A policeman came to her door to hand her a parking ticket. It was not a wellness check, not a worried neighbor, and not a friend who had not heard from her. It was routine business, a court summons for unpaid parking meter fines, the kind of task that takes thirty seconds and is forgotten by lunch. Officer Ron Greefou arrived at the home at 20 Chapel Street in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on the morning of September 28, 1981.
He knocked. No one answered. He noticed a panel missing from the front door. He leaned in, and through the opening he saw two bound legs, motionless, and blood on the opposite wall.
The blood had splashed upward at an angle that told him everything he needed to know before he entered. Laura Kempton was 23 years old. Everyone who knew her described her as outgoing, free-spirited, strong-willed, and devoted to new wave fashion. She had come to Portsmouth from Prince Edward Island, Canada, a young woman who crossed the border with quick steps, inexhaustible enthusiasm, and the energy of someone building her life on her own terms.
She was a student at the Portsmouth School of Beauty and worked two jobs, at Macro Polo and at Karen’s Ice Cream, to cover rent and tuition, doing what people do at 23 while they are still forming themselves. She dated actively and went out with her friends. She had a captivating personality and an unforgettable taste. She was 23, and everything in her life was still growing.
When Officer Greefou broke into the apartment, he found it ransacked, with clear signs of a struggle in the living room and the bedroom. Laura’s legs were bound with an electric blanket cord, and the kitchen telephone wire was wrapped around her neck. There was a large amount of blood on the carpet beneath her head and blood spatter angled upward on the wall. The autopsy revealed that she died from severe injuries to the side of her head.
She had been beaten repeatedly with a blunt object. She had also been sexually assaulted. Investigators collected numerous DNA samples from the crime scene and from her body during the autopsy, preserved them, catalogued them, and stored them against the possibility that the technology to use them would one day exist. In 1981, that future was far off.
Portsmouth police worked the case hard from the beginning. Over the next four decades, investigators followed hundreds of leads and potential suspects, but every time they failed to identify the perpetrator. A shadow hung over the case from early on. About a year after Laura’s murder, on October 19, 1982, another student from the same beauty school, 20-year-old Tammy Little, was found murdered in her apartment on Maplewood Avenue.
The autopsy showed that Little also died from severe head injuries. Two young women, from the same school, in the same city, in the same manner, in the same year. Investigators worked both cases in tandem, as the possibility of a serial killer hung over Portsmouth as an unanswered question. Tips came in.
Suspects were interviewed and cleared. The DNA from Laura’s apartment remained stored, carrying a name that technology could not yet reach. For years, then for decades, the man who killed Laura Kempton was alive in the world. Ronnie James Lee was born in Fort Myers, Florida, in 1960.
He was 21 years old on the morning he entered her apartment on Chapel Street. He had served in the U. S. Army until May 1981, four months before Laura’s murder.
By June of that year, he was working as a security guard for Liberty Mutual Insurance in Portsmouth, living in the city, moving through the same streets Laura walked daily. They had never met. There was no relationship, no prior contact, no connection any record could establish. Investigators later concluded it was an opportunistic crime.
Lee was known for breaking into apartments in the area for theft or sexual assault. He was in the neighborhood. He saw the door. He entered.
Between 1982 and 1983, Lee was linked to four residential burglaries and one commercial burglary in the Portsmouth area. In 1987, he was convicted of charges related to a burglary in Keene, New Hampshire, that involved the sexual assault of a woman who was home at the time. He served time in prison and was released. He kept moving, eventually settling in Manchester, New Hampshire, where he lived the final fifteen years of his life, with no connection in any official record to the woman whose apartment he had broken into and killed in 1981.
On February 9, 2005, Ronnie James Lee died at the Catholic Medical Center in Manchester of acute cocaine poisoning. He was 45 years old. He died while Laura Kempton’s DNA profile sat preserved in an evidence storage unit in New Hampshire, and his name appeared nowhere in connection with her case. To understand how the two cases finally met, the story must return to 2017.
That year, Identifinders International, a private forensic genealogy laboratory, began preliminary work in forensic genetic genealogy on Laura’s case, conducting Y-STR analysis on the DNA found at the crime scene. Y-STR testing targets the Y chromosome specifically, the genetic marker of male lineage passed from father to son, which allowed investigators to confirm they were looking for a specific man within a particular family line. The technology available at the time could narrow the search, but it was not strong enough to close it. The genetic profile was not robust enough for the next step.
They kept it, kept working, and waited for science to advance. In 2022, the Portsmouth Police Department, in cooperation with the New Hampshire State Police Forensic Laboratory, the Maine State Police Crime Laboratory, the Cold Case Unit of the Attorney General’s Office, and Identifinders International, used forensic genetic genealogy to analyze the multiple DNA samples found at the 1981 crime scene. When the DNA profile was uploaded to a public genetic genealogy database that year, investigators identified someone in that database who was a relative of the person who had left the DNA at the crime scene. By working backward from that relative, they identified the biological parents of the DNA contributor, and determined that those parents shared only one biological son: Ronnie James Lee.
Based on that information, investigators obtained DNA from a blood sample Lee had provided, preserved from his 2005 autopsy by the medical examiner’s office. Tests conducted in 2022 and 2023 showed his DNA matched various samples from Laura’s apartment, samples from her body, a cigarette butt, and nearby bedding. Match after match. The man who lived in Portsmouth in the same year she was killed, who worked one building from her neighborhood, who had broken into other apartments before and after, was confirmed through his preserved blood sample as the person who was in Laura Kempton’s apartment on the morning of September 28, 1981.
On July 20, 2023, New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella announced that the evidence was sufficient to charge Ronnie James Lee with first-degree murder, had he still been alive, for intentionally causing the death of Laura Kempton before, during, or after committing a felonious sexual assault, and for intentionally killing her by striking her with a blunt object. The case was officially closed and classified as solved without an arrest, a trial, or a courtroom. As for Tammy Little, the second Portsmouth beauty student killed a year after Laura in the same city and in the same manner, investigators stated clearly that there is no evidence linking Lee to her death. Her case remains open, assigned to the New Hampshire Cold Case Unit, still unsolved.
Two young women, one whose name was found, and one still waiting. Laura’s family, in a statement read on their behalf at the press conference, expressed what families who wait 42 years for a single piece of information say. Their persistence, determination, and extraordinary commitment had brought them to this moment for Laura. The attorney general described it as a mix of joy and sorrow.
Investigators called it satisfying and sad at the same time. Formella said: “New Hampshire is a small state. When homicides remain unsolved and cases go cold, it exacerbates the trauma and pain experienced by victims’ families. ” Ronnie James Lee died eighteen years before his name was mentioned in connection with Laura Kempton.
He was never held accountable for it. The parking ticket that brought Officer Greefou to her door on that Monday morning was still in his hand when he found her.