When April Balascio realized her dad, Edward Wayne Edwards, may have had something to do with a double homicide in a Wisconsin town where the family had once lived, her first call was not to the authorities.
“She agonized over whether she should call the detective for a while,” explains PEOPLE Senior Editor Gillian Telling in an exclusive clip (above) from a PeopleTV special about what Balascio ultimately discovered.
“She actually called her sister first and said, ‘I’m thinking of calling the detective,’ ” Telling continues. “Her sister said, ‘If you have to do it, do it.’ She called detective Chad Garcia, who had been the detective in the case originally, and told him that she thought she had a suspect in mind.”
That fateful tip was a key part of what led to Edwards’ arrest, in 2009 — after which he confessed not just to the 1980 “Sweetheart Murders” of Kelly Drew and Timothy Hack, in Watertown, Wisconsin, but also to slaying another young couple and also his own son.
• Watch the full episode of People Crime: April Balascio — A Daughter’s Decision, streaming now on PeopleTV. Go to People.com/peopletv, or download the app on your favorite streaming device.
Speaking to PeopleTV, Balascio describes piecing together the information that her father was a killer, having already unsuccessfully dug around online.
“One night, I believe it was a Sunday night, I all of a sudden remembered about the Wisconsin murders in Watertown, Wisconsin — which I don’t know why I didn’t remember those before, because those murders stick out more so in my brain than any other, I think because I was older,” Balascio recalls in the clip.
“I went online and I was actually really surprised to see that they had just reopened the Watertown, Wisconsin, murders and there was lots of information on there and as I read it, I am like, This is how I remember it.”
According to Telling — who wrote a cover story for last week’s PEOPLE on Balascio’s life, which was also featured on this season of People Magazine Investigates — Balascio was struck to realize that as a girl, she was taken by her dad to the same place where investigators had searched for the bodies of Drew and Hack.
• For more on Edward Edwards’ dark secrets and his daughter’s search for the truth, pick up last week’s issue of PEOPLE, still on newsstands.
Later, meeting detective Garcia, Balascio says she introduced herself as a potential dead end — not realizing the opposite was true.
“I had introduced myself and I had said, ‘I might be sending you on a wild goose chase and you might think I’m crazy, but this is what I remember when I lived in the area,’ ” she says.
“I explained to him who my dad was, his name and why I thought what I had thought and I didn’t know it at the time, but I was actually giving him a lot of information.”