FROM HERO TO HOMICIDE: DAHMER’S VICTIM

Life has a way of taking twists and turns like a winding rollercoaster. One minute you’re headed in the right direction, only to find a fork in the road. The decisions you make can either take you down the right path or lead you to a path that will ultimately destroy you. This article shows just how easily someone can go from a hero to homicide in a blink of an eye.

The only surviving person to escape from Jeffrey Dahmer is a black man called Tracey Edwards. He is the only survivor who lived to tell the tale. But in a twist of fate, Tracey became the one thing he desperately tried to escape.

Edwards was 32, when he met Dahmer at a downtown mall. Tracey had accepted the offer made by Dahmer to go back to his apartment to watch pornographic videos. Tracey was a Heterosexual male and didn’t consider anything wrong with the offer, until he was inside Dahmer’s apartment and realized that he was about to become a player in a sick homosexual perversion, which had previously left sixteen other victims dead and dismembered. Thirteen of these were discovered in various forms of decay and dismemberment, in his apartment after his arrest.

Edwards said Dahmer changed from a friendly man, who offered him money and beer to pose nude for photographs, to a crazed killer. He said Dahmer forced him to lie on the floor, and pointed a knife with a six-inch blade at his groin. “He put his head on my chest, was listening to my heart, and said he was going to eat my heart,” Edwards testified.

Edwards also testified that Dahmer chanted and rocked back and forth while watching the movie, “Exorcist III,” in his bedroom. Dahmer allegedly became excited during scenes in the movie that depict a priest processed by the devil. Edwards said he tried to calm Dahmer, who said he was afraid of being g disliked and left alone. “For some reason, God told me not to let this guy handcuff me,” Tracey said.

Over twenty years ago, Milwaukee police found Edwards, half- naked and partially handcuffed, in the street near Dahmer’s apartment. As Edwards punched his attacker in the face, and kicked him before running for the door, he said he noticed a smell coming from a blue barrel. Police arrested Dahmer that evening after finding body parts in his refrigerator and human remains throughout his apartment.

Dahmer who is said to have raped, killed, and dismembered as many as 17 boys and men, often had sex with their remains before eating them. He died in prison after a fellow inmate beat him with a broomstick in 1994. Tracey Edwards was hailed as a hero on July 22, 1991, for leading police to discover Dahmer’s house of horrors, ending a spree of cannibalistic homicides.

Twenty years later, almost to the day, Edwards was arrested on July 26, 2011, and accused of throwing a man to his death off a Milwaukee bridge. At the time of his arrest, Edwards was homeless, and had been moving from shelter to shelter since at least 2002.

A witness recalled seeing both Edwards, and Timothy Carr, another homeless man, push the victim, Johnny Jordan, into the water following a fight that lead to Jordan, 43, drowning after plunging from a bridge. Edwards and the two other men had been involved in an argument.

Edwards was sentenced to one and a half years in prison --- along with two years of extended supervision. He was also ordered to pay $2,520 to Jordan’s mother for funeral expenses, and get alcohol and drug assessment and treatment. He received credit for 191 days already spent in jail.

Friends say Edwards never really escaped from Dahmer’s shadow, falling into a pattern of drug and alcohol abuse, and floating in and out of prison. Even though he was brave enough to save himself from a sadistic killer, he couldn’t save himself from a life of turmoil, as a result of the trauma inflicted by Dahmer. No one can imagine what it would be like spending your whole life mentally trying to get away from someone you hate, only to turn into a part of them in the end.