My pleasant afternoon with the alleged Zodiac Killer
He was an eyewitness to the Jimmy Hoffa-Tony Pro prison fight
In 1977, a family friend in Akron, Ohio, introduced me to an ex-convict and career criminal named Edward Wayne Edwards who had appeared on the FBI’s Most Wanted List in 1961. When I met him—after his capture, conviction, incarceration, and release from prison—he insisted that he had turned his life around. In 1972, he published a little-known book, Metamorphosis of a Criminal: The True Life Story of Ed Edwards, and became a motivational speaker. My family friend—who owned a local cartage company and offered many ex-convicts second-chance opportunities—gave him his day job. To me, Edwards seemed to be a nice guy and had an important story to tell.
During my pleasant three-hour, recorded interview with Edwards at the dining-room table in his home—which included a delicious lunch that his wife, Kay, had prepared— Edwards told me that he did time at Lewisburg Penitentiary with Jimmy Hoffa. He added that he was present when Hoffa got into what became a famous fistfight in the prison dining hall with Vito Genovese Mafia family capo Anthony Provenzano, another labor racketeer.
Edwards told me that he helped break up the fight.
Notably, Provenzano wound up engineering Hoffa’s disappearance and murder in July 1975. And, in my opinion, Tony Pro’s top lieutenant, Salvatore Briguglio, did the actual killing. (I am the only journalist, living or dead, who had a face-to-face interview with Briguglio who was murdered in March 1978.)
I cited Edwards’s recollections about Hoffa and Provenzano at Lewisburg in my 1978 book, The Hoffa Wars, in which I wrote:
One of those Hoffa helped was a former member of the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” list, Edward Edwards. A convicted bank robber and prison escape artist, Edwards had arrived at Lewisburg five months before Hoffa. Although he was not a local heavy like [Carmine] Galante and some of the other talent in G Block, Edwards got to know Hoffa, whom he remembered as “talking tough but always having a good word for everyone and always keeping himself in shape.”
Edwards says, “The first time I met Hoffa was while we were going through the chow line, and he was lost. Everyone was looking at him, saying, ‘There’s Hoffa! There’s Hoffa!’ He had his tray and was looking around to sit somewhere. So I introduced myself and asked him to join me. I kinda felt sorry for him, because I knew that this was something new for him . . . We just talked about the institution, the food, and prison policies. He wasn’t the kind of guy you asked a lot of questions to. If he wanted you to know something, he’d tell you.”
Through Hoffa, Edwards met another union official serving time at Lewisburg, former IBT vice president and Genovese captain Anthony Provenzano, who, before going to jail, was reelected and was receiving salaries as president of both Local 560 in Union City and New Jersey’s Joint Council 73.
According to Edwards, Hoffa told him privately that he and Provenzano had personal problems. “It’s just that he’s become a sore spot with me,’’ said Hoffa. “In 1959, when the Teamsters had the monitors supervising the union, I was told to suspend him. But I didn’t. That was one of the biggest mistakes I’ve ever made. That guy is nuts.”
Edwards didn’t push the discussion further, but in August 1967 he was present when the situation seemed to come to a head. “I was sitting at a table . . . across from Hoffa, and Provenzano was sitting to my right and Hoffa’s left. They were talking between themselves, and I was talking to a friend of mine who was walking by. All of a sudden I heard chairs screeching, and both Hoffa and Provenzano got up and squared off. It was obvious that Hoffa was the aggressor, but no punches landed.
“So I tried to step in between the two men, but they were pretty hot and were just ignoring me. I grabbed Hoffa around the waist and pushed him back while I tried to tell them to cool it, because guards were all over the place.”
Edwards says that as Provenzano backed off he was pointing at Hoffa and shouting, “Old man! Yours is coming! You know, it’s coming one of these days. . . You’re going to belong to me!”
Even though I also mentioned my interview with Edwards in the Playboy excerpt of my 1978 book about Hoffa, I did not think much about Edwards again for many years.
In 2004, during a routine downsizing in my office, I shredded hundreds of pounds of old documents and destroyed several boxes of taped interviews, including the recording of my long interview with Edwards. Along with a large collection of published books, I also contributed my personally autographed copy of Edwards’s memoir to a local library.
Twelve years later, in the fall of 2016, I received a call from a documentary film producer who had read my book about Hoffa and saw the references to Edwards. When he asked me if I had memorialized my interview with him, I replied that I had—but that I had since destroyed the recording.
The producer audibly groaned.
When I asked him why he was upset, he revealed that he and his production team believed that Edwards was “The Zodiac Killer,” the subject of what became their controversial six-part series on the Paramount Network. He added that I had recorded one of the few known interviews with Edwards.
Part Four included the producers’ allegation that Edwards, among his many other victims, had murdered Hoffa.
I scoffed at that theory, later saying on camera that the cast of characters in the still-unsolved Hoffa caper was fairly well known and that Edwards wasn’t even on the radar screen in the Hoffa investigation.
But I remain open-minded that Ed Edwards, who died in 2011 in an Ohio prison hospital, was The Zodiac Killer. One of the producers described Edwards as “the most prolific serial killer of all time.”
According to the profile of Edwards on Wikipedia[1]:
In 2018 Investigation Discovery broadcast an episode titled My Father, the Serial Killer which tells the story of how Edwards' daughter [earlier] realized her father had committed the so-called "Sweetheart Murders" and tipped off authorities, leading to his arrest and conviction. The daughter told People that Edwards had a dark side, verbally and physically abusing her mother Kay, and making the children watch videos about The Zodiac Killer while screaming, "that's not how it happened!" In the episode she affirmed that she thought her father was also The Zodiac Killer.
For 50 years, I have concentrated on investigating the Mafia, organized crime in general, and political corruption. As a rule, I do not investigate psycho killers, foreign intrigue, or disorganized crime.
Although an investigation of The Zodiac Killer was way out of my league, I certainly do regret destroying the recording of my interview with Edwards. And admittedly, moth-to-flame, I would have liked another crack at him after learning about his life as a serial killer, . . . perhaps even as The Zodiac Killer.
ENDNOTE
[1] According to Wikipedia, Ed Edwards launched his murderous rampage in 1977—the same year as my long interview with him at his home:
The first murders for which Edwards was convicted took place in Ohio in 1977. William "Billy" Lavaco, 21, of Doylestown, Ohio, and his girlfriend Judith Straub, 18, of Sterling, Ohio, had been dating eight months when Straub's car was found in the parking lot of Silver Creek Metro park in Norton, on August 7, 1977, with her purse and shoes inside. Family members gathered in the lot the next day as Norton police, aided by a National Guard helicopter, searched the high weeds. There, they found Lavaco and Straub, lying on the ground, shot at point-blank range with a 20-gauge shotgun. He received life sentences for these crimes in 2010.
The second pair of murders, another double homicide, occurred in Concord, Wisconsin, in 1980, when a 19 year old couple from Jefferson, Wisconsin, Tim Hack and Kelly Drew, were stabbed and strangled. These are referred to as the "Sweetheart Murders." Edwards had been questioned at the time, but there was no basis to hold him. Almost 29 years later, his connection to the crime was established by means of DNA testing. Edwards' own child, April Balascio, tipped off police about his possible involvement.
Edwards confessed to the 1996 murder of his foster son, 25-year-old Dannie Boy Edwards in Burton, Ohio. The victim had lived with Edwards and his family for several years. Dannie's original name was Dannie Law Gloeckner. Edwards murdered Gloeckner in a scheme to collect $250,000 insurance money. Dannie Boy, a soldier in the U.S. Army, was persuaded by Edwards to go AWOL from the Army and taken by him to the woods near his house in Burton, Ohio. There, Edwards shot him twice in the face, killing him, and left his body in a shallow grave, where it was later discovered by a hunter.
Edwards was sentenced to death for this crime in March 2011. He died in prison of natural causes a month later.
I am amazed at Dan Moldea’s happenstances and discoveries. Undoubtedly there is more hidden in his journals akin to “being hidden in plain sight”. I am craving for more.
Nice piece, Dan.