Couple slain near Sheridan were 'rich in love'

SIDNEY TOWNSHIP, Mich. (WOOD) — The family of Jessie and Virginia Seward, the elderly couple found dead in their home near Sheridan on Wednesday, said they wondered if they were targeted because of their kindness.

“Because Dad and Ginny had such a good heart, they would let anyone who was down on their luck for a day, two months, two weeks, come and stay with them. And, honest to God, I feel in my heart that was their undoing, was their kindness,” Jessie Seward’s stepdaughter, Deborah Soule, said.

State police are saying little about the deaths, though they're calling it a double homicide.

“They're not telling us anything, and I'm glad they're not because I don't want anybody's hand to be tipped so that they could get away with it,” Soule said.

Soule said to a great-granddaughter discovered the Sewards' bodies Wednesday morning after the couple didn't show up for a 4-H horse show on Tuesday.

Police won't say whether there was evidence of a break-in at the ranch-style home on Beaver Drive near W. County Farm Road, though they have said there's no ongoing threat.

“That didn’t make any sense to me,” Soule said. “As long as whoever said that is out there, there's a threat to all of us. We're not special. It could happen to us.”

Soule, who lives across the street from the couple, said Virginia Seward, known to those who loved her as Ginny, had only recently left her job at a market and that Jessie Seward still worked at a hardware store.

“They were not rich people. Their wealth, if you look at their walls, it's like this only 10 times more so,” she said, pointing to the photographs of grandchildren on her own walls. “Their wealth was their family. They weren't rich people. Just rich in love.”

Jessie Seward was 81 and his wife 80. They had so many grandchildren and great-grandchildren that Soule couldn't keep track.

Soule said she grew up in the home where the killings happened and that her stepfather helped raise her. She says that after her mother died, he married Ginny in the late 1990s.

“For 59 years, he's been the only dad I knew,” she said.

Since the deaths, she said she can't sleep and that her husband has armed himself:

“He's loading a gun at night. It scares me but he says, 'I'm going to tell you what, Debbie, if somebody comes through that door, I've got a bullet with their name on it.'”