The Confessions of Mack Ray Edwards

Mack Ray Edwards pleaded guilty to three counts of first-degree murder and three counts of kidnapping — Stella Darlene Nolan (1953), Gary Rochet (1968), and Donald Allen Todd (1969) — and was sentenced to death.

Edwards surrendered to LAPD on March 5–6, 1970, turning over a loaded handgun, the day after a botched kidnapping attempt against three girls in Sylmar; all three survived.

Edwards worked for years as a heavy-equipment operator and crew chief on California highway construction projects. Nolan's remains were recovered on an embankment tied to Santa Ana Freeway construction.

Edwards died by suicide, hanging himself in his cell at San Quentin on October 30, 1971, after two earlier unsuccessful attempts.

In the 1956 disappearance of Don Baker and Brenda Howell near Morris Dam, Brenda Howell was Edwards's sister-in-law; Don Baker was a neighborhood friend. In 1970, Edwards personally directed investigators to a site where he said he had left their remains; none were found.

In October 2008, LAPD, Ventura County Sheriff's units, and the FBI excavated a site near a 23 Freeway exit ramp in Moorpark, searching for the remains of Roger Dale Madison based on cadaver-dog alerts and Caltrans ground-penetrating-radar anomalies. After about five days, the search was called off with no remains found.

In June 2011, Santa Barbara police, acting on research brought to them by writer Weston DeWalt, searched near the Winchester Canyon overpass on Highway 101 in Goleta for the remains of Ramona Price, missing since 1961. Cadaver dogs alerted to an "area of interest," but the search — conducted alongside a scheduled Caltrans demolition of the old overpass — found nothing.

True victim count. Edwards initially confessed to six murders; later reported statements put the figure as high as eighteen to twenty. Only three cases have ever been charged, each with recovered remains and corroborating physical evidence — whether the additional claimed victims should be credited remains unresolved.

Reliability of directed searches. The 1956 Baker/Howell search (based on Edwards's own directions) and the resourced 2008 and 2011 excavations for Madison and Price all came back empty, despite strong forensic indicators in the latter two. That doesn't disprove Edwards's claims, but it doesn't confirm them either.

The Ramona Price connection. Santa Barbara police treated Edwards as a suspect based on his construction work on the overpass near where Price disappeared and on Weston DeWalt's research, but no charge or official confirmation was ever reached.

The narrative details of the Roger Madison case — an orange grove, an invented game used to lure him, and a dinner-table relationship between Madison and the Edwards family — come entirely from Edwards's own confession as relayed through Weston DeWalt's research. No independent corroboration exists, and no remains were ever recovered.

Edwards reportedly told a fellow San Quentin inmate, before his 1971 suicide, that his other victims would never be found because "no one would tear up a freeway." This is a secondhand account relayed in reporting, not a documented statement from Edwards himself.

The characterization of Edwards as one of the most notorious child serial killers in California history traces to a single outlet's paraphrase of a detective's quote, not an independently verifiable superlative.

The exact total of victims Edwards claimed — reported variously as eighteen or twenty — has no cited primary document, such as a police report or court filing, behind it in the sourcing reviewed.