Trial Opens for Man in Hillside Murder Case : Crime: Edmund Arne Matthews’ attorney says no one knows how Lisa Mather died. The prosecutor says Matthews wanted a sex slave.

Testimony began Monday in the trial of Edmund Arne Matthews, who faces a possible death penalty on charges that he raped and murdered an 18-year-old West Los Angeles woman on a wooded Sherman Oaks hillside.

Matthews, 33--once nicknamed The Count because he frequented nightclubs in a black cape--is on trial in San Fernando Superior Court in the death of Lisa Mather, last seen by her friends on Jan. 12, 1985, talking with an unidentified man outside the Whiskey A Go Go on the Sunset Strip.

Nearly two years later, her scattered bones were discovered by a hiker in the hills just west of Coldwater Canyon Avenue. Prosecutors allege that Matthews, who at the time was a drifter, killed Mather soon after she disappeared.

In an opening statement Monday, Rickard Santwier, one of Matthews’ two attorneys, contended that there is “no evidence as to the cause of death. It is unknown how she died.”

In a statement to police shortly after Mather’s remains were found, Matthews said she had voluntarily gone with him to the remote site to have sex, according to testimony at the defendant’s preliminary hearing in 1987.

Matthews also told police that the victim allowed him to tie a rope around her neck, then slipped off the muddy hillside and strangled.

After discovery of the woman’s bones, police questioned Matthews because he had been convicted of raping a North Hollywood woman he brought to the same site after picking her up on the Sunset Strip.

Matthews is serving a 10-year sentence for the other rape. He was arrested for that rape four weeks after it occurred and two weeks after Mather disappeared.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Rosalie Morton told jurors Monday that the rape victim and another woman forcibly taken to the site will testify that Matthews told them “his fantasy was to keep someone there for months as a sex slave.”

The case has been delayed for nearly two years while defense attorneys unsuccessfully argued that the alleged rape of Mather did not constitute the special circumstances required by law to ask for the death penalty.