April Balascio Turned In Her Serial Killer Father. Here's the First Time She Suspected Him (Exclusive)

In an excerpt from her new memoir, 'Raised By a Serial Killer: Discover the Truth About My Father,' April Balascio reveals the moment she "never thought of him in the same way again"

April Balascio knew something wasn't right about her father, serial killer Edward Wayne Edwards.

“Kids aren’t stupid,” she told PEOPLE in 2018 for the cover story My Father Was a Serial Killer…and I Turned Him In. “Someone was always murdered wherever we lived.”

Her father moved the family frequently when she was growing up, usually in the middle of the night. And though he could be charming and funny, he was often violent at home.

So when Balascio, as an adult, searched for “cold case” and “Watertown,” she was flooded with stories about the notorious “Sweetheart Murders,” an unsolved crime involving two local 19-year-olds, Timothy Hack and Kelly Drew, who had disappeared after a wedding reception in 1980. Two months later, their decomposing bodies were discovered in a field.

“I was literally shaking,” April said of reading the articles, and recalling that her dad had worked where they'd been last seen. “I suddenly remembered everything.” She told the detective on the case she suspected that her father may have been involved. Weeks later, a DNA match came back 100%. Her father was arrested and confessed to five murders.

Edward Wayne Edwards died in prison of natural causes in 2011 before he could be executed by lethal injection.

Now Balascio is telling her own story in the memoir Raised By a Serial Killer: Discovering the Truth About My Father, out Dec. 3 from Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.

PEOPLE has an exclusive excerpt to give readers a taste of the story. Read it below.

The Concord House: 1980

It was early summer when our family of seven barreled down the highway in a U-Haul, leaving our life in Brighton, Colorado, headed to who knew where. How Dad picked Watertown, Wis., I’ll never know. Maybe he just drove through the night and ended up there.

When we arrived at a campground in what seemed like the middle of nowhere, I climbed out of the cramped U-Haul and stretched my legs, grateful to be out of the cab, which reeked of Dad’s unfiltered Camels and stale coffee. We checked out the lay of the land, then set up the two tents — one big one for sleeping in that fit all seven of us and the other screened tent for over the picnic table. 

Dad introduced himself to the neighboring campers and steered the conversation to jobs and places to stay.

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Someone told him there was an opening for a job as a handyman at the Concord House, right across the field from the campground. It was a big reception hall used for weddings and concerts. Dad got a part-time job there.

At night, Dad frequented the local bar. There, he met a man named John Simon, who lived not far from the campground. Mr. Simon was a farmer — most people in the area were. The fields he leased had an old house on it that was for rent. We moved in right away.

We had been living in this beautiful old house for just a few weeks. We kids had taken to gravitating to the dining room in the late afternoon to watch the light come dancing through the stained-glass window. We heard Dad come home. We were looking at each other, wondering how fast we could make ourselves scarce, when Dad strode into the room holding a hunting rifle as carelessly as if it were a tennis racket. I wondered where he got it.

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Back in Doylestown, I was too young to wonder where that shotgun had come from when he had me shoot it in the yard and nearly rip my shoulder off. Nor did I wonder about the handgun he’d shot over our heads. But now I wondered where this rifle had come from. It was big, with a scope. It looked like it meant business. 

My brothers and I gathered around Dad, staring at the impressive weapon in his hands. Without warning, the gun went off. I screamed and covered my ears. David covered his as well. John collapsed to the ground in a fetal position. Dad’s face went white. He dropped to the floor next to his son, saying, “John. John. Where are you hit?!” He was in a panic. But John hadn’t been struck. He’d fallen in terror.

Dad looked around to see where he’d actually fired the rifle. There, on the worn carpet, was the gash. The bullet had ripped through the floor and lodged in the ductwork.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Dad said. “I didn’t know the gun was loaded.”

I was relieved that none of us had been shot, but I didn’t think it was strange for him to bring a loaded gun into our house. This wasn’t the first or last house to bear scars from our tenure. Here, like everywhere, the outside of our house was often safer than the inside. Outside, there were fields worked by John Simon, the farmer. The best part of the farm itself was a dirt track that led from the back of the house to the edge of the property to a creek that ran swiftly through a dense thicket of trees. A rickety railroad tie bridge crossed the creek, and we played back there for hours, splashing in the creek, trying to catch fish with our bare hands.

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Mr. Simon got Dad a job repairing the porch of his neighbors, the Uttechs. Dad sometimes brought me with him to that job because the Uttechs’ daughter Nicole was my age. Her house overlooked a big field. We rode her bikes — she had one with a banana seat — up and down the street. Sometimes, she came over to play in the creek by the bridge with me and my brothers.

Dad was still working for the Concord House, and sometimes he worked late. I noticed one morning when Dad showed up at breakfast his nose was messed up. It was swollen, cut and bruised. I asked what happened. He told me he hurt it with the rifle scope while hunting. I had only ever known my dad to hunt elk once in Colorado. But it was August. I didn’t think it was hunting season. I was curious, but I held my tongue. He was in the kind of mood that didn’t invite questions. I had also seen his boots by the front door, covered in mud. Those boots were an iconic article of my childhood. So wide I could fit two of my feet in one boot. He wore them until even duct tape couldn’t hold them together.

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The next day, the Concord House was the center of police activity. Two Jefferson County kids — 19-year-old sweethearts named Timothy Hack and Kelly Drew — had gone missing after attending a wedding reception there.

As the days went by, Dad kept turning on the evening news, hoping for coverage of the missing kids. Despite the fact that his own kids ranged in age from four to 11 years old, he couldn’t seem to stop talking out loud about the case. He was obsessed. “I bet they find those kids in a field,” he speculated, as if once again he was playing amateur detective.

The whole town was upset by the news. I had heard my friend Nicole’s mom saying how worried the kids’ parents were. Dad had just finished work on her family’s deck, and they invited us for dinner on it. Mr. Simon and his wife, Allie, were there too. The talk at dinner was of Tim and Kelly, the missing kids. 

The Simons and the Uttechs were nice people, but I remember feeling awkward being there for dinner. We were outsiders. We didn’t know the families of the missing kids like everyone else did. And Dad was trying to be his usual jovial self in company. Every time Dad told one of his loud stories to make other adults laugh, Nicole’s mom would glance at her husband. I could tell she didn’t like Dad.

On the way home that night, Dad resumed speculating about the two missing teens. He repeated, “I bet they find them in a field.”

I sat in the back seat of the van with David, John, and Jeff. It was dark, and at a stoplight, I stared at the back of Dad’s illuminated head and thought, Huh. Why does he keep going on and on about that?

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A few weeks after school started, Dad told us to pack our belongings. He’d rented another U-Haul. He told us we were hitting the road the same day. There wasn’t much to pack up this time. Each time we moved, it seemed like we had a little bit less to bring with us. Just a bag of each of our clothes and a few boxes full of toys and books that we hadn’t even fully unpacked yet. 

As I took my seat with Jeff in the U-Haul between Mom and Dad, I looked over at Mom, sitting ramrod straight. I couldn’t read the expression on her face. Her eyes were locked on the road in front of her. What was she thinking? So many times in my childhood, I wondered what was going through her mind. I turned to look at Dad’s face as he drove. Something about this departure felt different yet familiar. We hadn’t left before the end of a school year ever before. Why were we leaving like this? That was new and I didn’t like it. But the familiar element wasn’t only that we were leaving a place that had seemed briefly like home. It was the recent disturbing news of two missing teens. It reminded me of the missing kids in Doylestown, the ones I had heard about in second grade. It had happened again.

“Where are we going this time?” I asked Dad. He snapped at me. “Watch your tone with me.”

Mom said nothing. My brothers and Jeannine said nothing. The only sound was of Happy panting at Mom’s feet. She was nervous, too. The tone Dad had noticed was real. It was not one of pure curiosity. It had an edge. I was angry. If there is a before and after a moment in the story of my relationship with my dad, this is it. This was when the doubt broke through that membrane I’d stretched across my brain. The barrier that kept the concept of “Dad, who I loved,” separate from “the man who we lived with who did bad things” had begun to fray. And I never thought of him in the same way again.

None of us asked my father why we were leaving this time. Each time we left a town, it was because we were fleeing someone bad. This time, I had a flash of insight. We weren’t fleeing the bad people. But we might be fleeing the good ones.

Excerpted from RAISED BY A SERIAL KILLER: Discovering the Truth About My Father by April Balascio. Copyright © 2024 by April Balascio. Reprinted by permission of Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.

Raised By a Serial Killer: Discover the Truth About My Father comes out Dec. 3 and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.