Hmmmm...this is an interesting case. A couple of thoughts I have:
--The remains of both of the deceased look to be older (age-wise) than what I might term "children." Legally, they might have been under 18 and therefore considered minors/children, but they look to me to be teens. I think maybe they weren't so much "playing" with the dynamite as maybe picking it up to figure out what it was, or to see if maybe it was something they could use or get scrap parts from.
--The review of the Death Scenes book linked below refers to the deceased as "a young lover couple." Now, that's likely just speculation on the review author's part...but that review website is authored and maintained by Anil Aggrawal, who appears to be a professor of forensic medicine. Which makes me wonder if he is also judging them to be older than we might think of as "children" because of his medical knowledge and interpretation of the photos of the remains. (Hope that made sense.)
Book review (WARNING: photos from the book are posted on the review, starting from the very top--so don't click on the link if you don't want to see gory photos. There are only 3 short sentences about these two, though, and it doesn't say anything new about them--and the photos from this particular case aren't on there--so there's really no need to click unless you want to read about some of the other cases):
http://www.anilaggrawal.com/ij/vol_002_no_002/reviews/pb/page003a.html
--The ages of Brenda Jo Howell and Donald Baker would fit if the children were older/teens, but the Charley Project page for Donald Baker says that Howell was Edwards' sister-in-law. If true, then I think LE would have already run a comparison of the photo with known/suspected victims of Edwards, and ruled the female out as a match for Howell.
--And actually, I think they would have ruled the female out as a match for any known missing persons from that area, since LE would have photos of the missing. Which makes me think that no one knew they were "missing," per se. If the two deceased are in their teens, I wonder if perhaps they eloped (perhaps with their families' knowledge), so there was no reason to report them missing, so that might be why they weren't identified. There was such a mass migration of people going west to look for work in the stated time period--from the Dust Bowl, to the Depression, to people flocking to find work in the shipyards during WWII. A lot of young people probably left home to find work out west, and were never heard from again simply because it wasn't as easy to stay in contact back then. Or maybe they came west with their families, and then it was just assumed they had run off together, and that's why they weren't reported missing.
--I also wondered if the photos were even from California, since the police officer had photos from all over the US in his collection. However, his notations on the boy's photo say, "Found some dynamite near one of
our dams [emphasis mine]." The "our" makes me think it was a local (to him) case.
--The photos of both the boy's and the girl's remains appear to have either stickers or pixelated bars placed over the left bottom parts of the photos, partially obscuring words and/or part of the photo. Several of the other, non-related photos from the book have that as well. Now, I'm looking at these photos from a website, so it's possible that the website owner did that for some reason...so if anyone has the book, it would be interesting to know if the obscured places are in the original photos, as well. If so, I would love to know what's under there? Maybe the scrapbooking police officer blocked out the "from the police offices of" ID marks so that officers who sent him photos from other departments (which were probably not meant to leave the police files, ever) didn't get in trouble for sending him stuff? If so, that might give some clues about location and time period. Just speculation, though--anything (or nothing) might be under those obscured spots.
