'I was a drunken young man': Cold case killer admits to fatally stabbing teen girl 49 years ago

In January 1976, Pauline Brazeau was seen leaving a restaurant in Calgary early in the morning. The RCMP said her body was found a few hours later on the city's west side. On March 3, 2025, Ronald James Edwards pleaded guilty to the involuntary manslaughter of Pauline Brazeau after 49 years.
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A 49-year-old murder case was closed in a Calgary courtroom, where both the killer and the victim's teenage daughter — who was just seven months old when her mother died — spoke publicly for the first time since the murder charges were announced.
Ronald James Edwards, now 75, was initially charged with murder but pleaded guilty to the involuntary manslaughter of Pauline Brazeau, a 16-year-old who was killed in 1976.
Justice Robert Armstrong of the Supreme Court of King's Bench accepted a joint motion by prosecutor Patrick Begg and defence lawyer Paul Milcharek for a sentence of 6 1/2 years in prison. Edwards will have to serve another 4 1/2 years in prison, including time served in custody.
Both Brazeau and Edwards are of Métis descent.
‘There are no memories’
“There are no memories. Nothing was shared between my mother and I, no laughter, no smiles. We didn’t get to experience the love of a mother and daughter,” Brazeau’s daughter, Tersey, said in a moving statement.
In 2023, Edwards, who was 26 at the time of the murder, was arrested at her home in Sanderet. The arrest was made after genetic testing and the use of genetic identification technology (IGG) by the RCMP and Calgary police.
‘I’m sorry’
Edwards, a small man with dark hair and a long grey beard, was given a chance to speak in court. With tears in his eyes, he apologized to Tersey, saying: “I’m sorry your mother was taken from you before you had a chance to know her. I was a drunk young man… I don’t think I had the ability to feel anything, I just forgot everything with alcohol.”
In 1976, Brazeau had just moved to Calgary from Yorkton, Saskatchewan, and had a baby. He was spending the night of January 8 and the early hours of January 9, 1976, with friends and family.
The group ate at Peppe’s Pizza on 17th Street. Brazeau lost his gloves and returned to the restaurant alone at about 3:30 a.m. to find them.
Details of the crime
Details of the crime were gleaned from an agreed statement read by prosecutor Bigg. According to the document, Edwards was driving around 17th Street and 2nd Street that night and picked up the victim in his car, thinking she was a streetwalker.
Edwards took her to a secluded road outside the city limits, where the two had “consensual sexual intercourse.” Edwards was drunk that night and "doesn't remember many details of what happened."
He admitted to using a four-inch knife and said he stabbed Brazo outside his car. Edwards drove away, thinking Brazo was dead.
A few hours later, two hunters found Brazo's body on Jumping Pound Road, about 20 kilometers west of the city.
Nine stab wounds
He was completely naked, with only a black jacket covering part of his body. His bloody clothes were found near the body. An autopsy showed that Brazo had defensive wounds on his hands and had been stabbed nine times.
The initial investigation was inconclusive and the case went cold. Police reexamined the case many times in the decades that followed.
In the mid-1990s, police developed a DNA profile of the suspect based on a semen sample taken from Brazo's body. In 2022, investigators used IGG technology to track down the killer's relatives and identified Edwards as the prime suspect.
"Very satisfying"
On October 17, 2022, police recovered a glass Edwards had used at the A&W restaurant in Sander and conducted a DNA test that matched the suspect's profile.
All five members of the Brazo family, who wrote moving statements, thanked the RCMP and Calgary Police for pursuing the case.
"It's very satisfying to hear that a 49-year-old case has been solved. This is not just the result of our efforts today, but also the efforts of the police who were at the scene in 1976, as well as the investigative teams in the 1990s and 2000s," said Capt. Farah Yeager of the RCMP's Historical Homicide Unit.