KTLA News
October 10, 2008
MOORPARK -- Los Angeles Police Department investigators have suspended the search for the body of a 16-year-old San Fernando Valley boy missing since 1968 who was believed to have been buried next to a local freeway.
The search for the remains of Roger Dale Madison was called off after no significant evidence was found, according to LAPD officials. A memorial for the teen was held at the site Friday morning. The victim's sister and other family and friends were on hand for the memorial.
Investigators had hoped to find the remains of Madison who was believed to have been killed by a child serial murderer 40 years ago. Investigators say Mack Ray Edwards confessed to fatally stabbing the boy and burying him near the 23 Freeway before hanging himself in 1971 while on death row at San Quentin.
The digging, which began Monday morning, took place beside what are now the southbound lanes of Highway 23 at the Tierra Rejada Road exit, just south of where the freeway bends east, becoming the Ronald Reagan (118) Freeway.
Tents, tractors, and police vehicles clustered around the dig location all week long. Police shut down the southbound Tierra Rejada Road off ramp on the 23 Freeway and the on ramp from westbound Tierra Rejada to the southbound 23 during the excavation.
The Moorpark location is about 25 miles from the Arleta home where Madison was last seen alive on Dec. 14, 1968.
Edwards, a heavy-equipment operator, told Los Angeles police in 1970 that he had killed six boys and girls over a 15-year period.
He later told a Los Angeles County jailer that the real number of victims was closer to 18, making him the most notorious serial killer of children in California history.
Police believe he buried the children near the freeway construction sites where he worked during California's freeway-building boom of the 1950s and '60s.
Each body they find gives them more information about his methods, which could help link him to other crimes.
Before his death, Edwards provided key details that led investigators to the site where he disposed of his first victim, eight-year-old Stella Darlene Nolan, who disappeared in 1953.
Her remains were unearthed in Downey, under 8 feet of earth, near a bridge abutment under the Santa Ana Freeway.
Mack, who moved to Los Angeles from Arkansas, also described killing Madison, a friend and classmate of his teenage son.
He reportedly told detectives, "You'll never find Roger. He's under the concrete, his family is not rich and he's under the Freeway."
He told detectives he used a bulldozer to dispose of the youth somewhere along the 23 Freeway in Thousand Oaks, during the time when that freeway was being built.
"It was his intimate knowledge of these often desolate sites, where it was easy to dispose of a body with little danger of discovery, that I think allowed him to kill repeatedly," said LAPD Det. Vivian Flores.
"His work was a huge part of it. It was essential to his crimes."
The description Edwards initially gave detectives was so broad that it fit most parts of the freeway, which connects Thousand Oaks to Simi Valley.
But after police went public with the long-forgotten cases last year, tips came in that helped them narrow the field considerably, Flores said.
