The frantic 911 call erupted from a quiet Kansas suburb on June 18, 2002, shattering the illusion of safety that had defined the community of Leawood. Roger Kemp’s voice, thick with terror and disbelief, crackled through the line as he reported the unthinkable: he had found his 19-year-old daughter, Ali, lifeless on the floor of the neighborhood pool’s pump shed. The call was a father’s worst nightmare made real, and it set off a two-year manhunt that would consume his life.
It was a gloomy, overcast afternoon that Tuesday, not the kind of day anyone would typically expect to find a crammed swimming pool. Ali Kemp, a promising college student home for the summer, had taken a lifeguard shift at the Foxboro pool, a job she shared with her brother. When her brother arrived to relieve her around 5:20 p.
m. , she was nowhere to be found, her car inexplicably still parked in the lot. A sinking feeling of dread propelled Roger, who was just minutes away, to rush down to investigate personally.
Roger Kempt initially scanned the pool’s passive area, his eyes darting across the water and the grounds in confusion. The mystery deepened when he objectified the unattended valuables on the pool house counter—her purse, her cell phone, and her car keys. The eerie stillness of the complex, coupled with the abandoned belongings, spurred a desperate, methodical search.
He pushed open the door to the pump room, a dark, cavernous space filled with facility equipment, and scanned the shadowed corners for any trace of her.
It was Frederick near the back of the pump room, tucked behind the haze of industrial machinery, that the world tilted on its axis. As he turned to leave in the semi-darkness, catching a glance of a leg jutting out from under a blue tarp, he pulled it back in fear. The life of the incredible light had been extinguished from the crime scene.
The first responders arrived to find the 19-year-old lying naked and brutally beaten, barely alive. She had been the epitome of a loving parent’s dream, a bright, joyful college student with a promising future, but that afternoon, her life was ebbing away in a hospital operating room.
Upon arrival at the hospital, medical professionals fought feverishly to save her, but the blunt-force trauma to her face and the back of her head proved too severe. Ali Kemp was declared dead that evening, just hours after her father had discovered her broken body. The shockwave of her murder hit the Leawood community with the force of a bomb.
The suburbs, a town where residents famously never locked their doors, was faced with an active, monstrous predator in its midst. The issue was not just unlawful, it was a brutal crime in a place where such things were not supposed to be handled.
In the immediate aftermath of the killing, the police dug into the evidence left hidden in the pump room. Blood spatter painted the concrete floor and the walls. The victim’s flip-flops were scattered, disjoined, proving the fight.
And in that violence, there lay a hope: a sample of blood that didn’t match Ali’s. A DNA profile was created for an unknown male, but it soared through the national database without a match. With no clear suspect, it fell to the father, Roger, to become the driving force behind catching a killer, even as he was plunged into a soul-crushing abyss of grief.
Instead of keeling to sorrow, Kemp channeled his rage into a relentless campaign for justice. He immediately increased the existing reward for information from $1,000 to $50,000, draping the town of the murderer’s face across billboards and television screens. And while Roger hounded for answers, the police attempted to piece together the last hours in Liberty’s life.
They learned she had felt uneasy, noticing men who did lawn work at the complex staring at her. They also discovered a witness to a strange man in a tan Ford pickup circling the pool’s parking lot on the day of the murder, a man carrying bucket who nodded to a friend who had come to see her.
Still, despite the sketch and a national hotline that accepted over 400 calls as leads, the case churned cold. They found a name from the tip of an alleged rapist, James Strater, looked a dead ringer for the sketch, but a DNA match ruled him out. The turning point came unsolicited to father’s desperate strategy.
In the summer of 2003, on the one-year anniversary of his daughter’s death, Roger announced a billboard campaign with his daughter’s face on the highway, hoping the public eye would spark a memory. A thousand saw it and finally called about Ted Hoover, a pool company owner who drove the same model of truck, and who had lawyered up when asked for his DNA, being cagey about his whereabouts on that June day.
The heat intensified, but Hoover would be able to pick up and vanish from state, leaving a tangled web of aliases overnight—Benjamin Applebee, and dozens of others. It would take another year for a Connecticut arrest for public indecency to catch up with him, all because he’d skipped on a gas station. The authorities in Kansas swooped into question the man they were sure they found, but were faced with that lack of a DNA sample.
Detective John Dickey and his partner staged an interrogation room with a chart of the suspect’s entire case history, holding his own face in the middle of the narrative. When confronted, the suspect hunched, his eyes wide, and said, “You know, I sort of lied to you… I was at that pool.”
The confession was plagued by horrific details. Ted Hoover, calmly recalling that day, said he had gone to the pool with the intention of meeting girls. He had watched Ali Kemp, gawking at her as she cleaned the pool equipment.
On June 18, 2002, he entered the pump room, attempted his hit, but when she rejected him and sought the door, he grabbed her. He had tried to overpower her, but she fought back, punching him. His action was a furious explosion of violence.
He repeatedly alongside his state, she pushed him, holding her down, and battered her face and skull. The motivation to his own freedom: “I took her clothes off with the intention of having 𝒔𝒆𝒙, but when she fought me I lost it. I hit her in the face.
I hit her on the head.” He strangled her when she fell to the ground and covered her with the tarp, believing she wasn’t dead.
At trial in 2005, Ted Hoover, aka Benjamin Applebee, was convicted of first-degree murder and capital murder, and later sentence to 50 years to life. The verdict was justice, but the family and jobs of “Take Defense”, a self-defense training program that grew from 12 girls in a basement to nearly 70,000 participants in over a decade. Roger’s unwavering, agonizing pursuit continues to be a photo of the life of his daughter; he took Lisa’s death and turned it into a triumphant, monumental woke of advocacy, one that ensures her legacy and empowers a safer world for future generations.
