Saturday, Sept. 26, 1998
By Lora Hines
Staff writer
Divers
for the Sheriff’s Department elite underwater recovery team searched in the
South River on Friday for a small handgun that may be evidence in a murder case.
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They found street signs, a microwave oven and newspaper boxes, but not the gun.
Detectives believe the gun was used in 1995 to kill Martha Ellen Edge. Edge, who was 29, was found dead in the cab of a pickup parked at the boat ramp on the Cape Fear River near Fayetteville. She had been shot in the head.
In February 1997, Edge’s estranged husband, John David Edge, 38, was convicted of three counts of solicitation to commit murder and sentenced to 60 months in prison. Sheriff’s detectives said he was shopping for a hit man shortly before his wife was killed. But no one, including John Edge, has been charged with the killing.
Recently, detectives got information that the gun had been thrown in the South River at Hollow Bridge Road on the Cumberland-Sampson county line near Autryville. Divers from the sheriff’s Search and Rescue Team spent Thursday and Friday searching the murky water.
“The murder weapon is always important in a homicide case,” Capt. Freddy Johnson said. “We’ve still got the bullets from her. If we get the gun, we can match the bullets. There are a lot of things you can try to put together.” Johnson said divers would check again because the information came from a reliable source.
“We’re actively working that case. We work all of our cold cases,” he said.
John Edge tried to hire a hit man twice in December 1994 and once in February 1995 to kill his wife, detectives said.
The Edges were separated and she was living at the mobile home of Johnny Wayne Cashwell of 5675 Monroe St. at the time of her death.
Cashwell told lawmen that he had lent his pickup to Martha Edge.
He last saw her when she drove to pick up her sons, then ages 9 and 10 months, in Stedman.
Edge told detectives that his wife never arrived at his mother’s house on Concord Church Road to pick up the children.
