Tuesday 29 November 2022 10:06 PM Cops say Virginia State Trooper who killed California family may have catfished ... trends now
The former Virginia State trooper who traveled across the country to meet a 15-year-old girl he catfished online before killing her family and setting her house on fire may have previously duped other young women, authorities warn.
Cops in Riverside, California are now combing through Austin Lee Edwards' phone, computer and social media profiles to see if he had previously used fake identities online to connect with young girls throughout the country.
As Officer Ryan Railsback told TMZ, the 28-year-old former law enforcement official's more than 2,000-mile trek to Riverside was likely not the first time he pursued young victims.
Authorities say Edwards parked his red Kia Soul at a neighbor's house and walked over to the girl's home Friday morning.
There, he killed the girl's mother Brooke Winek, 38, and grandparents, Mark, 69, and Sharie Winek, 65. All three were found bound and gagged.
Edwards is then said to have set their house on fire and fled with the girl before he was ultimately driven off the road by police and shot dead by sheriff's deputies.
The young teen, meanwhile, managed to escape his car and has since been taken into protective custody by Riverside County Department of Public Social Services.
Riverside police maintain she is an innocent victim in the brutal attack on her family, though it remains unclear whether she was abducted by Edwards or if she went with the murderer voluntarily.
Cops in Riverside, California say Austin Lee Edwards, 28, likely used other fake profiles in the past to connect with young women across the country
Edwards traveled from his home in Virginia to Riverside, California on Friday, where he murdered the family of a 15-year-old girl he was talking to online. The victims were identified as the girl's grandparents, Mark Winek, 69, and Sharie Winek, 65, as well as the girl's mother, Brooke Winek, 38
Police said they were first called to the 11200 block of Price Court just before 11am on Friday to check on the welfare of a young girl who appeared distressed while getting into a red Kia Soul with an unknown man — later found to be Edwards.
While officers were responding to the scene, police began to receive calls about a fire just a few houses away.
The Riverside Fire Department discovered three adults lying in the front entryway and took them outside, where rescue personnel 'determined they were victims of an apparent homicide,' police said.
The cause of the fire was under investigation, but appeared to have been 'intentionally ignited,' police said, and authorities soon discovered that the girl described in the initial welfare check had lived in the house with her mother and grandparents.
At that point, law enforcement officials in the town — about 50 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles — distributed a description of Edwards' vehicle to other agencies nearby.
Within a few hours, police were able to track down Edwards' Kia as he drove the teenager in Kelso, an unincorporated area of San Bernardino County.
When police finally caught up with him, Edwards fired shots at them before being fatally shot himself by at least one deputy.
An ensuing investigation found that Edwards had driven from his home in North Chesterfield, Virginia to Riverside, where he parked his vehicle in a neighbor's driveway and walked to the girl's home.
While there, authorities say, he murdered the girl's mother, grandmother and grandfather and set their home on fire before walking back to his vehicle with the girl and leaving the scene.
The Winek's exact cause of death is unknown, as is the cause of the fire.
Authorities say Edwards traveled over 2,000 miles from his home in Virginia to meet the unnamed teenage girl at her home in Riverside, California
The home where the Wineks lived was torched. Emergency services found the three bodies lying in the front entryway
Neighbor Sergio Gutierrez later told DailyMail.com he saw that the three bodies carried out of the house by emergency responders had been bound and gagged.
'I looked with binoculars from the back window of my house,' the 68-year-old resident of the Riverside cul-de-sac said. 'They carried them
