Laura Kempton and Tammy Little: Portsmouth Beauty School Murders
Tammy Little, Laura Kempton (left to right)
Around 9:30AM, on Monday, September 28, 1981, Officer Ron Grivois was walking downtown in Portsmouth, NH near the Old Harbor. A longtime member of the Portsmouth Police Department, he knew the winding brick sidewalks of the downtown district well. He paused at the corner of Chapel and Sheafe, looking at the neat, three-story, wood-framed apartment house in front of him. It was 20 Chapel Street—where he was headed. He glanced at the name on the official court summons he carried. Apparently, the young lady in question had been remiss in paying her parking meter violations this past year. He hoped she wouldn’t make a fuss.
Officer Grivois turned the knob to the front door of the building, and the door gave way—it was unlocked. The unit he was looking for—#2—was on the first floor on the left near the entry door. The upper left panel of the apartment’s 4-panel door—the one closest to the doorknob—was missing. With the panel gone, he could see the substantial thickness of the door’s stiles and rails.
Looking through the tall narrow portal into the room, he could tell the something was amiss. A beam of light illuminated an untidy pile of bedding just inside the door. Protruding from the blankets on the floor were a long pair of legs, bound at the ankles with what looked like white cord.
The officer backed away from the broken door, the court summons forgotten. He did a quick scan of the hallway and checked the stairwell of the building, but found nothing suspicious. Satisfied that the crime scene was secure for the moment, he stepped out and called on his radio for backup.
Laura Kempton
Twenty-two-year-old Laura Kempton was familiar with Portsmouth, NH, when she moved there in 1980. After all, she had grown up just across the bay in the college town of Durham. It was only a 20-minute drive into Portsmouth, where there was a livelier club and music scene. She likely visited the city growing up, especially in her teenage years as she was spreading her wings. Moving there from Durham must have felt like a real step into adulthood.
In the summer of 1981, she found a ground-floor apartment on Chapel Street. The building was on the northern edge of the downtown district and close to the Portsmouth Beauty School, where she was a student. She was just about six months away from becoming a hairdresser when she moved in. Laura was a tall, striking young woman with a strong jawline and large, dark eyes. She had even done some modeling work in the past.
The apartment put her in close proximity to the shops and restaurants of Portsmouth, where she would pick up work to support herself while going to school. She worked at Karen’s Ice Cream, where she scooped sundaes for summer tourists; and Macro Polo, a novelty gift shop on Market Street.
Laura was very social and loved Portsmouth’s nightlife. She would frequently go out with friends to hotspots like the Ranger Club and the Riverside. She loved dancing and mingling in a crowd. While she wasn’t in an exclusive relationship, she was dating a man named “Charlie,” the saxophonist of a band that played at Luka’s, a local restaurant.
September 28th, 1981
On the night of Saturday, September 27th, 1981, Laura was out with friends at the Riverside Club, a popular dance venue that played the kind of new wave music that she liked, and she met someone who caught her eye. A man, “JR,” asked Laura to dance. The two hit it off and, after last call, they took his car back to her place. Laura invited him to spend the night, which JR happily accepted.
The next morning, Sunday the 28th, the young lovers got breakfast together at Goldie’s Deli around 9:30AM. The meal was quick, as Laura had to work at Macro Polo at 10:00AM. A few of her acquaintances would later confirm that Laura left JR at the deli to get to work on time.
Sometime in the late afternoon—around 4:30 or 5:30PM—Laura took a break to get some food from nearby Café Petronella. A waitress at the café noticed that she seemed to be in a hurry—she likely needed to get back to the shop to finish her shift, which ended at 7:00PM.
After getting off of work, she went home, relaxed for a bit, and then got ready to go out again. Around 9:00PM, her friend Karen Weise arrived at her apartment. After catching up and perhaps sharing a drink, the two young women hit the town.
Their first destination was Luka’s, a popular restaurant in a historic brick building on Hanover Street. According to Karen, she and Laura danced after dinner, and several men chatted Laura up. The two women left the restaurant together around 1:00AM. Karen bid Laura good night on the front steps of 20 Chapel Street and started off for her own home.
Across Sheafe Street, a 13-year-old boy had risen from bed to use the bathroom. On his way, he passed through the living room, where his mother was sitting, having not yet retired for the night. The boy, “R.S.,” paused for a moment. Their living room window afforded an excellent view of the first-floor unit across the street and he had become used to spotting the good-looking young woman who had moved in that summer. She was sitting on the couch with her back to the window, and he could see the lines of her shoulder blades and an object in her hand, maybe a cookie or a cracker. This was among the last times anyone saw Laura Kempton alive.
The crime scene at Laura’s apartment
By mid-morning on the 29th, a small crowd, held back by crime scene tape, had gathered outside of 20 Chapel Street. Word traveled fast after Officer Grivois made his grim discovery.
At the apartment building that morning was William Mortimer, who would be the lead investigator on the case. Mortimer, a seasoned detective, had spent the majority of his career in the Portsmouth PD.
Laura’s body was still mostly covered by blankets, the mattress, and the box spring—as if the whole bed and everything on it had been piled on top of her. Only her legs, from the knees down, were visible. A white cord binding her ankles appeared to be part of an electric blanket. Beneath Laura’s body, a large pool of blood had soaked into her oval-shaped brown rug. Mortimer looked up and took in the rest of the room, which showed signs of a violent struggle. Blood stained the wall in upward strokes. Closets and drawers were ransacked. Clothing, paperwork, and detritus from Laura’s life was scattered everywhere.
After they carefully removed the mattress and blankets, Mortimer saw that Laura was nude and on her back. A gray telephone cord from the kitchen was wrapped around her neck and a green pillowcase covered her head. Removing the pillowcase revealed her badly beaten face underneath. The medical examiner would later report that she likely sustained punches to the face and blunt force trauma to the left side of her head so brutal that it nearly caved in her skull. Beside her body was a wine bottle—the likely murder weapon. Also on the floor nearby was a cigarette butt—but Laura Kempton didn’t smoke.
After Laura’s body was transferred to a gurney, Mortimer and his team found a small, black, metal hook, wrenched from the mailbox in the hallway. It was the type of thing that one might use to hang keys in an entryway. In Mortimer’s mind, an inkling of how the killer had gained entry to Laura’s unit began to form: he had used the scrap of metal to quietly pry out the pieces of molding that held the top left door panel in place. From there, all the perpetrator had to do was reach in and around the sheet metal to unlock the door and let himself in.
Laura’s autopsy was conducted that afternoon by Rockingham County Medical Examiner Denis Carlson, who was also a certified pathologist at nearby Exeter Hospital. In addition to confirming that the young woman had died from massive head trauma, Dr. Carlson found signs that she had been sexually assaulted. He collected vaginal swabs, scrapings from the skin on Laura’s upper left thigh, and swabs from the telephone cord that had been around her neck. All three of these samples revealed the presence of semen. He estimated that she had died between 1:30AM and 3:30AM.
Interviews with Laura’s friends and neighbors
Mortimer deployed a cadre of detectives and officers to interview Laura’s friends, family, coworkers, and schoolmates—virtually anyone who may have interacted with her in the days leading up to her death. A picture began to emerge of a happy, extroverted young woman with an active social life. It was hard to imagine anyone wanting to do her harm.
The police were eager to talk to JR, given his romantic encounter with Laura. He confirmed that the two of them had had sex in the early hours of Sunday, September 27, and again later that morning before they left for breakfast. Despite them having showered afterwards, it was possible that his semen was among the samples taken from her body. JR said that Laura had no bruises or cuts on her body when he was with her. He also offered some interesting information about Laura’s habits that he had observed in their brief time together. First, Laura had been fastidious about locking the door to her unit, including when they left the apartment briefly to get a snack. Upon going to bed around 3:00AM on Sunday morning, she asked JR to doublecheck that the front door was locked.
Secondly, he noticed that, as they were preparing to leave in the morning, Laura took a wad of cash and placed it in a plain envelope on her kitchen table. She didn’t mention what the cash was for—perhaps a utility or rent payment. But detectives didn’t find the envelope and the money—it had vanished, presumably taken by the murderer.
Interviews with Laura’s neighbors colored in the details of what happened after Karen left her in the early hours of Monday morning. There was RS and his mother across the street, who had witnessed Laura in her sitting room around 1:30AM. Roughly half an hour later a man named Daniel Fortier, who lived in Laura’s building, arrived home. He walked in through the front entryway and noticed that the hallway light in the ground floor corridor was out. To his left, he saw that the wooden panel on Laura’s door was missing. Noises from within led him to believe that someone in the apartment was fixing the door, possibly after a break-in.
It was later discovered that the lightbulb illuminating the hallway had been, perhaps deliberately, loosened. If his estimation of the time was correct, the sounds from the inside of Laura’s apartment were probably from her killer.
Tammy Little
You can’t say the name Laura Kempton without mentioning Tammy Little as well. While we don’t know if the pair knew each other in life, the two are inextricably linked in death.
If Laura had a more classical glamour, Tammy was a punk rock pixie straight out of the 1980s. A petite girl who only weighed about 100 pounds, she sported an asymmetrical spiked blonde mullet, dangling earrings, and an impish grin. Tammy was a native of Portsmouth and graduated high school there in 1981. Her yearbook profile lists her nicknames as “Kinky” and “Punk.” Her philosophy reads, ironically, “Live like you’ll die tomorrow. Learn as if you’ll live forever”— a quote from Gandhi.
Tammy dreamed of one day becoming a professional model and, like Laura, had already done a little modeling work herself. But she was practical and knew that she needed a career should those plans not work out, so, she enrolled at Portsmouth Beauty School, the same cosmetology program that Laura attended. Tammy was four years younger than Laura.
In what now seems to eerily mirror the steps taken by Laura the year before, Tammy found an apartment for herself in the summer of 1982. The unit was on the ground floor of a 2-story apartment house with blue wood siding, located at 315 Maplewood Avenue, about a mile northwest of Laura’s apartment.
In the fall of 1982, on Friday, October 15th, Tammy went with some friends to see a concert in Boston—about an hour away. It was early the next morning at 4:15AM before she was dropped off back home on Maplewood Avenue. She waved goodbye as she unlocked her door and ducked in. That was the last time anyone saw Tammy Little alive.
Over the next two days, she did not show up to school, nor did she answer any calls. Several friends tried to get ahold of Tammy, and a few even left notes on her door. Tammy’s mother, Kim Durgin, grew concerned after several days had passed without speaking to her. On the afternoon of Tuesday, October 19, she went to Tammy’s apartment after work and let herself in. Her daughter’s cat was there but there was no sign of her daughter... until she entered the bathroom and looked into the tub.
It was a sight that no mother should ever have to see. Kim ran out of the apartment and across the street to the corner store, Chase’s Minit Market. The clerk called the police for her and the first squad car arrived within minutes, followed by an ambulance that would be unable to help Tammy.
Throughout the evening, the Portsmouth Police collected evidence. They were once again led by Detective Mortimer. It must have felt like déjà vu to the officers who had worked on Laura Kempton’s case just thirteen months prior.
The Beauty School Murders
It didn’t take long for the public to draw a connection between the murder of Laura Kempton and Tammy Little. Tammy’s autopsy revealed that she was killed by a massive injury to her head, but the ME couldn’t narrow the time of death—just that it was sometime between Saturday and Monday. It didn’t escape anyone’s attention that the person—or persons—who killed the two young women had disfigured their faces during their attacks. Both women were in their early twenties, single, and lived alone in ground floor apartments. Their addresses were only about a mile apart and both women had only just moved in a few months before their respective deaths. They were both regulars at the same local night spots and ran in the same social circles. Both had been killed in the fall, in the early morning hours after a night out with friends.
And then there was the beauty school connection. Some of Tammy’s friends indicated that she at least knew who Laura was. It was unclear if they were friends, but many believed it was impossible that they weren’t at least acquaintances, given that they went to the same school at the same time. There was also the modeling—Laura and Tammy had each done some modeling gigs for local photographers. Had they come across the same person during one of these shoots? Or in the course of their studies at Portsmouth Beauty School?
Despite the strong parallels between the two cases, Detective Mortimer was hesitant to link them prematurely. There was no solid evidence that the two crimes had been committed by the same perpetrator. However, connected or not, the press would later dub the two cases the “Beauty School Murders”.
Advancements in DNA
In July 2000, nearly 19 years after Laura’s murder, detectives submitted two DNA samples for testing at Cellmark Diagnostics in Maryland. The samples came from the scraping on Laura’s thigh area and a swabbing from the grey telephone wire that was found on her neck. In August, Cellmark returned its results. While they were unable to develop a DNA profile from the grey telephone wire, they did obtain a partial male DNA profile from the thigh sample.
Two years later, in 2002, Portsmouth PD sent evidence to the Maine State Crime Lab for testing. They tested the vaginal swabs and the cigarette butt that was found near Laura’s body. Forensic Analyst Cathy MacMillan developed two DNA profiles from the vaginal swab—one belonged to Laura, and the other to an unknown male. From the cigarette, she got a partial male profile which was a match to the vaginal swab. When Cathy compared these results to the previous Cellmark testing of the thigh scrapings, she found that the partial profile from the thigh scrapings also matched the full profile from the vaginal swabs.
The first person the Portsmouth PD wanted to test was JR—Laura’s last known sexual partner. And to their surprise, he was not a match. In fact, it was determined that, though they had had sex early on the morning of September 27, JR’s DNA was not found on her body at all.
Investigators would continue to obtain comparison DNA samples and eliminate hundreds of persons of interest over the next decade.
Getting the DNA Match
In September of 2021, members of the Portsmouth PD, the New Hampshire State Crime Lab, and the AG’s Office met to discuss the possibility of using genetic genealogy on their cold cases. And they decided to reengage genetic genealogists at Identifinders International on Laura Kempton’s case. They sent the vaginal swab samples for new analysis.
Eight months later, in May 2022, the lead investigator on the case was notified that the unknown male’s DNA profile had been successfully obtained and submitted to a third-party public genetic genealogy database called GEDMatch.
Three days later, he got word that there was a match to a close relative in the database. And through the quick work of genetic genealogist, Linda Doyle, it was determined that the unknown male had to be an offspring of two specific individuals. Further investigative work determined that they had only one biological child—and that child was the killer that Portsmouth PD had long searched for.
The lead detective discovered that the child had passed away nearly 20 years prior—a great disappointment. But he contacted the Office of the Medical Examiner, and to his great relief, they still had a blood card from his autopsy. The Maine State Crime Lab compared the DNA on the blood card to the vaginal swab from Laura, and it was a perfect match. Authorities were now certain. They had a name to give the faceless specter that they had been chasing for over 40 years—Ronney James Lee.
Ronney James Lee
Ronney was born in Fort Myers, FL, on January 16, 1960. His obituary lists his parents as Charley James Lee and Janie Mae—though they may not both be his biological parents. Ronney was third in line of Charley and Janie Mae’s six children. Sometime during his childhood, his parents divorced.
We don’t know a lot about Ronney’s youth, but we do know that he enlisted in the Army in his teens during the late 1970’s. His service records show that he remained in the Army until May 15, 1981. By then he was living with his mother in Portsmouth on Rockhill Avenue, located in the city’s North End. The district is about an 8-minute car ride or a 40-minute walk to Old Harbor, where Laura Kempton lived.
In June of 1981, Ronney began working as a security guard for the Liberty Mutual building in Portsmouth, just a few blocks from his mother’s home, though his employer was technically MBI Security. This would have been around the time that Laura moved into her apartment on Chapel Street.
In September of 1981, Ronney broke into Laura’s apartment, and killed her, but remained elusive to law enforcement.
Ronney’s run-ins with the Portsmouth PD did not begin in earnest until November 1982, when he was arrested for an attempted burglary. The following summer, he went on a spree of burglaries across the city, robbing four residences and one commercial building. In one of the robberies, he broke a windowpane and reached in to unlock it for entry, similar to the way he broke into Laura’s apartment.
In 1987, Ronney was convicted of a burglary and sexual assault in Keene, NH, a college town in the western part of the state. A young woman who was home at the time of the robbery woke around 3:30AM to find someone touching her. She opened her eyes to see Ronney standing over her and screamed, waking her roommate. He fled, taking with him a number of items he had stolen from the house, including cash and jewelry. Ronney was arrested and charged with both the theft and the assault. He was sentenced to three years in prison, from 1987-1990.
Ronney’s story ends in 2005, when he overdosed on cocaine at 45 years old. He left behind a son, a number of step-siblings, and a trail of havoc that would not be uncovered until nearly two decades after his death.
Laura Kempton: Case Closed
On a hot and sunny afternoon in late July of this year, a room full of reporters and law enforcement agents gathered in Concord, NH, at the State Police Communications Center. Joined by Portsmouth Chief of Police Mark Newport, the New Hampshire Attorney General, John Formella, announced that the 1981 homicide of Laura Kempton had finally been solved.
He named Ronney James Lee publicly, for the first time, as her killer. His office was convinced, beyond a reasonable doubt, that he had broken into her apartment that morning with the intention of robbing Laura, sexually assaulting her, or both. The AG explained that if Ronney had lived, he would have been 63 years old, and would be facing charges of first-degree murder, aggravated sexual assault, battery, and robbery. Unfortunately, justice had come too late.
Police Commission William Mortimer, the first of the lead detectives on her case, did not get to see her killer finally named, having passed away in 2019 at the age of 95. At his retirement party in 2002, he expressed his confidence in those who came after him and his faith that the perpetrator would not outrun the rapid growth in forensic science.
Justice for Tammy Little
In the coming weeks, investigators on NH’s Cold Case Unit will peer more closely into the details of Ronney’s life to see if it intersected with other victims of unsolved crimes. At the press conference for Laura Kempton, investigators wouldn’t comment on the murder of Tammy Little from 1982. As of now, it’s still an unresolved case.
But somewhere in the state’s forensic laboratory, samples from Tammy’s body and apartment have been preserved. They have been waiting for the day when science and genealogical research can narrow the field of suspects to a bloodline—to a dark branch of a sprawling family tree. One day, hopefully soon, the detective working Tammy’s case will trace along the roots and branches of that tree, scratching off names until their finger comes to rest on one that cannot be crossed out.
This text has been adapted from the Murder, She Told podcast episode, Laura Kempton and Tammy Little: The Portsmouth Beauty School Murders. To hear Laura Kempton and Tammy Little’s full story, find Murder, She Told on your favorite podcast platform.
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Laura Kempton in high school
Laura Kempton (center) with friends at Durham High School
Laura Kempton at prom
Laura Kempton modeling photo (NH AG)
Laura’s apartment, 20 Chapel Street, circa 2001 (NH AG)
Laura's Apartment, 20 Chapel Street, today
Crime scene - Laura's apartment
Crime Scene - Laura’s apartment - photo of door panel (NH AG)
Crime Scene - Laura’s apartment - Photo showing area missing the metal piece (NH AG)
Crime Scene - Laura’s apartment - Photo of Piece of Mailbox found on floor (NH AG)
Crime scene - Laura’s apartment - glass bottle found near Laura's body, believed to the murder weapon (NH AG)
Tammy Little
Tammy’s apartment, older photo (315 Maplewood Ave., Portsmouth, NH)
Tammy’s apartment, today (315 Maplewood Ave., Portsmouth, NH)
Crime scene - Tammy Little’s apartment
Crime scene - Tammy Little’s apartment
Crime scene - Tammy Little’s apartment
Tammy Little, gravestone
Portsmouth Police Capt. Jim Tucker
Portsmouth Police Jim Tucker, Michael Ronchi
Ronney James Lee, booking photo, 1983 (NH AG)
Sources For This Episode
Newspaper articles
Various articles from Concord Monitor, Foster's Daily Democrat, Journal Tribune, Nashua Telegraph, New Hampshire Union Leader-New Hampshire Sunday News, Portland Press Herald, Portsmouth Herald, The Boston Globe, The Brattleboro Reformer, Valley News, here.
Written by various authors including Adam Leech, Adolphe Bernotas, Amy Miller, Beth LaMontagne, Brad Pokorny, Cissy Taylor, Clynton Namuo, D. Allan Kerr, Doug Roberts, Douglas Guarino, Elizabeth Dinan, Emily Bailey, Erika Mantz, Garry Rayno, Holly Young, Ian Lenahan, James Baker, Jeff McMenemy, Jody Record, Melanie Plenda, Michelle Firmbach, Mike Recht, Nancy Cicco, Nancy West, Neil Cote, Paul Montgomery, Ray Carbone, Rick Dumont, Rik Stevens, Robert George, Roni Reino, Tom Fahey, and Tom Mooney.
Online written sources
'Laura Kempton' (DurhamFriends.com), ~5/1/2005
Official documents
“Attorney General’s report regarding the September 28, 1981, murder of Laura Kempton in Portsmouth, New Hampshire,” issued 7/20/2023.
Photos
Photos from durhamfriends.com, NH Attorney General’s office, Boston Globe, Google Maps, Portsmouth Herald, FindaGrave, Hartford Courant, Portland Press Herald.
Credits
Vocal performance, audio editing, and research by Kristen Seavey
Written by Morgan Hamilton, writing support by Byron Willis
Research support by Ericka Pierce and Brittany Healy.
Murder, She Told is created by Kristen Seavey