I was glancing through the paper this morning and came across this article about a former classmate of mine, Ben Appleby. (reg required) Apparently, this has been all over the tv for last couple weeks. But I don’t watch tv. :smack: He attempted to rape and then killed a 19 year old woman named Ali Kemp at a her workplace, a community pool in 2002.
I had seen numerous billboards around town after her murder featuring a composite sketch of a man’s face and pickup truck. The damned sketch doesn’t look anything like him!
I have a story of my own about this fucker. He sat behind me in history class in 1992. He kept teasing me-- touching my hair, neck, and back, making suggestive comments, etc. Finally I got so fed up that I turned around and yelled, “If you don’t stop touching me, I’m going to haul off and clock you!”
That summer before our senior year, he held up a convenience store *right across the street from the goddamn Police Department. * According to the articles I’m pulling up on the net, was arrested for wanking in front of two women in Westport (bar district of KC) and then exposing himself in a town in Connecticut to underage girls. I’m not surprised. Shocked, but not surprised.
Here’s his own little page on America’s Most Wanted. Here is another article from the KC Star which outlines his record and includes a therapist’s description of Appleby in a 1996 report. From the article:
I’ve been creeped out by this all day. I feel so badly for Kemp’s parents, and for his parents too.
A guy I went to school with from elementary to high school was arrested for the stabbing of his girlfriend this past August.
It still brings tears to my eyes. I would have NEVER thought this guy could do this. He was a nice kid growing up. We didn’t take the same classes in HS but I never thought there was anything shady about him. His mom was one of the aides at my elementary school and his older brother helped w/ P.E. class.
The school they mention in the article that they had to lock down was the elementary school we attended.
Apparently he was spiraling down after some other problems and was on lots of drugs. He was never a violent person growing up.
He’s pleaded “Not guilty.” I just say my prayers for he and his family.
That’s some cold-blooded shit, friedo. You just don’t know what people are capable of. I was just reading calm kiwi’s thread about her prospective suitor’s letter here in MPSIMS… I have this urge to post “RUN!!! RUN FAST!!!” But her guy could be alright. I hate it when these things make me paranoid.
Cartoonist John Backderf (who produces a weekly comic strip, “The City,” under the name Derf) went to high school with Jeffrey Dahmer and wrote an amazing account of it in My Friend Dahmer. (Scroll down to the bottom of the page.)
As he told one interviewer: “My wife called and told me someone I went to school with was just arrested for murder. Dahmer was my second guess.”
Wow. How very freaky. I wonder if any of the kids I went to school with (who were a little whacked) went on to do something like this. :shudder:
Now a sort of hijack:
That could be just because the people that described him to the artist couldn’t didn’t give accurate information, but it also could be that the artist (Lee Hammond) wasn’t up to snuff. A lot of fellow artists and I shudder when we see this particular artist’s work. She’s got a huge block of fans (she writes instructional drawing books). She teaches artistic clap-trap, that, I believe, ends up limiting artists in the long-term. Think of paint-by-numbers, but not quite as bad. :shudder:
I am astonished that she is a forensic artist. But then again, I’ve seen some pretty sucky forensic art, so why am I surprised?
A kid that sat behind me in 6th grade science class robbed, then shot and killed the owner of the local bicycle shop. The owner (who was much beloved in the community, we called him “Bicycle Sam”) had cooperated fully throughout the entire holdup, and then the kid just shot him point blank in the head. The kid was only 11 or 12 at the time. IIRC, they tried him as an adult and he’s now serving a life sentence.
Supposedly, this kid was “good” until he transferred to the only other middle school in the district and fell in with the “wrong crowd.” When he transferred back to our school later in the year, he was fully involved in gangs. This rumor has fueled rivalry between the two schools ever since.
Flash forward: I recently reunited with a friend whom I was close with all through junior high and high school. She studied psychology at UCLA, and the incident was one of the major case studies in her juvenile delinquency class. :eek:
The hijack’s ok. I’m glad you commented on it. I figured that the eye witness gave a crap description, or the artist sucked. But if the witness looked at the composite after it was done, why didn’t she say it was bad? I realize that your memory can play tricks on you, or maybe she didn’t get a really good look at Appleby… But for christ’s sake, it looked NOTHING like him. Hell, if the sketch had been at least 50% more accurate, I could have called the hotline myself! It kinda pisses me off that this sketch was so wildly inaccurate. The billboards were still up less than a year ago, and the police could have caught this freak a lot sooner with better ammo. Know what I mean?
Well I don’t know anybody who killed other people. I did go to school with two people who committed suicide. In both cases, they shot themselves in the head. Both of them were heavy into drugs, no surprise.
A little further off the topic, but Kristin Pfaff (the guitarist from Courtney Love’s band ‘Hole’ who died of a heroin overdose) went to my high school. She was a few grades ahead of me, and therefore I didn’t know her too well. I didn’t even know about her semi-fame until her death. The local papers had an article on her, and showed her yearbook picture. I recognized that and was shocked when I saw it and realized who it was.
Long after I’d moved away, I heard that the guy who sat across from me in Grade 8 shot a cop. There was something wrong with him as a kid, and there was something wrong with his sister and his parents, too. You’d be hard pressed to find anybody with any good memories of the family.
A guy I knew only vaguely, but who used to live with my brother, killed an old coworker/aquaintance of mine that he had been dating and was recently convicted. He hid her body a couple of blocks from his apartment and she wasn’t found for a year. Initially, we all stuck up for him as an innocent. I remember putting pictures up of her at my university in the hopes she would be found.
And - I just recently found out that a chick I knew only vaguely but most certainly at least sat at the same coffee table with was recently arrested for creating child porn with her boyfriend. shudder
Makes you wonder about the so called ordinary folks all around you.
One of the boys who liked to tease me in elementary school was killed, many years later, along with the rest of the family when his oldest brother’s train jumped the track. Apparently the older boy heard voices telling him to kill the family…
AFAIK, no one I went to school with was involved in anything like this, but one guy my dad went to high school with was killed in a shootout with police and another killed himself. The guy who committed suicide’s brother was Hy Hepee (sp?), who my dad knew, not well. Hepee lived with his mother into his 40’s until one day he killed her while she slept, chopped her corpse into pieces, ate some of them, and had sex with others. He later explained that she was a zombie vampire and that he had to do these things to keep the town safe.
That really is an issue, so I shouldn’t be too hard on this particular artist (though she is bad and it’s hard for me to look past the “junk art” techniques she teaches, as well as her own quite mediocre work). Though I do frequently see examples of bad forensic art—so bad that it defies anatomy, uses poor drawing techniques, is just bad. And yet that passes somehow.
I once did a composite sketch for an organization—they ran some sort of halfway house (or something?) and one of their people was missing. I was asked to do the drawing as a favor, and I tried my best. However, when the drawing showed on the evening news, the station showed the most awful reproduction of my pencil sketch. It looked like a really awful, blurry, crappy Xerox. All the subtleties were gone. It didn’t look anything like my drawing. (The missing person came back on her own, as it happens, so everything was fine.)
There’s some sort of problem going on here, when such a shitty job is often done with these types of drawings (or in their reproduction). Ineptitude, or apathy—I’m not sure which.
In the late 70’s, I went to Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo. I had a series of 7am classes. Some days I’d drive to school and park at particular spot near a tree. Other days my dad would drop me off (I was living at home at the time.)
That particular day, my father needed the car (I wanted it for snoozing for a couple of hours) so I went to the am class some miffed over the loss of a nice place to crash. After classI wandered on over to the University Union for a snooze. I heard an ambulance during that time, but figured it was a professor with an MI. A few minutes later a friend of mine told me there had been a shooting of one of the school’s librarians. For Cal Poly SLO, this was a big event, since nobody could recall this ever happening. Well, we found out later that day that the person had been killed (another first ). The location? About ten yards from where I normally parked.
The killers escaped, but enough information came out to indicate who the culprits were–a father and son who were local to the area. When I saw the name of the son along with a picture in the campus newspaper, I realized he went to the same high school that I went to (he was one year behind). They were later caught and arrested. As it turned out, the murder occurred when the father was confronting this librarian for an alleged “affair” with his wife. The son went along, I guess, to give his dad moral support. Apparently, the son was as shocked as everyone else when his father pulled the trigger, since the charges were later dropped against him. His father was convicted of 2nd degree murder and sentence to a few decades in the state pen (one thing I remembered from the newspaper was when the judge handed down the verdict he criticized the father for his extremely “immature” behavior ). The next summer quarter, I was taking classes. I came up the stairs of the University Union and saw the son sitting in one of the lounge chairs. Apparently, he had enrolled at our school. I never saw him again after that.
I’m still grateful for the loss of the car that day.
). The next summer quarter, I was taking classes. I came up the stairs of the University Union and saw the son sitting in one of the lounge chairs. Apparently, he had enrolled at our school. I never saw him again after that.