MTV Star Dead At 23: How Did Alexis Eddy Die?
She was on 'Are You The One' in 2017.
getty One of the cast members from MTV's dating show Are You The One has passed away at the age of 23.
Alexis Eddy was on the show in 2017, when it filmed in New Orleans. She attracted attention for her multiple relationships on the show as well as for her colorful backstory.
She was open about her struggle with addiction in the past but in the fall of 2019, she was telling social media followers that she was sober and grateful for the second chance at life. Now she has passed away and her family is saying that the show made her issues even worse.
How did Alexis Eddy die? Read on for the tragic details.
1. Eddy was on Are You The One Season Six.
The premise of Are You The One? is that a computer uses an algorithm to match contestants up based on a "perfect match" formula. But they don't tell the participants who their match actually is.
Instead, the cast is brought together to live in a shared house for a few weeks. Once there, they try to find their perfect match and hook up with anyone else who catches their fancy along the way. If the cast accurately figures out all the perfect match pairings they can share a prize pool of a million dollars.
Eddy was on the sixth season of the show and filmed in New Orleans.
2. She hooked up with several contestants on the show.
During her time on the show, she got into a dramatic love triangle with fellow housemates — but non-perfect matches — Keith and Joe. And Zoe, actually. Alexis had started out hooking up with Keith but when Keith started getting interested in Zoe, another girl in the cast, Eddy was heartbroken and used Joe to make Keith feel bad.
Eventually, she and her actual perfect match, Anthony found one another and were able to end the series as winners — of the prize money at least. Their match-up didn't last and they ended the experience as friends.
3. Eddy shared a dramatic fact about her family.
One of the things that Eddy let drop to her castmates is that her cousin is a convicted murderer. Eddy's cousin is Shiela Eddy, who, in 2012, murdered her friend Skylar Neese. Sheila Eddy and a third girl, Rachel Shoaf, had been friends with Neese but they had recently stopped hanging out together.
Instead of doing what normal, non-psychopathic murderers do and just move on, the two young women decided they needed to kill Neese. They lured her out of her family home in July 2012 and drove her across the West Virginia state line to Pennsylvania to a spot where they often went to smoke pot.
While they were there, Shoaf and Eddy stabbed Neese to death and hid her body nearby. There was a months-long search for the teenager and when she was eventually found, she had over 50 stab wounds. Shoaf said they killed her because they "didn't like her" and "didn't want to be friends with her anymore." Shiela Eddy is serving a life sentence.
4. In 2019, she got sober and was engaged for a short time.
In September of 2019, Eddy posted a photo of herself and her grandmother outside of a rehab center. She wrote, "Recovery at its finest ;) Gr8ful 2 b clean & sober #justfortoday" in the caption.
The following day, she shared a photo where she and her father are posing with big smiles. "Here’s the first picture of my father and me," she wrote. "Both sober and healthy, we’ve ever been blessed enough to take. Overwhelmed with gratefulness today #RecoveryRocks."
Around the same time, in a now-deleted series of posts, she announced that she was engaged to a man named Nate Lee. The posts have all vanished, and she never got married, so it's not known what happened to those plans.
Eddy with her father, celebrating their sobriety.
5. How did Alexis Eddy die? The reality star died from an overdose on January 9, 2020.
In the early hours of January 9, West Virginia police were called to Eddy's home. The Mannington Police Department said to reporters, "This happened around 7 a.m. this morning. We were called for a report of a woman in cardiac arrest. She was pronounced dead at the scene, and her body was transported to Fairmont Regional Medical Center."
Officials did not list a cause of death at the time but her family revealed that it was an overdose. “It was an OD,” her grandmother Carol Efaw claimed. “She caught a hold of it again,” she said, implying that the addiction Eddy had fought to overcome had caught back up with her.
6. Her grandmother blames reality TV fame for her struggles.
Efaw opened up about how upset the family is over the death of Eddy. “My son and daughter-in-law are devastated,” Efaw said. “Alexis was a lost soul.”
She went on to say that being on an MTV show could have had a negative impact on Eddy. “Those shows mess up kids,” Efaw added, implying that the show encouraged her addiction.
An official cause of death won't be known until toxicology reports are finalized.
Rebekah Kuschmider has been writing about celebrities, pop culture, entertainment, and politics since 2010. She is the creator of the blog FeminXer and she is a cohost of the weekly podcast The More Perfect Union.