At about 11:30 on the night of July 22, 1991, two Milwaukee police officers, Robert Rauth and Rolf Mueller, were flagged down by a man with a handcuff locked around one wrist. His name was Tracy Edwards, he was thirty-two, and he told them a man had tried to kill him. Their own keys would not open the cuff. It was not police issue.
Edwards took them back to apartment 213 of the Oxford Apartments at 924 North 25th Street. The tenant, a thirty-one-year-old former chocolate factory worker named Jeffrey Dahmer, offered to fetch the key. Edwards said there was a knife in the bedroom, and when one of the officers went in to look for it he found Polaroid photographs of dismembered bodies. Dahmer was arrested that night. A human head was found in the refrigerator, the remains of eleven people were taken out of that apartment, and Dahmer went on to admit seventeen killings going back to 1978.
Edwards is usually described as the man who escaped Dahmer. That is true, and it is also incomplete in a way that matters. He was not the first person to get out of that apartment alive. He was the first whose escape led police to find what was inside apartment 213. And the story of his life did not end on the sidewalk outside the Oxford Apartments. Twenty years later he was back in a Milwaukee courtroom, this time as a defendant, after a homeless man drowned in the Milwaukee River.
The public record of Tracy Edwards before that July night is thin, and most of it comes from the weeks after the arrest, when reporters went looking for the man who had brought Dahmer down. He came from Tupelo, Mississippi. In Milwaukee he worked as a laborer and a roofer, and he told a Knight-Ridder reporter that he was the father of six children. The Associated Press gave his age as thirty-two; the Knight-Ridder story, written ten days after the escape, said thirty-one. His exact date of birth has not been published.
He lived in a rough part of the city and had seen Dahmer around the neighborhood a few times before they spoke. He did not know him. Features written in 2022, when a Netflix drama series revived interest in the case, added further details, among them that Edwards had grown up in a military family and that the two men found common ground in talking about the Army, in which Dahmer had served. Those features do not say where the information came from, and it is given here only as their claim.
In the early hours of May 27, 1991, Sandra Smith saw a naked boy run from State Street, bleeding, and asked Nicole Childress to call the police. The boy was fourteen. His name was Konerak Sinthasomphone. His family had fled Laos in 1980 and settled on Milwaukee’s north side, and he had left home the day before and not come back.
Three officers came: John Balcerzak, Joseph Gabrish and Richard Porubcan. Dahmer came out and told them the boy was an adult. Accounts of the rest of what he said differ: in some he called the boy his lover, in others a house guest who had drunk too much, and he gave the officers a false name for him. The officers took Dahmer’s word, went with him and the boy to the apartment, saw photographs of the boy there, and concluded that the two were in a consensual relationship. They left him there. Dahmer killed him about half an hour later. Glenda Cleveland called the police that night to press the matter, and nothing came of it. She later pointed out that five of Dahmer’s seventeen killings came after her call.
The Sinthasomphones already had a history with Dahmer. At an earlier address he had offered Konerak’s older brother, then thirteen, fifty dollars to pose for photographs and had fondled him. That case did reach the police: Dahmer was convicted of second-degree sexual assault in 1989, and after ten months of a work-release jail sentence a judge let him out early, in March 1990. “What I did was deplorable,” he had written to the judge.
There had been another man, too. In the spring of 1988 Ronald Flowers met Dahmer at a bar and went with him to the house in West Allis where Dahmer was then living, drank a cup of coffee Dahmer made him, and woke up the next morning in a hospital. He told police Dahmer had drugged him and taken $240 from his wallet. A West Allis detective who questioned Dahmer that year about a man’s claim that he had been drugged and robbed later testified that Dahmer had seemed normal and that he believed his story. The complaint was dropped when tests did not find enough of a drug in Flowers’s system.
So by July there had been a conviction for assaulting one Sinthasomphone boy, a robbery complaint that went nowhere, and a second Sinthasomphone boy handed back by uniformed officers. None of it had led anyone to look properly inside apartment 213.
Edwards met Dahmer on the afternoon of Monday, July 22, at the Grand Avenue Mall downtown. How the invitation came about depends on whose account is followed, and the versions do not fully agree.
In the story Edwards gave a Knight-Ridder reporter that summer, it began innocently. The two men made plans to meet up later with a few friends, two women and another man. Edwards meant to stop first at the home of his brother’s girlfriend to change his clothes, but she was not in, and Dahmer suggested that he wait at his apartment, a few blocks away. “It all started out so innocently,” Edwards said. The account in Grilling Dahmer, the book by Patrick Kennedy, the Milwaukee detective who later spent weeks questioning Dahmer, is different in one respect: in it, Dahmer approached Edwards while he was with his friends, said he photographed men, and offered him up to a hundred dollars to pose. In that version his friends urged him to stay, and he went anyway. Both accounts agree that Edwards went to the apartment willingly, expecting a drink and nothing worse.
Dahmer bought a six-pack on the way. The apartment was hot, and it smelled. Edwards noticed the odor at once; later he would say he had smelled death there. He also saw bottles of acid, which Dahmer said he needed for his work, along with power tools, pictures of bodybuilders and nude men on the walls, and a large fish tank. In Kennedy’s account Dahmer handed him a dark drink that tasted strange, and Edwards did not drink much of it. Dahmer put a film on the television, The Exorcist III, and grew quieter and more withdrawn as it played.
Edwards had been there for about the length of a beer when he decided he wanted to leave. He turned to look at the fish tank, and when he turned back Dahmer had a pair of handcuffs and a knife, and snapped one cuff onto his wrist.
What followed lasted nearly five hours, and Edwards’s account of it, given to the press in 1991 and in court in 1992, is the only one that exists from his side. Dahmer, the knife in his hand, pushed him toward the bedroom and demanded that he undress so that he could be photographed, and threatened to kill him if he refused. At one point he put his head to Edwards’s chest and listened to his heart. Edwards later testified that Dahmer held the knife against his groin and said he was going to eat his heart. Kennedy’s account describes Dahmer rocking back and forth and moaning, drinking heavily and paying little attention to what Edwards said.
Edwards understood that the second cuff was the danger. As long as one hand stayed free, he believed, he had a chance, and he never let Dahmer close the other cuff. “For some reason, God told me not to let this guy handcuff me,” he said in court. He talked. He told Dahmer they were friends, that he had only come over for a beer. He kept drinking, slowly, and unbuttoned his shirt as if he might go along. He asked to use the bathroom several times, and used the trips to study the locks on the front door and work out how fast he could get through them.
At about 11:30 Dahmer looked away. Edwards hit him. “I said, ‘At least I’m going to die trying,’” he testified. “I hit him and got out of the apartment.” Dahmer caught at his wrists at the door, and Edwards pulled free, got the door open and ran down the stairs and out into the street, partly undressed, with the cuff still hanging from his arm. The patrol car was about a block away.
Rauth and Mueller did not at first take Edwards for a victim. A man in the street wearing handcuffs looks like a man who has escaped from an arrest, and that is what they suspected until they tried their keys and found that the cuff was not one of theirs. A neighbor later reported hearing Edwards explain that the white man had handcuffed him and then pulled out a big butcher knife. Even then he was reluctant to go back. In Kennedy’s telling, it took some persuading, and the main reason he agreed was that he wanted the handcuff off.
At the door of apartment 213 Dahmer was calm and polite and said he would get the key. The calm lasted until the officers pressed the matter of the key and the knife. When one officer went into the bedroom, he found the Polaroids, and when the officers moved to arrest Dahmer he tried to stop them, and they subdued him. In the refrigerator was a human head.
In the early hours of July 23, according to the criminal complaint later filed against Dahmer, police and the Milwaukee County medical examiner’s staff were at work inside the apartment. They recovered seven skulls and four heads, among other remains. By the end of the search the remains of eleven people had been carried out.
Edwards was quickly called a hero, the man who got away. He talked to reporters about it with something close to disbelief. “I can’t believe I lived through it,” he said. Of Dahmer, he said, “He seemed so normal,” and then “He turned from Mr. Right to Mr. It,” and that it had been “like I was confronting Satan himself.” He also said that he was glad it had happened to him, because otherwise Dahmer might never have been caught.
The difference between May and July was not what Dahmer said but who was listening. In May the officers accepted his explanation and the boy went back inside. In July the officers went up with Edwards, and one of them went into the bedroom to look for the knife Edwards had described.
Dahmer was charged with fifteen counts of murder in Milwaukee County. On January 13, 1992, he changed his plea to guilty but insane, which meant that the trial that opened at the Milwaukee County Courthouse on January 30 was not about whether he had killed but about whether he had been legally sane when he did it. Judge Laurence C. Gram Jr. presided. District Attorney E. Michael McCann prosecuted, and Gerald Boyle defended. Most of the testimony came from psychiatrists, who argued over necrophilia and the legal meaning of mental disease.
Edwards was one of the few witnesses who could tell the jury what it had been like to be inside the apartment with Dahmer and live. He described the handcuff, the knife held to his groin and Dahmer listening to his heartbeat. “At one point, he said he was going to eat my heart,” he testified. He told the court how he had refused to let the second cuff close, and how he had hit Dahmer and run. Accounts published in 2022 say he described Dahmer’s face as having changed during the evening, so that he no longer seemed the same person Edwards had met that afternoon, and that he was asked on the stand whether he was gay and said he was not. Those details come from later magazine features rather than from a transcript reviewed for this article.
On February 15, 1992, a Milwaukee jury, ten votes to two on each count, found that Dahmer had been sane when he committed every one of the fifteen killings, and Judge Gram gave him fifteen consecutive life terms. A sixteenth was added that May in Ohio, for the killing of Steven Hicks in 1978. On November 28, 1994, a fellow inmate, Christopher Scarver, beat him to death at the Columbia Correctional Institution.
Police Chief Philip Arreola fired Balcerzak and Gabrish over the May call, and the city’s Board of Fire and Police Commissioners upheld the dismissals. In May 1994 Circuit Judge Robert Parins found that the evidence showed only a negligent failure to investigate and that firing them was unreasonable. The board replaced the dismissals with sixty-day suspensions, and both officers went back to work. The City of Milwaukee paid Konerak’s family $850,000 to settle their lawsuit. Families of other victims also went to court. Edwards, who might have been expected to have a claim of his own, never joined any of that litigation. His later lawyer, Paul Ksicinski, believed the reason was simple: taking part would have meant remembering.
Edwards was hailed as a hero in 1991, and it did not hold. The record that followed in Milwaukee is of a man coming apart. Reports from 2011 and 2022 list arrests for theft, property damage, failure to pay child support, bail jumping and drug possession. By the Associated Press’s count from online court records, he had several misdemeanor drug convictions and a conviction for bail jumping after 1997, and a felony conviction for manufacturing or delivering cocaine in 2009. Ksicinski said Edwards drank heavily and used drugs, never sought psychiatric treatment and, in his view, medicated himself instead. He was believed to have been homeless since at least 2002, moving between shelters. By 2011 he listed a Milwaukee shelter as his address.
Ksicinski said Dahmer “made Tracy into Humpty Dumpty,” and that Edwards “was never able to put the pieces back together.” Edwards, he said, called Dahmer the devil.
On Tuesday, July 26, 2011, three homeless men were arguing on a downtown Milwaukee bridge, about twenty feet above the Milwaukee River: Edwards, who was fifty-two, Timothy Carr, who was forty-four, and Johnny Jordan, who was forty-three.
According to the criminal complaint, a witness told police that Carr and Edwards picked Jordan up and threw him off the bridge head first. The complaint says Carr then jumped into the water from the bank while Edwards stayed on the riverbank. An officer arrived shortly afterward and threw a life ring; Carr swam to it. Jordan went under and was not seen again until a rescue squad brought him out of the water. He drowned.
Both men were charged on Friday, July 29, with first-degree recklessly endangering safety, an offense that carried up to twelve and a half years in prison and a fine of up to $25,000. Police said they had not established a motive. Neither man had a lawyer listed that day, and the public defender’s office said it was not yet representing them. Edwards pleaded not guilty.
It was through this case that Ksicinski met him. His account of the bridge differs sharply from the witness’s. Jordan, he said, was a homeless friend who had been drinking, and Edwards never threw anyone; he was trying to pull Jordan back. Ksicinski also described the relationship between Jordan and Carr as volatile. That is a defense lawyer’s version, and no court ruled on it. What a court did rule on came out of the plea.
The case ended in a plea that narrowed what Edwards was held responsible for. By early November 2011 Carr had admitted his role and pleaded guilty to first-degree recklessly endangering safety, and in January 2012 he was sentenced to four years in prison. For Edwards, Assistant District Attorney Mark Williams told the court that prosecutors would have had difficulty proving he helped lift Jordan off the bridge. What they could prove was that Edwards had lied to police afterward to protect Carr, which he admitted. On that basis he pleaded guilty to the reduced charge of aiding a felon.
Williams and Ksicinski jointly asked Judge Rebecca Dallet for probation. Ksicinski told her Edwards probably suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, had “shorted out” on the bridge, and was going to have “another ghost to haunt him all his life.” Carr, he added, could not swim well and had had to be rescued himself, and he did not know whether Carr had gone in to save Jordan or to kill himself. Edwards said, “I should have done more that day.”
On January 23, 2012, Dallet gave him the maximum: eighteen months in prison and two years of extended supervision, with credit for 191 days already served, an order to pay $2,520 to Jordan’s mother for the funeral, and drug and alcohol assessment and treatment. She acknowledged what he had been through with Dahmer and told him that at fifty-two he should have known better. “In your efforts to drown your sorrows,” she said, “you have made other people victims.”
Edwards was not convicted of killing Johnny Jordan, and no court found that he threw him from the bridge. The witness account in the complaint said he did; the prosecutors who had that account concluded they would have trouble proving it, and the only crime he admitted and was sentenced for was lying to protect the man who did admit his part. To call him a killer is to leave out the plea that ended the case. To call his part in that night blameless is to leave out the lie and his own words at sentencing.
Johnny Jordan’s life is barely recorded at all. The reporting gives his age, that he was homeless, that the defense called him Edwards’s friend, and that his mother buried him. The coverage that exists was written about the man who survived Dahmer, not about him.
In 2022 Netflix’s dramatized Dahmer series opened with the night of Edwards’s escape, with the actor Shaun J. Brown in the role, and reporters went looking for him again. They did not find him. Ksicinski told Fox News he had last seen Edwards in 2015 and did not know where he was. He defended him still. “Tracy didn’t ask to be a victim of Dahmer’s,” he said, and “Post-traumatic stress disorder is real.” He said Edwards had taken responsibility for what he had done.
Where Edwards is now is not publicly known. What survives of him in the record is a man in the street with a handcuff on one wrist, a few lines of testimony in a Milwaukee courtroom, and an eighteen-month sentence for a lie told to protect someone else.
• Spring 1988: Ronald Flowers tells West Allis police that Dahmer drugged and robbed him; the complaint is dropped. • 1989: Dahmer is convicted of second-degree sexual assault of Konerak Sinthasomphone’s older brother; he is released early from his jail term in March 1990. • May 27, 1991: Officers return fourteen-year-old Konerak Sinthasomphone to Dahmer’s apartment; Dahmer kills him. • July 22, 1991, afternoon: Edwards meets Dahmer at the Grand Avenue Mall. • July 22, 1991, about 11:30 p.m.: Edwards escapes and flags down Officers Rauth and Mueller; Dahmer is arrested at apartment 213. • July 23, 1991: Police and the medical examiner’s staff remove remains from the apartment. • January 13, 1992: Dahmer pleads guilty but insane. • January 30, 1992: The sanity trial opens; Edwards later testifies. • February 15, 1992: The jury finds Dahmer sane; fifteen consecutive life terms follow. • May 1994: A judge finds the firing of Officers Balcerzak and Gabrish unreasonable; both are reinstated. • November 28, 1994: Dahmer is killed in prison. • After 1997: Edwards collects misdemeanor drug convictions and a bail-jumping conviction. • 2009: Felony conviction for manufacturing or delivering cocaine. • July 26, 2011: Johnny Jordan drowns after going off a downtown Milwaukee bridge. • July 29, 2011: Edwards and Timothy Carr are charged with first-degree recklessly endangering safety. • January 2012: Carr is sentenced to four years in prison. • January 23, 2012: Edwards, having pleaded guilty to aiding a felon, is sentenced to eighteen months in prison and two years of extended supervision. • 2015: The last time his lawyer saw him. • 2022: His lawyer says his whereabouts are unknown.