I turned my serial killer dad in to the police after I made a horrifying realisation about why I kept moving house as a child. Yet my choice had devastating consequences

In the first part of our serialisation of her new book last Sunday, April Balascio told how, throughout her childhood, she noticed her father’s odd behaviour – such as brutally killing her kitten and making a macabre visit to a murder scene. Also, the family frequently upped sticks to move to a new home in another part of America. Here, in the final part, she explains how the pieces of that confusing jigsaw finally came together…

Sometime in the middle of the 1990s, Dad took in a sort of foster son – Dannie Boy, one of my brother Jeff’s friends from back in middle school. It made sense when I thought about it.

With no kids left to boss around, after all four of my siblings and I had left home, he had no one to shout at to fetch his cigarettes or a cup of coffee, or fix the clogged sink, or mow the lawn while he sat back in his recliner, feet up, watching TV or chatting endlessly on the phone.

I figured, too, that Dad was charging the new arrival rent.

Dannie was too old to be adopted by my parents but he legally changed his name from Dannie Law Gloeckner to Dannie Boy Edwards. In the petition, Dannie wrote: ‘I have been living with Mr and Mrs Edwards for over a year and have been supported by them. I call them Mum and Dad. They treat me like a son.’

Dad encouraged Dannie Boy to join the army, too. He coached and tutored him so he could pass the entrance exam. He also helped him fill out the enlistment forms, including signing up for the maximum military life insurance policy of $200,000.

Dannie Boy listed my father as the beneficiary. Dannie took out another policy for $50,000, also with Dad as the beneficiary.

It must have been about a year later that Dad called me with news about Dannie Boy. He had injured his ankle in basic training and would have received a medical discharge – but he had run off two days before he got it.

It made no sense. Why would Dannie have gone AWOL? What could have made him choose such a reckless act?

Dad said that Dannie called him after running away from the military base to let him know he was OK but refused to reveal his location. Dad had taped the call.

Several times during it, Dad says: ‘Turn yourself in, son.’ He ends it by saying: ‘I want you to stay safe,’ and ‘call us’. Finally: ‘We love you.’

That was the last anyone ever heard from Dannie Boy.

He had disappeared in May 1996. Nearly a year later, in April 1997, his decaying body was found in a shallow grave in a cemetery near my parents’ house.

Dannie Boy had been shot in the head, from behind, twice. He was 25-years-old. The death was declared a homicide and Dad, as well as everyone else in Dannie’s life, was questioned by police.

Dad was asked to come in for a lie detector test but, on entering the police building, he was struck with chest pains and couldn’t take it. Instead he wrote a 72-page summary of everything he knew about Dannie and sent that to detectives.

A funeral was held. Dad brought a cake that said ‘We love you, Dannie’ to the gathering after the burial ceremony.

Shortly afterwards, Mum and Dad moved 2,000 miles away from Pennsylvania to Tucson, Arizona.

Come 2009 and I was a parent myself, living in an immaculate four-bedroom house. Each of my three well-fed, well-dressed teenagers had their own bedroom. But I didn’t feel like I had arrived at some pinnacle of success.

Questions about my past nagged me. My childhood was like a jigsaw puzzle I couldn’t put together because there were too many missing pieces.

Then one night, out of the blue, the name Watertown, Wisconsin, came to me. We weren’t there long, just the summer of 1980. I was 11 but I remember with a strange clarity the old rambling farmhouse we briefly lived in.

I searched ‘cold case 1980 Watertown Wisconsin’ online. A case called ‘the Sweetheart Murders’ appeared. With my pulse pounding in my ears, I read a news story about two young people who disappeared on the night of August 9, 1980, after attending a wedding reception just outside Watertown. According to the article, 19-year-olds Kelly Drew and Timothy Hack were high school sweethearts. He was a farm boy, she was a town girl who had just received a cosmetology [beauty treatment] degree.

They were last seen alive at 11pm leaving the reception at a venue called The Concord House.

Six days later, strips of Kelly’s shredded clothing were found scattered along a country road, with dried semen on her trousers and underwear.

Their bodies were not discovered for two-and-a-half months. Kelly’s corpse was found by squirrel hunters at the edge of a field, eight miles away from The Concord House. Police found Tim’s body not far from hers. Tim had been stabbed. Kelly had been bound, strangled and possibly raped. Despite a huge manhunt, the police never found the killer.

I felt a shudder of recognition. The Concord House. We had camped next to it when we first moved to Wisconsin and Dad had worked there as a handyman.

I remember hearing that two teens in town went missing. Though we’d only arrived in Watertown a few months earlier, we left the state soon after the news broke.

In 2009, nearly 30 years later, Jefferson County Wisconsin reopened the Sweetheart Murders case and was asking the public for any leads. Flashes of déjà vu bombarded me. I could almost hear memories clicking into place.

But I was afraid that what happened next would be like a row of dominoes. Once the first one was tipped, I wouldn’t be able to stop the outcome, even if I wanted to.

The cold case website gave a number to call.

I paced my bedroom, window to window, wall to wall. My hair stood on end from running my trembling hands through it again and again. It was late in the evening. I thought I might just call the number and leave a message. Surely I wouldn’t have to talk to anyone?

Instead, I called my sister Jeannine. She was only four when we left Wisconsin, so I didn’t expect her to corroborate my memories.

I just wanted her blessing.

But she was wary. ‘Think of what it will do to our families,’ she said. She was thinking of hers and mine but also of our three brothers, and Mum and Dad of course.

But I was thinking of Kelly Drew’s family. Of Tim Hack’s family. And there were others, I was sure of it, if I could put all the missing pieces together.

An unbearable question confronted me that night. Was my own father, Edward Wayne Edwards, more than a bad man? Did all my memories of our leaving towns and schools and friends without saying goodbye qualify as evidence? Was there any truth to my growing suspicions that he may have been a killer?

I told Jeannine I would think about what she’d said and hung up – but I had already made up my mind.

I dialled the hotline number, while mentally composing the message I’d leave, something vague like: ‘Hi, my name is April. I might have information on the Sweetheart Murders.’

Then a voice answered. ‘Hello, this is Detective Chad Garcia.’

The first domino fell.

I replied: ‘You might think I’m crazy, or I might be leading you on a wild goose chase, but I think I have some information for you.’ ‘OK,’ he said, measured.

I told him why I thought I might be able to shed light on the unsolved ‘Sweetheart Murders’ of two teenagers 30 years previously.

I told him that my father had worked at the venue where the young couple had last been seen leaving a wedding.

I explained that we’d lived in Watertown, Wisconsin, just a few miles from the venue. I told him my dad had been in prison before and I mentioned the book he’d written about supposedly being a reformed character – Metamorphosis Of A Criminal.

Garcia just listened. I didn’t know how to read the silence at his end.

I kept talking. Garcia asked if he could call me if he had questions. I said yes, and that I would provide whatever information I could.

But three weeks went by and he didn’t get in touch. I felt both relief and guilt. What a terrible person I must be to have even suspected that my own father might be a murderer. That he could be capable of such evil.

With every day that went by without hearing from Garcia, I felt that burden of guilt lift a tiny little bit. And then he called.

Garcia asked if we could meet at my house in Ohio and if they could take a sample of my DNA.

‘Do you have any news?’ I asked.

‘Not yet,’ said Garcia. They were here to ask the questions, not answer them.

I said I thought that there might be more murder victims, and explained how, when we’d lived in Doylestown, Ohio, I remembered hearing about two kids who’d gone missing, just like in Wisconsin.

I described in detail the time Dad took us on an uncomfortable outing through tall weeds at a nearby park where their bodies were eventually discovered.

There were other ‘missing kids’. I relayed my concerns for a boy who had bullied my brother at school in Pittsburgh, who we heard had been killed.

Garcia said nothing in response to my theories. I was certain he thought I was crazy.

More weeks went by. But while I was stewing in self-doubt, Garcia was growing more certain.

He had access to state and county police reports and, thanks to new technology, was able to cross-reference them, something detectives had previously been unable to do.

Garcia was gathering evidence in favour of Dad as a suspect. He had my suspicions, and something better: my DNA.

When Garcia paid a visit to Dad in Louisville, Kentucky, with a Wisconsin state agent, I had no idea it was happening. But afterwards I had the opportunity to listen to the tape of their visit. I could picture it exactly.

The recording begins with Dad, having just returned home from a trip to the grocery store with Mum, being greeted by a group of police officers at his front door. For most people, this would have been alarming. But Dad took it in his stride, like this was something that happened every day.

I should add that Dad, at 76, was in poor health. He was morbidly obese, had diabetes and was confined to a wheelchair on oxygen. But in the recording you can’t hear any infirmity in his voice. He sounds strong as he greets the officers without a trace of surprise or concern, as if they were passing by, asking for directions.

First they chat idly about the humidity. Then one of the agents says: ‘We’re with the Wisconsin Department of Justice.’

‘Wisconsin,’ Dad says. I imagine he was thinking, ‘uh-oh’.

The Wisconsin agent continues. ‘The reason we’re here is we’re working on some cold cases and your name came up in a case file from 1980.’

Dad chuckles at this, as if he’s contemplating: ‘Oh, what antics I got up to when I was a younger man.’ I can imagine his face here perfectly – his coy smirk, the slight tilt to his head.

‘We’re following up on two teenagers – a guy and a girl – that disappeared from The Concord House.’

‘The Concord House...’ Dad repeats, drawing out the words. ‘What is The Concord House?’

Then he says, in full conman mode: ‘Tell me something. I’m curious. Ah… how in the world did you end up… you guys coming here, or whatever?’

Listening to this tape, I thought I could hear his lying voice. I’d been waiting for it.

The cops then throw him a curveball. Garcia explains that because they have DNA evidence on file, they’re asking for biological samples to rule people out.

The Louisville detective who came along asks if they can have a DNA sample from Dad.

‘Oh, I don’t know if I can go for that,’ Dad says. You can hear him thinking: ‘Crap!’ He didn’t see that coming.

Then – here’s the shocker – Mum speaks up and says: ‘If you don’t have anything to hide, you shouldn’t worry about it.’

When I heard that, I nearly fell off my chair. I didn’t recall her ever challenging my father before. Was she emboldened by the crowd of law enforcement officers in her living room?

But Dad says he’s seen TV shows where people are falsely accused after giving DNA. He’s flustered for the first time. He says to let him think about it and they can come back another time.

Garcia and the Louisville detective are ready for this. They have brought a warrant, which legally compels Dad to give the sample. Having run out of options, he submits. And when they leave, Dad, in a surreal, super-friendly voice, calls after them: ‘Thank you, now! You have a safe trip back!’

Five weeks after Garcia’s visit to my parents’ living room, I received an angry email from my brother Jeff. ‘Are you happy now?’ he wrote. I had no idea what he was talking about.

It turned out that Jeff had received a phone call from Mum saying that Dad had been arrested.

I called Garcia’s cell number. ‘Are you sure?’ I asked him. ‘Was his DNA a match?’ He told me yes – they were 99.9 per cent sure it was.

After Dad’s arrest he was taken to Louisville metro police department where an excruciating eight-hour interrogation began.

I was able to watch the video years later, seeing Dad toy with detectives, dodging questions and infuriating Garcia.

He was more than they could handle. He had been playing with cops for 50 years. They hated that they couldn’t get him to confess.

Some weeks later I received another email from Jeff. It knocked me off my feet.

This new email asked me a strange question: had I been molested during my childhood?

He was asking because Dad had written to him from prison and told him that I had been. And Dad had also told Jeff that he had killed a man because of it.

My answer to Jeff was simply one word: yes.

I had been molested in Doylestown at the age of seven or eight. I hadn’t told anyone and certainly would never have told Dad. But he must have known. How else could he have told Jeff? And he killed the man? I felt sick to my stomach.

Thanks to Jeff’s email, I was not surprised when I got a call from another detective, John Canterbury of the Norton, Ohio, police department. He wanted to ask me a few questions in person about a new case involving my father.

I dreaded the visit. Ever since turning my Dad in, I had begun to have migraines. I cried all the time. I had trouble eating.

Memories came to me that I didn’t want to have and they physically wrecked me.

Canterbury asked me questions about our life in Doylestown. Did I remember anything about a young couple who had been murdered in our area?

I told him I did remember that two kids had gone missing and were found dead. Canterbury told me they hadn’t really been kids but young adults, and they died in August, 1977, near us in Silver Creek metro park.

He said: ‘Your father has just confessed to killing that couple in that park.’

He looked at me over his glasses. ‘Does the name William Lavaco sound familiar?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said.

‘This is someone you might have known,’ he said. He told me that Dad claimed to have killed him because Lavaco had molested me as a child.

I took a deep breath as a face came into focus. It was Billy’s face. That was his name. Billy Lavaco. The man who had helped build our house in Doylestown. The man who was always there at our parties. The man who had sat me on his lap. He had stopped coming around to our house. Now I understood why.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I knew him.’

After the detectives left, I ran to the bathroom, doubled over and vomited. My mind was playing a reel of unwanted memories.

I learned afterwards that when Canterbury had come to see me, he had already met my father. He had received a crazy letter from him and wasn’t sure if it was a hoax.

The note claimed to have information about a 1977 double murder near Doylestown. In the letter, Dad concluded by saying that when they were done talking to him, they would be ‘wanting to put the needle in my arm’.

Dad had refused point-blank to confess to the Wisconsin ‘Sweetheart Murders’ of Tim and Kelly, yet here he was admitting a double murder in Ohio instead. The police couldn’t understand it. For someone who didn’t know Dad, this might have made no sense. But it made perfect sense to me.

Now, as a sick old man ageing fast behind bars, he was looking at the only possible escape route. Death. And he was going to play games with detectives until he got what he wanted: the escape and notoriety of the death penalty.

Dad was making demands, even from his seemingly helpless position awaiting trial in a Wisconsin jail where, if found guilty, he’d be facing two life sentences. He would die behind bars. Wisconsin had no death penalty. But Ohio did.

Dad knew Garcia wanted him to plead guilty to the Sweetheart Murders. They wanted to wrap up the case and spare the victims’ families a lengthy trial.

But Dad teased the promise of a confession if two conditions were met. One, he wanted a guarantee that he would be extradited to Ohio and, two, the promise that if he pleaded guilty to killing Billy Lavaco and his lover Judith Straub, he would be guaranteed the ‘needle’, as he put it.

Canterbury agreed. The detective asked Dad why he hadn’t gone to police with suspicions of child molestation. He replied: ‘My mind functions a little different than most people’s. You don’t mess with one of my children.’ He had taken matters into his own hands.

In the confession, Dad recounted that with the intention of murder, he rode his bike late one night to an area in Silver Creek metro park where he knew that Billy and Judith would be parked at a spot popular with couples. He said he watched his parked car, and when Billy got out to relieve himself, Dad meant to shoot him.

But Billy heard him and quickly returned to the car. At gunpoint, Dad told Billy to get out and he told Judith to stay where she was. But she followed.

In his confession, he blamed Billy for Judith’s murder. It was dark and Dad claimed Judith didn’t recognise him. But Billy called him by name, saying: ‘Wayne, there’s $500 in the car. Take the money.’ Judith, he told Canterbury, was collateral damage – now that she knew his name, he had to kill her.

After he shot Billy in the neck, Judith began to run and my father described, with cold detachment, how he reloaded the shotgun while he talked to Judith, telling her to come back, telling her that he wouldn’t kill her. She stopped. And then he murdered her.

One of Dad’s old police ‘friends’ from Ohio, Brian Johnston, now pulled out the card he’d been holding for some time. He told Dad that, to get what he wanted, my father needed to admit to a more recent murder. One that would qualify for the death penalty.

The killing in which Brian strived for a confession was one that Dad didn’t want to admit as, even for him, it was too terrible. He would be confessing to the murder of a young man who he’d taken under his wing and given his last name: Dannie Boy Edwards.

Dannie Boy’s death had been bothering Johnston for years. He had been to Dannie’s funeral and watched my father’s behaviour. He thought he’d acted like a showman. Fourteen years later, Johnston saw his chance to get Dad to admit to it once and for all.

It took months before Dad finally confessed to everything, including the Wisconsin murders. He admitted to Brian that he had played the long game with Dannie. This wasn’t an impulsive scam. He’d tutored him and got him into the military, and made sure, as beneficiary, that Dannie’s life was insured for the maximum amount possible.

On March 8, 2011, Dad was granted his wish and sentenced to the death penalty in Ohio for the murder of Dannie Boy Edwards.

His execution date was set for August 31. But, on April 7, Dad died of natural causes. His own body betrayed him, robbing him of his final performance. It was a small blessing that we – his children, grandchildren and his wife – were spared the circus.

Dad died alone in his jail cell.

• © April Balascio, 2024. Adapted from Raised By A Serial Killer by April Balascio (HarperElement, £20). To order a copy for £18 (offer valid to 14/12/24; UK p&p free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.