Things seemed to get better when divorced mother-of-two Joann Albanese started dating a man named John Edwards in 1995. In the months that followed, however, things quickly went downhill and Joann disappeared without a trace in August 1995.
The show “American Monster: When’s Mom Coming Home?” on Investigation Discovery is about what happened to Joann and how the man named John Edwards came about. So let’s try to figure out what happened, shall we?
How did Joann Albanese die?
Due to her father’s work, Joann and her family moved around Europe as a child. She met Tom Albanese when she was still in high school. In the end they married and had two girls. Joann was considered a beautiful woman with a smile that made people happy. But over time they had problems and in December 1991 they divorced. After that, Joann moved to Las Vegas, Nevada, where she got a job at the MGM Grand Hotel.
On August 20, 1995, after Joann’s ex-husband had the children over the weekend, she drove back to her house. But the girls could not find their mother anywhere. According to the show, the bedroom was a mess and her purse was still there. After three days, Joann’s car was found in Prescott, Arizona. Then, in October 1998, Joann’s bones were found by a hunter about a mile from where the car was found. But because the remains were in such poor condition, it was impossible to figure out what killed the person.
Who Killed Joann Albanese?
In March 1995, Joann met John Edwards, a fitness trainer, at a gym near her. They got along well at first, and according to the show, John liked her daughters. But in the months that followed, John became possessive and controlling, making Joann think twice about the relationship. She told her mother on August 19, 1995 that she was breaking up with John over dinner.
But the next day, when the children came home, Joann was nowhere to be found. Also, John seemed to have vanished into thin air, which made matters worse. The show said the police found out during a house search that John Edward’s real name was John Patrick Addis. He was pretending to be someone else. The investigation revealed that John was an Alaskan soldier who knew how to investigate crimes. But he had run into trouble with the law before.
John’s first wife left him because he was mean to her. In the late 1980s he moved to Michigan with his four children. Before he was caught, John lived there with the kids for about a year. After a short time in prison, John skipped his probation in Alaska in 1989 and moved around the country under different names. He met Joann in Las Vegas, where he was staying under a different name.
According to the show, Joann’s car was found a few miles from the border with Mexico. Police believe John killed Joann and then fled to Mexico. The case went cold until March 1997, when a lead said a man who looked like John was working under a different name at a gym in Guadalajara, Mexico. But he found out and soon left, again leaving the police a step behind.
How did John Patrick Addis die?
On October 18, 2006, police went to Laura Liliana Padilla’s home in Chiapas, Mexico, after neighbors said they had not seen her family for several days. Inside, Laura and her two children had all died from carbon monoxide poisoning, so the police were called. It was then that the police found out that she had married John, but he went by a different name. He had two children. Then a few weeks later, John’s body was found in a hotel room in Guatemala City, Guatemala. Officially, the 56-year-old died of a heart attack, but police thought he might have killed himself.