Dennis Murphy
Appearances
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
The North Miami detective was with the medical examiner's staff when the phone rang. It was Kevin Klim asking if they'd found a young woman, his girlfriend, Paula Sleduski, missing now for three days.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Dental records would later confirm that it was indeed Paula Sledewski.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
DNA, bodily fluids, skin under fingernails. The woman's murderer might assume all would be rendered just so much unreadable char.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Pretty quickly, the detective had a victim from Michigan with a name and a boyfriend who'd reported her missing. What's more, he was still in South Florida. So what was his story, this Kevin guy? On the one hand, he appeared to be appropriately distraught. He was the one who filed the missing persons report, and he was seen putting up posters around town with her photo on it.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
On the other hand, he was the boyfriend, and that single fact alone made him a person of interest to the investigators.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Of course. Standard procedure. Standard procedure. Take off the clothes, take some pictures, have a seat. We're going to talk to you for a while. Yeah. A good while, in fact. And even though Kevin Klim showed no visible marks or scratches from a fight or struggle, detectives still had a lot of questions.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Detectives quickly learned the details weren't always pretty. Kevin and Paula's relationship had been rocky at times. Court records in both California and Michigan showed a history of domestic violence arrests between the two. One included Paula's arrest in California for hitting Kevin with a bottle. The case was dropped when Kevin refused to press charges.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
And in the months prior to the Miami trip, Kevin was arrested twice for assaulting Paula in Michigan, the last time Paula's nose had been broken.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
But come Monday, the live-in boyfriend-girlfriend pair were not on a plane to Detroit. Rather, Kevin Klimt was a very worried guy, meandering down palm tree-lined boulevards in a city he didn't know, looking for his girlfriend Paula. She was missing. Paula, the aspiring leggy model with blonde hair down to there, had absolutely vanished.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Kevin's name and background quickly got into the reporting on the lurid murder. The reporters found the court records of domestic violence complaints. That didn't look good for the boyfriend. And neither did the story told by the Lady Gaga concertgoer who'd taken iPhone videos of Kevin and Paula.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
The cell phone photographer John Williams went on TV and said he distinctly remembered the man who would turn out to be Kevin as someone acting too aggressively in the crowd.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
And then there was a new lead to the coverage. According to news reports, sometime, it's not clear when, but before her Miami weekend, Paula had allegedly sent a text message to an ex-boyfriend saying, he's trying to kill me. He. Was that Kevin? They've got to find who did this to my baby.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Paula's mother, Patsy Watkins, up in Michigan, was telling anyone who'd listened that she had no use for Kevin Clem.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
As she arranged for care for her murdered daughter's two dogs, she was preparing to tell detectives in Miami what she'd already told the TV cameras. She claimed her daughter was terrified of Kevin Clem.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
But bad-mouthing family and maybe bad behavior at a Lady Gaga concert didn't make for the foundation of a homicide case. So detectives came here to the club where she was last seen to get down exactly what that story was about how the two of them had come to be ejected from club space by bouncers. Bartender Raymond Diaz told about seeing the start of the trouble between the pair.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
The club managers explained the House policy of ejecting both parties when trouble flares, him and her. So in the early hours of the case, there was a lot of stuff swirling about Kevin Clinton. He came across like a short-fused guy who sometimes got physical. At the end of that first interview with Kevin, the boyfriend, is he on your suspect list of people of interest? Yes, he is.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
He hasn't talked himself off the list? No. At the end of his 12 hours of grilling, Kevin said he felt more like a prime suspect with a star next to his name. Forget about person of interest.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
In the court of public opinion, it was looking as though the boyfriend did it. But it turned out the 26-year-old dancer who so loved the lens had one final scene before the camera. A few seconds of grainy security cam footage. And what investigators saw there made them think that maybe the boyfriend was telling the truth. Coming up, Paula's last date with a killer.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
When Death of a Golden Girl Continues Paula was dead. And the boyfriend, Kevin, realized he was falling behind the curve on where the finger of suspicion pointed. Do you volunteer the tumultuous histories that's going to be reported in the newspaper stories in the next few days?
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
The North Miami detectives interviewed him for 12 hours before letting him leave. So you're waiting to be arrested at that point?
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Looking back, maybe if Lady Gaga hadn't been booked at the Fontainebleau Hotel for New Year's Eve, Paula wouldn't have insisted on that last-minute trip to Miami and later gotten separated. But Paula really wanted to see Gaga's midnight show. And once down in Miami, Kevin scored scalpers tickets for $700 each.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Meanwhile, Dave Wasser, a private detective Kevin had hired the day after Paula went missing, was doing his own legwork.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
He videotaped interviews with people who hang around outside the club and handed out flyers. Kevin was just a guy who'd called the detective in the middle of the night. But there was something about the boyfriend that felt right in his gut.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
And soon the detective would meet an unlikely supporter of Kevin's, a member of Paula's family, her sister, Kelly Ferris, who, unlike her mother, thought that Kevin was getting a bad rap in the media, not that he was blameless.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Kelly, the sister, paid her own way down to Miami to help police in the investigation.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
She'd last seen her sister with Kevin that Christmas at a family get together, and they seemed happy together. No sign of the behavior that got both of them arrested for domestic violence before. If they're going at it like cats and dogs, why are they staying together, Kelly?
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Kelly said Paula was also taking prescription diet pills to stay in shape for her modeling and dancing careers.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
And that text message from Paula to an old boyfriend saying she feared for her life. That turned out to be less than advertised. It was moldy old and the shaky source of it was the same boyfriend who was jailed for having sex with a minor when Paula was just 14. Kelly doesn't make apologies for her sister's lifestyle choice. The strip bars, the booze, the pills.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
But she remembers as well a Paula who loved her Barbies and who caught the bouquet at Kelly's wedding. Now she was reduced to the 11 o'clock news tease. Playboy model in burning dumpster. Your pretty sister, your kid sister, treated like so much trash.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
When she got to Miami, she decided to do some searching herself. She turned on her rental car's GPS and punched in her sister's final waypoints, club space and the dumpster. Imagine you're hoping you're going to come across somebody who's seen something or noticed that there's a camera that might have taken a picture.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Club Space, it turned out, had almost 30 security cameras, but none outside showing the sidewalk. Most were aimed at the bar cash registers to keep the employees honest. But there was one camera that just might have captured something. There was a camera inside, high over the front door entrance. The private detective rewound the tape deck.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Seven seconds of grainy video. The last images of Paula Sleduski. That's her on the right side of the screen. The hair, the dress, the six-inch heels. It's 7.21 in the morning. And Kevin? Rewinding the tape about five minutes, the detective found him too. That's Kevin on the right side of the screen begging bouncers to ask his girlfriend to leave with him.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Although police still considered Kevin a person of interest, there was persuasive evidence now that he left Paula behind at the club. It seems to bolster his story and his recollection of the time that he accidentally left.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
The head of security at Club Space, Mike Samuel, says he saw both Kevin and later Paula leave alone. But he and others have added an important new observation, something not seen by this blinking security camera up here, the detail that has changed the focus of the murder investigations. The club security chief said he did see Paula walking away with someone once she was on the street.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Their attendance at the show was even documented by the guy behind them who took iPhone vids of them dancing. Men tended to do that when they saw Paula all clubbed out. 2010, at that moment, and for not much longer, was starting off for Paula Sledusky right in the sweet spot she loved so well.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Paula was gone, but who was the man who accompanied her? Coming up, was Paula's killer one of the men who'd been hitting on her at the club?
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
When Dateline continues... Police now had two big clues in the gruesome murder of Paula Sleduski. A grainy seven-second surveillance video showing the aspiring model leaving the club alone. And an eyewitness, a bouncer at the club, who said he saw Paula walk away hand-in-hand with a man she met on the street.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
But Paula's boyfriend, Kevin Clem, said the sometime exotic dancer was too savvy to go off with a stranger.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Kevin had told police that guys were swarming all over Paula at the dance club, and that was a reason he wanted to get her out of there. Was her killer one of the guys hitting on her? But when Kevin and his private investigator, Dave Wasser, went back to the seconds of surveillance cam showing Paula leaving, they came up with another theory.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
They studied the images and thought the two club employees seen following her out are maybe overly interested in the striking blonde. Kevin, break it down frame by frame, this little snippet of video of her leaving. What do you see in it?
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Police also study the tape and talk to every club employee seen in it. Lead homicide detective Michael Gaudio. You talked to the door guys, security. Were they also persons of interest to you? Yes. Yes. Have they talked themselves off your list at this point?
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Kevin, getting all conspiracy theory, even wondered if maybe there was a plot among club workers to make a play for the hottie left behind by her boyfriend. Police say that's doubtful.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Here's one of the club employees in that video. He's Mike Samuels, the club's chief of security. He says, look at the tape and you see exactly what really happened. Employees doing their job, showing an ejected patron to the street. No one makes a move for her.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Now, this is the little bit of chamber before you go to the street, and the security camera is up here where we see that video of Paula then leaving the club.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
That's front door manager Samuels directly behind Paula, escorting her to the door. The two bouncers at the left of the screen were not following Paula, he says. They were following him, their boss, to the front door to make sure there were no further problems on the street. Mike, when armchair detectives say... Look, she's a hot woman. Security guys had their eye on her.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
It's easy to get rid of the boyfriend for a minor violation, and then we've got the girl to ourselves.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
What's more, the security chief says every employee was accounted for that night and no one left with Paula.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Samuels emphasizes that the bearded black man Paula was seen walking away with had not been in the club that night. Why not? Because of the club's strict dress code.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
And she had a lot of them. Pictures, headshots, glamour stuff. At 26 years old, she'd come to know cameras very well. She was a model represented by a national agency. And she'd made the usual rounds. Local commercials, pretty girl at the Detroit car show kind of stints. Nothing really big until Hef said, maybe.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
But two weeks after Paula's murder, Club Space employees could not believe their eyes. They thought they saw the very man Paula walked off with that morning out on the street. He was back, brazen. Could this be the man everyone was looking for? Mister walked away with her hand in hand. Coming up, a first look at the man who may have killed Paula.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
A Sunday morning just before 7.30, outside a Miami club where the party night's only halfway through. Taxis, patrons. Paula Sledusky ejected and leaving under the watchful eye of the head security man.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Paula and somebody heading towards the lot behind the strip club across the street. And guess what? Two weeks after the murder, bouncers at Club Space are certain they've seen the same man again, right outside the front door. This guy that your door people saw that night, the one approaching her, they believe they saw that same individual again a few weeks later, is that correct?
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Club Space owner Louis Puig says they called the Miami cops who came and questioned the man.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
What happened during those 14 hours? The time between when Paula was last seen outside the club to the hour when her body was found afire in a dumpster. A gap in time police all over Miami were trying to fill. Paula's boyfriend left Miami within 10 days of the murder, under a shadow.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Back in Michigan, he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor assault charge in one of those domestic violence cases and was given probation. Charges against him in the other case were dropped. Police in Miami say they still consider him a person of interest. But now they were focusing on the man Paula was seen walking away from the club with.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Paula's sister Kelly also left her home in Detroit, but returned to Miami four weeks later. She wanted to keep the case alive.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
She gave TV interviews. Let's go stick on a tree. Posted flyers with the private investigator, Dave Wasser, and talked to anyone who might have seen something. A big sister, Nancy Drew. We appreciate it.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Kelly put up $15,000 of her own money for a reward. Club's space owners doubled that amount to $30,000, a lubricant, hopefully, for reluctant tipsters. And then, almost one month to the day after the murder, just when the case seemed to be stalled out, came a dramatic development. Police announced they had a composite sketch of that man the people had seen outside the club with Paula.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Paula tried out for a national Playboy Playmate search. Think an American Idol-style cattle call with skimpier clothing. Paula made it onto the 2003 video, Playboy's 50th anniversary ultimate Playmate search. She never got to be Miss November. She didn't make the cut. Still, her sister Kelly Ferris remembers Paula being happy she tried it.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
The club employees had only glimpsed the man from the back inside. Now there was a new witness, police won't say who, who got a better look at the man from head on. This is the sketch of that man produced by a police artist.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
The sketch was released the same day Kelly was putting up reward posters near the dumpster where her sister's body was found. This was the moment when Kelly got her first look at the man who may have killed her sister.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Kevin Klim thought he actually recognized that face in the sketch and dropped a bombshell.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Kevin thought it was someone who had checked Paula's ID when they entered the club. On another trip down to Miami, he went back to club space on a Sunday morning at the very hour when Paula had disappeared weeks earlier.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Hoping he wouldn't be recognized, Kevin went undercover at the club. He was looking for the bouncer he thought matched the sketch. Two hours later, he emerged to the daylight disappointed.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Bologna responded the club owners. They say Kevin is mistaken. The staff is the same, and they have the payroll stubs to prove it.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Police say none of the bouncers matches the suspect in the sketch. Now, many years later, it is an increasingly cold case in a hot city. Forensic experts have processed some abandoned cars found near the dumpster. If there was a hit there, the authorities haven't disclosed it. So mainly, there is this sketch.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
The detectives hope that Paula's look-at-me looks will trigger a memory from a witness somewhere that morning in January. So that signature of her whole life of turning heads might ultimately be the signature of who finds the killer. Absolutely. Because you couldn't take your eyes off her. Absolutely. Meanwhile, the Miami party goes on. business at the clubs hasn't dipped a bit.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
If club patrons don't seem to be worried about maybe a hunter in their midst, the police have done their worrying for them.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Back in Michigan, Paula's sister Kelly and boyfriend Kevin have waited so many years for a call that so far hasn't come. We have him. 2010 was a very short year for Paula Sledusky, murdered at the age of 26.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
But she talked to Kevin about revving up her modeling dreams or fantasies one last time as soon as this Miami trip was over. Saturday, January 2, 2010, was still a vacation day for Paula and her boyfriend. They splurged and moved hotels to a place on the beach. There, on the Art Deco Strip, they befriended a waiter and asked him, what's up?
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Miami's hottest after-hours club. It's only open one marathon night a week from Saturday at 11 p.m. till Sunday afternoon. So that night, Kevin says, they had a romantic dinner on South Beach where Paula bought this neon blue dress. They slept for a bit, then woke up and got dressed. Paula did her customary one-hour makeup thing, and at 5.30 a.m., Paula and Kevin cabbed it to Club Space.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Lady Gaga, now Club Space. Paula, in her six-inch heels, sheer blue dress, and waist-length hair, was a head-turner even to an end-of-shift bartender like Raymond Diaz, who sees lots of Miami hotties.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Paula and Kevin had been dating and living together for a couple of years, and he knew from painful experience what impact his girlfriend would have in a cavernous dance space jammed with single men powered by alcohol. Paula Sladuski was boom shakalaka. She seems to be the kind of girl who would walk in a room and just take the oxygen right out of it.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Paula danced, flashing her new mini as the fins began circling her. Kevin knew the drill. Run interference on the men salivating for her as best he could. But these guys were making heavy moves on his woman.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
But Paula, lit up by the attention and the shooter she was downing, had a different idea. She was digging in her stilettos.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Kevin was being ejected from the club by security. She was staying. She asked him for her credit card, and he gave it to her. Kevin said he wasn't going to reason with her in that haze. So seething, he says he got in a cab, still carrying her cell phone as he always did when they went clubbing, and headed back over the causeway to their hotel room on Miami Beach.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
As the sun came up that Sunday morning, Kevin Clem crashed without his girlfriend. But if he paced about outside that club for only a few more minutes after he was tossed out, he would have seen Paula herself leaving just before 7.30 in the morning. She turned right at the sidewalk and disappeared, as they say, without a trace. Coming up, Kevin wakes up alone but not worried, at least not yet.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Had you and Paula had nights that had ended like that before? Yes. And she always came home. This time, it would be different. When Death of a Golden Girl Continues. Three days into 2010, after a night of clubbing, Kevin Klimt woke up in his Miami Beach hotel room with a throbbing head and minus his girlfriend, Paula Sleduski. It came back to him.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Club space, the bouncers throwing him out at dawn, Paula electing to stay. Had you and Paula had nights that had ended like that before? Yes. And she always came home. So it was no big deal to you at that point?
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Kevin was starting to worry, but he also knew Paula could be a tough Detroit cookie when she needed to be. She's a big girl. She knows how to handle herself. She knows what she's doing. Yeah, she's not naive. Those growing-up pictures of pretty Paula masked a difficult Michigan home life with an absent father and lots of stepdads. When she was 14, she was dating a 29-year-old man.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
It was her older sister, Kelly, not her mother, who called the authorities on him.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
The man was arrested and convicted of having sex with a minor and sentenced to two years in prison. He's now on a list of sex offenders. Paula, meanwhile, waited till he was released from prison and started dating him again. By then, she was of the age of consent. Old before her time, but still a dreamy little girl in some ways.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
That whole little girl fantasy of being the pin-up girl or the shampoo model or something. She had a lot of Barbies.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Paula liked Barbie so much, she tried to become her. Tall, thin, with long golden hair. The world of modeling she hoped to enter wasn't taken with her real-life Barbie looks. But several strip clubs, gentlemen's clubs in the greater Detroit area, were. She danced at the penthouse club there and saved her tips to pay for college tuition until she dropped out.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
She seemed to like being the girl on the pole, the man lusting after her.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
New Year's 2010 was arriving on a shivery night by Miami standards. But temps in the low 60s weren't enough to chill the South Beach scenesters. And there in the throng, diving into the sizzle, was a couple from Michigan, Paula Sladuski and Kevin Klem, down from Detroit for an impulse long holiday weekend. Kevin, how did the idea of Let's Go Down to South Beach for New Year's come together?
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
So along comes Kevin, new boyfriend, and he has to deal with her being an exotic dancer, a successful one.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
The money from stripping was good enough to allow Paula and Kevin to move to Los Angeles, just in time for the housing bubble to knock his budding mortgage and real estate business into the ditch. Paula kept on dancing and paid the bills. For a few months, they moved back and forth between places in Michigan and California.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Now she was gone, and he was a guy alone in a Miami Beach hotel with a desk clerk on the phone asking if he was going to roll over the room for another night. Kevin got himself together and went down to ask the manager for help.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Miami Beach police told him he'd have to file his missing persons report with the city of Miami, a different jurisdiction. That's where Club Space was located. But the cops wouldn't take his report till 24 hours had passed.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Returning to his hotel room in the sleepless night that followed, he got an idea. Call a private detective. He went online and started calling some numbers. The next morning, Monday now, one of them, a private investigator named Dave Wasser, called Kevin back.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
After filing a missing persons, Kevin returned to the hotel while Wasser, the private eye and a Miami police detective went to club space and talked to the manager and two of the bouncers who'd worked the door that early Sunday morning. The people at the club said Paula left the club alone shortly after Kevin. Club policy, they say, is to remove both parties after a fight.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
While his private detective followed up wafer-thin leads, Kevin decided to call the medical examiner's office.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
The detectives asked Kevin, did Paula have any body piercings? Yes, he said, she did.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Detectives then checked out some photos of Paula on Kevin's iPhone. They studied an earring.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
The earring, Paula's earring, had been found at the scene of a burning dumpster. And inside the dumpster, they found the charred body of a person they thought was a female. And it turned out to be gruesome beyond relief.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
Kevin was driven to the police station in North Miami, near where Paula's remains had been found, about 10 miles north of the dance club. They had questions for him, intense ones. How was he going to explain what police were learning about a violent domestic history with his now-murdered girlfriend, the woman found in a burning dumpster?
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
And how was he going to explain that lover's quarrel at the club the very night of the murder?
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
When Dateline Continues... Nine o'clock Sunday night on New Year's weekend, 2010, residents of a neighborhood in North Miami began calling it in. A small dumpster behind a propane gas dealership was on fire. Flames were shooting out. A body, it turned out, had been set on fire.
Dateline NBC
Death of a Golden Girl
It was Detective Michael Gaudio's responsibility to learn who the victim was and how it was that he or she, they couldn't tell at first, had been thrown away and torched. At the morgue, the M.E. confirmed everyone's suspicions. It was a woman's charred body. In cop talk, a Jane Doe.