A native of Arkansas, born in 1919, Edwards moved to Los Angeles in 1941, logging one arrest for vagrancy that April, prior to finding work as a heavy-equipment operator. In that role, he helped build the freeways that made L.A. famous, and by early 1970 he was a veteran on the job, married and a father of two, the very model of blue-collar propriety. If anyone suspected his involvement in a string of brutal murders spanning sixteen years, they kept the secret to themselves.

On March 5, 1970, three girls, ages 12 to 14, were abducted by burglars from their home in Sylmar, a Los Angeles suburb. Two escaped from their captors, but one was still missing the next day, when Mack Edwards entered a Los Angeles police station, surrendering a loaded revolver as he informed the duty officer, "I have a guilt complex." Edwards named his teenage accomplice in the kidnapping , and directed police to the Angeles National Forest, where the missing girl was found, unharmed. Before authorities could take his statement down, the prisoner informed them there were "other matters" to discuss.

As homicide detectives listened, dumb-struck, Edwards voluntarily confessed to half a dozen murders, dating from the early 1950s. Stella Nolan, eight years old, had been the first to die, in June of 1953. Abducted from her home in Compton, she had never been recovered, and her fate remained a mystery for sixteen years, until a killer's conscience led him to confess. Mack's second crime had been a double-header, claiming 13-year-old Don Baker and 11-year-old Brenda Howell, in Azusa, on August 6, 1956. Once again, the bodies were missing, no solution in sight before Edwards surrendered himself to police.

According to the killer's statement, he had sworn off murder for a dozen years, returning with a vengeance in the fall of 1968. Gary Rochet, age 16, had been shot to death at his home, in Granada Hills, on November 26, and Roger Madison, also 16, had vanished in Sylmar three weeks later. The last to go was 13-year-old Donald Todd, reported missing in Pacoima on May 16, 1969.

On March 7, 1970, Edwards led officers into the San Gabriel Mountains, seeking the graves of two victims , but altered terrain foiled the search. He had better luck four days later, directing his keepers to a section of the Santa Ana Freeway, where the skeletal remains of Stella Nolan were unearthed from an eight-foot-deep grave. Edwards maintained that Roger Madison was buried beneath the Ventura Freeway, but authorities declined to plow the highway up in search of clues. The crimes, Mack said, had all been motivated by an urge for sex.

With Edwards safely under lock and key, police voiced skepticism at the 12-year gap in his "career," suggesting that there might be other victims unaccounted for -- a body-count of 22, in all. Responding from his cell, the killer adamantly stuck by his confession. "Six is all there is," he told reporters. "There's not any more. That's all there is." Before his trial, he twice attempted suicide, slashing his stomach with a razor blade on March 30, and gulping an overdose of tranquilizers on May 7.

Charged in three of his six confessed crimes, Edwards was convicted and sentenced to die after telling the jury, "I want the chair; that's what I've always wanted," Immediate execution was his goal. As Edwards told the court, "My lawyer told me there are a hundred of men waiting to die in the chair. I'm asking the judge if I can have the first man's place. He's sitting there sweating right now. I'm not sweating. I'm ready for it."

Ready or not, Edwards was faced with the prospect of mandatory appeals, conscious of the fact that no California inmate had been executed since 1967. On October 30, 1971, he cut the process short, using an electric cord to hang himself in his death row cell at San Quentin.