APNewsBreak: Ky. man convicted of killing 4 in Wis., Ohio, confesses to killing 1 more in Ohio

Man convicted of killing 4 admits he killed 1 more

JEFFERSON, Wis. — A 77-year-old Kentucky con man convicted of killing two young couples in Wisconsin and Ohio decades ago has confessed to killing another man in the hopes he will be sentenced to death.

Edward W. Edwards told The Associated Press during a jailhouse interview Wednesday that in June 1996, he lured Donnie Boy Edwards, a 24-year-old man he says was like a son to him, to a cemetery near his home in Burton, Ohio, and shot him twice in the chest with a shotgun. The young man was living with Edwards’ family and had changed his name earlier that year from Dannie Law Gloeckner to Dannie Boy Edwards.

Authorities found the body the following year but never charged anyone in the slaying.

Edwards, who admitted he’s been lying all his life, said he killed Dannie Boy because he stole credit cards and other things from Edwards’ children, and because he says he stood to collect about $183,000 in life insurance benefits if Dannie Boy died.

He said he was confessing to the slaying because his family had urged him to come clean about everything he’s done, and because he hopes that prosecutors will seek to execute him.

Edwards pleaded guilty earlier this month to murdering 21-year-old William Lavaco, of Doylestown, Ohio, and 18-year-old Judith Straub, of Sterling, Ohio, by shooting them both in the neck in a Norton park in 1977. He received two life sentences for those slayings.

He also pleaded guilty to murdering 19-year-old Wisconsin sweethearts Tim Hack and Kelly Drew in 1980, and faces mandatory life prison sentences when he’s sentenced in Jefferson County on Monday.

Wisconsin doesn’t have the death penalty, and Edwards was not eligible to be executed for killing Lavaco and Straub because a U.S. Supreme Court ruling invalidated Ohio’s death penalty statutes between 1974 and 1978.

Speaking in a matter-of-fact tone from a wheelchair in the Jefferson County, Wis., jail, Edwards said he buried Dannie Boy in a shallow grave and tossed the shotgun into a nearby reservoir.

“I went on home as if nothing had happened,” Edwards said. “I’m responsible for it. It didn’t work on my conscience. I spent the money. I was having a good time. … you do it, forget it was done and go about your business until next time.”

He said there was no next time, and that he only killed five people.

“There is nothing else,” he said. “His is the last one.”

Edwards said he returned to Dannie Boy’s grave about a year later to find animals had torn his head from his body. Edwards picked up the skull, stuffed it in a feed sack and hid it. He promised to show prosecutors where if they moved him back to Geauga County in Ohio.

Geauga County Sheriff Dan McClelland said detectives had spoken to Edwards many times about Dannie Boy’s death, and that they’re trying to corroborate his story.

“Each time he talks, we get a sliver more. You get enough of those slivers, pretty soon you have a lot of information,” McClelland said.

Edwards said he has a pacemaker, diabetes and can no longer walk, and that he would rather die than live out his last days in prison. He said if sentenced to death, he wouldn’t appeal and would fight any efforts to keep him alive.

It’s unclear, however, if Edwards would qualify for the death penalty. To recommend a death sentence, Ohio juries must find offenders guilty of a serious secondary offense — such as rape, arson or aggravated robbery — in addition to aggravated murder.

Edwards’ wife, Kay Edwards, did not immediately return a phone message Wednesday seeking comment. One of his daughters, Jeannine Davis, of Le Roy, N.Y., said only, “He is my dad and I love him.”

Edwards steadfastly refused during the interview to discuss the Wisconsin couple, saying he was scheduled to be sentenced for those slayings on Monday. He did describe for the first time publicly how he killed the Ohio couple, however.

Edwards said he met Lavaco at “beer bashes” Edwards held at the family’s farm near Doylestown, Ohio, and that at some point, he decided to kill him. He said he confronted Lavaco at a park in Norton after the bars closed one night, and told Straub to stay in the car while he and Lavaco argued. He said she didn’t listen and walked up to them, so he shot them both in the neck with a shotgun.

Straub’s brother, Jeff, said he doesn’t believe anything Edwards says.

“He’s so deceiving it’s hard to tell where the truth stops and the BS begins,” Straub said.

Edwards said he learned to lie as a child and was traumatized when his pregnant mother committed suicide in 1936 by shooting herself in the stomach.

He said he never had nightmares about his victims or relived any of the slayings in his mind. He also said he never imagined he’d get caught.

“I’ve just been able to put it out of my mind,” Edwards said. “I knew there was no evidence.”

Last year, however, Wisconsin analysts linked DNA in semen taken from Drew’s tattered pants to Edwards and arrested him.

Before any of the five killings, Edwards documented his life of crime in a 1972 autobiography, “Metamorphosis of a Criminal.” He spent the 1950s and early 1960s drifting across the country, stealing cars, robbing banks and gas stations and seducing women he met along the way.

He landed on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted Fugitives list in 1961. FBI agents captured him in Atlanta in 1962.

He did a stint in federal prison in Leavenworth, Kan., where he claims a guard persuaded him to clean up his life. After he was paroled from the federal prison in Lewisburg, Pa., in 1967, he embarked on a speaking tour to persuade young people to avoid crime.

“Don’t be a crime victim,” he wrote in the book. “Be a crime stopper.”

Edwards said the publisher embellished most of his story, but he did intend to go straight.

“Don’t ask me where I went wrong,” he said. “So much for good intentions.

Associated Press Writer Andrew Welsh-Huggins in Columbus, Ohio, contributed to this report.