Murder on a Quiet Street

Tuesday January 09, 2007 03:45 PM EST

Michelle Young (with daughter Cassidy last Easter) loved being a mother. "Cassidy is so kind and sweet and nurturing," says a friend, "all qualities that Michelle passed down to her."

Courtesy Fisher Family

Tiny footprints, made of blood, were everywhere. More blood was splattered on a wall. Meredith Fisher, cautiously making her way through her sister's Raleigh, N.C., home, then saw her niece Cassidy, not yet 3, alone and unharmed. And there, in the master bedroom, the thing she feared the most: a battered body crumpled on the floor. "I need an ambulance, it's an emergency . . . I think my sister's dead!" Fisher, 26, cried to a 911 operator. "She's, like, cold . . . and her body is stiff . . . oh my God!"

Two months later the murder of Michelle Young remains a mystery full of troubling clues and questions. Young, 29 – a vibrant former cheerleader who was several months pregnant – had been bludgeoned to death while her young daughter was in the house. Worried for her mother, Cassidy wandered the house searching, she later told her aunt, for Band-aids to fix her mother's "boo-boos."