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Raised by a Serial Killer : Discovering the Truth about My Father
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Overview
The untold story behind the hit true crime podcast The Clearing, this "engrossing and absolutely terrifying read" (San Francisco Chronicle) traces one daughter's moving quest to understand the truth about her father, the serial killer Edward Wayne Edwards, while confronting cold cases, unsolved murders, and the haunting mysteries of her larger-than-life childhood.
One evening in 2009, April Balascio was searching online, as she had been every night, for unsolved murders in the towns her family had lived growing up, when she stumbled across the latest investigations into the "Sweetheart Murders" cold case. All at once, the buried memories of her father's dark history were awakened, and she knew she had to take action. She picked up the phone to call a detective and the rest is infamous true crime history. In her unflinching memoir, Balascio bravely reveals an astonishing tale of a lifetime of manipulation, unexplained upheavals, and silent fear. Some part of her had always known what her father was capable of, but the full truth of how she came to these revelations is as riveting as it is quietly terrifying. Through searing storytelling, dedicated research, and intimate insight, Raised by a Serial Killer is a gripping, courageous memoir unlike any other.Customers Also Bought
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Details
- ISBN-13: 9781982177034
- ISBN-10: 1982177039
- Publisher: Gallery Books
- Publish Date: December 2024
- Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
- Page Count: 352
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Although the title Raised by a Serial Killer sounds provocative, the memoir by April Balascio, daughter of Edward Wayne Edwards, is sensational only in terms of its excellence.
Edwards was a man of contrasts: an outgoing, life-of-the-party figure to outsiders, but a physically and emotionally abusive tyrant to his wife and five children. Balascio, the oldest, “never felt safe under his roof—ever.” And yet, she writes, “Because he was impulsive, playful, and fearless, we had adventures that other children could not have had.”
By age 11, Balascio understood that her father was not only “a really, really bad father” but a “bad man.” Her childhood haunted her as an adult, “like a jigsaw puzzle I couldn’t put together because there were too many missing pieces.” Balascio writes, “We were poor, often hungry, moving from one dilapidated and filthy rental house to another, sometimes living in tents and campers and, once, in a barn.” They moved all the time—Ohio, Florida, Georgia, Arizona, Colorado, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—sometimes cramming suddenly into a U-Haul truck with no warning.
Long before being convicted of murder, Edwards published his own memoir, Metamorphosis of a Criminal, about the time before marrying Balascios’ mother. During his book tour, he appeared on TV and talked, “looking bashful and sweet,” about robbing a bank, escaping prison twice, being on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list and spending five years in a federal prison. He claimed to have left that life behind, portraying himself as a reformed family man.
Balascio left home as soon as possible, but her father “never ceased to be the center of my universe, even as I tried to get out from under his control.” In 2009, Balascio, now a wife and mother, was surfing the internet when she realized that her father may have been responsible for the “Sweetheart Murders” of two 19-year-olds in Watertown, Wisconsin, in 1980. After she called the cold case hotline, Edwards was eventually arrested and imprisoned, found responsible for at least five killings between 1977 and 1996, possibly more.
Balascio delivers page-turning tension as she describes her childhood, her later realization about her father’s crimes and finally, her search for additional victims. Like Tara Westover (Educated), she is a savvy survivor and a courageously skilled narrator. And as with Edward Humes’ The Forever Witness—another unputdownable book about solving a cold case—readers will find themselves utterly immersed.
Although the title Raised by a Serial Killer sounds provocative, the memoir by April Balascio, daughter of Edward Wayne Edwards, is sensational only in terms of its excellence.
Edwards was a man of contrasts: an outgoing, life-of-the-party figure to outsiders, but a physically and emotionally abusive tyrant to his wife and five children. Balascio, the oldest, “never felt safe under his roof—ever.” And yet, she writes, “Because he was impulsive, playful, and fearless, we had adventures that other children could not have had.”
By age 11, Balascio understood that her father was not only “a really, really bad father” but a “bad man.” Her childhood haunted her as an adult, “like a jigsaw puzzle I couldn’t put together because there were too many missing pieces.” Balascio writes, “We were poor, often hungry, moving from one dilapidated and filthy rental house to another, sometimes living in tents and campers and, once, in a barn.” They moved all the time—Ohio, Florida, Georgia, Arizona, Colorado, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—sometimes cramming suddenly into a U-Haul truck with no warning.
Long before being convicted of murder, Edwards published his own memoir, Metamorphosis of a Criminal, about the time before marrying Balascios’ mother. During his book tour, he appeared on TV and talked, “looking bashful and sweet,” about robbing a bank, escaping prison twice, being on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list and spending five years in a federal prison. He claimed to have left that life behind, portraying himself as a reformed family man.
Balascio left home as soon as possible, but her father “never ceased to be the center of my universe, even as I tried to get out from under his control.” In 2009, Balascio, now a wife and mother, was surfing the internet when she realized that her father may have been responsible for the “Sweetheart Murders” of two 19-year-olds in Watertown, Wisconsin, in 1980. After she called the cold case hotline, Edwards was eventually arrested and imprisoned, found responsible for at least five killings between 1977 and 1996, possibly more.
Balascio delivers page-turning tension as she describes her childhood, her later realization about her father’s crimes and finally, her search for additional victims. Like Tara Westover (Educated), she is a savvy survivor and a courageously skilled narrator. And as with Edward Humes’ The Forever Witness—another unputdownable book about solving a cold case—readers will find themselves utterly immersed.