Wife’s 24-year cover-up – I buried my hubby in the vegie patch
After committing shocking crimes, these killers were finally caught
DAD WAS A monster
As April Balascio was growing up, she got used to constantly moving. Every six to 12 months her dad, Edward Wayne Edwards, would wake his wife Kay and their five children in the middle of the night and insist they leave town, saying it was for work.
April also thought it odd how her dad kept newspaper articles on the murders that always seemed to occur in towns where they had lived.
But it wasn’t until 2009, when she was an adult with her own kids, that April acted on her suspicions.
She started researching cold-cases online and found articles on the 1980 ‘Sweetheart murders’ in Watertown, Wisconsin.
Tim Hack and Kelly Drew, both 19, were killed after leaving a wedding at Concord House – a place her dad was employed as a handyman.
Tim had been stabbed in the back, and Kelly strangled and sexually assaulted.
The same week they’d died, April’s family had moved.
‘Suddenly all hope was gone,’ April told People magazine. ‘My dad was the horrible, horrible person I’d always suspected.’
Shaking, April called the police and within weeks they had enough evidence to arrest Edwards.
DNA tests proved he was the killer and he calmly admitted to three other murders, including the 1996 murder of his adopted son Dannie, 25, who he took to the woods and shot in order to collect his life insurance.
He also shot and killed Billy Lavaco, 21, and Judy Straub, 18, in an Ohio park.
April, who was eight at the time, realised her father had pretended to stumble across the bodies and called police himself.
‘My dad took us kids and Mum for a walk through that very park,’ April recalled. ‘The next thing I knew, there were ambulances and sirens everywhere… He’d taken us to where their dead bodies were.’
He was sentenced to death, but died in custody aged 77 in 2011.
‘I live with two kinds of guilt,’ April, now 48, says. ‘Not reporting him sooner and possibly saving lives, and the guilt of turning in my own father.’