A sister’s long wait to find slain brother

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She knows it won’t be easy.

It will be noisy and dusty. It will bring back awful memories from decades ago. And it might ultimately prove fruitless. But Sherry Barlow plans to spend this morning standing alongside the 23 Freeway in eastern Ventura County, hoping to provide her brother with a long-delayed memorial.

Authorities believe a serial killer fatally stabbed her 16-year-old brother, Roger Madison, in 1968 and buried him alongside the freeway. This week, armed with new clues, authorities began digging up sites along the freeway, prompting Barlow to fly in Thursday from Oklahoma to mount a vigil.

‘Even if they don’t find anything, I can stand there close to where he is and say goodbye,’ said Barlow, 53. ‘Because I never got a chance to say goodbye.’

The last time anyone in his family saw Roger alive was in December 1968, when he left the family’s Sylmar home after an argument with his father about smoking.

The family thought he had run away. Two years later, her mother sat down with Barlow and her younger sister Annie to tell them the bad news.

‘She said she had something to tell us about Roger,’ Barlow said. ‘Me or my sister asked when he was coming home. She started crying and said he’s not coming home.’

Roger had been murdered, police told the family -- and not by a stranger but by a trusted friend and neighbor, Mack Ray Edwards. Married and the father of two children, Edwards lived five houses down from the Madisons and was a regular visitor.
Read Times Staff Writer Andrew Blankstein’s full story here. (And follow up here).