Edward Wayne Edwards was born Charles Wayne Murray in Akron, Ohio, on June 14, 1933. He grew up in a Catholic orphanage after his mother's suicide, and wrote later that he was physically and emotionally abused by the nuns there. He was let out of juvenile detention to join the Marines, went absent without leave and was dishonorably discharged. Through his twenties and thirties he worked as a docker, a vacuum cleaner salesman and a handyman, among other jobs.
His criminal record began long before the killings. In 1955 he escaped from the jail in Akron by pushing past a guard and drifted around the country holding up gas stations. He never wore a mask, and said it was because he wanted to be famous. After a 1960 escape from a jail in Portland, Oregon, where he was held on suspicion of impersonating a federal officer, he was put on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list in 1961, and he was arrested in Atlanta on January 20, 1962. He served his time at the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, was paroled in 1967, said a kind guard had reformed him, married, and became a motivational speaker.
In 1972 he published an autobiography, The Metamorphosis of a Criminal: The True Life Story of Ed Edwards, and appeared on the television shows To Tell the Truth and What's My Line? as a reformed offender. By 1982 he was back in prison, for two years in Pennsylvania for arson. His daughter April said that between 1974 and 2009 he lived in more than a dozen states under many false names. A 1993 letter found in his papers asked the FBI for his records in cities in nineteen states.
On August 7, 1977, the car of Judith Lynn Straub, eighteen, of Sterling, Ohio, was found in the lot of Silver Creek Metro Park in Norton, with her purse and shoes inside. She had been dating William Joseph Lavaco, twenty-one, of Doylestown, for eight months. The next day, as their families gathered and a National Guard helicopter helped search the high weeds, they were found lying on the ground, both shot at point-blank range with a twenty-gauge shotgun. By one account the scene was arranged to look like a murder and suicide.
On August 9, 1980, Timothy John Hack, nineteen, and Kelly Joye Drew, nineteen or twenty by different accounts, a couple from Jefferson, Wisconsin, left a wedding reception at the Concord House in rural Jefferson County and disappeared. Their bodies were found more than two months later a few miles away. Drew had been tied up and strangled; Hack had been stabbed. They were buried side by side under a single headstone in the shape of two hearts, with the words kidnapped and slain cut into it. The case was known locally as the sweetheart murders. Edwards was the handyman at the Concord House. Police questioned him at the time, he told them he knew nothing, and there was no basis to hold him.
The young man he called his foster son, Dannie Law Gloeckner, known as Dannie Boy Edwards, had lived with the family for several years and was serving in the Army. In June 1996 Edwards persuaded him to go absent without leave, took him to the woods near his home in Burton, Ohio, shot him and left him in a shallow grave, where a hunter later found him. He collected 250,000 dollars in life insurance. Accounts differ on whether Gloeckner was twenty-four or twenty-five, and on whether he was shot in the chest or twice in the face. Edwards told the Associated Press that he had gone home as if nothing had happened, that it did not work on his conscience, and that he spent the money and had a good time.
The case was closed by his daughter. April Balascio came to suspect her father of the 1980 Wisconsin murders and went to the police. DNA connected him to the scene, nearly twenty-nine years later, and he was arrested in Louisville, Kentucky, on July 30, 2009, where neighbors knew him as pleasant and neighborly. In 2010 he pleaded guilty to the murders of Lavaco and Straub and of Hack and Drew and was given life terms; Wisconsin has no death penalty.
He was seventy-seven and diabetic, and did not want to die slowly in a prison ward. So he wrote to the prosecutor's office in Ohio and, in a jailhouse interview, confessed to the murder of his foster son, a killing nobody had charged him with. Ohio convicted him of three counts of aggravated murder with aggravated robbery and sentenced him to death in March 2011. He was found dead in his cell at the Corrections Medical Center in Columbus on April 7, 2011, of natural causes, weeks after the sentence he had asked for.
Investigators suspected him of between nine and fifteen or more killings, because his movements put him in cities where unsolved murders happened; that is suspicion, and he was convicted of five. A separate set of claims, pressed principally by one former detective and repeated widely online, makes him the Zodiac killer, the killer of JonBenet Ramsey and the man behind the West Memphis murders. No evidence supports any of it, and no law enforcement agency has adopted it.