, he may have appeared or even sounded like, for a lack of a better term, normal. But he was not. He could never get his life together again after that. He abused drugs and drank alcohol excessively. He had no home. He just drifted from place to place. It destroyed his life. I don’t know how or what he could have done to put things back together again.”
According to the outlet, the publicity from the Dahmer case led to Edwards being extradited to Mississippi, where he had existing sexual battery charges. Ksicinski explained that he met Edwards in 2011, after the Dahmer survivor had been accused of throwing a man off a bridge in Milwaukee — the same place where Dahmer and Edwards’ fateful interaction happened.
Though Ksicinski was able to help Edwards get his charges reduced, he said they haven’t seen each other since 2015. While Ksicinski doesn’t know where Edwards is today, he still speaks in support of the man who ended Dahmer’s streak of murders.
“Post-traumatic stress disorder is real,” Ksicinski continued. “It’s not something that’s manufactured. People suffer incredibly traumatic events, and it’s different for every person in terms of how they handle it. You don’t know what that person has gone through or how they’re coping. And it might help to know that before passing judgment.”
