Edward Wayne Edwards was not born with that unusual name at all. The story is a bit convoluted, because Edwards apparently lied about his birth name and several other key details in his book. He was born Charles Edward Meyers in Cleveland, Ohio on June 14th in 1933. His mother was unmarried, and he never knew his father. For many years he was told the he didn’t have a mother, and that Lilian Meyers–his real mother–was his “aunt”. Why a family would lie like this to a kid is anyone’s guess, but suffice it to say that poor Ed probably didn’t feel genuine attachment to anyone from the very beginning. He was an illegitimate child born during the height of the Great Depression, not the most fortunate start. His mother yearned for someone to rescue her from her predicament, but that person never came.
It’s thought that most personality disorders develop when a person is still very young, and that our basic personality type begins to gel even before we learn language. Whatever happened to poor “Chuckie” during the very first years of his life could not have been good, but it was about to get much worse.
Edwards describes how his mother, desperate for attention, shoots herself in the stomach with a rifle when he was just five years old. She dies of gangrene three days later in august of 1938. He is adopted by Mary Ethel and Fred Edwards, and given the name Edward Wayne Edwards. Reeling from the death of his mother, Edwards now is forced into a new identity. Throughout the decades to come Edwards would use dozens of aliases; he would pretend to be a minister, a federal law-enforcement agent, or a doctor of Psychiatry all to get close to his victims.
Unfortunately for young Ed, things were not about to get any better. His new step-father was an abusive alcoholic, and within two years Mary Ethel Edwards would succumb to multiple-sclerosis and become bed-ridden. Although the first chapter of the book is meant to elicit pity from the reader, Ed later admits that his grandmother “could not control him”. He had probably begun to show behavioral problems by this time. So Edward, with no one left to care for him, was shipped off to Parmadale orphanage in Parma, Ohio.
According to Edwards, the orphanage was run by a group of sadistic nuns and one pedophile priest. The nun in charge of Edwards was particularly cruel and did not tolerate bed-wetters. Edwards had picked up this secret shame as he was trying to cope with his hopelessly unstable environment. His punishment began with public humiliation and quickly escalated into beatings with a stick. Today we would call that assault, but back in those days it was pretty much expected from the sisters. When the beatings didn’t cure his bed-wetting sister Agnes Marie lined the whole dorm of kids up and had them take turns giving Ed a kick in the ass. Nothing seemed to work, and perhaps Edwards found some other way of getting the attention he desperately craved, but he never does say what got him to stop wetting the bed.
He does tell us when he began stealing. Another boy had a birthday and shared some of his cake with everyone except Ed. Now this is the Great Depression, so the kids only ration out part of the cake and save the rest for later. When everyone is called for dinner Ed stays behind in the shadows. He gets the cake out of the other kid’s locker and proceeds to stuff handfuls of “sweet revenge” into his mouth. Of course he gets caught, and sister Agnes Marie beats on him until he confesses; at which point she leaves the room and suggests the other boys mete out their own punishment on poor Ed. He determines that no matter what, he MUST escape. An amusing side-note is that his love for cake and sweets finally contributed to his death. He died of complications from diabetes.
“Occasionally, my foster mother and my foster grand
mother would visit me in the orphanage, and bring me a
couple of bags of candy and some fruit. But after they had
gone, Sister Agnes Marie would seize my goodies, saying,
“Ed, you’re a bed-wetter. You don’t deserve all these nice
things. So you take one piece of each, and we’ll divide the
rest among the other children.””
-Ed Edwards, “Metamorphosis of a Criminal”
Edwards tried to escape many times from Parmadale, hitch-hiking or hopping a train to his grandmother’s house in Akron. She would bring him back to the orphanage and he would escape over and over. Finally, his grandmother was bringing him back to Paradale yet again and an exasperated sister Agnes says they can’t take him back. She gloats in her moral condemnation; explaining that Ed is stealing, and he’s a bad influence on the other boys. Ed actually feels happy for the first time in a very long time, he is finally going to be free of the horrendous orphanage! His grandmother was no doubt the opposite of happy as it was clear she wanted nothing to do with him.
Edwards would like us to think that his life of crime was preordained, due to his troubled child hood. The fact is, not all sociopaths suffer abuse or neglect, and most everyone that does survives it with their conscience intact. Ed already had a fractured sense of identity, and a complete lack of conscience.
Back in Akron, Ed soon got himself into trouble, stealing bikes and pulling fire alarms. One of the hallmarks of those with antisocial personality disorder is that since the person has no conscience, he feels that rules and laws don’t apply to him; and often gets into trouble with the police. This next snippet explains why later in life Edwards would set up somebody for one of his murders and then stand around and watch the mobs form and the pitchforks come out:
“I loved to watch the fire trucks… I loved to hear the sirens. But
most of all, I enjoyed seeing the confusion and the crowd because
it meant that, INDIRECTLY, I was being noticed, since it
was I who had caused all the hubbub. I could hear them
talking about the inconsiderate bastard who had sent in the
alarm, and how they wished they could lay their hands on
him. The more the crowd discussed me, the more I turned in
false alarms. They were stoking the fires of my desire for
attention.”
-Ed Edwards, “Metamorphosis of a Criminal”
Ed soon learns how to create impressive alibis for his petty crimes. He was in his grandmother’s house upstairs helping her hang wallpaper, when he ran downstairs to “make a sandwich”. While his grandmother thought he was raiding the fridge he bolted outside and set his neighbors van on fire with an improvised Molotov cocktail, then ran back inside the house, slapped together his sandwich and bounded up the stairs to eat with granny while he waits for the fire engines to come. Before long, Ed winds up in a reform school in Pennsylvania, over 300 miles from Akron:
“Though I hated the school, I did gain an education of sorts. I learned what burglar’s tools
were, how to “hot wire” a car so that no keys were needed to
start it, how to pick locks, and how to forge checks. I
learned how to avoid being caught by the police by setting
off a false alarm away from the scene of the crime, thus
deflecting the cops down a blind alley. I learned how to
jimmy a window and a door, and how to crawl through a transom.
I was all set to tackle the world. Some day people would
hear of Ed Edwards, master criminal.”
-Ed Edwards, “Metamorphosis of a Criminal”
Lock-picking turns out to be a rather useful skill, and REALLY important later in our story. He also learns to manipulate the cops and lead them “down a blind alley”, which is again worth noting for later. Now, around this time he goes through another series of escapes, and John Cameron theorizes that he begins to kill during one of his stints on the lam. He would have been around twelve-years-old.
Undetectable 