Few leads in 89-year-old's strangling

CASCADE TOWNSHIP, Mich. (WOOD) - More than half-a-year after his 89-year-old sister was strangled at a retirement home, Lyle Morrison is growing frustrated with the lack of progress.
 
But his frustration is not with Kent County sheriff's detectives, who are working on the case full-time.
 
"This is where we are," Lyle Morrison said on Friday. "I don't think anybody felt that we'd be here almost seven months after it occurred."
 
Mary Morrison was found July 19 strangled with an electrical cord in her apartment at Sentinel Pointe Retirement Community. At first, relatives said the home had been ransacked, but police later told them it was not.
 
"We have people we're looking at closer than other people," said Kent County Sheriff's Lt. Ron Gates. "But to say we're focusing on one person would not be correct."
 
Detectives won't say whether the victim was robbed, and they haven't ruled out the possibility that it was an inside job.
 
That wouldn't surprise Lyle Morrison, who was told the killer used a key to lock the deadbolt after strangling his sister.
 
"For somebody to come in in the morning, who maybe knew her pattern, had a key, went over and wrapped an electric cord around her neck and killed her is still so astoundingly horrid to us that she never leaves our mind," he said. "The community is as anxious as we are to get this solved and be able to put it behind us and have the person or persons who perpetrated this situation put away, and we can have closure, but there won't be closure until that happens."
 
Morrison said Kent County detectives have worked closely with him. They tracked down every funeral home guest whose name he didn't recognize.
 
They told him about the strange visitor, shortly after the death.
 
A well-dressed woman in a green Lexus drove up to Sentinel Pointe, walked in and said, "I want to see the room where the lady was killed," Morrison said. "Who was she? She got in her car and drove away."
 
Detectives say they'd like to find her, though they don't expect it would be a promising lead.
 
"I get the feeling sometimes that someday there'll be a guy in a bar someplace who's going to have a couple beers and he's going to say to the guy next to him: 'You won't believe this, I killed a lady and I got away with it.'"
 
Perhaps that, he said, would lead to the killer.