Police Arrest Suspect in 20-Year-Old Slaying

A convicted armed robber who was suspected but never prosecuted in the 1983 slaying of a Sherman Oaks nurse has been arrested on suspicion of murder in the death, police said Tuesday.

Edmond Jay Marr, 45, was arrested without incident Monday at his Cathedral City home in connection with the death of 29-year-old Elaine Graham, whose remains were found scattered across a hillside in a remote area of Brown’s Canyon in Chatsworth eight months after she vanished from the vicinity of Cal State Northridge.

Marr, an unemployed hairstylist, is being held in lieu of $1.1-million bail at the Parker Center jail. He is scheduled to be arraigned Thursday in Los Angeles County Superior Court in San Fernando and formally charged with felony counts of kidnapping and first-degree murder.

Marr’s arrest culminates a 10-month investigation in which LAPD cold-case homicide detectives linked Marr to Graham’s fatal stabbing through circumstantial evidence as well as forensic analysis of a bloodied military-style survival knife found in his possession a month after Graham vanished.

“What our investigation came down to is putting together good work by detectives from 20 years ago, as well as additional information we uncovered in recent months,” said Det. Rick Jackson. “Many cold cases are there just waiting to be solved, and all we need to do is have the people to work them and access to today’s technology.”

Jackson, who worked the case with Det. Tim Marcia, cited other factors linking Marr to the killing. Marr was discharged from the Army for drug use and was staying at his mother’s Northridge home the day before Graham vanished on March 17, 1983.

Marr showed up at his sister’s home in Orange County later that day. The residence was within walking distance of the Santa Ana shopping mall where Graham’s pale yellow Volkswagen Beetle was found.

In addition to DNA evidence recovered from blood on the hilt of the knife, the Los Angeles Police Department has asked the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center in El Segundo to test the physical characteristics of the knife against the wound track left in Graham’s body.

Graham grew up in Waterbury, Conn., and moved in 1976 to Los Angeles, where she met Dr. Stephen Graham, an intern at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. The couple later married and moved to Sherman Oaks in 1979. They had one daughter, who was 2 when her mother was killed.

Elaine Graham, short-haired and athletic, was working part time at Cedars and taking classes at Cal State Northridge, where investigators believe she encountered her killer on St. Patrick’s Day morning in 1983.

According to police records, Marr served a three-year sentence in state prison for an armed robbery in Orange County. Police recovered a knife in that case.

Marr was known to frequent the remote Brown’s Canyon area where Graham’s body was discovered.

While news of his arrest was greeted with relief, the passage of time has not erased the pain of those who loved Graham.

“For me it’s a very scary time,” said Stephen Graham, who has since remarried. “The experiences of 20 years ago were traumatic for me, my daughter and my family. You never get past an experience like that.

“Every week you read about a family member being taken away unexpectedly. The worst cases are when there’s a disappearance,” Graham said. “I will have to relive my own personal tragedy with the trial of this individual. These monsters prey on the innocent and the families of the innocent.

“It will be worth the burden of the pain I have to go through so that this man will not be allowed to steal another innocent life.”

Kit Chambers, who grew up with Elaine Graham in Connecticut and moved with her to California, continues to grapple with the loss of her friend.

“I never experienced more pain in my life than when she died, and it will never go away,” Chambers said. “Everything that I’ve gone through since, sad or happy, I think of her.’

Since its formation in November 2001, the LAPD cold-case unit has closed the books on nearly a dozen investigations, though the Graham case marks the first arrest.

The seven detectives in the unit have focused on revisiting murders that occurred from 1960 to 1997, prioritizing them for follow-up investigations based on available evidence such as DNA, fingerprints and ballistics as well as cases in which suspects were identified but never prosecuted.

But even as the detectives have made headway, the department has been criticized for an inability to efficiently process forensic evidence, including a failure to process fingerprints from more than 6,000 unsolved slayings. The department also drew fire for mistakenly destroying evidence in more than 1,000 unsolved rape cases.

A digitized federal database that contains 44 million fingerprints was developed in 1999, allowing local law enforcement to search for matching prints in just two hours.

Los Angeles City Councilman Jack Weiss introduced a motion Tuesday seeking an explanation from the LAPD and the Police Commission -- including an accounting of how many prints have not been tested and how the department plans to deal with the problem. The measure also asks the council to consider full funding for analysis of DNA from rape cases.