Seventeen-year-old Kevin Allan Kaiser was found shot to death inside the Clark gasoline station at 2627 Auburn Street in Rockford, Illinois, on the morning of January 28, 1981. He suffered multiple gunshot wounds—four to the chest and one to the head—and was pronounced dead shortly after 9 a.m. while working his morning shift as a service station attendant.

Detectives treated the killing as a robbery-homicide. Investigators lifted a fingerprint from a door inside the station, a surface employees said had been washed the day before; that print was later matched to recently paroled Rockford resident Raymond Lee Stewart. The slaying fit a pattern of daylight murders that struck Rockford and nearby Beloit over a week beginning January 27, 1981, including another gas station attendant killed the next day and two men slain at a RadioShack in Beloit.

Stewart was arrested in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 21, 1981, and prosecutors charged him with Kaiser’s murder, presenting the fingerprint and the broader spree context at trial. Stewart was convicted of murder, sentenced to death, and ultimately executed in 1996. Did anyone who knew Kevin or worked at the Clark station that day see anything unusual that morning?