For 25 years, she worked the streets of Davenport selling her body for money.

Now, Davenport police are investigating the death of Agnes McFedries Kennedy, a self-described lifelong prostitute.

"We know of her past. That has a lot to do with who she hangs out with," police Capt. David Struckman said Monday. "We have a person of interest we're looking for, but that's all he is right now, a person of interest."

A couple returning to their home discovered the 51-year-old's body around 8:30 p.m. Saturday, in an alley along the 1800 block of W. 7th Street.

Ms. Kennedy was taken to Davenport's Genesis Medical Center, West Campus, where she was pronounced dead.

"Due to the suspicious nature of the death and many unanswered questions, the death is being investigated as a homicide," Capt. Struckman said.

An autopsy was conducted Monday in Ankeney, Iowa, but results weren't immediately available.

In February 2005, the gentle-natured and soft-spoken Ms. Kennedy was interviewed by a reporter with The Dispatch and The Rock Island Argus about her life as a prostitute. The article used a pseudonym for Ms. Kennedy.

At 26, with three kids and a minimum-wage job, she couldn't pay her bills and Ms. Kennedy said she made the ultimate moral compromise. She went from working as a junior high school teacher's aide to working in a so-called "massage parlor" that in fact was a front for prostitution.

For the next 20-plus years, the life of prostitution came with a price. Though she eventually married, it didn't last. Some of her children, now grown, hated her, she said.

In the 1980s Ms. Kennedy was married for a time, but she continued to work until 4 a.m. at a massage parlor while her husband played Mr. Mom. "That didn't last long," she said.

And she'd been in jail numerous times for strings of prostitution arrests. The latest came in June 2006. She served 30 days in jail. Her longest sentence was two years in jail.

"The social ramification of my behavior has been devastating to my family," she said in the interview. "If I would have known full circle what I know now, I would have stayed at my nasty minimum-wage job. I can't make yesterday better. I can't change it."

Ms. Kennedy believed prostitution was a victimless crime. "If you eliminate prostitution, you put a lot of people in harm's way because there is no place for people who are sexually frustrated to turn," she said.

Following the interview nearly two years ago, Ms. Kennedy said she'd continue to be a prostitute "until men don't find me attractive anymore."

Now police are investigating her death.

Sunday, they continued gathering physical evidence and interviewing associates of the victim. They are attempting to determine her activities Saturday and that night.