Tracy Edwards walked out of Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment on the night of July 22, 1991, with a handcuff still on one wrist, and flagged down two police officers on the street. What they found when they went back with him ended seventeen murders. He is the reason the case exists in the form it does.
He was thirty-two. He met Dahmer at a downtown Milwaukee mall and went back to the flat, where they drank and watched a film. Dahmer put a handcuff on one of his wrists, held a knife to his groin, and put his head against Edwards's chest to listen to his heart. Edwards testified at the trial that Dahmer said he was going to eat it. He also testified that he talked to him, agreed with him, waited, and then hit him and went through the door.
Dahmer pleaded guilty but insane to fifteen of the seventeen killings he admitted. In February 1992 a jury found he had been sane at each of them and he was given fifteen consecutive life sentences. He was beaten to death by another inmate at Columbia Correctional Institution in 1994. Edwards gave evidence at that trial, and it is the last point at which the public record has anything good to say about his life.
Twenty years later, almost to the day, he was arrested in connection with the death of a man in the Milwaukee River.
This case is usually told as a hero who became a killer. He was not convicted of killing anyone, and the reason he was not is a matter of record.
On July 26, 2011, Edwards, Timothy Carr and Johnny Jordan, aged forty-three, argued on a downtown bridge. All three were homeless. A witness said Carr and Edwards picked Jordan up and threw him off the bridge head first. Carr went into the water afterwards. A police officer arrived and threw a life ring; Carr reached it, and Jordan went under and did not come up. Edwards's own lawyer said Carr and Jordan had a volatile relationship and that Carr, who could not swim well, may have gone in either to save Jordan or to drown himself.
Edwards and Carr were both charged with first degree recklessly endangering safety, and the charge against Edwards was later raised to reckless homicide, at which point he faced up to sixty years. That is the version of the case most people encountered, because it is the version that was in the news when the arrest was fresh.
It is not what happened. In January 2012 Edwards pleaded guilty to aiding a felon, a reduced charge, and the assistant district attorney explained the reduction in open court: Carr had admitted his own role, and the state would have had difficulty establishing that Edwards helped lift Jordan off the bridge. What the state could prove, because Edwards admitted it, was that he had lied to police afterwards to protect Carr.
So the offence he stands convicted of is not throwing a man into a river. It is lying about who did.
Both the prosecution and the defence asked the judge for probation. Judge Rebecca Dallet gave him the maximum the charge allowed: eighteen months in prison, two years of extended supervision, an order to pay Jordan's mother two thousand five hundred and twenty dollars for the funeral, and an order to undergo alcohol and drug assessment. He was credited with the 191 days he had already served.
His counsel argued that the Dahmer encounter had marked him permanently, that he had post-traumatic stress disorder, that he had struggled with drink and drugs, and that he had simply shorted out on the bridge that day. He told the court his client would have another ghost to haunt him for the rest of his life. Dallet accepted that the ordeal had been horrific and sentenced him to the maximum anyway, telling him that in trying to drown his sorrows he had made other people victims. Edwards said: “I should have done more that day.”
He had been homeless since about 2002, and had convictions for drug possession, theft, property damage and failure to pay child support.
Two things are worth separating here, because the case is almost always told with them run together.
The first is what happened to Johnny Jordan, who drowned in a river after an argument with two other homeless men, and whose mother needed help paying for the funeral. He is the person who died, and he is generally a detail in an article about somebody else.
The second is what the record actually establishes about Edwards. Not that he killed a man; the state said in court it could not prove he did. What it establishes is that a man who did one unambiguously good thing at thirty-two was, at fifty-two, homeless, drinking, on a bridge, and prepared to lie to the police for the person beside him. That is a smaller and sadder finding than the headline version, and it is the one the evidence supports.
The archive has a standing problem with the difference between what somebody was charged with and what a court concluded, and it usually runs the other way: a killer whose real total is buried under a claimed one. This is the same failure with the sign reversed. A charge that was reduced, in a case where the prosecutor said on the record what he could not prove, hardened in retelling into a conviction that never happened.