Edwards was born in 1918 in Arkansas and came to California in the 1940s. He worked for highway contractors on the freeway construction that reshaped Los Angeles County in the 1950s and 1960s, running graders and loaders.
Between 1953 and 1970 he abducted and killed children: Stella Darlene Nolan, eight, in 1953; Don Baker, thirteen, and Brenda Howell, eleven, in 1956; Gary Rochet, sixteen, and Roger Madison, sixteen; Donald Todd, thirteen, in 1968. He shot or strangled them. He buried at least three at construction sites where he was working, under what became freeway embankments and on- ramps, and the bodies of several have never been recovered because the roads were completed over them.
On March 5, 1970 he walked into the Foothill Division police station in Los Angeles with a friend, handed over a gun, and said he had a problem: he had just tried to abduct three girls, who had escaped. He then confessed to six murders and offered information on more.
He was convicted and sentenced to death in 1971. On October 30, 1971 he hanged himself in his cell at San Quentin with a television cord.
The case has been reopened repeatedly by researchers, and several unsolved child disappearances in Los Angeles County in those decades have been attributed to him. He said at one point that the true number was eighteen. Nothing beyond the six was ever established, and the physical evidence for most of it is under the freeway system.