After the murder of her adopted brother, April Balascio began to suspect her father, a charismatic but also violent and controlling man. It was 2009 and, while her husband and children had fallen asleep, she lay awake at night, trying to piece together the pieces of a tragic mosaic that had marked her childhood, a series of strange and unexplained deaths.
During their childhood, they never stayed in the same place: she and her father were always traveling, sometimes by truck, sometimes by car, even by school bus. Sometimes, he would wake the children in the middle of the night, without giving any explanation, and ask them to pack everything because they had to leave immediately for an unknown place.
The crimes that troubled Balascio were closely linked to her childhood memories. She recalled the Concord House dance hall, from which, in 1980, a young couple, 19-year-old Kelly Drew and Timothy Hack, had disappeared without a trace. Their bodies were found two months later. Her father had worked there the summer the crime occurred.
In 2009, after the case was reopened thanks to DNA analysis, April made a brave decision: she called the police and confessed that she believed her father, Edward Wayne, now 75, was the killer.
As soon as he hung up the phone, doubts began to make him feel guilty.
"I questioned my thoughts.
"I felt like a terrible person," she later told The Guardian.
But she was right. Edward was found guilty of the murders of that couple and three others. Some conspiracy theories even describe him as the serial killer with the most victims in US history.
What's it like to grow up with a serial killer?
In her autobiography, Raised by a Serial Killer, Balascio describes a strange childhood: on the one hand fun and on the other scary and dark.
Edwards had two “faces”: a loving father who couldn’t wait to see the children open their Christmas presents, and a monster who could wake up at any moment.
“I wanted readers to feel the same horror that I experienced,” she says. “To feel that love-hate relationship I had with my father. He was charming. He was the soul of the party.”
Balascio believes this is one of the reasons why he escaped capture for so long.
At first glance, he seemed like a devoted father.
She even remembers that when her father discovered that she and the other children had stolen sweets, he forced them to go to the store, apologize, and work for the owner to make up for their mistake. However, behind this facade, terrible crimes were hidden.
Her childhood was often difficult, sometimes living in dire economic conditions, without heat or running water. Inside the four walls, Edwards was violent and controlling. According to her, he broke his mother's jaw twice and stabbed her with a knife, all because she ate his French fries. More than once, he burned down the houses before they left.
Even pets were not spared: she remembers a dog and a cat that her father had hanged. At 18, Balascio left home and never returned. But it was only after her siblings had also left that she began to suspect that her father might have killed a friend of her adopted brother, Dannie Boy, a boy her parents had kept close for a while. His body was found in a ditch near their home, and shortly thereafter, Edwards and his wife disappeared. No arrests were made at the time.
"I truly believed my father had killed her, but I didn't know how to prove it," she says.
After her call, DNA tests confirmed that the killer was Edward. At the time, he was old, sick, and in a wheelchair. Despite this, he began to confess to other murders. He was sentenced to death, but died in prison of natural causes before the sentence could be carried out.
"I feel like a heavy burden has been lifted from me, one I didn't even know I was carrying," she says today.
“I hated him for a while,” she admits. “But now I love him. And I’m grateful for what he taught me. It depends on what I want to remember. I know what he did. I don’t justify it. But he was my father.”
