Raised by a Serial Killer: April Balascio’s Choice to Turn in Her Own Father
“I believe we all make choices. There are so many of us who were brought up in dysfunctional homes, but we come to a certain point in our lives where we make a conscious decision to either live the right way or to live the wrong way. And I believe no matter how you’ve been raised, there’s so much out there.”
April Balascio is talking about the hardest choice she ever had to make. In 2009, she turned her father into police when there was suspicion he was a serial killer.
April’s father was notorious serial killer Edward Wayne Edwards. Because of the heinous crimes Edwards was concealing, the family moved around the country many times, often in the middle of the night. By the time April was eighteen, she had lived in seven different states and countless towns.
Edwards, a handyman with a creative eye, was always able to find work wherever he went and was able to provide not just for his family, but as a cover for his crimes.
The Moving Life
“My dad had always said that we were moving because the bad people were out to get my dad,” April recalled. “I always recalled at an early age FBI agents coming and going from our home.”
Before Edwards was unmasked as a serial killer, he was already on the FBI’s Most Wanted list for his involvement in robberies and breaking out of prison.
“Initially, it was because of the crime spree he went on in the early sixties – or maybe it was even the late fifties – and he ended up on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. I believe it was around ’61 or ’62. I think there was bank robbery involved, maybe stealing a car, breaking out of a prison – maybe even two of those. So I think it was a combination of things.”
When they moved, Edwards told his children they were running away from people trying to harm him – “the bad guys.” And that was believable because from April’s earliest memories, FBI agents were in and out of their home.
“They actually brought me trinkets. They brought all my siblings trinkets.”
Every time they moved, Edwards purposely sought out local law enforcement – police, sheriffs, state troopers – and told them the family was running because he had turned people in for crimes and those people were after him.
“My dad never hid from us that he at one time was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. We knew about his book. When he would go on speaking tours, he would take us with him. So that was believable.”
The Cost of Constant Motion
“Every time I tell people that I moved every six months to a year, they’re like, ‘Oh, were you a military brat?’ As kids do, you just adapt. It really never devastated me too much until I got into my senior – actually my high school years.”
During her high school years, April was in a school district she had been in for about four years. She had developed friendships, a friend base. She was really involved in their church. Then they moved a couple of days before her senior year started.
“That was devastating.”
April, the oldest of five, says she was always daddy’s girl – until she started getting older and began questioning things.
“I had a lot of fun with my dad, and I was close to my dad. When I started to get a little bit older – I want to say the blinders started lifting probably definitely around sixth grade. That was when we lived in Wisconsin for just a few months. And that’s actually where he committed the Sweetheart Murders.”
The Sweetheart Murders
The Sweetheart Murders were the killings of two nineteen-year-old Wisconsin lovers, Kelly Drew and Timothy Hack. The couple had disappeared from a wedding reception in August 1980.
“I think that’s when the blinders started to lift. And then definitely a year later, when I realized he burnt down another house and had my brothers help him – then the blinders were totally gone.”
During that year period, there was a lot of other stuff that happened. She started questioning things. She started to realise that it was really uncommon that every place she lived, people came up missing or came up murdered.
“By that time, I’m starting – I’m not so much a child anymore. Abuse was always there, but now I started questioning things beyond that.”
The Abuse
“Mentally, a lot of mental games. Physically, he was very abusive. There were marks on me all the time. Many times I should have went to the hospital. He did put my mom in the hospital several times. Broke her jaw a couple times. Stabbed her in the hand where she needed to have surgery.”
It was nothing for Edwards to beat his children with two-by-fours, belts, pipes – anything he could get his hands on. His fist. He was very strong.
“He’s thrown me across the room multiple times. Hitting us with his fist – that was very common.”
April’s mother was always a “wallflower,” and April says she means no disrespect by that.
“She was a hard worker, and she was very willing to help people. But I think because she was just so beaten down by the mind games that my dad played, it was just easier – and I think the way for her to survive was to block it out and turn it off.”
She notes that there are all kinds of resources for battered women today. Back then, there really wasn’t that much. And they moved around so much. Edwards kept them very secluded.
The Turning Point
While April began questioning her circumstances, she eventually moved out of the house, lived on her own, and got married when she was about twenty-one.
Her suspicions of her dad rose in 1996 when a friend of her youngest brother – a teen named Danny Boy – went missing. Danny Boy, who Edwards treated as a child of his own, even took the Edwards last name. The patriarch told the teen to join the army and got him to sign for the maximum military life insurance of $200,000 – with Edwards himself as the beneficiary.
When Danny Boy’s body was found in a shallow grave near Edwards’s house, the family abruptly relocated from Ohio to Arizona. Danny Boy had been shot in the head. No arrests were made.
The Call That Changed Everything
In 2009, during a restless night battling her childhood trauma, April called police – an event that altered her life and her family’s lives forever.
“Many years in the process – because in 1996, after Danny Boy came up missing and the way that my dad called me and would talk to me on the phone – I knew my dad committed that murder. I just didn’t know how to prove it.”
She had already distanced herself from her dad. She was focused on raising her young family – her babies were born in 1991, 1993, and 1994.
“I was very much a young mom. I was focusing on raising my family. I didn’t want to be associated with that lifestyle. I suppressed a lot.”
Then around 2006 or 2007, as her children were becoming teenagers, she started thinking about the things that could happen to them. She started thinking about how almost every place they lived, young adults came up missing or were found murdered. And she knew that wasn’t just coincidence.
“I just had a feeling my dad was behind it.”
She started going on the internet, typing in different places – Brighton, Colorado; Ocala, Florida; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – trying to find any cold cases that lined up with the timeframe they lived there. There was nothing on the internet. Come to find out, the reason there wasn’t was because those cases were so cold. There weren’t good records. They didn’t bring them up to the public.
Finally, in April of 2009, she was in bed, once again thinking about her children, when Watertown, Wisconsin, came to her memory.
“Oh my gosh, why didn’t I think of that town before? It was very prominent in my mind growing up, knowing that two people had disappeared because my dad always talked about it. And in addition to that, we got – we left in the middle of the night one time during that time. We were packing in the middle of the night.”
The Call
She typed in Watertown, Wisconsin. It just so happened that the state had opened up the Sweetheart Murders cold case because they had DNA evidence. It had been on a late-night show. There was a lot of news coverage. All of it was on the internet.
As she started reading, the memories just started coming back to her. She remembered the campground. She remembered the dance hall. And she felt in her gut that her dad had committed those murders.
That led her to calling Detective Garcia in April of 2009.
“I thought I was going to be leaving a message because it was in the evening, and I believe it was the weekend. I really thought I was going to be leaving a message – but he happened to be in his office.”
When he actually picked up the phone, she was stumbling and stuttering.
“My name is April Balascio. I think I have some information for you. You might think I’m crazy, or I might be sending you on a wild goose chase.”
He asked her to tell him what she had.
What she didn’t know at the time was that he actually thought she was a little crazy – just a disgruntled family member trying to get her dad in trouble.
But the more she talked, the more she told him about her dad, the more he pulled things up on his computer. He saw that Edwards was on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. He saw Edwards’s book. She was giving him really detailed information. He pulled up the case files – and there was Edwards’s name mentioned.
Now he was thinking, “Okay, maybe this woman really knows what she’s talking about.”
He took all her information. He ordered Edwards’s book. He went to the place where she told him they lived. He questioned the people there. Everything she had told him about the house – from the stained glass window to the spiral staircase – everything matched up.
He called her back about a month later. By that time, she thought nothing had come of it.
“Oh my gosh, what a horrible person am I?”
Then he asked if he could come out and see her – if she would be willing to give a DNA sample.
“It was scary. I thought about everything. What is my family going to think? What if I’m wrong? What a horrible daughter I am.”
But what outweighed all of that was thinking about the victims, the families of the victims. And knowing that her children were at the approximate age that these young adults came up missing – as a parent, if something were to ever happen to one of her children, she would want to know.
“I thought that was more important – that outweighed any consequences of me turning my dad in.”
“It’s still hard to this day. But everyone has hard decisions to make in life. It’s just a choice that I made.”
The Arrest and Confession
After April submitted a DNA sample, DNA confirmed that her father was guilty of the Wisconsin Sweetheart Murders. Upon his arrest, he confessed to other murders and even begged for the death penalty.
“I know every crime that he did admit to – the murders that he did admit to – I remember him talking about them, especially in ’96 when I didn’t even live in the home anymore. He would call me up and intentionally talk about Danny missing, and I definitely didn’t want to hear about it in ’96.”
The ones he admitted to, he had an agenda for doing it. He wanted to be extradited back to Ohio. The two he admitted to in Norton, he thought the death penalty was in play at that time – and it wasn’t. So he turned around and admitted to another murder in Ohio where the death penalty was in effect.
“I have papers – I have letters where he had written and he reached out to those authorities. It wasn’t the authorities reaching out to him.”
The Sentence and Death
The seventy-five-year-old Edwards, who was in poor health, confessed to five murders including Danny Boy.
In 2010, he was tried for the murders of Tim Hack and Kelly Drew, which happened in 1977 in Concord, Wisconsin, and in 1980. He was tried for the murders of Billy Lavaco and Judith Straub in Norton, Ohio – for which he was given life sentences. He pleaded guilty to all those cases.
In 2011, he pleaded guilty to the murder of Danny Boy in Kentucky – for which he was given the death penalty.
Shortly after being sentenced to death, Edwards died in prison of natural causes at age seventy-seven.
No More Contact
“I never talked to my dad again.”
He did reach out – through the mail. He sent her an envelope that had two pieces of scrap paper in it. They were literally scrap paper with ripped edges. On one of them was his signature. On the other piece it said, “Hold on to this because it’s going to be worth a lot of money someday.”
“My reaction was – I ripped the pieces up and threw them in the trash.”
There are times she wishes she would have talked to her dad. But no sooner does she say that than she thinks, “You know what? I’m glad I didn’t – because he would have been trying to play mental games with me.”
He always tried to play these mental games, and she refused to participate. When he would call her up and talk about the disappearance of Danny and all this evidence he happened to come across and how he was helping the investigation, she wouldn’t ask questions. She wouldn’t even encourage him to talk. She would purposely keep changing the subject.
“It infuriated him.”
When she heard that her dad passed, she says that was very much a blessing in disguise.
Who She Is Now
April has told her story in the bestseller Raised by a Serial Killer. Now divorced and living on her own, April says she feels no guilt about calling authorities on her father.
“I’m not a victim. I’ve never said I’m a victim. And I don’t like to be referred to as a victim.”
There are two things people have used to label her: they’ll label her as a victim, and they’ll label her as a hero.
“I’m neither. I’m not a victim, and I’m not a hero. I just made that decision to call because I thought it was the right thing to do.”
