On the night of August 9, 1980, Tim Hack drove a brown oldsmobile into the Concord House parking lot in Sullivan, Wisconsin with his girlfriend, Kelly Drew to attend a wedding.
They were 19.
Tim was a young farmer from Hebron who drove [music] a tractor he nicknamed the Lonesome Lozer.
Kelly had just graduated from beauty school in Fort Atkinson.
They had graduated from the same high school, been in love since they were students, [music] and no one in the community doubted they would soon get married.
That night, they planned to meet friends [music] at Fortfest after they left the wedding.
They were last seen leaving Concord House around 11 p.m.
They never arrived at Fort Fest.
They never came home.
The next morning, Tim’s father, David Hack, found the Oldsmobile still parked in the lot, locked with a coat, a checkbook, a wallet, and $67 in cash [music] still inside.
No sign of a struggle, no witnesses, two people gone.
5 days later, police found Kelly’s pants, underwear, and bra torn apart and scattered on a road 3 mi from Conquered House.
That discovery turned a missing person’s case into a horror.
Jefferson County launched one of the largest manhunts in Wisconsin history, lasting 72 days.
Then two squirrel hunters from Milwaukee found their bodies at the edge of the woods beside a cornfield 8 mi from Concord house.
Kelly had been bound and strangled.
Tim had been stabbed.
They were buried side by side under a headstone shaped like two hearts carved with the words kidnapped and slain.
Police had a suspect, a man who did maintenance at Conquered House, who had a bloody nose the weekend the couple [music] disappeared.
He left Wisconsin right after he was questioned, but there was not enough evidence to arrest him.
The case froze.
29 years, no answer, no justice, only a headstone and two families living with a question no one answered.
Then in 2009, a 48-year-old woman sat down at a computer searching cold cases in towns her family had lived in.
She found Tim and Kelly’s story and recognized Concord House.
That woman was the killer’s daughter and she was about to pick up the phone and call the police.
This is the story of the longest cold case in Jefferson County history.
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Tim grew up in Hebrron, a small town in Jefferson County, [music] Wisconsin, where life turned around land, harvests, and neighbors who had known each other’s names since they were carried in someone’s arms.
His father, David Hack, was a farmer, and Tim grew up in that world, understanding the land before he understood [music] anything else.
He knew how to drive a tractor before he knew how to drive a car.
[music] He nicknamed his tractor the Lonesome Loser after a popular song of the time, the kind of name only a 19-year-old country kid [music] would think of.
Half funny and half the lonely romance of rural Midwest youth.
Tim graduated from Fort [music] Atinson High School, and that was where he met Kelly Drew.
Kelly came from Fort Atkinson, not far from Hebrin, and she belonged to the same kind of small community where people know your family, know what school you go to, and know who you are dating.
She had just graduated from beauty school, 19 years old, a future ahead of her, and the kind of plans only young people have enough confidence [music] to believe will come true.
Tim and Kelly had been in love since high school.
They were the kind of couple friends looked at and said it was only a matter of time.
No one in that little community doubted they would marry.
No one thought their story would end any way except a country church wedding, a few kids, and a quiet life like their parents.
That was the summer of 1980.
Ronald Reagan was running for president.
Disco was dying.
And in Jefferson County, Wisconsin, life still moved to the slow rhythm it always had.
Crops, weekend weddings, and long summer nights when teenagers drove country roads with the windows down.
The night of August 9, 1980 was one of those nights.
A friend was holding a wedding at Conquered House, a wedding and dance hall in the town of Concord in the Sullivan area about 40 mi west of Milwaukee.
Conquered House was the kind of place everyone in the region knew.
A wooden hall in the countryside where the community held weddings, birthdays, and weekend dances.
Beside the hall was a campground.
Around it were pastures, corn fields, and country roads that went black at night.
The kind of road where if you turned off the headlights, you could not see your own hand.
Tim drove the brown Oldsmobile with Kelly to the wedding.
The plan was simple.
Go to the wedding at Concord House, then meet a group of friends at Fortfest, a local festival going on in Fort Atkinson, an ordinary summer night for two 19-year-olds in rural Wisconsin.
Music played in the hall.
People danced, laughed, raised glasses.
Tim and Kelly were there among friends, among the music.
In the last summer they would live.
They were last seen leaving Concord House around 11 p.m.
No one saw anything unusual.
No one heard a scream.
No one saw a struggle or any break in that ordinary night.
Tim and Kelly walked out of the hall, walked into the dark, and vanished.
They never arrived at Fortfest.
[music] Their friends waited, but they did not appear.
There were no calls.
In 1980, cell phones did not exist.
When someone did not show up, you waited, you went home, and you started worrying the next morning.
On the morning of August 10, David Hack began to worry.
His son had not come home the night before.
He drove to Conquered House and found Tim’s brown Oldsmobile still parked in the lot, locked inside, Tim’s coat folded on the seat, the checkbook still in place, his wallet still there with $67 inside.
Everything Tim had brought was in the car except Tim and Kelly.
[music] Think about that.
A 19-year-old leaves a wedding, leaves his wallet, checkbook, and coat [music] in a locked car, then vanishes with his girlfriend without taking anything.
This was not two young people deciding to run off.
This [music] was not a fight and then each going a different way.
This was two people taken suddenly, so fast they had no time to [music] react, no time to grab a wallet, no time to unlock the car.
David Hack reported it to the police and from that second the search began.
5 days after Tim and Kelly disappeared, investigators found what no one wanted to find.
On a road about 3 mi from Conquered House, Kelly’s pants, underwear, and bra were discovered.
The clothes were torn apart, not taken off, torn with force.
They lay scattered on the road as if whoever left them did not bother to hide them, did not bother to worry, did not bother to feel anything except complete cruelty.
That discovery changed everything.
This was no longer a missing person’s case.
This was a criminal case, and everyone in Jefferson County knew it.
Jefferson County police launched a search described as one of the largest manhunts ever carried out in the state of Wisconsin.
Volunteers, state police, search and rescue teams, tracking dogs all poured into the countryside around Conquered House.
They searched cornfields, woods, riverbanks, abandoned barns, every dirt road, every trail within tens of miles.
Hundreds of people walked in lines across the fields, eyes on the ground, looking for any [music] trace, a scrap of cloth, a footprint, anything that would say where those two [music] 19year-olds were.
Day after day, week after week, 72 days.
For 72 days, the search went on.
And for 72 days, David Hack and Kelly’s family lived in the kind of hell only people with a missing loved one truly understand.
The hell of not knowing.
Waking every morning not knowing whether your child is still alive or already dead, still in pain somewhere, or already at rest.
Every ringing phone was a heart attack.
Every police car that stopped in front of the house was a moment when time stopped.
72 days with no answer.
Only torn clothes on a road and a locked car in a parking lot and a question no one could answer.
Where were Tim and Kelly?
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On October 19, 1980, 72 days after Tim Hack and Kelly Drew disappeared, the final answer arrived, [music] and it arrived in the crulest way possible.
Two squirrel hunters from Milwaukee were walking in the woods near Hustford Road in the town of Exonia, about 8 mi from Concord House.
They were not looking for two missing teenagers.
They were looking for squirrels.
But at the edge of the woods, right beside a corn field, they found something that made them stop and that they would never forget for the rest of their lives.
Kelly Drew’s body lay there among the stumps and rotting leaves after more than 2 months outdoors.
[music] The next day, searchers went back to the area and found Tim Hack’s body in the same stretch of woods.
Both bodies were badly decomposed.
More than 70 days of rain, sun, insects, and late summer into fall Wisconsin weather had [music] done what time always does to human remains.
But even in that condition, the medical examiner could still read the story the bodies told.
Kelly Drew had been bound [music] before she died.
Marks on her body showed she had been controlled, restrained, stripped of every chance to fight back.
Cause of death: strangulation.
Someone had choked her until she stopped breathing.
She was 19, just out of beauty school, just at a friend’s wedding, just dancing and laughing in conquered house a few hours earlier, and someone had tied her up and killed her with his hands.
Tim Hack had been stabbed.
The killer did not choose the same method for both.
He strangled the girl and stabbed the boy.
That says a great deal about the kind of killer the police were facing.
This was not a crime of impulse.
[music] This was not a robbery that turned into murder.
This was controlled, deliberate cruelty, and there was a sexual element.
The examiner found semen on Kelly’s [music] pants.
That detail, together with the torn clothes found 5 days after the disappearance, painted a horrifying picture of what happened between the moment the two left Concord House and the moment they died in that woods.
The 8 mi from Concord House to [music] where the bodies were found showed the killer had moved them by car.
He had taken them out of the wedding parking lot, driven the pitch black country roads typical of rural Wisconsin, taken them to the edge of the woods beside a cornfield, and ended two young lives there [music] in the dark in the middle of nowhere, where no one heard a thing.
The Jefferson County community had known the worst had happened since [music] Kelly’s clothes were found.
But when the bodies were discovered, when the forensic results were released, the fear turned into something [music] else entirely.
Not fear anymore, but pain.
The kind of pain a whole community shares when two of its children are murdered.
And no one [music] knows why.
Tim and Kelly were buried side by side in a cemetery in Fort Atkinson.
Their families chose a shared headstone shaped like two hearts interlocking.
Under both names and years of birth and death, a line was carved into the stone.
Kidnapped and slain.
Not rest in peace.
Not forever in our hearts.
[music] Kidnapped and slain.
The families chose those words because they wanted anyone who stood at that grave to know these two children did not die in an accident.
Did not die of illness.
Did not die for any reason a person can accept.
They were taken.
[music] And that line stood there as a permanent indictment.
A reminder that someone had done this and someone had not yet paid.
While the families buried their children, Jefferson County police were building a case and they had a name, Edward W.
Edwards.
Edwards did maintenance at Concord House and the campground right beside the hall.
He was not a wedding guest.
He was hired help.
The repair man, the man who knew that hall like the back of his hand, knew the parking lot, knew the exits, knew the dark roads around it.
He was there that night.
And witnesses remembered one specific detail.
The weekend Tim and Kelly disappeared, Edwards had a bloody nose.
[music] When asked, he said he had been hurt deer hunting.
August deer season in Wisconsin starts in September.
A small detail, but the kind of detail a good detective does not let go.
Police questioned Edwards.
He denied any involvement.
He said exactly what an innocent man would say and also exactly what a guilty man would say.
The problem was police did not have enough evidence to hold him.
In 1980, DNA technology did not exist [music] in the criminal justice system.
The semen on Kelly’s pants was biological evidence.
But at that time, there was no way to match it to a specific person.
No DNA database, no genetic analysis, only a biological sample police could not yet [music] do anything with except preserve it and hope that someday science would catch up to the crime.
[music] Then Edwards left.
In September 1980, only a few weeks after he was first questioned, Edwards and his family left Wisconsin.
No notice, no forwarding address.
They simply vanished the way Tim and Kelly had vanished.
Except Edwards chose to vanish.
[music] He was not kidnapped.
He ran.
Jefferson County police noticed that departure.
They noted it.
But noticing and having enough evidence for an arrest warrant are two completely different things.
No fingerprints, [music] no witness who saw Edwards with Tim and Kelly that night.
No murder weapon, no confession, only a bloody nose in a season that was not hunting season and a hurried departure.
In any other case with any other suspect, there might have been more clues, more witnesses, more mistakes.
But Edwards was not a firsttime offender.
He was not an angry young man who lost control.
[music] What Jefferson County police did not know at the time, what no one knew was that Edward W.
Edwards had killed before, and he knew how to disappear.
The case began to go cold month after month, year after year.
The file stayed in a drawer.
The seaman sample stayed preserved in the lab.
The words kidnapped and slain stayed carved on the stone, but there was no progress, no new suspect, no breakthrough.
The small community in Jefferson County kept living.
But the murders of Tim Hack and Kelly Drew never really left their minds.
In little towns like Hebrron and Fort Atinson, people do not forget.
People know each other.
People remember.
People talk about the case at church, in the coffee shop, in late night conversations between neighbors.
And the question is always the same.
Who did that?
Who took those two kids?
David Hack knew the answer was out there somewhere.
Kelly’s family knew.
But knowing an answer exists and actually finding it are two different things.
And while they waited, while the DNA sample sat in the lab, while the file went colder, Edward W.
Edwards was living free somewhere outside Wisconsin, carrying his secret and the darkness he had poured over two young lives in the woods beside a cornfield on an August night in 1980.
To understand the man who killed Tim Hack and Kelly Drew, you have to go far back before that August night in 1980.
Edward Wayne Edwards was born in 1933 in Akran, Ohio.
He did not have a childhood in any sense the word usually carries.
His father left early.
His mother could not raise him.
Edwards grew up in an orphanage where by his own later writing he was abused physically and mentally by the nuns.
No one visited.
No one adopted him.
No one wanted him.
And in the empty space where love should have been, something else began to grow.
From the orphanage, Edwards went to reform school.
From reform school, he joined the United States Marine Corps.
Maybe the military would have given him discipline, structure, purpose.
But Edwards deserted.
He was given a dishonorable discharge, the kind of military ending people do not put in a frame on the wall.
He went back to the street and began doing what he would do for the rest of his life.
Con, steal, and run.
Edwards robbed gas stations, not once.
Many times, scattered across states through the 1950s and early 1960s.
And he did something most criminals never do.
He did not disguise himself.
No mask, no cap pulled low.
He walked into gas [music] stations with his face bare, looked straight into the camera, and later wrote that he did it because he wanted [music] to be famous.
Think about that.
A robber who wanted to be identified, not because he was stupid, because he craved attention so badly he was willing [music] to trade freedom for it.
That is the kind of psychology experts would call pathological narcissism.
[music] The kind of person who needs the world to look at him at any cost, whether with admiration or with terror.
He escaped from jail.
He was caught again.
He escaped again in 1960 while locked up in Portland, Oregon for impersonating a federal officer.
He escaped again and this time he vanished completely.
State police hunted him.
The FBI came in.
On November 10, 1961, the name Edward Wayne Edwards was placed on the FBI’s 10 most wanted list.
He was subject number 160 in the history of that list.
An orphan boy from Akran, Ohio, now standing on the same list as serial killers, mob bosses, and terrorists.
Edwards was arrested on January 20, 1962 in Atlanta, Georgia with his first wife, Marlene.
He was sentenced to 16 years in federal prison and held at Levvenworth, Kansas, one of the highest security prisons in America.
And then the thing no one could have predicted happened.
Edwards declared he had been rehabilitated.
He said a kindly guard at Levvenworth had changed his life.
He joined vocational programs in prison.
He showed remorse and in 1967 he was parrolled.
[music] Edward Wayne Edwards, a former FBI most wanted criminal, walked out of the federal prison at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.
A free man, he remarried, had children, and began building the image that would later become the greatest paradox in modern American crime history.
[music] Edwards became a motivational speaker.
He went on the circuit talking about rehabilitation, about how a criminal can change, about the power of human will.
In 1972, he published an autobiography titled Metamorphosis of a criminal, the true life story of Ed Edwards, a book about his criminal life and his transformation into a good citizen.
That same year, he appeared on the national television show To Tell the Truth, where a panel of celebrities had to guess which of three contestants was the real Edward Edwards, the former FBI most wanted criminal now reformed.
He also went on What’s My Line?
A gas station robber, a deserter, an escapee, now sitting under television lights, smiling, shaking hands with celebrities, and telling his redemption story to millions of viewers.
America loves a redemption story.
America [music] wants to believe people can change and Edwards gave them exactly what they wanted to hear.
But Edwards did not change.
He never changed.
Detective Larry Lee, who later led the Hackdrew investigation, said of Edwards in one sentence, “He was a con artist his whole life.
He was a fairly intelligent person who could achieve and do a lot of things because of his intelligence and his cunning.”
Con artist.
That is the exact word.
Not a madman, not an uncontrolled monster.
A professional con man in complete control of his behavior who knew how to read people, knew how to say what they wanted to hear, and knew how to hide the darkness inside behind a smile and speeches about change.
In 1977, 3 years [music] before Tim and Kelly were killed, Edwards had already killed for the first time, or at least the first time we know of in the suburbs of Akran, Ohio, where Edwards grew up.
William Billy Lavico, [music] 21, and Judith Stra, 19, were murdered, a young couple like Tim and Kelly.
[music] Exactly the pattern that would repeat 3 years later in Wisconsin.
But in 1977, no one connected [music] Edwards to that killing.
The Ohio case froze the way the Wisconsin case would later freeze.
Edwards kept living, kept moving.
He never stayed [music] in one place too long.
His family, a wife and children, lived a kind of forced nomadism.
A year in a town at most, sometimes only a few months.
His daughter later said the family often moved in the middle of the night with no explanation, no goodbye to neighbors, simply packing and driving away in the dark.
Edwards beat his wife.
He [music] punched her while she was pregnant.
He broke her jaw.
He threw his daughter across a room.
The family lived in a constant state of fear.
The kind of fear you do not speak, [music] do not tell anyone because the person who frightens you is the person who shares dinner with you every night.
And mixed into the violence was the thing that made everything more complicated.
Edwards could love.
He could be cheerful, funny, warm.
He could be the father children wanted to love.
And that was the most frightening part, not constant darkness, the alternation between light and dark, between love and violence.
[music] So the children growing up never knew which version of their father would appear when the door opened.
Edwards was obsessed with murder stories and detectives.
In any town the family lived in, he found a way to get close to local police, volunteered [music] as an informant, inserted himself into investigations.
He wanted to be near the process of solving crimes.
[music] He wanted to know what the police knew.
The kind of behavior that now, looking back, is clearly a killer’s tactic for controlling information, but at the time only looked like an eager, slightly odd citizen.
After leaving Wisconsin in September 1980, Edwards appeared in Pennsylvania, [music] where he rented a house, sold off the furniture, then burned the house down.
He was convicted of arson in 1982 and served more than 2 years.
After that, he vanished into the 1990s, moving through states, doing odd jobs, repairs, maintenance, anything that did not require a background check.
And finally, he stopped in Louisville, Kentucky, living quietly in a mobile home park for more than a decade.
An old man in a trailer park.
No one knew who he was.
No one knew what he had done.
Meanwhile, in Jefferson County, Wisconsin, the two hertz headstone still stood.
The words kidnapped and slain were still readable under rain and sun through season after season.
David Hack still lived with a question that had no answer.
Kelly’s family still carried a pain with no closure.
And Edward Wayne Edwards, a man who had killed at least four people in two different states, who had gone on national television calling himself a changed man who had written an entire book about his rehabilitation, was sitting in a trailer park in Louisville, Kentucky, thinking he had gotten away.
He was 76, diabetes, a weak heart, his life was closing, and he thought his secret would die with him.
He was wrong.
In 2009, nearly 29 years after Tim Hack and Kelly Drew were murdered, the state of Wisconsin decided to reopen the case.
That was not a random decision.
DNA technology had advanced far beyond 1980.
The semen sample on Kelly’s pants, the thing police once could do nothing with except preserve, could now be analyzed to produce a complete DNA profile of the killer.
The state’s cold case unit built that profile.
They had the killer’s DNA.
They only needed to find the person who owned it.
Investigators released information about the case to the public, hoping that someone somewhere would see it, would remember something, would know something they had never said.
That is how many cold cases are solved.
Not by a single technical breakthrough, but by a combination of new science and old memory.
[music] Sometimes it only takes the right person reading the right article at the right time.
And that is exactly what happened.
Hundreds of miles from Wisconsin, a 48-year-old woman named April Blasio was sitting at a computer.
April was not a journalist, not a detective, not anyone connected to the case in any way she knew.
She was the daughter of Edward Wayne Edwards, and she was doing something she had done many times over many years, searching the internet for cold cases in towns her family had lived in [music] when she was a child.
That was not a casual hobby.
It was the result of decades of suspicion she had never fully put into words.
April grew up knowing there was something wrong with her father.
Not in a way a child can express clearly, but in the way a body knows before the mind can process it.
The family never stayed in one place too long.
A year in a town at most, often less.
And the moves were never ordinary.
Not the kind where a family packs during the week, says goodbye to neighbors, and drives off on a Saturday morning.
The kind where her father suddenly announced in the middle of the night that they had to go.
Right now, no explanation, no discussion.
Belongings thrown into the car, kids half asleep in the back seat, and the car driving into the dark toward a new town the children would not know the name of until they arrived.
April remembered her father beating her mother.
She remembered him punching her mother in the stomach while she was pregnant.
She remembered him breaking her mother’s jaw.
She remembered him throwing her across a room.
She remembered a constant state of fear.
The kind of fear you cannot explain to outsiders.
Because the person who frightens you is also the person who cooks your dinner.
Also the person who sometimes holds you, sometimes tells jokes, sometimes is the best father you can imagine.
And [music] then without warning becomes the most frightening person in the room.
April and her siblings once had a conversation.
It was after her father stabbed her mother with a kitchen knife because one of the boys ate half a bag of fries.
He wanted a kitchen knife over French fries.
In that conversation, the siblings asked themselves whether their father had committed crimes beyond domestic violence.
They did not say the word murder out loud, but the question hung in the air and it never really went away.
In 2009, April sat at a computer and typed the names of towns the family had lived in into a search engine along with the words cold case and unsolved murder.
She had done this many times before, and each time she found a case in some town she read it, compared dates, and tried to remember whether the family had lived there at that time.
Most times, nothing matched.
This time was different.
This time she found the story of two teenagers [music] who vanished after a wedding in Sullivan, Wisconsin in 1980.
She read the name Concord House and everything [music] stopped.
She knew Concord House not from the news because she had been there.
Her father worked there.
Her father was the maintenance man for the hall and the campground [music] beside it.
Her family had lived in Watertown, Wisconsin in the summer of 1980.
And she remembered with a terrifying clarity only trauma memory brings [music] that her family had fled Watertown 2 days after the two teenagers disappeared.
Not [music] a few weeks, not the end of the month, 2 days.
April later described that moment.
I started reading and then I started shaking.
I was shaking because I immediately knew who had committed the murders.
She shook.
Not the kind of shaking from cold.
The kind of body does when the mind finally lets itself know what it has known for a long time but never dared admit.
And then another memory rose.
A memory she had carried for decades without understanding what it meant.
As a child, her father had taken her to an area on the outskirts.
She did not remember why.
Maybe he said they were going for a walk, going out, any reason a father gives a little girl.
But now reading about the case, reading about where the bodies were found, she realized the place her father had taken her was the area police had searched for Tim and Kelly’s bodies.
Her father had taken his little daughter to the place he hid the bodies.
Think about that.
A killer taking his daughter to the dump site of his victims.
No one knows why.
Maybe he was checking whether the bodies had been found.
Maybe he used the child as cover.
A father walking with his daughter looking more ordinary than a man walking alone in the woods.
Or maybe, and this is the most frightening possibility, he wanted to go back because he liked going back.
Because the [music] kind of killer Edwards was often returns to the scene for the feeling of power, of control, of owning a secret no one else knows, April faced a decision no one should have to face.
Call the police and report her own father as a murderer or stay [music] silent and live with what she knew for the rest of her life.
She did not decide immediately.
She wrestled with it.
She lost sleep.
She weighed every possibility.
Maybe she was wrong.
Maybe it was only coincidence.
Maybe her father worked at Concord house but had nothing to do with the murders.
But she knew who her father was.
She knew he was violent.
She knew he had stabbed her mother with a knife.
She knew he was obsessed with murder stories and detectives.
She knew he found ways to get close to police in every town, inserted himself into investigations, asked about cases.
The kind of behavior she now recognized was not the curiosity of a good citizen, but the tactic of a killer who wanted to know what the police knew.
She knew the family moved in the middle of the night.
And she knew that 2 days after two teenagers vanished from the place her father worked, her family fled Wisconsin.
April called her sister.
She said, [music] “I’m thinking about calling the detective.”
Her sister answered, “If you have to do it, do it.”
No one in the family said, “Don’t.”
No one said, “You’re crazy.”
Because they all knew.
In different ways, at different levels, all of Edward Edwards’s children lived with the same ghost.
[music] She called Detective Chad Garcia, the investigator on the Hackrew case, the case that had now been reopened.
She introduced herself and said, “I might be sending you in the wrong direction and you might think I’m crazy.”
She did not know that the opposite was true.
She was not a dead end.
She was the turning point.
That call from a 48-year-old woman shaking on the phone, afraid she was betraying her father, but more afraid she was protecting a [music] killer.
That call changed everything.
It woke a case that had slept for 29 years.
It gave police the name they needed.
And it started the chain of events that would end with Edward Wayne Edwards in handcuffs, facing the crime he thought he had buried with two bodies in the woods beside a cornfield nearly three decades earlier.
A few weeks after April Bolasio’s call, everything began to move at a speed that 29 years of freeze made almost unbelievable.
Detectives from Jefferson County contacted [music] law enforcement in Louisville, Kentucky, where Edward Wayne Edwards was living in a mobile home park.
76 years old, diabetes, a weak heart, an old man neighbors knew as a quiet resident who caused no trouble and drew no attention.
No one in that trailer park knew that the man living next to them had once been on the FBI’s 10 most wanted list had once gone on national television calling himself a reformed man and had killed at least four people in two different states.
In June 2009, detectives went to Louisville and questioned Edwards.
[music] The interview took place nearly 30 years after Jefferson County police first spoke to him when he was still the Concord house maintenance man with a bloody nose and [music] a story about a deer hunting trip in August.
This time the detectives arrived with more than they [music] had in 1980.
They had a complete DNA profile from the seaman on Kelly’s pants.
They had April’s call.
[music] They had 29 years of scientific progress behind them.
And they had the kind of patience [music] only detectives working a cold case have.
The patience of people who know they need only one thing from the man sitting across from them.
[music] And that thing is DNA.
Edwards reacted exactly like the con artist [music] he had always been.
At first he denied everything.
He said he had never heard of the missing couple.
Never heard the names Tim Hack or Kelly Drew.
[music] Never knew what happened at Concord House in August 1980.
A man who worked at the very hall where two teenagers were kidnapped, lived in the same town, was questioned by police right after it happened, now [music] saying he had never heard of it.
When the detectives pressed, Edwards changed the story.
He admitted he had been drinking beer [music] at Conquered House that night.
He might have seen the couple.
Maybe he was not sure.
The shift from I know nothing to I might have been there is the kind of shift detectives recognize immediately.
That is how a guilty person often works.
Not confessing everything at once, conceding small pieces, [music] each piece just enough to explain the last one, but never enough to convict himself.
Edwards thought he was controlling the conversation.
He had controlled conversations with police his whole life.
But this time, the detectives did not need him to confess.
They only needed his saliva.
Investigators took a DNA sample from Edwards.
He agreed.
Perhaps because refusing would look worse.
Or perhaps because after 29 years, he believed nothing could connect him to the murders.
He had lived free for nearly three decades.
He had outrun police, the FBI, the justice systems of two different states and time.
Why would one saliva sample matter?
The DNA sample was sent to the Wisconsin State Crime Lab.
The results came back.
A match.
Edward Wayne Edwards’s DNA matched the semen on Kelly Drew’s pants.
Not possible match, not similar, [music] a match.
After 29 years, the biological sample Jefferson County police collected from the torn clothes of a 19-year-old girl finally had a name, and that name was Edward Wayne Edwards.
He was arrested at his home in Louisville in July 2009.
No chase, no resistance, no dramatic scene.
A 76-year-old man in a trailer park, handcuffed and put in a police car.
29 years of running ended not with gunfire but with the click of steel cuffs.
Edwards was taken back to Wisconsin [music] and there he did what he always did.
He told a story, not the truth, a story.
In his post arrest statement, Edwards told detectives he had had sex with Kelly Drew that night.
[music] He said it was consensual.
And then he said he watched a group of men stomp the couple to death.
He did not know who they were.
He could not describe them.
He just stood there and watched.
That was his story.
Consensual sex with a 19-year-old girl.
Then a mysterious group of men appearing from the dark and stomping two young people to death.
And Edward’s only a bystander.
[music] Forensic evidence shattered that story into pieces.
Kelly Drew was not stomped.
She was bound and strangled.
Tim Hack was not stomped.
He was stabbed.
The method of killing was completely different from what Edwards described.
And the fact that she was bound showed this was not the act of a chaotic crowd.
This was the act of one person controlling a victim, restraining a victim, then killing a victim on purpose.
One person, not a group.
One person who was at Conquered [music] House that night had access to the area, knew the surrounding roads, and left DNA on the victim’s clothes.
Edwards lied, but that was not surprising.
The surprising thing [music] was that he still thought he could lie successfully after DNA had already told the truth, a con artist to the last minute.
But Edwards’s story did not stop with Tim and Kelly.
After the arrest, the dominoes began to fall.
Investigators connected Edwards to the 1977 murders in suburban Akran, Ohio.
William Billy Lavico, 21, and Judith Straoud, 18, another young couple, killed a different way, but the same pattern, targeting couples, attacking by surprise, killing both.
Edwards eventually pleaded guilty in that case and received two consecutive life sentences in Ohio.
Then he confessed more.
Danny Boy Edwards, or Danny Logner, his birth name.
Edward’s adopted son, a 25-year-old man Edwards had adopted, lived with, called his son.
In 1996, Edwards killed Danny Boy.
The motive was not rage, not conflict.
Edwards had bought a $250,000 life insurance policy on Danny Boy.
He killed his adopted son for the insurance money, a quarter of a million.
That was the price Edward Edwards put on the life of the person he called his son.
In all, Edwards confessed to five murders.
Lovakco and Stra in Ohio in 1977, Tim Hack and Kelly Drew in Wisconsin in 1980, and Danny Boy in 1996.
Five people dead, spread across nearly 20 years in two states.
By a man America had once watched on television talking about his rehabilitation.
When news of the arrest spread, David Hack, Tim’s father, then 71, spoke to the press.
[music] He had waited 29 years to say these words.
“I’m glad it’s over,” he said.
Then he added what he had thought for 29 years.
I don’t know how you cannot admit it if the DNA matches.
He did not shout.
He did not slam the table.
He spoke in the voice of a father who had carried the pain so long it had become part of him.
Inseparable, unremovable.
[music] And he asked a question no one had a satisfactory answer to.
All I want to know is why he chose my son and his girlfriend.
Why Tim?
Why Kelly?
Why two 19-year-olds leaving a wedding on the most ordinary summer night of their lives?
Why them?
That question never got an answer.
Edwards never explained why he chose Tim [music] and Kelly.
Maybe there was no reason except opportunity.
He was there.
They were there.
A dark parking lot, empty country roads, and he was the kind of man who when the chance appeared did not hesitate.
[music] If this story is haunting you, if you are thinking about those two kids and the father who waited 29 [music] years to know who took his son, hit like and subscribe to Cold Case Reopened.
We tell the stories the system wants to forget, but families never forget.
[music] The last part of Tim and Kelly’s story is waiting.
Edward Wayne Edwards was brought back to Wisconsin to face the justice he had escaped for 29 years.
He was charged with two counts of first-degree murder for the deaths of Tim Hack and Kelly Drew.
The trial was held in Jefferson County.
And the scene in the courtroom was something no one present would forget.
Edward sat in a wheelchair handcuffed 77 years old about 20 ft from the victim’s families.
He did not speak, did not look at them, showed no emotion.
Most of the time he sat with his head down looking at the floor as if the trial were happening to someone else somewhere else in someone else’s story.
An old man in a wheelchair, eyes on the floor.
While the families of the two children he had killed 29 years earlier, sat a few steps away and cried.
The victim’s families were allowed to speak to the court.
And they did.
Norma Walker, Kelly Drew’s mother, stood and looked straight at the man who had killed her daughter.
She said, “You are a lying, evil murderer, and God has a special place in hell for you.”
She said, “Edwards deserve to be hanged.
29 years.”
She had carried that sentence in her heart for 29 years, [music] waiting for a face to say it to, a pair of eyes to look at while she said it.
Edwards did not look up.
Wendy, Kelly’s sister, read a statement.
Her voice was clear and cold as steel.
I’m glad Wisconsin doesn’t have the death penalty because I want this disgusting piece of garbage to rot in prison as long as possible.
She did not want Edwards to die quickly.
She wanted him alive in a cell every day until his body gave out.
She wanted him to know he would never see the sky without bars in the way.
The court sentenced Edwards to two consecutive life terms for the murders of Tim Hack and Kelly Drew.
He would die in prison.
But Wisconsin was not the only place demanding justice.
10 days before the Wisconsin trial, Edwards had already been sentenced in Ohio.
Two consecutive life terms for the 1977 murders of William Lvakco and Judith Stra, the first young couple, the first victims we know of.
Then the fifth case, Danny Boy, the adopted son he killed for $250,000 in insurance.
In Ohio, Edwards was sentenced to death for killing Danny Boy.
And here the story twists one more time in a way only Edward Edwards could create.
[music] He wanted to be executed.
He said so publicly.
He said he wanted to die.
In a prison interview, he told the Associated Press that the reason he confessed to killing Danny Boy was that he wanted a death sentence.
Ohio has the death penalty.
Wisconsin does not.
That is why he chose to confess in Ohio.
Even in the last moment, Edwards was still manipulating the system, still trying to control how his story ended.
He had controlled how people saw him his whole life.
From the reformed speaker on television to the quiet old man in a trailer park, and now he wanted to control his death, too.
Any boy’s halfsister, Jadeine Cppley, stood before the sentencing panel and begged [music] them not to give Edwards what he wanted.
She said executing Edwards would be giving him exactly what he was asking for.
The panel rejected her request.
An execution date was set for August 31.
Edwards would not live to see it.
On April 7th, 2011, about a month after the death sentence, Edward Wayne [music] Edwards died of natural causes at the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction Medical Center [music] in Columbus.
Leukemia, heart disease, diabetes.
His body gave out before the state could act.
He was 77.
He died in a prison hospital room, not on a gurnie.
Not the way he wanted.
And perhaps that was the last small piece of justice the system delivered.
That even death did not follow Edwards’s script.
After Edwards died, the story still continued, [music] but it belonged to the living.
April Bolasio, the woman who called Detective Chad Garcia in 2009, had to live with [music] the consequences of that call for the rest of her life.
Not legal consequences, emotional ones.
She reported her own father.
She helped put her father in prison.
And she carried guilt.
Not guilt for calling, but guilt for not calling sooner.
[music] She wondered if she had realized earlier.
If she had called police in 1996, Dany [music] Boy might still be alive.
If she had called in 1990, maybe someone somewhere would not have become a victim.
[music] That kind of guilt has no logic.
She was a child when the murders happened.
She did not know.
She could not [music] have known.
But guilt does not follow logic.
It follows feeling.
And April loved her father.
That is the hardest part to understand from the outside.
[music] She said, “He was still very loving, and I still remember the good things, [music] and I choose to remember the good more than the bad.”
A serial killer had also once held [music] his daughter.
Had also once told jokes, had also once been the father a child wanted to love.
And that child grew into a woman who had to reconcile [music] two truths that cannot be reconciled.
My father loved me and my father killed people.
In 2019, April worked with journalist Josh Dean to produce [music] the podcast The Clearing, telling the journey of how she discovered the truth about her father.
The podcast does not only tell the crimes, it tells memory, how a child processes what she witnessed, the distance between knowing and admitting, and the price you pay when you choose truth over family loyalty.
In 2024, she published the memoir raised by a serial killer through Atria Books, 288 pages about the family’s nomadic life in the 1970s and 1980s, about violence, about fear, about the strange love she still had for the man who caused it all.
The Tim Hack and Kelly Droop case also became the subject of the episode Sweethearts Silenced on A&E’s Cold Case Files, telling how a killer wrote a book about his con artist past and how that book itself, the very fame Edwards had craved his whole life, became part of the chain of evidence that cracked a 29-year cold case.
His narcissism, the need to be seen, known, noticed, was the thing that finally destroyed him.
Some people on the internet have tried to connect Edwards to other famous cases.
[music] John Benet Ramsay, Lachi Peterson, and many others.
Those conspiracy theories have no basis.
Edwards was a convicted serial killer, but he was not the ghost behind every unsolved case in America.
Five victims are already horrifying enough.
No extra legend is needed.
The most important thing this case leaves behind is not about Edwards.
It is about what came after him.
About David Hack, the 71-year-old father who finally knew who took his son.
About Norma Walker, the mother who finally stood in front of the man who killed her daughter and told him to his face that he would go to hell.
About April Bolasio, the daughter who chose ethics over family loyalty, chose justice for two strangers over the comfort of a secret, [music] and has to live with that choice every day for the rest of her life.
And about Tim and Kelly, two 19-year-olds leaving a wedding on a warm summer night in rural Wisconsin.
Tim, the young farmer with the tractor, the lonesome loser.
Kelly, the girl just out of beauty school with her whole future ahead of her.
They loved each other.
They had plans.
They walked out of Concord House around 11 p.m.
Walked into the dark and never [music] walked out.
Their headstone still stands in the Fort Atkinson cemetery.
Two hearts interlocking, kidnapped and slain.
That line has stood there for more than four decades.
Through rain, sun, snow, through 29 years with no answer, and every year after that, it is still readable.
It still stands.
Just as Tim and Kelly’s story still stands, refusing to be forgotten, refusing to be buried until a woman shaking on the phone decided that the truth mattered more than silence.
This is Cold Case Reopened.
We tell the stories of forgotten victims and the people who refuse to let them stay forgotten.
If this story stays with you, share it.
