Background: The home on Auble Moody Road in Wilmer, Alabama (WALA/YouTube). Insets (from left to right): Lisa Ferguson, Keziah Luker, and Thomas Cordell (Family/WALA).
A woman and her two teenage children were tied up and killed overnight in their Alabama home, authorities say as they search for a suspect.
Lisa Ferguson, 46, Keziah Luker, 17, and Thomas Cordell, 12, were found dead on Monday morning, Mobile County Sheriff Paul Burch said during a press conference. Luker was also seven or eight months pregnant.
As Sunday night turned to Monday morning, the mother and her children were at their home on Auble Moody Road in Wilmer, Alabama, an unincorporated community some 25 miles northwest of Mobile and close to the Mississippi border.
At some point, the father of Luker”s soon-to-be-born child noticed her phone “activated in the middle of the night,” the sheriff said at the news conference streamed by Mobile CBS affiliate WKRG.
A family member of the three victims went to check on them and noticed the “brutal” scene, Burch announced. “All three victims had their hands bound behind them with zip ties or flex cuffs. The mother was stabbed, the 17-year-old was shot, and the 12-year-old, his throat was cut … as was the mom.”
All three victims were in separate rooms.
Officers were called at about 2:30 a.m., and they arrived and identified the three victims. The sheriff added that the home was “in disarray,” including open dresser drawers, and it appeared as if “someone was searching for something.”
The indications to law enforcement were that this was a “targeted” crime.
“They had a plan coming in to bring zip ties with them,” Burch continued. “To murder two children brutally, the 12-year-old was almost decapitated, and so it was a brutal scene, and you know, I hope and feel comfortable we’ll have this animal or animals off the streets soon.”
The sheriff said his office does “have some positive leads” in the case, and he acknowledged that it’s possible — if even likely — that there were multiple perpetrators as “it’d be hard for one individual to patrol three people at one time.”
He added that “we don’t suspect any kind of domestic, family type situation” as being responsible for the deaths. As for whether four homicide charges could be brought against the suspect or suspects due to the unborn child, Burch noted that the county’s district attorney’s office will make that decision.
