A woman who was constantly moved around as a child by her dad, getting up and leaving home at short notice, found out years later there was a terrifying reason why
A woman whose family moved repeatedly because her father said “they needed to get away from bad people” made a terrifying realisation years later.
It wasn’t until 2009 that April Balascio put together the clues that she had spotted throughout her childhood. One specific crime, 1980’s so-called ‘Sweetheart Killiings’ in Watertown, Wisconsin was the key to unravelling the mystery.
April remembered how her father, Edward Wayne Edwards, had been fascinated by the case and had suddenly moved the family away from Watertown soon after the double murder.
Despite her doubts that she might be sending detectives on “a wild goose chase” April called a police tip line. She later provided a DNA sample that proved a family link to the crime and her father was arrested soon afterwards.
Edwards, who had more than once set fire to his homes as he left them, was eventually charged with five murders, and died of natural causes at the age of 77 – mere months before he was scheduled to be executed.
He has since been linked to at least another five killings – with some former police officers connecting him to the unsolved murder of six-year-old beauty queen JonBenét Ramsey and even the notorious Zodiac Killer murder spree.
April Balascio isn’t convinced by some of these wilder theories, but she does believe that her father had many more victims than detectives were able to find evidence for.
April says that her father was nothing like the brooding, solitary stereotype of a serial killer. He was a popular family man, with a wide circle of friends. But he also had a hair trigger temper, and could be violent and abusive towards his wife and children.
After April left home, Edwards had fostered a friend of his youngest son, a lad named Donnie. The boy idolised Edwards, adopting his surname and eagerly following his advice to join the military. Edwards coached Donnie through the army entrance exam, and also took out a substantial life insurance policy – with himself named as the beneficiary.
Donnie was later found dead from a single shot to the head, buried in a shallow grave not far from Edwards’s house. No arrests were made in connection with the death. But April was deeply suspicious of her father: “I really believed my dad killed him, I just didn’t know how to prove it, and I was busy raising my family,” she told the Guardian.
As he had so many times before, Edwards moved far away from the murder scene soon after Donnie’s death.
April recalled a similar moment, years before, soon after the “Sweetheart Murders”. Edwards not only burned down their family home in Wisconsin, he endangered his sons’ lives as he did so. She told the I newspaper: “When the fire wasn’t burning fast enough, he made them run back in and open windows.
“He made his sons run into a burning house. If I ever could have killed my dad, it would have been then.”
In an almost unbelievable twist, while he was still an active serial killer Edwards twice appeared on television, claiming to be reformed and denying having committed any murders.
After his arrest Edwards, by then in his seventies and morbidly obese, demanded the death penalty. He confessed to several other murders, and news of every one shocked April to the core. She explained: “Every time I talked to a detective, I literally locked myself away in a room afterwards because I did not want my family to be burdened with how I might react.
“I remember going into the shower, wadding up a washcloth, sticking it in my mouth and screaming without making a sound. I did that shower trick many times.”
