Solved cold cases in New Hampshire
1 documented case.
Laura Kempton
Laura Kempton, a 23-year-old Portsmouth Beauty School student, was found beaten to death in her ground-floor apartment at 20 Chapel Street in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on the morning of September 28, 1981 by a police officer who had come to serve a parking summons. She had been bound with cords and sexually assaulted, and she died of massive trauma to the left side of her head. Investigators recovered a male DNA profile from evidence at the scene but pursued hundreds of leads over four decades without identifying her killer. In 2021 and 2022 the Portsmouth Police, the New Hampshire and Maine forensic laboratories, the Attorney General's Cold Case Unit and the genetic-genealogy firm Identifinders International used forensic genetic genealogy to trace the crime-scene DNA to Ronney James Lee, a security officer who had been 21 at the time. Lee had died of acute cocaine intoxication in 2005, so no arrest or prosecution was possible. On July 20, 2023 the New Hampshire Attorney General and Portsmouth Police announced the case resolved and closed, naming Lee as the man responsible.