The Mousse Can Killer

In May 1986, Marjorie Deeble, a 55-year-old real estate agent, was found dead in her apartment on Green Street in Los Alamitos, California. She had been bound, sexually assaulted and strangled, and a can of hair mousse was found in her bed. Robert Mark Edwards, then 25, was dating her daughter. The case went unsolved for years.

Edwards later moved to Maui. From his apartment in Kihei he could watch the building where 67-year-old Muriel Delbecq, also a real estate agent, lived in a ground-floor condo; police later found binoculars positioned toward it. On January 25, 1993, he broke in, tied her up and killed her. His bloody palm prints and a footprint at the scene led to his arrest in early February, and investigators noticed how closely the attack matched the Deeble murder, down to the mousse can.

A Maui jury convicted Edwards in March 1994, and he was sentenced to five consecutive life terms plus 20 years. California then tried him for Marjorie Deeble’s murder in Santa Ana. After a first penalty jury deadlocked, a second jury chose death, and he was sentenced on September 9, 1998. The California Supreme Court upheld the sentence in 2013. California has not carried out an execution since 2006.