The Clearing is a show about crime and the trauma that can result from crime. It may not be suitable for all audiences. The Clearing by Pineapple Street Media The Clearing by Pineapple Street Media The Clearing by Pineapple Street Media The Clearing by Pineapple Street Media The Clearing by Pineapple Street Media The Clearing by Pineapple Street Media The Clearing by Pineapple Street Media
The Clearing by Pineapple Street Media The Clearing by Pineapple Street Media The Clearing by Pineapple Street Media The Clearing by Pineapple Street Media The Clearing by Pineapple Street Media The Clearing by Pineapple Street Media The Clearing by Pineapple Street Media
The Clearing by Pineapple Street Media The Clearing by Pineapple Street Media The Clearing by Pineapple Street Media The Clearing by Pineapple Street Media The Clearing by Pineapple Street Media The Clearing by Pineapple Street Media The Clearing by Pineapple Street Media
The Clearing by Pineapple Street Media The Clearing by Pineapple Street Media The Clearing by Pineapple Street Media The Clearing by Pineapple Street The Clearing by Pineapple Street The Clearing by Pineapple Street The Clearing by Pineapple Street The Clearing by Pineapple Street
The Clearing by Pineapple Street The Clearing by Pineapple Street The Clearing by Pineapple Street The Clearing by Pineapple Street The Clearing by Pineapple Street The Clearing by Pineapple Street The idea of to tell the truth in case you're not as old as me is that a panel of celebrities tries to guess who among three contestants is, you know, telling the truth. In this case, they're supposed to pick the one guy standing before them who used to be a notorious criminal.
Number one, what is your name, please? My name is Ed Edwards. Number two, my name is Ed Edwards. Number three, my name is Ed Edwards. Spoiler alert. Number three is the real Ed. Number three, what was your first term? Yes, that's Alan Alda. The prison term. How long was your first sentence, I mean? My first sentence was in a reformatory for two years. I see. And your second sentence was also in a reformatory for two years. I see. How old were you when you got a prison?
The last time I was released, I was about 32. The last time. The last time. The contestants wanted to wear dark suits and look a little like mobsters. Number three, again, is the real Ed. He's in rust colored pants, yellow shirt, and the kind of loud zigzag pattern blazer that people wore without irony in the 1970s. He's also the only one of the three who stare straight at the camera. Number three, do we infer that you did not have a good relationship with your parents? This is true.
In what way? Number three, in communications, as you indicate? I was born an illegitimate child, so I never had a real mother to speak of. Number two, what? I was supposed to watch this and not think it was intentional. That of all the Campy 1970s game shows, Edward's shows to go on the one where people have to guess which of the three smooth talking strangers is not a liar. Which, my God, do I relate? Parsing out rage is stories and then asking the real Ed Edwards to please stand up.
May as well be my job description at this point. As the show continues, actress Kitty Carlyle asks one of the fake Ed's. And number two, why were you on the 10 most wanted list then? I guess a lot of the FBI men sat around took a vote, and I won. Number three, please. Thank you. How old were you when you first went to the can number one? I mean, jail. Well, I'm not. And then, finally. Number two was low. There goes the bell, and that means no more questions.
It's time for the celebrity panelists to make their guesses. Comedian Peggy Cass finds number two, two obvious of a pick, and goes with three. He's the guy she says. He trusts with your life. By a variety of logics, we have arrived at the following conclusion. A pair of twos on each end of both's roll in. Will the real Ed Edwards please stand up? Numbers one and two both fake like they're about to rise. And then, actual Ed Edwards stands.
With the wide smile of a man who just cawned everyone into believing he's actually reformed. Before the real man speaks, Gary Moore gives the fake Ed the chance to talk. Let's find out Ed about your threat. Number one, sir. What is your real name, please? And what are you? My name is Mervin Spreds. I am the president of the Maryland Council of the Jewish National Fund. Number two, Rick Klein, is a self-defense teacher who also does stunt work.
Ed, there's one important point to you and I were chatting backstage, and I asked you, what was your reaction in your neighborhood when you came out of the reformatory the first time? Were you put down by your fellow citizens, or did they look up to you? No, when I was released from the reformatory, they looked up to me, and this motivated me to go on to bigger things because this is why I was out there committing the crime was for the recognition.
And this happens because a lot of people think it's a big shot thing to do, huh? Yes, this is the more trouble you get into, the bigger you are in their eyes. Well, I want to tell you, you look like a pretty big man from over here. And thank you very much for being with him, with his Mr. Edwards, and thank you, gentlemen also. One of the things I can't prove, but I've wondered about, was that Edwards out committing crimes the whole time he was touring as a redemption story?
Did he commit other murders? Whatever the truth is, redemption was the story he was selling at home too. That's the father April knew. When he wasn't out touring, he was home in Ohio with his growing family, getting by as a handyman. I've talked to April about her childhood so many times, but it's been hard to understand exactly what this period back in the 70s looked like for her. And we weren't able to speak with her siblings for this show.
So many things about April are objectively off the charts unreal, but she has a way of underselling it all. Not on purpose, she'll talk about pretty traumatic stuff. She just describes everything the same way, matter of fact, I guess. So it's hard to get a handle on how bad things actually were. But then I saw this Facebook message that someone from April's past sent her, and it was completely revealing.
It came from this woman named Diane Slaughter. She lives in Texas now, but back in the 70s, she babysat April on her siblings. April is 8th then. They lived across the street in Doyle's, Ten Ohio near Akron. When Diane and her family moved to the block, the Edwards family was already living there in a house Ed built himself. They were still unpacking when Ed showed up, all smiles at their door. Here's Diane. You know, he said, hey, you know, I'm your new neighbor across the street.
And then he presented, you know, my parents with the book that he had written. And he did, you know, disclose that he was formerly a criminal and he, you know, really was changing for the better. And my mom made the comment that, hey, everybody deserves a second chance. So she took the book and... Wait, wait, wait, I'm sorry. That kind of seems like a lot of information to get from your new neighbor all at once.
Yes. This friendly neighbor, who, full disclosure, used to be a criminal, told the new neighbors that he and his wife could use some babysitters if Diane and her sister were interested. They were. And their mom was okay with the idea too. The first she wanted to meet the rest of the Edwards family to make sure things were okay across the lane. Ed welcomed her with open arms. I mean, he just opened the door like, just come on in, hey. And he said, let me give you a tour.
He showed Diane's mom around, upstairs or two big bedrooms, one Fred and Kay. And then the other rooms were smaller. And the smaller rooms had like bare bones except, you know, just the basics. Like no window coverings, no furnishings, no toys, accessories. Nothing you would expect to see in a kids' room. It was basically, then mattress on the floor and a thin blanket on each bed. That's it, no pillows, no sheets, nothing. I don't think there was any furniture in the house.
This is Diane's mom, Lynn Michaels. She just got out of the hospital when I called her at home. This tour continued down the basement, which was mostly unfinished, just a dirt floor. But Lynn noticed a couple things. The first is that there was a spring as in burbling groundwater that seemed to be the family's water source. That seemed a little pioneer days for a 1970s house. Worse, the boiler, the house's heat source wasn't actually hooked up. They may have burned pellets for heat.
And when you say there's no heat, you mean literally, it's not just that like the heat was off. You feel like there was literally no heating system? Well, no, he told me there was no heat. April's told me plenty of stories about her dad's dark side. He could be violent and abusive. This is something I hadn't thought of before. That there were just basic needs that she didn't get growing up. Diane said the older kids seemed a little protective of the younger ones.
They could all be skittish at times around their dad. But Ed was all smile, she said, until he wasn't. There was a time me and my older sister had went down to the edwards. And I think there was only some of the kids outside. And I was like, you know, well, where's your brothers? You know, where's everybody else at? And Ed's like they're being punished. I was like, oh. I said, well, are they in the house? And he's like, nope, they're in the garage.
Ed was invited Diane and her sister to come take a look. So they walk around to the garage, which is open. Along the wall inside, there are hooks for storing tools. And the two boys, he hung them on the hook through the belt loops so that they were just hanging off that hook off the ground. And I was like, well, why are they up there? He said, because they're being punished. And I was like, thinking to myself, oh my gosh. And they were not allowed to have food, water, or use the restroom.
For how long? I don't know. But I mean, we're talking about along. We're not talking about five minutes. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Those boys hung there for a while. And then after a certain period of time, we were all told, y'all get out of here now. Both Diane and her mom remembered seeing bad bruises and marks on the kids. Evidently, the family wasn't good at hiding them. Kay had them too. Lynn worried about her. She went over a few times when she knew Ed was out somewhere to have tea.
And she described April's mom to me the way many others have, as a shell of a person. Like whatever light was inside had been turned off. Diane saw it too. There were very few times she would come out when we'd all be playing outside, but there was this one time, I specifically remember where everybody was having a good time. You could, I mean, she was, you could tell she loved those kids, you know. The kids were running around and some of them were like holding onto her wayside and stuff.
And you know, it was one of the few times I ever saw Kay smile. Like a genuine, she was just having a great time with the kids. Yeah, that was like one of the only times I ever remember her smiling. Hmm. Diane told me a lot of crazy stories, but one really stands out. We were playing and, um, Ed had told us, hey, hey, all you guys, you know, gather around. You know, I got something to show you. Ed crowd the kids all around at the back of the house with a yard blurred into woods.
He told them all to walk out into the woods and look around like they're on a scavenger hunt. And so he tells us, go keep going, you guys, keep going, you guys. Well, we get to the edge of the woods and we're thinking, we don't see it. He's like, keep looking, keep looking. And so then he tells us all, spread out just a little, you're going to find it better. You know, so, you know, we kind of spread out maybe five feet from each other.
And he goes a little bit more, keep going. And as soon as he finished that sentence, it was all of a sudden bang. And all of us just froze and I quit turned around and he had a black handgun in his hand. And he still had his arm raised in our direction like he never lowered the gun. He started just laughing, laughing. We didn't know what to do. We were all like scared to death. And he goes, oh, it's okay. Come on, come on, come on. Let's go now.
And I might be could not move fast enough. I went from the side of the house, hit the driveway. I was too afraid to even look back. I mean, we're just sort of sitting here and silence trying to process that story. So you fired a handgun either over your heads or between you guys for fun. Yeah, I mean, he would probably have been, oh gosh, at most, 10 to 12 feet. And, you know, you figured there's got to be five, six, seven, maybe seven or eight of us kids.
Now, I'm going to do this as his kids also. Diana, I never told her mom that story. She's not sure why it didn't matter. Linda didn't need any more evidence to make her wear this new neighbor. One day, Ed showed up in her door again looking to borrow something. It wasn't butter. He asked Linda if he could borrow her shotgun. She couldn't believe what she was hearing. I don't know now my gun. She said, okay, about your husband.
You can ask him yourself when said to a great surprise. Her husband Rod actually did loan Edwards a shotgun. A single barrel 12 gauge that he had since he was a kid. So then, not long after that, when standing in her kitchen looking out the window. She just noticed one day a car come bearing down the dry. They just went flying up Kevin's drive. Flying the gravel was flying. She was like, boy, they're going awfully fast and they pull in the Edward's driveway.
She states there's a flurry of activity. There's a lot of stuff going on. She notices they're loading up Ed's alchemy note. Then the second male, all of a sudden, put all the kids in K into his car. They just sped off like the guy sped in. No notice, no high by nothing, just they were gone. And you never saw them again? Never saw them again. I saw those two vehicles going. It's like, well, they went Rod's shotgun. About a week later, this black car pulls up to my front door.
And it had sheriff on the side. And he was in uniform and coming knocked on the door. So my mom answers the door. This guy in a black hat and a sheriff badge on. And sunglasses, a thick mustache. And he said he was, you know, can't be seeing the area. And he was trying to, you know, get information on a man named Ed Edwards. And so he asked my mom, you know, did she know anything about Ed Words? You know, it kind of opened and it questions. And she replied to him, you know, not a lot.
And then the sheriff proceeds, say, well, can you remember anything suspicious about, you know, him, the family, anything? Mom said, you know, well, his wife and his children appeared to be, you know, withdrawn. And something didn't seem, you know, quite right with the family. I told him about the shotgun. And I can't even remember what I only did tell him. But the general idea was you were telling him that you thought he was a bad guy or a suspicious guy or?
Yeah. And, you know, the sheriff just had a blank look on his face and he's like, well, anything else? And she goes, well, no, not really that I can think of. A couple days later, my mom, it hits her. Oh, shit. That was Ed Words. Oh, my God. Just to be clear, the cop of the mustache, that was Ed Edwards. Trying to picture, I mean, because he had sunglasses and a hat, he had disguised himself pretty well. Oh, he had, it was a fake mustache. It was a bad fake mustache.
I can't believe I fell for that. Coming up, our investigation of Ed Edwards continues. But this time, its Ed Edwards himself is doing the investigating. So when we left off, Ed Edwards had just piled the family into his El Camino and left yet another town. Do you remember what your dad would tell you when you were like, okay, we're leaving again? Last summer, April, Jonathan and I were driving around Northeastern Ohio, revisiting that period of April's life.
Same story, most of the time, the bad people had found us. Who were the bad people? Supposedly the people that were after my dad, from my dad, turning them into the police. So he was like basically telling you guys that you were constantly on the run from bad people who wanted to get him because he was a good person? Yes. Can I just take a moment to point out how crazy this lie is?
I mean, of course Ed Edwards wasn't going to say they were leaving town in a rush because he just committed a murder. But there are a million less absurd lies he could have gone with. He got a job. He owes some dude money. But he went with, I'm a good guy fleeing bad guys. We're here in Ohio to fact check April's memory is basically. It was her idea. Stories like the one Diane and Lynn were telling. That was April's day to day.
I'm not a trauma expert, but I think it's fair to say that if this is your life as a child, you have to manage it. You forget some things, you blend others together, especially you normalize. But if 40 years later you decide you need to go back into that memory bank to find some answers, it's a mess. April will remember something, share it with me, then immediately question the integrity of that memory.
So she wanted to come here to her physical past, to form her homes like Doyle's town, Ohio, and see if she could jar some things loose. Because that looks up on a hill too. I was a lot, see this is where it just drives me crazy. I want to know how accurate are my memories. There's this one memory she's described to me a bunch of times. It's a weird one. It's simultaneously filled with meaning, but also incredibly vague. It comes across more like a dream than an actual event in her life.
I've often wondered, assumed even, that's just something her mind can cock to at some point. Some little glitch as she sift through her past. But April said, in Ohio, that she thought it happened around here, in a park not far from that house across the street from when in Diane. There was like a parking area on the weeds and trees were behind us. The story's never exactly the same, but it's always some version of this. Her dad piles them in the car and drives them to a state park.
They never go hiking, but they do on this day. They start walking, kind of fast. And then at some point, he leads them all off a perfectly good trail into the thick brush, like he's looking for something. So here we were, in the parking lot of the state park near Doyle's Town. April remembered they're being a little pond nearby. We looked around. There was no pond. But there were a bunch of weeds, wildflowers and sawgrass and cat tails, which she promptly let us into.
The whole time I was thinking, this is nuts. We're literally waiting through weeds in search of what exactly. I really thought the trees were farther off of the distance though. Truly. Like that distance. I'm just shrinking down, because I'm making myself shorter. April's not squatting on the ground. She's approximating the height of an eight-year-old. Yeah, I think an eight-year-old would be the height of those weeds probably. I remember going like this with the weeds.
You were moving your arms around. I was swimming. It got windy. So Jonathan went to the car to change mics. But suddenly April started yelling. April, wait, wait. And then there it was. Okay, so there's the pond I was talking about. We have to come up on this little hill. I think there used to be a dirt pile here. Like maybe they were digging something or building something. We were standing up on this little rise, our backs to the parking lot, looking into a muddy pond.
April was still processing the scene. Things weren't exactly as she recalled them. But still, you knew she was right. She'd been here before. She was a kid, like a second grader. She remembers how urgent it seemed. Her dad pulling ahead with her mom. And then she caught up and looked in. There were cops and firemen and police tape. He'd led them straight to a crime scene. The strange memory of her dad bringing her to a crime scene in Ohio, it was true.
You could see the relief on her face. I'm not crazy. It also made me realize she wasn't crazy. All these half memories that keep surfacing, I need to take them more seriously. So the archives are in here. I haven't buried in the corner. Later that afternoon, we were back at April's house, in her bedroom. It also has a plush carpet and a lounging area with a couch. Plus a balcony. There's lots of space in Ohio.
She pulled out three carry-on rolly bags from a closet, unzipped them and laid everything open on the floor. So we could pick through these archives she's talking about. There are newspaper clippings, transcripts of conversations typed on an old typewriter. Pages torn out of telephone books. Family pictures. His mom's birth certificate. There's my dad. Isn't he cute little boy? All this stuff was taken from Edwards trailer when Detective Garcia arrested him.
We started taking stuff out of the bags and sifting through. It's a lot like parsing conversations about April's past. There's a lot of stuff in there, but it's kind of a mess. Is that a snake skin? No, it's a snake skin. The first time we went through it all, I didn't even know what to look for. April just pulling things out, talking about her dad. When he went to Kentucky, I have picture after picture. Here's one of them. He went around taking pictures of gravesites of his family.
So I don't know if he was researching family history. I have no idea. It turned out what Edwards was doing was trying to piece together his own life story. He just found out as an adult that he'd been adopted. That's why he was doing all this research. There is an 1846. And Edwards, of course, kept an audio record of this work. He recorded himself visiting graveyards and digging through files at funeral homes and in Ohio courthouses.
The probate court of summit, county, Ohio, appointed Mrs. Annabelle Myers-Igarian at the person in a state of Edward Lee Edwards. New start. Caringship of Edward Wayne Edwards. Let's talk to him from Oakwood, Cemetery, from 10, 6, 30, removal of Shirley Myers from Cemetery. Cars of death per mania, length of illness, three weeks. Name of father, Ross, or R-O-S-S. Number 5, Nathan, in bastard. That's him reading a legal document he'd come across.
One stating that he was about to be born a bastard child. It's from a civil suit as mother filed against the father he never knew for child support. Lee and Myers are resident within said county and meet and plead under oath that she is a married woman. That she is now pregnant with a child, which if born alive it will be a bastard. And that Charles Murray is the father of said child.
I took some of the files over to staples to make copies, and I started going through them in my rental car in the parking lot. I came across this transcript of a phone call Edwards made to a woman who drastically altered the course of his life. Her name was Esther. She's the one his mom, Lily, and Myers stole $100 and $1 bills from. She goes to prison, Ed is turned over to relatives. He doesn't learn the truth about his real mother until he's 36 years old.
One day when April's a baby, Ed found Esther. He took the local phone book and looked up everyone with her name, like the terminator did. And he called her. Now that we have a five little baby and I'm here to babysit my myself tonight. He explains that he's the son of the woman she turned in. Are you a cop with your mother? Yes, that is my mother. She wasn't murder that best. No, my mother committed suicide in 1931.
And of course, my mother wasn't married at the time, but I was born a year and a half cleaners because I was a real legitimate child. And it's just been a couple months ago that I have found out that I was adopted. And I found out anything. And so I have been checking all through the past here to find out when I could come up with. What's good so bad to find it? What's good so bad to be a kid for your sister? You're gonna check and find out things.
Well, actually, it's a good piece of mine because I still have none other. And even though she may have done it. Mother, you should love her. That's right. And there's nothing that can make me change my mind. That's what I'm saying. Once they're past the awkward niceties, Edward starts to probe for more details. What kind of business was it? What exactly happened? Esther told him that she called a service to have a girl come clean the house.
And his mother arrived in an evening gown, which Esther thought was weird. Because it is weird. Later, when Esther got back, she noticed $100 missing from her bedroom. A good shadow. Edward's basically interrogated the woman who had his mother arrested, like he was a reporter or cop. Well, I don't even understand that I am certainly not hearing anything against you. You did the right thing. Did anybody with you, Jack? Any? So, David, thank you for coming. And thank you very much. Goodbye.
Well, the fact is, you see, I never really knew. That happened so many years ago. I mean, it was heart rendering. It was technique. After that conversation, Edward's calls his aunt Lucille, his mother's sister. She's upset to hear that he's been digging up the past. And he's upset that he's never been told about it. People just decided for him that it was better to not know the truth. Well, here's the thing. I don't have these things that have been told me.
I would have known about it, and I wouldn't have had to go out and find out myself. I don't think it was my place or anybody's place to tell you that. Listen, everybody's got skeleton in their closet, and I'm not about, you know, to go dig them out. I can't see any point. It's trying to find out all this stuff. Well, I do in that it involves me. It is part of my life. And it doesn't make me a psycho, so you're trying to find out a little bit about my life.
Are you going to keep all these records about yourself and given 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. But you think that you want Ape to know all about you. I think the only one I know about me, I can't keep anything from that girl. Well, let her show their new head. They will not have to go out and be told different stories about different people. They won't lose that emotional eyes.
They will lose a truth. Yeah, I've actually heard this tape before. It's kind of funny, isn't it? Hypocritical. Ape remembers these tapes well. She was a teenager when she heard them for the first time. Ape would just pull them out and play them occasionally. The way another dad might show vacation slides. I had heard the tape when my mom was in labor with me. Um, he had quite a collection of 8-millimeter films. I wish I knew where all those films weren't. Wait, there are films, too?
How am I just hearing you're about to see films? Reals and reels of 8-millimeter films. Where are they? Reals and reels. I don't know. Ape says her dad was always using tape like this. To manipulate family members and create drama. Especially fights. He once took a phone call he taped with her and edited her words to make it sound like she was undermining her siblings. To keep them at each other's throats. Then he played her for them. She thinks that's what he was up to, Lucille.
I do remember thinking that he wanted me to be mad at Lucille. I just remember thinking it was stupid and that it was petty. And I think he was going on about the injustice that he had. That was done to him. In other words, he wanted me to feel sorry for him. And I didn't. I actually remember thinking that I felt sorry for my aunts. And that my dad was cruel. I mean, does any part of you feel bad at all? I mean, he did have a rough childhood.
I mean, it's not the way anybody should be brought into the world and raised. No, but you have to remember there's also another side of the story. And my aunts would talk about my dad. And they wouldn't talk cruelly about him. They would just tell stories. My dad was a horrible child. He was very mean and nasty. They did try loving him. It's just that he pushed them away. That's what I saw. Every time I mention a piece of tape we found, April asked to listen to it.
She says she can hear things in her dad's voice that wouldn't be obvious to other people. Certainly not to me. She might be the one person in the world who understands him best. When you say sometimes that you're the child of the five, you're the most like him. You feel like you've got the good qualities and not the bad ones? Oh no. I got as many good qualities as well as bad qualities. Believe me. 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. You lose your temper or you're not murdering people. That would be a hell of a twist at the end of the show. Josh, seriously? Gotta keep things light. Come on, I'm talking about murder here. No. Next week on The Claring, the gruesome Laurel and Hardy routine that led to an edit where it's confession. The story of the other murders we know he committed. The Claring is a production of Pineapple Street Media, an association with Kim Lit.
It's produced by Jonathan Manivar and me. I'm Josh Dean. Our associate producers are Josh Gwynn, Dean Ecliner and Elliot Adler, editing by Joel Lovell. Our fact checker has been failing. Our theme song is Modaphinal Blues by Matthew Deere, music clearance by Anthony Roman. The episode was mixed by Jonathan Manivar and Hannes Brown. Special thanks to Elin Arcagan, Christina DeJosa, and Arianna Martinez. Janoy Spurman and Max Lensky are the executive producers of Pineapple Street.
If you or anyone you know is experiencing suicidal thoughts or ideation, you can call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255. We'll see you next week.