Murder, Rockstar, Death - Edward Solly - Love and Murder Podcast: Heartbreak to Homicide

Love and Murder's case of Murder, Rockstar, Death - the case of Edward Solly

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**Episode Transcription

Welcome everyone! Welcome to a new episode of Love and Murder – the weekly true crime podcast discussing relationships gone terribly wrong. Where our motto is, you’re either someone’s last love or their first murder.

I am your host Ky and in today’s episode, we’re talking about an infamously horrible case that you probably haven’t heard of; I know I haven’t. It’s actually a bit similar to the case of John List – and you’ll see how. At the end, you’re probably gonna say, Ky how have you not heard of this case? What kind of true crime are you? Well, I don’t know every case!

Be sure to subscribe to Love and Murder right now while you’re listening so you don’t miss a case. If you didn’t know, you can also subscribe on our Patreon so that you don’t have to hear intros or commercials. Actually, our last bonus episode over there, we talked about murderers and the last pictures they took of their victims. Also, this episode has a bunch of extras that you won’t want to miss. It’s right there in my Patreon waiting for you. Join now and get past and current bonuses patreon.com/loveandmurder. You can also just search Love and Murder Premium Feed on Spotify and get the bonuses there. The link is in the show notes.

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In the meantime, though, grab your butts, grab your apple juice, and let’s get into some Love and Murder.…

Elmer Edward Solly was born on September 5, 1945, in Gloucester City, New Jersey. Little is known about his early years or his life before the fateful case that would define him.

Elmer’s life took a significant turn when he entered into a relationship with Linda Welsh, a woman who had a young son named Christopher Welsh. Together, they shared a home in Runnemede, New Jersey. However, Elmer’s character was far from “good boyfriend material.” He was an alcoholic, and when under its influence, he became violent and just a vile person.

Then, on the evening of Friday, July 25, 1969 Elmer, driven by an alcohol-fueled rage, subjected Linda’s two-year-old son to a brutal beating. He beat him so badly that he killed him. Jackass. Elmer turned himself in to local authorities a few days later. The legal proceedings that followed resulted in

During his sentence at Trenton State Prison in Trenton, New Jersey, Elmer’s mother and grandmother started a letter-writing campaign trying to allege that the prison guards were mistreating Elmer.

In 1974, because of the allegations, Elmer ended up being transferred to the medium-security Leesburg State Prison. It was at Leesburg that he formed a friendship with a prison psychologist. Isn’t the the first rule of being a psychologist? No relationships with your patients? Don’t allow the patient to get attached to you, and you of course don’t get attached to the patient. Let’s see where this is going.

The psychologist convinced prison officials to let Elmer go out to visit his mother. You know some prisons have plans where when an inmate is on good behavior for a long period of time, they allow the inmate to leave and go to work, or I guess visit family, and then trust them to come back to prison at the end of the day. It’s called a furlough. Weird to me, but I don’t make the laws.

Well, by the third visit, in June 1974, the prison allowed Elmer to visit his family, only accompanied by the psychologist as his guard. What do you think happened? If you said he escaped then you would be right. Your prize is in the mail! Elmer had asked to go visit his girlfriend – news to which I said – who in their right mind would be with someone who killed a two year old by beating him to death. So, of course his friend said “sure I trust you.” and allowed him to leave. Under the pact of trust and respect, Elmer IMMEDIATELY escaped. Like, immediately. Like, he didn’t even consider what this would do to his “friend.” As soon as the psychologist got the K in ok out, Elmer wasn’t even in the room anymore. Dummy. THEN, because he KNEW he was in trouble, the psychologist didn’t report his escape for 6 hours which, by this time, Elmer was in Timbuktu.

Immediately after he left, Elmer started using pseudonyms.

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In 1975, he ended up being arrested in Philadelphia, PA. Because he had stolen goods on him. But because he used a fake name, police didn’t know who they had in their custody. They didn’t know the significance of who they had in their custody, so they let him go. Then in 1979, he was stopped in traffic for a traffic violation, and again, he used a fake name. So they just wrote him up and let him go.

Again, they didn’t know who they had. They’re still searching for him, by the way. And they actually had basically no leads. His family was not talking like they were shut down. I don’t know. I don’t know. Ma’am, we’ll put you in jail. Put me in jail, then I don’t know.

I don’t know where he is. Ma’am, we know you know where he is. Look, do what you gotta do. Either arrest me or not, but I don’t know where he is. And this was all fueled and run and watched over by his mother, Edna Bolt. So after some time with no leads and stopping him countless times but not knowing who he is and the roadblocks put up by his mom, his case turned into a cold case. In the meantime, Edward is traveling all over the United States, and he eventually made his way to Florida. When he got to Florida, he decided that he was going to change his name now to Vinnie Taylor.

Now Vinny Taylor is the lead guitarist of a rock group called Sha Na Na. Never heard of them in my life. I don’t know if y’all have, but I never have. Now this is like, for instance, somebody escaping from prison and know, taking on the name Brad Pitt. Like what? Who would do something like that? Wouldn’t people know who the lead guitarist of Sha Na Na is? So he was able to do this because the real Vinny had died earlier in 1974 of a heroin overdose. But then Edward forged documents included a Social Security card, he had a birth certificate, and he had a baptism certificate and was able to pass himself off as Vinnie. He then went out and told everyone that his death was fake and he wanted to do this so then he could take a new stage name as Daniel Catalano. So Danny C.

So there’s this whole thing he said, yeah, it’s show business, man. I faked my death. Because, you see, Vinnie’s dead. Now I go by Danny C. So that’s what he did. And then he started performing and recording under Danny C. Then the group Sha Na Na found out what was happening and went to Edward and be like, what are you doing? No, you cannot do this. You cannot say you’re Vinnie because you’re not Vinnie.

And then you can’t perform as Danny C. And Edward was like, well, what are you going to do, stop me? Then stop me? And the group was like, well, and they actually did consider filing a lawsuit, but then they decided not to do it because they didn’t want to give free publicity to Edward. So this is what their mindset was, because if they filed a lawsuit, then of course it’s going to be in the papers, it’s going to go to court, it’s going to have cameras in there, and it’s going to give Edward free publicity as Danny C. to now push his music more. So they decided not to do that. So he just continued on. He put out a website. He had fans go in there and log in.

They were able to see who he performed with, everything. I don’t know. That’s some cajones for real. Then he met a small group who was up and coming, musicians, and he asked them if their group could back him up on stage. So of that’s, they feel like, this is Danny C. and this is the big break they were waiting for.

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“We featured Tommy and the Saints, and then we featured Danny C from Sha Na Na. We sold it out.”

So they were just ecstatic. Then he met a woman, Jessica Hart. And to Jessica, Danny C. Was the man she’d been looking for, the man of her dreams.

“I just felt safe with him. Our relationship just flowed. It couldn’t have been any better.”

Jessica and Danny C. then moved in together, bought a house, beachfront property, and Danny C. continued on with his music, released a new video. But as they were living together, jessica started noticing some weird stuff.

“We would be in bed at night, and he would just jump out of bed and run to the window. He never wanted people coming into our apartment. And he would tell me a lot of times, whatever you do, just don’t bring up the Sha Na Na thing. He was a little paranoid about little certain things. If I would talk to somebody, he would ask me, what’d that guy say? And then I had some people come over to me at some show saying that he wasn’t there. You know, the right guy. He’s a phony. That’s what they told me.”

Then his bandmates, remember those two that I said were up and coming, and he asked them to play for him. They started getting similar complaints, too. One of them, Mara, said,

“The owner of the show, palace, came up to me and said, we got a problem. There’s people here that say Danny C is a phony. I says what? That can’t be. I mean, he says, he’s Danny C. He’s got the jewelry.”

After that, his bandmates started doing some digging. They literally called up Sha Na Na and, “I talked to Scott, and he told me he was not the former member of Sha Na Na. We don’t know this guy. This guy’s a fraud. End of story.” He also said this Danny C. couldn’t be Danny C.

“He couldn’t be Vinny Taylor because I know Vinny Taylor. And Vinny died of a drug overdose in 1974.”

So this is what Sha Na Na actually told them. So his bandmate goes up to him and was like, what the hell? What’s going on? I just called Sha Na Na and they said that you are not Vinny. You’re a fraud. So then he said, Danny says,

“He told me he was Taylor. He was the legit Taylor. And that’s when he sent me all the proof.”

And then, you know, the proof is his fake birth certificate. His fake Social Security card. Like, who sends somebody their birth certificate? Who sends somebody their once you did that. Once you sent me your Social Security card and your birth certificate, I don’t trust you, because nobody actually freely gives that information to just regular people. I would just say, believe me or not, like, you can quit the bandan, but I’m not sending you my Social Security card and my birth certificate. Sending you no. Now, I don’t believe you. Now, in all this time, while Edward is here playing rock and roll singer, police are still looking for him.

In 1999, New Jersey state police, Lewis Kinkel, and Cumberland county sheriff’s office investigators reopened the case. They then called Frank Bender. Do y’all remember Frank Bender? Remember the guy who did the bust of John List back in the John list episode? Go back and listen to that episode. They called him, gave him Edward’s pictures from when he was 25 years, and asked him to draw what he thinks Edward would look like now. So that’s what Frank did. And they started putting out all these pictures the next year, probably just a couple of months after that.

March 2000, Edna died. Soon as she died, probably at the funeral, police went and spoke to Edward’s father and didn’t really have to pressure him that much. He came out with,

“Look, all I know is that he’s a singer, and he goes by the name Danny, Danny C.”

That is all police needed. They ran and did a web search for Danny C. And found him there’s Edward calling himself Danny C. The bad boy of Sha Na Na. And the site featured a picture of Edward, which actually looked almost exactly like the picture that Frank drew. So with this information, they hopped on the next flight to Orlando. Then from Orlando they went to St. Pete’s beach. While they’re just walking down the walkway, they see a guy fishing, and they walk up to this guy, and wouldn’t you believe it, it’s freaking Edward just fishing on the pier near his apartment. Later on, they asked Edward, what was this moment like? How were you feeling in this moment? And he said,

“Devastating. Devastating, because my world that I knew now had totally exploded.”

He also tried to explain to police that he never meant to kill the two year old boy, but police was like, look, whatever. There’s no freaking way it was an accident that you beat a baby to death. Do you know how many times you had to keep punching and hitting and everything? But Edward came back and said, quote, I never had any violence on my record. I’m not known as a violent person. Police said, yeah, whatever. And US. Marshals arrested him on May 10, 2001, and he was sent right back to Jersey on May 18. On October 5, he was convicted for his 1974 escape, and they sent him right back to prison at Riverfront State Prison in Camden to serve out his sentence for escaping and the remainder of his sentence for the manslaughter.

So he’s supposed to be behind bars until 2010. And of course, his arrest was plastered on the front page news in Florida. Now, while he’s in prison, Jessica is still with him. They keep writing each other. They’re writing in prison, and she believes that he’s not guilty. She does not think that he did this, and she just thinks police have the wrong guy. There’s no way this guy did this. He’s such a great guy.

We bought a beachfront property. My God. Who buys beachfront property if they murdered a two year old? And she was waiting for him to get exonerated? In the meantime, she married him while he was in prison. She decided she wasn’t going to wait. He was the man of her dreams. And so they got married while he was in prison. However, the band, the actual band, Sha Na Na, was like,

“As much as one of us is tempted to find humor in this, when it turns out that the person in question is a murderer, and not only that, the murderer of a child, the humor really ends.”

Now, like I said, he is supposed to be in prison until 2010. However, for some reason, prison loves him, and he was granted parole in August of 2003. So he was arrested in 2001, and they paroled him in 2003. He escaped. He murdered a two year old, and this dude was out in two years, was it even? Two years? Yeah, two years and some months for good behavior and time served. Are you serious? And then he’s supposed to be on parole until 2011, but he’s out living his life on parole until 2011. And check this. I thought Jessica loved him so much. However, they’re not together. His last known whereabouts was in a welfare motel in Jersey. However, he was supposed to be paroled until 2011. But on November 30, 2007, he died in Glouchester City, New Jersey, at the age of 62. I looked up his obituary, and surprisingly, somewhere in all of this, he had children. Pamela Soli of Parker, Colorado, and Deborah Denek of Brandon, South Dakota. That was literally a shock to me.

And that is the case of Edward Solly. What do you think about this case? To me, I can’t even fathom it. I’d love to hear from you and you have 3 ways of sharing them with me:

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