Disturbing newly revealed footage shows the moment a Florida man calmly confessed to bludgeoning his fiancée to death with a Walmart baseball bat — because he couldn’t afford to pay for their wedding.
Jerry Odum was filmed sitting in an interrogation room giving a 40-minute confessional about how he murdered massage parlor owner Vickie Edge, 59, two months shy of their planned nuptials.
“I didn’t have the money to pay for [the wedding],” said Odum in the footage first obtained by Law&Crime.
“I guess I didn’t know how to get out of it, and that’s what precipitated what happened yesterday,” he added.
“She was getting ready to leave, and I told her I had another surprise for her… I had a baseball bat and I hit her with it,” Odum explained matter-of-factly of the bat he bought from Walmart with murder in mind.
While under attack, Edge begged, “Why are you doing this?”
As his fiancée started to scream, Odum put “a chokehold on her until she went to the ground and I choked her after that,” he told cops.
Odum was arrested a day after Edge’s body was found in August 2020 on the living floor of their home in Milton, Florida, Odum. Footage of the interrogation only recently emerged.
Odum is currently serving life after pleading guilty to first-degree premeditated murder, WEAR said.
During his interrogation, Odum’s demeanor bordered on catatonic. He told his interviewing detective that he was “basically going broke” when he met Edge on a dating app three months earlier.
“She started talking about getting married, and one thing led to another, and she was talking about wanting to get a house, and I was just agreeing to it, even though I didn’t have the money to do it, realistically,” Odum says.
He even wrote Edge a check for $15,000 to pay for their wedding, set for October 2020, even though he didn’t have enough money in the bank.
“I knew, basically, I couldn’t afford it,” he said.
“I was just kind of going along with a ride I thought maybe it would end beforehand, but I just kept getting deeper and deeper into the relationship and I didn’t know how to get out of it.”
When asked if he had thought about killing Edge in the past, Odum replied: “I thought maybe this might be an end result,” he said.
“I mean, I went down and bought the baseball bat from Walmart,” he said of the murder weapon.
