As usual, for a few short days, the Tabloid newspapers had the edge. The regular news media filed stories daily - the Tabs' worked on a weekly deadline. With a story moving this fast there was no time to look back. The body count was growing each day as police pieced together Dahmer's ten-year rampage - with the bones and flesh that remained.

Terrified Traci Edwards was nearly the twelfth victim. Only he escaped a hideous death at the hands of the cannibal killer Dahmer, who confessed to the mutilation-murders of at least eleven men and boys. Traci was held prisoner in Dahmer's apartment of horrors - an apartment littered with human skulls and body parts. Finally after hours at the knife-edge of death, he fled half-stripped, bleeding and handcuffed into the street, where he flagged down a passing police car.

When freelance reporter Denny Johnson was assigned to the Dahmer story the tabloid M.O. ran true to its peculiar form. Johnson was thinking front page, not tomorrow and local, but next week and national. To perform this magic Denny would prospect for any small nugget the gold-rush-media-frenzy had overlooked the first day. That nugget which would still be news seven days later. News even to the media that covered the story from the start.

The first day after the story rocked the world, the Journal ran a small page one article on Traci Edwards and his escape - here was Johnson's nugget. The account of Traci's getaway was short and shallow. It was dwarfed by the huge headlines and photos of Dahmer's arrest and victims' IDs. Other reporters pursued grim body counts, grieving relatives and daily news conferences. There was no information about Traci's experience inside the apartment with the murderer - no inside story. Denny's assignment was to find the one that got away.

It would be a week before the media would turn back its collective attention to Edwards. By then Traci was on a plane home to Texas and, ultimately, jail. Johnson had them scooped.