HISTORIC MURDER: 1964 Kempe murders: 10-year-old girl reveals killer’s identity while arguing on a school bus

Editor’s note: This is the conclusion of a two-part series written by Springfield-area freelance writer and retired Texas State University professor Kathryn “Kitty” Ledbetter detailing the Aug. 17, 1964 brutal double murder of Oscar and Ruby Kempe in Theodosia. Ledbetter and her grandparents become fast friends with the Kempes after they moved to Ozark County in 1955.

See last week’s edition (As residents await decision in Leckie murder trial, many are reminded of another brutal Ozark County murder, Ozark County Times, July 20, 2022) for the first portion of this two-part feature, giving details of the brutal discovery of Theodosia residents Oscar and Ruby Kempe’s bodies in the yard of their home Aug. 18, 1964, and the investigation that followed. 

Bus driver and part-time deputy overhears two girls talking about a fight

In mid-October, school bus driver and part-time Taney County deputy Lyman Cardwell was on his regular route taking children to school in Forsyth when he overheard an argument between 10-year-old Kathy Jo Brown and her 8-year-old stepsister Beverly Duren. 

Brown said her stepfather, Beverly’s father, Virgil Duren, had a terrible fight at a house last summer. 

Beverly remembered her father walking up to the house and back to the car, but she didn’t see the fight and wouldn’t believe Kathy’s story. 

As Beverly later recalled, “I told her it didn’t happen and she said ‘well, I seen it.’ So me and her was kind of fighting over it.” 

Two other children were in the car, 6-year-old Eugena and 3-year-old Tommy. Cardwell relayed the information to Sheriff Sallee in Ozark County.  

Sallee, Cardwell (who was now the acting Taney County sheriff) and Trooper Charles Reppell took Beverly Duren, Kathy Brown and their grandmother Alma Brown to the Kempe farm to verify their story. 

Kathy and Beverly recognized the house, barn, garage and general setting where the fights occurred. 

Ozark County Prosecuting Attorney Paul Boone then came to the scene and gave Kathy strings to mark the spots where she saw the two bodies fall to the ground before her stepfather pulled away from the property. Kathy missed the placement of Ruby’s body by 4 feet, but her mark for Oscar’s was exactly on target. 

More details emerge

Working on information given by Kathy Brown, Taney County deputies searched the house Duren and his live-in girlfriend Virginia (the children’s mother) occupied from Aug. 4 until Oct. 12. They found two knives, some undershirts and two shirts that Alma Brown identified as Virgil Duren’s. 

Unfortunately, all the cloth items had been washed and the knives cleaned. Although chemical testing of the fibers and the knives proved they were blood-stained, it could not identify a blood type that would tie them to Duren, and DNA testing was not yet available. Yet it was enough evidence to bring Virgil Duren in for questioning. 

It was the first good lead in the case. 

Now that Sheriff Sallee had a primary suspect, more information about Duren surfaced. George Dunn reported seeing him with a black eye at a meeting of job applicants for Branson School District bus driver positions on Thursday, Aug. 20, three days after the murders. Carl Wallace confirmed Duren’s black eye and attendance at the meeting, adding that he also had scratches on his left arm. Dunn said he saw Duren again in a Branson bank on Tuesday, Aug. 24, still with a black eye.

Duren, in jail in Oregon on check charges, arrested and brought back to Ozark County

On Oct. 12 authorities in Pendleton, Oregon, extradited Virgil and Virginia on check charges.

Virginia pleaded guilty and was released on a three-year probation and agreed to make payments on her check, while Virgil was charged with obtaining money under false pretenses and remained in jail as he waited for trial. On Nov. 10, Duren was given a one-year suspended jail sentence after settling a $20 check. 

However, just as he was preparing to leave, Prosecuting Attorney Boone filed a telegraph warrant for his arrest for first-degree murder of Ruby and Oscar Kempe. 

Sallee and two troopers flew to Oregon and brought Duren back to the highway patrol office in Springfield to take a polygraph test. Sallee watched the procedure through a one-way glass while Duren denied all charges against him. Polygraph officer Joe Duncan suggested taking Duren back into the room for another test. 

Before Sallee and his troopers could head upstairs for a cup of coffee, Duncan called them back to say Duren had confessed to killing the Kempes in self defense. 

A confession of killing the Kempes as self-defense

The confession Duren wrote and signed on Nov. 15, 1964, claimed that he first met Kempe on a street in Forsyth. They started a casual conversation about fishing, and Kempe invited Duren to Theodosia for a visit. 

On Monday morning, Aug. 17, Duren loaded his stepdaughter and three children into his 1956 white and maroon Chevy for a trip to the Kempe house. 

Nobody answered the door, so he returned to Forsyth for the day and came back with the children at about 7 that evening when the Kempes were home. 

Duren said they sat on the porch and talked until Kempe said “I do know you. You are the man that cut my fence.” 

Kempe started “cussin’ and raisin hell” and started a fight, according to Duren, who claimed he was trying to get back to the car when, “All at once I felt something attack me from behind and hit me on the head with a hard object. All I could think of was the knife that I had in my pocket.” 

Duren said he just started slashing his way out. 

“I guess that I just went out of my head for all I know,” he said in the confession. 

When it was all over, Duren said he walked to the car and told the kids to get out of the car and “go pet the dog or something” as he wiped the blood off his hands. 

The next day he washed the jackknife and put it on the refrigerator where officers later found it in their search of the house. After Duren wrote the confession officers asked more questions to test his story, but it remained consistent.

A battle in court: self defense or murder?

The preliminary hearing on Dec. 22, 1964, consisted of a series of testimonies from law officers and other officials that chronicled events from the beginning of the homicide investigation to the hearing. 

Witnesses included Herschel Meyer; Corbin Frost; Coroner M. J. Hoerman; pathologist Henry Sweets, Jr.; Kathy Brown; Kathy Brown’s grandmother Alma Brown; Lyman Cardwell; Kelley Sallee; and Troopers Robert Pitts and Charles Reppell. 

The hearing transcript indicates that Duren’s West Plains attorney, William C. Scott, made every effort to turn the narrative toward Duren’s plea of self defense, which would require a reduction of sentence from first-degree murder to manslaughter. 

Sheriff Sallee didn’t think there was “an ounce of truth” in Duren’s story about Kempe starting a fight over cut fences. “I think that was just a theory that he fell on to try to find something.” 

Sallee said the only motive that made sense was that Duren went up to the Kempe place wanting money. He insisted that Duren was guilty of pre-mediated murder: “How come that he was there that morning and come back that evening? Now premeditation, how long before something happens before they have to meditate? . . . Whenever you go to a place thinking you’re going to get money and you take some weapon with you, well . . . ” 

Prosecuting Attorney Boone’s evidence included a jackknife and blood-stained clothing found in Duren’s house. 

The most damning evidence came from Duren’s stepdaughter, Kathy Jo Brown, who told the court what she saw from the car window on Aug. 17, 1964. She described going to the rock house with Duren and hearing him ask Kempe where his wife was. She watched him fight with one man and leave him on the ground. 

She said another man then came out of the house and jumped on Duren’s back. Kathy did not know the second man was Ruby Kempe. They fought until Duren left the second man on the ground, Kathy told the court. She said he came back to the car and told the children not to tell anybody about what they saw. 

A life - and death - in prison

Her testimony was stronger than Scott’s attempts to validate Duren’s story of self defense. 

Duren was convicted of murdering Ruby Kempe on June 19, 1965. On July 30, he plead guilty to a second count of murdering Oscar Kempe and received two life sentences at the Missouri Department of Corrections. 

He spent most of 1966 and 1967 filing motions of one kind or another with no success. 

Duren had various job titles in prison, including general laborer, landscaper, warden’s shack and farming. 

Eventually the Department of Corrections moved him to the Fordland Honor Camp near Springfield. In 1975 a satisfactory record of good behavior, as well as poor health, earned Duren a series of leaves to visit family members. 

Gossip from people who happened to see him walking freely on the city streets of Springfield terrified my grandmother and others in Theodosia. Many people thought Duren had been released from prison and still believe he died a free man. 

However, he died of a heart attack while on a Fordland Honor Camp work detail at Montauk State Park on Feb. 7, 1978. He is buried at Eastlawn Cemetery in Springfield. 

Grandma never again left her home without locking the doors.