Edward Wayne Edwards

What the record shows

Edward Wayne Edwards was an American con man and convicted serial killer who pleaded guilty to five murders committed in Ohio and Wisconsin between 1977 and 1996. He was arrested in Louisville, Kentucky, in July 2009 after DNA linked him to a 1980 double killing in Jefferson County, Wisconsin. In 2010 he received life terms in Wisconsin and in Summit County, Ohio, and in March 2011 a three-judge panel in Geauga County, Ohio, sentenced him to death for killing a young man he regarded as his foster son. He died of natural causes on Ohio death row in April 2011, aged 77, before any execution date arrived.

Edwards was born on June 14, 1933, in Akron, Ohio, according to the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, under the name Charles Wayne Murray, according to the Wikipedia article. He spent the 1950s and early 1960s committing car thefts, robberies and other crimes, which he later described in a 1972 autobiography, Metamorphosis of a Criminal. He was placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list in 1961 and was captured in Atlanta in 1962, the Associated Press reported. After federal prison and parole in 1967 he toured the country speaking to young people about avoiding crime. In a 2010 interview with the AP, he said the publisher had embellished most of the book.

The first killings for which he was convicted took place in Summit County, Ohio. William Lavaco, 21, of Doylestown, and Judith Straub, 18, of Sterling, were found dead on August 8, 1977, in Metropolitan Silver Creek Park in Norton, near Akron. Both had been shot at close range. Three years later, on August 9, 1980, Tim Hack and Kelly Drew, both 19, disappeared after a wedding reception at a dance hall in Jefferson County, Wisconsin. Their remains were found more than two months later several miles away, Drew's in woods and Hack's in a nearby cornfield. ABC News reported that investigators believed the pair had been stabbed and strangled. Edwards lived and worked near the dance hall and was interviewed by Wisconsin investigators at the time, but was not charged.

The Wisconsin case was reopened decades later. Investigators re-examining the evidence found DNA from an unknown donor, and a sample obtained from Edwards in Louisville produced what Jefferson County Sheriff Paul Milbrath called a confirmed hit, WAVE 3 News reported. Edwards was arrested at his mobile home in Louisville on the night of July 30, 2009, and returned to Wisconsin. The Wikipedia article says the investigation was prompted by a tip from his daughter, April Balascio. In May 2010 a Norton detective and a Summit County prosecutor's investigator interviewed Edwards in a Wisconsin jail, where he confessed to the 1977 killings.

Under a deal with prosecutors in both states, Edwards pleaded guilty on June 9, 2010, in Wisconsin to the murders of Hack and Drew, and on June 11, 2010, in Summit County Common Pleas Court before Judge Thomas Teodosio to two counts of aggravated murder for Lavaco and Straub. Teodosio imposed consecutive life terms, the maximum then available, because Ohio's death penalty statutes had been invalidated for crimes committed between 1974 and 1978. Wisconsin, which has no death penalty, imposed mandatory life terms for the Hack and Drew murders.

In a June 2010 jailhouse interview with the AP, Edwards confessed to a fifth killing: Dannie Boy Edwards, born Dannie Law Gloeckner, a man in his mid-20s whom the family had taken into their home in Burton, Ohio, in the mid-1990s. Edwards said he lured him to a secluded cemetery near the house in 1996, shot him twice with a 20-gauge shotgun and buried him in a shallow grave; the body had been found in 1997. Edwards gave his motive as life insurance money, though reported amounts differ, and he said he was confessing because he wanted to be sentenced to death. He told the AP he had killed only five people. Geauga County prosecutors indicted him on aggravated murder charges, and on March 8, 2011, he pleaded guilty in Geauga County Common Pleas Court. A three-judge panel imposed the death sentence he had asked for, the AP reported. The victim's sister told The Plain Dealer that life in prison would have been harsher.

Edwards was found dead in his cell at the Corrections Medical Center in Columbus on April 7, 2011, of what were believed to be natural causes, according to the Wikipedia article; Ohio prison records list him as released due to death. Some writers, notably a retired detective in a 2014 book, have since tied him to the Zodiac killings and other notorious crimes. The Wikipedia article says those claims were met with almost universal disdain, especially from law enforcement, and no court or investigating agency has attributed any killing beyond the five to him.