A 46-year-old man was arrested in the stabbing death of two nuns in MS, police said.
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Rodney Earl Sanders, 46, of Kosciusko, is charged with two counts of capital murder stemming from the deaths of Sisters Margaret Held and Paula Merrill.
MBI Director Lt. Colonel Jimmy Jordan said investigators zeroed in on Sanders as a person of interest early in the investigation.
Margaret Held and Paula Merrill, both nurse practitioners, failed to show up for work Thursday at a clinic in Lexington, where they served one of the state’s poorest counties. The Mississippi Department of Public Safety said on Friday (26 August) that Rodney Earl Sanders of Kosciusko in Attala County, Mississippi was being held in an undisclosed detention centre awaiting a court appearance.
Plata said both nuns’ religious communities have asked that people pray for the killer or killers. “Right now, I don’t see no forgiveness on my heart”.
Diocesan chancellor Mary Woodward said the service would be “an opportunity for the diocesan community and friends to celebrate the lives of these two remarkable women”.
58, went to Lexington Medical Clinic on Friday in hopes of talking to grieving staff members, but a handwritten sign in the front door said the clinic was closed until Monday.
Sister Paula Merrill was found dead along with Sister Margaret Held in the MS home they shared.
Those who knew the two nuns described them as outgoing and compassionate. Sister Margaret Held and Merrill, two nuns who worked as nurses and helped the poor in rural MS, were found slai.
Held will be buried in Wisconsin and Merrill will be buried at her congregation’s headquarters in Nazareth, Kentucky.
The nuns were from Durant, in Holmes County, which is incidentally the seventh-poorest county in the US, according to the Census Bureau.
The sisters were loved by the doctors and residents in the area, and were the primary caregivers at the clinic, he said.
Merrill’s nephew opened up about his aunt’s murder.
After Hurricane Katrina left much of the town without power for weeks in 2005, the sisters allowed people to come to their house to cook because they had a gas stove, neighbor Patricia Wyatt-Weatherly said.
“We do more social work than medicine sometimes”, Merrill told The Journey. “The word “sister” has many meanings, and they fulfilled all of them”.
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“It’s just going to be a disaster”, she said.
