April Balascio Discovered Her Dad Edward Edwards Was a Serial Killer — Can She Tie Him To More Cold Cases? (Exclusive)

In 2018, April Balascio first opened up to PEOPLE about how she’d discovered her father, Edward Wayne Edwards, had been responsible for a string of murders that had occurred near places they’d lived while she was growing up.

“Kids aren’t stupid,” she said at the time for the cover story My Father Was a Serial Killer…and I Turned Him In. “Someone was always murdered wherever we lived.”

Now Balascio, who was also the subject of the hit podcast The Clearing, is telling her whole story in the memoir Raised By a Serial Killer: Discover the Truth About My Father , out Dec. 3 from Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.

“It was healing,” Balascio tells PEOPLE of writing the book. “But it was also very, very difficult. One minute, I’d be telling a story about my childhood and laughing, and then I’d start another story and be crying and getting angry. I just had a very wide range of emotion going on.”

Diving deep into her memories for the book also renewed Balascio’s interest in other cold cases that she believes her father is connected to.

“I would like to pursue some of them again,” she says of those cases, including the murder of a young couple in Portland in 1960.

“What’s sad and frustrating is that I’m being told over and over that it hasn’t been until the last 15 years that accurate records were kept,” the author explains. “In a lot of cold cases, they just threw the paperwork out. My goal is that the book gains momentum and could reach people with memories that could help answer some questions.”

Baslacio’s memoir also details her unsettled — and unsettling — childhood, raised by Edwards, who was frequently violent to Balascio and her siblings and mother Kay. On the flip side, he was also charming and funny, and often beloved by friends and neighbors.

But he had the habit of moving his family without warning, sometimes in the middle of the night, and had a fascination with newspaper true crime announcements. It was this odd behavior that led Balascio to start digging into her past when she was an adult.

“As a mother, I couldn’t imagine if anything bad happened to my children,” Balascio said in 2018. “I started Googling places we had lived and ‘cold-case murders.’ I was coming up blank.”

When she searched for “cold case” and “Watertown,” she was flooded with stories about the notorious “Sweetheart Murders,” an unsolved crime involving two local 19-year-olds, Timothy Hack and Kelly Drew, who had disappeared after a wedding reception in 1980. Their decomposing bodies were found in a field two months later.

“I was literally shaking,” April said of reading the articles, and remembering her dad had worked as a handyman at the place where they’d been last seen. “I suddenly remembered everything.” She called the detective working the case and said she suspected that her father may have been involved. Weeks later, a DNA match came back 100%.

Edward Wayne Edwards was arrested and confessed to five murders. He died in prison of natural causes in 2011 before he could be executed by lethal injection.

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from juicy celebrity news to compelling human interest stories. 

These days, Balascio is living a much more peaceful existence than she was 15 years ago when she first discovered the truth about her dad.

“I’m in good health. I live in Florida, and I have ducks, cats and chickens in my garden and orchard. I have my dogs. I’m thankful I got to tell my story,” she says. “Now I just hope it will help others and bring some light into some of those investigations that have come to a standstill.”

She adds that she doesn’t think of herself as a hero for turning in her dad.

“There are two words that I don’t want to be associated with,” she says. “One is a ‘victim.’ I’m not a victim. I see myself as a survivor. I also hate the word ‘hero.’ I’m not a hero. I don’t put my life on the line for others every day. That’s something veterans did, police officers do. All I did was tell my story and bring some situations to light.”

She adds, “There was so much darkness there.”

Raised By a Serial Killer: Discover the Truth About My Father comes out Dec. 3 and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.