A 42-Year-Old MYSTERY Solved By a Single Cigarette Butt

A 42-Year-Old MYSTERY Solved By a Single Cigarette Butt

She checked her lock twice that night. The killer never needed a key. Portsmouth, New Hampshire, September 1981. A small coastal city, tight streets, familiar faces. The kind of town where a girl walks home from a restaurant at 1:00 in the morning and never once looks over her shoulder. Laura Kempton was 23 years old, enrolled at Portsmouth Beauty School, working two jobs.

 A bold love for new wave fashion that turned heads on quiet New England streets. She was social, she was dating, she was building something. One shift, one Saturday night, one small dream at a time. It was exactly where she wanted to be. Saturday night, September 26th, the Riverside Club was packed. Loud music, full dance floor, the kind of night that stretches past midnight without anyone noticing. Laura met a man there.

 They hit it off. At closing time, she invited him back to her apartment on Chapel Street. When they briefly stepped out around 2:00 in the morning to get food, Laura locked her door behind her. When they returned, she pulled the handle once before bed. Firm, satisfied, secured, just habit. Something she did without thinking.

 That habit would mean nothing by morning. Sunday passed the way Sundays do. A quick breakfast at Goldie’s Deli, a full shift at Marco Polo. By evening, Laura was at Lucas Restaurant with her close friend Karen Weiss. Live band, dinner, easy conversation. Karen would tell investigators the night felt completely ordinary.

 They left between 1:00 and 1:30 in the morning. That walk home, two friends on a quiet Portsmouth street a little past midnight, was the last ordinary moment of Laura’s life. At the door to her building on Chapel Street, Laura invited Karen to stay the night. Karen said no, early shift. She had to get up for work.

 They hugged, said good night. Karen turned and walked home. She had no reason to worry. She had no idea that the hallway behind that door was already dark. Not burned out dark, not flickering dark, deliberately dark. Earlier that night, someone had come into that building with a purpose. They reached up to the hallway light bulb and turned it slowly.

 Not enough to remove it, just enough to break the connection. The faint hiss of glass on metal. Then silence. Then darkness. That one quiet act tells you everything. This was not someone who snapped in the moment. This was someone who stood in that hallway beforehand and thought, “The light needs to go first.

” Then he moved to Laura’s door. He pulled a piece of metal from the hallway mailbox and pressed it against the lower left panel of her door. The wood was old. It didn’t take long. A sharp crack, then a crunch, then a splintering give, and a hole opened up just wide enough to slide one arm through. He reached in, found the lock, turned it.

 The same lock Laura had checked before she went to sleep opened without a sound. Around 2:00 in the morning, a resident named Daniel Fortier came home. He walked into that dark hallway. His foot hit something on the floor, a piece of broken wood, a chunk of the door panel. He looked up. The gap in Laura’s door was right there.

 And through it, in the shadows inside, he could hear something. Movement, shuffling, something being dragged. He thought it was Laura. He opened his own door and went inside. He thought it was Laura. Sit with that for a moment, because the question that will stay with you is this: Was it? Earlier that same night, before Laura had even come home, a homeless man named Arthur Edwards had slipped into the building to sleep in the hallway. He’d done it before.

 It was warm. Nobody usually bothered him. A loud crash woke him up, then voices. A man and a woman. The tone wasn’t conversation. It was urgent, sharp, the kind of sound that punches through a wall. Arthur lay still in the dark and listened. And then the voices stopped. Just like that. Cut off. Silence. Arthur didn’t check the door. He didn’t knock.

His mind went to one thing. If police showed up and found him sleeping in this hallway, he’d be the one answering questions. So he got up, walked past Laura’s apartment, noticed the door was slightly open, noticed something felt wrong in the air, and stepped out into the cold Portsmouth night. He walked to the park.

 The building went quiet behind him. Arthur Edwards didn’t know that the silence he left behind wasn’t peace. He didn’t know that behind that broken door, the fight was already over. He didn’t know that by 2:30 in the morning, the young woman who loved new wave fashion, who checked her lock before bed, who had two jobs and a whole life in front of her, was already gone.

 He just saw a dark hallway, and for the next 42 years, that darkness was the only thing the world had left. Officer Ron Grivois had a simple job that Monday morning, deliver a parking summons, knock on the door, move on. He pulled up to 20 Chapel Street on September 28th, 1981, the same way he would have pulled up to any other address on any other routine morning.

 Portsmouth was waking up. People were heading to work. The weekend was over. He walked to the ground floor apartment and raised his hand to knock. Then, he stopped. The lower left panel of the door was gone. Not damaged, not cracked, gone. A dark hole punched through the wood, edges splintered outward. Grivois leaned forward and looked through the gap.

 Inside, the officer discovered a scene that indicated a serious struggle. It was clear that someone had been restrained against their will. He called for backup. What investigators stepped into that morning was not a crime scene, it was a map. Every object in that room told part of the story. The mattress and box spring had been lifted off the bed frame and placed directly on top of Laura’s body.

Sheets, blankets, everything piled on top of her, hiding her from the knees up. Only her legs were visible. Her ankles were bound with the cord from her own electric blanket, that soft domestic object, the kind you pull out on a cold night, now used as a restraint. The evidence showed that the intruder had used household items as part of the assault.

The room told the story of a struggle that lasted far longer than anyone wanted to imagine. The killer didn’t bring a weapon with him. He used what he found, a glass wine bottle from her apartment. Lab results would later confirm her blood type on its surface. He turned her own home against her. Her blanket cord, her phone cord, her wine bottle, every object of violation, every familiar thing twisted into something it was never meant to be.

 And on the floor near her body sat something that had no business being there at all, a single cigarette butt. Laura Kempton was not a smoker. It didn’t belong to her date from Saturday night. It didn’t belong to Karen. It was foreign, out of place, a tiny overlooked piece of trash that contained something its owner never thought about leaving behind.

 In 1981, no one fully understood what that cigarette butt was. It was a ticking time bomb of biology, and it had just started its 42-year countdown. The envelope of cash was gone. Laura’s Saturday night date remembered it clearly, sitting on the kitchen table before breakfast. When investigators searched, it had vanished.

 The killer had taken it. But look at the totality of what happened in that apartment, the sexual assault, the sustained beating, the deliberate way he covered her body before he left, the calculated entry he had planned in advance. This man did not come for the cash. The cash was just what he took on his way out the door. Police moved fast.

 They interviewed residents, friends, anyone connected to Laura’s life. Investigators collected critical DNA evidence from the scene, including samples that would eventually hold the key to the killer’s identity. Over the following months and years, they ran down hundreds of leads. And then, they found him, or at least they believed they did.

 By the mid-1980s, investigators had locked onto a Portsmouth local, a long-time resident, a manual laborer, someone with the physical strength to do what had been done in that apartment and the intelligence to cover his tracks. Police were so certain about this man that by 1996, detectives spoke to the Boston Globe on record, publicly, confidently, saying they had their suspect, that they watched him constantly, that it was only a matter of time, 15 years.

 15 years of surveillance, of certainty, of waiting for one piece of evidence to seal it. They were staring at the wrong man, and while they spent 15 years stalking a ghost, the real predator was already miles away, starting over. He had a name, a face, a daily routine. He passed people on the street. He went about his life.

 He was just another face in a crowd that had no idea what he had done. The case went cold the way cold cases always do, not dramatically, but slowly. Fewer detectives, fewer leads, a file growing thicker with dead ends. And the teen news there is and then Portsmouth got a second shadow. 13 months after Laura’s murder, October 19th, 1982, a young woman named Tammy Little was found dead inside her apartment at 315 Maplewood Avenue, less than 1 mile from Laura’s building.

 Tammy was 20 years old. She lived alone. Ground floor apartment. She was a student at Portsmouth Beauty School, the same school Laura attended. She had gone out with friends, come home in the early morning hours, waved goodbye at her door, and never been seen alive again. Same school, same neighborhood, same ground floor. Same brutal end.

 Her mother found her after days of silence. No calls answered, notes piling up on her door. Fatal injuries sustained during the struggle. Think about what that means. Two young women learning the same trade, walking the same streets, living in the same kind of apartment, killed in the same way within 13 months of each other. Did he see them both at Portsmouth Beauty School before he chose them? Was he watching from the same sidewalk while they walked to class? Did he stand in the same hallway where they learned their craft and make his calculations in

silence? The police believed then, and investigators believe now, that the same person was responsible for both. But without enough physical evidence to make a case, both files stayed open. Both families waited. Both names sat in the cold case unit year after year. Everything was preserved. The cigarette butt, the skin scrapings, the biological evidence collected on September 28th, 1981 sat in storage while the years turned into decades.

 The puzzle was on the table. Every piece was there, except one. The name of the man who had loosened that light bulb, torn that mailbox apart, broken that door, and walked out into the Portsmouth night, it stayed invisible, stayed hidden, stayed safe. And while Portsmouth police filed their reports and updated their databases and chased leads that went nowhere, Ronnie James Lee was just another face in the crowd.

 Nobody knew it yet, but that cigarette butt was still counting down. One cigarette, one careless moment in a dark apartment on Chapel Street. That’s all it took. 42 years later, the evidence never left. While the investigation stalled, while the wrong man was watched, while the years quietly turned into decades, the biological samples collected on September 28th, 1981 sat in storage.

 The skin scrapings, the cigarette butt, sealed, preserved, waiting. Science just hadn’t caught up to them yet. The year 2000. Nearly two decades after Laura’s murder, DNA testing had advanced enough that Portsmouth investigators decided to try again. They pulled two samples from storage, the thigh scraping and a swab from the telephone cord, and sent them to Cellmark Diagnostics in Maryland, one of the country’s leading forensic labs at the time.

 The telephone cord came back empty, but the thigh scraping returned something. A partial male DNA profile, incomplete, not enough to run a match, not enough to name anyone, but enough to confirm what investigators already suspected. A man had been in that apartment. His biology was still there two decades later waiting to be read.

 It was the first step, and it pointed in exactly one direction. Two years later, in 2002, investigators pushed further. The forensic DNA samples and other evidence went to forensic DNA analyst Kathy MacMillan at the Maine State Police Crime Laboratory. MacMillan ran her analysis and came back with something far more significant than a partial profile.

 A full male DNA profile, complete, clear. She compared it to the 2000 Cellmark results. They matched. Same man. They compared the cigarette butt partial profile, but consistent with the same contributor. The man whose DNA was found inside Laura’s body had also smoked a cigarette on her floor that night and left it there without a second thought.

 That cigarette was no longer just trash. It was his signature. Investigators uploaded the profile to every database available. CODIS, the FBI’s national system, crime labs across the country, Interpol. They pulled comparison samples from anyone connected to the case. One by one, they eliminated people.

 The Saturday night date, cleared. Neighbors, cleared. Friends, cleared. Hundreds of names, hundreds of swabs, hundreds of dead ends. The profile sat in the system unmatched for years. The killer had simply never been tested. December 2016, 35 years after the murder, Portsmouth Police Sergeant John Perachi heard about a cold case in Arizona that had been solved using a completely different approach.

 Not traditional DNA matching, but forensic genetic genealogy. A private company called Identifinders International, founded by Dr. Turi King Tasha, Colleen Fitzpatrick, had used DNA to trace a killer, not through a criminal database, but through his own family tree. Perachi called Fitzpatrick directly.

 The sample went to her team. The initial analysis used Y-STR technology, tracing the male lineage through the Y chromosome to try to determine a family surname. It was 2017. The technology was still early. No surname match came back. No suspect was developed, but one piece of information emerged that would matter later.

The DNA came from a man with African-American heritage. The search wasn’t over. It had just been given a new direction. September 2021, investigators from Portsmouth PD, the New Hampshire State Lab, and the Attorney General’s Office sat down together and made a decision. Forensic genetic genealogy had evolved dramatically.

 Whole genome sequencing, a method that reads hundreds of thousands of genetic markers across the entire DNA strand, had recently become viable for cold case investigations. It gave genealogists something the old YSTR method couldn’t, the ability to search public ancestry databases for partial relatives and reconstruct a family tree from scratch.

 They submitted the vaginal swab samples to Identifinders International for a new round of analysis. In May 2022, Detective Eric Widerstrom received the call. A profile had been successfully obtained. It had been uploaded to GEDmatch, a public genealogy database where people voluntarily submit their DNA to find relatives and trace ancestry.

 Three days later, there was a match. Not a match to a name in a criminal database, a match to relatives. People who had submitted their own DNA to trace their family history, never imagining it would lead investigators to a killer. Genealogist Linda Doyle took those matches and went to work. She mapped the family tree, traced the branches, cross-referenced records, and she narrowed it down to two specific individuals, a man and a woman whose DNA signatures pointed to them as the biological parents of the unknown contributor. They had only one

biological son. His name was Ronnie James Lee. Lee passed away in 2005 due to health complications related to substance abuse. He was 45 years old at Catholic Medical Center. But death doesn’t destroy DNA. Investigators contacted the office of the medical examiner and requested the blood card preserved from Lee’s autopsy.

 McMillan in Maine compared it directly against the profile from the vaginal swabs. It matched. In June 2023, she ran the confirmation, Lee’s DNA against the cigarette butt, the thigh scrapings, and the pillowcase recovered from Laura’s apartment. Every sample, every piece. Every single one matched Ronnie James Lee.

 So who was he? Born in Fort Myers, Florida in 1960, his mother had moved to Portsmouth and when Lee left the US Army in May 1981, just 4 months before Laura’s murder, he moved in with her at 1908 Rockhill Avenue. He got a job with MBI Security at Liberty Mutual in Portsmouth, a security guard, a man paid to protect buildings.

 In November 1982, 1 year after Laura’s murder, he was arrested for attempted theft. The following summer, he went on a burglary spree across Portsmouth. Four residential break-ins, one commercial. In one of them, he broke a window, reached through to unlock it from inside, and crawled in. The same method he had used on Laura’s door.

In another burglary on Wheel Street, a woman noticed the hallway light was off at 1:15 in the morning. She went to check. A man was standing in the dark leaning against the light switch. When she asked what he was doing, he raised a finger to his lips. Shh. That single word. The instinct to silence a woman who had just caught him in the dark.

 It is the same instinct that erupted into violence inside Laura’s apartment. The same man, the same darkness, the same need to make the noise stop. In 1987, he was convicted of breaking into an apartment in Keene, New Hampshire. A woman woke at 3:30 in the morning to find him standing over her touching her. She screamed.

 Her roommate woke up. Lee grabbed what he could, cash, jewelry, and ran. He went to prison from December 1987 to July 1990. After his release, he moved to Manchester where he lived quietly for 15 years until he passed away in 2005. He never spent a single day in prison for Laura Kempton, not one. On July 20th, 2023, New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella stood at a podium and said the words Laura’s family had waited 42 years to hear.

 Ronnie James Lee killed Laura Kempton. The evidence established it beyond any reasonable doubt. Had he been alive, he would have faced first-degree murder charges. Formella called it bittersweet, and that word is exactly right. Because bitter is watching a killer die free in a hospital bed of a drug overdose, never handcuffed, never charged, never forced to look Laura’s family in the eye.

 And sweet is the truth finally existing, undeniable, on record, in public, forever. Laura’s family released a statement. They thanked the investigators who never stopped. They said, simply, that the diligence and determination over the past decades had led to this moment for Laura, not for the case, not for the system, for her.

And Tammy Little, her case file remains open today. Same city, same school, same pattern. The AG’s office said they hope the resolution of Laura’s case will bring forward new information about Tammy. But as of now, her killer, if it is a different person, if it is the same shadow wearing a different face, has not been named.

 Two young women walked into Portsmouth Beauty School with their futures ahead of them. One case has a name attached to it now, the other still doesn’t. Laura Kempton was 23 years old. She loved new wave fashion. She checked her lock before bed. She worked two jobs and danced on Sunday nights and invited her friends to stay so they wouldn’t have to walk home alone.

 She deserved to grow old. A cigarette butt on a floor said otherwise. But it also said this, you can run for 42 years and science will still find you. You can die before the handcuffs come, but you cannot die before the truth does. The truth doesn’t need a heartbeat, it just needs time. And before you go, three questions worth sitting with.

 If Arthur Edwards had knocked on that door instead of walking away, would Laura Kempton still be alive today? Tammy Little’s case is still open. If you know anything, anything at all about what happened on Maplewood Avenue in October 1982, do you have a responsibility to come forward? And finally, if forensic genetic genealogy can reach back 42 years and pull a killer out of the shadows, how many other cold cases are sitting in storage right now, one database upload away from being solved?