It was the early 1980s and south-central Wyoming was winding down from an energy boom but was still attracting workers from all over the country and state with the promise of big money.
Among those drawn to the Rawlins area was 18-year-old Naomi Lee Kidder, who had left home three hours north in Buffalo, Wyoming, with friends to work on a seismograph crew in the oil field.
A young mother at the time, Kidder left behind her young daughter with her parents at their Buffalo home and was staying with friends in a Rawlins motel. She’d just been there for about a week when she got homesick, according to her sister, Trish Sealey, and wanted to go home to her daughter.
Without a ride, Kidder hatched a plan to hitch the 228 miles home to Buffalo and left Rawlins on Tuesday, June 29, 1982.
She never made it. Her parents reported her missing to the Buffalo Police Department on July 1, 1982.
For three months there was no trace of Kidder, until her nude body was found partially buried in sage grass on rural ranchland owned by a Natrona County commissioner, outside Casper. She had been strangled with wire found wound tightly around her neck.
Her clothing was never found and the only item recovered was a backpack and a little leather purse that her parents confirmed belonged to her, according to media reports at that time.
A broken, “hippie” necklace with a jade shell was also found near Kidder’s body, but her family didn’t recognize it. With no personal information to identify her at the time of her death, Kidder remained a Jane Doe for 12 years until she was ultimately identified through dental records.
To date, nobody has been charged in Kidder’s murder though there have been a couple notable suspects, including Larry Dewayne Hall, an avid Civil War buff, who has been linked to homicides near places he had traveled to for reenactments, according to the Natrona County Sheriff’s Office.
Hall is currently serving a life sentence in a federal prison in North Carolina for the abduction of a 15-year-old girl, whose body was found in an Indiana cornfield. And though he’s suspected of upwards of 50 murders of young women and girls, he has yet to be formally charged with any of them.
To date, Kidder’s murder remains unsolved, though the Natrona County Sheriff’s Office has not given up and continues asking for the public’s help in tying Hall to the area at the time of Kidder’s murder.
Not taken seriously
Sealey was a young, teen mother herself when her younger sister disappeared. Both she and her older sister, Sherry Crutchfield, had moved out by then, and Naomi was the only one still living at home with their parents in Buffalo, a town of around 4,500 residents in northeastern Wyoming.
At the time of her disappearance, Kidder’s daughter, Bobbi, was 16 months old. Her parents, Russ and Helen Kidder, later adopted Bobbi.
As a teen from rural Wyoming, Kidder would have been impervious to the dangers of a boom town full of drifters and hitching a ride home with a stranger, Sealey said.
"I don't think she realized how dangerous it was," she said.
Worse was the feeling that Kidder’s disappearance wasn’t being taken seriously by police.
When she disappeared, Sealey said police seemed to write it off as teens being teens. Part of the problem, Sealey thinks, was the multiple jurisdictions involved.
Kidder was from Buffalo, last seen in Rawlins and ultimately found outside Casper.
“Nobody did it well,” Sealey said of the efforts by law enforcement agencies to coordinate, communicate and find missing persons.
Missing files
Then, there was the oversight of the Buffalo Police Department to enter the missing person report and dental records into the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database, which links law enforcement agency records across the country.
“It’s pretty basic to just enter it into the system,” Sealey said. “Buffalo should have done that when they took the report.”
The omission led to Kidder remaining a Jane Doe for 12 years, which Sealey ultimately brought to light with the help of a friend who learned that Kidder wasn’t in the database.
Sealey had a friend affiliated with a crime victim’s’ coalition, she said, who checked NCIC and realized there was no record for Kidder.
The Kidders then informed the Buffalo Police who entered the dental records in March 1994, according to Natrona County Sheriff Office records. Within a day, there were 18 matches in the U.S., including three in Wyoming, which ultimately led to the positive identification of Kidder, the Casper-Star Tribune reported at the time.
Erika McCarter, public safety administrator at the Buffalo Police Department, said she can’t speak to why Kidder’s missing person’s case wouldn’t have been entered into NCIC at the onset because she couldn’t locate a missing person's report for Kidder among their older, hard copy files from that period.
This omission added to the Kidder’s frustration with law enforcement as Helen and Russ shared with a Casper-Star Tribune reporter in a 2002 article, marking the 20th year anniversary of their daughter’s death.
“Nobody did their job,” Russ said at the time. “It was six years before they did anything.”
Natrona County Sheriff’s Investigator Don Tholson, who took over Kidder’s case in 1988, objected to that characterization in the same article, saying that it was a tough case to solve.
“I don’t think it was a botched investigation,” Tholson is quoted as saying. “I just think these murders are difficult to solve. A stranger who picks up a hitchhiker and has no connection to them and then drops them somewhere and leaves them, there’s no way to tie them together and come up with suspects.”
A major part of the problem, Tholson added, was tracing Kidder’s movements after she left Rawlins.
The unsolved crime was more than just a frustration for the family. Without answers, Sealey said the Kidders also worried that they might be next. Perhaps her sister had gotten into some kind of trouble and potentially put her family in harm’s way.
“We always wondered was somebody going to come kill us next?” Sealey said.
Pinpointing Hall
Over the years, investigators have looked at several suspects, including Larry DeWayne Hall.
Hall remains a suspect in Kidder’s murder, according to Kiera Hett, spokesperson for the Natrona County Sheriff’s Office.
The suspicion lies on an alleged piece of paper with Kidder’s name on it that was reportedly found among Hall’s possessions upon his arrest in 1994, according to Unidentified Wiki, an online site dedicated to missing and formerly unidentified victims.
Hett declined to comment on the existence of such a document, citing an active investigation, though she did confirm that there is evidence to tie the two together.
“There are other items of information and evidence to suggest that Hall is responsible for Naomi Kidder’s murder,” Hett told Cowboy State Daily in an email. “However, we’re not releasing that information because maintaining the integrity of the investigation remains a priority of ours to protect any potential future prosecution.”
The trouble is that the agency can’t find anyone to confirm that Hall was in Wyoming at the time.
Hall was an avid Civil War re-enactor who traveled throughout the Midwest and south to battle sites and other historical events.
“Although over the years, investigators have searched historical sites and numerous other avenues to place Larry Hall between Rawlins and Casper in 1982, they have been unsuccessful,” Hett said.
Hett said they are actively seeking any information that might place him in Wyoming at that time.
Who is Hall?
Hall, now 62, is currently serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole at the Federal Correctional Complex in Butler North Carolina for the 1993 kidnapping of 15-year-old Jessica Roach, whose body was found six weeks later in an Indiana field.
Hall denies being responsible for the kidnapping and murder.
He did not respond to a letter sent by Cowboy State Daily inquiring about his potential involvement in Kidder’s death.
Hall has a long and sordid history of the alleged rape and murder or upwards of 50 women and girls, many of whom are still missing, beginning in the early 1980s up until his arrest in 1994, according to a report compiled by researchers in the Psychology Department at the Radford University, in Radford, Virginia.
Many of these alleged crimes occurred in areas where he was known to have been for battle enactments spanning 22 states from Tennessee, Illinois, Michigan and as far east as Maryland and Pennsylvania and south to Georgia and Alabama. The furthest West the researchers could track Hall was Missouri.
The son of a grave digger from Wabash, Indiana, Hall is thought to have killed his first victim, 14-year-old Dean Marie Pyle Peters, who disappeared in February 1981 from a middle school in Grand Rapids, Michigan, when Hall was 18.
Hall allegedly went on to abduct two more teen girls who are still missing over the next four years until the body of 21-year-old, Marie Fuller Swinford was found strangled and sexually mutilated in Vigo County, Indiana.
There are many more victims thought to be raped, killed or stalked by Hall, the report states, though to date he has not been charged with any of the crimes, despite confessing to a handful over the years and then recanting that confession.
Law enforcement did not give up on finding answers after Hall was incarcerated. The FBI enlisted a charismatic inmate named James Keene befriended Hall in hopes of gleaning confessions on his alleged crimes. Keene saw a map that Hall made with red dots denoting the burial sites of his victims.
Keene blew his cover after confronting Hall and calling him a “sicko” after which Hall allegedly destroyed the map.
The relationship between the two is portrayed in the 2022 crime drama miniseries, “Black Bird.”
Connection to another notorious murder
Hall was not the only notorious suspected serial killer that police were investigating. Media reports indicate that investigators also looked into Royal Russell Long, Tholson told the Casper-Star Tribune.
And though they could tie Long, a long-haul trucker, to the Casper-area at the time of Kidder’s murder based on his trucking records, Tholson said there was no other evidence to tie him to the crime.
Long was also suspected of multiple rapes and murders in Wyoming, Oklahoma, Arizona among other states, but was only charged with the kidnapping and sexual assault of 12-year-old Sharon Baldeagle and her friend in 1984.
The two had been hitchhiking when they were abducted by Long, who tied them up at gunpoint and took them to his home in Evansville. The friend was able to escape and call for help, but Long fled with Baldeagle, who was not with him when police arrested him in New Mexico.
He pleaded guilty to the two counts of kidnapping and received two life sentences, according to legal documents.
Long was also charged, but not convicted, with the murders of two 13-year-old girls in Oklahoma. He died in a Wyoming prison of a heart attack in 1993, taking his secrets to his grave.
“Rawlins Rodeo Murders”
Long has also been linked to the unsolved murders of four girls in Rawlins, dubbed the “Rawlins Rodeo Murders,” where Long, lived at the time and was known to carry equipment to local fairs and carnivals.
The victims include 19-year-old teens, Christy Gross and Carlene Brown, who vanished on the way home from the Little Britches Rodeo on July 4, 1974. Gross’s skeletal remains were found nearly a decade later, with her death determined to be homicide from blunt force trauma to her head. Brown still remains missing.
Also missing is 14-year-old Deborah Meyer, who was last seen walking to a Rawlins movie theater in August 1974.
Jayleen Banker, then 10, disappeared from the Carbon County Fairgrounds that same month. Her partially clothed body was discovered in a field eight months later.
Janet Franson, a retired Lakeland, Florida, homicide detective currently living in Powell, does not believe Long is connected to Kidder’s murder. Franson, who has worked as a volunteer investigator for several national cold case coalitions and nonprofits, has been studying Long’s connections to the Rawlins murders since 2001.
Franson continues to search for Brown and Meyer.
In terms of Kidder’s death, though she’s not discounting Long, but she tends to think Hall is a better suspect given Long’s suspected mode of killing – blunt force trauma to the head – based on the two murder victims who were found.
“And while I won’t discount RRL [Royal Russell Long], I am leaning toward the other guy first,” Franson said.
Yet another tie to notorious Wyoming murder
Six years after Kidder’s body was found, another young woman, Lisa Marie Kimmel, was reported missing in March 1988. Kimmel, also 18, had been driving from Denver to her family’s home in Billings, Montana, when she disappeared in Wyoming enroute.
Kimmel, who was also known as “Lil Miss” based on her vanity license plate, was found eight days later floating in the North Platte River. Her case remained cold for 14 years until DNA profiling led to the arrest of her killer, Dale Wayne Eaton, who had buried Kimmel’s car on his property.
Before Eaton was arrested, investigators thought there might be a tie between the two young women.
Sealey, Kidder’s sister, is fuzzy on the details of this connection, but recalls someone giving her mother a note about the two murders potentially being tied to the same killer. Her mother turned over the note to law enforcement, which led to Kidder’s then still-unidentified body being exhumed from the Highland Park Cemetery in Casper, according to reporting by the Casper-Star Tribune.
Ultimately, however, no link was found, Tholson reported to the media.
Still no answers
Throughout the years, investigators have taken cracks at existing evidence as new technology prevails including testing the “hippie” jade necklace that had been found within 25 feet of Kidder’s body.
Those tests yielded no DNA, Hett confirmed.
Otherwise, Sealey and her family are left with questions about what happened to Kidder and whether anyone will ever be held accountable for the crime.
In the absence of answers, Sealey has her own theories.
Sealey wonders if other potential suspects, including the county commissioner on whose land Kidder’s body was found, were thoroughly vetted. Regardless, she questions if her sister will ever see justice.
Over the years, there’s been one let down after another, Sealey said. Still, she can’t let it go and feels compelled to share her sister’s story.
“I always feel like one more time, let’s keep it out there,” she said.
Anyone with information about Hall or any other information pertaining to Kidder’s murder, is asked to contact the Natrona County Sheriff’s Office at 307-235-9282 or by emailing: soinfo@natronacounty-wy.gov.
Tips can also be submitted anonymously on the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation’s website.
Jen Kocher can be reached at jen@cowboystatedaily.com.
