Edwards’ sexually abused most of his victims prior to their deaths, and he claimed that all of his crimes were motivated by “a desire for sex.”
It is possible that Edwards was responsible for the deaths of more victims than are known, and his own confessions were not consistent. While he was in jail, he claimed, at various times, to have slain as many as eighteen to twenty children, and he remains a person of interest in numerous missing persons cases throughout the region, with the large gap in his known victims leading authorities to suspect that he committed other murders that are as yet unaccounted for.
Other times, however, Edwards insisted that the six murders to which he initially confessed were the only ones that he had committed and expressed his relief that his last three victims had escaped. “I’m glad they got away,” he told authorities shortly after his arrest, “because it would have been nine instead of six.”
Despite the guilt he claimed to feel about his crimes, Edwards’ murders showed premeditation and cold calculus. After kidnapping and raping his first known victim, 8-year-old Stella Nolan, Edwards recounted how he strangled her in the Angeles Forest before throwing her body from a bridge. When he returned to the scene of the crime the following day, she was still alive, having crawled some 100 yards from where he left her. At this time, he stabbed her to death with his pocketknife.
As is often the case in such grisly crimes, Edwards did not match the image that we frequently associate with child predators. He was known to many of his victims, and he often took neighborhood children on camping trips or let them ride the horses that he owned. He was married, with two children of his own, both adopted, and at least one of his victims was a classmate of one of his own children.
“I never talked to anyone who met Edwards and didn’t like him,” said LA-based author Weston DeWalt, who began digging into the case after becoming intrigued by one specific disappearance in 1957, that of 8-year-old Tommy Bowman. “The father of the girls who were kidnapped in Sylmar said Edwards was a great guy.”
DeWalt was one of the people responsible for discovering that Edwards was, in fact, the likely killer of young Tommy Bowman. In 2006, DeWalt managed to secure an interview with Edwards’ widow and her family, during which time he was told that the killer had left behind a confession letter with his wife before he killed himself.
“I was going to add one more,” Edwards wrote in the letter, referring to his confessed murders, “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.”
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