A man suspected of stabbing two nuns to death in their rural Mississippi home confessed to the killings on Saturday, police said.
Rodney Earl Sanders, 46, was arrested on Friday and charged with two counts of capital murder in connection with the deaths of Sister Margaret Held and Sister Paula Merrill, 68, whose bodies were discovered on Thursday at their shared home in Durant, Mississippi, a town of 3,000 people that had gone years without a murder.
“Sanders was developed as a person of interest early on in the investigation,” State Bureau of Investigation Director Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Jordan said in a statement.
Sanders has a history with the police. In 1986 he served six years in prison for an armed robbery in Mississippi and last year he was convicted of a felony driving under the influence of alcohol.
He had been on probation since September last year, Mississippi Department of Corrections spokeswoman Grace Simmons Fisher said.
An officer went to the women’s home around 10am on Thursday for a wellness check after they did not report for work at the Lexington Medical Clinic near Durant.
The door to the one-story home was open and the officer found the bodies inside.
The authorities said they believed Sanders stole the victims’ car, a blue Toyota Corolla, before abandoning it about 1km away in Holmes County, about 105km north of Jackson, Mississippi.
Sanders, from Kosciusko, Mississippi, lived about 48km from where the murders occurred.
Merrill was from the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth, based in Kentucky.
Held was from the School Sisters of St Francis, in Milwaukee, which said it thanked local and state law enforcement, but had many unanswered questions.
“There is still much we do not know about the suspect and the circumstances that led to this brutal and senseless crime,” the order said in a statement.
Willie March, the Holmes County sheriff, said late on Saturday that Sanders had confessed after an extensive interrogation.
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