Kimberly Morse was the youngest of four children, born in York, Maine but eventually relocating to North Providence, Rhode Island in the late 1990s.
According to friends and family, Kimberly was an outgoing, adventurous young woman with a passion for travel and a generous spirit who was well-liked by everyone. She was studying to be an aesthetician at Warwick Academy of Beauty Culture and was due to graduate in the early spring of 2000. In January 2000, she was thirty-two years old; her thirty-third birthday was less than a week away.
Kimberly lived alone at the Brick Manor Condominiums and worked a couple of nights a week at the Foxy Lady Gentleman’s Club to pay for school. On the night of Tuesday, January 18th, she had worked a shift, leaving the club after midnight. She arrived home shortly before two a.m. on January 19th.
According to later reports, Kimberly either found the door of her apartment open or perhaps buzzed someone in after she entered the residence. Whatever the case, there was no sign of forced entry, leading authorities to assume that the events that followed were perpetrated by someone she knew.
Kimberly was not discovered until five p.m. on Wednesday the 19th when neighbors reported smoke billowing from her apartment and called emergency services. When firefighters arrived, they found Kimberly’s body smoldering in the bathtub. She had been brutally stabbed numerous times, and her remains were then doused in gasoline and set alight.
From the copious amounts of blood all over the apartment, police deduced that the killer had likely attacked Kimberly the moment she walked in the door, then dragged her into the bathroom, where he set her on fire.
Due to the savagery of the crime and the fact that the attacker had not broken in, investigators were operating on the assumption that Kimberly had known the person responsible and believed she had no cause to fear him. Although links to her work at the gentleman’s club were pursued, no obvious suspects materialized, and there were likewise no connections to drugs or any other illegal activity that might have made Kimberly a target.
A twenty-thousand-dollar reward was offered for information, but the case sadly went cold almost immediately. There was a brief spark of hope in 2014 when an anonymous tip sent detectives to investigate a suspect in Michigan, but his DNA did not match evidence recovered from the crime scene, and authorities were back to square one.
The case remains open, but there have been no significant updates for more than a decade.
Crime Immemorial 