The daughter of a serial killer is speaking out to detail how she helped police bring her father to justice – and the mix of emotions she’s felt for turning him in.
April Balascio, 48, the eldest of Edward Wayne Edwards’ five children, told her story to People magazine.
Growing up, she says her handyman father moved the family around often, about every six months to a year. The moves would happen without notice, sometimes in the middle of the night. Whenever they asked their father why they were moving, he would say it was for work.
Even as a kid, Balascio says she was suspicious of her father’s obsession with collecting news clippings about the local murders that seemed to happen wherever they moved.
‘I always had my suspicions. You grow up and you realize this is not normal,’ she said.
April Balascio, 48 (left), turned her father, Edward Wayne Edwards (right), into police in 2009, when she suspected he was responsible of a 1980 double murder
But it wasn’t until she was an adult, married with kids of her own, that she finally dived into her father’s past.
In the spring of 2009, Balascio started doing some online research, looking up cold case murders in every town they lived in growing up.
She already knew her father’s past wasn’t squeeky-clean. In the 60s, Edwards landed himself on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list for a string of robberies and subsequently spent five years in jail.
When he was paroled in 1967, he claimed to have reformed his ways and even started working as a motivational speaker. Soon after, he married Balascio’s mother, Kay, and the family grew up thinking his life of crime was far behind him.
Once in police custody, Edwards (pictured in court in 2010) confessed to three more murders
Edwards was sentenced to two life sentences and the death penalty in one case, but died of natural causes in jail in April 2011 at the age of 77 (pictured left in 2009, right in mugshot from his younger years)
While Balascio hoped she wouldn’t find anything in her online research, all that hope was drained when she came across articles on the 1980 ‘sweetheart murders’ in Watertown, Wisconsin, where she had lived when she was 11.
The double murder involved Tim Hack and Kelly Drew, a couple who went missing after leaving a wedding reception at Concord House.
‘I was literally shaking. I suddenly remembered everything,’ Balascio recalled.
Balascio remembered that her father worked as a handyman at Concord House, and that they moved in a rush just days after the couple went missing.
A few months later, the couple’s decomposing bodies were found in some local woods. Hack had been stabbed in the back and chest, while Kelly had been strangled and sexually assaulted.
‘Suddenly all hope was gone. My dad was the horrible, horrible person I’d always suspected,’ she said.
In this August 19, 1980 photo, a psychic, who was called in on the case of the two missing Jefferson County teens, stands near the car the couple had driven the night they were last seen, in Sullivan, Wis. On Thursday, July 30, 2009 Wisconsin investigators armed with a DNA match arrested Edwards, in Louisville, Kentucky after receiving the tip from his daughter
Balascio immediately called up police in Watertown, and spoke to Det. Chad Garcia of the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office – who worked on the original case.
He revealed to Balascio that her father had been interviewed at the time of the couple’s disappearance because he worked at the venue.
The two discovered that Edwards left town the day after being interviewed.
A few weeks later, police had enough evidence to arrest Edwards, and DNA later confirmed he was a killer.
Once in custody, Edwards not only confessed to the sweetheart murders, but to being behind three other murders as well.
Edwards admitted to fatally shooting Billy Lovano, 21, and Judy Straub, 18, in a Norton, Ohio Park in 1977.
Balascio, who was eight at the time of the double murder, remembers her father taking the family to the park and them stumbling across the bodies.
As a young man, Edwards was on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list for a string of robberies. When he left prison in 1967, he wrote a book (pictured) about how he had reformed his life
‘My dad took us kids and my mom for a walk though that very park. He took us through the weeds, and I remember he was shouting something to my mother. The next day I knew, there were ambulances and sirens everywhere…he’d taken us to where their dead bodies were,’ she said.
Returning to the scene of the crime and even pretending to discover bodies is a pattern noticed in some serial killers.
Edwards also admitted to the 1996 murder of his adopted son Dannie Boy Edwards, a soldier in the Army.
He said he took the 25-year-old, who he adopted as an adult in his early 20s, to some woods in Troy, Ohio and shot him twice at point blank range in order to collect on the young man’s $250,000 life insurance plan.
The victim’s body was found about four months later in a shallow grave just a mile from the Edwards family home.
Edwards was sentenced to two life sentences for the two double murders, and was given the death sentence for killing his adopted son.
In April 2011, a month after he was given the death sentence, Edwards died of complications due to diabetes while jailed in Columbus, Ohio.
Balascio never spoke to her father again after his arrest, but she says she regrets not asking him why he did it.
‘I want to know “why”. But I think I know…It was a cat-and-mouse game with him. It was always a thrill for him to one-up the police,’ she said.
Today, Balascio is working as a personal trainer in Kingsville, Ohio, where she lives with her husband Michael, who works at a chemical plant, and their three kids.
In the aftermath of her father’s arrest, she says she’s been emotionally torn.
‘I live with two kinds of guilt. Not reporting him sooner and possibly saving lives, and the guilt of turning in my own father. They’re both strong,’ she said.