Before murdering and mutilating Sherry Kennedy and Catharine Kalberer near Montgomery Mall in 1970, Thomas Francis Edwards spent approximately seven years incarcerated at the Patuxent Institution, a “correctional mental health center,” in Jessup. Edwards was a Bethesda native who exhibited violent and antisocial tendencies early in life when he lived in a neighborhood near the intersection of Bradley Boulevard and Arlington Road.

Opened in 1955, the Patuxent Institution was originally established to “insure public safety through the psychotherapeutic treatment of ‘Defective Delinquents.’” Edwards was first incarcerated there after being repeatedly expelled from schools and committing armed robbery and attempted assault in at age17 in 1962.

Thomas Francis Edwards was paroled from Patuxent Institution in 1969. Upon his release, he found employment at a gas station at the corner of Democracy Boulevard and Westlake Drive in Bethesda. The propinquity of his employer and his felonious record immediately raised flags among Montgomery County Police Detectives when they investigated the January 18, 1970 murder of fourteen year old Sherry Kennedy and the January 28th murder of Catharine Kalberer, both found within walking distance of Edwards’ place of work.

Upon executing a search warrant for Edwards’ residence, police found a number of disturbing, if circumstantial, pieces of evidence. These included written descriptions of female customers of the gas station where Edwards worked. Police also found numerous styrofoam mannequin-style heads, adorned as female, with ice picks inserted into the back of the necks. Sherry Kennedy had been found dead with an ice pick protruding from the back of her neck.

According to Retired Montgomery County Detective Jack Toomey, who worked the case in the 1980’s, a young Edwards once snuck up on a girls’ slumber party in a backyard tent in his neighborhood and cut off a girl’s ponytail while she slept. Mr. Toomey confirms that Edwards’ fetish was the back of girls’/women’s necks, in particular pulling up a ponytail to expose the flesh.

The following is excerpted from a Los Angeles Times article from December 12, 1986, written by Mark Landsbaum. In the excerpt, ‘Conley’ is the prosecutor:

Edwards was ‘Bethesda Butcher’ NOT ‘Beltway Butcher’

Just five days after Thomas Francis Edwards murdered Catherine Kalberer at Spring Lake Apartments in Bethesda, another woman, Donna Sue Oglesby, eighteen, was murdered in an Alexandria, Virginia apartment building. Oglesby had been stabbed and slashed repeatedly with a pair of scissors. 

News media was rife with speculation that the three murders were connected, dubbing the supposed common killer the ‘Beltway Butcher.’ Police knew differently. Thomas Francis Edwards had been re-incarcerated at Patuxent Institution on January 30th, and could not have committed the February 3rd murder of Donna Sue Oglesby. Law enforcement was not, however, in a position to release this information to the press, as Edwards was not being indicted for the Maryland murders. Oglesby’s killer remains unknown. There never was a ‘Beltway Butcher.’

A Maryland Reprobate In California Court

Prior to his arrest during a nationwide manhunt for the killing of Vanessa Iberri and the attempted murder of her friend, Kelly Cartier, both twelve, in California on September 19, 1981, Edwards holed up in a College Park, MD Holiday Inn. From his room, Edwards called one of his counselors from Patuxent Institution for advice. Law enforcement acted on this information to apprehend him, according to a September 29, 1981 Associated Press article in the (Fredericksburg, VA) “Free Lance Star” newspaper. 

Thomas Francis Edwards was subsequently extradited to California and found guilty of murder in 1983. In 1986, after convening two different sentencing juries, he received the death penalty. The execution never happened. He lived on San Quentin’s death row until his death by natural causes in early 2009. His attorneys filed a series of appeals challenging the legitimacy of his sentence, but not his guilt.

As reported first on Bethesda.com, Montgomery County Police Cold Case Detectives received a positive match for Sherry Kennedy’s DNA from a small blood stain in Edwards’ jacket seized as evidence in 1970. The results of that DNA test came back just one week before Edwards’ death. Police technically closed both the Kennedy and Kalberer cases and notified surviving family of both victims. The general public remained in the dark about these developments until the Bethesda.com story of January 25.

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