Kelly Drew, a 19-year-old White/Caucasian woman from Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, disappeared on the night of August 9, 1980, with her boyfriend, Timothy Hack. The two were high school sweethearts who had gone to a wedding reception at the Concord House, a dance hall in the Sullivan area of Jefferson County. They were last seen leaving the reception at about 11 p.m. and were expected to meet friends afterward, but they never arrived.
When Hack’s father reported them missing the following morning, he found his son’s Oldsmobile still parked at the Concord House. The vehicle was locked, and Hack’s wallet remained inside, immediately raising fears that the couple had not simply gone away voluntarily.
As authorities began what became one of the largest searches in Jefferson County history, troubling evidence surfaced away from the reception hall. About five days after the couple disappeared, investigators found Drew’s shredded pants, underwear and bra along a road roughly three miles from the Concord House. Despite extensive searching, neither Drew nor Hack was found alive. Seventy-six days after the reception, searchers discovered their badly decomposed remains in a rural area near Ixonia, approximately eight miles north of the Concord House. Drew’s body was discovered in the woods, and Hack’s remains were found in the same general area the following day. Because of the condition of the remains, investigators could not reconstruct every detail of the killings, but the medical examination indicated that Drew had apparently been restrained and strangled. Hack had suffered injuries consistent with being stabbed.
Investigators questioned numerous people during the original investigation, including Edward Wayne Edwards, a man who had recently moved to Wisconsin with his family and had been working as a handyman at the Concord House and the adjoining campground. His presence placed him on the property during the period when Drew and Hack vanished. Witnesses also remembered Edwards having a bloody nose during the weekend of the disappearance. At the time, he reportedly explained the injury by saying he had hurt himself while deer hunting. Edwards was interviewed but was not arrested, and in September 1980 he abruptly left Wisconsin with his family without providing a forwarding address. The murders remained unsolved for decades.
Evidence preserved from Drew’s clothing ultimately provided the breakthrough. Testing revealed semen on her pants, and investigators determined that it had not come from Hack. By 2007, advances in forensic technology allowed Wisconsin authorities to develop a full DNA profile from the evidence, although initially there was no match in the national DNA database. In 2009, Edwards’ daughter, April Balascio, contacted investigators after researching unsolved crimes in places where her family had lived and recognizing the circumstances surrounding the Wisconsin murders. Her information caused authorities to take another close look at her father.
Detectives traveled to Louisville, Kentucky, and interviewed Edwards again in June 2009. He initially denied remembering the disappearance, but eventually acknowledged that he had been at the Concord House and might have seen the couple. Investigators also confronted him with his old explanation for the bloody nose. During the newer interview, Edwards reportedly said he had never been deer hunting, contradicting the explanation attributed to him in 1980. Authorities obtained a DNA sample from him, and on July 8, 2009, the Wisconsin State Crime Laboratory determined that Edwards was the likely source of the DNA recovered from Drew’s pants.
Edward Wayne Edwards was arrested at his Louisville home on July 30, 2009. Jefferson County prosecutors charged him with two counts of first-degree murder for the killings of Drew and Hack. He initially pleaded not guilty during court proceedings in Kentucky and was held while authorities arranged his extradition to Wisconsin. The arrest came nearly twenty-nine years after the couple disappeared. The combination of the preserved physical evidence, modern DNA testing, Edwards’ connection to the Concord House and inconsistencies in his statements transformed a decades-old cold case into a prosecutable murder case.
There ultimately was no murder trial. In June 2010, Edwards entered into a plea agreement and admitted killing Drew and Hack, while also admitting responsibility for the 1977 murders of Judith Straub and William Lavaco in Ohio. On June 21, 2010, a Jefferson County judge sentenced Edwards to two life terms for the Wisconsin murders. Relatives of both victims attended the sentencing after waiting nearly three decades for the person responsible to be held accountable. Edwards declined to make a statement to the families during the hearing. Under the plea arrangement, he was to serve his imprisonment in Ohio, where he had also received life sentences for the earlier murders.
The disappearance of Drew and Hack had haunted their families and the surrounding communities since that summer night in 1980. What began with an abandoned car outside a wedding reception, scattered clothing along a rural road and the discovery of two bodies months later remained unanswered for almost three decades. The preservation of Drew’s clothing proved crucial: DNA technology that did not exist when she was killed eventually identified Edward Wayne Edwards, leading to his arrest, guilty plea and life sentences for the murders.
