Volume 9 · Chapter 10
The Count
Edmund Arne Matthews
Victim: Lisa Ann Mather
Case at a glance
- When
- January 12, 1985
- Where
- Sunset Strip, West Hollywood, and Coldwater Canyon, Hollywood Hills, Los Angeles, California
- Perpetrator
- Edmund Arne Matthews
- Victim
- Lisa Ann Mather
- Outcome
- Convicted of first-degree murder in 1991 and sentenced to life without parole; earlier sentenced to 10 years for two rapes
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.
Read the full story
This case is told in full in True Crime Case Histories, Volume 9 by Jason Neal.
Get Volume 9 on AmazonCase photographs
2 photos
Where it happened
Why this case
“Matthews used the same canyon, and the same lure, more than once. I find that the most troubling part of Lisa’s story, more than the nearly two years she was missing. Her friends noticed who she was talking to that night, and their memory mattered when the evidence was thin.”
— Jason Neal, author of True Crime Case Histories
