Kim Bryant
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To get this episode of Forensic Tales ad-free, please visit patreon.com/forensictales. Forensic Tales discusses topics that some listeners may find disturbing. The contents of this episode may not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised. On the morning of January 26, 1979, a 16-year-old woke up in her home in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Las Vegas, also known as Sin City, for its nightlife, gambling, and crime. Kim, who also volunteers for the Special Olympics, just finished registering for her classes. After all of the excitement, she went across the street to the Dairy Queen, a popular hangout for the high school students. Kim called her boyfriend to pick her up. She waited in broad daylight on a busy street.

Her boyfriend shows up minutes later, but Kim is nowhere to be found. This is Forensic Tales, episode number 138, The Kim Bryant Story. ♪

Welcome to Forensic Tales. I'm your host, Courtney Fretwell-Ariola.

Forensic Tales is a weekly true crime podcast covering real, spine-tingling stories with a forensic science twist. Some cases have been solved with forensic science, while others have turned cold. Every remarkable story sends us a chilling reminder that not all stories have happy endings.

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On the morning of January 26, 1979, 16-year-old Kim Bryant woke up inside her mom and stepdad's house in Las Vegas, Nevada. Las Vegas, also known as Sin City, is the unofficial gambling capital of the United States. Sin City is a place notorious for its 24-hour casinos, sparkling lights, and extravagant nightlife.

Thousands of people flock to Las Vegas each year to chase fast money, whether it be to strike it rich in the casinos or make it as an entertainer. Las Vegas is the place to make big dreams happen. But Sin City also has a darker side, a dark side that lies underneath the flashing lights of Las Vegas Boulevard.

The shadier side of Sin City involves sex trafficking, organized crime, money laundering, and violent crime. Las Vegas during the 1970s might have been rising in popularity, but so were the violent crimes. After putting together her backpack and books for the day, the 16-year-old sophomore headed out the door to Western High School.

Kim was the kind of girl known to let her bright and exuberant personality shine through her sense of fashion. That morning, she wore a patchwork rabbit fur coat covering a white pullover blouse with a black skirt. It was the perfect outfit for someone like Kim Bryant. When Kim wasn't at school, she volunteered most of her free time with the Special Olympics organization in Las Vegas.

She enjoyed helping athletes, despite their challenges, achieve their fullest potential. This volunteer work seemed to suit Kim's personality well because she had a big heart and made friends quickly. Kim and her fellow classmates at Western High School were on campus selecting their classes for the upcoming school year. The school was packed with students excited about the new school year.

Once the students registered, they had the rest of the day off from school. Some students went straight home, while others, like Kim, planned to hang out with friends before heading home for the day. After Kim picked out her classes, she and a girlfriend walked to a local Dairy Queen fast food restaurant across the street.

The Dairy Queen was located on Decatur Boulevard, a busy, high-traffic street directly across the street from Western High School's football field. The Dairy Queen restaurant was a popular high school spot to hang out with friends or grab an ice cream. The restaurant's parking lot was popular for high school kids to hang out. Students waited for their parents to pick them up after school.

Although the Dairy Queen wouldn't open for the next couple of hours, Kim and her friend planned to hang out in the restaurant's parking lot until around 10 o'clock a.m. At 10.10 a.m., the mother of Kim's friend pulled her car up in front of the Dairy Queen. She was there to pick up Kim's friend, but she asked Kim if she needed a ride home that morning.

Kim told her friend's mom to hang on for a moment. Then she walked over to a payphone. A few minutes passed. Then Kim walked back to the car and told her friend's mom not to worry about it. She didn't need a ride home that day. She spoke with her boyfriend over the payphone and he said that he was on his way to come pick her up and take her home.

The friend's mom said okay and drove away, leaving Kim alone in front of the Dairy Queen. Around 20 minutes later, Kim's boyfriend pulled into the Dairy Queen parking lot just as planned. When he got there, he expected to see Kim standing there. He had just spoken to her over the phone and she said that she was going to be there. But when he parked, he didn't see her. She wasn't where she said she would be.

So he decided to wait inside the Dairy Queen parking lot for a few minutes. But once she didn't show up then, he figured that Kim got a ride home from someone else. So after waiting for a few minutes for Kim, he drove off on Decatur Boulevard.

An hour and a half later, around 12 o'clock noon, Kim's mom began to get worried. It was almost 12.30 p.m., and Kim still hadn't come home from registering for classes. She and Kim had plans to go shopping together at 12.30 on the dot, and it wasn't like her daughter to be late. Kim always called. That's the type of person she was.

Once 1230 came and Kim still wasn't home, Kim's mom, Sherry, headed out of the house to start looking for her. She and Kim's stepdad drove around Las Vegas the entire afternoon searching for their daughter. They even went to the school to see if she was still there. But they discovered no one had seen her all afternoon. The last person to see Kim was her friend's mom, who drove to the Dairy Queen and offered her a ride home.

An hour after sunset, Kim's mom and stepdad were convinced that something terrible had happened to Kim. They spent the day driving all over town but didn't find her. And they knew she wouldn't simply run off. So it was time to contact the police. They drove to a Las Vegas Police Department substation and told the officers that their 16-year-old daughter didn't return home from school earlier that day.

They spent the day looking for her, but no one had seen her since around 10 a.m. in the Dairy Queen parking lot. Initially, the Las Vegas police were skeptical about their story. It's a 16-year-old teenager. She'd only been gone for a handful of hours. Maybe she simply ran off and was just staying at a friend's house.

But Kim's parents were adamant that this was entirely out of character for Kim. She wasn't the type of teenager to just run away and not tell them where she was. She was a responsible kid who didn't do drugs and wasn't involved in the wrong crowd. Despite living in Sin City, she didn't follow the city's temptations like other teenagers might have.

She might have been a little naive, but she wasn't the runaway type. But the police weren't convinced. They told Kim's parents, just wait it out a few days and Kim's going to come home. It was Sin City after all. Kids run off all the time and eventually they show back up. The following day, Kim's parents continued to look for her. If the police weren't going to help, maybe others would.

They decided to contact local newspapers and radio stations to get the word out about Kim. But when they asked them to run a story about her, the first question the media asked was, did the police take a missing person report? Kim's parents said no. They tried to, but when they did, they were turned away. The radio stations told Kim's parents they were sorry, but there wasn't anything they could do.

If the police weren't going to report her as a missing person, then they wouldn't cover the story. Once local newspapers and radio stations turned down the story, Kim's stepdad returned to the police substation. This time around, he begged them to file a missing person report. It had been over 24 hours and Kim still hadn't returned home.

The station agreed to send over a couple of police officers to Kim's house to see if they could find anything. The first place they looked was inside Kim's bedroom. They wanted to check if they could find anything to suggest that Kim merely ran off.

Inside the bedroom, they found her journal. Like many 16-year-old girls, she kept a journal. This is where she journaled about school, her relationships, and her family. When the police officers combed through Kim's journal, they found an entry that piqued their attention.

The entry vaguely mentioned that Kim wasn't happy with her mom and stepdad, and she was thinking of running away if she was given the opportunity. This journal entry was all the police needed to become convinced that Kim had simply run off, and it wasn't worth their time or their resources to send out a search team.

The police told Kim's parents about the journal entry and said that hundreds of teenagers, just like Kim Bryant, run away each year in Las Vegas and nearly all of them return back home. The Las Vegas police considered Kim's sudden disappearance a low priority for the next week.

But one week after she disappeared from the Dairy Queen restaurant on Decatur Boulevard, the police learned about Kim's school backpack. A motorist driving down Decatur Boulevard found Kim's backpack lying in the middle of the street around 12 o'clock p.m. on the day she went missing.

The motorist said that they saw the backpack in the street and pulled over. They opened the book bag and saw Kim Bryant's school ID inside of a wallet. The motorist told the police they tried calling Kim's house that afternoon, but when they called, no one answered. Kim's mom and stepdad were likely already out looking for her when the phone call came in, and that's why no one picked up the phone.

One week after Kim's disappearance while standing in front of the Dairy Queen, the Las Vegas Police Department finally reported her missing. By this point, they were already one week behind in their investigation, and if they had any hope of finding her safe and sound, they needed to make up ground quickly. During the next three weeks, Kim's search intensified.

Her family and authorities contacted all of her friends and classmates to see if they knew where Kim was or if she was staying with them. But they kept hearing the same answer, no. They had no idea where Kim went after Dairy Queen. But all of that was about to change.

In the late afternoon on February 20th, three teenage boys were hiking through the desert on the western edge of Las Vegas. As they crossed Buffalo Avenue and Charles Boulevard, they discovered something that caught their attention. At first, it looked like it was a wig tangled in the dirt and rocks.

But as the group of boys got closer, the less it looked like a wig and the more it looked like real human hair.

The three teenagers immediately turned around and ran back down towards Charleston Boulevard. On Charleston Boulevard, they saw a police patrol car and flagged the officer down. The boys led the officer to a small stream of water where they saw what they initially thought was a wig. When the officer kneeled down, he discovered it wasn't a wig.

Instead, it was the lifeless body of 16-year-old Kim Bryant. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. What are some of your self-care non-negotiables? Maybe you never skip leg day or therapy day. When your schedule is packed with kids' activities, big work projects, or podcasting like me, it's easy to let your priorities slip.

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That's betterhelp.com. When Kim's body was found on February 20th, 1979, she was found lying face down in a small pool of water. Her body was partially covered by leaves and dirt, like whoever had killed her attempted to hide her body. She was completely naked from the waist down, and there was evidence that she had been sexually assaulted.

She'd been struck in the head several times, likely by one of the rocks scattered around the dump site. Her arms and hands were covered in defensive wounds, indicating that she fought against her attacker or attackers. Initially, the police believed that Kim had been murdered shortly after she disappeared from the Dairy Queen on January 26th.

But once the autopsy was performed, investigators believed that Kim may have been alive for up to four days after she was kidnapped. Word about Kim's murder shocked the Las Vegas community. No one could understand why someone like Kim Bryant could be killed in such a brutal way.

She was just a 16-year-old girl who volunteered for the Special Olympics and had her entire life ahead of her. Kim's mom and stepdad laid her to rest at Palm Memorial Park in Las Vegas. Hundreds of people showed up to her funeral, including former Nevada Governor Mike O'Callaghan, a friend of the Bryant family.

At the same time Kim's funeral was happening, the Las Vegas Police Department was under a tremendous amount of pressure to find Kim's killer. Anytime a young 16-year-old is killed in such a brutal way, the public demands answers. In the days following the discovery of Kim's body, the police were inundated with tips.

The most promising information was that Kim was last seen talking to several men inside of a Jeep. When investigators tracked down the men inside the Jeep, they all provided solid alibis. Detectives even traveled to Michigan to speak with the man who said he saw Kim's murder. But when they sat down and spoke with him, he admitted to making everything up.

In the end, he didn't witness the murder and made the story up after overhearing a group of teenagers talking about Kim's murder. After the initial flurry of the tips dried up, the investigation stalled. At the time of Kim's murder in 1979, Las Vegas was experiencing an influx of violent crimes and homicides.

There were 25 murders by mid-March of that year, compared to 14 by the same time a year before in 1978. The Las Vegas Police Department was also severely understaffed. At the time, they only had nine full-time homicide detectives. So when a new murder came in, most detectives were forced to put Kim's case down and focus on the new one.

As the leads dwindled, a local Las Vegas newspaper published an article about Kim's case in August of 1979. The article talked about the status of the investigation and the impact that Kim's murder had on her family. When the article was published, it jogged the memory of two of Kim's classmates at Western High School.

The two female students told investigators that on the day of Kim's disappearance, they'd been approached by two men driving a later model 1950s Chevy bearing Nevada license plates. The girls described the Chevy as having silver primer paint with light primer spots and raised black wheels.

They said the two men inside of the Chevy approached them and offered to sell the girls jewelry. But according to the girls, something about these two men seemed suspicious. When they looked inside the car's back seat, they didn't see any jewelry. Instead, they just saw an old speaker.

When the girls told the two men they weren't interested, the men got upset and started shouting obscenities at the girls and then drove away. Both teams provided the police with independent descriptions of what the two men looked like.

They described the passenger as an 18 to 19-year-old with shaggy blonde hair and droopy stoner eyes. And they described the driver as a man in his early 20s with a mustache and dark brown hair. These descriptions allowed the police to create the first sketch of a potential suspect in Kim's murder.

When the police ran a photo of the sketch in the local news, they were once again inundated with tips. But after only a few weeks, the tips ran out again and investigators were right back at square one. Throughout the investigation, several potential suspects emerged. The first promising suspect was a guy named Bobby Jean Thomas.

At the time of Kim's murder, Bobby Jean Thomas was a 37-year-old roofer who went missing the day after Kim disappeared. About a month later, his body was discovered one mile from the Hoover Dam. He'd been stabbed over 30 times. When the police discovered Bobby Jean Thomas' body, they started to dig into his past.

They learned that Bobby Jean Thomas was no stranger to committing violent crimes against young women. Police wondered, could some of his crimes include the murder of Kim Bryant? In January 1970, nine years before Kim's murder, 20-year-old Christine McKinney was trying to get her car started on the side of Las Vegas Boulevard.

As she attempted to get her car started, a man approached her from behind, grabbed her from the waist, and tried to kidnap her. Fortunately, Christine McKinney was able to get away. Her attacker was identified as Bobby Jean Thomas, and he was arrested and charged with assault with intent to commit a crime.

Two years later, in January 1972, Katherine Hines dropped her three younger children off at the home of her eldest daughter, Mary Hines, who just so happened to be common-law wife to Bobby Thomas. One of the kids at Mary and Bobby's house that night was 14-year-old Helen Hines.

When Katherine Hines returned to pick up her children the following day, she experienced every parent's worst nightmare. She discovered that her daughter, 14-year-old Helen, was unresponsive in her bed, and less than an hour later, she was pronounced dead. An autopsy determined that 14-year-old Helen had died of a fatal overdose of two drugs.

But even more disturbing than the overdose was that Helen had been raped before she died. Bobby Jean Thomas was arrested and charged with statutory rape and involuntary manslaughter in Helen's death. Just days before the trial was scheduled to begin, Thomas accepted a plea from prosecutors.

He agreed to plead guilty to the statutory rape charges in exchange for having the involuntary manslaughter charges dropped. In exchange for his guilty plea, he was sentenced to the maximum sentence of 10 years in prison. Not long after he was paroled, after only serving a small fraction of that 10-year sentence, he was found dead in the desert with over 30 stab wounds.

But Bobby Jean Thomas wasn't the only suspect in Kim's murder. Stephen Peter Morin also popped up on the list of potential suspects. Throughout the 1970s, Stephen Peter Morin was a cunning serial killer with a compulsive urge to abuse and murder young women. Despite being named on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list,

Stephen Peter Marin couldn't control his desire to kill. Marin's crimes began when he was 15 years old when he was busted for stealing a car. A few years later, he was arrested again for stealing another car, and this time with drug charges. At that point, he left the East Coast and headed to San Francisco in Northern California.

Throughout the years, Marin was known to dramatically change his physical appearance. He basically became a chameleon. His crimes escalated in San Francisco. He lured his younger sister's 14-year-old friend to his apartment, and when they got there, he raped her. After being released from prison, the chameleon moved to Las Vegas.

In Vegas, he assumed the alias Robert Ireland, and not long after he moved to Nevada in 1977, he met and married a woman named Sylvia, a local school teacher. Three years later, they welcomed their first child together. Later that same year, while he and Sylvia were on vacation, he went down to the local library to browse the obituaries.

He searched the records looking for anyone who had a similar physical appearance. Bingo. He ditched the name Robert Ireland and assumed a new alias. This time he was Robert Generoso.

On the outside, Stephen Peter Morin may have appeared to be a husband and a father, but behind closed doors, he was living a double life, a secret, violent life. While his wife Sylvia thought that her husband, Robert Generoso, went to work each morning, the real Stephen Morin was out murdering young women.

Two of Marin's victims included Cheryl Daniel and Susan Belote. One year before Kim Bryant was murdered, 18-year-old Susan Belote disappeared after work one day. She was last seen at the intersection of Eastern Avenue and Bonzoa Road around 4 p.m. and was never seen alive again.

A few months later, in June 1980, 19-year-old Cheryl Daniel and her boyfriend parked their Jeep in front of the Alpha Beta supermarket. Cheryl's boyfriend briefly ran into the supermarket to grab something, but when he returned to the Jeep, Cheryl was gone. The bodies of both Susan Belote and Cheryl Daniel were found a few weeks later.

Stephen Peter Morin was eventually linked to both murders after the police found an ID for Robert Generoso near Cheryl Daniels' body. When the police went to Robert Generoso's house, they met Sylvia Generoso.

Instantly, Sylvia realized her entire marriage and her entire life were a lie. Her husband wasn't really Robert Generoso. He was Stephen Peter Marin, a serial killer who bore all the hallmarks of a dangerous, violent predator.

With most of his victims, he methodically stalked them before singling them out. He often targeted young women in their teens. Young women just like Kim Bryant. Detectives working the Kim Bryant case wondered if Stephen Peter Morin could be their guy.

When they executed a search warrant on a storage unit that Marin owned, they found two items possibly connected to Kim. First, they found a belt similar to the belt that Kim wore on the day she disappeared. And they also found a broken gold lighter. According to Kim's parents, Kim was known to carry around a similar gold lighter.

In November 1981, the FBI tracked down Marin in a hotel in San Antonio, Texas. By this point, he had left Las Vegas to embark on a crime spree across the country that involved the murder and rape of several more young women.

When the FBI confronted Marin inside of the hotel, they got involved in a hostage situation. Inside his hotel room was a woman that he had abducted in Corpus Christi. During the altercation between the FBI, Marin was somehow able to sneak out a window and get away, leaving the hostage behind and unharmed.

Later on, Marin eventually used a payphone to call the police and turn himself in. He led them to his location and he was arrested without incident. After he was arrested, he faced several murder charges in Texas, Colorado, and even Nevada.

He was eventually found guilty in Texas for the murders of Carrie Scott and Jana Bruce and received two death sentences. He got a death sentence for both cases. On March 13th, 1985, he was executed by lethal injection at the Texas State Prison in Huntsville, Texas.

For decades, the Las Vegas police and Kim's parents wondered if Stephen Peter Marin was Kim's killer. They could only speculate because they had no solid evidence linking him in the case. They only had the possible belt and gold lighter found in his storage unit, but neither of which were in fact ever linked to Kim.

They also had the fact that he matched the same M.O. that Kim's murder did. So could this killer be the one that they had desperately searched for?

Following Marin's arrest and execution, Kim Bryant's mother made a public statement. She told reporters, quote, I'm glad he's caught, but I want to know for sure he's the one who took Kimmy, end quote. The Las Vegas Police Department also suspected Marin of the murder of another 15-year-old girl from Las Vegas.

She was found sexually assaulted and left for dead near the same spot where Kim Bryant's body had been left just a year before. Like Kim, the 15-year-old female victim had her skull fractured by a nearby rock. Again, the same method Kim Bryant's killer attacker used to kill her. So the questions loomed.

It wasn't until many years later, in 2021, that they considered another possible suspect. In 2021, the Las Vegas police decided to take another look at Kim's case. By this point, all of the original detectives who worked on Kim's case in 1979 were retired. The department had new detectives who were interested in looking at cold cases.

Homicide Lieutenant Ray Spencer had recently heard about Stephanie Isaacson's case. Earlier that year, a private lab in Texas helped the Las Vegas police solve a cold case using just 0.12 nanograms of DNA. The police sent DNA from Stephanie Isaacson's case, a four decades old cold case, to the private lab, Othram, Inc.,

The 0.12 nanograms of DNA were analyzed, and the lab identified the DNA as belonging to Darren Roy Marchand. After decades, Othram was able to use a tiny amount of DNA to solve one of the city's oldest cold cases.

After hearing about Stephanie Isaacson's case, Lieutenant Ray Spencer wondered if the same advanced DNA testing could be done in Kim Bryant's case. So they decided to submit DNA collected in Kim's case to Othram, Inc. in Texas to be tested.

The entire process was funded on money donated by Las Vegas entrepreneur Justin Wu. Justin Wu is also the founder of the Vegas Justice League. Authrum Inc. is different than your traditional crime lab. Over the last couple of years, they've developed highly advanced methods to perform DNA sequencing on even the smallest amounts of DNA.

From that, they can create high-performance profiles of a suspected killer or, in other cases, identify an individual who's been left unidentified for years.

In Kim's case, Othram compared the DNA collected at Kim's crime scene to profiles uploaded to publicly available genealogy databases as well as their own database. From there, Othram Inc. was able to generate a family tree possibly related to Kim's killer.

Once they had a family tree, they narrowed their search down to a promising suspect. Next, they compared the possible suspect's DNA to the DNA collected at Kim's crime scene, and when they did this, they got a match. On November 29, 2021, Othram identified Johnny Blake Peterson as Kim Bryant's killer.

At the time of Kim's murder, Johnny Blake Peterson was 19 years old and lived in Las Vegas. Before Othram identified his DNA from the crime scene, Peterson was never considered a suspect or even a person of interest in Kim's case. Over the many years of investigating Kim's murder, the Las Vegas police never knew about Johnny Blake Peterson.

Once Othram and the Las Vegas police identified Peterson's DNA, they discovered that Kim Bryant wasn't his only victim. Not long after he was linked to Kim Bryant's murder, an anonymous acquaintance of Peterson's approached the Las Vegas police and told investigators they should look into him as possibly being involved in another unsolved murder.

Through DNA comparison, the police also identified him as the person responsible for the 1983 murder of 22-year-old Diana Hansen. In 1983, Diana Hansen was in Las Vegas while home from college break. One night in late December, she left her parents' house to go jogging but never returned.

A few weeks later, Diana Hansen was found murdered not too far from where Kim Bryant's body was discovered. Today, the Las Vegas police have announced they are investigating him and at least five other murders committed between the late 1970s and early 1980s. They are hopeful that advanced DNA testing can also be used to link him to these other possible murders.

But until DNA testing can link him definitively to these murders, Peterson is only considered a person of interest at this time. He is not considered an official suspect. Unfortunately, getting justice for Kim Bryant as well as Diana Hansen is a different story.

Johnny Blake Peterson died in a Las Vegas hospital on January 20th, 1993, when he was 32 years old, many years after he murdered and abducted Kim Bryant out in front of that Dairy Queen restaurant. Since Peterson is dead, the motive behind what he did on January 26th, 1979 isn't clear.

Many people speculate that Kim's murder was a crime of opportunity. Johnny Blake Peterson is a sexual, violent predator, and Kim Bryant just so happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. As Peterson drove down Decatur Boulevard in Las Vegas, he saw Kim standing in front of the Dairy Queen alone.

He used a lure to get Kim inside of his car, either by the threat of violence or charm. After Kim was inside of Peterson's control, he drove off, sexually assaulted her, and then murdered her by beating her to death.

Johnny Blake Peterson abducted her just minutes, just seconds before her boyfriend was set to pick her up as planned in front of the Dairy Queen. There does exist a small amount of closure. After all these years of searching, we finally know who is responsible. But justice is a whole different story.

Johnny Blake Peterson is dead. He'll never be held accountable for his crimes in a court of law, and the surviving members of Kim Bryant's family won't get the opportunity to confront him. Following the announcement that Kim's killer had finally been identified through DNA, the Las Vegas community was finally at peace. They felt a sense of relief knowing that her killer had been identified.

For many years, Las Vegas residents didn't think this case would ever be solved. Without advanced DNA testing and the use of forensic genetic genealogy, the murder of Kim Bryant wouldn't have been solved. We may have never been able to identify Peterson or his connection to other possible murders.

It also took hard work and dedication on behalf of the Las Vegas Police Department, from the original investigators to the cold case detectives who took on the case years later. Investigators in the late 1970s might not have had the resources or the testing they needed to identify Kim's killer,

they did have the hunch that DNA testing would catch up in the years to come. And by 2021, DNA testing had finally caught up, all thanks to the private lab near Houston, Texas, Othram, Inc., and the generous contributions made by Justin Wu and the Vegas Justice League.

It's expected that over the next several months and years, the use of forensic genetic genealogy will be used to solve even the coldest of cold cases, just like the case of Kim Bryant. Criminals are officially on notice. You can run, sometimes for months, sometimes for years, for decades, you can get away with it.

But eventually, forensic genetic genealogy is going to catch up. To share your thoughts on Kim Bryant's story, be sure to follow the show on Instagram and Facebook. To find out what I think about the case, sign up to become a patron at patreon.com slash forensic tales. After each episode, I release a bonus episode where I share my personal thoughts and opinions about the case.

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