As he walked up to knock on a front door, private investigator Steve Kerpelman warned his student interns to stand to the side; someone might shoot at them from behind the door.
“You never know what you’re going to face,” he said.
But this is what three university interns signed up for when they decided to join Kerpelman, a retired Prince George’s County Police officer, on his investigation of the 1975 murder of Kathy Beatty.
The 15-year-old was assaulted near her home in Aspen Hill and later died of her injuries. Her case remains open 39 years later.
Senior criminal justice and criminology majors Ariana Amini, Alexandra Broseker and Rebecca Peele started interning with Kerpelman at the beginning of this semester. He has been working on the case as a private investigator since 2008 and said he felt student interns could help bring a fresh perspective.
“We’ve got different people looking at the same notes we’ve been looking at for years,” he said. “You start to miss things.”
The students accompany Kerpelman on interviews, analyze potential sources and pore over Kerpelmans’s six years’ worth of notes. They are currently working to organize the information and create a visual data web of suspects, people of interest, interviewees, witnesses and anyone involved to show how they might be connected to one another and to the night of Beatty’s assault.
“One of the major things we’ve noted is the fact that there’s sill more work to be done,” Peele said. “There’s a lot of people, in my opinion, that I think we could still interview and consider that could hopefully give us information.”
Part of the difficulty of this case is the hard drug use among the circle of suspects, which can skew the facts, Amini said.
Phencyclidine, or PCP, is a drug that can produce hallucinations, paranoia and sense of invulnerability in users and was just starting to grow popular in the area at the time of Beatty’s murder, especially among those close to the case, Amini said.
“It adds a layer of the unknown because we don’t know if the person who assaulted Kathy was on drugs that night,” she said. “If they were, they might not even remember they were doing it.”
Because many people of interest were heavily involved with drugs, their stories often aren’t as reliable, Kerpelman said. Some have carried their drug use into later adulthood, and many people Kerpelman wishes he could interview have died or are deep into alcoholism or drug addiction, he said.
But there are still plenty of people to talk to, and Kerpelman said he always brings the interns along, though he would never allow them to go alone because some of the interviewees could be dangerous.
It can be alarming at first to be standing in front of and interviewing a potentially violent person or a known sex offender, Broseker said. However, she said she has never felt she was in danger because of her involvement with the case.
The interns said they aren’t helping with the investigation for the adrenaline rush or the class credits. Like Kerpelman, they said they’re doing it for Beatty’s mom, Patricia Haberman.
“I just hope and pray that they can come up with answers and find something that somebody else has missed,” said Haberman, 81. “It’s incredible that 39 years have gone by and we don’t have answers. You don’t know what it’s like to live with that.”
Kerpelman said he connected with the case because he went to middle school with Beatty and said they always got along well in school. He carries his yearbook with Beatty’s school picture in it in his car wherever he goes.
And with the help of the interns, the investigation is making progress, Kerpelman said.
This semester alone, the team has interviewed about 20 people connected to the case and has a working list of about five suspects, he said.
Though everyone would like to see the killer or killers brought to justice, the most the investigators can realistically hope for now, 39 years later, is the truth to come to light and a little peace of mind for Haberman. Broseker said she believes the case will be solved one day.
Kerpelman and the interns said they are confident there are people alive who know exactly what happened that summer night in 1975, and Kerpelman said he is hopeful that the weight on someone’s conscience will eventually bring them to confess.
It may be awhile before the investigators make a breakthrough, but Peele said she’s prepared to continue working on the case until that happens.
“It’d be weird after the semester’s over to wipe your hand of it all because of what we know now,” she said. “I would be willing to work with Steve on this case as long as he needed. I hope it won’t take another 40 years.”
