Disturbing newly released footage shows the moment a Florida man calmly confesses that he beat his fiancée to death with a Walmart baseball bat because they couldn't afford their wedding.
Jerry Odum is seen sitting in an interrogation room and giving a 40-minute confession about how he murdered 59-year-old massage parlor owner Vicki Edge, two months before his scheduled wedding. Photographed.
“I didn't have the money to pay. [the wedding]” Odum said in the footage first obtained by Law&Crime.
“I think they just didn't know how to get out of it, and that's what led to what happened yesterday,” he added.
“As she was getting ready to leave, I told her I had another surprise for her…I had a baseball bat and I hit her with it,” Odum said with murder in mind. He casually explained about the bat he had purchased from Walmart. .
While under attack, Edge begged, “Why are you doing this?”
Odum told police that his fiancée started screaming, and “I strangled her until she fell to the ground, and then I strangled her.”
Odum was arrested the day after Edge's body was found on the living floor of his home in Milton, Florida, in August 2020.
Footage of the interrogation was only recently released.
Odum is currently serving a life sentence after pleading guilty to first-degree premeditated murder. Ware said.
During the interrogation, Odum's demeanor was on the verge of catatonia. He told interrogating detectives that he was “basically going broke” when he met Edge on a dating app three months ago.
“She started talking about marriage and one thing led to another and she said she wanted to get a house. Realistically, I didn't have the money to do it, but I just agreed to it,” Odum says.
He even wrote Edge a $15,000 check to pay for their wedding, which was scheduled for October 2020, even though he didn't have enough money in the bank.
“Basically, I knew I couldn't afford it,” he said.
“We were just casually dating because we thought it might end beforehand, but the relationship kept getting deeper and deeper and I didn't know how to get out of it.''
When asked if he had ever considered killing Edge in the past, Odum replied, “I thought maybe this was the end result.”
“So I bought a bat at Walmart,” he said of the murder weapon.
