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.
His criminal record began long before the killings. He escaped from a jail in Akron in 1955 by pushing past a guard, then held up filling stations across the country. He never wore a mask, and said it was because he wanted to be famous. In 1961 he was put on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list, and he was arrested in Atlanta on January 20, 1962. He was paroled in 1967.
In 1972 he published an autobiography, The Metamorphosis of a Criminal, and appeared on the television game show To Tell the Truth as a reformed offender. The Wisconsin killings came eight years later.
In August 1977, William Lavaco, twenty-one, and Judith Straub, eighteen, were shot in a park in Ohio and the scene was staged to look like a murder and suicide. Accounts place it at Norton and at Sterling.
On August 9, 1980, Timothy Hack and Kelly Drew, both nineteen, left a wedding reception at the Concord House in rural Jefferson County, Wisconsin 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 and he told them he knew nothing.
In June 1996 he shot the young man he called his foster son, and whom sources name variously as Dannie Boy Edwards and Dannie Law Gloeckner, in a secluded spot near Burton, Ohio, and buried him in a shallow grave. He collected two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in life insurance. Accounts differ on whether he was twenty-four or twenty-five, and on whether he was shot in the chest or 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 in 2009. DNA connected him to the scene, and he was arrested on July 30, 2009.
What he did next is the part of this case that stands apart. Wisconsin convicted him in April 2010 and, having no death penalty, sentenced him to two life terms. 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 confessed to the murder of his foster son, a killing nobody had charged him with. Ohio convicted him of three counts of aggravated murder and sentenced him to death in March 2011.
He died of natural causes at the Corrections Medical Center in Columbus on April 7, 2011, three weeks after the sentence he had asked for.
Investigators suspected him of between nine and fifteen or more killings, on the basis that his movements put him in cities where unsolved murders happened. Those figures are suspicion and nothing more; five is what he was convicted of.
A separate set of claims should be named and dismissed. It has been argued, principally by one former detective and repeated widely online, that Edwards was also the Zodiac killer, the killer of JonBenet Ramsey, and the man behind the West Memphis Three murders. No evidence supports any of it, no law enforcement agency has adopted it, and it is not treated here as an open question.