On May 22, 1993, a man named Kurt was carrying some boxes into his new home.
He had just moved into this two-story house along with his fiancée, whose name was Kem.
Kurt went into the house and he dropped the boxes in the foyer and then he turned back to head back down to the car to get another load.
And as he walked down the steps, he passed his fiancée, Kem, and they smiled at each other.
She was making her way up, he was making his way down.
But seconds after they passed each other right as Kurt got back to the car, he felt this incredible pressure and blast wave hit him in the back that almost sent him flying.
And then when Kurt turned around, he could not believe what he saw.
But before we get into today's story, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark and Mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right place, because that's all we do.
So if that's of interest to you, please sneak into the Follow Buttons house and replace their toothpaste with numbing cream.
Okay, let's get into today's story.
On the evening of Friday, May 21st 1993, a 29-year-old woman named Kem Wenger clapped her hands together in front of her with happiness, in the basement of the Golden Congregational Church in rural Iowa.
Her closest friends had gathered here to throw Kem and her fiancé, 32-year-old Kurt Simon, a combination wedding shower and goodbye party, and now they were presenting the couple with their gift.
It was a money tree planted in a little yellow coffee can with envelopes full of cash hanging off of it.
Cam and Kurt both smiled and began making their way through the crowd to give everybody a big hug and to say thank you.
Tonight was a big night for them.
All their plans were finally falling into place.
Tomorrow, they would pack all of Kurt's belongings into their car and they would drive 230 miles south from the place where he had been living in Iowa to the city of Bloomington Illinois, just outside of Chicago, where Kem already lived.
And in Bloomington they would begin their new life together as a soon-to-be-married couple, raising Kem's two children from previous relationships.
It had been a whirlwind eight months since they had first met on actually a blind date.
Cam had known almost immediately that Kurt really was something special, but it hadn't been easy for them to get to this point.
They both had almost no money.
Kurt was studying to be a Presbyterian minister and living in Iowa to finish seminary school.
And Kem was a single mom living in Bloomington who had just recently quit her office job because her coworker was sexually harassing her.
She'd taken on off-the-books work as a hairdresser and house cleaner, but she still had to rely on public assistance to make ends meet.
The long-distance relationship itself was also just exhausting, with all the driving back and forth.
And it didn't help that Kem had contentious relationships with the fathers of both of her kids.
Her one-year-old son's father, Dale Fosdick, was always late with his child support payments and he still acted like he was entitled to walk right into Kem's house anytime he wanted.
Kurt had actually recently confronted him about doing that and told him to stop, which Dale did not seem to appreciate.
Her seven-year-old daughter's father, Todd Wenger, really wasn't much better.
Todd fought with Kem all the time over their custody arrangement, and he and her other ex Dale, were actually friends, which really annoyed Kem.
But now, as somebody handed Kem a piece of cake in the church basement, all those problems seemed like they were about to get a whole lot smaller.
Kurt was moving in, and Kem was about to get her whole life organized.
Waiting for her at home in Bloomington.
She had a whole collection of Modern Bride magazines so she could plan their wedding.
And she and Kurt were actually talking about Kurt maybe adopting her son.
And she knew Kurt could very quickly get a job in Bloomington as a pastoral counselor.
And they could maybe save some money by only having to pay for one residence now.
And this money tree they were getting was a sweet start.
I mean, Kem knew that the members of the congregation were not wealthy people by any stretch.
But you know she found it very touching that they'd pooled their limited resources to give her and Kurt such a wonderful send-off.
The only thing that could make this moment any better would be if Kem's mother, Cricket, was there.
But, unfortunately, Kem and Cricket were estranged.
Kem wished she could be closer to her mother, but Cricket had a mean streak and for some reason she really hated Kurt.
Kem finished her cake and then checked the time, and she realized, you know, it was time to go.
So she tapped Kurt on the shoulder as he was speaking to some friends.
They had a lot left to pack tomorrow morning, and they had a long drive ahead of them.
So Kem and Kurt made their goodbyes and then headed out of the church holding hands.
The next day was Saturday, May 22nd, and Kem and Kurt spent the first part of the day packing and then the second part driving.
And then finally, at 1030 pm that night, they pulled their car into the driveway of Kem's two-story house in Bloomington, the home they would now share together.
Kem just sat for a second in the passenger seat while Kurt got out of the car and opened up the trunk.
They had a lot of stuff to carry in, but Kem was just exhausted and frankly didn't feel like doing it quite yet.
So she watched as Kurt went ahead and walked up the front stairs carrying a box and the money tree.
He unlocked the door, he stepped inside, and then a minute later, he came back out empty-handed.
And at that point, you know, Kim sighed and decided she better get out and help too.
Kurt was halfway back down the stairs as Kim grabbed her own box out of the trunk and walked her way into the house, into the foyer of her home.
She put her box down and was about to go back outside and do another trip with Kurt when she paused.
There was something she didn't recognize on the floor of the foyer that had not been there when she had left for Iowa.
Kurt was outside facing away from the house when an intense wave of pressure hit him from behind.
And nearly at the exact same time, this booming sound like some kind of explosion filled his ears.
He stumbled forward almost uncontrollably and then whipped around and called out for Kemm.
But his ears were ringing now, and he couldn't really tell if she had answered.
There was smoke pouring out from the front door of their house.
And instinctively, he just ran into the house, into the foyer to go find Kem.
When he got in there, there's all this smoke and chaos.
There's shards of broken glass everywhere.
And also, he noticed all these little pieces of what looked like metal kind of all over the foyer.
Kurt screamed Kem's name over and over, and he looked frantically all around through all the rubble.
But it was impossible to see.
It was like everything was destroyed in here.
And so now, beginning to gasp from all the smoke, he started walking around the foyer, kind of ducking below the smoke as best as he could.
And that's when he saw legs on the floor.
Minutes later, Detective Larry Shepherd of the Bloomington Police Department pulled up outside the two-story house in his cruiser, with his partner beside him and another squad car behind them.
Shepherd did not usually respond to 911 calls because he was a homicide detective, but he had happened to be in the area when dispatch requested officers go check out a report of potentially a shotgun blast on a residential street.
However, the second he stepped out of his car and looked at this two-story house.
Shepherd knew this could not have been a shotgun blast.
There was all this black smoke billowing out the front door of the house and although Shepherd couldn't see any fire, he could hear the fire alarm going off inside.
And outside, the street was chaos.
There were all these people who Shepard guessed must be neighbors shouting and running around.
And there was debris everywhere, broken glass and splintered pieces of wood and chunks of metal that had basically been blown out of the house out onto the street.
In the driveway of this home Shepard could see there was a man who had his hands on his head and he looked frantic and he was yelling the name Kem over and over again as he looked towards the destroyed house.
And it was at that point Shepard realized there must be someone, or multiple people, inside of the house.
And he really couldn't wait for backup to go find them.
So he and his partner shouted for everyone to stay back, and then they raced up the stairs into the smoke.
Once Shepherd was inside the front foyer he could tell there was no active fire, just lots of smoke kind of hanging in the air.
And he looked around and he saw there was a six inch hole on the wall right near the front door.
And there was another hole right in the floor of the foyer.
But even though he saw those things pretty quickly, his attention quickly snapped to the body of a woman who was on the ground.
And it was immediately clear that there was nothing they could do for her.
Literally half of her head was just missing.
In his entire career, Shepard had never worked a murder case where the weapon was a bomb.
But standing in this blackened, destroyed foyer over the charred body of this woman...
Shepard felt sure that that is exactly what he was looking at right now.
Around this point.
The officers from the other squad car had now come up the stairs and into the house.
But Shepard told them to get back, go back outside because the scene was not safe to process yet.
They needed the fire department here and they needed the bomb squad, because there could be more explosives.
Not long afterwards, Shepard and the other officers stood on the front lawn as members of the fire department, and the state police bomb squad combed through the scene.
By this point, Detective Shepard had learned a bit more about what had happened.
The dead woman was Kem Wenger, and the man he had seen screaming in the driveway was Kem's fiance, Kurt Simon.
Neighbors said the pair had arrived around 1030 pm and a couple of the neighbors had actually noticed them before the blast went off, when they started unloading their car.
These neighbors said that they saw Kurt be the first one to go inside the house and when he did he went in carrying a box that he had pulled from the back of the car.
And then these neighbors said they saw Kurt come out again empty-handed, but he went down to the back of the car again and he appeared to put something in the trunk.
And at the same time, Cam had grabbed a box from the car and she went into the house by herself, and that's when the explosion happened.
Shepard was troubled by these accounts.
He thought it was suspicious that Kurt had been able to walk into the house without getting hurt.
And then just seconds later, Kem goes in and her arrival seems to have triggered the explosion.
And so naturally, he wondered if maybe that box Kurt was carrying that he went inside with, maybe that was the bomb and he planted it.
And then when he left, she goes in and it obviously goes off.
And then also he wondered, you know, what had Kurt put back into his car after he came out again?
What did he put into the trunk?
But even more suspicious than any of that was what a preliminary sweep of Kem's home had turned up in the basement.
And that was wires, gunpowder, and fuses.
Shepard did not need to be a bomb expert to know that these could be components of a bomb and that whoever killed Kem must have built the bomb right there in her basement.
Which naturally made Kurt Simon the number one suspect.
So Shepard told a crime scene tech to process Kurt's vehicle and pay extra attention to the trunk.
Then the detective walked over to Kurt himself.
And Kurt was rocking back and forth and he was crying and he was still just saying Cam, over and, over and over again.
Shepard asked Kurt if he could tell him, you know, what had happened here.
And Kurt looked at him with this vacant and shocked expression.
And he told the detective that he didn't know what happened.
He'd gone inside with a box and he had just started back down the stairs when he felt the blast behind him.
And at this, Shepard's eyes narrowed.
Because, according to the neighbor's account, they said Kurt was actually at his trunk, you know, putting something back into the car at the time of the explosion.
But Kurt was now claiming that he had actually only just exited the house.
Basically was on the stairs as the blast happened.
Now, this discrepancy could just be a result of confusion, or Kurt could be lying to cover up whatever he may or may not have done.
But independent of whatever this was.
Shepard just told Kurt that right now he was going down to the station for questioning.
Several hours later, a little before dawn on Sunday, May 23rd 1993, Detective Shepard walked out of the interrogation room in the Bloomington Illinois police station, where he'd just spent more than an hour hammering Kurt Simon with questions about his murdered fiance.
And Kurt had been a pretty difficult interview.
He had plenty of ideas about other people who might have killed Kem.
He told Shepard that both the fathers of Kem's children, Dale Fosdick and Todd Wenger, fought with her all the time.
And he said that Kem's estranged mom, Wilma Lewis, who everybody called Cricket, was quote every kind of evil.
But Kurt had seemed to have no information to offer about what he had actually witnessed before the explosion.
He had stuck to a story that he had not seen anything suspicious at all in the foyer, which Shepard found hard to believe.
Kurt also had no explanation for why the bomb exploded on Kem and not on him, and he also denied knowing anything about the bomb-making materials that had been found in Kem's basement.
Kurt also said he hadn't put anything back in his trunk around the time of the explosion, but he couldn't explain why the neighbors said he had.
Shepard ultimately thought Kurt was either the most unobservant person alive, or he was lying.
And on top of all that, Kurt had refused to take a lie detector test.
However, Shepard still had to let him go home.
The detective just didn't have anywhere near enough evidence to arrest Kurt, at least not yet.
At this point, the bomb squad was actually still searching the house for any additional bombs.
So the crime scene techs had not gotten in yet to begin to start looking for forensic evidence.
They actually hadn't even been able to remove Kem's body yet.
Shepard knew the day ahead was going to be very busy.
Other members of his team had spent the entire night canvassing the neighborhood and notifying and questioning Kem's family members.
And now Shepard was sure there was going to be quite a few interrogations for him to conduct.
He'd already been awake for 24 hours by this point, but he knew there was not going to be any sleep soon.
So he walked to the office coffee pot and poured himself a cup of coffee and stood there drinking it and thinking about how he was going to nail Kurt Simon for murder.
Meanwhile, the bombing itself was making huge news all across Illinois.
By about 9 am on Sunday morning, so less than 12 hours after the explosion.
There were all these reporters milling around the front entrance of the police station and some were even going in and out of the lobby trying to talk to people and get any information.
And Detective Shepard knew this story was only going to get bigger because the Illinois State Bomb Squad had just called in the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, or ATF, to help them process the scene.
And all that meant there was going to be an enormous amount of pressure on Shepard, who was leading the investigation.
And this pressure was especially stressful this morning because the case he'd thought he'd had against Kem's fiancée, Kurt Simon, was starting to fall apart.
In all their interviews with Kem's friends, everyone had said Kem and Kurt had a good relationship and were excited to start their life together.
The crime scene unit had searched Kurt's car, where neighbors claimed they had seen him place something in the trunk right after the explosion or manipulate something back there.
You know, maybe a detonator.
But the crime scene techs had found nothing suspicious at all back there.
Shepard's partner had checked out Kurt's story that he had spent the entire week previous to the explosion in Iowa where he lived and he was moving here to Bloomington to live with Cam.
And they had found out that that story was true.
He really had been in Iowa.
And so this made Shepard's theory that Kurt had assembled the bomb in Kem's basement a lot less likely, since Kem was home all week and Kurt wasn't there.
Plus, Kem's babysitter had given police two additional pieces of information that really widened the suspect pool.
First, she said that the spare key to Kem's house had recently gone missing.
The second thing was because the spare key was gone.
Kem had gotten locked out at some point and had to cut a hole in the screen in the back door to get inside.
And so this meant that basically, anybody could have gotten inside of Kem's house to build the bomb if they just went in through the back door or if they, you know, had the key.
If they stole the key,
So Shepard's suspect list effectively had gone from Kurt to all of Bloomington.
Just before lunchtime, Shepard walked into the station's interrogation room, where Kem's ex-husband, Todd Wenger, was sitting waiting for him.
With Kem's fiance Kurt, looking less and less likely as a suspect, the detectives had set their sight on Kem's exes.
Both Todd, who was the father of Kem's daughter, and Dale Fosdick, who was the father of Kem's son, not only had obvious motives, but they also knew Kem's schedule, because each of them had been watching one of her children over the weekend before she was killed.
Shepard's partner had actually already spoken to Dale, basically a couple of hours after the explosion.
He had spoken to him while Shepard himself had been busy questioning Kurt.
And during that exchange, Dale had seemed shocked by Kem's death and he'd made what seemed like a good faith effort to answer the detective's questions, although his son kept crying and interrupting them.
Dale did admit to having some tension with Kem, but he also had an alibi.
He'd been with family in the morning and doing yard work in full view of his neighbors in the afternoon and the evening.
He'd given Shepard's partner names and phone numbers of potential witnesses that could have witnessed this, and a preliminary round of calls to those witnesses had suggested that Dale was telling the truth.
But the detectives were conducting all their interviews with very little information about the crime itself, because they didn't really know how the bomb that killed Kem actually worked.
They weren't sure if the killer had to be, you know, right nearby to detonate it, or if maybe it had been remote-operated so the killer could be farther away, or maybe the bomb was just set to some kind of timer.
Scientists at the ATF were trying to reconstruct the bomb from all the shrapnel, but until they did that, Shepard and his partner would not know exactly when the killer would have been at Kem's house.
And none of the neighbors had reported seeing anything unusual around the time of the explosion that would help them narrow it down.
So now, as Detective Shepard sat down across the interrogation table from Kemp's ex-husband, Todd Wenger, he started with some general questions about his relationship with Kemp.
And Todd seemed a little nervous because he kept wringing his hands while he spoke.
He said that he and Kem did fight about child support costs.
And he said he had been very frustrated with her because he didn't feel like she was always fair during their divorce.
But he insisted that that did not mean he wanted to hurt her.
He said their problems were common for most divorced couples.
Shepherd did not put much stock in that assertion because in his experience divorce or breakup plus money was a very good motive to hurt somebody.
So he asked Todd where he'd been all day on the night of the blast.
And at this question Todd definitely appeared to relax and he launched into a very detailed explanation of all his movements.
He said he'd been with his daughter and his new girlfriend and both of them would definitely vouch for him, along with several people who had seen them during the day.
By the time Shepard sent Todd home, he really wasn't sure which of the exes Todd or Dale he thought was a better candidate for his killer.
Both had clearly been fighting with Cam or had real tension with Cam, but both had alibi witnesses.
So Kem's fiancé Kurt might have had the opportunity to plant the bomb if it was set shortly before the explosion, but he had no clear motive.
As for Todd and Dale, they seemed to have plenty of motive, but no real opportunity.
And so Shepard decided his next move should be to talk again to Kem's family.
Maybe they would be able to help him sort out his flawed suspect list.
On Sunday evening, so almost 24 hours after the explosion, Detective Shepard knocked on the door of the home where Kem's sister Joni, lived.
Now, by this point, another officer had already been there to tell her and their mother Cricket, about Kem's death, but Shepard wanted to hear from them himself.
Now Shepard had been told that Cam and her mother were estranged, but even though he went in with some idea that this interaction could be odd, Shepard was still really caught off guard by the way Cricket was acting.
It was like way over the top.
As Joanie welcomed Shepherd inside and offered him a seat on the couch, you know, she was crying.
Her reaction to the death of her sister seemed very genuine.
But Cricket was not crying or showing any signs of being sad.
Instead, she was just furious.
And not about the murder or about losing her child or about the fact that police had not made an arrest yet.
She was furious about her child's life insurance policy which apparently, Kem had not added her to as a beneficiary, which meant that Cricket was not going to be paid any money despite her child being killed.
You know, as Shepard's seeing this, he thought about how Kurt had insisted in his interrogation that Cricket was a horrible person, that she was evil.
Now, at the time Shepard had not really taken that seriously because he figured Kurt was trying to throw suspicion off of himself.
And lots of people don't like their mother-in-laws.
But now he was reconsidering.
He felt like he was witnessing someone who could be just as bad as they were described to be.
And then when Shepard actually asked Cricket about her relationship with her now deceased daughter.
Cricket went off, but not about her relationship really with Kem, but more about Kurt and how Kurt had ruined Kem's life.
She said Kurt was a terrible partner for Kem and that he had destroyed the best relationship she ever had, which Cricket said was with Dale Fosdick, the father of Kem's son.
She also said that Kurt had destroyed her, Cricket's, relationship with Kem, too.
She said that she and her daughter used to talk every day, but once Kurt was in the picture she had been forbidden to call the house at all.
Now, to Shepard, Cricket seemed completely scattered, bouncing from one subject to another and just mad about everything.
But he started to wonder if what he was witnessing here was not just pure selfishness and being a terrible person, but instead could be some kind of very complicated grief, or maybe even guilt, or grief and guilt combined.
But one thing was definitely true, which was Cricket really seemed to hate Kurt as much as Kurt seemed to hate her, and Shepard just wasn't sure which one of them was in the right.
But it was around this point in the conversation that Kem's sister Joni, cut in, and she offered up a potential suspect idea of her own.
She said that Kem had recently left a job where a colleague, a man named Phil Hartman, had sexually harassed her.
Following this, Kem had actually gotten a settlement out of it and apparently Phil had made threats afterwards, including a promise to get her for this.
And so Joni said it was Phil who the police really should be investigating for this murder.
When Shepard finally left the house, his head was spinning.
He'd gone to Cricket and Joanie, hoping for clarity, sorting out his three suspects.
But he'd come away with less clarity than now five suspects.
Kem's fiancé Kurt, her exes Dale Fosdick and Todd Wenger, her co-worker Phil Hartman and frankly Cricket herself.
At this point, it was late on Sunday night, and Shepard had been awake since Saturday morning.
And so he decided the best thing he could do now was just go home and get some sleep.
That way he could come back with a clear head on Monday morning and maybe make sense of it then.
On the afternoon of Monday, May 24th, so almost two days after the bombing that killed Kem Wenger, Detective Larry Shepard walked through the front door of Kem's house feeling cautiously optimistic.
On the night the bomb went off.
The police had to evacuate so the state bomb squad and the ATF could make sure there were no additional explosives.
But finally, the night before, the scene had officially been cleared, which meant Shepard could now enter the house and actually look around for himself.
Inside the house, he could see that the foyer was still in complete disarray, although Kem's body, by this point, had been removed and autopsied.
There were also now all these little flags and markers all over the place pointing out how she'd been positioned on the floor and where various bomb fragments and other evidence had been collected.
And also now because the feds had completed a preliminary assessment of the bomb, Shepard could actually imagine how the bombing went down.
There was a six-inch hole in the foyer floor and Shepard now knew that that was where the bomb had been placed, right there on the ground, probably concealed in some kind of a small box or package.
From the autopsy, which had shown distinct damage to Kem's right hand.
Shepard knew that what likely happened was that she had spotted the package and picked it up with her right hand, which then triggered the explosion.
And this was actually the single most important thing the feds had been able to determine that the bomb was motion-activated.
This was huge because it meant the bomber did not have to be at or even near Kem's house to trigger the explosion manually, which meant they could have left this thing there any time during the weekend.
This also explained why there were a bunch of wires and bomb-making materials found in the basement.
Because if the bomb had been built somewhere else and transported to Kem's house in say, a car, the bomb could have exploded along the way.
So what likely happened was that Kem's killer brought a partially finished bomb to Kem's house that would not detonate as they carried it, And then they put the final touches on it right on site, once it was actually in position in the foyer.
This also meant the bomber had to be pretty sophisticated, because building a bomb like this took technical skill.
It took some intelligence and real attention to detail, because if you don't have those things, you can set off the bomb and kill yourself.
And so in Shepard's mind, this likely took Kem's mother, Cricket, right off the table.
She just did not strike him as organized enough or really coherent enough to build this type of bomb.
She just seemed way too scatterbrained.
Kem's exes, Dale Fosdick and Todd Wenger, both worked with machines for a living, so they were definitely still in.
And her fiancé, Kurt, was highly educated, so he was still in.
Shepard wasn't sure about Phil Hartman, the co-worker who Kem had accused of sexually harassing her.
He had reached Phil by phone that morning and Phil had told him he was working in Louisiana at the time.
The bomb went off hundreds of miles away.
But Shepard knew just being physically far away from the bomb when it went off was not a perfect alibi because it was motion activated.
You could place it and then travel and be far away.
But at the same time Louisiana was really far away and Phil really didn't seem to have any technical background that Shepard had found.
So Phil was still in, but less so.
As Shepard stood there in the blackened, destroyed foyer looking at the partially burned pages of Modern Bride magazines that had been blown all over the room, he thought about the fact that whoever had done this had to have been very comfortable in Kem's house.
They had gotten inside the house at some point and then clearly spent time in the basement tinkering with the bomb.
Then they came up, and they're in the foyer setting the bomb up.
I mean...
That's someone who's pretty confident they're not going to get caught doing all this inside the house.
That's serious boldness.
And so Shepard was starting to feel pretty confident that whoever had done this was either family to Kem or as close to her as family.
Shepard left Kem's house thinking about how he might search both Dale and Todd's places of work to see if any of the machinery they used shared parts with the bomb.
But as he stepped off the final step onto the sidewalk, He heard a voice call out behind him and he turned to see a Bloomington police officer jogging over towards him.
The bombing had created real panic, not just in Bloomington, but across Illinois.
People were now terrified that there was going to be a bomb that would show up on their front porch.
They would see a package they didn't recognize and they would call the police with fears that that could be an explosive.
I mean, it was like this paranoia had swept the state.
And so in response to that, specifically in Bloomington, the police had a much stronger presence out on the street.
And Shepard had also asked officers to re-canvass Kem's neighborhood to question the neighbors again now that they knew more about the bomb itself.
Specifically that the bomb was motion activated, which meant the bomber did not need to be there, basically right before it went off.
They were in the house.
They were building the bomb days before.
They planted the bomb in advance of the bombing.
So there was a bigger window of time that they were wondering who was at Kem's house, who was acting suspicious near Kem's house in the days leading up to the bombing.
Those were the questions they had for the neighbors.
And so this officer that was running over to Shepard.
That's what they had been doing re-canvassing the neighborhood.
And when he reached Shepard, he told him he'd found something.
Shepard eagerly followed the officer over to one of Kem's neighbor's houses, and there he saw a little girl, maybe 10 or 11 years old, standing nervously next to her father.
And based on what this little girl would say, along with evidence collected by the Bloomington Police Department and the ATF, this is a reconstruction of what authorities believe happened to Kem Wenger on May 22 1993.
At around 10.30 that morning, the killer pulled up in their car outside of Kem's house.
They picked up a bag that was sitting on their passenger seat, which contained a partially completed pipe bomb and some tools.
With this in hand, they got out of the car and they walked up to the front door and they pulled a key from their pocket.
This was the same key they had stolen from under the doormat a few months earlier.
They used the key to unlock the front door, and they let themselves inside.
The killer then walked down to the basement, where they took all the various items from the bag and placed them on the counter, and they got to work.
The killer was not worried about getting caught.
They knew this neighborhood very well and everybody in this neighborhood knew them, and they would not find it suspicious at all to see them there.
Plus, they knew they would have an alibi for the time period when the bomb actually would go off.
Once the bomb was mostly assembled, the killer gathered up most of their things.
They left behind some random supplies in the basement but figured it didn't really matter, since the explosion would take care of everything.
Feeling very confident in their worksmanship so far.
The killer walked back upstairs and placed the nearly completed bomb on the floor in the foyer.
And then, as they completed the final steps, they could feel sweat beating on their forehead because if they did anything wrong, the bomb would go off.
But the killer got it all done and they stood up very slowly and carefully and walked back out through the front door.
But before they could get in their car and drive away, they saw one of the neighborhood girls playing in the yard next door.
And the girl looked at them and waved and said hello.
Well, the little girl remembered that interaction and she would tell Detective Shepard who she saw leaving Kem's house.
It was none other than Kem's ex-boyfriend and the father of her son, Dale Fostick.
Dale was very upset that Kem had broken up with him and was now seeing Kurt.
He had also heard from Cricket, who he was still very close with, that Kurt had talked about adopting his own son, and this enraged him.
He couldn't stand the idea that his own boy might grow up calling another man dad.
So he used the electronic skills and the tools he'd acquired from his hobby of building model airplanes to build a pipe bomb.
And so ultimately, Dale was caught because of his entitlement to feel like he could just stroll into Kemp's house anytime he wanted.
Because he did that all the time, despite her saying not to, he became a familiar face in the neighborhood.
And that's why that little girl remembered him.
After months of forensic work that tied Dale even more closely to the bomb, he was finally arrested and found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to 61 years in prison.
But he would only serve 14 of those years because in 2010, while still behind bars, Dale died of a sudden illness.
A quick note about our stories.
They are all based on true events, but we sometimes use pseudonyms to protect the people involved and some details are fictionalized for dramatic purposes.
The Mr Ballin Podcast Strange Dark and Mysterious Stories is hosted and executive produced by me, Mr Ballin.
Our head of writing is Evan Allen.
Our head of production is Zach Levitt, produced by Jeremy Bone.
This episode was written by Zeth Lundy.
Research and fact-checking by Shelley Hsu, Samantha Van Hoose, Evan Beamer, Abigail Shumway and Camille Callahan.
Research and fact-checking supervision by Stephen Ear.
Audio editing and post-produced by Whit Lacascio and Cole Lacascio.
Additional audio editing by Jordan Stidham.
Mixed and mastered by Brendan Cain.
Production coordination by Samantha Collins.
Production support by Antonio Minata and Delaina Corley.
Artwork by Jessica Clogston Kiner.
Theme song called Something Wicked by Ross Bugden.
Thank you for listening to the Mr. Ballin Podcast.
If you enjoyed today's story and you want to hear more like it, go ahead and check out our YouTube channel, just called Mr Ballin, where we have hundreds more stories a lot like this one, but most of them are not available on this podcast.
They are only available on that YouTube channel, which again is just called Mr. Ballin.
So that's going to do it.
I really appreciate your support.
Until next time, see ya.
