Tracey Edwards at 32 years old.Photo: Anonymous/AP/Shutterstock
Handcuffs dangling from one wrist, Tracy Edwards wandered the streets of Milwaukee looking for help after he escaped from a four-hour-long nightmare in Jeffrey Dahmer’s putrid-smelling apartment.
When he finally flagged down a cop car, he led authorities back to the serial killer’s apartment, where they ultimately arrested Dahmer, who notoriously killed and dismembered 17 men from 1978 to 1991.
Edwards emerged from the ordeal a changed man and spent time shuffling from one homeless shelter to another. And almost 20 years to the day he cheated death in Dahmer’s den, he was arrested for attempted murder.
Edwards pleaded guilty in 2011 to throwing a man to his death off a Milwaukee bridge and spent a year-and-a-half in prison.
His defense attorney, Paul Ksicinski, tells PEOPLE that his former client shared with him years ago that he would “never” be able to be the same, following his harrowing experience in 1991.
“Way back when the case was going on, I analogized it to the old Humpty Dumpy rhyme where he sat on the wall and was pushed over with this and could never get his pieces back together again,” Ksicinski said. “He just can’t. It was too traumatic.”
Ksicinski said Edwards became homeless after Dahmer’s capture, and was “still having nightmares” 20 years later about the time he spent with the killer.
Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story.Courtesy Of Netflix
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In the fictionalized depiction of the events, Dahmer gave Edwards a drink that has been spiked with drugs, but Edwards resisted drinking much of it, saying it looked and smelled funny. The killer then slapped handcuffs on one of his wrists, but did not shackle him to anything.
When they moved to Dahmer’s bedroom to watch the 1990 movie — which Dahmer says he watched “every day” — things became even more tense.
Ksicinski believes what happened next resulted in Edwards being further traumatized.
“‘Dahmer told me that he would kill me. He was listening to my heart because at a point, he told me he was going to eat my heart,'” the attorney says Edwards told him.
“How can [you] say you’re going to have a normal life after someone says that?” Ksicinski said.
Yet Edwards also told his attorney at the time that “Dahmer underestimated” him.
“God sent me there to take care of the situation,” he told Ksicinski.
For Edwards, who testified against Dahmer in his 1992 murder trial, life became more difficult after his encounter with the murderer.
According toABC News, police in Mississippi recognized him from media reports and he was extradited there in connection with the sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl.
After he returned to Milwaukee, Edwards sued the city for $5 million for not following up on tips about Dahmer before his July escape, according to the outlet, but it was thrown out of court.
Milwaukee Police Department
Edwards was not part of a later class action suit that awarded restitution to Dahmer’s victims’ families, and his former attorney thinks he knows why.
“My guess is he wanted no part of it,” he said. “He didn’t want anything to remind him of what had happened. It was just too much.”
Ksicinski added, “He really presented himself as straightforward, until you touched that nerve, and he just became completely different.”
Today, Edwards would be 63, and Ksicinski has lost touch with him.
“I have no doubt that Tracy was pushed over the edge, and I only hope that he is surviving,” he said.
“I mean, his life was completely destroyed.”
source: people.com
