The chilling childhood clues that my dad was a serial killer: From brutally slaying the kitten he’d bought me to a macabre visit to a murder scene – but it would be years before I realised the horrifying truth

Everyone said Dad’s was the best barbecue chicken they’d ever tasted. The adults would sit around drinking beer and pop, and the kids and Scottie – Dad’s little terrier dog — would tear around the farm, playing hide-and-seek and chasing chickens.

And Dad was always in the centre, holding court at the grill in his Bermuda shorts – this was 1970s America, after all.

He was happy and funny when he had an audience, in his element as a real family man.

Sometimes he liked to show off in front of the assembled friends and neighbours. The first time he held his 20ft ladder straight up in the air in front of the crowd, I wondered what he was doing.

‘April,’ he called to me. ‘Come here.’ I approached cautiously. ‘Climb up to the top rung.’

I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right. The ladder wasn’t leaning against anything. He was just holding it straight up.

‘Go on,’ he encouraged me. I knew that the reason his tone wasn’t forceful was because he had an audience. I obeyed him anyway and climbed the ladder as he held it almost steady, bracing it against his own weight. ‘David!’ he called next to one of my brothers. ‘Climb up to the middle.’

I couldn’t look down. My limbs felt tingly, and my heart was pounding. The ladder quivered as David climbed. Dad called out to another of my brothers John-John and again, I felt the ladder shake slightly as he took his position somewhere below David.

‘Hold on tight!’ Dad demanded, and then the ladder began to shake violently. My brothers and I screamed as I held on with all my might. I felt the edge of the metal ladder cutting into my palms. I pressed my feet into the rung as the ladder swayed, spun, shimmied and shook.

Finally, we came to a stop and Dad let us climb down one by one.

He did not just perform this stunt once as an experiment – it became a regular trick at backyard parties. Mum shot a home movie of it that he liked to show guests. He was the main attraction in the centre ring of his own circus. We were just props.

One day, when I was about 11, Dad came home with three kittens – I’m not sure why. I claimed a gorgeous white fluffy kitten, which I named Snowball. She slept in my bed each night.

But one day Dad found Snowball on the kitchen top. ‘What’s she doing on the counter?’ Dad screamed, and picked up Snowball in one hand. Time slowed down as I watched with horror. I knew that he was not simply going to lift her off the counter to put her down.

With the kitten in his hand, he pulled back as if to hurl a stick. I clapped my hand over my mouth to stifle my scream as I watched Snowball fly across the room. She hit the wall with a sickening thud. A sound left my throat, a strangled roar of sorrow and rage.

Without looking at Dad, I carried Snowball up to my room and put her in my bed.

At school the next day I prayed for Snowball. When I got home, Dad was in the living room, watching TV. ‘How is Snowball?’ I asked.

‘Snowball died,’ he said.

He told me he’d given her some medicine to put her out of her pain. ‘It was the right thing to do, not to let her suffer,’ he said. He made it sound like he’d done her a favour.

He didn’t admit that he was the cause of her suffering. I ran to my room and threw myself on my bed and wept.

At that moment I hated Dad. And I hated myself for hating him, but I had started to feel that nothing was safe in his hands.

I liked to think I could always tell what kind of mood he was in, like I had special powers to see inside his head, but I would sometimes get it wrong.

Like the time we were all sitting in the living room. Mum was on the sofa knitting baby booties. Dad was in his recliner with a stack of white typing paper in his lap.

‘Look,’ he said, holding up a sheet of paper for his children to admire, ‘I can draw a perfect Santa.’ David and John-John were impressed.

But I noticed faint lines on the other sheet and said he must have traced it.

‘No. I just drew that,’ he insisted.

‘But there are lines on the paper already,’ I challenged him.

‘No there aren’t.’ 

‘Yes there are. You’re a liar!’

I just knew that I had said the wrong thing. Like a cobra striking, he grabbed me by my hair and arm. I felt my body yanked back and then lifted in the air. I went flying across the room and struck the wall hard.

I came to on the sofa, with Dad sitting beside me, holding a cold compress to my head.

I kept my eyes closed for as long as I could. I was afraid to open them. I didn’t want him to know I was awake.

My head ached. When I finally opened my eyes, he stared at me with a worried expression. He asked: ‘April, honey, you OK?’

I wondered if he looked so worried because he thought he might have killed me.

But I knew what I had said was true: he was a liar. We all knew it. He could look you in the eye and tell you something you knew was not true, and he would do it with complete sincerity. His truth was the only truth that existed.

As A family, we watched the news every night in the living room. Dad watched it the way some people watch sports, yelling at crime reporters as if he knew better.

‘No, no, it didn’t happen that way,’ he would say. Or he’d scoff: ‘Don’t be an idiot. He wouldn’t have done it like that.’ Or speculate: ‘I bet they find the gun in…’

He was particularly obsessed with murders and stabbings.

One day he took us on a trip. We drove to Silver Creek Metro Park, four miles from our house. It was a spot where we’d had picnics before with Dad grilling up a chicken while us children played tag.

But upon getting out of the car, this time Dad insisted we walk, not on the clear trail, but through weeds as high as my chest. Dad zig-zagged through the tall grass – as we stumbled in his wake – seemingly looking for something.

Suddenly he stopped. Holding up his hand, he exclaimed: ‘I was right, it’s here.’

Then he told us to turn around and go back to the car.

I didn’t know it then, but Dad had taken us to a crime scene.

A few days later, we were watching the news. ‘Hey,’ Dad said to Mum, ‘you know those kids who went missing in the park? Their bodies were found.’

We moved in the summer of 1978, leaving Doylestown, Ohio, for Florida.

When one of my brothers asked why, Dad said that he turned over information to the police about some bad men, and now they were after him.

The people were different in Florida. In Doylestown, everyone was white and pretty much talked the same way. In Florida, people came in all colours and accents. Here we had friends for the first time who didn’t look or sound like us.

Two boys around seven or eight rode the school bus with us. I’ll call them Curtis and Chris. They lived near a peanut farm in a small white cottage that sat back off the road and walked to our house through an overgrown field nearly every day to play.

They sometimes went to the drive-in theatre with us. Dad snuck them in by hiding them under blankets in the van so he wouldn’t have to pay extra.

Dad was always friendly to the Cub Scouts who came over with their parents, but he was different with Curtis and Chris.

I didn’t know why for sure, but they were black and I often wondered if that was the reason. He made jokes in their presence that I later realised were racist.

It was toward the end of the school year that I noticed Curtis and Chris weren’t on the bus. They stopped coming over to play.

Dad would never let us go to their house. Days passed and I began to worry that something bad might have happened to them.

I asked Lucy, a neighbour’s daughter who sometimes babysat for us, if she knew anything, but she didn’t.

I wondered if they had moved without telling us, which would have surprised me.

Of course they would have told us, right? I suspected that we were about to move ourselves.

Dad hadn’t said anything about moving, but I could tell that he was getting restless.

There had been a couple of odd things that happened in a row, one being a visit from the police.

Not long after that, Dad told us he had sold the house and we would be leaving as soon as the school year was over.

When we had arrived in Florida, I believed we were on the run from the bogeyman. It did not occur to me for several more years that perhaps the bogeyman was my father.

On my first day at my new school, near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, it was obvious that my classmates had known each other all their lives. They had formed their cliques and friendships, and, once again, I was an outsider.

In gym class, I noticed nearly all the girls shaved their legs, and they looked at the black hairs on mine with raised plucked eyebrows. I pulled up my socks over my knees.

I had other reasons to cover myself. Once, Dad made Mum write me a note to excuse me from gym for a week so no one could see the black and blue marks across the back of my legs from one of his beatings.

One night I was in the dining room setting the table for dinner. I could see Mum pulling the tuna casserole out of the oven and it smelled good. Dad walked in through the kitchen’s back door and began to yell at her.

‘Get over here!’ he said. I paused, a fork suspended in the air. My siblings’ heads swung away from the TV and their wide eyes sought mine. We braced ourselves, knowing that the sound of his fist hitting her body or her crashing into the wall would surely follow.

But nothing came because Mum refused to go to him. Instead, in a move unheard of in our family, she bolted fast out the kitchen door.

‘Kay! Get back in this house or I’m going to kill you!’ Dad yelled as he followed after her.

That’s when I noticed the handgun in his right hand. I looked over to my siblings. We had all frozen. Then we heard a shot. My sister Jeannine burst out crying. I considered calling the police.

But before I could make up my mind, Mum came back in, slinking like a punished dog, shaking from head to toe. Dad was no longer holding the gun. And it seemed the rage had left him.

I was disgusted, but hadn’t believed that, despite beating her in the past, he would shoot her. He needed her too badly.

How Dad picked Watertown, Wisconsin, as our new home in the early summer of 1980 I’ll never know. Maybe he just drove through the night and ended up there.

He found a dilapidated but beautiful old farmhouse for us to rent, surrounded by fields. It was the best bedroom I’d ever had. He also landed a part-time job at Concord House, a large events venue.

Sometimes he worked late. I noticed one morning, when Dad showed up at breakfast, his nose was swollen, cut and bruised. I asked what happened. He told me he hurt it with the rifle scope while hunting elk.

It was August. I didn’t think it was hunting season but I held my tongue. He was in the kind of mood that didn’t invite questions.

I had also seen his boots by the front door, covered in mud.

The next day, the Concord House was the centre of police activity. Two Jefferson County kids – 19-year-old sweethearts named Timothy Hack and Kelly Drew – had gone missing after attending a wedding reception there.

As the days went by, Dad kept turning on the evening news, hoping for coverage of the missing kids. He couldn’t seem to stop talking out loud about the case.

A few weeks later, he told us to pack our belongings. He’d rented another removal van, and told us we were hitting the road the same day.

None of us asked my father why we were leaving this time. Each time we left a town, it was because we were fleeing someone bad. This time, I had a flash of insight. We weren’t fleeing the bad people. But we might be fleeing the good ones.

In the spring of 1982 my father was jailed for arson after setting fire to one of the rental houses we’d lived in. While he was in prison, I began to relax, as had the rest of the family. We all laughed more and fought less.

But Dad was released early from his two-year sentence, because he had snitched to police about some of his fellow prisoners. My heart filled with dread. When Dad returned, it all changed again.

Behaviours of his that I hadn’t questioned before now seemed like assaults on my privacy. He wouldn’t let me wear make-up, although I was 16 years old.

In the time he had been gone, I had perfected my make-up routine, meticulously applying foundation and mascara, eyeshadow and lipstick each morning.

But now Dad said: ‘You can’t leave this house looking like a whore.’

He made me scrub it off before I left. He objected to the clothes I wore and how I styled my hair, ordering me to stop cutting it.

He didn’t like that I went out with friends, or that I had any to begin with. And he especially disapproving of my boyfriend, Mark.

I was now not allowed to call him, and we were never able to go out alone together. Instead, Mark would come over and Dad would put him to work.

One Saturday, Dad and I were alone at the house, grouting the tiles in the downstairs bathroom. He started asking me questions about what Mark and I did sexually.

I was a devout Christian and, to me, sex was off limits. But Dad didn’t believe me. He asked if Mark gave me hickeys, or love bites.

‘What’s a hickey?’ I said.

‘You don’t know what a hickey is?’ Dad asked, as if I was lying.

I shook my head. ‘I’ll show you,’ he said, and he grabbed me and started sucking on my neck. I froze. What was happening? I’d rather he hit me, punch me, kick me – anything but what he was doing.

Finally he stopped and threw me down on the cold tiles. ‘You can show that to Mark,’ he spat, and left me curled in on myself in shame on the bathroom floor.

I felt like throwing up. I didn’t know if I could look at Dad again.

That night, I wrote to Mark, ending our relationship. I didn’t trust myself to break up with him in person. If I’d had to look into his kind eyes, I would have broken down sobbing.

I advised him that he would be better off dating someone else. Someone who had more freedom. I wrote that trying to talk me out of the break-up was a waste of breath.

I could not tell him the truth – that my father was too powerful and frightening, and, if he stayed with me, Mark would be risking his life.

He wrote two letters and I didn’t respond to either. Finally he got the message. I now felt such revulsion for Dad that I couldn’t bear to be in the same room as him.

A year or so later I moved out. I would never live with my father again. It would be several more years before I pieced together the jigsaw of my childhood and realise the horrifying truth about Dad.

© April Balascio, 2024. Adapted from Raised By A Serial Killer by April Balascio (HarperElement, £20), to be published December 5. To order a copy for £18 (offer valid to 14/12/24; UK p&p free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.