Woman Killed By Mackinac Island Killer Who Was Never Caught
When most people think of Mackinac Island, usually fudge, bicycles, carriage rides, and the ferry come to mind, the phrase Mackinac Island Killer usually doesn't come up.
Michigan's Mackinac Island
I think it's pretty safe to say that Mackinac Island is one of the happiest places in the state of Michigan.
No one makes better fudge than what comes from Mackinac Island which is one of Michigan's biggest tourist attractions that is not only known around the state, and country but all around the world.
With all the horse-drawn carriages and bicycles traveling around the island, Fort Mackinac, and the Governor's summer home to visit it is hard to imagine a brutal murder happened at Michigan's happiest place, but it did.
Murder On Mackinac Island
On July 24, 1960, a widow named Frances Lacey was found brutally murdered on Mackinac Island. Lacey was found under a bush with her shirt pulled up to her shoulders, her skirt pulled to her hips, and underwear around her neck where she had been strangled to death.
The death of the 49-year-old from Dearborn, Michigan, shocked everyone from Mackinac Island all the way to the city of Detroit. Lacey visited the island to spend time with her daughter and son-in-law but never made it from the hotel to their cottage.
You would think a crime of this magnitude would have been noticed by someone seeing how the island was packed with people for the yacht races that were going on that weekend. According to Mackinac police, no one saw or heard anything and her body wasn't found until 4 days after she went missing. To this day this is still an unsolved murder.
Lacey's murder has been a cold case for 63 years but one author by the name of Rod Sadler who has written a book called "Grim Paradise - The Cold Case Search For The Mackinac Island Killer" thinks advanced DNA technology could lead to the identity of the killer similar to how it did in the case of the Golden State Killer. You can take a deeper dive into Sadler's book here.
