For years, April Balascio lived under the shadow of a man who was both father and predator. Edward Wayne Edwards could be charming, even funny, but behind closed doors he was violent, erratic, and constantly on the move. Wherever the family went, it seemed, death soon followed.

Now, Balascio — the woman who eventually turned her father in — is telling her story in a new memoir, Raised By a Serial Killer: Discovering the Truth About My Father, set for release on December 3. In an exclusive excerpt shared with PEOPLE, she recalls the moment in 1980 when she first suspected that the man raising her might also be a killer.

A Childhood of Fear and Flight

Growing up, April and her siblings were used to packing up in the middle of the night. Her father always had a reason for why they had to leave town, why they had to start over. He smoked unfiltered Camels, drank endless cups of coffee, and carried himself with the restless energy of someone always looking over his shoulder.

When the Edwards family landed in Watertown, Wisconsin, in the summer of 1980, they settled into a campground before moving into a farmhouse owned by a local farmer. Edwards picked up part-time work at the Concord House, a reception hall for weddings and concerts. For a few fleeting weeks, life seemed almost normal.

Then came the rifle.

One afternoon, Edwards strode into the family’s dining room carrying a hunting rifle as casually as if it were a tennis racket. His children gathered nervously as he handled it. Suddenly, the gun went off, blasting a hole through the floor. Everyone froze. Edwards, feigning panic, checked to see if anyone was hit before laughing it off: “I didn’t know the gun was loaded.”

For April, it was just one more scar in a home already pocked with violence.

The Sweetheart Murders

Soon after, two local teenagers — Timothy Hack and Kelly Drew — vanished after attending a wedding reception at the Concord House. Their decomposing bodies were found in a field weeks later. The community was shaken, and Edwards seemed strangely obsessed with the case.

“He couldn’t stop talking about it,” April recalled. He speculated aloud: “I bet they find those kids in a field.”

The fixation unsettled her. At dinner with neighbors, Edwards played the jovial guest, but April noticed the strained looks on the faces of those around the table. Back home, his speculation about the missing teens continued.

One morning, she noticed his nose was swollen and cut. He claimed he had injured it with a rifle scope while hunting. But it was August, and it wasn’t hunting season. His boots by the door were caked with mud. April kept her questions to herself.

A few weeks later, Edwards ordered the family to pack up and leave town abruptly — before the school year had even ended. Sitting in the back of the U-Haul, April stared at her father’s silhouette behind the wheel. For the first time, she felt her love for him slipping into suspicion.

“If there is a before and after a moment in the story of my relationship with my dad, this is it,” she writes. “The barrier that kept the concept of ‘Dad, who I loved,’ separate from ‘the man who we lived with who did bad things’ had begun to fray. And I never thought of him in the same way again.”

The Search for the Truth

Years later, as an adult, April typed “cold case” and “Watertown” into a search engine. The results floored her: article after article about the “Sweetheart Murders” — the very crime she remembered her father obsessing over.

Her hands shaking, she reached out to investigators and shared her suspicions. DNA evidence confirmed what she had feared: her father was the killer. He would ultimately confess to five murders, though investigators believe the true toll could be higher.

Edward Wayne Edwards died in prison in 2011 before his execution date.

A Daughter’s Burden

For April, the decision to turn him in was both an act of justice and a heavy burden. “Kids aren’t stupid,” she told PEOPLE in 2018. “Someone was always murdered wherever we lived.”

Her memoir now revisits those years — the midnight moves, the loaded guns, the gnawing fear, and the dawning realization that safety was an illusion.

By choosing to confront the truth, April Balascio broke the cycle of silence. Her story is not only about surviving a childhood of violence but also about the courage it takes to stand up — even to your own blood.