Rose drew a heart in blue ink around his school photo in her Gardener Middle School yearbook and scrawled "Billy" beneath his school-boy smirk.īy the eighth grade, their friendship was firm. They played tag and built tree forts, dug tunnels and romped through the woods in and around Lansing's southern parks. They shared a school, a home room, teachers and a friendship that grew as they grew. Often her conversations were with Billy Brown, who became her fifth-grade classmate at Maplegrove Elementary. "Anytime you picked up the phone downstairs it was hot - warm from her ear." "Any number she could get, she would call," Markey said. She'd talk for hours to friends.Įven friends of friends. Rose - whose parents divorced when she was 4 - earned mostly A's and was unbeatable in fourth- grade spelling bees.įor most of her growing-up years, Rose spent more time on the phone than doing almost anything. They lived on Hughes Road," Rose's youngest brother Jami Larner recalls. "We talked to them later and found out they were the Browns. Rose teamed with her brothers against the kids they'd never met. She grabbed a stone from the field near her Miller Road home and chucked it at a pack of boys across the way.
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More: Serial killers, unsolved homicides: A look at some of Lansing's infamous cases That's just about how old Rose was when she met up with Billy Brown for a rock-throwing battle beneath a tidy row of power lines. 7, 1993, the day police say she was strangled and dismembered, her body burned to hide the homicide.´ Her story is of triumph and trouble. This is the story of Rose Larner's 18 years. "If she were kidnapped for ransom, the kidnappers would pay me to take her back." "She could be a headache and a half," her mother, Rose Markey said. Rose was a big-hearted pain who craved attention and nearly everyone who knew her knew it. The boys liked Rose, and she liked them right back.ĭiagnosed in her early teens as hyperactive, she stopped moving only to sleep, take three showers a day and talk on the telephone. She was mouthy and streetwise, fearless and friendly.
Rose traipsed about town doing who-knows-what with who-knows-whom. She was a whirlwind with a hair- trigger temper. Her family called her "The Vampire," a name that fit the wiry 18- year-old l ike her $60 bluejeans. Rose Larner slumbered all day and roamed all night with a rugged band of buddies on the streets of Lansing's southwest side. Part 1: Who was Rose? Lansing teen tested the limits
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9, 10 and 11 of 1997, several weeks before John Ortiz-Kehoe went on trial for Larner's murder. These three stories on the 1993 murder of Rose Larner were originally published on Feb.