Metamorphosis of a Serial Killer:
Edward Wayne Edwards and why there is no substitute for love
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Introduction to Murders
The real hell of life is everyone has his reasons.
– Inspector Lewis, of the BBC’s Lewis.
In the late summer of 1996, downtown Great Falls, Montana was plastered with missing person posters for Zachary Xerxes Ramsay. That’s when our family—Chris Hables Gray, Jane Wilson, Corey Grayson (11) and Zackary Grayson (6)—moved there. Almost everyone we met had to share the story of how the 10-year-old Zachary had disappeared from the alley behind our new house on 5th Ave. North. It had happened only six months earlier, on February 6, while he was walking to Whittier Elementary School. The same school we would soon be taking Zack to.
A few years later—December 13, 1999—the town buzzed with excitement over reports that a man named Nathaniel Bar-Jonah, pretending to be a police officer, had been arrested lurking near Meadowlark Elementary on the other side of town. It soon became clear that he was a suspect in a number of crimes, including the disappearance of Zachary Ramsay. The lead detective on the case was Great Falls Police Sargent John Cameron.
Thanks to Cameron’s work, and that of others on the Bar-Jonah Task Force, he was convicted of various crimes and imprisoned for the rest of his life.
Great Falls is a small town when it is not a violent little city. So we got to know Zachary Ramsey’s mother slightly, our Zack became good friends with Detective Cameron’s son Justin, and Corey played soccer with the son of Patrick Flarherty, one of Bar-Jonah’s lawyers, who Chris often chatted with on the sidelines. Chris’s great-great-great grandmother was Honora Flarherty who fled Tuam, Galway during the Irish famine, and he would tease Patrick that they were no doubt cousins.
Nathaniel Bar-Jonah lived in our neighborhood and the investigation eventually proved he was almost certainly a cannibal and that he served some of his victims, probably including little Zach, in his chile at neighborhood and church dinners. Thankfully, although invited, we never went to any of those!
We eventually learned of the growing obsession Cold Case Detective Cameron had developed for the serial killer Edwards Wayne Edwards (EWE), who had certainly robbed at least one service station in Great Falls (Bob and Ole’s on March 6, 1956) and might have killed Duane Bogle and Patty Kalitski, January 2, 1956 in Wadsworth Park, a well known Lovers’ Lane.
This book is about Edward Wayne Edwards, certainly, but it is also about Detective Cameron’s obsession with him. The third main character is April Balascio, the daughter of Edward Wayne Edwards and the heroine who turned him in.
It is also about the city of Great Falls, Montana, fascinating, once beautiful, and always brutal. It also honors the many victims of serial killers, whose stories it tries to honor. In the end, the biggest questions this book tries to answer are about serial killing and how one separates the myths from the realities, what is true about True Crime in the end? Perhaps most importantly, maybe even the mystery that sells so many True Crime books, is how do we know evil, how do we evaluate, understand, and judge the worst that humans are capable of?
To do this we explore in detail the possible killings and other crimes of Edward Wayne Edwards, which includes some of the most famous in American history—Zodiac, the Atlanta Child Murders, Jimmy Hoffa, Adam Walsh, DB Cooper, Joan Bennet Ramsey, Chandra Levy, Laci Peterson—and many others. For each of these cases the likelihood that EWE committed them will be compared with other potential suspects to evaluate what the chances are that Edwards was the actual UnSub—the Unknown Subject in FBI-speak.
The tale starts in Chapter 1 with the documented life of Edward “Ed” Wayne Edwards from his birth to dying in prison, with at least a dozen murders in-between. It includes introducing the woman who made his capture possible, April Balascio.
Next, in Chapter 2, comes a necessary discussion about murder, serial killing, and how we know what we know, what counts as true? This is called epistemology in philosophy; in the world of crime it is evidence. But it is the same problem—how do you distinguish between what is true, what is probably true, what is improbable, and what is impossible?
In our analysis we give extra weight to information that is collectively produced—DNA and other forensic evidence, official documents, collaborations such as podcasts, books and articles vetted by editors and others. There are also sources such as recordings, videos, confessions, that might directly come from suspects, victims, and witnesses. Of course, individual witnesses are very problematic. Many people are wrongfully convicted because of inaccurate witnesses. Human judgement is far from perfect but we give special weight to personal claims none-the-less, but very carefully. Flawed human perception is what makes deception so effective. Most of us have trouble disbelieving someone who smiles nicely, looks us straight in the eyes, and tells us lies.
In the case of Edwards we are fortunate enough to have a fair number of official documents including birth/death/marriage certificates and various reports, such as two psychological evaluations. There are also videos and recordings of some of his police interviews and a large number of recordings he made himself that came into the hands of his oldest daughter, April.
The 8-part podcast she made with Gimlet media is invaluable, as is the miniseries It Was Him: The Many Murders of Ed Edwards that features the theories of Detective Cameron as explored by the grandson of Edward Wayne Edwards. There are several true crime series episodes (one with John Edwards, April’s brother), books (especially EWE’s Metamorphosis, John Cameron’s It Was Him, and the powerful memoir by April Balascio I Was Raised by a Serial Killer) and many articles and blog comments.
Evaluating all this evidence requires rigor. Some sources (Edwards) lie habitually, many instutituions and individuals are more interested in hiding their mistakes and pushing their agenda than the truth, and everyone shades their claims through their perspective. We especially have to watch out for the typical cognitive flaws all humans suffer from —confirmation bias especially — and at the sources of claimed facts while comparing those facts with others.
Chapter 3 introduces the tragic hero of the book, John Cameron, whose quest to bring Edwards to full judgement is the framework for this journey. The apprehension and conviction of the cannibal Nathaniel Bar-Jonah is the starting point. We also introduce one of the most interesting characters in this tale: Great Falls, Montana. Chapter 4 goes deeper into EWE’s superpower—his charm. The secret behind his many escapes, his long career in killing, and his many chameleon-like transformations.
Chapters 5 and 6 begins detailing the possible killings by Edwards. They start with his confessed “sweetheart” murders of two couples and other possible killings for the same psycho-sexual reasons. Then follows the killing for insurance money of his foster son, which he also confessed to. Whether or not he killed others for profit of some sort is considered, especially his many arsons. Chapter 7 looks for evidence that some murders attributed to his rage might have actually happened.
In the next Chapter, the question of serial killer writings is addressed. There is a widely held view that serial killers don’t often write about their crimes, but in reality it is very common. It isn’t just the ciphers of the Zodiac that interest us, or even the many Zodiac letters, although they are important. EWE’s memoir Metamorphosis of a Criminal is the most relevant text, actually, followed by the many letters he wrote, some to Detective Cameron.
Chapter 9 is about the Zodiac Murders and the next six chapters cover over 100 homicides attributed to EWE, from the notorious to almost completely unknown. Chapter 16 unpacks Cameron’s wildest claim, that EWE was the author of the Anthrax attacks that followed 9/11, and, as a bonus that he was DB Cooper. The very impossibility of these theories is revealing, especially about True Crime as a genre and social force.
The book ends with a summing up of the life, the death, and the afterlife of Edward Wayne Edwards and explains why for him, much as he longed for it, there was no substitute for love. But there are synonyms for love, and one of them is justice. Love, true love, always comes with a cost. April his daughter paid a cost, one she seems to feel was well worth it. Detective Sargent John Cameron—A postmodern knight with a very postmodern fate—has also paid dearly for his quest to bring Edward Wayne Edwards to full account. Whether it has been worth it, only he can say.
While we don’t know what has brought you to this book, we suspect it is some combination of the main appeals of such stories, the questions we all have about people killing people: The fear of murder, the mystery of murder and the temptation of murder. We hope to have illuminated some corners of this dark land, maybe even changed your journey through it. But our final answers are unique to each of us, and we will carry them to our end.