Dave Schrader (email) welcomed retired police detective John A. Cameron for a discussion on the most notorious serial killer you've never heard of—Edward Wayne Edwards, who allegedly killed scores of people over a sixty-six-year period and was never caught (for murder). Cameron described Edwards' tragic childhood, noting that he was born in 1933 at the height of the Great Depression, raised by an aunt while his mother served out her prison term, and eventually placed into an orphanage at age five. "By time he's eight years old... he's been sexual abused by the older boys, beaten by nuns for bedwetting, and turns into a psychopathic monster," Cameron revealed.
Edwards' experiences at the orphanage destroyed him spiritually, compelling him to rebel against Catholicism and embrace Satanism and the teachings of occultist Aleister Crowley, Cameron continued. At age eleven Edwards was a full-fledged sadomasochist and had committed three gruesome murders in the Chicago area, he added. Cameron said he connected Edwards to the Chicago 'Lipstick' murders after tying him to a series of 'Lovers Lane' killings in Great Falls, Montana in 1956. Edwards left behind messages at the Chicago murder scenes that appeared to have been written by a young person and was smart enough to steer the evidence toward an innocent person, he explained.
According to Cameron, almost two dozen people have been framed for murders that Edwards committed from 1945 through 2010. "There's innocent men sitting in prison on the false evidence this man perpetuated and [law enforcement] would just as soon turn a blind eye," he lamented. Cameron credited Edwards with some of the most notorious murders in US history, including the infamous Black Dahlia case from 1947, the slaying of JonBenét Ramsey in 1996, and the Zodiac killings in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Cameron said he determined Edwards was the Zodiac killer after solving some of the murderer's previously unsolved cryptograms.