Broken bonds

April Balascio recounted details of her father’s murders in the true crime podcast The Clearing (2019), but the focus in her memoir Raised by a Serial Killer is on the quandary of a daughter’s mixture of love and hatred for a violent, abusive parent. Balascio did not realize that her father, Edward Wayne Edwards (1933–2011), was a murderer until 2009, when she was forty. Reading about unsolved murder cases in Wisconsin, she was able to bring crucial, clinching evidence to the police, and childhood memories shifted sharply.

Balascio’s skill in disentangling the child’s perspective from the adult’s revulsion is remarkable. She remembers, as a young girl, being swept up in her father’s excitement over Christmas presents, and comforted by his skilled care after she bit into a live electrical wire. We learn that he had been trained in first aid during a stint in prison for armed robbery; and that he wrote a well-received memoir, Metamorphosis of a Criminal (1972), about his road to “redemption” – although the first murder he is known to have committed took place in 1977. Edwards was an adept manipulator, and Balascio was filled with pride when he presented the “version of himself” that was “charming and funny and a little bit sheepish”. But when he showed protectiveness, it often inflicted pain and isolated her from supportive allies. When she was teased at school about her burn scar, Edwards’s “solution”, she writes, was to train his children to retaliate, staging physical fights between them to see who “won”. Only when Balascio was in her teens and her father had been imprisoned for arson could the children’s bonds re-form – but they were broken again when he was released.

Like many abusers, Edwards in this account “plays sweet” after delivering a beating – his default response to any flaw he finds in the carrying out of the many chores he assigns them – and absolves himself by insisting that the victim “made him do it”. Balascio’s mother remains a shadow presence, so terrified of Edwards that she lets her daughter take a beating for her own “crimes” (such as misplacing the nail clippers). When he is in prison and the family enjoys some emotional and material reprieve, Balascio hopes that her mother will leave him, but she soon realizes that this voiceless woman cannot make any decision without her husband’s direction.

Life with an abusive parent is often chaotic, and the Edwards family is repeatedly uprooted – a consequence, the author sub­sequently realizes, of her father’s wish to flee before his crimes were detected. He enlists his sons in arson and brings the entire family to a crime scene so that he can remove evidence. Long before Balascio discovers that he is a murderer, she shrewdly observes his cruel delight in hurting others, his intolerance of being challenged and his frequent deceptions. But children do not have the luxury of cancelling a parent. Raised by a Serial Killer gives a chilling close-up view of a murderer, but has broader value as a depiction of a child’s complex attachment to a heinous parent.

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