Rockford woman strangled with neckties in 1966 murder mystery

ROCKFORD, Ill. (WTVO) – On the morning of June 9, 1966, an unknown assailant carefully slipped out of a home in far-north Rockford and disappeared, leaving a woman dead inside.

“She had been beaten up pretty bad,” said author and folklorist Kathi Kresol. “And she had been strangled with the neckties.”

The victim was 46-year-old Lauretta Lyons. She was attacked inside the Latham Road home she owned with her husband, Edwin, after walking her three poodles.

“She was supposed to meet him at noon to go to lunch, and she didn’t show,” Kresol said.

At 7:30 a.m., Edwin left for Rockford Drop Forge Company, where he worked as a chemist. It was a drizzly day, and Lauretta left to walk the dogs about an hour later, planning to meet her husband at the business they owned together before grabbing a bite.

Worried when Lauretta didn’t show, Edwin returned home. There, he’s greeted with the reason she did not kept their date.

“He walks in, and he finds her by the door, face down,” Kresol said. “And she’s got blood around her and neckties. And the puppies are all laying on her. And they’re still wet from the walk.”

The business Edwin and Lauretta owned together, a pet an accessory store called the Lyons Den, was located on Mulberry Street in downtown Rockford.

“She loved her pets,” Kresol said. “She loved her little puppies.”

As a member of Emmanuel Episcopal Church, the Rockford Women’s Club and the Rockford chapter of the Order of the Eastern Star, Lauretta also spent a lot of her time volunteering throughout the city. She had no known enemies.

Investigators learned that because nothing was taken from the house and the Lyons Den was not targeted, robbery was not the motive for the murder.

“They think that what happened [was] she didn’t lock the door,” Kresol added. “They lived out on Latham Road. Nobody ever went out there. And this was in the ‘60s. Somebody snuck in her house and was waiting for her when she returned.”

‘They always look at the husband’

As in almost every murder investigation, police start with those close to the victim and work outward.

In Lauretta’s case, that meant the spotlight was on Edwin Lyons. At first, detectives weren’t ready to accept his claim that he left for work and came back and found his wife dead. After all, Lauretta was strangled with his neckties, and he was the one who found her.

But, Edwin was cleared as a suspect when his alibi checked out. Based on the timeline of that day, police determined he wasn’t involved. Edwin also had no reason to kill his wife.

“The couple was OK,” Kresol added. “Their relationship was good. So they dropped him as a suspect pretty quickly. But they always look at the husband.”

A ‘trophy’ and a strange car

A telephone repairman and neighbors reported seeing Lauretta walking her dogs the morning of June 9. Witnesses told police that it wasn’t out of the ordinary to see her and her poodles, even on a rainy, dreary day.

But, there was something inside the home that had investigators puzzled. They noticed that one of the neckties clenched in Lauretta’s hand had a distinct feature.

“The tip of it had actually been cut off with a pair of scissors,” Kresol said. “And they never found that part. So, their theory was that somebody took it as a trophy.”

A dark red or maroon Ford Galaxie that was parked in Lauretta’s driveway was also something neighbors had never seen before. Neither she nor Edwin drove a Galaxie, and the couple almost never got visitors during the day.

Because Edwin and Lauretta lived in a remote area during a time when there were no surveillance cameras or advanced security systems, it was likely easy for someone to commit murder without being detected.

“She got away from him and got to the door,” Kresol said. “And that’s when he attacked her again. That’s when he killed her. There was furniture knocked over. There was evidence of a struggle. She fought her attacker.”

A suspect emerges

When Edwin returned home and found his wife’s lifeless body, he immediately called police an ambulance. But they were too late. Lauretta was already dead.

In the days following the murder, detectives had dozens of leads, but none panned out. All they had was a theory that someone hid in Lauretta’s house and attacked her when she returned. But, it was just a theory—until it grew legs in the form of their prime suspect, a man who had already done time for killing his wife.

“They find him pretty quickly because of the second case,” Kresol said.

About a month after Lauretta is killed, a Rockford woman named Charlene O’Brien was abducted from the Colonial Village Mall.

O’Brien, 27, stopped to buy some undergarments and was eager to get home to her young family.

“[She] goes back out to her car, and it doesn’t start,” Kresol said.

That’s when a man approaches and offers to help. Instead, he puts a gun to Charlene’s side, forces her and kidnaps her. He dumps her in a field off of Perryville Road after severely beating and robbing her.

“And he leaves her for dead,” Kresol said. “But she wasn’t dead. She lays out there for 40 hours.”

O’Brien’s attacker was 43-year-old Sanford Harris, a man who in 1941 killed his wife in Detroit and was paroled after serving 20 years.

In Rockford, Harris was living with a woman he called his 20-year-old common-law wife. Police later learned she was only 15 years old. Investigators also uncovered another shocking piece of information.

Sanford Harris owned a maroon 1957 Ford Galaxie, the same car witnesses saw in Lauretta Lyons’ driveway a few weeks earlier. Police appeared to have their man.

But then the case hit a wall. 

“They couldn’t put him in there definitely, in that area,” Kresol said. “And for sure they didn’t find other things that put him in that house.”

Twenty years too late

Sanford Harris died while serving a 75 to 90-year prison sentence for kidnapping Charlene O’Brien. He was never charged with the murder Lauretta Lyons. The case remains cold.

Experts say had Lauretta’s murder been committed today, technology would have provided police with better tools to preserve the crime scene and make an arrest. 

“Nowadays they would do a lot of DNA collection and other evidence collection that maybe would have led to something if the person was arrested at a later time,” said defense attorney Eli Granger.

But DNA would not become a common tool in criminal cases until 1986, 20 years too late for Lauretta’s family. And even if evidence has survived, it may simply be too late to connect it to her killer. 

“Because we have all this technology and DNA,” Granger said, “[it can be useful], whether it’s a fingerprint or DNA that was left over six, seven eight, sometimes 10 years ago. But into the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s, not so much.”

Aftermath

Kresol said it’s frustrating when a case like Lauretta’s goes unsolved because justice is expected to be served.

“We like to watch detective shows were in a half an hour or an hour the case is solved [and} the person is in jail where they belong,” she said. “But that’s not this case. This has been going since 1966. That’s a long time for this family not to have their answers.”

After Lauretta’s murder, Edwin moved to Dubuque, Iowa, and remarried. He died in 1999.

Anyone with information about the murder of Lauretta Lyons is urged to call the Winnebago County Sheriff’s Office at 815-319-6400 or Crime Stoppers at 815-963-7867.