Mr. Edwards, 35, was married with two small daughters aged four and two. He and his family lived small house on Norman Street which he had largely built himself. While on the night shift Mr. Edwards always returned home at midnight for lunch. His wife had his lunch waiting for him on the night he disappeared. At about 10:30 p.m. on Sunday, March 14, 1948, a man aged between 45 and 50 called from the phone booth outside the Clearview Tea Room on the outskirts of Pembroke and asked for a cab. Mr. Edwards took the trip. About 40 minutes later Bill Perkins, another Murphy's taxi driver, saw Mr. Edwards' black 1947 sedan at the side of the road. Mr. Perkins had been on the taxi stand with Mr. Edwards when the Clearview call came and declined when Mr. Edwards offered to let him take the trip. Thinking that Mr. Edwards had encountered mechanical trouble he investigated and found the body lying in a pool of blood across the front seat. Mr. Edwards had been shot in the right temple. The bullet had gone through his head and smashed through the driver's side window. Perkins had no radio and drove to the nearest telephone to call the police. Investigators learned that the man who made the call returned to the Tea Room later the same night riding on the back of a truck. Police tracked down the truck driver and the two companions who were with him. They said that they saw a car approaching them from Pembroke, but it was parked when they drew abreast of it. When they stopped a little way beyond the car the suspected killer ran up and asked for a ride, saying that he had had car trouble. Since there was no room in the truck cab the man rode in the truck box. The driver expected to drop him off at the nearest gas station but the man insisted on being driven back to the Clearview Tea Room. Police theorized that Mr. Edwards was killed just before the truck arrived on the scene. His money was still intact, suggesting that the robber had no time take it. Running to the truck and asking for a ride ensured that the truck driver and his companions would not discover the murder. Another motorist arrived at the nearby intersection at the same time and saw the suspect run from Mr. Edwards' car to the truck. Mr. Edwards was survived by his wife and daughters and by eight brothers and two sisters. Hundreds of mourners attended the funeral. A trust fund was established and donations collected for Mr. Edwards' family. A front-page announcement in the Pembroke Standard-Observer noted that the couple's house was mortgaged and that Mrs. Edwards' sole assets consisted of the taxi and her husband's $1,000 life insurance policy. Donations totalled $2,075.50 by the first week in April. In December, 1948, police announced that they had arrested a suspect in the case, but he was freed after questioning and the murder remained unsolved. A strange postscript came in September, 1971, twenty-three years after Mr. Edwards's death when a Toronto city gardener confessed to his role in the killing "so I can go to sleep at night". [Next column]

Main street of Pembroke, Ontario, in 1958. (Source: Todd Franklin, Neato Coolville) The gardener, who was 17 years old in 1948, claimed that the killing was not a robbery but a "stupid accident". He and an older friend hired Edwards to take them out of town to a spot on the Ottawa River where they intended to stay overnight and shoot geese. The gardener had brought along his father's 20-gauge shotgun and a .30-30 calibre rifle. As they reached the river the older man, sitting in front, asked to see the rifle and the gardener passed it to him from the back seat. As the older man reached for his money to pay the fare the gun went off. "The shot hit the driver in the head and I could hear the blood running down on to the floorboards of the car," said the gardener. "[The older man] said 'Let's get out of here' so we turned the lights out on the cab and got a ride back to Pembroke on a logging truck." The gardener told his wife about the killing before he was married, but was always afraid to tell the authorities. In July, 1970 the older man, the father of nine children, died in Toronto's Don Jail of an apparent epileptic seizure. Ontario Provincial Police were notified of the confession but had no immediate comment. In the event the OPP do not seem to have acted on the confession, probably because it contradicted the testimony of the truck driver and his two companions who reported driving only one man from the murder scene to the Clearview Tea Room. The murders of Elmer Battler and Albert Richer also featured confessions that were made decades after the event.