By ELIZABETH FERSZT
Contributing Writer
Defendant Leonard Hugall, age 74, was scheduled to be in 12th District Court on Friday, Oct. 17 for the 1984 murder of his stepdaughter. The case was adjourned until Nov. 18 at 9 a.m., for a preliminary exam with witnesses, to determine if there is enough evidence to bind the case over to the 4th Circuit Court.
Anne Harrell, the aunt of the victim, Kelly Harris, age 13, was in attendance. In the hallway, she made the following statements.
“You need to know this about Kelly. She was a yard girl — a child who did not stray from her house.” She was “inseparable from her mom,” Carol Harris, and thus “would never have taken a bus to Detroit” in 1984, as falsely alleged by Hugall.
“He also planted her bike,” to throw investigators off track, said Harrell. It was found in the eastern area of Ella Sharp Park. A full force of Jackson County law enforcement searched the area but never found anything.
Kelly’s body has never been found.
It’s now 40 years later and Harrell wants answers. “Kelly went to Aunt Minnie’s house on Friday night,” on Woodsum Street (on her bike), she said.
On Saturday morning she rode back to her home on Lincoln Court. According to Harrell, it was there that Leonard Hugall killed her. She said Kelly’s mom, Carol, was not at home at the time.
“A neighbor said Len came out the house with a rolled-up rug” which he took to JCMS (Jackson Catholic Middle School) which was on Cooper Street at the time. Hugall was employed there as a janitor. According to Harrell, they had an incinerator at the school. “He killed her in the house, rolled her up in a rug, and took it to work,” and destroyed her body there she said.
When Kelly was reported missing, “he sat at my table and said he done nothing to her,” said Harrell.
She said to him, “You know you killed her.”
Harrell called JPD and Det. Henderson first.
“Carol called me the night he left for Florida, soon after it happened,” said Harrell. “She said that he said, ‘I killed the little bitch.’”
In Florida Hugall started another crime spree, CSC-1 and other charges, which he has served in FDOC.
Harrell offered her phone number for further contact — a landline; she remarked that it had not been changed “for over 40 years, in case Kelly was alive and had called.”
