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.
