DURANT, Miss. – A man suspected in the slayings of two nuns found dead in their Mississippi home confessed to the killings, a sheriff said Saturday.

Rodney Earl Sanders, 46, of Kosciusko, Mississippi was arrested and charged in the deaths of Sister Margaret Held and Sister Paula Merrill. Both women were 68.

Mississippi Department of Public Safety spokesman Warren Strain said in a statement Friday night that Rodney Earl Sanders of Kosciusko has been charged with two counts of capital murder in the deaths of the nuns. 

Their bodies were discovered Thursday after they failed to show up for work at a clinic in Lexington, about 10 miles from where they lived.

 “Sanders was developed as a person of interest early on in the investigation,” Lt. Colonel Jimmy Jordan said in the statement.

Sanders is being held in an undisclosed detention center awaiting his initial court appearance. 

In the Mississippi county where the two nuns were slain, forgiveness for their killer is hard to find, even if forgiveness is what the victims would have wanted. 

The nuns were nurse practitioners who dedicated their lives to providing health care to people in the poorest county in the state. 

“Right now, I don’t see no forgiveness on my heart,” says Joe Morgan Jr., a 58-year-old former factory worker who has diabetes and was a patient of Merrill’s at the clinic where the two nuns worked .

He said he hopes the perpetrator is convicted and executed. “She doesn’t deserve to die like this, doing God’s work,” he says. “There’s something wrong with the world.”

Sanders appears to have been released from prison last December after serving nine months for a felony conviction for driving under the influence, according to the Mississippi Department of Corrections. He also did prison time from the mid 1980s to early 1990s for armed robbery, records show. 

Shortly after the women’s bodies were found, authorities said the motive for the killings remained unclear, adding that calling it a “robbery would be premature.”