Preliminary Court Exam Today For Suspect In Elderly Killings

Preliminary court exam today for suspect in elderly killings

By BONNIE DeSIMONE 

NEWS STAFF REPORTER

A prime suspect in two murders of elderly women in Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor is scheduled for a pre-liminary examination in Jackson this morning.

Nineteen-year-old Michael Harris was arrested in Jackson last week and charged with sexually assaulting a 68-year-old woman. The beating was the third such incident in Jackson over the last three months.

Harris was arraigned last Monday in 13th District Court. Bond was set at $100,000.

Detectives in Lansing, Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, facing a series of unsolved beating and homicides of elderly women in their cities, have been in contact with Jackson police since mid-November.  In each case, an older woman was sexually assaulted and choked in her home.

Ypsilanti resident Margorie Upson, 85, was raped and strangled to death on Sept. 29. Louise Koebnick, 84, of Ann Arbor, was murdered in similar fashion three days later.

YPSILANTI POLICE are less sanguine about connecting Harris to the stabbing murder of 91-year-old Florence Bell last Jan. 8. David E. Brown, an escaped convict now being held in California on a murder charge, continues to be high on the police’s list of suspects in that case.

Both the Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti police departments have indicated their intention to send detectives to Jackson to interview Harris after receiving an analysis of evidence from state police crime labs in Lansing and Northville.

Four elderly Lansing women were murdered and four more attacked between August, 1980 and August, 1982. Lansing police have definitively placed Harris in that city during the two-year wave of assaults.

Harris, originally of Muskegon, is believed to have moved to Jackson in October. He was living in a temporary shelter for men and receiving general assistance at the time of his arrest.