Police See a Pattern Behind 5 Michigan Murders

Police in Michigan's capital say they're now weighing whether a single attacker is behind a cluster of killings along Lansing's popular River Trail. At a briefing last week, Police Chief Robert Backus said there appears to be a pattern behind five murders going back to October 2025, ABC News reports. All the victims were white males, all are believed to have been unhoused, and all were attacked in the overnight hours, possibly while they were sleeping.

• "One question that we are being asked is, 'Do we have a serial killer in Lansing?'" the chief said. "What we need the public to know is that we are investigating all of these cases. They are all active investigations, and we are looking at the idea or the possibility that these may be related cases."

Backus said all five victims were attacked along a 1-mile stretch of the River Trail between the city's Old Town neighborhood and downtown's Kalamazoo Street, the Detroit Free Press reports. The attacks on four of the victims—a 70-year-old man, two 57-year-old men, and a 54-year-old man—"involve what appear to be blunt force trauma, traumatic injuries to the facial area," apparently with no weapon involved, Backus said. Those victims died in hospitals days after the attacks. Another victim, 22-year-old Daniel Lusk, was stabbed to death on Aug. 20 this year.

A suspect, Edward Joseph Smith, has been charged with murder in the stabbing of Lusk, but Backus stressed it's too early to link him to the other deaths and warned against building a theory around one name. The 23-year-old was arraigned on Sept. 3, days after the fifth victim, 57-year-old Louis Woodruff, was found under a bridge, the Lansing State Journal reports.

• "I've mentioned that we have a suspect in custody for one of these incidents," Backus said, per ABC. "And so, the question that's been posed to us is, is this a suspect for all the incidents?" He said it's a "challenging question" to answer, and one that he has to be "very cautious" on. Investigators have opened a dedicated tip line and say the scarcity of surveillance cameras is hampering the effort to determine whether a serial killer is at work.