7 Years After Woman’s Murder, Man Charged : Crime: Robert Mark Edwards, 32, formerly of Long Beach, is accused of killing Los Alamitos real estate agent Marjorie Elaine Deeble. He is awaiting trial in a separate murder case in Hawaii.

It had been more than seven years since Marjorie Elaine Deeble, a popular and successful real estate agent, was found strangled in her apartment on Green Avenue.

The 55-year-old woman’s murder in the spring of 1986 sent shock waves through this small community of 13,000 residents. Los Alamitos had only had a handful of homicides in the last two decades.

On Wednesday, the Orange County district attorney’s office filed murder charges against a former Long Beach resident who police say has been a prime suspect in the unsolved case from the very beginning.

The suspect, Robert Mark Edwards, 32, is being held in a Maui County jail on an unrelated murder charge in Hawaii. He is accused in that state of killing a 67-year-old woman in January and is awaiting trial, authorities said.

“His arrest in Maui led the Los Alamitos Police Department and the Orange County district attorney’s office to reopen this case and compare the two cases,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Rick King. “We took another look and with further investigation, we filed criminal charges.”

Edwards was a former boyfriend of one of Deeble’s two daughters, said Los Alamitos Police Detective Jim Jessen, one of three investigators originally assigned to the case.

“We never stopped looking at him as a suspect,” Jessen said Thursday. “We kept track of his whereabouts and it was just a matter of waiting for more conclusive evidence to come in.”

New evidence surfaced in February, leading to Edwards’ being charged in Deeble’s murder with the special circumstances of burglary and torture, Jessen said. Because of the special-circumstance charges, Edwards may be eligible for the death penalty if convicted, King said.

Jessen would not say what the new evidence was but it was in February that Edwards was arrested and charged with kidnaping, sexually assaulting, robbing and killing Muriel Delbe, a part-time Maui resident.

Edwards is expected to be returned to California to face charges in Deeble’s murder once his trial in Hawaii--scheduled to begin in October--is completed, Jessen said.

At the time of her death, Deeble worked at the Los Alamitos office of Great Western Real Estate, where she was the top saleswoman in 1985. She was active in the Soroptimist Club, a civic organization for professional women.

Jessen, who has had to investigate only one other murder case in Los Alamitos during his 18 years on the force, said his former partner, Cmdr. Orville Lewis, who died last year at age 43, had long been determined to make an arrest in Deeble’s murder.

“Commander Lewis was adamant about solving this case so we kind of did it for him,” Jessen said. “I wish he was around today to appreciate it.”

Jessen said that many residents in the city, particularly those who knew Deeble, had never forgotten about the case.

“The community was very much at a loss as to why this murder happened,” Jessen said. “It’s a pretty nice little community and even though we are surrounded by larger cities where things like this happen, our citizens generally feel like it can’t happen here.”