Carol Richardson recalls vividly the summer a Lawrence teenager raped and beat to death his 80-year-old neighbor.

It happened Aug. 5, 1984, in a quaint, two-bedroom house on Tennessee Street, a few doors away from where Richardson’s own elderly mother lived.

The recent double slaying of an elderly Lawrence couple refreshed the feelings of grief, disbelief and fear among friends and neighbors of Marguerite Vinyard, who was killed that August day almost 18 years ago.

“My mom would never lock the door because we came from a farm, and they just didn’t lock the doors then,” Richardson said. “Right after that, I made her start.”

In the weeks after Vinyard’s death, as police hunted down hundreds of leads, family and neighbors were on edge, waiting for a break in the case.

The wait wasn’t long. Just 17 days passed before Lawrence Police arrested Donald Eugene Alexander, a recent Lawrence High School graduate who had lived directly behind Vinyard on 21st Street.

As in the recent shooting of George “Pete” Wallace and Wyona Chandlee, both 71, the suspect was a young man who lived nearby. He was jailed about a week after the slayings.

Although the elderly more often are targeted by financial scam artists and predatory salespeople than by violent criminals, recent decades have seen several of Lawrence’s senior community slain, often at the hands of people looking for money. In 1984, Vinyard was the fifth such victim in seven years.

Lawrence Police always have been quick to solve the crimes. But that only eases slightly the psychological trauma the brutal acts and ensuing investigations inflict on neighbors and family members, who also must endure painful trials.

“It’s extremely draining on everyone,” said Dolores Moseley, victim-witness coordinator with the Douglas County District Attorney’s Office. “The waiting is the hard part.”

An emotional ordeal

Once authorities make an arrest, wounds that may have begun to heal open again when family and friends see the suspect in court.

“I think it suddenly becomes real when they see the actual person in the courtroom,” Moseley said. “There’s a whole variety of emotions that they’re going through at that time.”

Relatives of Wallace and Chandlee have maintained a low profile. However, in a Douglas County courtroom on Thursday, when Damien Lewis, the 22-year-old man charged with the couple’s slayings, approached the stand for the first time, several family members clutched hands and appeared shaken.

“You’re still in shock,” Moseley said. “You’re angry. You have thousands of questions going through your mind, and probably the main one is ‘Why?'”

Neither of Vinyard’s two sisters, one of whom discovered Vinyard’s body just hours after her death, is alive today to recount the emotions that engulfed them at the time. But neighbors and other Lawrence residents remember reeling at the senselessness of such an act.

“I was just so shocked and so upset for her,” said Susan Peterson, 55, who has lived in the house where Vinyard was slain since about two years after the woman’s death. “You live to the ripe age of 80 and then you’re murdered in your bedroom.”

Elderly victims

Alexander remains in prison at Lansing. He came up for parole in June but the state parole board rejected his release.

In a confession, Alexander told police that late on Aug. 4, 1984, he noticed Vinyard’s back door was open as he passed on his way to a service station. He went inside “to steal some little thing, like jewelry or money,” ran into Vinyard in the hallway outside her bedroom and hit her over the head several times with a police-like baton.

His apparent motive has been common to most of the other murders of elderly victims in Lawrence in recent decades.

Former Lawrence restaurant operator Robert E. Conlin, 66, was beaten and robbed at his apartment shortly after midnight on May 21, 1977. He died six days later at Lawrence Memorial Hospital. He lived long enough to tell police that a black man of medium build in his mid 20s beat him over the head with a broom handle and kicked him in the midsection before taking a color television and $2 in cash. A suspect in the case was charged with robbery, not homicide, apparently because authorities could not prove Conlin died of injuries suffered during the attack.

A neighbor discovered the body of Vanera Smith, 84, on Nov. 8, 1977, at her home at 823 Ky. An autopsy showed Smith’s injuries included a cut on the back of her head, several broken facial bones and several broken ribs. Eugene E. Westergren, then 50, was later charged with sexual assault and murder in the beating death.

The bruised, dead body of Herl Wilson Housworth, 65, was found Aug. 5, 1979, under the Kansas River bridge, a spot he called home. He had been robbed of $50 to $60. David Lee Knoxsah, then 31, was convicted of aggravated robbery and involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to prison. Two other men Levi Louis Cummings, then 28, Tulsa, Okla., and George Mahkuk, then 22, Manhattan agreed to plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter if they testified against Knoxsah.

Ninety-four-year-old Harry Puckett, who had often been the victim of robbers seeking money rumored to be hidden in his East Lawrence home at 1109 Del., was killed late June 24 or early June 25, 1983. An autopsy ruled he died from blows to the head. James Chadwick Fourhorn, then 27, 824 Ark., was found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to 15 years to life in prison.

A vulnerable group

The elderly are more likely than younger victims to face attacks by strangers, according to the National Institute on Aging. They are more often attacked at or near their homes and are typically more seriously hurt than a younger person, the institute reports.

There may be a perception on the part of criminals who target the elderly that they are more vulnerable, Lawrence Police Sgt. Mike Pattrick said.

“They come from a generation that is more trusting,” he said.

George Kinnard, who frequently makes in-home visits with elderly clients in his position as community services program assistant with Douglas County Senior Services Inc., said such trust sometimes swelled to a fault.

“I hate to admit how many people’s houses I go to that I knock on the door and they say come on in. I’m concerned at the number of people who don’t have their doors locked when I get there to visit them,” he said, noting that elderly victims usually wouldn’t be as strong or fast as their attacker.

That was true of Vinyard. And, although the details of exactly what transpired July 10 before a burglar police believe was Lewis gunned down Wallace and Chandlee at their home on Learnard Avenue have yet to emerge publicly, it’s a safe bet the couple’s killer had the upper hand.

Coming to terms with the horrifying truths of the case will be a difficult road for the community, neighbors, friends and, especially, Wallace and Chandlee’s family, Moseley said:

“This is going to be a tough one.”