Ali Was Here: A Promising Life. A Brutal Murder. Justice, and a Legacy of Hope. - Hardcover

James Kirkpatrick Davis

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1935362445 ISBN 13: 9781935362449

Publisher: Kansas City Star Books, 2009

Synopsis

From the inside flap: She was a popular college student working a summer job in the suburbs of middle America. He was a maintenance man with a police record and an alias. By grim chance, they crossed paths, and within minutes Ali Kemp lay dead - beaten and strangled in the pump room of a neighborhood swimming pool where she worked.

On television, "America's Most Wanted" told her story to the country. Along highways, billboards implored motorists to call if they recognized her assailant. Thousands of tips flowed in.

Detectives spent more than two years sorting through them all, chasing wrong leads and hitting dead ends. Finally, they assembled the clues that led them to a small house more than a thousand miles from the scene of the slaying.

This is the true story of the brutal murder of Ali Kemp and the exhaustive search for her killer. It's also the story of a family's dedication to protecting other women from the same horrible fate by sponsoring women's safety awareness and self-defense courses coast to coast.

More info: When Ali Kemp, a 19-year-old Kansas State University student, was brutally murdered by Benjamin Appleby, her death set off an extraordinary range of events still being felt today.

Ali Was Here chronicles that impact.

The case: For sheer size, use of manpower and number of leads and tips, this case is virtually unmatched in K.C.-area history. By the end of the case, Leawood detectives received more than 7,000 calls regarding the murder.

Helping the hunt: Six days after Ali's murder, the crew of "America's Most Wanted" showed up in Kansas City. The first time the Ali Kemp show aired on "AMW", the calls amounted to the highest number ever from the airing of a single episode. However, the leads that came in were inconclusive and the hunt continued.

Roger Kemp, Ali's father, decided to look into purchasing a billboard to post Appleby's composite sketch and a picture of his vehicle. Lamar Advertising decided to donate four billboards to the Kemp case that stayed in rotation for 19 months. These billboards resulted in two tips that led to Appleby's arrest.

The good: Meanwhile, Roger Kemp turned his grief into something positive. He felt that if Ali had been trained in self-defense, her life would have been spared. He launched The Ali Kemp Education Foundation (T.A.K.E.) that teaches self-defense courses to girls and women all over the country.

Ali's billboards sparked billboard campaigns in other cities. More than forty cities now post wanted billboards that have led to many arrests. In four years, T.A.K.E. trained more than 25,000 women in self defense. The free program travels to universities across the nation to work with young women, and also offers college scholarships.

The lasting impact of Ali Kemp's death has been extraordinary: the creation of free self-defense programs for women and the introduction of billboards in police investigations throughout the country. The sadness of losing her will always be with those who knew her. Ali's legacy is profound, and even though she lived for such a short time, the world is a better place because Ali was here.

Royalties from this book will be donated to the Ali Kemp Education Foundation (T.A.K.E.).

About this title

About the Author

James Kirkpatrick Davis is the author of Spying on America: The FBI's Domestic Counterintelligence Program (Praeger, 1992). His book Assault on the Left: The FBI and the Sixties Antiwar Movement (Praeger, 1997) won honorable mention from the American Association of University Women Kansas City for the best non-fiction book of the year. He was co-author with Clarence M. Kelley, former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, of Kelley: The Story of an FBI Director (Andrews McMeel & Parker, 1987). His first novel, Why Did I Grow So Cold?, was published in 2005. He a student in the English Honors program and a graduate of Michigan State University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Kansas City Star Books
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1935362445
• ISBN 13: 9781935362449
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 125