Police Probe Links In Murder of Women

Police probe links in murder of women

YPSILANTI - Police say they are looking into similarities between the apparent murder of an 85-year-old woman this week and the murder last January of a 91-year-old woman.

Marjorie Upson, 85, was found dead Wednesday morning by her daughter and granddaughter, and police said that, due to the “condition of the scene and the victim,” they were treating the death as a homocide.

Deputy Police Chief Daniel Heliker would not say today what kind of wounds Upson had suffered, and said he did not know if she had been sexually assaulted. An autopsy was scheduled at University Hospital this morning.

Heliker said the autopsy would also reveal how long Mrs. Upson had been dead before she was found. Relatives had last heard from her on Monday, and checked on her Wednesday after not hearing from her Tuesday.

Heliker said that once the autopsy is completed later today the department will release more details of the murder and will set up a special task force to handle the investigation.

YPSILANTI POLICE are being assisted in the investivation by officers from the Michigan State Police Crime Lab who were asked to examine the scene of the crime Wednesday.

Heliker said the home at 309 W. Cross St., where Mrs. Upson had lived for about 43 years, appeared to have been broken into. The Upson home is located several blocks from where Florence Bell was murdered in her home at 36 S. Summit St. last January. Her home had been broken into, and her throat slashed. Mrs. Bell had been raped, beaten, and choked in a prior attack in her home 19 months before she was killed.

Heliker said police will be pulling files on suspects in Mrs. Bell’s murder for comparison to this week’s murder. The January murder remains unsolved, but police suspected David E. Brown, 24, of Grand Rapids, who was serving a 30-year prison sentence at Southern Michigan Prison at Jackson for an assault on an 81-year-old Grand Rapids woman. He escaped from University Hospital in Ann Arbor last Oct. 31, and remains at large.