The sister of a Catholic nun raised in Stoneham and found slain in Mississippi on Thursday morning remembered her as a woman devoted to helping those who needed it most, both through religion and healthcare.
“She was just such a wonderful human,” Rosemarie Merrill said of her sister Paula Merrill on Thursday evening. “It’s a tremendous loss for that community.”
Sister Paula Merrill, 68, a member of the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth, was found dead in her Holmes County home Thursday morning, along with Sister Margaret Held, Rosemarie Merrill said.
Durant police found the two women after an employee at a Lexington Medical Clinic where they worked as nurse practitioners said they did not show up for work, according to Assistant Police Chief James Lee.
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Wellness checks usually are “nothing out the ordinary,” Lee said by telephone Thursday night. “Except for today.”
Durant police and the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation are investigating the deaths. There were signs of a break-in, and one of the victim’s vehicles was missing, Lee said.
On its website, the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth confirmed the deaths, and asked people to “Pray in gratitude for the precious lives of Sisters Paula and Margaret . . . They served the poor so well.”
The order had recently profiled her work as a nurse helping those in rural Mississippi in an article on its website. “She felt a connection and a need to serve people,” the profile stated.
Merrill made a life for herself in the Deep South after joining the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth, her sister said.
But she would come back to her native Stoneham at least once a year, and was supposed to visit her family in the coming weeks.
“She was planning a trip here next month and we were talking about what we were going to do,” Rosemarie Merrill, 74, said. “Some of her high school friends were planning on getting together to have some lunch. I’m sad it won’t be happening.”
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Paula Merrill was born in 1947 in Stoneham, where she was baptized at St. Patrick’s Parish. She grew up in a family with plenty of nurses and nuns, vocations that would become her calling.
She went to Catholic school throughout her childhood, attending Our Lady of Nazareth Academy in Wakefield, run until 2009 by the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth. She first entered the Kentucky-based order in 1968, but returned to Massachusetts to follow her dreams of studying medicine.
“We have a number of nurses in the family,” Rosemarie Merrill said. “We have always been that family that has seen that vocation, that calling to help people.”
She worked for a time at a hospital in Cambridge, and earned her associate’s degree from Lasell College in Newton. She returned to the convent in Kentucky in 1979, and first moved to Mississippi in 1981.
In Mississippi, she continued to study medicine and became a registered nurse.
“I always introduced her to people as my sister the Sister,” Rosemarie Merrill said. “Her patients loved her and she loved them.”
Rosemarie and her brother, John, who live together in Stoneham, maintained a close relationship with their younger sister, who would have turned 69 in October.
Rosemarie Merrill planned to travel to Mississippi in December to celebrate her own birthday with her only sister.
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“We talked at least three times a week. Sundays, Tuesdays, and Fridays,” Rosemarie Merrill said. She last spoke to her Tuesday.
Rosemarie Merrill recalled their last family trip in September, to their grandmother’s birthplace of Germany.
Rosemarie Merrill said her family is likely to hold a memorial for Paula Merrill at St. Patrick’s Parish in the coming weeks. Her burial will be in Kentucky.
“Holmes County will really miss her and Sister Margaret,” she said. “I can only pray for the perpetrator or perpetrators.”
Miguel Otárola can be reached at miguel.otarola@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter at @motarola123.