A cozy neighborhood murder tale

It's been sort of a grisly week in terms of strange, demented, and/or violent news stories. The Dyersburg nanny. The husband-killing Selmer woman. And now this.

The story is quite chilling:

A suspect in the grisly killings of a Midtown couple, found wrapped in plastic in an attic, died early Friday during a gun battle with police that also killed his father.

Police said that Larry Mosely, 29, of Memphis would have been charged with the murders of the man and woman whose bodies were found inside 765 East Parkway S. Thursday afternoon.

Mosely and his father, Frank Mosely, 69, of Murfreesboro were killed near Coldwater, Miss., in an early morning shootout.

The Shelby County Medical Examiner, using dental records and fingerprints, on Friday confirmed the bodies inside the duplex were those of James Smith, 22, and Stephanie Grace Smith, 21, who lived at 767 East Parkway S. across from Mid-South Fairgrounds.

Larry Mosely, James Smith's uncle, lived in the adjoining duplex.

The Smiths' deaths were ruled a "blunt force trauma homicide" by the Medical Examiner, said police spokesman Sgt. Vince Higgins.

"The manner in which (the suspect) concealed them was like something out of a Stephen King novel," Higgins said.

Both bodies were tightly wrapped in "plastic and all kinds of stuff," Higgins said.

"The method of this murder was so brutal, I wouldn't want to bring a family member in to view their remains."

I'm making a mental flowchart to make sure I've got this right. Sometimes newswriting conventions (15-word ledes and snippy short paragraphs) make things harder to understand than they should be. Let me tap it out in my stumbling fat prose.

So this married couple lived in a duplex adjacent to a duplex occupied by the husband's uncle. The couple disappeared around March 15, and their disappearance sparked a criminal investigation early this week. Last night, we got the call at the paper from our cops reporter that they had found the bodies in the Parkway house. And the uncle was a suspect in the homicide. And then when the cops got the warrant for the uncle's arrest, they staked him out in Coldwater, Miss., at a friend or relative's house or something, and the uncle and his father — who is from Murfreesboro! — got into a gun battle with the police and both men died.

Jesus.

And, of course, this is made even stranger by the fact that those bodies were found a block from Phil's apartment.