The Clearing is a show about crime and the trauma that can result from crime. It may not be suitable for all audiences. These cops have driven down from rural Wisconsin to a mobile home park in Louisville, Kentucky to talk to this suspect in a double homicide that's gone on-solve for 30 years. His wife is there too. The guy's name is Edward Wayne Edwards.
This is The Clearing. I'm Josh Deane. Episode 1. Hunting Season So in order to explain how these cops ended up at that trailer, 430 miles outside their jurisdiction, I need to take you to a living room in Northeast Ohio. On a country road, a short drive from Lake Erie. To me, to woman, I've spent a lot of time with over the past three years.
Edward's oldest daughter, April Bellascio. He traveled the United States when he was younger. And as we as a family, we kind of followed his same path. We went to places that he had already lived. April's the oldest of the five Edwards kids. She's 50 now and her place is immaculate. She vacuum so much that you can see your footprints in her plush carpet. Socks only please. And it smells good. There's always a seasonal fragrance in the air.
As tidy as April's house is, her childhood is the complete opposite. Even after all this time talking to her, I still have trouble keeping it straight. Well, I started out in Akron, Ohio. Then we moved to Doyle's Town, Ohio. From Doyle's Town, it was O'Cala, Florida. And then a short little stay in Arizona. Then on to Brighton, Colorado for a year. On to Watertown, Wisconsin for just a couple months. After Watertown, Wisconsin, it was Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for a year.
April's known for a long time for decades that her dad was a bad guy. Before she was born, he'd done time in two maximum security prisons for our robbery. That first life of his wasn't a secret. He wrote a book about it. It's called Metamorphosis of a Criminal. When April was literally supported the family by touring around, telling a story of redemption to church groups and high schools and police academies.
But she also knew he couldn't hold down a job. He was absent for long periods. And he kept making the family pick up what few things they had and move with no warning. After Pittsburgh, it was Slippery Rock for a few months. As when he burnt down the other house, was running from the wall, left in the middle of the night, ended up in Atlanta, Georgia. Came back to Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, Newcastle, Pennsylvania.
April says that she and her siblings watched their father lie and steal and lie about stealing. He'd shoplift right in front of them, then swear he'd done nothing. He burned a house twice because the first time the insurance company didn't rule it a total loss. And he had a terrible temper. April says they all suffered abuse at his hands.
As soon as she graduated high school, April moved out of the family home, then in Burton, Ohio. She got married at 21, had three kids. She tried very hard, she told me, to bury the memories of her dad and her childhood, to just focus on her own life. By 2009, she had basically no relationship with him anymore. But memories would surface unexpectedly, often at night. April's never slept well. And back in 2009, the insomnia was worse than ever.
She was tortured by the idea that she was suppressing things. Things her father may have done. She'd lie awake and try to remember all the places they lived. And then she'd get out of bed, grab her laptop, and start googling those places, looking for unsolved crimes. What if her dad wasn't just an abusive asshole, but far worse? But every time she'd look, nothing. Then one night in May 2009, this town name popped into her head.
I grabbed out my laptop and I plugged in cold case, watertown, West Concent, and boom, all this stuff started coming up. Two teenagers with bright futures found murdered. The double homicide in one rural community has puzzled investigators for nearly 30 years. On August 10, 1980, Tim Hack and Kelly Drew went missing. They were both 19. They had been in a wedding reception at a dance hall in rural Jefferson County, Wisconsin.
Hack's oldsma be able to steal in the lot with his wallet inside and the doors locked. Local and state police mounted a massive search on land and by air. Many people in town helped with the search. For days, all they found were some pieces of Kelly Drew's clothes. They were strewn over miles, unroes leading away from the dance hall. Two months after the teens disappeared, their decomposed remains were found in some thick woods. Hack had been stabbed, Drew was raped and strangled.
The spectre of the killing haunted Jefferson County for the next three decades. Everyone had a suspect and strangers were eyed wearily around town. Parents worried every time a child was a little late getting home. On anniversaries, the case would pop back up on the news and reporters would poke at old wounds. Tim Hack's father Dave has his own list of suspects. One thing I would really like to know who's not responsible because I always have suspicions.
Hack also has hope. He hopes whoever kidnapped his son and Tim's sweetheart will see justice. In 2007, 27 years after the murder, Wisconsin cops took another look at the evidence and found viable DNA on Drew's clothing. In 2009, the state received a big federal grant for cold cases that had some chance of being solved. The Hack Drew investigation was suddenly a priority again.
And as I was reading the case, it all rang true. I mean, I remembered everything. It was like stepping, taking a step back in my past. And just all these flashes and memories were just come flooding back. I just remember myself sitting going back at that time and sitting in the van, our van. And I remember sitting behind my dad, listening to him once again, talk about the murders. And him specifically saying, I bet you they're going to find him in a field.
And I just remember looking at the back of his head and just thinking, huh? April was 11 years old at the time. Now, reading about the case, certain details came back to her. She'd seen pictures of the dance hall where the kids went missing. A dance hall, she remembered, where her dad had been a handyman. A dance hall right next to a campground where the family lived for a few months while they looked for a house to rent. And then there was the nose thing.
My dad came home late in the evening. He was muddy, dirty, and he had a bloody nose. A cut on his nose. And I believe he said it was due to hunting. Would that have been a surprising answer or not really? I just remember thinking I didn't know that was hunting season. I didn't remember him hunting that really at all. One more thing came back to her. That fall, a few months after the murders, her dad pulled a familiar move. She came home with a U-Hallet truck and we started packing.
I believe in the morning and we were finished by the evening and we left while it was when it was dark. We just moved there and here we're moving again. The more April read, the more she couldn't escape the feeling that it all made sense. At the end of one story, she saw a contact. Investigators desperately want information. If you have any information call the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office at 920. April wrote the number down and stared at it.
She wanted to call, but not before talking to someone. So she called her younger sister, Janine. April says that her sister had suspicions too. But she warned April to think very hard about what she was doing. Because she knew the ramifications that this is our dad that we were talking about that's going against family. And what were you feeling on that front? That's my producer, Jonathan Minhebar. Even though she was telling me, think about it, she actually pushed me to make that call.
Does that make sense? I was kind of annoyed after the conversation. Here we think that our father has committed these crimes. How can you not think of turning him in? So I was just like, you know what, I make it out and calling. So April picks up the phone. It's the Thursday, about 9pm. Because I remember thinking, I'm going to call up and I'm going to leave a message because this guy's not going to be in.
And I call up, I get a lady and the lady puts April right through to the detective on the case. Chad Garcia of the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office. He's one of the guys you heard in the recording at the start of the show. And as I'm being put on hold, I'm thinking, oh my god, oh my god. What am I going to say? I wasn't expecting to talk to this guy. He's got to think I'm a nutcase. He's got to think I'm crazy.
And when the detective Garcia got on the phone, I think those were my almost exact words. I said, you might think I'm crazy or I might be sending you on a wild goose chase. But I think I have some information for you. I had gotten all these leads that went nowhere when a woman from another state calls and says she saw something on the internet. And I think it's a piece of my peer father that's involved. This, as you probably guessed, is Chad Garcia.
He's a former Marine in a very no nonsense detective. He's the only cop I met while reporting the story who wore a jacket and tied to work. It had been almost two months since his office put out the call for tips. For the first couple of weeks, his phone rang incessantly. Any pursuit all leads. None of them went anywhere. By the time April called, the tips that slowed to a trickle. So, I mean, are you thinking that this is very credible from the outset? Or about her call?
No, initially no. So, initially, when I get the start the phone call, and I get, okay, I already is nine after nine p.m. This thing hasn't been on the news for over a month. It's an out-of-state person that's accusing her own father. So, initially, from that alone, I'm like, no, this isn't credible. This is another one of these wild goose chase types tips. But as I'm talking to her, I'm also firing up the computer, and I'm looking through my list of suspects.
I'm looking through names that pop out that kind of stuff. So, as she's giving information, I'm verifying the information she's giving. And this name that she's giving is there. It's in my top 80-some people of suspects. So, it's like, okay, well, this person does exist, and it was somebody that was talked when looked at, and it's still an active suspect. So, that all adds up. All the stuff she's telling me about is past. That's all clicking.
The next thing she talks about is book. So, I jump on eBay or the book. A few days later, his used copy of Metamorphosis of a Criminal Arrives, and Garcia dives in. The book reports to be a redemption tale, but it's not exactly heartwarming. Edwards writes about himself treading gleefully all over America, chasing girls and committing crimes. He seems to revel in his use of violence. He talks about how much he'd like to control women. He had a thing for Bernetz.
So, Garcia goes back to the documents from the original case. He starts pulling interviews and reports from multiple agencies into a single searchable file. I find where Edwards is named in two separate reports. Talked to on one occasion and reported on another occasion, which were years apart. So, there's stuff in there, and my boss agrees that that's the best tip we've had in years, and that I should go forward with it.
So, this must have felt, I mean, are you thinking you obviously don't know for sure at some, but are you thinking, wow, this really seems like a very likely suspect, if not my actual murderer? It's enough that I definitely want his DNA, because I have a DNA profile, so it's a very easy elimination if I'm able to obtain his DNA. I'll get to whether Garcia gets Edwards DNA soon enough. But I think it's worth pausing here to talk about how the cops missed Edwards in the first place.
In the days after the teens went missing, investigators canvassed guests and workers from the dance hall, which is known as the Concert House. Edwards, the handyman, was among those questions, especially agent from the state police talked to him. So, they go talk to him. When they go talk to him, he's out in the barn shooting pigeons or whatever. He's got some injury to his face, and he says, you know, basically I've never really been in the Concert House itself.
I don't know who these people are. I don't know anything. Blah blah blah. Is the shooting pigeons, is that what was he doing exactly? Yeah, that's what he had told me, was shooting pigeons in the barn. That was his way to explain the face injury. That's about it. So he doesn't really give a whole lot of information. They cross him off the list, basically, because he was just someone they had to talk to.
They don't have anything leading them to believe that he's involved in this at all, other than the fact that he worked out there. A big problem here is that there were two different agencies working in the case, the state and the county. And they weren't communicating as well as you'd hope. This is 1980. The reports are all on paper, not computer-est. And there was no central database for collating their findings.
So, if the county did a bunch of reports and the state did a bunch of reports, the chances of me reading all the state reports or the state agent reading all my reports were very slim. So, more or less, if I'm working the case with state agent Joe, we'll meet for coffee and we'll talk about the case. Well, he's not going to remember every possible thing that he put in a report. So, he's just going to tell me a few different things.
So, if I go and interview this handyman and I get nothing of use, that's what I'm going to tell state agent Joe is, I went and talked to the handyman, he didn't really tell me anything, I crossed him off. And that's it. So, he's never going to get my report, he's never going to know about the shooting pigeons, the broken nose, he's never going to know that kind of stuff.
It was only when Chad Garcia was looking at the decades-old file with a benefit of hindsight and computers that he started noticing things. Like this detail, for eight years after the murders. The county gets notified by the landlord that Edwards lived at his place, was interviewed and took off in the middle of the night or the next day. Suddenly, he had scared a couple off at gunpoint that was on the property.
And he had gone over to have dinner at the landlord's house before, which overlooks where the bodies were dumped. All good information. But, again, wasn't linked to the other report. I talked to that landlord, John Simons. He couldn't believe the authorities had missed Edwards. He thought all along that this handyman was the most obvious suspect and even went back to county cops in 1988 to say as much. But that lead to fell through the cracks.
And no one with the state police or Jefferson County paid any more attention to that Edwards. Until April picked up her phone and called Chad Garcia. So, when she calls and I look up the names and I see Edwards, I can pull both of those reports and go, oh, yeah, we've got something here. Cops like to say that luck is a major factor in solving murders, especially the ones that go cold. And here's where luck comes in for us.
If the federal government doesn't offer that money to revisit cold cases, there are no TV news segments about Tim Hack and Kelly Drew in March 2009. April gets out of bed, does yet another Google search, finds nothing, goes back to lying awake, searching her mind for some other place she might be missing. But let's say April has that premonition about Watertown any time before the case was reactivated and those stories appeared. Again, she finds nothing. Chad Garcia never gets her call.
Edwards never emerges as a suspect. None of us ever know his name. He just goes on living and eventually dying in obscurity. I certainly never would have met April. And she'd still be wondering if she'd just been crazy all along. Coming up, the goose chase takes us back to that trailer. That's right after this break. Okay, so let's go back to March 2009. April makes that call to Chad Garcia and then nothing. Days go by, then weeks. Enough time had gone by that I'm thinking to myself.
Okay, I'm a nutcase. I sent this guy on a wild goose chase. Obviously nothing has come out of it. You know, I've been assuming things wrong and I was wrong. And what a horrible person to think that about your dad. But Garcia had seen enough to convince his boss that he needed to go visit at Edwards and get a sample of his DNA. That's how he ends up in that mobile home in Louisville. Redwards is living with his wife. April's mom, okay. We come in talking for a few minutes here.
It's one month after April's call. And remarkably for our purposes, Garcia has a small tape recorder role in the whole time. My plan is to do a very soft interview with him because I don't have any solid proof at this point. The DNA would be my proof. And I don't want to screw that up or potentially have him mess with evidence. Have him do anything to destroy the case. So I'm going there with a mindset of having just a sit-down conversation with him.
You're still helping, maybe you can get it willingly. Just naively. Why would a suspect ever give it to you? If you come to my door and I'm under suspicion of our crime, I think I wouldn't want to give you my DNA. If you're innocent, then it's going to prove that you're innocent and then we're done. That's human today. Yeah, this is... How many of you got dialed up? Does he know you're coming? I don't think so.
Actually, no. I know he doesn't know we're coming because he had just pulled in with K with groceries. His wheelchair was just going up the ramp as we pulled in. You're right, it's cool. I got ice in here. I don't see it yet. It's all for warm, huh? Inside the trailer, Garcia finds a very different man than the one he's read about. He's parked in his wheelchair on the trailer's messy living room, in case it's next to him.
He is obese and weasin, a thin tube feeds oxygen from a nearby tank to his nose. Ron Führer, the Wisconsin state agent who drove down there with Garcia, speaks first. He calls Edwards by his middle name, Wayne, which is how most people know him. Okay, let's let me tell you who we are in life right here. Okay, I'll do that. So it's the three of us making contact there and just explain what we're there for following up on this double homicide that occurred in Wisconsin.
He had worked for the Concord House back then, just like to sit down and talk to him. We've gotten some new information that's developed and just not the suspect approach, but more of the witness you were there when this happened. We're just crossing off our teeth and dotting our eyes right now. I'm with the Wisconsin Department of Justice. Wisconsin. Wisconsin. Okay. One way is a way. And the reason we're here is we're working on some cold cases. And your name came up in the case file.
Oh, well, 1980. 29 years ago. Is he playing cool at cooperating or what's his response to that? Very, very cool, very laid back. It's more than willing to talk. It gives us little to no information that's of any value whatsoever, but takes a good hour and a half to do it. Did you ever do any hunting while you were there at all? No. Yeah, I used to go out there in the barn and shoot pigeons. Remember the big barn we had there? I remember that.
For recreation for everything we had there, shoot pigeons. Eventually they start probing a little deeper, watching Edwards for expressions as much as they're listening for responses. And either can't remember details about the 1980 murder of two teens at the Concert House. Very spying, very dumb. What we're following up on is that the two teenagers, the guy on the girl that disappeared from the kind of courthouse. The kind of courthouse. The kind of courthouse. Yeah. The kind of courthouse.
No, look at me. I was homeless at times. I don't even know what the kind of courthouse is. I'm gonna say what is the kind of courthouse? The sense from him that was he trying to get details out of you to see what you had? Absolutely. Yeah, he was trying to ask questions as much as he was answering him if not more. And I actually happened with this case. And I assume in that situation you know that he's likely to do that so you're not gonna give him anything that might tell him that you know.
Right. The only thing I'm gonna release is stuff you could find on the internet or in the paper. Your last name is Edwards. Tell me something, I'm a curries. How in the world did you end up dying in the ball that you guys coming to hear whatever? What we're doing is going through this file. It's okay. And your interviewer is your... About half an hour in Garcia starts to ask questions that cut closer to the bone. And Edwards, he's even scared. You can almost feel it in the silence.
You recall at all these people that came out missing. I'm trying to. Two teenagers, nice and old, boy and girl. See that? If I do, it's not a... I don't know, I gotta think about that. Uh... Did you say come up missing? Okay. I was just doing that floor up there. I was doing some carbon dioxide work for him. Uh... No. Just they were at a wedding reception at the dance hall early in August. And the... And the disappeared car was left there.
No. Yeah. No. As the interview continues, Edwards tactics shift. He decides to acknowledge some small details, harmless ones. You were interviewed by a couple of officers. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Okay. At barn that we had with shoot, yes. Okay, there was. Edwards just rambles. He spends a bunch of time talking about his ailments and the many medications he's taking. He's taking about 26 pills a day. He won't... He won't right here in the... In the chart.
Do you recall injuring your nose at any time in the middle of the Wisconsin? I've injured my nose, I can tell you where the other factor just did. Matter of fact, he said that an extra thing has been broken once before well. Are they a plastic surgery or a infotaincer? Basically, anyone that's giving any information about him is different than the information that he's giving. But he's sticking to his 1980 story. Do you get any kind of gut reaction to him in the interview? I mean, do you...
Are you any more or less convinced by your interactions? I do get a gut reaction just talking to him. That this guy definitely thinks he's smarter than everybody else. He definitely thinks that he can steer the conversation, can dictate what happens. And to have two people from another state travel that far to talk to you, I would be shocked to have that happen. And it didn't even seem to matter to him whatsoever that we had traveled that distance to talk to him.
If he was simply just a handyman and may have seen something, because that's something that normally you could do over the phone. So once this thing wraps up, as we could see that it's wrapping up, we're not getting anywhere, we're just spinning our wheels.
It's at that point where I explained to him, hey, since you were there during that time frame when all this happened, what we're doing now, because of DNA technology and everything, is we're just eliminating anybody that had the potential to be there. So because of that, before we take off that to Wisconsin, I'd like to ask you for your sample, your DNA, just to completely eliminate you from anything whatsoever. We want to bother you again, that's it.
Because it's not as jurisdiction, Garcia has also brought it detected from Louisville along to the trailer. And it's that cop who steps forward to explain what's about to happen. They asked me to ask you if we could have somebody come and swap this out of your mouth and get a biological sample. I'm not that good for that. It's not intrusive, and it's as much as it does to find a suspect that also eliminates the other 40 or 50 people as possible suspects.
And as anything to hide, you shouldn't worry about it. That's K in the background. She's saying, if you don't have anything to hide, you shouldn't worry about it. I've listened to this recording many times, and every time I pause on this moment, and this woman, the long-suffering wife, who has no idea when she wakes up that morning, that she's about to be shown an escape hatch. That's true, but...
And at which point, he changes the position in his seat and says, I've watched a lot of those shows on TV, and I don't like that idea. I don't want to be wrongfully accused or convicted. And looking over at K, you could see there was a look on her face like, OK, this is weird. What you do that, would be a little bit of a break of mind, but be on... Say, it's like fearful, OK? I don't know. I mean, I don't know. There, I don't know what I'm trying to say.
Edward says he needs time to consider what they're asking, but it's not working for him, so he tries a new approach. Well, I've been making arrangements to get myself creamy, because I don't know that much longer than he goes up there, but I'm just... I don't know. I have to think about that. Well, unfortunately, he's shown me, he won't have all of that time from Wisconsin, so we can...
Well, I mean, you're here, you can get back with me, if you can do it, I'm sure, at the location, set it to him or whatever. I mean, it is. Would you be willing to do it an hour now? No. No, I got to think about that. So, at that point, the Louisville detective whipped out the warrant and said, no, you will be supplying the DNA, and he had an analyst outside of the trailer. Well, under circumstances, I did all of myself with a search warrant. I have search warrant, okay.
The search warrant basically is just describing exactly what I've said, or we're just going to take a DNA sample. And it's just to keep us from having to bother you and DNA. Yeah, the way you're going to take it. Yep. Finally, Edward's relents. The column in analyst has been waiting outside. She swipes the inside of Edward's cheek, places a swab into a plastic sheath, and hands it to Garcia. Thank you very much.
The only other question I really got, is do the names Kelly Drew or Tim Hack mean anything to you? No. Kelly Drew and Tim Hack, as people you ever remember meeting at any point? No. Tim Hack would be a red-haired farm boy, six foot or so, flunder, Kelly's brunette, fairly tall, probably five baitish. Both around 19 years old. No, okay. Well, thank you very, very much. Thank you. Take care, hope you are. I'll see you later. Okay, I'll see you later. I'll see you later. I'll see you later.
Thank you, now. Have a safe trip back. Yeah. I can't imagine what the conversation was like in that trailer after the cops left. What outrageous lie Edward's cooked up to explain when it just happened. Katie wanna talk to us, but in her interviews with police, it's obvious she blocked out huge portions of her life. And when the cops finally caught up to her husband, she saw it as a gift. She told them, it's like just before this happened, I said, God, I can't take it anymore.
You've got to do something. I just can't handle it anymore. Back in Wisconsin, Garcia's DNA test jumps to the front of the line at the state lab. Five weeks later, he has his result. He goes back to Kentucky, this time with Rick Luel, another state agent, and an arrest warrant issued by the District Attorney of Jefferson County, Wisconsin. They returned to the Mobile Home Park, a little more wary of Edwards this time around. Which is why there are seven people.
Yeah, if I were just to go arrest somebody, it's usually two people that go arrest somebody. Edwards put up no resistance. Garcia later told me he acted as if he'd been expecting them. Louisville cops wheeled Edwards out the door, down the ramp, and into a waiting van. Once he's gone, Garcia Luel and a small team from Louisville Metro searched the trailer. They find a photo album from 1980, including shots of the family at Watertown's July 4th parade.
Boxes filled with cassette tapes that Edwards had recorded and labeled, and a chicken sprawl with dates and names. An array of fake documents, social security cards, and birth certificates, and IDs that claimed Edwards was a PI. Another said he was a bail-inforced band agent. One said, special investigator, whatever that is.
They also find a laptop, and when they look at the search history, they can see that since Garcia's first trip to the trailer, Edwards had been reading about the Hackdrew case. He'd also studied up on DNA test results. A few hours later, Garcia sees Edwards again. It's around 9 p.m. This time, in a small dingy interrogation room at Louisville Metro homicide. Garcia and the Wells sit across from Edwards. He's in his wheelchair. He's got a cast on his arm. He seems confused, but not nervous.
I don't know. I just feel kind of like an idiot. Well, it's just so freaking unreal, guys. For the first hour, Edwards is just making a small talk. Then, for a while, he plays dumb again. Takes us probably an hour and a half, two hours, to finally get him to admit that he knew who Kelly was and that he had consensual sucks with her. That's about it. That goes two to three hour point, where we're just getting nowhere, we're spinning our wheels.
What's he saying when you say to him that we have this DNA sample before, while he's denying it, what's his explanation? He's not giving an explanation. He tries to mislead you, he tries to redirect you, and he had this tell. What he would do is when he was getting ready to really lie as he would lift his arm, like he would stretch his arm out, like you're trying to catch your breath or something, and then he would lie as a rastth, and he did that repeatedly.
After about a couple hours, two, three hours, we take our break and he gets some water and medication, whatever it was. And at that point, Ryan Nunn, who was a supervisor at Louisville Homicide Squad, said, would you mind if we took a crack at it? And I said, no, absolutely, because we weren't getting anywhere. We'd gotten stuck at a point where we just weren't getting any further. So Ryan went in with another one of the Louisville detectives to talk to him.
They interviewed him for, I don't know, say five or ten minutes. And this detective that went in there couldn't stand it. Couldn't stand his lying, couldn't stand his bullshit, and finally just threw up his hands and said, do you think you're smarter than us? You're not. We got you, basically, you know, you're a lion, piece of crap. You're not going to slip his hands and walk out of the end of your run. I think it's just a game for you. And he's right, your DNA was there.
You can see, you're wasting your time. Wait, you're not in charge. You talk to him. And that will be my charge, because I thought you'd read it to his name in the pre-name. I heard. For eight hours, until five a.m. with only a few short breaks in part, so Edwards could take his medicine. Garcia Lauel, and sometimes in other words, Lauel and sometimes in other Louisville cops grill him on the murders. He never confesses. They never did get the truth.
In fact, Edwards says several times that he's never killed anyone, ever. The final story he tells them is maybe the most ridiculous and confusing of all. He seems to be saying that Tim Hatt came out of the dance with two other guys and caught him and Kelly having sex. For some reason, these other guys turn on Tim and beat him to death. Then they kill Kelly because she won't stop screaming. Edwards says nothing and never would, because he's no snitch.
If you're feeling like April's kind of disappeared from this story, that's the way she was feeling too. She now hadn't heard from Garcia in over a month, since just before the first trip to Louisville. And Garcia didn't call her after the arrest either. She'd been avoiding the news, so she didn't know her dad had been arrested until the next day when she got an email from her brother. April jumped right in the car and took off for Louisville to be with her mother. I was with my daughter.
I was going to go be with my mom. And the papers were saying that the DNA was a match to the crimes committed in Wisconsin. And I didn't want to even believe the papers, because I know how things can be misconstrued or what have you. So I called Detective Garcia's cell phone. And I thought I wanted to hear it from him. And I was driving down the interstate, and I called him on the cell phone. He answered, and I asked him, and he said, April, there's no mistake. There's a match.
He goes, I'm 99.9% sure. And I remember kind of starting to hyperventilate and kind of going to not so much of a panic attack, just like it really hit me. Like, there's no mistake. He is a killer. And not only did he kill those two people, he has killed so many people I had. And I literally had to pull off. I was right by an exit, pulled off to an exit, pulled into a gas station, and got out of the car, because I didn't want my daughter to see me in the condition I was in.
And I used the disguise of pumping gas. And I just tried to get myself under control. I remember my heart clenching, and it wasn't a pretty experience, but that's when it really hit me that there was no mistake that all my wishing was that I was in the hospital. I was in the hospital, and I was in the hospital. Wishing was to know good that he was everything that I had suspected and more. April refused to speak with reporters after her dad was arrested.
She talked to some cops, and then just went back to her life. I met her seven years later. It was April 21, 2016. She came to meet me grudgingly in a law office in Asheville, Ohio. Her leg was in a brace, because she'd heard herself at the gym. She sat in a chair with her head in her hand, talking about her dad gave her a migraine. After dad's arrest, April wanted nothing more to do with him.
Ed Edwards sat in prison than Wisconsin in Ohio, and eventually confessed to murdering three other people over decades. A young couple parked in a car, and another young man, who was close to the Edwards family. But then something even more bizarre happened. A retired cop in Montana latched onto the story of Ed Edwards and took it in a wild direction. He became convinced that Edwards didn't just kill these five people.
He started to tell the world that Ed was responsible somehow for every unsolved murder you can think of. I believe some of the most famous murders in the last 60 years Lacey Peterson to Black Dog. John Benny Ramsay James, the zodiac we created by this one man, Edward Edwards. I'd initially fallen into the story through this Montana cop and his crazy theories. And I was curious what April thought about it all.
She ignored me for months, and then one day I got a Facebook message from April that said she changed her mind. He pissed me off, she said, because it wasn't just this one guy anymore. Online, his theories had spread and mutated. People speculated that Edwards might have killed John Boney Ramsay or that he was the monster behind Atlanta's child murders. Guess what else? In making a murderer? And of course podcasting on the action. That's him in the hallway behind the lawyers.
Are they sure of him? They know it's him. That is him, because you'll see there's... Yeah, he's like, yeah, this big dude. He has a pointy kind of downward facing nose. The morning everyone on Megan Kelly, and we begin today with Ed Edwards. Yep, it even escalated to the today show. Ever hear of him? Me neither. But he is potentially one of the most prolific serial killers of our time. So there was April, seeing all this stuff spread.
Her dad's story is feeding the true crime industrial complex we all live with. If bothered her to hear her dad's name connected to John Boney Ramsay or the Black Dahlia. But she also knew her dad was capable of anything. Over the next few months, we kept talking on the phone by text and on subsequent visits. The story I said out to right about a killer and a cop morphed into something very different. A partnership with that killer's daughter.
So now, April and I are on this weird dual mission together. We want to find out if her father killed any other people. But we're also trying to rid the world of the Boogie Man version of Edward Wayne Edwards. I'm hoping you're gonna work your expertise to get this podcast out there and get the truth out there. I expect a lot out of you. I'm not gonna promise you that we'll solve any murders on this show. Even though April thinks we might. And if I'm being honest, I sometimes hope we can too.
Because there's plenty of reason to believe that Edward's killed more people than he's ever confessed to. I sent you shaking your head. I realized just by making this show, we're participating in the myth making of Edward Wayne Edwards. But we're pushing on anyway. Because April needs to find answers. That's important to her. And now it's become important to me too. Even if, as Jonathan pointed out, the answers we find might only make things worse for her.
I'm wondering too about the possibility that... So like Josh is saying, it's been nine years since you first started this. But there's the possibility that nothing is gonna come of any of it. I know. I know. Like one of my headaches are coming on now. I've just been coming on. Today's a more difficult day. You're right. Nothing may come of this. This is kind of my last resort. I might have to be a day that I just tell myself that you gotta let it go. Just live with not.
I mean, accomplish what I wanted to accomplish. You know, a lot of people don't care. You know, it's in the past. The people who care are the victims, families, and myself. It's really not important to anyone else. So, you know, they don't... I know nothing might come of this. Coming up on this season of the clearing, something does come of this. Hello listeners. My life has certainly been anything but good.
Exciting? Yes. Dangerous? Yes. Honest? No. We know for a fact that they're both here and they're both there at the same time. Well, nearly identical murder. Nearly identical murders occur. We know for a fact. You're a very intriguing fellow. I'm very intrigued by you, Mr. Edwards. And I can do one or two things. I can give you a lot of recognition. If you're looking for another book deal, no, no. Hollywood, no. Nothing off for those. No, I'm not injured.
Okay. Your father also killed three kids in 1955 in Chicago. Bullshit. Yes, he did. No, he did. Bullshit. I would take my life on it. My dad does not kill kids. And less, and less, that child would have hurt one of us. And it doesn't make me a psycho, so we're trying to find out a little bit about my life. Are you going to keep all these records about yourself and give them to, um, Ape? I'm going to tell everything that is new about me.
Well, I don't think that is normal. I don't think that is normal in a person. And all of us just froze and I whipped her around and had a black handgun in his hand. And he still had his arm raised in our direction, like he never lowered the gun. I have a temper like my father. I've lost control of my temper. But there again, I choose not to go past a point. Do you lose your temper or you're not murdering people? Right. Right. I don't know. That would be a hell of a twist at the end of the show.
Josh, seriously? No. The clearing is a production of Pineapple Street Media, an association with Gimlet. It's produced by Jonathan Menhivar, and me, I'm Josh Dean. Our associate producers are Josh Gwynn, Dean of Clienter, and Elliot Adler, editing by Joel Lovell. Our fact checker has been failing. Our theme song is Modaphno Blues by Matthew Deer, music clearance by Anthony Roman. The episode is mixed by Jonathan Menhivar and Hannah Sprown. Special thanks to Christina DeJosa and Ariana Martinez.
Jenna Weiss, Berman, and Max Lenski are the executive producers of Pineapple Street. And since I'm running out of tape, that's the end of everything.