"It was the night of Sept. 25, 1959, when nine-year-old Sherry Edgell apparently walked out of her mother's modest home in South Centralia and was not seen alive again," reads a 1976 Chronicle story.
"Sherry's bloodstained body was found the next day just west of Chehalis and within sight of the four-lane Pacific highway. Her throat was cut and she'd been attacked. For the next 7 months, Lewis County sheriff's officers and Centralia police engaged in a crime hunt that led to a half dozen suspects, including a young Olympia man who had been a friend of Sherry's mother.
"The months passed. It was May of 1960 when Centralia police became interested in a 14-year-old Centralia boy who had escaped from Western State Hospital at Steilacoom the previous August and had been living in Centralia at the time of Sherry's death. He was defined as a psychopathic delinquent."
The boy, who long remained a suspect in the case, wasn't easy to find, having gone to California with his mother and younger brother. In California the boys got involved in a school burglary that brought them to the attention of alert California officers. The suspect was promptly returned to Lewis County. Officers said he had confessed to the killing and supplied enough detail to make police believe him.
"However, the county's prosecutor - and later the superior court - said there was not enough evidence to charge the young prisoner even if he had signed a confession. Four days after he was taken into custody the court ordered the boy returned to Steilacoom. The court told officers that when they had enough material to substantiate the boy's confession, it would have him returned. With that ruling, the case had ceased to be anything more than a bulky file."
THE LEWIS COUNTY SHERIFF'S OFFICE confirmed this week that the case remains unsolved, but interest in solving it has remained high through generations of investigators. Chief Criminal Deputy Joe Doench and Det. Bruce F. Kimsey of the Lewis County Sheriff's Office continue to work the case as leads arise. Having learned about this column, they're asking people with information to call them. Both can be reached at 748-9286 or through Crime Stoppers at 1-800-748-6422.
The Lewis County Historical Museum's Fire and Safety Exhibit, on display through mid-April, includes a September 1960 article that appeared in an Official Detective Stories crime magazine. Called "Through Dust in a Lawman's Eye" it was written by Jack Ward, a special investigator for Actual Detective Stories.
ON THE NIGHT of her daughter's disappearance, the girl's mother, Geraldine Murray, was working as a waitress in a café and finished her job at about 2 a.m. She said she returned home at about 2:30 a.m., where her three children, Sherry, Steven (6) and Vicki (3) were being cared for by a 14-year-old baby-sitter, who had fallen asleep on a sofa after putting the children to bed.
After filling Murray in about her night with the children, the girl left. Murray said she set the alarm for 7:30 a.m. and went to bed.
"I always get up and get Sherry dressed for school and see that she has breakfast. When I went into the room where the children sleep, Sherry wasn't there," she recalled.
Ward wrote, "Mrs. Murray hadn't become alarmed immediately, for Sherry sometimes spent the night with her grandmother, Mrs. Bessie Turman, who lived only a block from the Jefferson-Lincoln school Sherry attended. 'But Steven woke up and I asked him when Sherry had gone to her grandmother's place. He told me Sherry had gone to bed at the same time as he and Vicki. I immediately called her grandmother's house. She said she hadn't seen Sherry all day.'
"Was she at home when you came home?" asked then Chief of Police Otto Rucker of Centralia.
"I don't know. The light was out in the children's room. I looked in and I thought she was there in bed with Vicki, but I can't be sure."
Rucker and Juvenile Officer William Merriman went to work on the case.
"Sherry's clothes were on a chair where she had shed them. The only clothes missing were a bright red coat, a pair of shoes and the nightgown Sherry had been wearing."
OFFICERS ASKED about Geraldine Murray's then-husband (her third husband), James, from whom she had been estranged for about five months. He worked at a local lumber yard. Geraldine Murray didn't think he would have abducted the child: "I'm sure he would not have. Part of our trouble was over the children."
"How about the child's father?" asked Rucker.
Sherry's father, Robert Edgell, was in the Army. When last Geraldine Murray heard from him, he was stationed in Germany. That was confirmed by the Army.
According to Ward, Lewis County Sheriff O.R. Amondson talked with James Murray and said Murray swore he had not been in Centralia and knew nothing about Sherry's disappearance. Several witnesses later verified he had been at the bunkhouse at the timber camp that entire evening, night and early morning. Army authorities checked the service record of Robert Edgell and he was in Giessen, Germany.
ANOTHER SUSPECT was one Steve Cort (a fictitious name), a man Geraldine Murray had been "keeping company with" since her separation. Cort lived with his parents in Olympia, had a criminal record and had been with Geraldine Murray the night Sherry disappeared. Suspiciously, Cort also disappeared, but was picked up in Medford, Ore., on a warrant. No charges were ever filed against him in this case.
The baby-sitter was also questioned. She said she had checked in on the children about an hour after putting them to bed at 9 p.m. She thought she went to sleep about half an hour after that.
"She was positive she had not heard anyone come into the house," it was written. "She had heard no outcry."
Particularly troubling to Chief Rucker was this lack of struggle: "The youngster was taken from bed, right alongside her sister and with her brother in the room. And there was the baby-sitter. If she had made an outcry at all she would have been heard. She must have left the house with someone she knew."
Strangers weren't ruled out in the case. As the home was located near railroad tracks, investigators reportedly "shook down the hobo jungles" from Seattle to Portland. Train crews were also questioned and bloodhounds were brought in. They picked up a solid trail that continued about 200 feet from the Murray home and stopped cold, leading police to believe the girl had gotten into a car.
Investigators hoped the girl had been taken by family members for some reason not yet disclosed.
"But at 4:45 in the afternoon (on the day she went missing), the investigators and the quiet, small town of Centralia were shocked by a violent, brutal crime when Sherry Edgell's body was discovered," it was written.
Two farm workers walking home along the busy four-lane Highway 99, just south of Chehalis, spotted the small red bundle that was Sherry's body lying in tall grass on Airport Road. The little girl was wearing a blood-stained nightgown and red coat.
"Offhand, I would say she was killed sometime after midnight," said Dr. Robert Larson, a Tacoma pathologist.
Even more shocking, Larson is reported to have said, "Her throat was slashed after she was dead. I think the autopsy will show that she was strangled."
No one could disagree with Chief Otto Rucker in 1959 when he said, "It just don't make sense."
Pat Jones is The Chronicle's lifestyle editor. She may be reached by e-mail at pjones@chronline.com, or by telephoning 807-8226. The Lewis County Historical Museum's Internet address is www.lewiscountymuseum.org.
