On Saturday night, August 9, 1980, a boy named Timothy Hack and his girlfriend Kelly Drew went to a wedding reception at Concord House in Wisconsin.
He had plans to be a farmer and she had just graduated beauty school.
They had no intention of staying at the reception long. Instead, they sought to meet their friends at a carnival. However, they never showed up.
For three decades, their families were left to wonder and despair. They knew everything about their children, from their wants and interests and loves and quirks. But they did not know how they met their end. Instead, their children would publicly be known as the Sweetheart Murders: The two kids who accidentally ran into evil in a case that no one could seem to solve.
Some 32 years later, a woman by the name of April Balascio sat on her couch on an otherwise standard Sunday night in March 2009, her laptop sitting plum on her legs.
“It was a Sunday night, I was on my computer and I saw the State of Wisconsin had given a bunch of money to open cold cases and the Sweetheart Murders were one of them. So I started reading and… oh.
“It was at that time that I realised I had seen the Concord house before.
“And I was shaking, I was shaking because immediately I knew who it was that committed the murderers.”
The Concord House was a dance hall in Wisconsin where the couple been just prior to vanishing. She knew the hall, and she knew the killer. The killer had taken her to the scene of the crime before. The killer’s name was Edward Wayne Edwards, and he was her father.
Balascio, now aged 48, immediately told police what she knew and a few months later, her father was arrested. He later admitted to the murder, and the murders of at least three others.
Top Comments
The question I have after reading this article is what happens to the many people in the US that have been convicted on the profiling model that came out of the Zodiac killing spree, & also the accompanying murders around that time. As I understand it the FBI used a model that was developed by psychiatrists at the time so that they could discount a huge amount of known criminals as people were dying & they couldn't make sense of it.. Considering a lot of people were relying on this at the time for survival, I would suggest that the FBI has a hell of a lot to answer for in respect of the fact that a) most states still have the death sentence & last time I read that over 200 people are on death row & wrongly convicted, these are the one that are known about so far. b)how many people have been murdered by the state for the crimes that this man has committed? c) How is the FBI & psychiatric community are going to not only explain what has happened but, also recompense those families that have lost those that have been wrongly convicted, often after many years of claiming their innocence & of course not being believed. Knowing that America is the most litigious place in the world if I was a part of the FBI profiling teams I think I would be more than a little nervous around about now. Not just for those that have lost years & years of their lives in the prison system, but those that have lost their lives through laziness or sheer ignorance on behalf of the investigators who have relied on a
system that is clearly flawed. The interesting thing about this is that if it turns out that this man is the worst serial killer the states have ever known, this I would suggest means that not only have they solved these long term unresolved crimes it opens not only the government but also the FBI & legal system to whole litigious can of worms, which could on the surface of it not only bankrupt the government but also turn the legal system & how it functions on its head.