In the quiet city of Lansing, Michigan, Edith Crossette, an 83-year-old white female, was known for her punctuality and devout attendance at the First Baptist Church. Her life, however, came to a tragic and violent end on February 14, 1981. On that day, she was discovered strangled to death outside, near the front porch of her home at 1510 W. St. Joseph.
The nature of her death sent a chill through the community, as it was one of several similar homicides targeting elderly women in the area at the time.
The investigation into a string of brutal attacks eventually led police to a man named Michael Darnell Harris. Born in Muskegon Heights, Harris had a troubled youth and had been living a transient lifestyle. He was arrested on December 7, 1982, in connection with an attack on another woman. Following his arrest, authorities in Lansing and other jurisdictions began to view him as a prime suspect in the series of rapes and strangulations of elderly women that had plagued the region between 1980 and 1982. Harris was subsequently convicted for several of these murders and sentenced to life in prison.
While Harris was a strong suspect in the murder of Edith Crossette due to the similarity of the crimes, no charges were ever formally brought against him for her death. In the years following his convictions for other murders, a dramatic turn of events cast doubt on the case against him. In the mid-2010s, DNA testing on evidence from one of the murders for which he was convicted came back as not being a match to Harris. This revelation prompted a review of his cases and raised serious questions about the evidence used to convict him. Despite these developments and the questions they raised, his other convictions were upheld, and he remains incarcerated. Edith Crossette's case officially remains unsolved, a cold case still seeking justice.
