Rosa McMillan (9 of Hearts, North Carolina)

85-year-old Rosa spent her days tending to a small garden outside her home in the Massey Hill neighborhood.

It was the same home her late husband had built for them, and she cared for it the way she cared for everything: deliberately and with pride.

I did pick up the fact that she was grandma to everybody, and that her house where she was murdered was actually the, the place where the family gathered and met periodically during holidays and the like.

But on this Sunday in the summer of '89, Rosa's family wasn't coming over for a holiday gathering.

They were heading to the beach.

Rosa's daughter Elaine, and her son-in-law Rodney, and their children were in the car.

When they drove by Rosa's house, they saw that her porch light was on in the daytime, which was unusual enough for them to make a quick stop to see if everything was okay.

Rodney went inside while the family waited in the car.

And that's when they discovered that someone had broken into the house and killed their mother and their grandmother.

Neither Rodney nor Elaine wanted to be interviewed for this podcast, which we understand.

And so it was Corcione who told us that after Rodney found Rosa, he immediately called 911.

When police got to the home, they found that not only were those porch floodlights on, but Corcione said that something else stood out.

The side window where a glass was broken out, one of the panes broken out, okay? And that window was eventually opened, and it appeared that someone had entered the house.

And then according to the family members, the back door was open, and she would have never gone to sleep with the back door open.

Rosa was a woman who lived by routine.

Every night she turned the porch lights on.

Every morning she turned them off.

She locked her doors, kept her home neat, which is why what investigators found inside the house felt so deeply unsettling.

The house inside is, is ransacked.

Everything's turned over, papers are dumped all over, and Rosa's body is covered with a, a floor rug that's thrown on top of her, and then there's items from the drawers dumped on top of her body and all over the house.

More than the items that were strewn about the house, what caught investigators' eyes was the fence post that had seemingly been taken from the fence that surrounded Rosa's small garden and used as a weapon, then left atop Rosa's body.

They were able to show that that wooden post on the very end of it had some of the tile material from the ceiling tiles.

And when, if you looked up, you could see the marks on the ceiling tile where the post was used as a weapon, hit the ceiling, and then hit the victim.

Rosa's official cause of death was blunt force trauma.

And while Rosa had been physically beaten and strangled, she was ultimately killed with that fence post.