These Things Don't Happen in Nice Towns

1/31/2024

By M.P. Pellicer | Stranger Than Fiction Stories
Karen Klaas was raped and then strangled with a pantyhose. Despite the attention the case received since she had been married to Bill Medley from the Righteous Brothers, eventually the investigation went cold, and stayed that way for decades.

Police sketch of suspect in the Klaas murder c.1976 (Source - The Redondo Reflex)

Karen was attacked on January 30, 1976. She lived in Hermosa Beach, California and had returned home at 9 a.m. after dropping off her son Damien at McMartin Preschool. Her older son was with his grandfather.

Two neighbors, Noel Castle and Sue Croft came by to warn her of a suspicious-looking man seen loitering around the neighborhood for the past week. They were also supposed to meet for coffee, and they thought it was strange she had not joined them.

Bill Medley and Karen Klaas with their son

They found the back sliding door to the home opened a bit. They called her name and heard only a muffled sound. The women knew something was wrong and they left to call the police. The unexpected happened when they came round the corner, "the front door opened and a gentleman came out with bushy kind of long hair and a beard, and he said 'Hi ladies.'" He fit the description of the man they had heard was prowling around the neighborhood.

The police was called and when they arrived they found Karen lying nude on the bedroom floor. "One leg of the pantyhose bound her hands and then the other leg of the pantyhose was used along with her bra to strangle her, which was tied securely around her neck."

Karen was still alive. She had been raped, but her friends interrupted the strangulation. She was rushed to the hospital, but never came out of her coma and she died five days later. Physicians told the family that even if she would have survived, since she had air supply cut-off for over 10 minutes, she would have suffered severe brain damage.

The house had not been ransacked too much, but the bedroom showed signs of a struggle. The police found Karen Klaas' crutches at the rear of the house, which she was using since she had a broken leg after trying to use her son's skateboard.

The stranger was described as being about 5'8", stocky build, wearing an olive drag knee-length coat with military tunic type collar. The shoes were block type or possibly boots, and the pants might have been blue jeans.

Later it was theorized that perhaps Karen arrived home while the home was being robbed, but there was also a definite possibility the perpetrator had been stalking her.

Scene from first shootout between Troyer and police c.March 1982 Source - LATimes)

Evidence was taken from a semen-stained towel lying nearby, and Karen's bra and pantyhose. Unfortunately these were the days prior to DNA processing. All they had was the description given by Karen's neighbors, which matched a broad swath of men.

When she was killed Karen had been divorced twice and had a boyfriend. She had a child from each marriage. All the men were cleared. Bill Medley employed a private investigator in an effort to track down the killer.

At one point police suspected a firefighter from Orange County, especially after Noel Castle picked him out of a photo array. This turned out to be a dead end since it was verified by his accountant that he was with him while preparing his taxes.

As leads cooled, a theory emerged connecting the murder of Karen Klaas to the McMartin Preschool satanic allegations.

The theory gained traction when Karen's second husband Gerald Klass was killed in September, 1984, after falling to his death when he drove off the side of a mountain in Oregon. This was shortly after indictments were handed to defendants in the McMartin child molestation case. Also the accountant who handled the taxes for the firefighter who had fallen under police suspicion, handled the books for the preschool.

It was rumored around town that the Klaas deaths, and the McMartin case may have been related. But police said no.

Kenneth Frederick Troyer (1946-1982)

The crime of the murdered 32-year-old eventually became a cold case, in a town that seldom had violent crimes committed there.

In 1999, the Klaas case was reopened and DNA from the scene was processed. There were no matches until 2016, when police got two hits of familial DNA. One of the individuals was dead, and the other had been arrested and convicted of a crime in November, 2011.

In 2017, they had the name of the killer who left his DNA behind. His name was Kenneth Frederick Troyer. He was a violent California prison escapee. He was a suspect in other rapes, however he was beyond the reach of the law since he was killed in 1982, after a standoff with police.

Troyer was originally a suspect in the crime since he had raped two women in the area, however he eluded capture until he was arrested for armed burglary in 1981.

Troyer escaped in February, 1982. He had been committed to the prison in December, 1981. Right after his escape he broke into a home on Ash Street, and raped the 20-year-old woman who lived there when she came home. He tied her up and escaped with her car.

It wasn't until a month later that police caught up with Troyer. By then he had gotten ahold of gun, and in an initial scuffle it was suspected he was wounded. By then Troyer was a suspect in at least 18 rapes, sex crimes and burglaries.

A few days after he exchanged fire with police they got a tip he would meet a woman named Pamela Cuen, 24, at a location in Santa Ana. They staked the area out and after the woman got in his car, police ordered him to stop. They opened fire when he sped away. He drove to 17th Street and Cabrillo Park Drive where he lost control and hit a tree. When he came out of the vehicle he made a "furtive move", and he was shot by officers. He died later at the hospital. An autopsy showed he was killed due to a gunshot wound to the heart.

Troyer had been convicted of attempted rape when he was 15, and served a term with the California Youth Authority. In 1964, when he was 18 years old he married Jeanne M. Dalton. They divorced in 1973 in Oregon. It appears he shuttled between California and Oregon, and in 1977, he returned to Oregon and married Valerie Hickey.

Later it was found that Troyer being in Hermosa Beach was due to his brother living two blocks away from Karen Klaas. In 2017, the brother was in a mental institution.

Plate bears a pentagram found at the McMartin PreSchool on the 900 block of Manhattan Beach Boulevard. Parents say if could be part of a Satanic ritual. c. May 27, 1990 (Source LATimes)

THE MCMARTIN ANGLE
Paul Bynum was assigned to Karen Klaas' case in 1976. Three years later he was forced out of the police department even though he had an unblemished record.

He had just finished a case, in which serial killers Roy Norris and Lawrence Bittaker were convicted in the murder of teenage girls in nearby Redondo Beach. His chief recommended he take leave due to stress, but he refused to take the time off. In response, his superior obtained an order from the city manager forcing him to take an indefinite disability leave.

Bynum then changed career paths and became a private investigator. In 1984, he was hired by Danny Davis, a defense attorney in the McMartin case. The accused were the owners of the McMartin preschool where Karen Klaas' child had attended when she was killed in 1976.

Once involved in the case, Bynum came to the conclusion the children had suffered abuse. He was told by Kevin Cody, a reporter that the allegation was that hundreds of children had been molested at the preschool.

In 1986, the morning that Bynum was to testify at the trial of Raymond Charles Buckey, a juror's home was burglarized, and his testimony was rescheduled to the next day. Part of his testimony would refer to citation books he had lost. This was where he kept records during the time he was an Hermosa Beach detective. They were found on the McMartin preschool attendant's desk, after the arrest of Ray Buckey on molestation charges. How had they ended up there?

"Prosecutor Rubin had intended to ask Bynum about a map turned up by DA investigators in March 1986, pin-pointing the location of turtle shells and animal bones Bynum had unearthed at the lot next to the McMartin preschool. (The children claimed teachers had killed turtles and other small animals to demonstrate what would happen to them and their families, if they talked about the molestations. Bynum, while retained by the defense, had managed to corroborate a key point in the testimony of the children.)"

There was not only one odd death tied to the McMartin case. One of them concerned Judy Johnson, who was the first mother to speak out publicly about molestation at the preschool. She claimed she was intimidated and even believed she was poisoned.

She was found dead in December, 1986, after she had been subpoenaed for the trial, which started in January 1987. The defense attorneys said there would have been no McMartin case, if Johnson had not made her allegations. The defense attorneys insisted she was mentally unstable when she reported in late 1983, that her son then 2 1/2 years old was molested not only by Raymond Buckey, but by Los Angeles school board member Roberta Weintraub and others. He had blood in his diaper, and she found he was bleeding from the anus. Johnson's cause of death was found to be liver disease linked to alcohol toxicity or alcohol intolerance.

In February 1984, psychiatrist Roland Summit interviewed Johnson and found her to be "quite sane and emotionally contained".

Prior to her death in 1985, Robert H. Winkler, 35, an uncharged suspect in the McMartin case, was found dead in his Long Beach apartment of an accidental drug overdose.

Despite the claims the accusations were based on hysteria in the 1987 trial, according to the Los Angeles Times:

Virginia McMartin the family matriarch vehemently denied, that she had ever molested a child or seen her daughter or grandson do anything that might even be misconstrued as molestation, adding that she had 'never heard' of molestation before being caught up in the case that bears her name.

"She acknowledged however, that one of her own granddaughters believed that her two children were molested at the nursery school. She said Ray Buckey had a drinking problem and had received counseling from a pastor at the Church of Religious Science in Redondo Beach."

In 1992, Los Angeles' Ritual Abuse Task Force claimed that satanists were poisoning them

In October, 1986, George Freeman a jail house informant was granted immunity from prosecution for past perjuries. He testified that while he and Ray Buckey were cellmates at Men's Central Jail, Buckey admitted to having molested children and to incest with his sister. Freeman disappeared after allegedly receiving a threatening telephone call as his cross examination was about to begin. He was arrested and compelled to complete his testimony.

In 1992, the Los Angeles' Ritual Abuse Task Force claimed that satanists were poisoning them, and other satanic abuse survivors—and their therapists—by exposing them to diazinon a toxic pesticide that was pumped into their offices, homes and cars.

Catherine Gould who belonged to the task force said that two task force members, and three others active in anti-cult activities locally, had either been diagnosed with pesticide poisoning or had found traces in their food, cars, offices or homes.

Gould released copies of medical records that showed evidence of poisoning for a Glendale woman, 45, examined at Glendale Adventists Medical Center. The diagnosis was poisoning by organo-phosphates, a family of pesticides.

Evidence of tunnels underneath the school were found in 1990, and confirmed in 1993 by a team of five scientists from leading universities, which matched the descriptions given by the children. Also found was an unbroken plate with a pentagram, a Ziploc type lunch bag from Disneyland with Mickey Mouse on it and a date, 1982. These reports were buried by the local newspapers, who wanted to push the story the children's allegations as not being based in reality.

The Beach Reporter, a local newspapers described where "parents began to dig with shovels, allegedly in an area pointed out by a 9-year-old former student of the McMartin preschool, who told them to dig behind a cement planter in the northeast corner. When parents unearthed several broken turtle shells and a few bones, they stopped digging and notified the district attorney's office."

Virginia McMartin died in 1995, Peggy McMartin Buckey died in 2000.

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