More Murders
In June 2010, while being held on the murder charges in Wisconsin, then-76-year-old Edwards wrote a letter to a prosecutor in Ohio. He claimed to have information about the deaths of 21-year-old Billy Lavaco and 18-year-old Judy Straub, who’d been found shot to death in 1977 at a park just outside of Akron. When Ohio authorities visited Edwards in jail in Wisconsin, he admitted to killing the two.
Then, in a jailhouse interview with the Associated Press later that same month, Edwards confessed to killing his 24-year-old foster son, Dannie Boy Edwards. Edwards told the reporter he shot his foster son in the chest twice with a 20-gauge shotgun in a secluded cemetery in Burton, Ohio, in 1996. He said he was upset with Dannie Boy for stealing credit cards and other items from his children, so he killed him to collect on a $250,000 life insurance policy. Hunters found Dannie Boy’s remains in a field in 1997.
“I'm responsible for it,” Edwards told the reporter. “It didn't work on my conscience. I spent the money. I was having a good time ... you do it, forget it was done and go about your business until next time.”
Edwards, who had diabetes and other health problems, said he confessed to killing Dannie Boy because he would rather be executed than endure prison. He claimed to be responsible for five murders in total.
“There is nothing else," he told the reporter. “His is the last one.”
In the end, Edwards agreed to plead guilty to the murders of Hack and Drew in Wisconsin and Lavaco and Straub in Ohio. After Edwards pleaded guilty to aggravated murder and robbery for killing Dannie Boy, a three-judge panel sentenced him to death by lethal injection. Their sentencing decision was derided by Dannie Boy’s half-sister, Jai-Dean Copley. “Do not give this man what he wants,” she told the judges.
In April 2011, while awaiting execution, Edwards died in prison of natural causes at the age of 77.
Who Is Edward Wayne Edwards?
His death marked the end of a long life of crime. Edwards was born in Akron, Ohio, to a single mother in 1933, at the height of the Great Depression. Two years later, his mother died by suicide, and Edwards ended up in a Catholic orphanage. While there, Edwards claimed he was repeatedly abused by nuns and other children.
Once, after he stole another child’s birthday cake, one of the nuns asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. “I looked her straight in the eyes and answered, ‘Sister, I'm gonna be a crook, and I’m gonna be a good one,’” Edwards wrote in his 1972 autobiography, Metamorphosis of a Criminal.
Criminologists have established a clear link between childhood experiences and future criminal behavior. But the equation is not as simple as “bad childhood equals bad outcome,” according to Michael Gould, a former lieutenant who investigated several serial killers during his time with the Nassau County Police Department in Long Island, N.Y.
“It’s usually a combination, environment plus personality,” Gould tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “Some individuals are more predisposed to detachment, lack of empathy and control-driven behavior. Trauma can amplify that, but it doesn’t create it in every case.”
Edwards made good on his childhood promise to the nun. As a young adult, he traveled across the country carrying out armed robberies and wooing women. He joined the Marines, but was dishonorably discharged after going AWOL. He stole cars, robbed banks and broke out of jail several times. In 1961, he ended up on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted Fugitives list.
“He was kind of a con person his whole life,” Larry Lee, the lead investigator in the Drew and Hack case for the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office, told the Associated Press in 2009. He was a “relatively intelligent person [who] could get things and do things because of his intelligence and cunning.”
Edwards spent several years at federal prisons in Kansas and Pennsylvania, where he claimed he decided to clean up his life and leave crime behind. After he was released on parole, he toured the nation as a speaker on prison reform and wrote the autobiography describing his rehabilitation. He also appeared on the television game show To Tell the Truth.
To Angelo Brown, a professor of criminology at Arkansas State University, these public appearances signal that Edwards was probably a narcissist. These individuals “think they are too smart to be caught,” Brown tells A&E Crime + Investigation. They often “give clues or manipulate people to think they are changed or good so that no one would suspect them.”
In the late 1960s, Edwards met and married 21-year-old Kay Lynn Hedderly. The two had five children together, including Balascio, who was the oldest.
Balascio has conflicting memories of her father—some happy, some scary. Her father could be extremely loving and supportive, but also allegedly violent, especially toward her mother and the family’s pets. Balascio also remembers in her book Raised by a Serial Killer that her father loved watching true crime documentaries—especially those about the Zodiac Killer—and that he always befriended the police wherever they lived.
Despite all this, Balascio didn’t suspect her father of murder until Dannie Boy turned up dead in the late 1990s. “I really believed my dad killed him, I just didn’t know how to prove it, and I was busy raising my family,” Balascio told The Guardian.
In the years that followed, she began wondering whether her father was capable of killing other people too, a persistent thought that ultimately led to her father’s arrest.
Many questions remain unanswered. It’s still not clear why Edwards killed Drew and Hack in Wisconsin, nor Lavaco and Straub in Ohio. Balascio submitted her DNA in hopes that it might one day help investigators solve other cold cases.
“My dad did confess to five murders, yes, but I also believe… there’s more out there,” she told Fox News Digital. “There are more victims out there.”
