My father, the serial killer: how April Balascio put her dad behind bars – and broke free of her childhood

April Balascio (front left) with her father, Edward Wayne Edwards (rear right), her mother and her two younger brothers. Photograph: Courtesy of April Balascio

In 2009, while her husband and teenage children slept, April Balascio was often wide awake in their home in Jefferson, Ohio, jotting down the small towns she’d lived in as a child and trying to match them to their month and year.

This wasn’t as easy as it might sound. Her father had driven them all over the US – Ohio, Georgia, Florida, Arizona, Colorado, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania – in whatever vehicle they had at the time – an RV, a U-Haul truck, a camper, a school bus. They had set up home in farmhouses, mobile homes, tents, a barn. Sometimes Balascio completed a school year in one place; other times she didn’t, because her father would wake them at night, tell them to pack up, then off they’d go, no goodbyes, headed who knows where.