Friends and family of Stella Sproule grieved at her funeral Saturday, reflecting on a world where a loving person could be used up and tossed aside with ease by another.
"This is my reward?" asked a high school friend of Sproule's, Larita Winbush, who attended Sproule's funeral at Jehovah Missionary Baptist Church. "Society is just screwed up. You can't be good."A woman remained jailed in Mississippi on Saturday, accused of plotting Sproule's death and trying to assume her identity.
About 200 mourners packed the church where Sproule, 28, was a faithful, involved member.
Outside the church, Linda Dinwiddie said she last saw her cousin a week before she was killed, at the bedside of her dying grandmother. "I just can't believe it," she said, collapsing into tears.
Mary Wittacker, a close friend of her grandmother's, described how Sproule went to meet Annie Cole, a former co-worker, sure she was going to finally get a full-time job.
"She was so nice she didn't know what she was getting into," Wittacker said.
Police said Cole, 32, asked to meet Sproule during her lunch hour to give her a job application; instead, Cole had promised a nephew and one of his friends $5,000 each to abduct and kill Sproule. When Sproule's body was found May 3, police said, Annie Cole went to the scene, identified herself as the fictitious Betty Cole and said the victim was her sister - Annie Cole.
She told a funeral home operator that she wanted the body cremated, with no service and without visitation by the family.
But before the body was cremated, police say Annie Cole's brother looked at it and said it didn't look like his sister. Then a department store reported that a woman was using a temporary credit card issued in the name of Stella Sproule - whose relatives had reported her missing by then.
Cole was arrested Tuesday in Indianola, Miss. Police say she was trying to assume a new identity to escape a criminal past, including bad-check charges and a parole violation.
Cole denies any role in Sproule's death and said she wouldn't fight extradition to Michigan to face a felony murder charge.
But Detroit Police Detective Monica Childs said she interviewed Cole Thursday at the jail in Humphreys County, Miss., and that she confessed.
"I was worried about all my legal problems, and I didn't want to be separated from my children," Cole reportedly told Childs. "My plan was to get rid of someone else and let someone take my place. Then everybody would think I was dead."