Laura Kempton was 23 when she was found murdered in her first-floor apartment at 20 Chapel Street in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on the morning of September 28, 1981. A police officer answering an unrelated call entered an unlocked door and discovered her body concealed under mattress and bedding; she was nude, her ankles bound with an electrical cord and a telephone cord wrapped around her neck and shoulders. The autopsy determined she had been sexually assaulted and died from massive head trauma inflicted with a blunt object; a glass bottle consistent with the weapon was recovered and the door showed signs of forced entry.

Kempton was a student at Portsmouth Beauty School and worked locally while hoping to model. The case went cold for decades and took on new urgency after a similar killing of a classmate, Tammy Little, a year later. A male DNA profile from the scene remained the key piece of evidence and was eventually reexamined using genetic genealogy. Investigators identified Ronney James Lee, then 21 and with a history of apartment break-ins, as the offender; he reportedly acted alone and there was no known prior connection to Kempton. Lee died of a drug overdose in 2005, and there will be no trial.

Did anyone who knew Laura or saw her in Portsmouth in 1981 ever notice anything out of the ordinary that morning or the days before her death?