Every Town - The PORTSMOUTH Beauty School Murders

Episode Date: November 21, 2025

Today we’re checking out the story of two girls who attended the same school in NH and unfortunately met the same dark end. So let’s dig in to the Portsmouth Beauty School Murders. To Get 15% off your next gift, go to UNCOMMONGOODS.com/EVERYTOWN 👀 Watch This Episode On Youtube: https://youtu.be/lmbt8OpJq_g 👁 Check out our movie AN ANGRY BOY: https://www.anangryboy.com 💀 MERCH: https://scary-mysteries-merch.dashery.com 💀 Scary Mysteries SECRET VAULT: https://www.patreon.com/c/scarymysteries/collections    🎧 Our Other Podcast Scary Mysteries: ⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/3ZooEZMoZ421WdsOVJhVkT⁠ 👁Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/andrew.fitzg⁠ 👁 TikTok: ⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@andrewfitzgerald⁠ 👁Facebook: ⁠https://www.facebook.com/scarymysteriesofficial⁠ 👁 X: ⁠https://x.com/ScaryMysteries1⁠  🗣 Business Inquiries, questions and comments hit us up at ⁠[e-mail]⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are you ready to dive into the unknown? Join me, Peyton Moreland, on Into the Dark, the true crime podcast from Ono Media with a hint of horror and mystery. Each week, I dive into a different case, breaking down the facts and pondering the age-old question, why do people do what they do? Now, sometimes the answer isn't so clear, and that's why I'll also explore conspiracy theories, hauntings, and all things spooky. From the Green River Killer to the Mothman incident, we will unravel all of the questions that keep us up at night. So don't miss out.

Subscribe now on your favorite podcast platform. New episodes drop every Wednesday. Into the dark, where true crime meets the eerie unknown. Every town has a dark side. On the coast of New Hampshire, there's a small city that essentially sells itself on peace. Salt in the air, hallmark-esque bricks, streets, a waterfront where families eat ice cream just after dark in the summer. It is the kind of

place that tells you without actually saying it, well, you're safe here. And that's the charm of Portsmouth, and most nights it is as safe as can be. But every place has a blind spot, of course, and in this town, it was two young women, two different apartments, each one of them becoming a victim of a similar fate, almost a year to the day, apart from one another. And what happened to them is so horrific that this town would love to forget this story ever happened at all. But some things can't be undone, no matter how hard you try. Hey guys, it's Andrew, and this is every town. Thank you so much for tuning in.

So today we're headed to the seaside city of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to check out the story of two girls who attended the same school, and unfortunately met the same dark end. So let's dig into the Portsmouth Beauty School murders. Laura Kempton was just 23 years old when she died. She was tall and striking with strong features. She had these big, dark eyes that pulled you in, and she had done some modeling,

but really what people remembered about her most was the good energy she gave out. Always up for a good time. Laura was a free spirit with a loud laugh and a soft spot for fashion and glamour. She grew up across the bay in Durham, which is probably best known for being the home with the University of New Hampshire. It's a fairly quiet college town in Portsmouth, at least in

comparison, was the opposite. Music venues, bars, late-night restaurants, that hum that attracts a lot of young people to it. When Laura moved there in 1980, it must have felt like finally stepping into the life she wanted, something bigger than her hometown. By the summer of 81, she'd landed a ground floor a place on Chapel Street, right on the edge of downtown, perfect for someone like her. And days were for Portsmouth Beauty School, a short walk from her door, and she was six months from getting the license that would make her official. To cover rent, she worked two jobs, scooping ice cream for tourists during the busy season and ringing up oddities and trinkets at the Macro Polo gift shop on Market Street, which is still there to this day. But Laura wasn't built,

for just work and sleep, Knights pulled her out. The Ranger Club, the Riverside, Duran-Duran-type music bumping out of the speakers. Crowded floors, that electric feeling of being young and in the middle of it.

She was seeing a sax player at the time named Charlie who gigged at Lucas regularly. Nothing serious. Laura was just living and enjoying herself, taking in everything Portsmouth had to offer. On Saturday night, September 26, 1981,

Laura went to the Riverside Club with her friends. The music was loud, the dance floor packed, and at some point during that night she met a guy. Friends would later refer to him only as JR, but the two of them got along swimmingly. They danced, talked, and when the club closed, they went back to Laura's apartment together. In the following morning, Sunday the 27th,

they grabbed breakfast at Goldie's Deli around 9.30, 30 a.m. And Laura needed to be at work by 10, so she left JR there and headed to her shift at Macropolo. And several people saw her that day, and she seemed normal, happy, rushing around like always. At around 5 p.m., she was seen getting something to eat at a cafe nearby. The waitress who took care of her later told police that nothing about her seemed off, and there was nothing to report other than a young woman grabbing a bite before finishing her shift. that evening. And when work wrapped up at about 7 p.m., Laura headed to her place and got ready to go out again. After all, it was Sunday, fun day, and the weekend wasn't over yet. Her friend, Karen Wise,

stopped by. And the two hung out for a bit, chatting, fixing their hair, deciding where to go. And their first stop was Lucas, that little restaurant on Hanover Street where Charlie sometimes played music. They had dinner there, stayed for drinks, and danced afterwards. A few guys tried chatting Laura up. Usual kind of attention she drew whenever she went out. By 1 a.m. they were calling it a night. And Karen watched Laura right to her apartment, said good night, and started her walk home. Across the street, a 13-year-old boy got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. On his way, he passed through the living room where his mother still sat awake, and glow with a TV spilling across the floor.

He stopped at the window, just for a second, the way kids do when something catches their eye. And from that angle, he had a clear view into the apartment across the street. He'd seen the woman who lived there before, always on her couch, usually with the television flickering in front of her. That night was no different. Laura sat facing the screen, her back toward him, the light outlining her shoulders. And she looked completely at ease, a picture of someone winding down for the night.

And to the boy, it was just another quiet moment on Chapel Street. And he didn't know he was witnessing the last calm minutes of Laura Compton's life. And that was around 1.30 a.m. The countdown is on. The holiday shopping season is officially here. Uncommon goods takes the stress out of gifting, with thousands of unique, high-quality finds you won't see anywhere else. So don't wait. The most meaningful gifts get scooped up fast and now is the perfect time to cross

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goods has something for everyone, so don't wait. Cross those names off your list before the rush. To get 15% off your next gift, go to Uncomcom slash Everytown. That's Uncomcom slash everytown for 15% off. Uncommon goods were all out of the ordinary. Come Monday morning, September 28th, Officer Ron Grouvoir just so happened to be headed over to 20 Chapel Street apartment too. He was there to serve a parking ticket summons to Laura because she had some unpaid tickets to take care of. He knocked, and no answer. Noticing the damaged door panel that left a hole in the door, that he peeked through,

and that's when he saw a pair of bound legs and what looked like blood on the rug. Iran backed out, radioed it in, and secured the hallway, holding the scene for detectives. And his routine paper stop had just turned into a homicide. Morning of September 28, 1981, police went to Kempton's Appel. to serve her a court summons for unpaid parking tickets. When police arrived, they saw her apartment had been broken in... When Detective William Mortimer arrived, he already knew the outline. A young woman, signs of a struggle, a violent scene waiting inside.

Mortimer had been with the Portsmouth Police Department for years, so he'd seen death before, but what was waiting behind that door wasn't routine. Inside apartment, too, the air was still and heavy. and Laura's body was buried under layers of bedding. Blankets, a mattress, even the box spring, stacked as if someone had tried to erase what they had done in a hurry. Only her legs were showing, bound tightly with a white cord, later identified as wiring from an electric blanket.

The rug beneath her was soaked through, and the brown fibers turned nearly black. Blood had sprayed in thin arcs up the wall, signs that told investigators a struggle had taken place. Droars were yanked open and clothes, papers, and personal items were scattered all across the room. When detectives carefully began removing the bedding, the full scope came into view. Laura was lying on her back, completely nude. A telephone cord from the kitchen was round around her neck.

Green pillowcase had been pulled over her head. When they lifted it, her face turned. told the story, bruised, swollen, and broken. The left side of her skull showed the impact of a single crushing blow. Next to her body on the floor was a wine bottle. Investigators believed it was the weapon. And near her feet, a cigarette butt, carefully collected, bagged, and logged. A small piece of evidence that decades later would prove far more important than anyone in that apartment could have imagined. And that was a very important detail because Laura Kempton didn't smoke. Mortimer's eyes caught something small on the floor near the doorway, a metal hook, the kind you'd

used to hang keys on. It had been bent out of shape and snapped clean from the wall of the building's shared mailbox area. When he stepped closer to the door, the rest of the picture came together. One of the wood panels near the knob was missing, and the edges splintered. That hook hadn't just been ripped off by accident. It had been used. The killer had slipped it under the trim and pried the molding loose and carefully lifted out the panel. And from there, all he had to do was reach in, unlocked the latch from the inside, and walked straight into Laura's apartment.

Later that afternoon, the autopsy was performed by Dr. Dennis Carlson, the Rockingham County Medical Examiner. The cause of death was blunt-forced trauma, a single devastating strike to the left side of the skull. But there was more. Alora had been assaulted, and swabs from inside her body, scrapings from her upper left thigh,

and swabs from that telephone cord around her neck, all of them came back positive from male DNA. The time of death was estimated between 1.30 and 3.30 a.m. right around when the boy across the street saw her sitting on the couch. It was all hands on deck now, and Mortimer sent his detectives all across Portsmouth, knocking on doors, piecing together the last days and hours of Laura Kempton's life. They spoke to her friends, her classmates, and co-workers from the beauty school, anyone who might have noticed something. But every answer sounded the same.

Laura was happy, no enemies and no drama. The kind of person who didn't make waves in a town, where nothing like this was supposed to happen. The first real person of interest was the obvious pick. It was JR, the new man she'd been hanging out with that weekend. And he'd spent time at her apartment, slept there, and didn't try to hide it. When detectives brought him in, he was cooperative, nervous, of course, but open. He admitted they'd been intimate several times, which, if investigators later found his DNA, could explain it. He seemed genuinely shaken by the news, and a few things he mentioned stood out to investigators.

He told detectives that Laura had been particular about locking her door. The night before her death, she made him check it twice. On Sunday morning before they went out for breakfast, she took a wad of cash, slipped it into an envelope, and set it on the kitchen table. She didn't say what it was for, and he didn't ask. maybe rent, maybe bills. When police searched the apartment, that envelope was gone. Whoever killed her, had taken it. And then came another detail, one that only made things stranger.

A tenant named Daniel Fortier, who lived in the same building, returned home around 2 a.m. that Monday. He noticed the hallway light was out, strange since it was usually left on all night. He tried to flick the switch, but it didn't turn on. As he passed Laura's door, he saw the wooden panel missing and heard noises from inside, though it wasn't enough to warrant prying in and getting involved. He assumed the broken panel was from Laura, having lost her keys, and that it would get fixed soon. In other words, his mind didn't go directly toward there being any danger, and this was a safe seaside town in New Hampshire, after all.

Later police discovered that the light bulb had been loosened on purpose. And detectives quickly ruled out JR, and his DNA didn't match what was found on Laura's body, so from here the search widened. They dusted every surface for prints, and photographed every inch of the apartment, and sent everything. Fibers, blood samples, cigarette butts, to the state crime lab. Every lead was followed and every tip checked, but the days started to stack up. They turned into weeks, and weeks turned to months. and whoever killed Laura Kempton had vanished in a thin air.

And Portsmouth wasn't built for this kind of story. A young woman murdered in her own home in a town where people still left their doors unlocked. Despite all the evidence, despite all the work, the case froze in place. But then, a year later, almost of the day, will it happen again? The body of 23-year-old Laura Kempton was discovered on September 28th, 1981. in her Chapel Street apartment after a night out with friends. A year later, 19-year-old Tammy Little was found out.

October 19, 1982, another woman, another apartment, another student from the same beauty school. Her name was Tammy Little, 20 years old with the same easy energy Laura had. On the night of Friday, October 15th, she and her friends drove down to Boston for a concert. It was about an hour's drive away and late when they got back, around 4.15 a.m. when Tammy got dropped off at her apartment on Maplewood Avenue. She waved good night, unlocked her door, and went inside. And Tammy was pure early 80s punk energy, barely 100 pounds with spiked blonde hair and mismatched earrings, and a grin that pulled people in. As she'd grown up right there in Portsmouth, graduated high school in 81. After that, she enrolled at the Portsmouth Beauty School. She wasn't exactly

friends with Laura, but she knew who she was. In a small city like this, everyone did, especially after what happened. And by the summer of 82, Tammy had done what a lot of young women do when they're finding their footing. She got her own place. Another ground floor apartment at 315 Maplewood Avenue, about a mile from where Laura had lived. And the weekend after that Boston, came and went, and by Monday people started to worry. And Tammy wasn't answering her phone, and she didn't show up for class. Friends knocked on her door, left notes, but nothing. Her mother Kim felt the kind of panic only a parent knows.

By Tuesday afternoon, October 19th, she drove to Tammy's apartment and let herself in. The cat was pacing in the living room, and otherwise the place was still. called out her daughter's name, no answer, and then she stepped into the bathroom and saw her. Tammy's body was in the bathtub. When first responders arrived, there was nothing left to do. The autopsy the next day confirmed what Kim already knew, and Tammy had been beaten to death. I can tell you it was blood force trauma, and it was, um, it was a rage. I mean, they were brutally, brutally harmed. Whoever killed her had broken into the apartment in the early morning hours,

just like what happened to Laura one year before. The similarities were impossible to miss. Two young women, both beauty school students, both attacked in their ground floor apartments. The press didn't hesitate. They called them the beauty school murders. Detectives asked themselves the same question everyone else was asking, and wasn't the same person. It had to be.

The details lined up too neatly to be coincidence. But without hard evidence, no DNA match, no witness, no confession, it stayed a theory. After that, both cases drifted into that quiet place where unsolved murders live, and two families waiting for answers at a town wondering when or if it might happen again. And then time did what it always does. Years turned to decades, and technology finally caught up. By the 2000s, DNA testing had gone from primitive to powerful, and the Portsmouth Police Department never let go of the evidence.

They'd kept every scrap from Laura's apartment sealed and preserved, hoping signs might one day finish what they couldn't. That moment came more than 40 years later, when genetic genealogy started cracking cases everyone thought were unsolvable. In 2016, DNA advancements helped determine the suspect in the case was a man. And here's how it worked. Investigators took the DNA from Laura's body and from that cigarette butt found nearer and uploaded it to public genealogy databases,

the kind used by people searching for long-lost relatives. It took months of cross-checking and building family trees and chasing distinct matches, but in 2022 they found something. And two names popped up, a man and a woman who shared the right genetic markers to be the biological parents of the killer. When they traced that family tree forward, the path led to one person, one son, one name.

Ronnie James Lee. He was 21 years old at the time. He was later arrested for several burglaries here in the Portsmouth area. When Laura was murdered in September of 81, Ronnie was 20. 21 years old. He worked for a private security firm in Portsmouth, the kind of job that gave him access to buildings, back alleys, and the pulse of downtown life. And he knew when the streets were

quiet, and he knew when people were alone. Around that same time, police connected him to a string of five burglaries across the city, breaking into homes, stealing, violating spaces that weren't his. It was a pattern and one that escalated. In 1987, six years after Laura's death, Ronnie broke into a home in Keene, New Hampshire. And this time, it wasn't just theft. He assaulted the woman inside. He was arrested, convicted, and then sent to prison. Released in 1990, he faded back into obscurity. No fixed address, no long-term job. Just another face lost a time. The AG's office says there will be no arrests made because Lee died from acute cocaine intoxication in 2005.

If he were alive, the AG's office would be charging him with first-degree murder and sexual assaults. For nearly two decades, his name never came up again, not until the DNA did. When someone dies and an autopsy is done, a blood card is taken, a small sample stored by the medical examiner for recordkeeping. Ronnie's blood card had been sitting in state storage for 17 years. In 2022, detectives reopened it. They extracted his DNA, ran the profile against the evidence from Laura's case, and waited. In June of 2023, the results came back. Match.

Ronnie Lee's DNA matched those samples taken from Laura Kempton's body, from the bedding and from the cigarette butt found beside her. After 42 years, Portsmouth finally had an answer. On July 20th of 2023, the New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella stepped up to the podium in front of a packed room. Reporters, cameras, people who have been waiting more than 40 years for this moment. He read the words everyone had been hoping to hear. The murder of Laura Kempton had been solved. The man who broke into her apartment and beat her with a wine bottle and left her body beneath her own bedding was Ronnie James Lee.

Today our hearts are with Laura Kempton's family and her friends and all those who knew and loved her. And again, for all those who were affected by this crime. We hope today brings at least some sense of closure and peace. And so in the end, DNA technology and genetic genealogy had done what decades of investigation couldn't. It gave Laura back her story, and her family finally a name. But it came too late for justice, and there would be no arrest and no day in court. Just an anticlimactic ending that felt both complete and unfinished at the same time, because of course there was still Tammy Little.

Her case, of course, mirrored Laura's in ways that were hard to dismiss. The timing, the method, the profile, everything pointed toward a connection. But without DNA to prove it, investigators couldn't close that chapter. And Tammy's name remains on the list. One of New Hampshire's cold cases still waiting for resolution. But, for many, the answer as to who was responsible is clear. Even if it's never called out officially. So that's going to do it for this week's episode of Everytown.

I hope you all enjoyed it. We have some new merch available. So if you want to be the coolest person in your neighborhood, go check that out. Our store is Scary Mysteries on dashery.com. Links are down in the description. Appreciate you very much for tuning in. Thank you so much.

Remember to come back next week for another episode of Every Town filled with scary, strange, and mysterious stories because you never know. Maybe your town will be next.