By 1980, April Balascio had grown accustomed to moving with her family every six months to a year.
On one particularly memorable evening that year, the 11-year-old was woken up by her father in the middle of the night and told they were leaving their Watertown, Wisconsin, home. They had only lived there for a year.
It wasn’t for nearly three decades that she would learn the horrible truth as to why her dad uprooted their family so often.
Balascio’s father, Edward Wayne Edwards, was a charming man who loved parties as much as he loved the local newspaper’s crime section. But he also had a “very dark side,” she told Fox News Digital in a Saturday interview.
He was abusive to both Balascio and her mother. She recalled him hitting and punching her mother in the face when she was a little girl.
“It was scary,” she said. “He was abusive. And especially as I got older, I became more scared of hearing his tires on the gravel in the driveway. I would wonder how he was going to walk through the house. Was he going to be in a good mood or a bad mood? For a while, I hated him.”
Not only was it emotionally difficult moving around so much, but it was also terrifying, she recalled: “It was hard starting a new school every year or even sometimes twice a year. … [Edwards] made us believe we were leaving because people were coming after us. So, there was also that fear that we were being hunted, that fear that we could be killed.”
By 2009, when she was 40, she started piecing together the puzzle of her father. Balascio specifically started looking into the crimes that most fascinated Edwards. She looked up cold cases in Watertown.
That’s how she came across the so-called “Sweetheart Murders.” Kelly Drew and Timothy Hack, both 19, had disappeared in 1980 in the area. Edwards, then a handyman, had been gathering his tools to fix a sign at the site where the high school sweethearts were last seen, he told police searching for the couple, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Their bodies were discovered near a cornfield two months later, apparently prompting Edwards to leave the state with his family. Three other bodies were later found in the same area where Drew and Hack were discovered; police suspected a serial killer, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.
“I suspected my dad was doing some bad things, but I didn’t verbalize it to anyone,” Balascio told Fox News. “There was no proof. … I can’t say I suspected that it was exactly murder, but I did believe he was harming people.”
She noticed that the Sweetheart Murders case had been reopened so she reached out to investigators with her childhood memories. While she had no proof that her father had committed the heinous crime, she told detectives what she remembered, including that he had talked about the missing couple “constantly” at the time. On one occasion, she remembered he suggested: “I bet you they find them in a field.”
In 2009, his DNA matched the genetic material found at the crime scene and Edwards, now 76, was arrested in Kentucky, where he’d been living. When grilled by police, he confessed to the murders of three others — including his 24-year-old foster son, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Edwards collected $250,000 from the life insurance policy for his foster son Dannie Boy Edwards, whom he admitted killing in 1996, according to Fox News. He also admitted to killing young couple William Lavaco, 21, and Judith Straub, 19, in 1977 in Ohio, where he spent his childhood.
Edwards insisted he murdered only five people, and police could never connect him to the deaths of the three individuals found in the area near Hack and Drew.
After his confession, Balascio recalled: “That’s when it truly hit me how evil my dad was. He was a bad man.”
She details the discovery of her father’s true identity in her newly released book Raised by a Serial Killer: Discovering the Truth About My Father.
Edwards died from natural causes in 2011 at 77 years old, as he awaited execution behind bars, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
“His dying before the execution was a blessing. It was a relief. It was all over,” Balascio said. She and her family could avoid what would have likely been a “media circus.”
She still believes there may be other victims.
“My dad did confess to five murders, yes, but I also believe … there’s more out there,” she said.
