"My Dad Was a Hidden Serial Killer: How I Noticed the Clues and Alerted the Authorities"

LYING awake at night, as her then-husband and teenage boys slept, April Balascio racked her brain for missing remnants of her childhood.

Images swirled – of missing people, dead bodies and quick getaways at 12am.

April Balascio has told how she turned her dad, Edward Edwards, over to copsCredit: Supplied Before being arrested for murder, Edwards was on the FBI’s ’10 Most Wanted’ list for gas station robberiesCredit: Supplied

Teacher April, then living in , USA, was trying to piece together her fragmented past. But it was tricky. Her dad, ensured they were always on the move.

By 18, she’d been to 17 schools and lived in states including Wisconsin, Florida, Arizona, Georgia, Colorado, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

“I remember Dad regularly waking me in the middle of the night and saying ‘we’re going now’,” says April, now 56. “But it wasn’t unusual. We never stayed too long in one place, constantly moving to where the work was.”

Ten Most Wanted

Edwards also did some motivational speaking about “choosing the right path” having once been on the ’s “Ten Most Wanted” list for a string of petrol station robberies in the 1960s, for which he had served a prison sentence.

As an adult April became incredibly uneasy about her childhood. “Dad was very hot and cold,” she says. “On special occasions like Christmas, he would go all out decorating and was giddy with excitement watching us kids rip open the gifts he had picked. Other days, he had a raging temper which he would take out on us.

“We would leave places so suddenly, me, my mum, him and my four siblings all crushed in the vehicle. I remember setting up in various places such as farmhouses, tents, mobile homes and once a barn.

“But what really stuck with me was, seemingly, wherever we went there were missing people cases.”

But she couldn’t remember exactly where they’d stayed. So, for 18 months in 2009, having left home, married and had children, she would wake and try desperately to recall the locations. Until one day – a match.

“I typed in ‘Cold Case, 1980, Waterford, Wisconsin’,” she says. “And there it was.”

Researching online, she found articles on “The Sweetheart Murders”, the name given to a cold case involving couple Kelly Drew and Timothy Hack, both 19, who vanished in August 1980.

“I read about how they had been celebrating a friend’s wedding reception at a venue called Concord House before vanishing,” says April. “Then I felt a jolt of recognition because I knew that place… we camped nearby, and Dad had worked there as a caretaker.

“I recalled him, like everyone in the town, tuning into the nightly news for updates on the missing couple.

“‘I bet they find those kids in a field,’ he had said over and over again. We left town not long afterwards and moved hundreds of miles away. But as I read on, I was horrified to discover their bodies had been located in a field more than two months after they had disappeared.”

‘I bet they find those kids in a field’

The news articles reported Tim had been stabbed. Kelly had been bound, strangled and possibly raped.

April continues: “Police never found the killer, and all the leads dried up. But thinking back, I recalled Dad coming home with a busted nose around the same time. He told me he had injured himself hunting, but even as a kid I remembered thinking it was odd.”

April called the old article’s hotline number, not expecting anyone to answer – but police did… and they were interested.

“I told the police everything I knew,” she says. “I wasn’t sure if it was the right thing to do, or if I had sent them on a wild goose chase. I wondered, ‘Am I a horrible person doing this to my Dad?’”

He appeared in court when he was in his 70s and was sent to death row, but died before he could be executed.Credit: AP:Associated Press Edwards in a mugshot from the 1960sCredit: Alamy One of his victims, Daniel Gloeckner – known as Dannie Boy, who Edwards murderedCredit: Supplied

About a month later, the police went to visit Edwards, who agreed to a DNA sample – and it was a match.

“I felt sick,” says April. “I couldn’t believe my Dad had killed that couple. Soon afterwards, he was arrested, pleaded guilty to two counts of murder and was handed a double life sentence. I didn’t speak to him again.”

However, in April 2010, he went on to admit to the murders of couple Billy Lavaco, 21, and Judy Straub, 18, in 1977 in Ohio.

They were found in a park, shot at point blank range in the back of the neck.

Sickest confession of all

“Then came the most chilling confession of them all – Dad had my brother’s friend, ‘Dannie Boy’,” says April. “After I had left home, my parents had taken in Dannie and encouraged him to join the Army. He admired Dad so much he even took our surname. But in 1996, shortly after Dad signed up Dannie for the maximum military life insurance of $382,412, he had been found dead by a gunshot wound, aged 24.”

In March 2011, having admitted five murders and hinted at more, Edward Edwards, then 76, from Kentucky, appeared in and was sentenced to death.

“I wanted him jailed so he would suffer,” says April. “What he did was awful. I knew he was a volatile man, but he was also charismatic and could be charming.

“I imagine that’s how he got away with being a secret ”

In April 2011, while on death row, he died of diabetes. “I felt relief that our family was spared the media circus, but the weight of Dad’s actions hung over me like a dark cloud,” says April. “Not wanting to burden my family with the agony I felt, I would muffle my screams in the shower with a washcloth.”

In 2019, she created a podcast, The Clearing, detailing the journey to discovering the truth about her father.

Meeting a victim’s family

“In the final episode, I arranged to speak with Tim Hack’s parents, Dave and Judy,” she says. “They shared sweet stories of their son growing up, and their heartache of losing him before his life had truly begun. I was so sorry, but they said I wasn’t to blame.”

In January, she released a book, Raised By A Serial Killer, and dedicated it to Dave and Judy.

“For a long time, I shied away from the parts of myself that reminded me of my father, including my own temper,” she says. “But I’ve learned I don’t have to be a product of my environment, that I can choose my own path – such as by helping people instead of hurting them.

“I may never know why my father did what he did, but I know I’ll do everything I can to leave the world a better place than I found it.”

Shockingly she handed him into policeCredit: Getty April, in the patterned dress, with her serial killer dadCredit: Supplied