PERRYVILLE COUPLE SLAIN IN HOME; SUSPECT ARRESTED

PERRYVILLE -- An elderly couple was found dead Friday morning at their home, the victims of a robbery, police said.

The bodies of Edgar "Eddie" O. Sauer, 84, and his wife, Leona M. Sauer, 83, were discovered about 9:15 a.m. by a son who had arrived to visit, Perryville Police Chief Eugene Besand said. "He found their bodies just inside the door," the chief said.

Shortly before 11 a.m., police had arrested a St. Louis man who was staying at the Intersection Motel, adjacent to the couple's residence at 618 Main St.

Samuel David Lowe, 38, was charged with two counts of first-degree murder, two counts of armed criminal action, a class B felony of burglary and a class A felony of robbery, police Detective Keith Tarrillion said.

Lowe was being held Friday in the Perry County Jail in lieu of a $250,000 cash bond.

Lowe had come to Perryville to appear in court on Friday for a probation violation involving a drug charge, Tarrillion said. "But court was canceled," he said.

Officers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Missouri Highway Patrol assisted police at the crime scene. Evidence gathered from the home and motel room where the man was staying led police to make the arrest, Besand said.

Perryville's last slaying on Feb. 8 involved three men in a drug deal, the police chief said. This makes Friday's killing harder to accept, he said.

"Before, I was telling residents that unless you're dealing with drugs, you don't have anything to worry about," Besand said. "But this couple was murdered in their home. It gives everyone kind of an uneasy feeling."

Residents in the town of 7,000 were talking about the killings all day, said Mike French, whose Total Package Fitness Center is across from the Perry County Courthouse.

French said Perryville isn't the same town he grew up in.

"We have all sorts of people coming through here now," he said. "You don't know your neighbor anymore, and now you lock your doors at night."

French said he sleeps with a gun by his bed.

Nancy Emmendorfer was relieved when she heard that police had arrested the suspect in the killings. She had told her 16-year-old daughter to lock her car doors when she was driving around Friday night and her 13-year-old son to stay close to friends.

"This has just been really scary," she said.

Adding Friday's killings to the deaths of a 2-year-old girl and her mother in a wreck and a teen-ager's suicide, all occurring this week, have been difficult for Perryville, Emmendorfer said.

French said the slayings are shocking but not surprising.

"The way society is going now, you almost look at this and say it's just more deaths," he said.