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Edward Wayne Edwards Pleads Guilty to the 1977 Murders of a Young Couple in Norton, Ohio, Solving a 33-Year-Old Case

Two days earlier, Edwards had admitted killing another young couple in Wisconsin in 1980. A week later, he told the AP he had also killed his foster son.

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Illustration of television camera crews on the steps of a columned Midwestern courthouse on a summer day. Not an actual scene from the case.

A young couple were found dead in a park in Norton, Ohio, in 1977, and the case went unsolved for 33 years. On June 11, 2010, Edward Wayne Edwards pleaded guilty to their murders.

Edwards, 76, who grew up in Cuyahoga Falls, pleaded guilty before Judge Thomas Teodosio in Summit County to two counts of aggravated murder for the deaths of Billy Lavaco, 21, of Doylestown, and Judith Straub, 18, of Sterling. Their bodies had been found on August 8, 1977, in Norton's Silver Creek Metro Park. The judge imposed the maximum sentence available for a 1977 murder, life with parole eligibility after 10 years on each count, to run consecutively; the death penalty was not available. Edwards had written to Summit County Prosecutor Sherri Bevan Walsh in April 2010 saying he had information about the killings, and confessed in May to investigators who visited him in a Wisconsin jail. "Bottom line, he isn't ever leaving prison," Walsh said.

Two days earlier, Edwards had pleaded guilty in Wisconsin to the 1980 murders of Tim Hack and Kelly Drew, both 19, after DNA connected him to the case. On June 16, he told the Associated Press in a jailhouse interview that he had also killed Dannie Boy Edwards, 24, a young man he considered a foster son, near his home in Burton, Ohio, in June 1996. Geauga County Prosecutor David J. Joyce called the confession an attempt at "court-assisted suicide."

WOIO reported that Tim Hack and Kelly Drew were found in a cornfield in Jefferson, Wisconsin, while the Associated Press placed their killings near Sullivan, Wisconsin.

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