This photo is of Edie Marie Clark Montgomery’s first headstone

This photo is of Edie Marie Clark Montgomery’s first headstone. Edie was brutally stabbed in her home in Ferndale in 1980. She was 18 years old. Her murder is still unsolved. I first learned about Edie this summer on Facebook of all places. Chrey Nelson, who works as an Identification Technician for the Whatcom County Sheriff’s Department, made a post about Edie and her crumbling headstone in a local Facebook group.

Edie’s case has been recently reopened. Detective Derek Jones is the lead investigator and Chrey is assisting. Through their work on the cold case, they developed a fondness for Edie. As this affinity grew, Chrey made a pilgrimage to visit Edie’s grave at Woodlawn Cemetery in Ferndale. It would have been Edie’s 63rd birthday that day. Chrey was heartbroken by what she found.

Edie’s headstone was a free, stamped concrete plaque provided by the cemetery as a temporary marker. Families without the means to afford anything else would leave these in lieu of permanent memorialization. It was stamped with her married name, “Edie Montgomery,” and the date of her burial: 1/14/1980. Forty-five years had gone by and what Chrey found was broken and barely legible, with grass growing through a large crack. A few days later Chrey returned with tools to clean up the headstone. But it still didn’t do justice to this poor girl’s memory. And Edie needs justice.

So, Detective Jones started a GoFundMe page to raise money for a new stone for Edie. Chrey got to work making sure Edie’s story got told; that her voice, silenced so young, was heard again. That her memory was properly honored. Of course, Chrey took the campaign for Edie to Facebook, the digital town square. This is where I started to develop my own fondness for Edie.

Comments were accumulating quickly on the post, almost a hundred in all. As a community, we had forgotten Edie Clark for a long time. All her family were gone, some of them buried near her at Woodlawn Cemetery. Any recollections of her were faded and dim. But some locals reading the post were moved to comb through distant memories to share tidbits about Edie. Most of them sad. She was poor, living in real poverty. The school bus picked her up in front of a rundown shack. Her clothes were always unwashed, her hair uncombed. She was skinny and went hungry most of the time. It is likely that she was developmentally delayed. In school she was segregated in special ed classrooms, bullied by her peers and mistreated at home. A few people remembered her as gentle and kind whenever someone gave her a chance. One person remembered the way she clutched her books to her chest and kept her eyes downcast as she got on the school bus. At 18 years old, she married a man 12 years her senior. An “odd man who also treated her badly.” A few months after their marriage, Edie was found stabbed to death at home, in the trailer park where they lived.

It was clear that Chrey’s advocacy for Edie was having an effect on our community. When the staff at Woodlawn Cemetery learned about Edie’s story, they took it upon themselves to put her broken headstone to rights as best they could. A bundle of lavender was left for Edie. And the GoFundMe page started to receive donations. Not a lot, but enough. Especially if a headstone could be provided at wholesale.

Edie’s story, and Chrey’s passionate advocacy, moved me to tears as I read the post and comments. My first career was supporting adults with cognitive challenges – work that continues to inform how I engage the world. Had she lived, Edie could have been one of my clients. To my core I believe the sacred trust Wildflower Funeral Concepts carries includes doing right by our dead. And Wildflower is in the heart of Ferndale. This is my community. I was in a unique position to help. So, I dropped a comment in the post offering a new headstone for Edie at cost, no markup.

A few weeks later, Chrey, Detective Jones, and I sat down to design a new headstone for Edie. Just last week, it was set. And the good folks at Woodlawn Cemetery, Mary, Justin, Devin, and Shawna waived their fee and set it for free. With the support of community there was nearly twice as much money donated than needed to get Edie a new headstone. Detective Jones made sure the remaining funds went to a perfect cause, one that honors Edie’s story, The Lindsey Baum Foundation. (I cried again when I read about Lindsey.)

Edie’s life was tragic. And our collective forgetting these last 45 years maybe even more so. Yet, I witnessed the power of Edie’s story, told anew, to bring out our best nature. Her story, lovingly amplified by Chrey and Detective Jones, has the ability to call forth our humanity. We live in a world that works to divide us. Ironically, often by same medium that is spreading Edie’s story, social media. And it frequently feels like we are losing our collective humanity, on both sides of the divide. Maybe Edie’s legacy is to help us transcend these manufactured divisions and rediscover what is common to all of us. Maybe justice and our humanity can be served by remembering Edie.

If you have any information about Edie Marie Clark Montgomery’s death, please contact Detective Derek Jones at the Whatcom County Sheriff’s Department, (360) 778-6600.