A Serial Killer, a Highway System, and the Children Who Were Never Found

A Serial Killer, a Highway System, and the Children Who Were Never Found Somewhere beneath the northbound lanes of a California state highway, a fifteen-year-old boy named Roger Madison has been waiting to be found since December 1968. He knows exactly where Roger is. He put him there. Between 1953 and 1969, Mack Ray Edwards murdered at least six children across suburban Los Angeles, and buried the evidence in a place no investigator would think to look: the freeway embankments he built for a living. A union heavy equipment operator on California's post-war highway expansion program, Edwards used his professional access to active construction sites to inter his victims within the permanent infrastructure of the state itself. From his death row cell at San Quentin, he boasted that his crimes would never be fully uncovered. "No one would tear up a freeway." He was right. Drawing on forensic records, construction archives, criminological research, and the cold case investigations that have continued into the twenty-first century, The Freeway Beneath Their Feet tells the complete story of the most methodologically sophisticated serial killer in California history, the trusted neighbor, the skilled tradesman, the community patriarch whose surface concealed a depth of violence that the smooth face of the highway still conceals today. A narrative of grief, institutional failure, and the ongoing cost of crimes that were designed never to be solved.