Oct 10, 2008 8:11 am US/Pacific
LAPD Quits Dig To Find Boy Missing Since 1968
Memorial Service For Roger Madison Held At Dig Site In Moorpark
MOORPARK
Authorities Friday ended the search for the body of a 16-year-old San Fernando Valley boy who has been missing for 40 years and is believed to have been buried next to the 23 Freeway in Moorpark.
Police believe Roger Madison's remains are under the freeway, but cannot be recovered. A memorial service for the teen was held at the site at 11 a.m., according to the Los Angeles Police Department.
The search was conducted at the Tierra Rejada Road off-ramp of the 23 Freeway, where a 12-foot-deep pit was dug Monday as cold-case investigators from a half-dozen jurisdictions – most of them volunteers working on their days off – searched for the remains of the boy, who was last seen just before Christmas 1968.
On Wednesday, a search dog's barks indicated that it smelled decaying human bones, authorities said. But no signs of a body were found, LAPD Detective Vivian Flores said.
The dig was a follow-up, delayed nearly four decades, to a confession by California's most prolific serial killer of teens and children.
Mack Ray Edwards, who worked at freeway construction sites, was never convicted for the murder of Madison but was sent to death row for as many as 18 kidnappings and murders during the 50's and 60's.
Edwards committed suicide at San Quentin prison in 1971, leaving a confession that Madison had been slain in an orange grove in Sylmar and buried next to a freeway near Thousand Oaks.
Flores and Pasadena author Weston DeWalt worked on the case for three years, and found a retired Caltrans engineer who supervised Edwards and knew where the bulldozer operator was working in December 1968.
The teen's parents have died, but his sisters and brothers gave LAPD detectives DNA swabs to be compared with any human remains that may have been found in Moorpark.
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