When Balascio was growing up, her charismatic father was violent, controlling, yet often very loving. Then her foster brother was killed and she started piecing together the dates and places that would prove crucial to solving a string of murders
In 2009, while her husband and teenage children slept, April Balascio was often wide awake in their home in Jefferson, Ohio, jotting down the small towns she’d lived in as a child and trying to match them to their month and year.
This wasn’t as easy as it might sound. Her father had driven them all over the US – Ohio, Georgia, Florida, Arizona, Colorado, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania – in whatever vehicle they had at the time – an RV, a U-Haul truck, a camper, a school bus. They had set up home in farmhouses, mobile homes, tents, a barn. Sometimes Balascio completed a school year in one place; other times she didn’t, because her father would wake them at night, tell them to pack up, then off they’d go, no goodbyes, headed who knows where.
