Crime Immemorial

On July 9th, 1970, in Lansing, Michigan, sixteen-year-old Laurie Murninghan was working her part-time job at Gallaghers Gift and Antiques Shop when an armed assailant stormed through the front door demanding money.

The robber first grabbed at store owner Mrs. Gallagher, hitting her in the head with his pistol. The impact caused the firearm to discharge accidentally into the ceiling, at which point the perpetrator panicked, thinking he had shot the woman. He quickly swiped a paltry sixty-four dollars out of the cash register, then collared sixteen-year-old Laurie and forced her at gunpoint out of the store. Witnesses reported seeing the kidnapper putting her into a blue and white car.

Mrs. Gallagher was able to give a description of the suspect when she regained consciousness: she claimed he was a light-skinned black man in his mid-twenties, roughly six feet tall, who sported a mustache and a goatee, and wore dark slacks and a yellow knit shirt.

The whereabouts of Laurie Murninghan would not be discovered for more than a week. On July 20th, three boys out looking for bottles in the woods south of Mason came across her lifeless body. Her remains had been dumped approximately fifteen miles from the location from which she had been abducted. Though her remains were too degraded to determine whether she had been raped, the coroner ruled her cause of death was strangulation.

A composite sketch was drawn up from the description that Mrs. Gallagher had given of the assailant, and she was further able to pick his photo out of a book of mug shots. The suspect she identified did have prior convictions for kidnapping, and police found it promising that his fingerprints were discovered in the pharmacy next door to the gift shop, though not at the gift shop itself.

Unfortunately, the investigation’s case against this individual was hindered by the fact that Mrs. Gallagher failed to pick him out of a lineup, and the further revelation that his mother claimed he was with her on the day the crime had occurred.

According to some sources, this suspect was a known drug informant who was arrested in Flint, Michigan on an unrelated rape charge only a few days after Laurie Murninghan’s murder. The suspect later reportedly served ten months for the rape charge, and while in jail, allegedly confessed to killing Laurie.

The homicide investigation was reopened in 2001 at the behest of the Murninghan family, and Laurie’s body was exhumed. Investigators were able to recover a few hairs that did not belong to Laurie, and set about comparing the hairs to those of their prime suspect, but it does not appear that the results were conclusive enough to warrant an arrest, as no further updates on the case have been evident.

Oddly, other sources claim that the main suspect in the crime died in 1992, though it is unclear if this individual was the same man referred to in the matter of the 2001 hair samples. The case, therefore, remains frustratingly unresolved.