Chilling footage captured the moment a Florida man calmly admitted to beating his fiancée to death to avoid marrying her.
Jerry Geisler Odum, 64, was sentenced to life in prison in 2021 for the August 2020 murder of his fiancée Vickie Edge, 59, of Okaloosa County, Florida, two months before they were supposed to get married.
He struck Edge, a massage parlor owner, in the head multiple times with a baseball bat and then strangled her.
Disturbing bodycam footage of the police interrogation, obtained by Law&Crime, shows an emotionless Mr Odum admitting that he murdered his fiancée because he could not afford their wedding.
“I had no way to get out of it,” Mr Odum says in the footage. “I didn’t know what else to do.”
The pair had met on a dating app and had been together for three months before Edge was killed. During that time, Mr Odum led Edge to believe that he was wealthy and planned to buy her home and boats, however he did not have the means to follow through on his promises.
“She was getting ready to leave. I guess this all started a long time ago. I got divorced about a year ago,” he told detectives.
“I guess basically I was going broke you know so okay and we started dating each other at the beginning of May and you know she started talking about getting married.
“You know 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.
“I guess I didn’t know how to get out of it and then that’s what precipitated what happened yesterday.”
He then admitted to the detectives that he killed his fiancée that day.
“She was getting ready to leave and I told her that I had another surprise for her and she put this blanket over her head,” Odum admitted.
“I had a baseball and I hit her with it a couple of times. She said ‘why are you doing this?’”
He said Edge then started to scream. “I put a chokehold on her until she went to the ground and I choked her after that,” he said.
“I guess it was all precipitated with all this. I didn’t have the money to pay for it.”
According to court documents, Mr Odum told investigators that he provided Edge a $15,000 check to plan their wedding shortly before the attack, despite not having the money in his bank account.
“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.”
Asked if he thought about killing his fiancée before, he admitted: “I thought maybe this might be an end result you know because I mean I went down I bought the baseball bat from Walmart.”
Jerry Geisler Odum in bodycam footage of his police interrogation
