New Hampshire Cold Case Got UNSEALED After 42 Years 

New Hampshire Cold Case Got UNSEALED After 42 Years 

 

 

In a decades-old cold case in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, officials have named a suspect in the murder of 23-year-old Laura Kempton, a beauty school student who was killed back in September 1981 inside her apartment on Chapel Street. >> On the morning of September 28th, 1981, a Portsmouth police officer walked up to a ground floor apartment on Chapel Street to serve a court summons for unpaid parking tickets.

 When nobody came to the door, he looked through the window. A 23-year-old woman was lying motionless on the floor. She had been beaten with a glass wine bottle and sexually assaulted. The front door kicked open in the middle of the night. Next to her body was a single cigarette butt the killer had smoked all the way down before he left.

 The detectives at the scene that morning had no way to read what they were holding. In 1981, no forensic lab in the world could pull DNA from saliva on a cigarette filter. The butt went into evidence storage, sealed and labeled, and sat there for the next 42 years. The killer’s name was on it the entire time.

 Her name was Laura Kempton. Laura was just 23 years old and was about 6 months away from finishing her training at the Portsmouth Beauty School and becoming a licensed hairdresser. She had grown up in Durham, a quiet college town about 12 miles to the west of Portsmouth. To support herself while she finished school, Laura worked part-time at a gift shop and at an ice cream parlor in the area.

 On the evening of Saturday, September 27th, 1981, Laura Kempton went out for the night with a friend. The two of them spent the evening at one of the bars in downtown Portsmouth, a small, quiet coastal city of about 26,000 people sitting on the southern tip of New Hampshire’s short Atlantic coastline. The downtown area was compact, a few blocks of old brick buildings and narrow streets between the river and the neighborhoods to the west.

 On a Saturday night in a city that size, the bars and restaurants were all within walking distance of each other, and a person could walk from one end of the downtown to the other in just a few minutes. Later that night, Laura came home to her apartment on Chapel Street alone in the early morning hours of September 28th.

At some point during the course of that evening, she and her friend had split up and gone in different directions. Laura ended up walking the rest of the way back home by herself through the quiet downtown streets, went inside her apartment, and closed the door behind her. At some point after she got home, someone broke into the apartment.

 The front door had been kicked in from the outside. Whoever came through that door didn’t find it unlocked or ajar. He didn’t slip in through a window. He had broken his way in through the front door of a ground floor apartment on a quiet residential street in the middle of the night.

 Laura was inside the apartment all by herself. Once he was inside, the man beat Laura with a glass wine bottle and sexually assaulted her. He used an electrical cord and tied it tightly around her ankles. A telephone cord was found wrapped around her neck and shoulder area. According to the medical examiner, the cause of death was massive blunt force trauma to the left side of her head.

 Laura had deep cuts and dark bruises on her hands and arms. She had fought back hard against the man who broke through her door. And the defensive injuries on her body recorded that struggle even though she didn’t survive it. At some point during or after what happened inside the apartment, the man pulled out a cigarette and smoked it.

 When he was done, he dropped the butt on the floor right next to where Laura was lying. He also left behind the glass bottle that he’d used to beat her. Both of those items had biological material on them. Saliva on the cigarette filter, residue on the bottle, all left behind by whoever had handled them. But back in 1981, none of that evidence could be read by any forensic lab anywhere.

 On Monday morning, September 28th, 1981, at about 9:30 a.m., the officer who had come to serve the parking summons looked through the window and saw Laura on the floor. He called for backup immediately. Within minutes, other officers arrived and went inside. Laura was already dead. The scene inside the apartment told detectives everything they needed to know about what had happened to her.

Detectives arrived shortly after and began working the scene. All of the physical evidence found near Laura’s body was carefully collected, photographed, and documented. What followed was a massive investigation that would go on for more than four decades. Starting in the days right after Laura was found, detectives went door-to-door up and down the street and all of the surrounding blocks.

 They talked to her friends, her classmates at the Portsmouth Beauty School, her co-workers at the gift shop and the ice cream parlor, and every single person she’d been with on the night of September 27th. They put together a detailed timeline of Laura’s movements that evening, starting from the time she left her apartment that evening and ending with the time she got back.

 The friend that Laura had been out with on the night of September 27th was brought in and interviewed at length. Detectives went through every detail of that Saturday evening with her, step by step, hour by hour. Nobody had walked Laura home after they had all left the bar, and as far as anyone who’d been out could remember, nobody had followed her or approached her on the walk home.

Detectives asked whether anyone in the neighborhood had seen a man near Laura’s apartment in the hours after Laura got home. They went through the records of every known offender in the area. The forced entry told them something about who they were looking for. The way the door had been kicked in pointed towards someone who had done this kind of thing before.

From there, detectives started pulling records of anyone with a history of burglary or home invasion in Rockingham County and in the surrounding parts of New Hampshire and Maine. Everything that had been collected from the apartment, the bottle, the bedding, and every other item was sealed up, labeled, and went into long-term storage at the station.

Back in 1981, storing all of that evidence and keeping it carefully preserved for the future was the only real option anyone had. The investigation produced hundreds of leads over the months and years that followed. Dozens of names came in from the public and were individually checked against the evidence and eliminated one by one.

A case like this one, a young woman attacked and killed inside her own apartment, got a lot of attention in a city that size. Tips came in from people across the entire Seacoast region of New Hampshire. Detectives working in the department followed every single one of them down, but none of it brought the detectives anywhere close to making an arrest in the Kempton case.

The trail went cold. The file stayed open at the department, but there was nothing left to work with. The detectives who had worked the case from the very beginning eventually retired and handed the file off to the next group. New detectives picked it up, spent weeks reading through the old notes and witness statements, and found themselves facing the exact same dead ends their predecessors had run into.

Year after year after that, the leads dried up and the evidence from Laura’s case sat untouched in the police station. Over the years and then the decades that followed, DNA science slowly advanced to the point where the stored evidence from Laura’s case could finally be tested by a lab. By the middle of the 1990s, forensic labs across the country were doing things with biological material that would have been completely impossible just a few years earlier.

 Detectives assigned to the cold case unit pulled the old crime scene evidence out of storage and sent it off to the state lab for testing. Scientists at the lab were able to pull a male DNA profile from the samples, from the cigarette butt, from the bedding, and from biological material recovered from Laura’s body. All of the DNA recovered from those items came from one person.

 One single unknown man had been inside that apartment on the very night that Laura was killed. The DNA profile was entered into the FBI’s national database where crime scene evidence is checked against the records of people who’ve been convicted of serious crimes and had their DNA collected. Nothing came back. The unknown man whose DNA was on the evidence had never been convicted of anything serious enough to get his sample taken and put into the system.

After that, the profile sat in the database for years. Every time a new offender’s DNA was added to the system anywhere in the country, the database automatically ran it against all of the unsolved cases on file. Every single time for Laura Kempton’s case, it came back empty. Wherever this unknown man was at that point, whether he was alive or dead, the database couldn’t find him.

 By 2022, detectives were ready to try a different approach. The Portsmouth Police Department teamed up with the New Hampshire State Police Lab, the Maine State Police Lab, the State Attorney General’s Cold Case Unit, and a forensic genealogy firm called Identifinders International. Together, the team took the unknown male’s DNA profile and uploaded it to several consumer ancestry databases, databases where millions of ordinary people had sent in their own saliva samples to learn about their family history. Then, in May of 2022,

Detective Eric Wiederstrom got word that the uploaded sample had produced a lead. A distant relative of the unknown man had turned up as a partial match in one of those ancestry databases. The relative had ties to Rockingham County, the same county where Portsmouth sits. The match was distant, suggesting the two people were related somewhere a few generations back.

 But even that partial match was more than enough to give the genealogists a solid starting point for building a complete family tree. Remarkably, just 3 days after the initial lead came in, the genealogy team reported back with results. They had traced the family lines far enough through public records, census data, marriage certificates, and death records to identify the mother and father of the person whose DNA had been found at the crime scene.

 Those two parents had a single son, no other children. There were no other brothers or sisters to rule in or rule out. The entire family tree pointed to one person and one person only. But there was a problem. The man the genealogy team had identified was already dead. He had died back in 2005, nearly two full decades before the genealogy search even started.

 There was no way for the detectives to bring him in for an interview or to ask him to walk into a police station and provide a sample. The detectives working the cold case were going to need another way to confirm the match. As it turned out, during his autopsy back in 2005, the medical examiner’s office had collected what’s called a blood card.

 It’s a small sample of a person’s blood that gets drawn and preserved on a card and then kept in the examiner’s files. That particular blood card had been sitting undisturbed in a drawer for 18 years. A forensic analyst in the lab extracted DNA from the blood card and ran it against the profile that had originally been developed from the crime scene evidence collected at Laura’s apartment back in 1981.

The two DNA profiles were a dead-on match. The man whose blood was sitting preserved on that card was the same man who had smoked a cigarette in Laura Kempton’s apartment and left the butt there on the floor right next to her body 42 years earlier. The man’s name was Ronnie James Lee. Lee had been born in 1960 in the New Hampshire area, which made him just 21 years old on the night Laura Kempton was killed.

 He had been serving in the United States Army up until May of 1981 and had received his discharge about 4 months before the attack. After leaving the military that same spring, Lee took a job as a security guard at the Liberty Mutual Insurance Building in Portsmouth. He started that job in June of 1981, the same summer Laura moved into her apartment on Chapel Street.

 When detectives dug into Lee’s background, they found no personal connection between him and Laura Kempton. There was nothing at all to link them. The two of them didn’t share any friends, didn’t work together, and didn’t live anywhere near each other. Lee was a recently discharged soldier working nights at the same insurance building in the same city where Laura was attending beauty school.

 Their lives crossed only because they both happened to be living in Portsmouth during the same few months in the summer and fall of 1981. After the night of September 27th, Lee went right on living his life as if nothing at all had happened. He kept right on working at the security firm through August of 1982. During the daytime hours, he was collecting a paycheck to protect someone else’s property.

But at night, he was out breaking into other people’s homes and apartments. Between 1982 and 1983, he was connected to four residential burglaries and one commercial break-in in the area. The residential break-ins he was linked to all followed the exact same pattern that had played out on Chapel Street.

 He went in late at night well after the residents had gone to sleep, and he picked homes and apartments where he believed the people inside were either asleep or home alone. Then, in 1987, Lee broke into a place in Keene, New Hampshire, about 80 miles west of Portsmouth. A woman inside was alone and asleep.

 He forced his way in at about 3:30 in the morning and sexually assaulted the woman while she slept. He was eventually caught, arrested, and convicted of the sexual assault in Keene. Forced entry in the nighttime hours. A woman alone inside. A sexual assault during the break-in. The crime was almost a carbon copy of what had happened on Chapel Street 6 years earlier, but nobody connected the two cases at the time.

 And nobody would manage to connect them for decades afterward. He was sentenced and went to prison in December of 1987 for the Keene assault. He ended up serving less than three full years behind bars and was released in July of 1990. New Hampshire didn’t start requiring DNA collection from convicted felons until later.

 And the timing of his conviction and release fell outside the window that would have put his sample in any database. Lee went through the entire state prison system and came out the other side without his DNA ever being collected or recorded anywhere. After his release from the state prison in July of 1990, Lee lived another 15 years out in the community without getting into enough trouble to draw the attention of law enforcement or put himself back on anyone’s radar.

 He died on February 9th, 2005, at just 45 years old. The official cause of death was a cocaine overdose, ruled accidental by the examiner. The medical examiner’s office did an autopsy and collected a blood card as part of the standard procedure. It went into a drawer and sat there. Just like Laura’s evidence had sat in Portsmouth for years before that.

 Ronnie James Lee was buried in early 2005 without anyone in law enforcement ever having asked him a single question about Laura Kempton. And he was never once named as a suspect in her death. The Chapel Street case file and the Keene case file sat in separate departments, in separate parts of the state, and nobody had ever thought to connect them.

 On July 20th, 2023, the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office and the Police Department held a joint press conference. Officials at the podium announced that a man named Ronnie James Lee had been identified through DNA evidence as the person responsible for the sexual assault and death of Laura Kempton on Chapel Street in September of 19 81.

 The announcement came a full 42 years after the crime and 18 years after Lee’s death. Laura was a victim of an unspeakable act of violence, Portsmouth Police Chief Mark Newport told the room. New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella also spoke, addressing himself directly to the family. It is my hope that this will be the long-awaited first step in providing what closure the criminal justice system can offer to Laura Kempton’s family and community, Formella said.

 The Kempton family released a written statement through the department. The Kempton family wishes to express our deepest gratitude to the Portsmouth Police Department for solving Laura’s case, the family said. Their diligence and determination, along with extraordinary personal commitment over the past decades, have led to this moment for Laura.

 Because Lee had been dead since 2005, there would be no arrest. No trial would follow, no verdict would be reached, and no one was left to put in handcuffs. Ronnie James Lee had been dead for 18 years by the time anyone matched his blood card to the cigarette butt he had left on Laura’s floor. When it was all over, Laura Kempton’s family finally got a name and a full explanation for what had happened to their daughter all those years ago.

 But what they didn’t get, and what they knew they would never get, was their day in a courtroom. The family also learned that the man who broke through Laura’s door had gone on to live another 24 years after the crime. He had been arrested and convicted of sexually assaulting a woman during a break-in in a different part of the state.

 He had served less than 3 years in state prison for it, and had eventually died of a drug overdose at the age of 45. A 23-year-old beauty school student walking home alone on a Saturday night in Portsmouth. A ground-floor apartment on Chapel Street. A door kicked open in the middle of the night. And a single cigarette butt left behind on the floor right next to her body.

 That cigarette butt sat in an evidence bag for 42 years. When the science finally caught up, it pointed to a man who had been dead for almost two decades. Buried without a single person ever connecting him to the door he broke down on Chapel Street. If this case stayed with you, leave your thoughts in the comments. More solved cases in the playlist.