The case
Lisa Mather was eighteen and spent her nights on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood. On January 12, 1985, her friends Anthony O’Farrill and Aimee Steckler saw her talking with a long-haired stranger there, shortly before police broke up the crowd. Lisa never came home.
In the months before, a man had lured two women from the Strip to Coldwater Canyon in the Hollywood Hills with promises of celebrity parties, then raped them. On January 28, 1985, police arrested Edmund Arne Matthews for those attacks. Known as “The Count” for the cape and tall hat he wore, Matthews was convicted of both rapes and sentenced to ten years. Lisa, however, was still missing, and nothing yet tied him to her.
On December 3, 1986, a hiker in Coldwater Canyon found skeletal remains, with a rope tied at the base of a tree and handcuffs hanging from a branch. Dental records showed it was Lisa, though her cause of death could not be determined. One of her friends picked Matthews out as the man she had been talking to, and he was charged with her murder, with a rape special-circumstance allegation. A Los Angeles jury convicted him of first-degree murder in 1991, and he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Case photographs
Where it happened
The Sunset Strip, where Lisa Mather was last seen in January 1985