Edward Wayne Edwards Interviewed by the Geauga County Maple Leaf, March 2011 (Part 3 of 3)
Edwards gives his own version of the 1977 Norton, Ohio, and 1980 Jefferson County, Wisconsin, double murders, accounts that differ from the evidence in the cases. Part 3 of 3.
- Subject
- Edward Wayne Edwards
- Recorded
- about March 9, 2011
- Runtime
- 7:58
Content warning: Edwards describes shooting a young couple and killing a second couple, makes unverified allegations against two of his victims, and refers to sexual activity with one of them.
The Interview
This is the last of three parts of the jail interview Edward Wayne Edwards gave to Glen Miller, news editor of the Geauga County Maple Leaf, about March 9, 2011, the day after he was sentenced to death in Geauga County, Ohio, for the murder of his foster son. The newspaper posted the three parts on April 22, 2011, two weeks after Edwards died. After a short tourism advertisement, Miller turns from Dannie Boy Edwards to the four murders to which Edwards had pleaded guilty in 2010.
Historical Context
On August 8, 1977, Billy Lavaco, 21, of Doylestown, Ohio, and Judith Straub, 18, who had been dating for about eight months, were found shot at close range with a shotgun in Norton, Ohio, near Akron. On August 9, 1980, Tim Hack, 19, and Kelly Drew, 19 (some sources give 20), disappeared after a wedding reception in Jefferson County, Wisconsin; their bodies were found in woods in October 1980. Hack had been stabbed and Drew strangled. Edwards was questioned in 1980 but not held. Almost 29 years later, after a tip from his daughter, DNA linked him to the Wisconsin case; he was arrested in 2009 and in 2010 pleaded guilty to all four murders.
Circumstances of the Interview
Edwards was 77, in poor health and newly under sentence of death; he died in custody on April 7, 2011, about a month after the interview. It is one of his last recorded interviews. He had already admitted these four killings in court.
What the Interview Covers
Asked why he killed two people he did not know, Edwards says he knew them well, and he makes allegations against both Lavaco and Straub; these are his own unverified claims and are not repeated here. He says he shot Lavaco at about 3 a.m. after Lavaco called him by name ("Wayne") in front of Straub, and then shot her as she came back. Asked about Hack and Drew and whether it was rape, he says "Hell no" and claims he and Drew had a consensual relationship; he says he punched Hack in the neck during an argument outside the reception hall, then choked Drew when she turned on him, and drove the bodies away in his van. Asked why he did not go to the police and claim self-defense, he says he had a family, had a record and "also had that double murder there in Norton they didn't know about".
What Makes the Recording Significant
It is Edwards's own account, near the end of his life, of the four murders that led to his 2009 arrest and 2010 guilty pleas. It shows how he justified himself: in each case he blames the victims or the circumstances, while admitting the killings.
Important Caveats
Everything Edwards says about his victims and his motives is his own claim and is not supported by the record. His allegations against Billy Lavaco and Judith Straub are unverified, and page copy should not repeat them as fact. His claims about Kelly Drew (a consensual relationship, no rape) are his alone; the interviewer notes that semen was found. His account of how Tim Hack died (a punch to the neck) does not match the record, which says Hack was stabbed. The uploader's description places the 1977 murders in Doylestown, Ohio; the killings took place in Norton, as both Miller and Edwards say in the clip (Doylestown was Lavaco's home town). Edwards claims no further victims in this part; any other killings attributed to him are unverified. The transcript is a machine transcription checked against automatic captions; it has not yet been checked by a human listener.
Advert: Hi, everybody. [unclear: "Mabel Maxx" / "Maple Max"] here from Geauga County Tourism. Mark your calendars: May 7th is our annual Spring Drive It Yourself tour. Lots of great fun. You can get your free tour map by calling us at 440-632-1538, or check it out on our website at tourgeauga.com. Hope to see you here. Going to be a lot of fun!
Glen Miller: Let's go back to this 1977, and you killed Judith Straub and Bill Lavaco at close range. And they were in, they were in the Akron area, a couple, in Norton. Why? You didn't even know them, did you?
Edward Edwards: Oh, yes, I knew them very well. I knew him very well, and I had told him on different occasions that if he did not stop making eyes and fooling around my small children, and being around them, that he was going to end up getting hurt. And after about the fourth or fifth time I explained that to him, I told him, I said, "I'm going to tell you something, Bill, I'm going to kill you if you do it one more time." And it just so happened that Judith, Judy, was a prostitute. She used, when we used to go up [inaudible], I can't think of it, right up in Wayne County.
Glen Miller: You were downtown Akron there?
Edward Edwards: No, we were living in Wayne County, right out Route 21. I can't think of the name of the little town up there, but we used to go up there and shoot pool and everything, and she'd be out in the car making money with prostitution and stuff like that. Well, I did not expect her to be with him this particular night. She was. It was dark. She did not recognize me. I know she didn't. And I told her to stay in the car, I want to talk to him, and I said please. About, about three o'clock in the morning, and [unclear: "Doylestown was where we" / "Doyle's time was where we would live"], this happened.
Edward Edwards: And so I was over there with Bill, talking to him, [unclear: "telling him" / "tell them there"], and then she insisted to be there. She got out of the car, come on over, and then at that time Bill told her, says, "Look, Wayne, there's $500 in her purse in the car. If you want money, why don't you just get it?" I said, "Bill, do you know what you just did?" And at that moment I shot him and killed him. What he just did was tell her who I was. And she started to run. I told her to stop. I wasn't going to shoot her or kill her. I only had a single, [unclear: "single gauge" / "single-shot"] shotgun. She come back. By the time I had one, another one I put in, and I shot her. But I didn't threaten her, tell her I was going to. I didn't even give reasons for it. There was no threats. There was no pleading and things like this here.
Glen Miller: Okay. What happened with Kelly Drew and Tim Hack in Jefferson, Wisconsin? That was rape, right?
Edward Edwards: That was what? Rape? Hell no, it wasn't rape. I've never raped anybody.
Glen Miller: Well, they found semen.
Edward Edwards: No. First of all, the girl and I, Kelly, we knew each other. Okay? I had, I was doing work up there at the, they were the dance hall and the bar and everything [unclear: "at around" / "at a rat"], and doing carpet [unclear: "rework" / "re-work"] and rebuilding. My son was helping me. But we lived about three or four miles away in a farmhouse that we had rented. And Kelly and I had been together. It was a wedding reception. And the boy, the man, he was inside, he was arguing over a tractor. He was in the tractors, tractor pulls, and the expensive tractors. He was in there arguing, and she didn't want to hear it. She come on out, and I was out in the bar right next door. We went on over to the car, and we had our fun, sexually, yes.
Edward Edwards: And she went on back, and she went around the corner to go into the reception hall, where he was coming out, and they started arguing. And this arguing, it progressed, oh, a couple hundred feet down toward the end of the building. And now there's no lights down there or anything. And he had pushed her. And so I had walked over, and at that time, it was kind of obvious to him I was the reason why, he didn't know where she was. And he pushed her again, she went down, and I hit him in the neck very hard. I was a husky man then, and we're talking about 1980. And in the neck here, the rabbit punch. But anyways, he went down and he stayed down.
Edward Edwards: And [unclear: "I'm bent over, see here" / "unbent over the see"], I mean, 'cause I didn't mean, my intent was not to kill him. It was just get him off of her and get him away from me. Well, as it worked out, then she started piling on me, and she's talking about, "He's dead, he's dead," and she started smacking me and everything, so I ended up choking her right there. And that's where they both died. But I didn't leave them there. I pulled them back away from anybody, 'cause there was nothing there. It was all cows and everything out in there, and woods. And I went down, not the front way, but around the back way, got my van, brought it back around the back way, put them in the van, and drove off and [unclear: "disposed of" / "exposed"] them in a cornfield. Now, she was not raped, and that's how that come about.
Glen Miller: But you had sex with her?
Edward Edwards: Yeah, I had sex with her on, oh, five or six occasions.
Glen Miller: Okay. Wasn't there a better way to deal with that situation? Explain to the police that he had attacked you and you had acted in self-defense?
Edward Edwards: No. First of all, I was having sex with her. I had a family, had five children, and...
Glen Miller: You were cheating on your wife and your family?
Edward Edwards: Yes, yes. And I had a record way back [unclear: "up there" / "nothing there"], but then I also had that double murder there in Norton they didn't know about. But no, that was, for my lifestyle and everything, no, I just killed two people. No way in hell was I about to call the police out, because I wasn't from there, and I'd have been convicted. [clip ends] ---