Seventeen-year-old Annette Edwards vanished the night of August 21, 1978, from the Anderson area of Shasta County. She was reported missing after being seen walking toward a local fireworks area; her remains were found three days later down a steep embankment about two miles from her home. An autopsy documented catastrophic blunt-force trauma to the face and skull: twin fractures splitting the upper jaw, bone shards driven through the eye sockets into the brain, and basal skull fractures. The position of her clothing and other physical evidence indicated a violent sexual assault immediately before the fatal fall from a bridge outside Anderson.

Shasta County detectives linked the scene to a string of assaults in Redding and Anderson. Attention turned to 23-year-old Cottonwood mechanic Darrell Keith Rich after he discovered two other victims and failed a polygraph; he was arrested on August 23. In taped interviews he confessed to killing Edwards and three other women, led officers to the murder weapon and other evidence, and no additional suspects were developed. A jury convicted him in January 1981 of four counts of first-degree murder, including Edwards’s, and related sex-crime counts; the convictions and a death verdict were later upheld. Edwards’s family may still be seeking answers or remembering her; did anyone in the Anderson area know Annette or notice anything about that night?