Los Angeles police will dig near two freeway ramps in Ventura County on Monday to search for the remains of a San Fernando Valley boy killed by a serial murderer 40 years ago.
LAPD officers, aided by dozens of FBI agents and police from other agencies, are excavating where four police dogs indicated human bones were buried.
A ground-penetrating radar unit from Caltrans identified a likely burial location, and a particle detector that sniffs out decaying human bones "went off like a Geiger counter in the same place," Los Angeles Police Detective Vivian Flores told the Ventura County Star.
The interchange of the 23 Freeway at Tierra Rejada Road in Moorpark is about 25 miles west of the Arleta home where Roger Dale Madison was last seen alive on Dec. 14, 1968. A construction crew chief who was building the freeway, Mack Ray Edwards, confessed to kidnapping and murdering the boy, throwing him into a hole and covering him up with rocks and fill dirt as the 23 was being built.
Edwards, known as the most-notorious serial killer of children in California history, confessed to as many as 18 kidnappings and murders dating back to at least 1953. Although he was never charged with killing Roger Madison, he confessed to the crime shortly before he hanged himself with a television cord while on death row at San Quentin.
Flores said Edwards' confession in the Madison case was not followed up in 1970, but the reasons may never be known because the records of that investigation have not been located by LAPD archivists.
"He told detectives, 'You'll never find Roger, he's under the concrete, his family is not rich and he's under the freeway,'" Flores told the Star.
Several dozen police officers, aided by 44 FBI agents and police dogs, will work on the exhumation of Madison's remains. If they are located, his three sisters and brother plan to have them cremated and buried with the ashes of the boy's parents, who moved away from California and died in the intervening 40 years, Flores said.
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"The mother and father have passed away, and one of the sisters told me the family hasn't placed the ashes anywhere permanently," Flores told the Ventura County Star. "Now that they might get Roger's remains, they hope to place all three in one place. It means closure for them."
Edwards, a construction foreman for a company that was building freeways throughout Southern California, used heavy equipment to bury children whom he had abducted and abused in the 1950s and '60s.
The killer claimed his conscience was bothering him when he walked into the LAPD Foothill Station in 1969 and confessed that he had just kidnapped a girl, who was found alive in a nearby orange grove. He eventually was linked to as many as 18 murders.
One of the children was Stella Darlene Nolan, who had disappeared in 1953. Edwards led detectives to her body on the side of the Santa Ana (5) Freeway in Downey, and she was reburied.
Flores said Edwards' confession in the Madison case languished in LAPD files for decades until Pasadena writer Weston DeWalt started looking into a missing child case from 1957 in Altadena.
DeWalt noticed that a suspect sketch in that case resembled a photo of Edwards from 1970, and started looking into the files.
The LAPD detective found out that Edwards had claimed to dump the Madison boy's body somewhere along a freeway north of Thousand Oaks, and Flores went to a Caltrans meeting for engineers who were widening the 23 Freeway recently.
They put her in touch with a retired Caltrans engineer in Northern California "who kept detailed construction logs for everything he had ever done. This man had a Caltrans calendar that said Mack was working on the Tierra Rejada offramp on Dec. 14, 1968," she said.
Motorists using the southbound offramp of the 23 freeway and a ramp from westbound Tierra Rejada Road to the southbound 23 have been warned by the Ventura County Sheriff's Office that the ramps will be closed at times today and all next week.
Flores said the exhumation will be conducted "with hand shovels, trowels and toothbrushes," and may take as long as 10 days.
