Taken from School:

The Unsolved Murder of Kim Bryant

a mysterious daylight abduction

The 1979 daylight abduction of a teenage girl across from her Las Vegas high school stunned the local community.  While it was only a few weeks before Kim Bryant’s body was discovered in the desert surrounding the city, in the four decades since then her murder remains one of the most tragic and enduring unsolved mysteries in southern Nevada.

I.

Kim’s Last Day and the Aftermath



Tick-Tock: The Morning of January 26, 1979

Kim Bryant, a 16-year-old sophomore, arrived at Western High School on the morning of January 26, 1979, where she melted into the throngs of her fellow classmates entering the building for registration day to choose her classes for the upcoming year.  Kim was known by her fellow students for her eclectically exuberant disposition, and her attire this morning of a patchwork rabbit fur coat covering a white pullover blouse worn over a black shirt suited her personality.

After she finished registering for classes, Kim walked with a friend across Decatur Boulevard, a busy street running north-south on the western side of the city.  The two stopped at a Dairy Queen directly across the street from the Western High School football field.  The Dairy Queen wouldn’t open for another few hours, but several other teenagers were hanging out in a nearby parking lot.  It was about 10:00 a.m.

Shortly after the girls arrived at the Dairy Queen, a late-1950’s Chevy with a sanded silver-gray primer finish and sporting raised back wheels slowed to a stop in front of the Dairy Queen.  Two young men occupying the car made some suggestive and uninvited comments to the high school girls, to which Kim and her friend responded with some obscene words of their own. The car sped off and merged back into the traffic flowing southbound along Decatur.

Another car pulled up to the Dairy Queen not long after the altercation with the occupants of the Chevy.  It was the mother of Kim’s friend, who offered Kim a lift. Kim asked her to wait a minute while she ran to a nearby payphone.  She returned and thanked her friend’s mother for the offer, but told them her boyfriend was on his way to give her a ride home.  They drove off and Kim was left standing by herself in front of the Dairy Queen.  It was about 10:10 a.m.

Not long after Kim made the call on the payphone, her boyfriend pulled into the parking lot of the Dairy Queen. But there was no sign of his girlfriend.  He waited for a minute before driving off, figuring Kim must have caught a ride with someone else. It was about 10:30 a.m.

Sometime around noon, a motorist driving along heavily-trafficked Decatur Boulevard noticed a backpack in the center median.  The driver pulled over and examined the bag.  Upon opening it, she discovered a driver’s license and other personal items belonging to Kim Bryant.  The driver used a payphone to call Kim’s home, but nobody answered.

Back at Kim’s home on Banjo Circle, her mother, Sharrie Elliott, started to grow worried.  She and Kim were supposed to go shopping at 12:30 p.m., and it was uncharacteristic for her daughter to be late without calling.  Sharrie headed out to look for Kim.

Kim would never come home.

The Search

Kim’s mother and step-father waited about an hour after darkness fell on January 26th before driving to a Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department substation to report their daughter missing.  They told officers on duty that Kim was not the type of kid to run away, and that she would call if she were going to be running even fifteen minutes late.  But during the course of discussing their concerns with the police, Kim’s parents mentioned there had been a verbal fight with their daughter the night before her disappearance.  The police said it sounded like their daughter had run away, and officers suggested she was probably staying at a friend’s house. 

Kim’s parents reached out to local newspapers and radio stations, imploring them to air a message about their missing daughter.  In a frustrating catch-22, media outlets refused to take any action until the police officially reported Kim missing.  After a night of futilely driving around the city in search of Kim, her step-father barged into a Metro police station and demanded that more action be taken to locate the missing girl. When detectives with the juvenile division went to Bryant’s house, they looked through her diary and saw scribblings about wanting to run away, confirming their belief that Kim had joined the numerous other Vegas teens that ran away from home each year. Her case remained a low priority.

It wasn’t until police learned that Kim Bryant’s backpack had been found in the middle of the street - a full week after she went missing from in front of her school - that Kim was officially declared a missing person. A brief article reporting the disappearance appeared on the second page of the February 3, 1979 edition of the local paper.

Found

On the afternoon of February 20, 1979, three teenage boys were hiking through the desert on the western edge of Las Vegas.   As they neared the power substation standing solitary at the edge of Buffalo Avenue and Charleston Boulevard, one of the trio, 14-year-old Alan Jones, noticed what looked like a wig tangled amidst the dirt and rocks.  The group approached a little closer before stopping in their tracks – the body of Kim Bryant lie facedown in a shallow gully, some debris covering her corpse in a hasty effort by her killer to conceal the crime scene.  The boys spotted a police car traveling along Charleston and flagged down the officer. 

Soon, detectives with the Metro homicide unit were examining the scene.  Investigators quickly determined the cause of death – Kim had been struck in the head several times with a rock, likely one of the stones scattering the landscape around the disposal site.  Her body was found nude from the waist down, and detectives ultimately determined Kim had been sexually assaulted prior to her murder.  Police also determined based on marks to Kim’s hands that she had engaged in a sustained fight with her killer or killers.

Police initially stated Kim had been murdered shortly after her disappearance. But later, in the most potentially tragic aspect of the case, detectives later speculated that Kim was alive for up to four days after her abduction. 

The growing community of Las Vegas was horrified by the brutal slaying of Kim Bryant.  Hundreds turned out to honor her memory, and former Governor of Nevada Mike O’Callaghan – a friend of Bryant’s family – delivered remarks at her funeral, giving specific note to Kim’s extensive volunteer work with the Special Olympics. “She gave of herself,” Governor O’Callaghan said. “She gave of her time and talent to those that needed it most.” 

As Kim was being laid to rest at Palm Memorial Park in Las Vegas, homicide detectives were on the hunt for those responsible for her death.

II.

The First Suspects

Beginnings of the Investigation

Police promised the public swift action to locate suspects in the teenager’s slaying.  Kim’s family noted that she was not involved with the drug scene and generally conducted herself responsibly.  In a city known for offering every conceivable type of vice, Kim steered clear of those temptations.  She was not known to make risky decisions, though Kim did exhibit a level of naivete that brought her into contact with potential predators.

Police had plenty of tips to track down in the days after Kim’s body was found.  The most promising initial information was that Kim had been taken by several men in a jeep.  But the individuals associated with the jeep were able to provide solid alibis to investigators.  Detectives with the Metro homicide unit even traveled all the way to Michigan to follow up with a man who said he witnessed Kim’s murder, but when police arrived, the man admitted that he made that statement after overhearing a group of local kids talking about the crime.   

After an initial flurry of investigative activity, the weeks slowly passed without any solid leads.  Matters were not helped by the fact Las Vegas was experiencing a significant increase in its homicide rate during 1979 – there were 25 murders by mid-March of that year compared to 14 homicides by that time in 1978.  The burden created by the heavy workload was compounded by chronic understaffing, with only nine detectives on the homicide team.  The head of the detective bureau told local reporters that detectives were forced to abandon their work on old cases to work on new murders – Commander Eric Cooper said, “Because we have so few investigators, they have to deal with the murders that are fresh because you can’t let a crime scene grow old.”

The most frustrating aspect of the crime for investigators was the lack of viable eyewitness information despite Kim having been taken in broad daylight along one of the busiest roads in the city.  Police questioned several teens hanging out in a parking lot next to the Dairy Queen the day of the abduction, but they reported seeing nothing unusual.

It was like Kim had simply vanished.

“Grubby Hippie Types”

A break in the case finally seemed to arrive in the summer of 1979 after a local newspaper ran a lengthy feature on the status of the investigation and the impact Kim’s murder was having on her family.  The news story jogged the memory of two of Kim’s classmates at Western High School.  The unidentified female students reported that on one of the days during registration week, they had been approached by two men driving a 1955-57 Chevy bearing Nevada plates and sporting a coat of silver primer paint with light primer spots and raised back wheels.  The men attempted to entice the girls into their car with an offer to sell them jewelry, but the students grew suspicious when they peered in the backseat and saw only a large walnut-grained speaker.  When the girls rebuffed their offer, the men in the car yelled obscenities and drove away.

The two students provided independent descriptions of the events to police and both got a clear look at the passenger in the Chevy, allowing police to create the first sketch of a potential suspect in the Bryant case.  The 18-to-19-year-old man in the drawing hosts shaggy blond hair and droopy stoner eyes.  The girls also said they remember the driver as a man in his early twenties with a mustache and medium brown hair.  Detective Bob Hilliard, head of the murder investigation, said of the suspects, “Both looked like grubby, hippy types.”  The two teenage witnesses also reported the additional detail that the men had been seen approaching other students earlier in the day, including a group of male students near the Western High School parking lot. 

One of the few consistent facts throughout the Kim Bryant investigation is that Kim and her friend were approached by an old Chevy while they waited in front of the Dairy Queen.  She and her friend exchanged obscenities with the occupants of the car before it sped off down Decatur Boulevard.  The two unidentified witnesses that were solicited by the occupants of the Chevy both told police that the men became enraged when the girls refused to get in their car.

A torrent of calls flooded into the police after the local news ran the sketch of the potential suspect in the Bryant murder.  For the first time there was a face to pin to the crime.  But this buzz of activity sputtered out after a few weeks as none of the dozens of leads led to a name to fix to the sketch.

As often happens in an unsolved murder, there are ebbs and flows that mark the progression of such cases.  After the pulse of the Bryant case picked up during the summer of 1979, the pace of activity had again slowed to a near stop by the end of the year.

Disappearance After Disappearance

Bobby Gene Thomas, a 37-year-old roofer, went missing the day after Kim Bryant’s abduction.  Over a month passed before his body was found on a dirt road about a mile from Hoover Dam.  He had suffered approximately thirty-six stab wounds, including one to the eye, and his body had been brutalized after his death.  Not long after the mutilated remains were discovered on a desert pathway, police investigators would be faced with a question – did the crimes of Bobby Gene Thomas include the abduction and murder of Kim Bryant?         

Thomas, a native of California that had made Las Vegas his home for close to twenty years, had been a menace to the community ever since his arrival.  On a cold night in January of 1970, 20-year-old Christine McKinney was trying to start her stalled vehicle on Las Vegas Boulevard a little after 10:00 p.m.  Suddenly, she was grabbed around the waist from behind, but fortunately was able to escape her attacker.  Bobby Thomas was arrested and faced charges for assault with intent to commit a crime.

A few years later, Thomas was at the center of a much more heinous crime.  On January 15, 1972, Katherine Hynes dropped her three younger children off at the home of her eldest daughter, Mary Hynes, and Mary’s common-law husband, Bobby Thomas.  One of the children spending the night at the Thomas household on Oahu Street was 14-year-old Helen Hynes.  When Katherine returned to her daughter’s home the following morning, she encountered every parent’s worst nightmare.

Helen Hynes was unresponsive in her bed.  Hearing the commotion, Bobby Thomas awkwardly responded by showing Katherine some pill bottles and telling her, “Helen must have gotten into these.”  An autopsy determined that Helen died of a fatal overdose of secobarbital and amobarbital.  The coroner’s report also contained another finding – Helen had been raped before her death.

Thomas was arrested on charges of statutory rape and involuntary manslaughter for the death of Helen Hynes.  He made bail and continued working as a roofer while awaiting trial.  Then, only days before trial, he struck a deal with prosecutors – Thomas agreed to plead guilty to the statutory rape charge in exchange for having the manslaughter charges dismissed. 

It was a routine hearing at the Clark County Courthouse where Thomas recounted the facts constituting the crime to which he was admitting his guilt. But Thomas became enraged when the district attorney argued to have his bail revoked after entering his plea.  The prosecutor argued that since Thomas had plead guilty, he no longer had the benefit of being presumed innocent.  Thomas angrily countered that he needed to remain free pending sentencing so that he could pay off a parking ticket.  The judge found the parking ticket argument unpersuasive and ordered the defendant incarcerated pending his sentencing hearing.  Thomas yelled at the judge in response, “This is great, you know!”  A bailiff slapped handcuffs on the convicted man and hauled him to the Clark County Detention Center.

Thomas was eventually sentenced to the maximum term of ten years behind bars.  But he was paroled after only serving a portion of his sentence.  And not long after his release, he met his brutal end in the desert outside of Las Vegas.

Murderers Killing Murderers

At 24 years of age, Ronnie Lee Fain had already spent most of his life confined within the California penal system.  He moved to Las Vegas after being released from prison in 1978 and took up residence in an apartment in downtown Vegas that he shared with his girlfriend, Lori Lambson.  He was arrested in connection with the murder of Bobby Gene Thomas in early 1980, a year after Thomas’s body was found stabbed along an isolated road near Hoover Dam.

Fain secured the services of respected Las Vegas defense attorney Tom Pitaro after his arrest.  And shortly after that, Fain reached out to prosecutors to make a deal – he would not only confess to the killing of Thomas, but he would also provide authorities with information allowing them to close the Kim Bryant murder case.

In a Las Vegas courtroom on April 22, 1980, Ronnie Lee Fain stood before District Court Judge Carl Christensen and plead guilty to a second-degree murder charge for killing Bobby Gene Thomas.  “What was it you did on January 27, 1979, that causes you to plead guilty to this charge?” Judge Christensen asked.

Fain responded that he killed Thomas in February of the prior year, causing the judge to correct him as to the date of the Thomas murder.  Fain then proceeded to recount the events of January 27, 1979.  He had joined Bobby Gene Thomas on a drive along with two other men – one he knew as the “Worm” and the other he knew as the “Hulk” – to the forests of nearby Mount Charleston for an afternoon of drinking.  With night falling early, the group made the drive back toward the lights of Las Vegas.  After dropping off the Worm and the Hulk, it was just Fain and Thomas in the car. 

Thomas, in his drunken state, started to tell his new companion about how he had taken part in the abduction, rape, and murder of a teenage girl the day before.  Fain claimed he felt bound by “prison honor” to avenge the girl’s death.  He parked at his place and retrieved a knife from his girlfriend.  When Fain returned to the car, he didn’t delay before slashing Thomas to death, landing at least three dozen blows from the blade. After killing his new acquaintance, Fain drove out to the desolate area around Hoover Dam to dispose of the corpse.  “I was enraged when he started bragging about what he did,” Fain told the Court. “That’s why I killed him.” 

Fain passed two independently administered lie detector tests before prosecutors accepted his plea.  Detective Herb Barrett, the lead investigator in the Thomas killing, placed heavy reliance on Fain’s ability to pass the polygraph exams.  He also found persuasive the fact Fain correctly identified the brand of beer on a bottle located near the Bryant disposal site.  Barrett told reporters that Kim Bryant was last seen alive in a car with four men, quipping after Fain’s confession, “Now we’re only looking for three.”

UnReliable Source

But Detective Bob Hilliard, head of the Kim Bryant investigation, was doubtful about whether Thomas was behind Kim’s killing.  An unidentified witness to Kim’s abduction from in front of the Dairy Queen, who Hilliard described only as an “older man” and a “prominent local businessman”, was shown the jeep identified by Fain as the vehicle Thomas used to abduct Kim. The businessman informed Detective Hilliard it was not the type of vehicle used to take Kim.  The same article in the local newspaper that led to the first and only sketch of a suspect in the Kim Bryant case also prompted the businessman to come forward – he initially hadn’t reported Kim being forced into a vehicle because he thought it was part of a high school prank.

Upon reviewing Fain’s polygraph exam results, Detective Hilliard concluded that they only showed Fain was truthful in denying he had any role in Kim Bryant’s murder and that Thomas had made some vague rumblings about having attacked a woman.  Hilliard’s doubts increased when police received a report they later confirmed from a woman that was taken out into the desert by Thomas the day before his murder.  Thomas had attempted to rape her, but upon being unable to perform, he apologized to the woman and let her go.  Investigators on the Bryant case surmised that in his drunken state, Thomas mixed up the attempted rape the same day of Kim’s abduction with the fatal overdose he had been responsible for years before when rambling about his past to Fain. 

Further holes were poked in the theory that Thomas was behind Kim’s murder when the biggest champion of the theory, Detective Barrett, conceded that Fain never mentioned Kim’s name in his initial confession to the Thomas murder.  In fact, Fain didn’t include any details not already publicly known about the Kim Bryant slaying in his confession.  Fain himself said all he knew was that Bobby Gene Thomas had raped and killed a teenager until his attorney told him the name Kim Bryant, then he put that name to the story told by Thomas.  And as for the beer bottle found at the crime scene, it had been located 70 yards away from Kim’s body and looked like it had been there longer than Kim’s remains.  Detective Hilliard believed this could have been left by unsuspecting individuals just enjoying a drink in the desert.

Another question about Fain’s veracity stems from his role in the December, 1978 murder of Wayne Rutledge in downtown Las Vegas.  Fain and a friend, Joseph Carpino, lured Rutledge to an apartment where the two proceeded to bludgeon the man with a hammer before forcing the victim outside.  Rutledge’s body was found a few blocks from the Fourth Street residence shared by Fain and Carpino with their girlfriends. He had been stabbed over thirty times, sodomized, and a cinder block had been left on his head.  Carpino’s girlfriend later testified that Fain proclaimed he was becoming a new Charles Manson and that Carpino had proven his loyalty to the rookie cult leader by stabbing Rutledge.

After a winding legal battle due to the lack of a speedy trial over charges in the Rutledge murder, Fain finally entered a plea of no contest in 1992 for the killing.  Fain was limited to only using crayons to write during these court proceedings because he had been deemed such a dangerous prisoner.

III.

Or Was it the Serial Killer?

A Mysterious Newcomer to Vegas

Kim Bryant’s parents moved away from Las Vegas in the years following the untimely death of their daughter.  But they continued to press police for information on the status of Kim’s case.  And the mid-1980’s would bring a new suspect into focus along with the possibility that Kim’s slaying was one of several perpetrated by a ruthless cross-country serial killer.

Robert Ireland arrived to Las Vegas from San Francisco sometime around 1977, and in short order he struck up a romance with a local school teacher by the name of Sylvia.  That same year, the couple traveled to visit Sylvia’s mother at her home in New Haven, Connecticut.  Robert, whose trade was in the construction industry, performed work remodeling what he hoped would be his future mother-in-law’s house.  At some point during the trip, Robert asked Sylvia to accompany him to a vital statistics office in the area to obtain a copy of his real birth certificate.  Once the couple returned to Las Vegas, Robert obtained a legal name change to what he claimed was his true birth name – Robert Generoso.

Robert and Sylvia Generoso wed in Las Vegas in November of 1977 and lived in a middle-class neighborhood on the western side of the city, less than a ten minute drive from where Kim Bryant’s body would be found.  Robert settled into performing painting and insulation installation at building sites around town while Sylvia continued working for the Clark County School District.  Before long, the couple welcomed a child on January 17, 1980.

Despite the happy outside appearances presented by the Generoso marriage, Robert had a much darker secret life hidden from his wife.

Missing Girls in Sin City

Nearly a year after Kim Bryant’s daylight abduction from in front of her school, Susan Belote, an 18-year-old recent graduate of Clark High School, left her job at the Al Philips Cleaner at the intersection of Eastern Avenue and Bonanza Road at around 4:00 p.m.  She never made it home.  

A few months later, around 12:30 a.m. on the night of June 27, 1980, 19-year-old Cheryl Daniel and her boyfriend parked their jeep in front of the Alpha Beta Supermarket located at Spring Mountain Road and Rainbow Boulevard.  Cheryl’s boyfriend ran into the store to grab something.  But when he exited about five minutes later, he was surprised to find the jeep parked in a different spot about 150 feet away from where he had left it. 

When Cheryl’s boyfriend walked up to the jeep, she was nowhere to be found.  Her purse, which contained $40, was still on the floor of the vehicle.  Cheryl’s boyfriend spent the next four hours searching nearby stores around the area in hopes of locating her but found no sign of his girlfriend.  She had disappeared.  Months later, police told the press they believe Cheryl Daniel had moved the jeep to help jumpstart a maroon Ford Ranchero with a white camper shell that was driven by a white man in his 30’s.

The clothed body of Susan Belote would be found on May 26, 1980, about a mile off of I-15 near the southern Utah town of St. George, though it would take another six months before she was positively identified.  Belote had been killed by strangulation.

A few weeks after police made a positive identification of Susan Belote’s remains, the nude body of Cheryl Daniel was discovered by a group of hikers about three miles away from where Belote’s corpse had been found.  Daniel died of a gunshot wound to the head.

The Real Robert Generoso

Detective Hilliard of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police homicide unit received a call from his counterparts in St. George on December 15, 1980, with information that could help break two cases in Hilliard’s jurisdiction.  The police in St. George reported that an ID card belonging to one Robert Generoso was recovered near the body of Cheryl Daniel.  Hilliard took immediate steps to locate the murder suspect – but it was already too late.

Robert Generoso separated from Sylvia at some point during 1980, setting himself up at the Mission Apartments on Decatur Boulevard.  Then, Robert suddenly contacted Sylvia on December 3, 1980, to inform her that he was leaving Las Vegas for an undisclosed location.  Investigators later determined that Robert was already in Hawaii when he made this call to Sylvia.  He would phone his estranged wife a few more times over the following weeks to press her on what the police knew of his links to the Daniel and Belote murders, with Robert insisting to Sylvia that he was being set up by the police. 

When Metro detectives came knocking on Sylvia’s door to gain additional information about her husband, a fuller picture of the terror her husband had brought upon the Vegas Valley came into view.  For instance, Robert got a new haircut as part of a complete change to his appearance in April of 1980 shortly after news broke that a 15-year-old girl had been found in the desert raped and left for dead not far from where Kim Bryant’s body was found.  The girl had been abducted while walking near Garside Junior High School at about 6:00 p.m. on March 30, 1980.  After being dragged to the desert, the girl had been beaten in the head with a nearby rock by her assailant, leaving her in a coma, though fortunately the girl eventually recovered from her injuries.

Sylvia Generoso quickly realized that her entire marriage had been rooted in lies.  She had to learn her husband’s real name from the police – Stephen Peter Morin.

And Morin had been concealing much more than the murders and sex crimes around Las Vegas from his wife.

The Chameleon

Stephen Peter Morin had been in trouble with the law his entire life.  When he was fifteen, Morin was arrested in Florida for stealing a car and sentenced to a term of six months to five years in the state prison.  Morin ended up serving just over two years of his sentence, being released on July 16, 1968.

Morin next ran afoul of the law in 1972 while he was living in his native Rhode Island.  He was arrested for possession of LSD and stealing a Ford Ranchero – the same type of vehicle that would later be implicated in the murder of Cheryl Daniel.  Morin was sentenced to five years of probation. 

Giving in to his itinerant tendencies, Morin abandoned the East Coast for San Francisco sometime around 1976, taking up work as an auto mechanic.  As he traveled, Morin made sure to change his physical appearance, which would later lead to authorities dubbing him “The Chameleon.”  At this point, Morin had a chance to start his life over, but he proved unable to control his impulses – and his move to the West Coast would see him escalate his crimes to a vicious new level.

Morin’s legal troubles were initially more of the same petty crimes that marked his checkered history up to that point – he was arrested in San Rafael on April 9, 1976, for possessing a syringe and resisting arrest, ultimately receiving a year of probation.  His crimes escalated and he was next arrested for killing his girlfriend’s cat and then sending the remains to her workplace.  Morin and this girlfriend later married but unsurprisingly soon divorced.

A few months later, in September of that year, Morin lured a 14-year-old friend of his sister to an apartment where the drifter tortured and raped the young girl.  This brutal crime led to Morin’s indictment on felony charges by a San Francisco grand jury. 

But Morin continued staying just one step ahead of the law.  He moved to Las Vegas under the alias Robert Ireland and soon took up with an unsuspecting woman named Sylvia.  While on a vacation with his new fiancée, Morin visited the Yale University Library to scour the obituaries until he found the name of a man that was of a similar age and appearance to himself. 

The name was Robert Generoso.

Links to the Bryant Murder

Shortly after the Las Vegas police began investigating “Robert Generoso” and his role in the murders of Cheryl Daniel and Susan Belote, the FBI informed them of Generoso’s real identity.  It wasn’t long before Vegas police looked for connections between Stephen Peter Morin and the murders of other young women around the city, including Kim Bryant. 

Detectives found their first link when they searched a storage unit owned by Morin off of Valley View Boulevard and discovered a macramé belt similar to the one Kim wore the day she went missing, which hadn’t been found at the crime scene.  Sylvia provided further links to the Bryant murder when she recounted for police an occasion when her husband brought home a broken gold lighter that he said he had found.  Kim’s parents told investigators that their daughter routinely carried around a broken gold lighter.

This strong evidence would be bolstered once police linked a familiar vehicle to the Bryant killing – a Ford Ranchero.  About two weeks before her disappearance, Kim introduced her parents to a new male friend she had met.  He called himself Joe and said he was 24-years-old.  Kim’s parents recalled their daughter’s new friend as “Italian looking.” 

“Joe” took Kim in a vehicle similar to Morin’s dark-colored Ford Ranchero for a night of skating at the Playland Skating Rink on Valley View Boulevard.  But soon after Kim and her date arrived at the skating rink, her new friend’s behavior inexplicably and suddenly turned aggressive.  Kim grew so uncomfortable that she asked an ex-boyfriend that was also at the rink for a ride home, telling her ex that she was afraid to drive home with “Joe.”  Kim and her ex-boyfriend were followed from the skating rink by a red Ford Ranchero driving in an erratic manner, and Kim’s ex later identified a photo of Morin as the man present that night at Playland.

Friends of Cheryl Daniel also identified a photo of Morin as the man that she had dated for about six weeks before ending things upon learning he was married.  In a circumstantial link to the Bryant murder, Daniel had met Morin at the Playland Skating Rink while taking her younger sister to skate.  Daniel also told her mother that her new boyfriend worked in the construction industry, which fits with Morin’s work as a building contractor.  Sylvia also confirmed with police that her husband frequented the Terrible Herbst gas station where Daniel worked as a clerk and he also often shopped at the Alpha Beta Supermarket near their home where Daniel was kidnapped. 

Detectives found additional evidence tying the Bryant, Daniel, and Belote murders together when they learned that Morin had once brought a sick pet to the animal shelter on Spring Mountain and Jones where Susan Belote worked at nights.  Sylvia recalled that on September 17, 1979, she and her husband took their poodle to that same animal clinic.  Later that night, the couple went back to check on their dog.  Morin made a solitary trip to the kennel areas to visit the animal at the same time that Belote was cleaning up the area.  The young woman would go missing about four months later, on the same day that Sylvia went into labor.

Cross-Country Spree and Capture

After placing those few short, cryptic calls to Sylvia in December of 1980, Stephen Peter Morin embarked on a nationwide crime spree that would take him from one coast of the country to the other.

Morin first traveled from Hawaii to northern California.  Even though he was now a wanted federal fugitive, Morin was unable to keep a low profile.  He was arrested in Pleasonton, California for brandishing a .45 pistol at two men during an argument on January 5, 1980.  Morin provided authorities with an alias and he was released on $500 bail pending trial.

The fugitive was wise enough to know he could no longer hang around California.  Morin hitchhiked for more than a thousand miles, finally landing in Branch, Louisiana, where he took up work as a machinist.  Morin kept on the move and traveled north to Buffalo, New York, where the serial killer used his trademark ability to gain the trust of unsuspecting people to strike up a friendship that quickly turned romantic with the owner of a local antique shop named Rita.

When it again was time for Morin to return to the road, he convinced Rita to sell her antique store and use the money to purchase a van for their travels.  Morin and Rita stopped for about a week in the Denver area where he obtained work as a painter while the couple took up residence at a local motel.  It wasn’t long before Denver was hit by tragedy.  Sheila Whalen, a recent college graduate, went missing from her job as a waitress.  Her body was later found strangled at a motel room in Golden, Colorado, the victim of Morin’s steadily worsening compulsion to kill.

Fleeing Colorado around November of 1981, Morin and Rita headed south to Texas.  But tensions simmered between the couple as they entered the Lone Star State, with Rita growing progressively more frustrated at her new boyfriend constantly checking out other women until she became so fed up she returned to New York.  In short order, Morin charmed another woman by the name of Sara Clarke to accompany him on his continuing spree.  Morin murdered two more women – both times to steal their car – as the couple traveled through Texas.  Morin and Sara even kidnapped a woman from an apartment complex in Corpus Christi and forced her to accompany them on their journey.

Police finally tracked Morin to a hotel in San Antonio, where they located the hostage taken in Corpus Christi alive and were able to arrest Sara.  But Morin managed to slip out a window moments before police arrived.  Amidst the police manhunt, he kidnapped another woman from a department store parking lot, but over several hours his hostage managed to use the quotation of Bible verses to convince Morin to turn himself in without further bloodshed.  Morin released his hostage and phoned the police from an Austin bus station, where he was soon arrested without incident.

Texas Trials

Morin faced two separate trials in Texas for the murders of Carrie Scott and Janna Bruce during his frenzied flight from the authorities.  Morin was convicted in both cases and twice sentenced to death by lethal injection.  Upon learning of his second death sentence, he whispered to his attorney, “Now I guess I’ve got it in both arms.”

Morin was also found guilty and received a death sentence in Colorado in relation to the murder of Sheila Whalen.  Utah also lined up with the other states touched by Morin’s destructive tour to obtain justice and issued a warrant for his arrest for the murder of Cheryl Daniel – Nevada lacked jurisdiction since the body was located in Utah – but Utah ceased its efforts to extradite Morin after his convictions in the Texas cases.

Detectives with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department traveled to Texas to interview Morin about the Bryant, Daniel, and Belote murders, but the killer steadfastly refused to discuss his time in Vegas.  No indictments were issued in relation to these crimes because police lacked sufficient evidence to link Morin to the murders, though there was plenty of circumstantial evidence putting Morin with the motive, means, and opportunity to carry out the three slayings between 1979 and 1980, as well as the brutal rape and attempted murder of the 15-year-old girl abducted near Garside Junior High School.

Shortly after midnight on March 13, 1985, officials at the Texas State Prison in Huntsville led Morin to the execution chamber.  A technician spent several minutes trying to locate a vein to insert the intravenous line into the condemned man’s left arm without success.  Morin’s years of chronic drug abuse had left his veins shot.  The technician then tried to find a vein in Morin’s right arm.  As the serial killer had inadvertently predicted after his sentencing, he “had it in both arms.”

Prison technicians eventually found a viable vein in Morin’s arm.  He was put to death after making a last statement professing his conversion to an evangelical branch of Christianity and granting forgiveness to his executioners – but without expressing remorse for the lives he had taken.

IV.

Who Killed Kim Bryant?

The Case for and Against Bobby Gene Thomas

Forty years have passed since Kim Bryant disappeared from in front of her school and police still have been unable to identify a firm suspect in the teenager’s murder.

The office of the Clark County District Attorney was responsible for prosecuting Kim’s murderers, and the only plea accepted by the D.A. in relation to the Bryant killing was from Ronnie Lee Fain.  He swore during his allocution that Bobby Gene Thomas confessed in a drunken state to the abduction, rape, and murder of Bryant.  Further, the detective leading the investigation into the Thomas murder expressed his confidence in Fain’s truthfulness.  After all, Fain’s confession was backed up by two separate polygraph exams. 

Then there is the fact Thomas had a demonstrated history of crimes against young women and girls.  Not long after he arrived in Las Vegas, Thomas attacked Christine Lee McKinney along Las Vegas Boulevard.  Then he drugged and raped his 14-year-old sister-in-law Helen Hynes, resulting in her death.  And near the same time Kim Bryant was abducted, Thomas kidnapped and attempted to rape a young woman in the desert.  

But still, questions remain about whether Bobby Gene Thomas was really responsible for the death of Kim Bryant.

For instance, there was an internal division within the Metro homicide unit as to how much weight should be given to Fain’s successful polygraph exams. And while Fain passed two polygraph exams, the veracity of his confession remains questionable.  Shortly after Fain told a District Court Judge that Thomas had confessed to killing Kim Bryant, he filed a hand-written motion with the court seeking to rescind his confession.  He also mixed up the month of Kim Bryant’s murder when he placed his admission to the crime on the court record.  And he lacked knowledge of many details not otherwise publicly reported about the murder.  And en eyewitness described as a “prominent businessman” said Thomas’s jeep was not the vehicle used to kidnap Kim Bryant. 

Ronnie Fain’s story is also called into question because he seems to have had something of a propensity for stabbing people.  In December of 1978, only a month before murdering Thomas, Ronnie Fain led a hammer and knife attack against an acquaintance in a downtown apartment as part of a purported effort to found a Manson-like cult in Sin City. Rutledge’s body was found stabbed dozens of times and desecrated post-mortem in a similar fashion to the Thomas murder. Perhaps, as he alleged in his numerous handwritten court filings, Fain was simply a sociopath. And it is not a stretch to imagine a sociopath concocting a story about a young girl’s murder in the hopes of a lighter sentence. 

Finally, there is the unsettling proposition that follows if one believes Bobby Gene Thomas was in fact the killer of Kim Bryant.  Detective Herb Barrett, the lead investigator in the Thomas killing, said that Kim Bryant was last seen alive in a car with four men, noting that with the death of Thomas police were only looking for three suspects. In this scenario, while Thomas may have met a cosmic justice, the other participants in the Bryant killing remained free.

The Case for and Against “The Chameleon”

Strong evidence supports the conclusion that Kim Bryant fell victim to a ruthless cross-country serial killer’s reign of terror that he brought to Las Vegas between 1979 and 1980.  

Stephen Peter Morin was a cunning operator with a compulsive urge to abuse and murder women, an impulse so powerful he was unable to restrain himself from violence even while a fugitive on the FBI 10 Most Wanted List.  Morin bore the hallmarks of a predator – he likely stalked and methodically plotted the abductions of Cheryl Daniel and Susan Belote from their places of work.  He also had a propensity for targeting young women in their teens as his victims - young women much like Kim Bryant. 

Another aspect of Morin’s M.O. supports him as the killer. Morin generally had prior interactions with his victims before carrying out his attacks.  He met his teenage victim in San Francisco via his sister; he dated Cheryl Daniel prior to abducting and killing her; he interacted with Susan Belote while she worked at the animal clinic several months before her abduction.  Witnesses described Morin as the same man that took Kim on a date to the skating rink, only to make her so uncomfortable that she sought a ride home with an ex-boyfriend.  Morin also tailed Bryant home that night in a Ford Ranchero, the same type of vehicle present when Cheryl Daniel was abducted. 

There are also other links between Morin and the Kim Bryant case. There’s the macramé belt found at Morin’s storage locker that was similar to the one Kim was wearing the day she disappeared. Then there was the 15-year-old girl found raped and left for dead near the exact same spot where Kim Bryant’s body had been left a year prior.  The teenage victim had her skull fractured with a nearby rock, the same method used by Kim’s killer.  And both girls were left at the same site at Buffalo and Charleston half-clothed. 

But But plenty of Metro detectives believed there could be other suspects besides Morin in Kim’s murder.  No less than the head of the homicide division noted several other young women had been found dead in the desert under circumstances similar to the Bryant killing after Morin’s arrest.  And the lead detective on the Bryant case, Bob Hilliard, was reassigned from the detective detail to patrol duty – normally considered a demotion – for allegedly leaking information about the Morin case to the press. One questions if Hilliard was focused on Morin as a suspect to the point he blinded himself to other possibilities.  

Kim’s mother commented on Morin’s arrest, “I’m glad he’s caught, but I want to know for sure he’s the one who took Kimmy.”

Others Unknown

There also exists the possibility that some other unknown individual killed Kim Bryant.  After all, two of Kim’s classmates provided independent descriptions of two suspicious young men cruising around Western High School in a Chevy near the time Kim was abducted. And that same type of car with two young male occupants was described by several eyewitnesses early on as having verbally accosted Kim just minutes before her abduction. 

As the head of Metro homicide noted, other murders after Morin’s arrest were similar to the Bryant murder.  For example, Cathryn Tighe was a 17-year-old Chaparral High School student that went missing for a month and was later found strangled in the desert along Boulder Highway.  Or the case of 20-year-old Norma Gonzalez, whose body was found shot, strangled, and beaten near Red Rock Canyon in 1983.  

As there were a spate of murders of young women around Las Vegas in the late-70’s and early-80’s – it’s possible that Morin committed the Daniel and Belote murders, while a different suspect perpetrated the Bryant homicide and the attempted murder of the girl taken from near Garside Junior High.

The Kim Bryant case remains officially open with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department.

Remembrance in the Search for Answers

The missing and the taken are often forgotten – sometimes in months, sometimes years or decades.  But their memories can resurrect in unexpected ways.

For this author, it was not until well into writing this story that I realized my daily commute to work brings me past the intersection at Charleston and Buffalo.  The area is no longer vacant desert where kids wander, teenagers gather to share illicit booze, and young lovers find a place to meet.  Today it is populated by one-story homes, a gas station, and a repair shop on three corners of the intersection.  But the power substation where Kim Bryant’s brutalized body was found still stands on the northwest corner, a marker for those looking with the right eyes to an enduring mystery and the tragic taking of a charitable spirit from the local community.