In 1991, Tracy Edwards managed to escape Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment, leading to the serial killer's arrest.
On the evening of July 22, 1991, a 32-year-old Tracy Edwards managed to flee Jeffrey Dahmer’s apartment, where he was handcuffed and held captive by the serial killer. His escape is what led police to finally arresting Dahmer, who up until that time, murdered 17 men and teenage boys since 1978.
Now, over 30 years later, Edwards’ former defense lawyer, Paul Ksicinski, is speaking out now that the harrowing encounter has been recreated in Ryan Murphy’s true-crime Netflix series, Dahmer -- Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. In an interview with Fox News Digital, Ksicinski said the tragic events “destroyed his life.”
“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,” the lawyer said of Edwards, whose current whereabouts are unknown. “I don’t know how or what he could have done to put things back together again."
In the opening episode of the limited series, Evan Peters portrays Dahmer while Shaun J. Brown appears as Edwards as the two reenact what happened that night. Though, what is seen onscreen doesn’t capture just how horrifying it was for the survivor.
According to Ksicinski, Edwards “described smelling death when he entered Dahmer’s apartment, how Dahmer put his head on his chest, so he [could] hear his heartbeat. He described how Dahmer said, ‘I’m going to have to eat your heart.’”
The lawyer added that despite Edwards’ own troubled past and encounters with authorities, “Tracy didn’t ask to be a victim of Dahmer’s.”
Believing that he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, the lawyer shared that Edwards “was just so averse to wanting to remember what happened to him or even talk about it,” adding that “there was a civil litigation involving some of the victims' families. He never took part in that. My personal belief is he didn’t because he’d have to remember what happened.”
Edwards’ lawyer is the latest person to speak out on behalf of Dahmer’s victims and survivors, with relatives of 19-year-old victim Errol Lindsey slamming the Netflix series for “retraumatizing” their experiences.
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