In early March 1970, Mack Ray Edwards and a fifteen-year-old boy went into the Sylmar home of Edgar Cohen and took his three daughters, Valerie, Cindy and Jan, who were twelve, thirteen and fourteen. They had once been his neighbors. He made the girls write a note to their parents saying they were running away, and drove them to remote Bouquet Canyon in the Angeles National Forest. Two of them escaped. He let the third go, and on March 6, knowing they could name him, he walked into a San Fernando Valley police station, handed the Foothill Division detectives a loaded handgun and told them he had meant to molest and kill the three girls. Then he confessed to murdering six other children.
"I have a guilt complex," he told Sergeant George Rock. "I couldn't eat and I couldn't sleep, and it was beginning to affect my work. You know I'm a heavy equipment operator. That long grader I'm using now costs a lot of money, $200,000. I might wreck it or turn it over and hurt someone." About the Cohen sisters he said he was glad they had got away, because otherwise "it would have been nine instead of six."
He was fifty-one. Born on October 17, 1918, in Montgomery County, Arkansas, he had come to Los Angeles County in 1941, joined the Army Corps of Engineers the next year, and served as a combat engineer trained on heavy machinery. He married Mary Howell in 1946, and the couple adopted two children. Through the 1950s he lived in Pico Rivera, El Monte and Azusa, kept horses that neighborhood children rode, and took local children camping. As a member of the operating engineers' union he ran backhoes and graders on the freeway projects that Caltrans and other agencies were cutting across the county, and in the 1960s he moved to Ralston Avenue in Sylmar.
His first victim was Stella Darlene Nolan, eight, who disappeared from a refreshment stand at a flea market in Norwalk on June 20, 1953. He took her to his home in Azusa and raped her, then drove her to the Angeles Forest, strangled her and threw her over a bridge. When he came back the next day, he found her still alive, sitting up a hundred yards away and unable to speak or move, and he stabbed her to death with a pocketknife. In March 1970 he led police to her skeleton, buried eight feet down in an embankment by a Santa Ana Freeway abutment in Downey.
On August 6, 1956, Donald Lee Baker, thirteen, and Brenda Jo Howell, eleven, rode their bicycles into the San Gabriel Canyon near Glendora Mountain Road and vanished. Brenda was his sister-in-law and Donald a neighbor. Edwards said he paid Donald seven dollars to talk Brenda into a bike ride, followed them in a pickup, separated them in a secluded spot and cut both their throats. He took investigators to where he said he had left them, and nothing was found. Twelve years passed before the next killing he admitted. On November 26, 1968, he broke into a home in Sylmar looking for a thirteen-year-old girl, found only her brother, Gary Rochet, sixteen, and shot him. On December 16, 1968, Roger Dale Madison, fifteen, a classmate of Edwards's son who lived five doors down, rode off on his motorcycle after an argument with his father and never came home. Edwards said he lured Roger into an orange grove, talked him into being tied up as part of a game, stabbed him and buried him with a bulldozer in a compaction hole under State Route 23 in Thousand Oaks, which he was helping to build. A 2008 search at the Tierra Rejada Road off-ramp, where cadaver dogs signaled, turned up nothing. On May 16, 1969, Donald Allen Todd, thirteen, of Pacoima, was sent home from school after a fight and never arrived. Two children found his body beneath a bridge a mile and a half away; he had been sexually abused and shot with a .22.
Only three of the six bodies were recovered, and he was charged with those three murders and with three kidnappings. At a preliminary hearing on March 17, 1970, he tried to plead guilty and the judge would not accept it. "Guilty. I am guilty!" he said, and when his lawyer asked to enter a not guilty plea for him, "I don't need a lawyer! I am guilty!" He cut his stomach with a razor blade on March 30 and took an overdose of tranquilizers on May 7. At trial the deputy district attorney, David Kenner, told the jury that if any case cried out for the death penalty, this was it, and Edwards agreed. "I want the chair," he said. "That's what I've always wanted." He was sentenced to die in the gas chamber and sent to San Quentin.
On October 30, 1971, he hanged himself in his cell with a television cord. He had told a county jail guard and another inmate that he had killed between eighteen and twenty-two children, and then told the court "Six is all there is, just six." Investigators have since looked at him for other disappearances, among them that of Tommy Bowman, eight, who ran ahead of his family on the Arroyo Seco near Altadena on March 23, 1957, and was never seen again. The author G. Weston DeWalt found that Edwards's employer kept an equipment yard less than half a mile away and was shown a letter Edwards wrote to his wife before his death: "I was going to add one more, and that was the Tommy Bowman boy that disappeared in Pasadena, but I felt I would really make a mess of that one. So I left him out of it."