A Look Back: 1960 - Girl, 3, helped catch mother’s killer

It was 3-year-old Heidi Haas who would help catch the man who shot and killed her mother, putting five bullets in her back in the middle of their Costa Mesa living room on March 2, 1960, as the preschooler looked on.

“A bad man hurt mommie and drove away in a white car,” Heidi told Costa Mesa police after the witnessing shooting, the Los Angeles Times reported in an article dated March 6, 1960.

An intruder talked himself into 29-year-old homemaker Nancy Haas’ house on Princeton Drive the day of the shooting. Posing as potential buyer of the Haas home, which was up for sale, the man killed the homemaker with a .22-caliber pistol as she ran away after he tried to chain her to a bed.

Haas’ husband, Donald Haas, 30, was working at a nearby aircraft manufacturing plant when the shooting occurred.

The information Haas’ eldest daughter, Heidi, provided to police about the car her mother’s killer was driving would help lead them to Robert Elton Edwards, a 19-year-old college dropout from Modesto.

Police found Edwards in Phoenix, Ariz., a few days after the shooting. He was driving a stolen white 1959 Plymouth Fury.

Edwards also was wanted in Bakersfield in connection with a robbery in which he chained a housewife to a bed, the Times reported March 4, 1960.

In both the Bakersfield robbery and Haas’ killing, the perpetrator targeted homes that had for-sale signs in the yards.

Edwards quickly confessed to the murder and was extradited back to Orange County.

Edwards pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison for Haas’ murder.

“I’m not doing you any favors,” Judge Robert Gardner told Edwards as he handed down the life sentence, the Times reported on June 19, 1960.

“It would be easier to send you to the gas chamber because the idea of sentencing a 19-year-old to a lifetime in prison is not easy,” Gardner said. “I have wrestled with myself for the past 24 hours and even longer to decide this.”