Raised by a Serial Killer: Discovering the Truth About My Father

Ed Edwards was convicted of five murders that took place between the late 1970s and mid-1990s, and he’s suspected to have been involved in many other homicides. Scheduled to be executed by lethal injection in August 2011, he died in prison in April of that year. This work is a mesmerizing memoir written by Edwards’s oldest daughter, born in 1969, that includes stark details of her feelings and circumstances during her childhood years. She asserts those years were marked with much physical and emotional abuse perpetrated by her father upon all the members of her family, including four other siblings and her mother. One of the murder victims was his foster son, whom Edwards confessed to killing to gain a $250,000 insurance payout. After getting married and having a family of her own, Balascio felt a responsibility to report her father so that family and friends of the victims could have some measure of closure. She describes her own attempts at reconciliation and understanding with families and others associated with the victims.