The Sentinel-Record 9-21-2004

A daughter’s plea

Dear editor:

I would like to start out by saying that it is hard for me to write this letter. I have been avoiding the news channels and I have agreed to speak with only one newspaper, this one. I am the daughter of the late Linda Edwards, the lady who was brutally murdered 28 years ago. I have a handful of memories of her before she was murdered. Thank God I could not remember the time she came up missing until about a year later. My life as a child was challenging (if you were to ask my Dad, he probably would say that is an understatement!). My life now is wonderful. I am a grown mother of three. I look down on my children and see their need for me, how I am everything to them. I cannot even imagine that time in my life, how I felt, what was going through my mind when my mother was missing.

Linda Edwards was a person, she was my mother, and this could have been your mother. Even if she were your mother, what happened to her was not right and my feelings would still be the same.

Someone said that they were scared, they have a family now, they are afraid someone would find out it was them that spoke up about the murder. I have a family, too, and I am only guessing that we, you and I, believe in the same God. What will be your excuse to God at Heaven’s gate?

I know you are out there; you know enough to put this person away; please do it.

   Kim Smoke
Bismarck