DURANT, MS (WJTV/AP) – In the poverty-stricken Mississippi county where two nuns were slain, forgiveness for their killer is hard to find, even if forgiveness is what the victims would have wanted.

A reward is being offered to anyone who can provide police with information that could lead to an arrest in the murder investigation of Sister Margaret Held and Sister Paula Merrill.

The two were found dead in their Durant home Thursday on Castalian Springs Road.

Officials said the two women appeared to have stab wounds. Autopsies are being done to find out exactly how they died.

A car that was stolen from their home was recovered Thursday night. It’s been sent to the crime lab for analysis.

As authorities search for the killer, many residents wonder how they will fill the hole the women’s deaths have left.

“Right now, I don’t see no forgiveness on my heart,” said 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 Merrill would want him to forgive whoever killed the women, but he hopes the perpetrator is arrested, convicted and executed.

“She doesn’t deserve to die like this, doing God’s work,” Morgan said, shaking his head. “There’s something wrong with the world.”

Merrill is a member of the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth in Kentucky, and Held is part of the School Sisters of St. Francis in Milwaukee. The Sisters of Charity released a statement on their website.

Initially, a 2,500 reward was being offered by Crime Stoppers. The Mississippi Department of Public Safety is increasing the reward by $20,000. This brings the total to $22,500.

The clinic and the nuns’ home in Durant are in Holmes County, population 18,000. With 44 percent of its residents living in poverty, Holmes is the seventh-poorest county in America, according to the Census Bureau.

The slayings did more than shock people and plunge the county into mourning. They leave a gaping hole in what was already a strapped health care system.

Dr. Elias Abboud, who worked with the sisters for years and helped build the clinic, said it provided about 25 percent of all medical care in the county.

The two nuns cultivated relationships with drug company representatives, who often left extra free samples, according to clinic manager Lisa Dew.

Merrill’s sister Rosemarie, speaking by telephone from her Stoneham, Massachusetts, home, said her sister had been in Mississippi helping the poor since 1981 and had previously worked in Holly Springs, where she used to ride around on a moped and was instrumental in locating the source of a tuberculosis outbreak.

Merrill was raised in the suburbs of Boston and came from a working-class family, her father a laborer and her mother a bookkeeper, her nephew David said. He said his aunt had worked with Held for many years.

“We always considered Margaret just part of the family,” he said. “The word ‘sister’ has many meanings, and they fulfilled all of them.”

Rosemarie Merrill said she doesn’t know what will happen to the clinic now and worries about the effect on health care in Holmes County. She said her sister and Held would often go into the clinic on Sundays after Mass or on their days off.

“It’s just going to be a disaster,” she said.

Genette Pierce, who works at a home health and hospice business a few doors down from the clinic, said: “Their patients – all of them – they’re going to be lost without them right now.”